The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  Mel opened his case and set it on his knee. “Thank you for fitting me in at such short notice. I’ll try to keep it as brief as I can.” Gilman nodded and waited. Mel had hoped for a more animated response. There was no option but to press on. “As I said when I called, it’s to do with the late Ms. Stephanie Carne. There are a few details concerning her affairs that I hope you might be able to help us with.”

  “Yes, if I can. What do you wish to know?” Gilman replied. One of the advantages of being with a law firm was that motives and credentials were so rarely questioned.

  “A sad thing to have happen to one of your employees, Mr. Gilman,” Mel said, making a pretence of sorting through papers behind the lid of his briefcase.

  “More than that, Mr. Shears. To me it was a personal tragedy. I was very concerned for her. She had tremendous promise as a scientist.” Gilman shook his head sadly. “You know, I was talking to her that very evening—only a few hours before it happened, I suppose. I really thought she was over the worst of it. The news came as a terrible shock. The people that she worked with haven’t gotten over it yet. They all felt for her when Brett was killed… I take it you knew about that?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “She was very popular.”

  “You knew Brett Vorland, Mr. Gilman?”

  “I met him once or twice, at company social events—barbecues, things like that. He moved here from… California, I think it was, sometime around early summer.”

  “Now, let me see…” Mel opened a notepad, took a pen from his inside pocket, and looked down at the list of questions he had prepared. They didn’t mean anything. It was just to get Gilman talking. “Stephanie was with the firm how long?”

  “Oh, a year or so as far as I remember. The personnel people can get the exact date for you before you leave.”

  “Fine. And her exact job title?”

  “Research physicist, grade three.”

  “What kind of work did that entail?”

  “She helped design and develop measurement equipment that we use on the prototype reactor that’s under construction here… I assume you’re aware of the nature of our main program?”

  “Er, sufficiently so, I think. And, ah, tell me, Mr. Gilman, during the year she worked here, was there ever any reason for dissatisfaction with her performance?… Or maybe I should say, any reason to suspect anything irregular in her actions?”

  Gilman looked surprised. “No. None… I’m not sure exactly what you mean by ‘irregular.’ ”

  “Does any of your work here involve classified information?” Mel asked.

  “Classified? You mean in the military sense? Secret stuff?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, some of the more advanced physics does overlap with certain areas of defense work, especially in the space defense sector, yes… But only one or two of our senior scientists have any involvement in that. Basically we re in the commercial energy business. We don’t do military research.”

  “So Stephanie wouldn’t have been connected with the overlap area that you mentioned?”

  “No. As a junior staff member, she didn’t have the clearances.” Gilman stared dubiously across the desk for a second or two. “Mr. Shears, could I ask what the purpose of all this is?”

  Seeing an opportunity, Mel ignored the question. “The senior scientists who do get involved in the more advanced physics, do they deal from time to time with Dr. Oberwald, the national defense adviser?”

  “What does that have to do with Stephanie Carne?”

  He was too far in to back off now. The only choice was to go for it. “My particular interest concerns Stephanie’s friend, Brett Vorland,” Mel said. “I am aware that Dr. Oberwald has visited this establishment on occasions, and that he does have technical connections with some of your work. Now, what I’d very much like to know is if you have any knowledge of dealings between Dr. Oberwald and Brett Vorland.” Mel adopted the greatest look of sincerity he could manage. “Believe me, it is important.”

  He wasn’t sure just what reaction he expected, but it certainly wasn’t the one he got. Gilman had started to stiffen even before Mel finished speaking. Then, without warning, he reached out to flip a switch on his desk intercom, and without taking his eye off Mel, instructed brusquely, “Ruth, get the number of Evron and Winthram in Boston, would you? Call them and find out if they have a Mr. Shears on their staff, and if he’s supposed to be here today. Let me know right away. ” He released the switch before she could reply. “I don’t know who you are or where you’re from,” he told Mel icily. “Now tell me what’s going on. I warn you, if I’m not satisfied, I’ll have the police here before you can get off the premises. Now?…”

  For a few seconds Mel was too taken aback to respond. He had no idea what he’d said to provoke the reaction, but it was clear that he was on to something. There would be only one way to find out more now. He drew a long breath, closed the lid of the briefcase, and placed his hands palms down on top of it in a gesture of candor.

