Jezebel's Ladder

by Scott Rhine

  PJ could see Nick bridling at his work being handed over to older, less-inspired scientists, knowing he could make it work and using the pursuit of science to justify a little midnight requisitioning. He shut up when the salad came and stayed quiet till the waiter was out of earshot. “I told you. He had an ace in the hole, an e-mail message that he sent out to everyone he could trust to warn the world.”

  “Did you bring a copy?” asked Amy.

  “In a minute. There are still a few things I need to clear up first. I know about the mess where Nick hurt that guy in New Mexico, and I don’t think it was entirely his fault. Is he going to be in trouble for that?”

  “Hurt, hell. There wasn’t enough left of the poor man to put in a Dixie cup. It took out the whole building.”

  Seeing PJ’s obvious surprise, she added “If you discuss this with anyone, we will deny it, and you can be tried for treason—the death penalty sort.”

  “Save the buffalo, but shoot the people. What kind of moral code is that?”

  “Buffalo can’t blow up the planet even if you tell them how.”

  After the entrées arrived, he asked, “So that’s why Nick moved back east?”

  Amy seemed disgusted. “You don’t understand the military mind. Some people at the Pentagon took personal control of the Icarus project. Funding and staff were no longer an issue. The Icarus field went from a mild curiosity to a potential super-weapon.”

  “In the middle of Maryland?” he exclaimed loudly. She shushed him, and he calmed down before asking, “And Braithwaite was the only member of the oversight committee who objected?”

  Amy came alive with her passion for the injustice and idiocy displayed in Washington. “He’s not on the committee, but he has friends who hear things. Our above-ground nuclear testing in the 1950s probably did more damage to our health, weather, and ecosystem than any foreign power ever has. Senator Braithwaite wanted adequate safeguards to make certain that this type of damage never happened again, but the people in charge of the project assured him that all precautions were being taken. When Mr. Cassavettis called us, we knew something wasn’t right.”

  Just then, PJ’s cell phone rang. “Excuse me,” he said, and made his way to the men’s room.

  “PJ?” His mother was on the other end. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure, Mom. I’m just out to dinner with a young lady,” he said, hinting that she should keep the call brief.

  “A date?” His mom had almost given up hope of this ever happening. “Some nice girl from work?”

  “No one you know, Mom. What did you call for? You never use this number.”

  Mom huffed. “When you weren’t at home, and those men came asking about you, I didn’t know what to think.”

  “FBI?”

  “Then it’s true,” Mom decided.

  His father grabbed the phone. “What the dickens is going on here, PJ? They say you’re wanted for questioning on computer-fraud charges.” PJ knew by the way he said it that Dad was more upset at the Feds than him. “They confiscated everything from your room, grilled your mother about her grandparents, and took our darn trash. Does that sound like a computer-crime case to you? Besides, I know that if you ever broke the law again, you wouldn’t leave a trail.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong, Dad. It was Nick Cassavettis. He’s a witness in a Federal case. I can’t say any more.” When you mentioned an Italian name and Federal Witness in the same sentence, people didn’t ask for details.

  “I remember the wedding. He was the quiet boy who got mononucleosis and passed out on the plane,” Dad said.

  When PJ had asked Nick about the incident, all he would say about his illness was that he had seen a Kansas lake from the air and recognized it as a perfect Mandelbrot set. Nick described it like a religious experience. The effects of erosion on minerals in the soil, the magnetic currents, and the pull of the moon on the water all conspired in perfect, computational harmony. Everything in nature was math, and hydrogen was one. PJ understood now why he had been so excited; that moment on the plane had probably given him the keys to the secrets of the universe. The programmer felt less than safe now knowing that the keeper of those keys was a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

  He almost missed what his father told him next. “They mentioned Nick, but they also asked about all your other friends.” Great, now nowhere was safe.

  ****

  When PJ got back, Amy’s plates had been cleared, and a tip was sitting on the table. She seemed a little put out that he had kept her waiting so long. “Sorry, it was my parents.”

