Ivar glanced over at the monitor. All within parameters. Organized. Doing what it was designed to do, which Ivar knew was something that could be very, very original, although the professor had been rather vague on what the end result should be.
Since he had to miss the game live, he should have been invited to the dinner party, Ivar thought as he labeled a drawer Label Maker. It held the extra cartridges to load into the machine. He saw no irony in this.
He checked the clock on the wall. The game had to be over by now. Even if it went to overtime, which would be cool, but fuck those Duke Blue Devils anyway. He’d attended a lecture up there in Durham and one could feel the snobbery slithering off the Duke professor at being made to talk to a bunch of dumb UNC grad students. Everyone had been looking forward to this off-season charity game because it would be played by some of the most famous graduates of both programs.
Okay, Ivar decided. He sat down on the old Naugahyde couch and picked up the remote.
Game time.
Behind him, the first crackle of a golden spark arced around the mainframe.
Inside Doctor Winslow’s sock drawer, the screen of the laptop shimmered out of the darkness and took on the faintest hint of gold.
Deep under Area 51, it sounded like a hundred angry grasshoppers had been loosed in the cavern holding the Can. Several cycles ago, someone had remembered from an undergraduate physiology class that a clicking sound activated the reticular formation with a higher degree of success than any other form of alarm. They had then taken that to the extreme, just in case both people on duty had fallen hard asleep or into a coma during their duty shift.
Both, however, were awake, and while one turned off the clicking, the other activated the alarm to be transmitted to the Nightstalkers, Japan, and Russia.
Nada was sharpening his machete, Eagle was reading, Kirk was fiddling with his PRT, Doc was taking pills out of bottles and placing them in various slots on a fishing tackle box (which he had discovered was the perfect way to carry the max array of possible pills efficiently), and Mac was toying with a Claymore mine, modifying the contents.
“Really,” Mac said. “They have to print ‘front toward enemy’ on the front? How stupid are people?”
Nada didn’t even look up. “In Afghanistan, one of the Afghan army fellows pulled in his Claymore after an overnight patrol base, just rolling the cord around the body of the mine, and put it in his ruck without removing the fuse. The first time he did a rucksack flop, he blew himself in two and killed three others around him. People are pretty stupid.”
Eagle lowered his Kindle. “That doesn’t connect directly with Mac’s complaint about the printing. It’s more in line with the warnings they put on plastic laundry covers: Don’t wrap this around your head: could be bad for you. I think Darwinism has to get a chance to work. The more we protect stupid people from themselves, the more we ensure the long, slow descent of the human race into idiocracy.”
Roland was doing chin-ups on the bar next to his locker. It was either chin-ups or push-ups for Roland most of the time he was in the Den. If he wasn’t breaking down a weapon and cleaning it. Moms was in the CP, doing whatever it was Moms did in the CP when she was alone.
Everyone looked up as Nada’s cell began playing the tune Kirk had heard once before. Then Doc’s, Mac’s, Eagle’s, and Roland’s went off. Barely two seconds later, his PRT began playing “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”
Moms came flying out of the CP. “We’ve got a pre-Rift alert from the Can.”
They were already moving toward the exit.
Downstairs, Doctor Winslow picked at the tiny bit of salad on his plate. It was all strange stuff that he hated, without even knowing what it was called. The farm had its detractions, but normal, hearty food had not been one of them. One had to eat solid food in order to do all those chores. This food was for people who thought pine nuts and cranberries made a salad.
He had a bit of a buzz going from three glasses of champagne he’d gotten down before meeting his wife on the main floor. A quiet celebration all his own. On top of the program initiating at the secret lab, there was the added satisfaction that UNC had won the alumni game handily, and it was fun to rub it in the faces of the Dukies, one of whom was a guest.
The table held fourteen, and he had been able to concoct his favorite mix. Three couples who might be considered his peers, but he secretly knew weren’t now, because they didn’t know about the laptop upstairs and the program it was running. There were also six grad students. He always invited over a fresh batch each time, because Lilith loved seeing their faces when they had to pick up their passes from the guard at the gate and then pull up in their beat-up little cars and see the huge double staircases and the chandeliers. It was petty, but it kept her happy, and when she was happy she didn’t care what he did in his closet. Winslow would never admit to her that he enjoyed seeing their faces, too. He also enjoyed that specified on the gate passes was that they expired at midnight, adding a fairy-tale edge to all of it. Poof and they would return back to their miserable little apartments.
Lilith had called him a sadist when she walked around the table. Mixing the haves with the have-nots. His point, which he knew was a waste of time to explain to her, was that a have-not would not make it to a have if they didn’t get to see what they had. There was some pronoun confusion there on his part, but Lilith understood the base drive to cause turmoil. As Gore Vidal had once famously said: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” Winslow had understood the sentiment the minute he heard it, and he always remembered it, not even needing his recorder app to remind him.
Still, the guests seemed happy and his buzz was growing and he was considering a fourth glass of champagne. He had much to celebrate although he could not speak of it. He’d never been much of a drinker, not like Lilith, who could put it away faster than you could pop the cork. Looking down the long table he could see the flush of her cheeks and the liquid glaze in her eye that meant she’d also had more than three while awaiting their first guests.
Winslow sighed. Her drinking could go one of three ways later in the evening, after the last guest departed. From the very low chance of an enthusiastic blow job, to the higher possibility of torrents of tears and recriminations on how he’d destroyed her career, her life, and her one chance of happiness, to the most likely — and optimal — result of her simply passing out on the bed, leaving him free to go back to his closet. He idly wondered — for the first time, perhaps because of his own inebriated state — what that one chance had been? He felt like she’d pretty much let her chances pass her by well before he met her.
Winslow poked at his sliver of purple lettuce and thought of her in a long gown in Sweden sitting at the table as he accepted his award and made a short (but smart) speech that was just about complete on the recorder on his phone. He knew she’d be happy then, because the Nobel, despite high-minded protests to the contrary, was a prize. And when one won a prize, it meant many others had lost. He must have smiled at the thought, because the physicist seated next to him asked:
“What are you so happy about?”
“Ah, a new experiment,” Winslow said. The four grad students who worked in his lab and his one physicist competitor from Duke all frowned, wondering what he could be talking about. Winslow abruptly grabbed his full glass of champagne and downed it. “To knowledge!”