Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  “I know that, Jason, but, baby, it’s like this—” She drew a long breath, and sighed deeply, and I could almost imagine her lowering her eyes and showing him what a difficult confession this all was. “There was this guy, Calvin, once. He made me cum better than anybody ever before or ever since. Probably cause he had such a good big one, like yours. So I was thinking … um, you kind of got to me the last couple times … and if I could just call you Calvin … you know, to kind of remind me … just for me, just this once? I mean, it will turn me into an animal for you. That is guar-an-teed. C’mon, you gotta let me call you Calvin.”

  He wasn’t what you call super happy about it, but she wheedled a little more, and he finally said okay.

  A couple minutes later she started with “Oh, Calvin, squeeze my tits” and “Oh, Calvin, I want your big, big dick so bad,” and all this raunchy rape-talk about her hot hole and his massive meat. Honestly, John, I’ve been eavesdropping for more than fifteen years, and I have to say, ever since pornography became easy to get, the quality of most people’s bedroom dialogue has gone straight into the toilet, you know what I mean?

  The funniest thing to me—I mean, honest to god and jesus and that whole crowd, John, I was sitting there and laughing fit to bust a gut while I listened—was that she sounded like she meant it. Which was pretty funny because by then I’d heard her boinking old Calvin a couple more times and you know that bed barely moved.

  I just didn’t think Lena Logan could be getting off fantasizing about Calvin Durango, because despite his high income, the man was a little rat of a person, losing his hair young, major acne scars, stick-outy ears and a potato nose, and no taste in clothes. Front view, Karl Malden doing a “before” shot for Stridex. Side view, a goblin in a kids’ book. Top view, a very messy nest with one big egg and handles.

  Anyway, so Lena got Jason out the door. By then the pure weirdness had pulled me out of my room at the No-Tell Motel and I was listening to the bug on my cell phone’s earpieces while I watched through an infrared sniper scope, from under a bridge over a concrete arroyo.

  No, the arroyos are a basic feature of Albuquerque, which is built on a desert floodplain—flash flood territory, in other words. So they’re not much like the arroyos you have to cope with in desert hiking, though some of them must have started out that way. What they are is concrete ditches that cut all through Albuquerque. They give the flash flood water a quick, harmless route to the river on the rare days when it rains. Nobody goes into an arroyo if they have any sense or any choice, since they can go from bone dry to nothing-can-live-in-that in a few seconds, but us detectives are always short on choices and even shorter on sense. And if you work Albuquerque at all, you get to know your arroyos. Throw something under the bridge in an arroyo and the next rainstorm will take it way away—very likely right on down to the Rio Grande, and who knows how far after that. Half the murdered bodies in that town turn up under arroyo bridges.

  Okay, so now are you picturing me squatting in that concrete ditch, and watching Lena Logan’s door with an infrared sniper scope, and listening to Jason the unhappily married moron pool cleaner get his last little cuddle after having sex with “Wendy” who was insisting on calling him Calvin? Got all that?

  Well, when he finally came out, it sure looked like she hadn’t lied about showing him an extra good time. Jason was bouncing down the steps to the parking lot, from sheer pure joy, like Barney on crack. He looked like he’d been run over while dressing, and he more or less fell into his car, but he was radiating enough happy to be seen by the naked eye from Santa Fe. If they had a car that could detect when you’re emotionally unfit to drive, old Jason’d’ve set off every alarm.

  As soon as Jason left, Lena made two phone calls. The first one was to an engineer from subnucleonics section, a guy named Rod Johnson (indicating that God or his parents had a strong sense of irony, if one could judge by his past performance). She said, “Baby, I’m so sorry, but my mom is just coming into town tonight, and she didn’t tell me she was coming, and she’ll be here in an hour, so I gotta cancel with you. Can you forgive your little Wendy? I promise you the next one’s free if you just forgive me this time.”

  Well, naturally, being an engineer, he was probably a shitload more excited about getting it free than he would have been about having sex, so he agreed right away. She thanked him gratefully and hung up.

