“Be careful,” Jack said, with cold irony, “It has not warmed to room temperature yet.”
“Ouch! Now you tell me!”
It was like giving away a child. He’d used the scanning tunneling microscope needle as his waldo to place the last ten thousand atoms on the chip with a precision that he could not yet be sure a machine would match. There were no little bumps and clusters in those final layers—it was a perfect geometric arrangement—a continuous superconducting layer with deliberately asynchronous flux pins to prevent resonant quenching. He had bound it against its titanic magnetic pressure with a monomolecular fullerene belt. That had taken him six months to get right.
The man produced a small paper bag and dropped the device in it.
Jack shut his eyes. An end, he told himself, came to all things.
The man put the bag in the briefcase, with all of Jack’s documents.
“There is no way I can talk you out of this?” Jack ventured.
The man shook his head and gestured with the gun again. “Move over there and face the wall.”
There was about a meter of unused wall between the vacuum pump and the computer rack. Two-centimeter aluminum utility conduit tubes ran along it in a bundle at about waist level. Otherwise it was bare concrete. The last thing, Jack thought, that I will see in my life. “May I leave a note for my fiancee?”
“We’ve been at this for three hours. If you haven’t figured out how to do that, it’s too late now. I let you play with your apparatus longer than I should. Once upon a time, I…” The man shook his head. “You’ve already done more than most people in a lifetime. Take that thought with you—but it’s reality time now. Face the wall!”
“I could do more,” Jack said, with as much dignity as he could muster as he turned. “If this science once meant something to you, let me live. Let me continue my research.” There were a million undignified things he could do to try to rush the man and struggle with him. But they would all be ineffective—the man was at least twice his size and armed. Jack would not give him the excuse of self-defense.
He stared at the wall for what must have been a minute. Get it over with, he thought. Finally, he started to turn back.
“Don’t! I don’t owe this idiot world and its idiot people a goddamn thing!”
The man was so close, Jack could smell his breath and thought he could feel the cold of the gun. What was taking him so long? He almost felt like shouting “get it over with.” But no. The man was clearly troubled—Jack’s words must have had an effect. He was an intelligent man, who once had thought to dedicate his life to acquiring knowledge instead of money. The thing to do, Jack thought, was to let the gunman’s conscience work for him, a kind of psychological jujitsu.
If Jack gave him no excuse, perhaps he would not shoot. He had to take his mind away—to do nothing as hard as he could. He sought refuge in “the Kubota effect” and concentrated on the wall. He tried to imagine himself so small that he could climb inside the block, between the grains of concrete, and win his way through, then up through the soil into the bright sunshine above. The smell of the gunman faded from his mind.
He imagined doing this hand in hand with Gina—exploring the inside of the concrete block the way they were going to explore the Universe together, cataloging passages like neutron stars, doing papers on the stochastic properties of molecular bonding in Portland cement and the topological similarities between cement and the large scale structure of the Universe.
The bullet, when it came, would interrupt some very important work.
Sounds made their way to him. Somewhere, in the distance, or above him, he heard the whine of one of the electric carts they used to traverse the unused tunnel. Perhaps he and Gina could lay tracks for such carts through the pores of their concrete block.
An interesting endeavor, he thought. On the microscopic level there was a universe of passages in this one block—it would take a lifetime. Perhaps the way to approach it was with many machines, Von Neumann machines could do it, but they would have to be very tiny. Like his chip. He could use the same apparatus, with some modifications.
“Jack! Jack!”
“Gina?” For a crazy confused moment, Jack thought the voice came from the cement, but no, no. He snapped back to reality. How had Gina come so soon? She’d get shot! He yelled right at the block, sure that it would reflect the sound, and heedless of the consequences. “Gina! Get away! He’s got a gun!”
Then Jack spun around, hoping to draw the gunman’s fire to himself. But there was no one there.
Dark-haired Gina drove into his laboratory’s light pool from around the bend of the tunnel, left her cart in the center, and threw herself into his waiting arms. “Oh, thank God you’re all right! What happened?”
“Oh. Oh, Gina. Oh Gina.” That was all Jack could say. “Someone stole my plans and my chip, and our papers. I thought he would shoot me.”
“It’s OK, Jack. Whoever it was is gone. There’s no one here. It’s been half an hour since you signaled me.”
They held each other for long minutes. Finally Jack let out a long sigh and caressed her arms as he released his embrace. “He knew what he was doing. There was something about him, as if he were, for a moment, involved again in something he cared about. He was one of us once, I think, a scientist or an engineer, on the supercollider. But he’d fallen to this. And he was bitter about it. I made him wrestle with his conscience. I didn’t give him any more reason to shoot. But he stood there forever—it was like he couldn’t make up his mind about which world should live. Mine or his.”
“You’d never fall that far.”
“I think he was supposed to kill me.” Jack shook his head. Entropy was gaining on the world above tunnels, these relics of an era when people could do things collectively. Now, the dogs were eating dogs, and people had to carefully avoid dogfights. Finally, he managed a smile. “When I am too old to fall in such a way, then I will judge him. What took you so long?”
“When we realized those were physical constants coming through, one of the grad students grabbed a C.R.C. and sat down with it for what seemed like forever.” Gina giggled. “Finally he turns around an asks why would anyone send h… e… R… P?”
“It must have taken me a minute to figure it out. But then I knew it was you, where you were, and that you needed help! I called security and headed for your lab.”
There were other footsteps in the tunnel. Uniformed security guards appeared around the bend.
Gina put up a hand. “It’s all right now—he’s gone.”
A lean, dark-haired security officer nodded. He was carrying Jack’s briefcase. “We took this off of someone without a valid badge; he had a thirty-year-old key that still worked. Unauthorized, of course. Yours?”
With a trembling hand, Jack reached for the briefcase and thumbed the combination lock. Inside was the paper bag with the small, gold-plated box that contained his life’s work. He shut his eyes and bowed his head briefly. He knew now that he could leave that life with dignity. But, fortunately, not just yet.
Jack nodded to the officer. “The man who was carrying this?” he asked.
“He surrendered and asked for protective custody. Says he’s doing research’ for the Myanmar government and wants to quit.” The guard looked Jack in the eye. “He had a Berretta nine millimeter on him—fired recently.”
Jack gestured to the punctured file cabinet. Then the tension of the last hours escaped him and he collapsed into his chair with an audible groan. Gina rushed to help him.