Lee didn't dare make any sudden moves, not wanting to provoke a violent response. He held his hands out in a gesture for the young soldier to stay calm. In the cold, Lee could see sweat beading on the soldier’s forehead. He understood the conflict in the young man’s mind. The contradiction he saw before him must have shaken his foundation. Everything he’d been told about the southern devils would have been called into question when Lee staggered through that door holding his sister. Now his sister was safe and the devil stood before him, what would he do?
“Don't,” Sun-Hee whispered, and her whisper carried through the empty wooden hut. Lee had no doubt Sun-Hee meant well, but he doubted her brother could turn his back on his country.
Lee stepped backwards, inching toward the door. He could feel the wind gusting around his legs, the rain driven against his lower back.
There were voices outside, boisterous and loud, but they weren’t behind Lee, they were coming from somewhere beyond the back door of the hut, behind the soldier.
The young man's dark eyes betrayed what was about to happen. Lee understood before the back door opened: this young soldier was not alone. The soldier’s trembling fists told Lee he should run, that he should flee while he could, that the brother had to come after him but that he would give Lee a head start.
Deep down, Lee knew there could never be any other outcome. The young soldier could never let him go, but it seemed he would spare his grandfather and sister from seeing Lee killed in cold blood in front of them.
Lee had to run.
Sun-Hee reached out her arm toward Lee, distracting him for a moment. He could see the pity in her eyes, but a woman's pity could not save him, not in North Korea.
The rear door opened and two more soldiers walked into the hut. They must have been outside smoking as one of them stubbed out a cigarette on a metal case, saving the stub. With rifles slung over their shoulders, they joked with each other, smiling and laughing. Their features froze as they locked eyes with him.
Lee wanted to run, but his legs wouldn't move. He thought about running, but the time lag between that thought and the muscular response in his legs felt like an eternity. The soldiers swung their rifles down from their shoulders, dropping their cigarettes and yelling as they brought their guns to bear on him.
Lee's boots scraped on the wooden floor. Turning, he slipped, falling against the door jamb. With his hands, he grasped at the frame, pulling himself out onto the wet porch.
“Halt!”
Lee swung his arms and began pumping his legs as he bolted into the drizzle.
Water splashed beneath his boots as he ran through puddles.
The mud caked on his boots slowed his pace, acting like lead weights tied around his ankles.
He could hear someone behind him, pounding across the porch, their heavy boots thumping on the old wood.
He drove his legs, scrambling across the muddy gravel outside the hut.
The rattle of a diesel engine starting up cut through the quiet of the night. Headlights blinded him.
He turned, darting between two huts.
Voices screamed behind him. Coming around the corner of the rickety old hut, he lost his footing and slipped, falling sideways in the mud.
He looked back.
Several soldiers ran down the alley behind him, their dark silhouettes illuminated by the lights of a military jeep.
Lee scrambled to his feet and ran on, his heart pounding in his chest, his lungs burning in the cold air.
A shot rang out, piercing the night like the crack of thunder.
At first, Lee wasn’t sure what had happened. Fire burned in his thigh, tearing through the muscle like a red hot poker.
He fell.
Adrenaline demanded he keep going. He struggled to get back to his feet, but his left leg refused to respond. He grabbed at his thigh and his hand came away covered in blood. Still, he staggered on, turning into another narrow alleyway between the huts of the village, trying to weave his way back to the fields and into the forest.
Voices yelled behind him.
“He is here. Down here.”
“Cut him off!”
Lee hobbled, using the rough wooden walls to keep himself upright, falling against the warped panels and pushing off them, dragging himself on.
Dark shapes moved across the alley ahead of him.
Flashlights shone down the narrow, muddy gap between the huts.
Lee could see two soldiers at the end of the alley with rifles raised. He turned. Behind him, three more soldiers stood poised, ready to fire.
Lee fell to his knees in the mud as the rain picked up, soaking him once again.