  Then there was a long, long silence. There is no longer silence than when you’re surveilling somebody who leads a dull, repetitive life, and they finally do something interesting, and now they’ve stopped doing the interesting thing and you’re waiting for them to start again. Trust me, John, they don’t make silences longer than that.

  Than the silence while you wait for something to happen again.

  That silence.

  They don’t make them any longer—hey, don’t throw your cat. I was just shitting with you, bud.

  I climbed out of the arroyo and moved in closer, keeping an eye out for anyone who might notice a guy sneaking between parked cars with a scope in the middle of the night. Wouldn’t do to get busted for a perv.

  She picked up the phone and dialed. She didn’t say hello and nobody said hello at the other end of the line. She just started. Her voice was flat and dull, not like a machine, just like she was real tired and trying to concentrate, as she said, “Xegon Tech Memo One Five Four One Oh Oh Two Nine Seven. Date October Two Nineteen Ninety-seven. Subj entropy increase with distance negative result. From Paula Carson To Ned Vernal Exec Sum Experiments with STS package reveal that the Gaudeamus phenomenon neither increases nor decreases entropy in response to changes of distance on the order of three to five orders of magnitude of difference in potential energy with respect to the Earth’s siffergraf.”

  “Subj?” I asked. “Like the abbreviation for subject on memos?”

  “That’s what she said,” he agreed. “She pronounced it, just like that. And like I said, in a weird tired voice, all flat and everything, like she’d spent the day running wind sprints and just gotten her breath back, and with no more expression than those reader programs on a desktop computer.”

  “And what’s a siffergraf?”

  “My best guess, after I did some searching in my special accounts, is that it’s a pronunciation of SIFoR GraF”—he spelled it out, capitals and all—“which stands for Standard Inertial Frame of Reference Gravitational Field, which is what the crowd at Xegon seems to call the everyday world we all live in. To differentiate it from experiments conducted in orbit by a couple of robots on the space station or the shuttle, or out in interplanetary space on probes that aren’t supposed to be there, or maybe on the moon. No question, though, that there are at least four alternative test sites to SIFoR GraF, so I’d say they’re doing more in space than either of us would believe offhand. One of those other places is AFoR ISNc, and I’m curious as all shit about where that is. Now—on to the weirdness! We’re almost there.

  “So she recited physics and even rattled off very elaborate descriptions of graphs, giving all the points and every place where a curve intersected a gridline, and that went on for almost an hour, which meant she was transmitting maybe a thirty-page typewritten double-spaced paper, footnotes and all. Then she hung up, and I heard teeth brushing and clothes sloughing off, and her lights went out. After a while she was snoring.

  “I went back to my room and checked; I’d gotten it all in the mp3, and recorded the number she’d dialed, which was a number in Negon’s private exchange.

  “So I burned a CD of that, and the next day I handed the CD over to Mr. Hale at Xegon. I suggested that we do the absolutely conventional thing: since it had already been outside the company and no longer secure, the thing to do was to transcribe it, say we’d picked it up on a cointel intercept, and post it for identification.”

  “I don’t follow you,” I said.

  “And I only follow you if someone pays me,” Travis said. “Maybe old Kara’d be interested, but only if she was going to
try to catch you at something, and she’s not the type.”

  “She’s not,” I agreed, “and you stole that joke from Groucho Marx. ‘You follow me? Well, stop following me, I’ll have you arrested. ’ A Night at the Opera, I do believe.”

  “Hey, all the best material is stolen,” Travis said, “especially including the book you’re gonna get out of this, someday, and you’re stealing that from me and I’m stealing it from life.”

  “Life never sues,” I pointed out. “That’s what I love about it. So, now, explain what you were doing.”

  “Well,” Travis said, “we had a transcript made. That was an ordeal in its own right, for me, and I think that evil bastard Hale was laughing his lipless little laugh at me the whole time. See, I knew I’d be needing transcripts of a lot of what had gone on in that apartment, and I asked Hale if we could get them all made—rush this one out and then have the rest done as soon as possible afterwards. And the Incredible Iguana-Faced Preppy said yes.

