She had planned to call the lab, let Nate know she wasn’t coming in, but she had finally fallen asleep around seven. The phone jarred her awake an hour later.
“Hello?” she answered groggily.
“Are you okay?”
Nate’s voice. With her head raised off the pillow to answer the phone, Jill felt a wave of dizziness that nearly undid her. “Flu. I was going to call—”
“Oh god.”
“ ’s all right.”
“No, it’s not. Someone broke into the lab.”
Jill dragged on a pair of sweats and drove over to the university. She was feeling a little better by the time she got there, if only because she was so panicked that it distracted her from what her body was feeling. When she got to the basement, Nate was busy on the computer. Her eyes swept around the room but didn’t see any signs of disturbance.
“The door,” he said grimly.
He followed her back out into the hall and they examined the dead bolt together. They’d had it installed when they first moved down here—it had been bright and shiny new. Now there were scratch marks on the surface of it, near the key slot, and there were heavy marks, too, on the wooden doorjamb, where the dead bolt went in.
“Are you sure they actually got in?”
“Stuff’s been moved around.”
“Show me.”
Back in the room, Jill turned the lock behind her, feeling violated. Nate went to his chair. “I had a bunch of papers near my keyboard. Someone moved them into a stack. I think there might be some missing.”
“What! What’s missing? What was in them?”
“Just my notes. I’m not sure.” He rubbed his forehead with two fingers. The circles under his eyes were grape-colored. She realized he was muddled and that pissed her off.
“Nate! This is important!”
“I’m not sure what pages!”
“Well, what else did they get?” She looked around the room anxiously and went over to their lab subjects. It didn’t appear as though any of the cages or specimens had been touched. The white board was intact, but the sight of it, the realization that someone—and she thought she knew who—knew all that, had seen it…
“And maybe stuff on the computer,” Nate said dourly.
“The computer!” She stomped over to the machine.
“I think the papers were moved around so that they could get at the keyboard.”
“Nate!”
His face darkened with anger. “How exactly is this my fault?”
She moved around the desk and looked at the screen. It was running Windows, and right at the bottom of the shortcut list was the little happy-face icon Nate used for their wave simulator. She moaned. “Someone could have gotten the sim? Doesn’t it have all the Quey data in it? And the differential routine, the one that discovered the one-minus-one wave?”
Nate clenched his jaw. “Yes.”
“Could they have copied the program?”
“The directory’s too big to fit on disk, but they could have downloaded it to the university network and copied it anywhere they liked.”
“Damn it!” Talcott smacked the keyboard in frustration. For a moment she had an urge to beat it senseless, which was really inane, since it was already senseless.
When they’d first moved down here Nate had insisted on hooking the computer up to the campus net, said it would make it easy to transfer files between the lab and their office. And she’d thought him resourceful!
“You didn’t even have a Windows password on that thing!”
“No one’s ever in here but you and me.” He looked guilty and angry about being made to feel guilty.
Jill sank into a chair. She had to think. The thief had possibly gotten the sim and some of Nate’s papers. What else? Her notes for the article and her journals were all in her briefcase. She’d gotten paranoid enough to keep them with her at all times, so that was all right. But the Excel data had been on this computer and possibly other things, too, like the early statistics Nate had accumulated.
“What about the equation?” she asked, her tongue thick. “Was my equation on the computer?”
Nate thought about it, then shook his head. “No.”
“Not in the sim? Isn’t it in the sim? I thought—”
“No. The sim just uses two sets of data—the Quey results and the carbon atom data. This computer can’t even crunch your equation, remember?”
Yes, that was true, and it gave her some relief. She was pretty sure her equation was in her briefcase and nowhere else. She’d been very careful not to throw it around. It was far too precious for that.
“You’re sure it wasn’t in your papers?” she said carefully.
“Yes. I’m sure.”
Well, that was something. “Is there any way to find out if someone did move the sim from this computer over the net?”
Nate sank into the chair in front of the treacherous machine and played with the mouse. “Dunno. I can call the computer department, see if they’d have a log.”
“Call them.”
“Fuck it,” Nate said coldly. “I’ll go over there.” He put on his motorcycle jacket with stiff jerks and left.
He’d barely made it out the door when Talcott felt a wave of nausea hit her. She grabbed the closest waste can and held it between her knees, panting. Hot tears stung her eyes.
Someone had gotten, stolen, her work. Her work. Had he gotten enough to put it all together? To publish her work, claim it as his own? Or just enough to get her fired? Of all the questions she asked herself, there was one that never occurred to her, and that was who did it. She knew damned well who. Chuck Grover.