  “My name is Shears, and I am from Evron and Winthram,” he said. “But I’m also a very close, old friend of Stephanie’s. And yes, you’re right—I’m not dealing with her affairs following her suicide. You see, Mr. Gilman, Stephanie isn’t dead.”

  Gilman stared hard for a long time, his eyes flickering in a silent interrogation over every inch of Mel’s face. Eventually he had read all he wanted to. “Go on,” he said, remaining expressionless.

  “It was her sister, and she didn’t kill herself. She was murdered. They were always being mistaken for each other. I knew both of them, and Brett, for many years. We were all at university together. Brett was working on the space-based defense program in California. To cut a long story short, we believe he was mixed up with an espionage operation to pass information to the Soviets. We suspect that he was killed by them when he tried to opt out, and that has a precaution in case she knew more than she should have, they decided to eliminate Stephanie too… except they got her sister by mistake.”

  There was silence for a while as Gilman took in what Mel had said. He sat back in his chair, and the look in his eyes changed as the full awfulness of the situation sank in. He looked back at Mel, horrified. “My God!” he breathed. Mel waited for a moment longer. “Then she could still be in great danger,” Gilman said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s in a safe place, and as well as can be expected.”

  “In Boston?”

  “Yes.”

  The intercom buzzed. Gilman touched a switch and said mechanically, “Yes?”

  “I’ve called Evron and Winthram, Mr. Gilman. Mr. Shears is employed by them, and yes, he was scheduled to be here today. Everything seems to be in order.”

  “Yes… er, thank you, Ruth.”

  “Will there be anything else?”

  “No. It’s all right.” Gilman still seemed numbed. He sat for a while longer, slowly absorbing the implications. Mel waited, staring at the desktop. At last Gilman said, “So exactly what aspect are you pursuing? I know you can’t be a part of any official investigation into Brett.”

  Mel frowned. “You do? How?”

  “Because if you were, you’d know about the rest of what has been going on. You see, the FBI were here yesterday, asking the same questions. They weren’t very forthcoming with details, but I got the impression that his previous employers have uncovered something about him that made them suspicious, and called in the authorities.”

  “You mean Livermore Labs? Or Spirac, where he worked before that?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t say. There wasn’t really anything I could help them with.”

  Now it was Mel s turn to stare numbly. Deep in his own mind he had tried to convince himself that Brett wouldn’t really have gone over to a hostile power, that the WPI documents had nothing to do with anything important, and that everything else would turn out to have an ordinary explanation. But if the FBI was involved, aler
ted independently by the people that Brett had actually worked for, that seemed to clinch it. He emitted the long, heavy sigh of someone who at last had no choice but to accept the inevitable.

  “You didn’t really believe it,” Gilman said, again reading the signs.

  “I guess not.”

  Gilman studied Mel’s face and frowned momentarily to himself as if uncertain of having missed something. “What I don’t get is, why are you hiding her, and why aren’t you talking to the proper authorities? Why get involved like this? Why not let them handle it?” He thought for a moment longer over the things Mel had said earlier. “And you still haven’t told me how Oberwald figures in all this.”

  There could be no evading the issue now. “He’s the reason we don’t want anyone to know that Stephanie is still alive,” Mel said. “We have reason to believe that the person who recruited Brett in the first place… was Dr. Oberwald.” He allowed a moment for that to sink in. “Can you see where that puts Stephanie?”