  “See, I was expecting they’d send me some fast-typing engineer or some old court reporter with tech training, to get filled in on nonstandard and unfamiliar words he or she might hear. Instead they sent me this girl Lynn, who was probably twenty-five but looked fifteen, so besides transcribing all that physics, I was getting this little angel-face girl to type out a bunch of major heavy-duty fuck scenes. She wore her red-blonde hair in pigtails, didn’t wear makeup, and every time I saw her she was wearing a different color sweatshirt with a different Disney Winnie the Pooh character on it. She looked like Heidi meets Pippi Longstocking without looking as jaded or decadent as either.”

  I told her what I needed transcribed and what parts I needed timings on (when you go to court, which we might have needed that for, you need things like how long the heavy breathing went or what times the screams and moans came, sometimes), and she took notes with complete seriousness, and as far as I could tell I was the only one embarrassed.

  “Sorry this is such rough stuff,” I said to Lynn, when she said she thought her notes were complete and she was ready to start.

  “Where’d you get this stuff, anyway?”

  “From a bug I planted in a prostitute’s apartment,” I said, seeing no way that she wouldn’t figure that out anyway. “Somebody that some Xegon employees go to. That’s what I do for a living. I mean I’m a detective and I follow them around, not that I’m a Xegon employee or a prostitute. This is all part of a security investigation.”

  “So there’s only that one hour of protons and gravity and all that?”

  “Yeah, but I need a transcript of the whole thing, and with sounds like snoring and squeaking springs and stuff like that, I need start and stop marks, and timings.”

  “Sure, I can do that, it will be interesting to type something with no science and a lot of entertainment value.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way.”

  “I’m just bored stiff with tech transcription. I got my AA’s degree in tech transcription so I could support my son and me, but nothing in the world can make it interesting, you know?”

  Great. I was doing this to somebody’s mother.

  “Your son?”

  “Neddy is two. At least I can do transcriptions at home, so we get more time together. I don’t think I’ll ever quit because the job’s too perfect for what I need. But I’m so tired of typing about gravity and energy and teleportation. A few pages of ‘oh baby’ is going to be such a relief. Do you ever need this kind of thing done for places other than Xegon?”

  “Actually I need transcripts all the time.”

  “Let me give you my card. I’d love to transcribe some sex and violence instead of all this science shit. They let me moonlight as long as it’s for an approved firm and I promise not to share secrets between them but the only moonlighting work I’ve gotten has been transcribing more science papers for scientists at other companies, or for papers the guys here are going to publish. It would be cool to have a little variety.”

  So we traded cards, and filled out nondisclosure forms so that it would be okay with Xegon for her to work for me, and I promised I’d think of her when I had work. What the hell, I can always use a good transcriptionist. I just tried not to picture her typing the part where Lena was screaming “Oh Calvin, you’re so big it hurts my fucking cunt” in her sunrise-yellow Tigger sweatshirt while a little boy played with Tickle Me Elmo at her fuzzy slippered feet.

  Lynn got it done in a day, and we sent the transcript to everyone in the Q-tip with a note saying that our spook spotters had found this in a hostile location, and asking if any of them could identify it. We expected that almost all of them could but we’d only hear from a couple of them. That was okay, those were the ones we needed to hear from.

  When you’ve got one rotten apple in the barrel, you want to find it and isolate it. But if the whole barrel is rotten—if you’re just riddled, and you got more crooks than honest people, you don’t want to isolate the few bad guys and pull them out; you want to find the few good guys, and use them as informers while you wipe out the bad-guy operation, before setting up a whole new organization.

  So Hale put out the transcript with a note claiming it was a cointel pickup. If anyone recognized it they were supposed to contact him at once, and set up an interview (it didn’t mention I’d be there). And it very strongly said not to tell anyone else that you’d recognized it.

