“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.
10
Although not all suffering in human life is wholly evil, a great deal of it is, and the ultimate source of all evil is the biological capacity for suffering. The biological capacity for suffering, in turn, exists because it has evolved. It has evolved because it often served an adaptive function… It was adaptive because it contributed to the reproductive success of its possessors. Because it contributed to the reproductive success of its possessors, it was favored by natural selection.
All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons.
10.1. Calder Farris
The parking garage was vast. The light, at 7:00 P.M., was flat, ugly, and artificial. Chuck Grover had parked on floor C. Most of the cars in faculty parking were gone, leaving a space next to his BMW convertible for a large sedan to slip in and wait.
Grover was just getting into his car when a hand fell on his shoulder. He jumped.
“Dr. Grover?” Calder removed his sunglasses. “Lieutenant Calder Farris, United States Marines. We’d like to talk to you.”
Grover seemed reluctant to look away from Calder’s eyes, the way a man might fear turning his back on a hooded and hissing cobra. But he did tear them away, took in Calder’s military uniform and that of Ed Hinkle, hulking behind him. For a moment Grover looked confused; then a self-congratulatory smugness crept over his face. “This about Quey, right?”
Calder held up a zip disk. On the label was written “wavesim.exe.”
“No, Dr. Grover, it’s not.”
It took twenty minutes to shake Grover down. Unlike a lot of geeks, he had a healthy and realistic fear of authority (a drug bust way back when, Calder guessed). But even so, the bastard was cagey. He tried to probe to see how interested the government was and what was in it for him. Calder got tired of it, sensed a snow job a mile high, and began to turn the screws. Grover crumbled like blue cheese.
To be honest, and he was leveling now, he knew absolutely nothing about the simulator. He’d been hoping Serin could tell him. He told a story about a Dr. Jill Talcott and how she’d promised him she’d share her work with him if he (a bunch of shit Calder didn’t care about), but then she reneged and kept it all under wraps. She was a loner, a hermit. Nobody liked her. Nobody had the first clue what she was doing. Nobody.
Calder might not have believed him, might have made sure with what Hinkle referred to as some “serious work,” if he hadn’t already expected Grover to be clueless from that enigmatic phone call to Alaska. So, like a fisherman being careful to remove his hook before throwing back a fish too small to eat, Calder spun a brief cover story involving HAARP confidentiality and a missing-documents investigation.
But the whole thing, the whole pointless, shitty thing, took thirty minutes. Thirty minutes were lost, all because some marijuana-smoking, self-serving geek would not give Dr. Talcott’s name over the phone. It was thirty minutes Calder would deeply regret.
The sedan nudged out a car trying to park in a space on Forty-fifth Street, across from the campus. Calder smiled tightly as Grover tried to make his excuses and slip away. He gripped the physicist’s elbow.
“No, I’d like you to escort me to Dr. Talcott’s lab.”
“It’s in the basement of Smith Hall. If you go—”
“I appreciate your help, Dr. Grover.”
They crossed the street. The rain had finally let up, but it was colder than a witch’s tit, and the cement walkways were turning icy. They passed bundled students. Might as well be in Alaska, thought Calder. It wasn’t supposed to be like this in Seattle, was it? But he forgot the cold as he walked at Grover’s side because he was close now. He could smell it. Close to the Big One, close to congratulations and recognition and a promotion or three or four. Close to being Maj. Calder Farris or, hell, even general, a man personally responsible for his country’s continued superiority and invulnerability to the chaotic hordes, maybe for the next several hundred years. Close, after all this time.
They rounded a corner at the library and faced a quad lined with buildings. After a few faltering steps, Grover stopped and stared, perplexed. Calder followed his gaze. At first he took it for a plume of steam from a heating duct. Then he saw it was smoke. It was coming from the basement windows of a Gothic brick-and-cement building. A few students passing in front of it looked at it curiously, but no one seemed unduly alarmed.