  He needed to find some place to hide while they got this sorted out. “I’m not so hungry any more. We can leave as soon as the check is paid.”

  “Done,” she said, waving a yellow, credit-card receipt.

  “Please tell me you didn’t charge it.”

  Amy put her hands on her hips. “I told you when we came in here that I was going to charge it to my expense account. That’s how these things work.”

  He pulled her close as if to whisper something personal in her ear. “They’re already monitoring my calls, my mail, my friends, my family, and my family’s garbage. The only reason the FBI doesn’t have me in a cell already is that I haven’t used my credit cards. How long do you think it’s going to take for them to track us here?”

  “You’re paranoid,” she laughed.

  Then he showed her the e-mail print-out.

  He watched her expression change to shock as she scanned it. “No. They can’t. They’re not allowed to.” She ran out to the lobby, but someone was already on the pay phone. Stepping out into the parking lot, she said, “PJ, lend me your phone.”

  He handed the unit over. She flipped through a list of numbers in her purse.

  “The senator is in Wyoming this weekend,” she said as she dialed. “Cameron, sorry to call you at home. This is Amy from Braithwaite’s office. Yes. We need to meet. It’s an emergency.”

  She listened patiently and cut through all the objections with a single word. “Icarus. We had an agreement.” She listened for a few moments more. “I’ll meet you there.”

  “You can ride with me,” Amy said, quite businesslike. She got efficient when she was terrified.

  As he grabbed his bag and climbed into her car, PJ asked, “Was that somebody from the Pentagon who can resolve this?”

  She shook her head. “That was the special projects’ coordinator for NASA. If they’re sending one of these devices into orbit, a lot of heads are going to roll.”

  Atlantis must fall. He meant the space-shuttle launch tomorrow morning! Things just kept getting worse.

  ****

  Amy wove between cars going 85. “Cameron has an estate out in Potomac, Maryland. He’ll look at your e-mail and can scrub the launch if it’s authentic.”

  PJ had to concentrate on her face or he would’ve shouted every time they got close to someone else’s bumper. “I don’t have it. Someone deleted my copy. All I got was the envelope. That’s why I called you.” Amy almost locked her brakes, the tires squealing and dust flying as she pulled off onto the berm.

  “You what?”

  “Maybe we’d better start back at the point where I say ‘You got a message’ and you say ‘What message?’ Your address is right at the top of that thing. It had to have gotten there,” he reasoned.

  She read the message again. “No. It never reached us because he combined the addresses! He has a period between us and Butterfly. We have to contact these other people and see if they have a copy. I can’t go to Congress without proof.”

  He shook his head. “Feds got to all of them. The data disappeared as neatly as Nick did, but Nick kept records of everything, even passwords. His apartment is in Maryland. Delay your meeting for a few hours. We can search his place, find the name of the machine he used to send his mail, download the evidence onto my laptop, and still stop the launch in plenty of time.”

  Amy stared at him in disbelief. “That is the most harebr
ained plan I’ve ever heard.” Lacking a better alternative, she asked directions to Nick’s place.

  On the way, PJ pumped her for more details about the Sandia incident.

  She seemed relieved to have someone to share the story with. “Getting the field effect jumpstarted takes an enormous amount of energy. Though, once established, the oscillation can keep going for a long time before it drops below the critical threshold. After the prototype team successfully deflected alpha particles, the whole team went out to celebrate their rousing success. Cassavettis miscalculated the energy decay rate, and the field had stopped sparking by then.”

  He took a guess where this was heading. “The Icarus field was still powered up while they were gone, just invisible.”

  She nodded, pausing before delivering the morbid conclusion. “Mr. Mendoza, a technician, had been ordered to set up equipment for the next day’s experiments in that test chamber. That’s when we discovered that people explode on contact with the Icarus field.”

  “Holy sh…” he blurted, stopping himself this time.