  We figured the authors of the paper would probably call in, even though we suspected that they were probably guilty as all shit, because they could hardly pretend not to recognize their own work and they’d have to at least try to bluff their way out by pretending to be innocent dupes. Other than that, though, we weren’t expecting to hear from much of anybody, except maybe a couple of religious nuts and a couple of ubergeeks that probably had never been invited to share the Wendy Experience.

  But three hours after he sent out the transcript, Hale called me. “Everyone on your list of suspects called in, and the very first was Calvin Durango, who appears to be quite distraught and wants to meet right away. He and I are both at the facility today—can you come down?”

  The facility is what they called the labs where they actually tried out all the weird things that they worked out on blackboards in that nondescript little strip mall up in the northeast. If you head east on 40, past Kirtland AFB, you eventually pass a bunch of pricey gated community-type places that contain a pretty surprising number of majors-and-up—what’s going on at Kirtland, at any given time, tends to be a hot area for getting promoted, and guys want to be standing next to it, and it’s been that way ever since they were figuring out how to get an atom bomb into a B-29 and then get the B-29 off the ground. It’s not quite as general-and-colonel-heavy there as it is in some developments around Groom Lake or Vandenberg, but close enough.

  Past the super-high-end subdivision, you run through a bunch of strip-mallish stuff that caters to the lower ranks, places where a bored guy can get drunk, hunt pussy, get his motorcycle tuned, and so on, and then it trails off into hills and desert. All that long way, as you drive east, off to your right, it’s still Kirtland, which is a hell of a big place. And every so often, there’s a road south, that leads to a guarded gate, and then a road beyond that through more and more guarded checkpoints, and finally there will be some little building in the middle of nowhere, where brainy guys are playing around with stuff that nobody will admit to.

  The facility is one of those buildings, and considering that it might change the whole world, and there’s a danger that someday it might be famous, I wish it looked a little less like a standard light-assembly plant, or at least had something other than “Operated by Xegon in cooperation with the Departments of Energy and Defense” over the door. It took me a little time to get there because they crawled all over my car at each checkpoint, and while I was driving along the gravel road a jeep full of guys in unmarked uniforms came up and they searched me too, as well as waving some gadgets over the rental car that presumably were good-guy g
adgets used for detecting bad-guy gadgets, but the equipment itself looked like R2D2 with an old-style vacuum-cleaner hose coming out his butt, hooked to a supermarket price scanner.

  Finally I got to the facility, and it was a nothing-special building like I’ve described—see ’em in any industrial part of any big city. I went in the square, double-doored glass front entrance, which, since it faced west, was already turning into an oven. Beyond the second set of glass walls and doors, they had bone-chilling air-conditioning, and a nice, thirtyish, plump receptionist. I wondered what her life was like when she wasn’t sitting at a counter, taking calls and visibly wearing a big old honking nine-millimeter—she seemed like the type that goes to church and volunteers for Habitat for Humanity, and there was a picture of her with a little boy (but no man in sight) on her desk.

  She found my name on a list, gave me a badge, and called in a guard who walked me through the corridors swiftly, with an air that suggested he’d rather have blindfolded me, stuffed me into a box, and wheeled me there on a dolly. I did my looking around just as discreetly as I could.

  The windowless white office was absolutely bare; just two desks with phones, three chairs, Mr. Hale, and Mr. Calvin Durango. Old Calvin was acting and sounding like the most innocent man that ever breathed (even if his face still looked like a troll with a live wriggling gerbil stuck in its butt). He wanted to help to the max. He knew the leak had to be coming out of the Q-tip, and he was the senior engineer-manager of the Q-tip, and he was screaming— I mean, literally, his voice was high and loud and not in control, these big high-pitched emotional shrieks of “I want something done and I want it done now!” I think he might have actually screamed those exact words, but even if he didn’t, it was sure as fuck what he meant.

  Not one word of his screaming was about suddenly discovering that there was a detective prowling around his group. So I figured it wouldn’t be a real good icebreaker to say that although we’d never met, officially, I’d listened to him fuck several times. I’d have to save that to start some other conversation, some other time.