Lash pocketed the card. “Thanks. Where can I find coffee around here?”
“There’s a staff cafeteria down the hall. The bathroom’s that way, too. Is there anything else?”
Lash dropped his leather satchel on one of the chairs. “Could I have a whiteboard, please?”
“I’ll have one sent in.” With a nod, she turned gracefully and left the room.
For a moment, Lash stared thoughtfully at the space where she’d stood. Then he stowed his satchel inside one of the desk drawers and made his way to the cafeteria, where a Junoesque woman behind the counter cheerfully brought him a large espresso. He took it gratefully, sipped, found it excellent.
No sooner had he returned to his office and made himself comfortable than a technician knocked on the open door. “Dr. Lash?”
“Yes?”
The man wheeled in what looked like a black evidence locker, set on a steel cart. “Here are the documents you requested. When you’ve finished your examination, call the number stamped on the cartons and someone will pick them up.”
Lash lifted the heavy locker and placed it on the table. It was sealed with white tape that read HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY — NOT TO LEAVE EDEN INTERNAL.
He closed the door to the office. Then he slit the tape and snapped open the lid. Inside were four large accordion files, each bearing a name and a number:
Each was sealed with white tape and bore an identical labeclass="underline"
EDEN CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL
INTERNAL USE ONLY
L-3 AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED
NOTE: HARDCOPY WITHIN. DIGITAL MEDIA ALSO AVAILABLE.
USE REQUISITION AT-4849
Lash reached for Lewis Thorpe’s file. Then he hesitated: no, he’d leave Lewis Thorpe for last. Instead, he opened Lindsay Thorpe’s file and upended it onto the table. A flood of paper streamed out, much of it testing sheets and result forms, but also a thick spiral-bound packet that made little sense:
CODING SHEET FOLLOWS
Note: Summarization only
header
=====
telephony metrics — quantization
assembly period: 27 Aug 02/09 Sep 02
datastream: nominal
homogenization: optimal—
data location (hard): 2342400494234
first access sector 3024-a
compartmentalization algorithm set
chief operator: Pawar, Gupta
scrub chief: Korngold, Sterling
data gathering supervisor: Rose, Lawrence
hexadecimal source follows
It appeared to be some kind of machine-code summary of Lindsay’s telephone habits during her surveillance period. Readable or unreadable, it wasn’t the data he was interested in. Lash put this aside and picked up the test forms. They looked precisely like the tests he had taken just days before; the sight sent a fresh surge of mortification through him. He sipped his espresso, riffled through the pages, glancing at the little black circles Lindsay Thorpe had filled in so industriously. Her answers seemed to fall within normal ranges, and a quick glance at the scoring sheets confirmed this. His eye fell at last on the senior evaluator’s report.
Lindsay Torvald shows all signs of being well-adjusted socially, with a normative personality profile. Appearance, demeanor, behavior during and between the tests was within normal limits. Attention span, speech articulation, comprehension, and verbal skills were all within the top 10th percentile. Tests showed little abnormal scatter or skew, and validity scales were high across the board: the applicant seemed exceptionally candid and forthright. The projective inkblot test indicated creativity and a vivid imagination with only slight morbidity factors. The personality profile showed slight tendencies toward introversion but well within acceptable levels, especially given the strong indicators for self-confidence. The intelligence battery was also strong, particularly in the areas of verbal comprehension and memory; computation skills were weaker, but still the overall score gives the applicant a Full Scale IQ of 138 (modified WAIS-III).
In short, all quantifiable metrics suggest Ms. Torvald would make an excellent candidate for Eden.
R. J. Steadman, Ph.D.
August 21, 2002
There was movement in the corridor outside his door; a technician wheeled a whiteboard into his office. Lash thanked him, watched him leave. Then he put the report aside and reached for the testing forms once again.
By noon, he had studied the test results for three of the applicants. No smoking guns, no signs of incipient pathology. Across the board, the signs of depression, the suicide indexes, were extremely low. Lash replaced the stacks of paper into their respective folders; stood; stretched; then went down to the cafeteria for another espresso.
He walked back to his temporary office more slowly than he had left it. There was only one folder left: Lewis Thorpe’s. Thorpe, who specialized in invertebrate biology and enjoyed translating the poetry of Bash — o. Lash had spent several nights rereading Narrow Road to the Interior, putting himself in Lewis’s shoes, trying to feel what he’d felt in the testing suite, in that sun-filled Flagstaff living room where he had died under the gaze of his own infant child.
Eagerly — yet a little warily — Lash broke open the seal on the fourth folder.
It took less than half an hour to realize that what he most feared was, in fact, true. Lewis Thorpe’s test results showed him to be as normal and well adjusted as the rest. They showed an intelligent, imaginative, ambitious man with a healthy self-regard. No indicators for depression or suicide.
Lash slumped back in his chair and let the senior evaluator’s report fall from his hands. The tests he’d fought so hard to get brought him no closer to an answer.
There was a knock at his door, and he looked up to see Tara Stapleton leaning in, her long, intent face framed by thick auburn hair.
“Lunch?” she asked.
Lash gathered Lewis Thorpe’s papers together and stuffed them back into the folder. “Sure.”
Already, the cafeteria down the hall felt like an old friend. It was bright and almost festive, and more crowded now than it had been on his two earlier visits. He fell in line at the buffet rail, helped himself to another espresso and a sandwich, then followed Tara to an empty table near the rear wall. She’d taken only a cup of soup and some tea, and as Lash watched she tore open a packet of artificial sweetener and poured it into the cup. Her reserved, preoccupied silence remained. But right now, that seemed all right: he wasn’t eager to field a lot of questions about how his investigation was going.
“How long have you worked at Eden?” he asked after a moment.
“Three years. Since just after its founding.”
“And it’s as great a place to work as Mauchly says?”
“It always has been.”
Lash waited as she stirred her soup, a little uncertain what she meant by this. “Tell me about Silver.”
“How do you mean.”
“Well, what’s he like? He wasn’t at all what I expected.”
“Me, neither.”
“I take it this was the first time you’ve met him face to face.”
“I saw him once before, at the first anniversary celebration. He’s a very private person. Never leaves his penthouse, as far as anybody knows. Communicates by cell or videophone. It’s just him up there. Him and Liza.”