  She softened at the belated gallantry. “The true intensity of the explosion is still Top Secret, but we heard reports that it blew out all the windows on the installation and fused sand for a city block. The prototype was unharmed. We don’t know why yet. No one but Cassavettis seems to know why the field works at all. A friend on the committee told us that the Pentagon immediately made plans to install these prototype fields in high-security installations to prevent theft and sabotage.”

  “Why not just use them as car alarms? That would save on prisons.” Nick had been trying for Star Trek, but this was more like a Monty Python skit gone bad.

  She shared his sense of outrage. “Exactly. It took an Executive Order to stop these nimrods. They were supposed to halt production. Now we find out NASA is sending one into space on the latest spy satellite. Someone not only lied to us, but they disobeyed a Presidential Directive.”

  PJ shook his head. “Frankenstein never thought about how he would control the monster; he just wanted to prove he could build it.”

  ****

  When they got to Nick’s apartment, Amy wanted no part of the break-in.

  “Just keep watch, then. Two short honks followed by a long means trouble.”

  Amy agreed reluctantly.

  Nick lived on the first floor. PJ grabbed the key from under the ceramic frog in the bushes and let himself in. The place had already been tossed by experts. The cushions had been turned inside out, the trash was gone, the answering machine taken, and all the vents had been unscrewed. Someone had vacuumed recently, too.

  There was a big dust void on Nick’s kitchen table where his computer had been. The computer, peripherals, and even his game CDs were all gone. Neither the napkins atop the refrigerator nor the pad by the phone had any writing on them. On an impulse, PJ hit redial on the phone. He got an answering machine for Clarence Murphy. Murphy was an apt name for everything that had gone wrong with this venture to date.

  The next place PJ looked was in the now-jumbled book collection on the floor. Nick’s Bible was gone from its protective box. The only time PJ had ever seen it open was to settle a bet. He found the missing Bible on a nightstand in the bedroom. There were several makeshift bookmarks stuffed in it, but the one from the Book of Revelation was the most interesting. The tiny slip of paper was from a fortune cookie. “Many eyes are upon you. Behave accordingly.” On the back were lucky lottery numbers and the single handwritten word “Mycroft.” This was the name of a self-aware computer in a Heinlein novel—the sort of place where Nick would cache his information.

  PJ poked through the books with no real interest until he spotted the name Einstein on the spine of one. Jackpot! PJ flipped through the book until he found a large, gold Ex Libris sticker in the back stamped “from the library of Dr. Eric Reuter.”

  On the back flap, PJ saw the equation. He recognized some of the symbols from statistics and others from physics. In the space beneath, Nick had added some notes. Most of them dealt with special cases and simplifications of the formula. “Assume g (the gravitational constant) is 10 m/s.” The rounding didn’t bother him, because the strength of gravity varies a little over the Earth’s surface and somewhere it is exactly 10. The errors he made must have all canceled each other out, because the prototype worked. What bothered PJ was that gravity is not constant, especially not in space.

  The key simplification was “let hydrogen = 1.” PJ could see now why it had been such a revelation to him on the plane. Most of the variables dropped right out when this substitution was made. He couldn’t even begin to grasp the complexity for inputs other than one. Had Nick even bothered to solve the system of equations completely? Certain values could result in division by zero or dueling infinities in the numerator.

  Just then, PJ heard a honk from the parking lot. In a panic, he scooped up the book, and ran out to Amy’s car. He arrived panting, ready for a high-speed car chase. However, he was disappointed. “Where are the squad cars?”

  “Sorry. It was getting near the twenty-minute mark, and I thought you ought to know.”

  “You almost gave me a heart attack because your watch is fast?” He slammed the door in a snit.

  “Look, I couldn’t reach my contact. Your phone is dead. We have to leave now if we’re going to get there on time. We can’t afford to miss this meeting,” she said, accelerating over the speed bumps. She swerved so that the tires on her side went through the gap in the asphalt barrier, but his side bounced hard enough to slap his head into the roof. PJ heard the muffler scrape as he buckled up.