The huts had been built on raised stumps. Lee realized he could crawl beneath them. He couldn’t give up. In his mind, he could still see the US Navy SEAL being savaged by dogs on that lonely, windswept beach. He couldn’t die like that. He had to believe he could escape.
Soldiers ran in from both ends of the alleyway.
Lee had begun scrambling beneath one of the huts when a hand grabbed his leg. He kicked, lashing out with his boots, but the soldier was strong, dragging him back into the alley.
Lee clutched at mud and stones on the ground, desperately trying to claw his way beneath the hut.
Another set of hands grabbed at his clothes, wrenching him out and flipping him over on his back.
Flashlights blinded him.
The last thing he remembered was the sickening crunch of a rifle butt being slammed into his forehead.
Chapter 06: Professor Lachlan
Jason checked the time on his phone – 11:47.
He rushed up the broad stone stairs leading to the physics hall, holding his paper under his arm.
The campus was deserted.
Normally, the ebb and flow of students gave life to the old buildings, giving them a charm beyond the lifeless red bricks and the white wooden window frames staring back at him. Without students, the physics hall seemed more of a museum than a university.
The main door was locked.
Jason shook both doors, testing them for any give.
“Fuck!”
Why the hell didn’t Professor Lachlan allow him to email his paper? How could such a brilliant mind be so backwards in regards to technology? What was wrong with email? What plausible reason could there be for not allowing papers to be submitted electronically? Especially on a holiday! Why did the professor insist on coming into the university on his day off? Professor Lachlan needs to get a life, Jason decided.
Damn, he thought, Lachlan is probably sitting in his office waiting. How the hell am I going to get in there? He peered through the thick glass, trying to see if there was anyone inside the hallway, perhaps a security guard.
Jason took a deep breath, trying not to get frustrated.
Lachlan loved working with paper. He would use three different colored pens to mark his papers: blue for general comments, green for praise, and red for everything in between, showing his disdain for anything out of the ordinary. Jason tended to get a lot of red. Paper was the soapbox upon which Professor Lachlan proclaimed his disdain for change.
“The 1930s called,” Jason muttered. “They’d like their slide rules back.”
“Sorry,” a voice said from behind him. “I didn’t catch that?”
“Professor!” he cried, jumping at the sound of Lachlan's voice. Jason's eyes were wide with surprise. He turned to see Professor Lachlan standing behind him smiling.
“Ah, nothing,” Jason continued, almost dropping his paper. The loose sheets slid in the manila folder and he grabbed at them, catching them before they fell.
The professor was of Asian descent, and Jason had often wondered how a Scottish surname had entered the mix. There had to be quite a story behind that union. A warm smile lit up a kind face. Well, Jason thought, a kind face if you were doing what you were told. Deviate from the norm and Professor Lachlan could be as tyrannical as Joseph Stalin. Ah, that was an exaggeration, he thought, but Jaso
n did wonder if his various professors knew how intimidating they could be with their vast intellects. It seemed decades of lectures to snotty nosed teens had shortened the fuse of everyone on the faculty. Today, though, the professor seemed delighted to see Jason, greeting him with a hearty handshake as though he were catching up with a student from years past.
Jason stood there awkwardly, not sure how to respond. In the background, a teenaged girl rode by on a bicycle as a young guy chased her playfully on roller blades. They called to each other, laughing and smiling. At least someone was enjoying the holiday.
Lachlan pulled a set of keys from his pocket and fiddled with the lock on the door.
“Come in,” he said, stepping into the lobby and punching a key code to disable the alarm. He was holding a cardboard tray with two drinks in styrofoam cups. White plastic lids hid the content. “Mocha Latte, right?”
“Oh,” Jason said, accepting the cup from the professor. “I’m quite fussy, sticking only to high-brow brands like International Roast, but ... I’m sure I can make an exception.”
Lachlan grinned.