  Had the statement come earlier, Gilman’s reaction might have been different, but by this time he had heard too much to be completely shocked by anything. He draped his arms limply on the sides of his chair, and stared distantly at the far wall. “Je-sus!” he muttered finally, more to himself than to Mel.

  “A mess,” Mel agreed.

  Gilman refocused inside the room. “Do you have any plans for lunch, Mr. Shears?”

  “No. I was just planning on going back to my hotel later this afternoon. I’ll be going back to Boston in the morning.”

  “Let me take you to a good place that I use a lot. They have private dining rooms where we can talk. I can’t promise anything for sure, you understand, but I’d like to help you if I can. First, however, I want to hear the whole story.”

  Over lunch, Mel related the story of Brett and Stephanie, Eva’s visit to Denver, and his own involvement from years gone by. Gilman listened intently, needing to ask only a few, infrequent questions, which reinforced the impression that Mel had already formed of a man with an agile mind, and the deep, analytical ability that marks a thinker. Gilman reaffirmed his willingness to help, which for the present could mean little beyond that he would reexamine GPD’s dealings with Oberwald and let Mel know if he came across anything unusual or suspicious. Mel said he would be grateful.

  Then the conversation turned to the project under development at GPD. Stephanie had told him it was a fission-fusion hybrid and tried to describe it, but Mel still wasn’t really clear what that meant. “You can think of it as a halfway step between fission and pure fusion,” Gilman said. “Basically you use the neutron flux from a low-grade fusion process to breed high-grade fuel for fission reactors from fertile elements such as uranium 238 or thorium 232. Then, you use that to produce power instead of from fusion directly. The advantage of doing it that way is the amplification factor that you get from neutron multiplication in the fertile material, while the fast fusion neutrons are being slowed down and absorbed—which can be twenty, thirty times, or even more, theoretically. What it means is you can relax the performance criteria significantly from what you’d need for pure fusion to be economic.”

  “Are you saying pure fusion isn’t practical, then?” Mel asked.

  “Not at all. The physics is well understood now, but there are still some formidable engineering hurdles. What I’m saying is, we could be on-line commercially with this a lot sooner.”

  As his enthusiasm warmed, Gilman went on to talk about how, one day, controlled hundred-million-degree plasmas would provide limitless energy and revolutionary ways of producing materials of every kind. Every square mile of deep ocean contained enough deuterium—fusion fuel—to deliver as much energy as all the oil under Saudi Arabia. “The whole universe consists of energy and matter,” he said, making a wide, sweeping motion over the table with his arm. “And every advance in human knowledge makes more of it accessible to us. Resources become cheaper and more abundant with time, not less. All this doomsday nonsense we’ve been hearing for years in the biggest fallacy of the age. Look at how the prices of just about every commodity you can name have come down in real terms over tile last two hundred years—despite all the insane economic policies to prevent it.”

  Mel smiled. “I take it you’re a Constitutional, then?”

  “God, how could anyone not be?” Gilman took the salt shaker and poured a little onto the side of his plate. “By Einstein’s equation, mass is energy, yes? Well at the rate of energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, those grains—or any matter, come to that—at today’s energy prices, are worth about ten million dollars per thousandth of an ounce. The only difference between a shovelful of dirt and unlimited resources is knowledge.” Mel stared at the salt, fascinated. He’d never thought about it that way before. Gilman sat back in his chair. “And we’re sitting on a ball of it eight thousand miles across. Convert that into dollars, divide them out on a per-person basis, and then tell me that the human race is poor.” He swept his arm out exuberantly again. “And that doesn’t even take account of what’s out there beyond the planet.”

  “You’ve no doubts that we’ll get out there, then?”

  Gilman looked astonished. “Of course not. That’s what it’s there for.”

  It was uplifting to hear such vision and enthusiasm for a change. All the same, Mel had heard too many reservations expressed to let himself be carried away. “A lot of people wouldn’t agree, though,” he said. “They say they’ve heard it all before, and technology has failed to deliver. All they see are risks and pollution.”