  “Did you find the data?” Amy asked as they broke the 45 mph speed limit.

  “Almost.”

  “What did you get?” she asked impatiently.

  “One of the original Reuter equations and the name of a computer,” he announced proudly.

  “I stand corrected. We’ll connect to it when we get to the director’s house. Where did you find it?”

  “In the Book of Revelation, in the gloom and doom section where they talk about breaking the seven seals at the end of the world.”

  “I think I’ll leave that part out when I talk to NASA,” she said.

  “The last person he phoned was some guy named Clarence Murphy. He could probably tell us more.”

  “He was an Icarus team member who committed suicide yesterday,” she said grimly.

  “Or someone helped him do it,” PJ suggested.

  “Sometimes a banana is just a banana, Dr. Freud.”

  “Sometimes a zebra is just a horse with a bad dye job,” he said weakly, unable to find a suitable cliché on such short notice. This mistake got a giggle out of her and lightened the mood in the car. He really liked her smile.

  Chapter 33 – A Small Problem with Physics

  Amy and PJ turned off the highway into an affluent suburb. They drove around a walled community until they came across a huge, iron gate. He mistook the estate for a cemetery till Amy honked and the gate opened. He was dying to ask how a bureaucrat could afford to live in this sort of luxury. At the front door, Amy introduced him to the butler. “This is Mr. Smith, a friend of Nick Cassavettis, with some interesting documents the director should see.”

  “Oh, by all means, interest me,” someone sneered from the other room.

  “Mr. Paulson,” Amy said, leading PJ into the den.

  A slender man in a light-gray suit sat in a wingback chair in front of a fireplace. He was bald on top, with a two-inch wreath of curly, salt-and-pepper hair remaining at ear level. He was unremarkable except for the incredibly sharp narrowness of his nose. His slender tie only accentuated his caricatured features.

  Amy shook his hand and sat in a leather chair, and PJ plunked down on the sofa beside the delicate, cherry table holding the phone. He put his computer on the end table and held up the phone cord. “With your permission?”

  Paulson nodded for him to continue.

  While Amy exchanged pleasantries and l
aid the groundwork, the programmer powered up his computer and logged in. Paulson listened quietly, with his slender fingers steepled in front of his chin. By the time she showed him the printout of the incomplete e-mail, PJ was firing up his browser to contact Mycroft.

  Director Paulson chuckled at the short message of doom. “How clever. What else did he have to say?” He neatly folded their only copy of the e-mail message and placed it on the arm of his chair.

  Amy turned to PJ for his part.

  He clicked a few more buttons and got a file menu. “I’m in.” He clicked on the first file with the Icarus name attached. Black script on a white background sprang to life. Symbols and letters he’d never even seen before crowded onto a single line. Before he could memorize it, Paulson shrieked, “Shut it down!”

  The butler came out of nowhere and slapped the laptop shut so hard he damaged the liquid-crystal screen. “Hey!” PJ shouted as security types came pouring into the den. Someone had grabbed his wrist.

  He was trying to decide how violently to object when Amy intervened. “Director, there’s no need for this. We came to you with this first.”

  PJ had a goon on each elbow when Paulson came over to examine him. “How high is your clearance?”

  Amy looked surprised when he answered, “Secret.”

  “We’re a little beyond that now, my boy,” the special projects’ director said. “Do you know anything about quantum mechanics?”

  “Only that the first thing they do is make you unlearn all the lies they taught you in low-level Chemistry and Physics classes,” PJ said.

  “We’ll send for your file and have it amended immediately. This is a State Secret.” Paulson motioned to the guards to release him. “He has no idea what he’s seen. Tell the damage-control team Cassavettis hid them on the JPL mail server. Get the standard forms for Mr. Smith to sign before he leaves. Use the laptop for fingerprints.”

  Before the goons grabbed his gear, the programmer begged, “Do you mind if I get some CDs and the book I’ve been reading out of the case first?”