They walked along the polished wooden floor, past the staircase and over to the professor’s office at the back of the physics lecture hall. Lachlan opened the door and signaled for Jason to step in ahead of him. The office was unusually cramped, being wedged between two lecture halls and was shared with another professor as a prep room.
Jason knew Lachlan had a more luxurious main office on the second floor, one that was spacious, with green palms and brown leather seats, the kind of plush seats with brass buttons pinning the stiff leather in place at regular intervals. He liked that office, it had an air of importance about it, but this room between the lecture halls was little more than a long storage room or a tiny corridor. A mop and bucket wouldn't have been out of place.
The chairs inside the long room had to be pushed into the desks before he could squeeze past. For such a narrow room, the ceiling was absurdly high, reaching up over thirty feet. The ceiling height matched the lecture halls on either side with their raised, theater seating, and made the prep room seem even more claustrophobic than it already was, as though it were modeled after a deep desert canyon from an old western. The dust on the shelves reinforced that notion.
“Grab a seat,” Lachlan said warmly.
Jason pulled out a desk chair and rolled it back against the narrow window at the far end of the cramped room. He sat between the internal doors that led out to the lecture halls on either side, feeling the warmth of the sun on his back. The chair squeaked as he rocked slightly, settling into the seat. It was an old wooden framed chair, like something from the 1930s, just like the imaginary slide rule he'd ascribed to Professor Lachlan.
“Einstein taught here, you know,” Lachlan continued, taking a seat in a similar chair between the two desks.
The desks were more like waist high work benches, lacking drawers and their finishes were worn and scratched.
“Einstein gave a lecture here in 1948 on how gravity warps space-time. Beforehand, he sat in one of these chairs. No one’s sure which, but like some lost Roman Catholic relic, these chairs are destined to be honored forever. Silly, huh, how even scientists can cling to such irrational, meaningless objects as though they could somehow impart a mystical power the man never had?”
He laughed, adding, “I tried to get rid of them. You wouldn’t believe the backlash I got from the head of faculty. I should have just thrown them in the dump without telling anyone and been done with it, but the Dean is determined that this tiny back room remains pretty much as Einstein saw it in the 40s. I think Einstein would be horrified to see that this room has become a sort of shrine.”
“I think it’s pretty cool,” Jason said, not afraid to contradict Lachlan. He didn’t feel he had to agree with the professor. Lachlan was never one for ass kissers, Jason thought, and he respected those that had confidence in their own convictions. Jason had picked up on this quite early in his time at the university, and the professor’s mature attitude gave him enough leeway to feel he could be himself around the old man. There were no airs or pretenses with Lachlan.
Lachlan smiled.
Jason glanced around the room, trying to imagine Einstein reviewing his notes. The tiles on the ceiling were decaying and probably dated back to well before Einstein's lecture. Pulley ropes were visible on both walls, connecting with moveable blackboards inside the lecture halls. They were whiteboards now, but Jason could imagine Einstein standing in front of dusty chalkboards, his air of confidence unmistakeable, with his wild hair tossed carelessly to one side. With a stub of chalk in hand he would do battle with the blackboard, defining reality in white strokes hastily buffed against the darkness, revealing secrets hidden since the dawn of the universe.
“Maybe it’s ...” Jason ventured, but he stopped mid-sentence, doubting himself.
“No,” Lachlan said, “Go on.”
“I know there’s no authority figures in science, but I’d like to think Einstein would see this tiny room for what it is, an attempt to retain the heart of the times, to capture the spirit of theoretical physics reaching beyond the technological limits of the day. He saw more in the scratchings of chalk on a blackboard than anything we could see until we put telescopes in space. Perhaps he would be pleased to see us learning from that.”
Lachlan smiled warmly, saying, “You're right, and yet there's more to Einstein than exotic formulas. His genius, his brilliance lay in seeing the obvious. Some eighteen years before he formulated the theory of relativity, two scientists, Michelson and Morley, demonstrated that the speed of light never varied regardless of motion. All the clues were there, plain for all to see for the best part of two decades, but it took Einstein to put it together, and do you know why?”
