Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  “So do flying saucers work on the Gaudeamus principle?”

  “They could use it for a power source, and they’re talking about doing that for the eventual civilian models, but it makes them way too easy to track to be any good in a military application. This is where it gets complicated and weird, John.”

  “Like it’s been simple and normal up till now?”

  “Right. Hey, how about not disturbing your cat, ’cause I don’t want him remembering that he likes to whack balls, and pouring some coffee?”

  Hold him, Corner, guard,” I said, taking Travis’s cup. Out in the kitchen I kept trying to think of questions, but the bright sunlight on the backyard, and the swarms of birds around Kara’s feeder—I reminded myself again that I had to keep reloading that stupid thing while she was gone, the birds weren’t going on vacation with her—and the general quiet, quickly lulled me into a near-trance.

  Still, when I returned with the coffee, I did say, “Uh, I’ve checked in my desk sources, and there is not now and never has been a Twining AFB, in fact the Air Force has no presence in Kennedy County. All that’s there is a lot of empty space and a thin scattering of people who work too hard and don’t make enough money.”

  “Kennedy County is very far south in the panhandle, and it adjoins the Gulf, in the direction you’d want to fly if you were headed up to orbit, since spacecraft always take off west-to-east if they can. So it would be a perfect place for covert space launch, or covert anything, now wouldn’t it? Besides, you didn’t show that there’s no Twining—only that there’s no acknowledgment and no public record.”

  “Um, yeah, right. Did they say anything about how those flying saucers fly?”

  “Now and then. Nothing I remember. And you read more science than I do, but you’re just as rusty. You know as well as I do that if you can’t follow the math, you don’t know the physics, and it’s all hand-waving, and you were never all that good at the math, so why do you want an explanation?”

  “Habit,” I said. “Most science fiction readers can’t read the math but they appreciate good hand-waving. And they want to feel like, if they could follow the math, my hand-waving is what the math would say. I’m used to pleasing that audience.”

  “Have you looked at your online reviews?”

  “I’m used to pleasing some of that audience.”

  “That’s better. A good liar like you should stick close to the truth.”

  My first flying saucer ride felt very much like an elevator ride, except that there was more of a view—but the view might as well be a film shot from a helicopter flying over Colorado, or better yet from a steadicam on a cherry picker on top of a mountain, because it’s that steady and there’s that little sense of motion. They gave me some story about how inside the saucer there was gravitation relative to the Earth but no inertia relative to the universe, whatever that meant. It was sort of a light, easy feeling, and for a few minutes, until I learned to do what they did and “pull” every nonvertical movement, my hands would fly out from my body and then slap back at me, every time I gestured. Thank god I didn’t try to itch my nads; it was like the brakes were off on all my motion, and yet I sat as comfortably there as I’m sitting here, my weight holding me into a chair. It wasn’t near as dramatic an experience as that stuff you imagine for money all the time, John.

  It’s also a little peculiar when you realize that the pilot has about ten controls, total, more or less just telling it to go somewhere and then watching it while it does; and a pilot smoking while he flies is a strange thing to see nowadays; but maybe strangest of all was that his main control was a plain old Mac optical mouse. I commented on that and Kermit shrugged. “Secret projects don’t get forced to buy from high markup suppliers, the way public defense projects do, and besides, you can’t expect the Air Force to use PC parts in something has to work right, with lives depending on it. Of course it’s a Mac mouse.”

  I watched as Jake selected a destination from a list, clicked on it, and told the saucer to go there “usual way,” as the pull down menu put it. Then he sat back and faced the rest of us. Now that he had found his mirrorshades, he looked like an angry bug. They’d been in his jacket pocket all along, by the way.

  Another disconcerting feature of the saucer was that it was all cabin; there was no equivalent of an engine compartment, or a transmission hump, or anything at all that suggested “a volume of space containing working parts.” And still another disconcerting feature was the old beat-up Ford Explorer parked in the cabin with us. The word “disconcerting” kept coming up; I tell you, John, if I’d boarded that flying saucer totally concerted, my concertment would still have hit zero in less than a minute. Yes, that’s a word too. You understood it.