Now the sense of pressure, of urgency, grabbed her as never before. It seemed to merge with her nausea. She retched weakly, but nothing came up; she’d had nothing but water for days. She looked up at the white board, at the data, breathing in deep shaky breaths. With less than a week running the negative one pulse at 75 percent power, they only had a 35 percent differential between the control group and the lab subjects. Thirty-five percent. She needed at least 50. She needed it to end.
She went over to the transmitter and put the power up to 90 percent. She locked the lab, put a note on the door.
Nate, take some time off. Don’t go back in the lab. That’s an order. Jill
9.4. Calder Farris
When Dr. Serin was paged and went to his office to answer it, Calder followed. And when Serin covered the receiver and said softly, “Someone from the University of Washington,” Calder hit the speaker button, ignoring the resentful daggers thrown his way.
“Uh… hello?” The man on the other end paused in his spiel when he heard his voice echo.
Calder motioned to Serin.
“Go ahead, Dr. Grover,” Serin said.
“Call me Chuck.” The man on the phone went on to explain that he’d heard about the call that had been placed to HAARP from the University of Washington and that he had an idea who had done it. It was, in fact, his partner. The basis of her research was work done on his quantum computer, for which reason he was a fundamental part, actually co-author—
“That’s very interesting,” Serin interrupted. “So what’s this partner of yours doing exactly?”
Calder sat on the edge of Serin’s desk, ready at any moment to pick up the receiver if that became necessary.
“She’s doing research with particle waves. The equation she crunched on Quey had to do with particle wave mechanics.”
Grover sounded suspiciously like he was reading. Calder’s expression showed nothing, but his blood pressure had just headed for the north pole and, mentally, he already had his hand around the caller’s throat. Ansel had been working on wave mechanics.
“She put the equation together, but, you know, it would have been impossible to crunch on a conventional computer, but with Quey…”
Nearly endless detail about the value of quantum computing. Calder took it all in, expressionless. He was patient. Oh, yes. Patient as a snake outside the burrow of a mouse.
It was Serin who began to fidget. “Is she just running equations or what? Because I got the impression the caller was doing something with wave transmission. I’m confused.”
“You’d be surprised,” Grover said enigmatically. “Actually, I’d like you to take a look at some stuff. I’ve been pretty focused on Quey lately, and I haven’t had time to stay as on top of this as I’d like. I’d love to get your opinion on our work.”
“Well, I’m kind of busy myself, Chuck.” Serin had an academic’s loathing of reviewing anyone else’s material.
Calder rapped Serin hard on the noggin to get his attention. He nodded a strong affirmative.
“Steve?” Grover asked. “It is Steve, isn’t it? The man at the switchboard said—”
“Uh… hold on.” Serin put Grover on hold and ran the situation through his little gray cells. He rubbed his pate, eyeing Calder with sullen resentment.
“This isn’t anything,” he said. “I told you before, and I don’t have time to go over a bunch of—”
“You don’t have to go over anything.”
Serin frowned, but he did as he was told—typical candyass. He put Grover back on. “Uh, Chuck, go ahead and e-mail it to me.”
“You got a big limit on your E-mail? ‘Cause I have about twenty meg.”
“Uh—we’re on the DARPA net, Chuck.”
“Oh. Right. I’ll send it then. You have a fax? I’ve got some pages, too; I don’t wanna scan ’em.”
Calder nodded.
“S-sure.” Serin gave the fax number and his E-mail address.
“Okay. I’ll send it now. Call me back ASAP, okay?”
“Will do.”
Grover hung up. Calder stood, stretched his legs. “Bring up your E-mail,” he commanded. Whatever restraint he’d displayed in the past few days was gone.
Serin blinked up at him. “Well, yeah,” as if he hadn’t had to be asked, particularly not in a tone like that. He brought it up. The fax machine on the table behind him buzzed.
Calder stepped behind Serin’s chair and yanked it out, forcing the scientist to stand or fall. He stood. Calder put a hand on his shoulder. “Okay, Dr. Serin. Time to go.”
Serin gaped wordlessly, going apoplectic. That narrow fem face wanted so badly to protest, wanted so badly to. But the fax behind him was printing and Calder didn’t have time to let him work it out. He placed a widely splayed hand on Serin’s chest and pushed lightly, but ever so painfully, with his fingertips. He let the demon creep into his voice.
“Get. Out.”
Serin left the room.
Calder Farris locked the door and sat down at the desk, waiting for the new E-mail. The fax machine went on and on. He glanced at the pages but didn’t get into them. Mostly scribbles, notes. It would take time to review them.
A ding informed him that he had 1 unread E-mail. It was from cgrover at the University of Washington. He opened it, saved the attached executable to his hard drive, ran it.
A minute later he was looking at the one-minus-one.