  “I know, and they’re wrong,” Gilman said. “It’s worked so well that they don’t see it any more. They’ve forgotten how people used to live. When a culture loses its confidence that it can comprehend and solve its problems, that’s when it goes into decline. Negative thinking and defeatism are the only kind of pollution we have to worry about.”

  • • •

  Mel arrived back at his hotel in the middle of the afternoon. He had a drink at the bar and watched the news on TV, which was still dominated by prognosticators of every kind speculating on likely developments following the election. It was like a roulette game with every number covered. Since every prediction conceivable was being made, one of them at least was bound to get it right. So, another expert would be acclaimed and a new guru found to follow—for a while, until the next one. The stock market worked the same way. Computerized superstition.

  Afterward, he went up to his room, where he wrote down all his facts, guesses, and questions concerning Brett and Oberwald. Then he sat staring at his notes for a long time, trying to reconstruct the probable sequence of events. As he sipped his third cup of black coffee from the room’s do-it-yourself stock, the chilling realization dawned of how the pieces fitted into place.

  Sometime in the comparatively recent past, somebody connected with Brett’s work, either at Spirac or Livermore, had stumbled on something amiss, which had led to the FBI’s becoming involved to investigate a possible espionage connection. From what Gilman had said, it didn’t seem that the FBI had so far uncovered anything implicating Oberwald, too; however, that could have changed by the time they amassed sufficient evidence to confront Brett directly. But before they had been able to take the investigation to that point, Brett had had an accident. And just for good measure, in case she knew too much about Brett’s recruitment and who was behind it, they had tried to eliminate Stephanie, too. Brett’s accident and the attempt to kill Stephanie hadn’t been simply to protect the investment when Brett tried to get out. It had been to prevent the exposure of Oberwald’s collaboration with the Soviets. Mel blanched at the realization of the enormity of what they had taken on. It would have been a formidable enough task for a national intelligence agency. But there could be no backing out now. He and his colleagues would have to pursue it as best they could.

  The place to begin, as Mel saw it, was where it had begun with Brett himself: Oberwald’s initial recruitment of him. He didn’t thi
nk that something like that would have begun only after Brett and Stephanie’s move to California. It was more likely that the organization which Oberwald represented had been aware of Brett’s potential usefulness ever since his days at university. If so, what would have singled Brett out to them? Mel wondered. He doubted if it could have been simply Brett’s potential for doing classified work later, for the same could have been said for any other gifted programmer, too. Probably it had more to do with things like motivations and ideological convictions—things that would incline him to be cooperative. With people of Oberwald’s caliber involved, injecting him into a suitable area of the defense program for the investment to pay off would be something that could be engineered later… And that was where it all suddenly started to make more sense. For Brett’s almost manic fear of national policy being dictated by the ultraright had been hardly a secret around the campus; and such incidents as throwing Rudshaw down the library stairs would mark him as a person who didn’t shrink from drastic action when he thought the occasion warranted it. Thus, the ingredients were there for him to have been spotted early on as not only having the right talents, but also as possessing a lever that would make him potentially manipulable.

  Who, then, had done the spotting? It seemed improbable that Oberwald had just happened to meet and talk with Brett by chance when Oberwald visited Pensacola—the occasion that Stephanie had described, when Brett came home feeling flattered and excited. The encounter had to have been set up, which implied that somebody who had been around at that time was an information conduit (though not necessarily to Oberwald in person). It could have been a member of the Socratic society, where Brett liked to go and argue, who had hosted Oberwald to lunch on the day after his address to the Chamber of Commerce; or somebody in the computer department; or one of the antifundamentalists that Brett had mixed with. Or it could have been somebody else entirely. But whatever the answer, the time and place to begin looking was not here, but among the events that had taken place four years previously at the University of West Florida, in the year after Mel had moved to North Carolina.