  At takeoff, we went straight up, very fast, to about sixty thousand feet, way above airliner altitudes, and then, as the landscape crept by far below, went at just below sonic, to avoid the boom, to a point directly over the landing area, and made another very high speed descent. Apparently the inertialess business meant that we could comfortably take turns, starts, and stops that would have been twenty g’s or more without it. I started to hope that gadget never happened to need a reboot in mid-turn, but nobody else looked nervous, so I wasn’t going to, particularly not in front of Jenapha Lee.

  From just west of Salida to about fifty miles east of Denver took maybe an hour and ten minutes; the Front Range from the air was as gorgeous as ever, but farther away, so it went by slower, even with our greater-than-airliner speed.

  On the way I asked a couple of questions. “Why the clown suits?”

  “Hmm. Let’s see if you can figure it out, Mr. Detective. If you saw three Indians and a white chick get out of a flying saucer, and they were messing around someplace connected to the Gaudeamus effect, how many suspects would match that profile, assuming you had any other information?”

  “Uh, that would be you guys.”

  “Unhunh. Now suppose you see a UFO and a bunch of circus clowns get out of it.”

  “I’d keep my mouth shut.”

  “Remarkable, Holmes, how do you do it?”

  We flew on, silent as a cloud, swift as an arrow, mixed as a metaphor, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say for a while, which annoyed the shit out of me because I wanted to start a conversation with Jenapha Lee, who was standing there smoking very importantly, in her perfect white dress and perfect heels and perfect her, and I felt like a gob of phlegm on the sidewalk by comparison. Yeah, I know, smokers are no fun to kiss. I know she’d taste like an ashtray. But she’d taste like an ashtray with style.

  John, how does someone so unromantic get to be a writer? Just go with it. I was crazy fucking in love with her.

  We crossed the mountains far below, and kept going; we came to a stop that was visually abrupt, but I felt nothing in my feet or body. There was a funny swirl in the air as we descended.

  “Cloaking,” Kermit explained, standing beside me. “Doesn’t work perfectly but basically it causes most of the light coming at the saucer, in all directions, to travel about 180 degrees around it. It’s not precise, so on a city street or in a forest this thing would have a shimmer like something projected off a drop of mercury, and you’d see through it only about as well as you see through a clear shower curtain with the water going. But as long as the background is the sky, it hides us till we’re almost down.”

  “You’re going to land this thing at a roadside rest stop?” I asked.

  “Naw, we picked that rest stop because it’s only six miles from one of our concealed hangars. We’ll drive the Explorer over.”

  The seeming abandoned barn below us retracted its roof, and we settled inside; as the roof closed over us, Jake touched a button and that weird flamelike glow surrounded the saucer; as it had the night before. “What is that?”

  “One of the atmospheric effects we get by tweaking the fields around this thing,” Kermit said. “If you want to know more, call me after you finish your master’s in physics, and
I’ll give you a reading list, and you can start applying for security clearances—”

  “We do have regular headlights—hell, we buy ’em at Sears—but this is just way cooler,” Jake added.

  “Thank you for an explanation I understand.”

  The saucer extended its tripod of legs and sat on the floor of the converted old barn. Jake selected a command, and a door opened and a ramp dropped, right behind the Explorer. We all got in. Esau grumped at Jenapha Lee until she fastened her seat belt. And in a minute or so, we were rolling down an old farm road in that bright October daylight.

  And a week before I’d thought I had an ordinary industrial espionage, prostitution, and drugs case here.

  It was a nice day, like you get, very unpredictably, on Colorado’s eastern plains at that time of year; the skies were clear, the air was warm, and there was that fall smell that it’s impolite to like anymore, plowed dirt and burning waste and all the other things that tell you that this land works instead of just looking pretty. We all rolled windows down even for the short drive.