“No,” Jason confessed.
“Because everyone else looked to explain away the result. Everyone else became embarrassed by what looked like an inconsistency, a mistake, but not Einstein. For Einstein, inconsistencies were a red flag, the key to unlocking a greater understanding of the universe. For Einstein, the contradiction was the answer. He realized scientists had been asking the wrong question. Many a good idea has been brought low by observations. Einstein understood reality is not subject to our theories, our whims and desires, it is reality that must define them. He started with the assumption that reality was right, it was our thinking that was wrong, and then it was just a case of figuring out the relationship described by reality. I don't mean to say his reasoning and equations were some blithe, simple step, but the hardest part of formulating his theory was letting go of what he'd previously assumed was true.”
Jason was mesmerized. He sat there in awe of the professor. For him, this was the essence of science: an awakening of the mind.
“Don’t let anyone ever belittle a good question,” Lachlan said softly. “There are no dumb questions, only dumb people afraid to ask good questions.”
Jason smiled. This is what he loved about Lachlan. The professor had a way of making him feel like he was part of the family. It was good advice, advice he hoped he wouldn’t forget.
“Did you complete your assignment?” Lachlan asked.
“Yes,” Jason replied, handing him the folder.
Lachlan reached out for the folder. As often as he’d seen the professor’s right hand, Jason never got used to the sight. Lachlan had lost three of his fingers in an accident; his little finger, ring finger and middle finger were barely stubs, leaving just his thumb and index finger on his right hand. The injury was old. The scars were rough and lumpy. Tiny bumps marked stumps where his fingers had once been. Jason could see them twitch as the professor reached for the folder, phantom fingers stretching out where they no longer existed. He tried not to stare.
Lachlan had been Jason's professor for the past four years. Although Lachlan was hard on him, Jason appreciated the rigor and discipline the professor brought to physics. There was nothing mean, nothing unfair. The old man's professionalism carrie
d a sense of regency and respect. The professor had probably never had an impure thought in his life, Jason thought.
Each year Lachlan would tell the class how he lost his fingers, only it was never the same story. Normally, he’d spin his yarn during orientation week to freak out the new students. Those who took his class for only a year never knew quite what to think, but the old timers like Jason understood. One year it was that he lost his fingers trying to stop the lift doors from closing in the biology wing. That made the girls squirm. Another year it was as the result of playing with lasers in his basement laboratory. Of course, there was no such lair for this mad scientist. He later admitted to Jason that he lived in a third floor apartment, so there wasn't even a basement. Jason had heard rumors on campus that the professor had lost his fingers rescuing a young boy from a shark while on vacation in Miami. Mitchell swore it happened while the professor was wrestling a girl free from the jaws of a tiger in Cambodia, as he found an article on the Internet describing the incident. No one really knew, and that was clearly the way the professor liked it.
Lachlan put his glasses on and began looking at Jason’s paper.
Jason’s phone chimed with an incoming message. He looked at his pocket and then at Lachlan, who had his head down, reading the assignment. Lachlan waved his good hand, and a flutter of fingers signaled that he didn’t care if Jason checked his messages. Jason didn’t need permission, but he felt his respect for the professor required that tacit permission as a courtesy. He pulled out his phone, entered the password and looked at the message:
From Helena: Lily wants to know if you’ve heard from her father. She’s worried.
Jason typed a quick response into his phone using his two thumbs.
From Jason: At uni with prof. Nothing yet. Tell her not to worry, we’ll find him. Or, more likely, he’ll find us. I stuck more posters at surrounding intersections. c u guys soon.
Jason sat there quietly, wondering if he should leave and help Lily. He started getting nervous himself, even though he knew there was nothing to be done. He felt as though he ought to be doing something, regardless of how irrelevant it might be. It would take most of an hour for Lachlan to review his work, but the professor appeared to be skimming over the content, so Jason thought it would be best if he waited patiently.
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