  Hale was sitting in a t-shirt and jeans at a picnic table at the rest area; it was kind of early in the day for anyone to be there, except maybe to pee or have their dog take a dump. He had an arm sling and a great big bunch of pads and things on both sides of his left shoulder.

  That must suck, since I was pretty sure he was left-handed.

  We got out of the car and approached Hale; I felt Kermit’s big hand close on my wrist in the light way that a chef holds an egg that he’s going to break but not yet. Esau and Jake each had one of Elvis’s arms, and Elvis was calling them stinks, over and over, and bringing up their mother constantly.

  I stayed with Kermit like a good boy. The Irwins and Jenapha sat down all around Hale; he didn’t seem worried about that. He did check me over for a moment, visually, confirming that I looked like hell but not unfixable.

  “All right,” Hale said. “As far as I can tell, you not only have all the good cards, I don’t even have a hand. So, why don’t you begin by telling me what you want and why you think I might do it for you, or get it for you?”

  “Well—” Jenapha Lee said, but Esau cleared his throat.

  Kermit nodded. “We think the time has come to let Xegon as a company, and you in particular, know what’s going on. We hadn’t planned to do that anytime soon but our hand has been forced; you’re making such rapid progress on the Gaudeamus Effect.” He reached down into a black case he had been carrying and pulled out the Gaudeamus box that he’d taken back from me just three nights before. “We’ve taken your Gaudeamus box apart, measured its performance, and it confirms that you have come very far very fast, which means we know now that you’re going to have the full panoply of Gaudeamus tools within a few months at most, and be conducting large-scale experiments. Go ahead, take the box back, we’ve seen it, and if we want one we can make a better one, at least for right now. Oh, and we do think your energy-absorbing system is a great idea and you’re way ahead on that.”

  Hale dragged the box closer to himself; he seemed pretty shocked and bewildered. I guess he hadn’t envisioned the meeting going like this. Neither had I, of course. “Who are you?” Hale asked.

  “You’d know us best as Negon Corporation. Your rival, I guess. I’ve written all the reports to you that you thought were coming from industrial espionage on Negon, so you know me that way too. A much better question might be what we are, so I’m going to pretend you asked that one.”

  Kermit let go of my wrist and said, “Now, I’m trusting you to be a smart guy, Mr. Hale. I’ve been tracking you for a long time and I know a lot about you, and I don’t expect you to rashly kick the board over before you know what the game is. Am I justified in that trust in you?”

  “That and no more. The moment something smells bad I’m bolting.”

  “Fair enough. All right, here’s what I want. You’ll have no reason to doubt that. Then I will tell you why I want it. I’m going to have a hard time persuading you that I’m telling the truth, but I have a few very persuasive arguments at my disposal—arguments of evidence, not of force.”

  I noticed that the less rough stuff was involved, the more Kermit talked like a professor. I wondered if he thought of himself as bilingual, with his two languages being academese and goon.

  “Finally, if you agree with me about what I want and why it’s desirable, we can talk about how you will help—which, if you believe me and understand me, I think you will want to do. You’ll forgive my being an old college prof who tends to deliver everything in lecture? I hope you’re not one of those students who’s good at sleeping with the eyes open? All right, then, this will take a little explaining. Let me know if you need a bathroom break.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “That sounds like a good idea to me, too,” I said, “now that the coffee is hitting.”

  “Hmm. Must be contagious. Come on, Corner, let’s go pee.”

  Damn if that weird cat didn’t follow him into the guest bathroom, as if he understood.

  “So you want me to drive you over to Saguache,” I said, returning to my living room. “To a place called the Mutilated Cow. And Skin2Skin is playing there. And I take it your real purpose is to see Jenapha Lee?”

  “Oh, it’s a real purpose, but there’s some work-related stuff. And, like I said, it might be your chance to meet some of the people that come up in this story. For some reason, I want you to know it. I guess because you’re likely to be the guy who writes it down, if anyone ever does, and I kind of think it might be important, someday, somewhere, somehow, that it gets written down, if you see what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Sometimes a case just feels important, how’s that?”

  “It’ll do. So what exactly did Kermit tell Hale, and how did that lead to your showing up here?”

  He got up, walked to the phone, picked up the phone book—in Gunnison, that’s a thin little thing the shape but half the thickness of a trade paperback—flipped in the yellow pages for an instant, and then asked, “Who’s the decent pizza place in this town—decent local, I mean? We ate there—”

  “Mario’s.”

  “Good. Let me get one headed this way—it’s been some hours since we ate, bud. My treat. And then I’ll pick up the story. Got any beer or red wine?”

  “More Fat Tire than both of us together ought to have in the fridge,” I said. “I teach. It’s a necessity.”

  “Will a Buddhist order come out okay?”

  “They have about forty ingredients. ‘One with everything’ will come out pretty soggy. Order their veggie combo and add meat to it.”

  “Awright.” He phoned in the order. After he hung up, he asked, “Frozen glasses in the freezer?”

  “Mais c’est de rigueur, mon vieux.”

  “Either that means your answer is yes, or else my answer is I’d have to be drunker and you’d have to be prettier, and as far as I can tell, we can only fix one of those things.” He emerged with two chilled glasses full of Fat Tire, handed me one, and then said, “Look, I can’t remember exactly how Kermit told it all, okay? And Hale is one weird case—turns out he’s actually a Ph.D. in physics and quit it to be a detective, which makes him the weirdest physicist since Bud Grace. Though not nearly as funny. So the things that most convinced Hale are exactly the things I can’t remember, and the whole story is pretty goddam strange no matter how you slice it, bud, so—how about the capsule version? And you want to do me a real favor, you’ll take notes, and give me a copy, because I’ve been carrying all this in my head and I know I’m getting parts of it more and more screwed up, and other parts of it are getting so faded in that I can’t really remember not knowing them before, and I tend to leave them out of the telling. So—”

  I rolled to my right, grabbed at my work bag on an end table, and pulled out the tape recorder. “Fresh tape, fresh batteries, I’m good to go for an interview,” I said. I slid my thumb back and forth, hitting the fast forward and t
hen the rewind to rack-and-pack the first few inches and make sure it would start smooth. “Ready when you are.”

  Travis’s story was like a fusion of the weirdest, nuttiest possible explanations for every page three news story going on at the time, and I’m not sure whether the incoherence I find here is in my notes or was there in Travis’s narration or what. Tammy, the girl I hired to do transcripts for me that year, is the only reason why there is any of this. She recovered her rough draft transcript from her crashed hard drive, which was quite a feat, but things that are quite a feat are not unusual for Tammy.

  She was one of those brainy types that Western State sometimes gets due to family financial crises that hit right in their senior years of high school, or because their family has no college graduates and therefore can’t recognize a feeble college, or lack of confidence, or any of a dozen accidents that will send a could-go-anywhere student to WSC—the faculty were just grateful every time it happened.

  I never quite knew what Tammy’s story was, but most such stories had something to do with poverty. I first got to know her because she applied to work in the theatre and turned out to be a tech wiz, keeping lighting gear running way past any time when it should have—she might be the youngest person on Earth ever to have correctly rebuilt a ceramic resistance coil, a kind of dimmer that was officially “obsolete” according to textbooks published in 1960. Tammy also wrote and installed software fixes in the main board, since we couldn’t afford upgrades, which is to say she learned and wrote in an embedded control language.

  All that might have gone into a letter of reference for her, but she never needed one. When she graduated, she enlisted in the Marines, made it through flight training, and nowadays she ferries Harriers. (She claims that when she retires she wants to spend her time at horse tracks, following the veterinarians around, calling them names, and urging them to work faster, so that she can then say that she also harried farriers. Certain things cannot be fixed by even the best teaching, mentoring, or advising.) Whenever we’re in the same town I have a beer with her and she tells me stories at least as wild as Travis’s. But Tammy is for another book, another time.