CHAPTER TEN

 

The maglev was three coaches long and a burnished silver. Growing clouds overhead did not dim its luster. The streamlined coach on either end was shaped like the semi-wadcutter rounds that had killed John Doe; the one in the middle, blunt-ended, was connected to the others by a ribbed plastic shield. The gray-on-red ATL symbol gleamed confidently on each coach, like the eyes old mariners used to paint on their ships.

Even at rest the train made a loud, grating, humming sound. As if impatient to take off.

Loren took off his shades and stepped off the worn wood platform into the front coach. The inside walls were cream-colored, the wide seats— shaped plastic— were orange. The high-backed seats, tall enough to include padded headrests, faced both ways. He looked left and right. There were no other passengers. And no engineer— the maglev was entirely computer-controlled.

He sat in the front seat and looked out the window at the old AT&SF station. It was a classic southwestern design, a two-story brown adobe with a graceful little false front on top that displayed the Santa Fe logo. Though the building was still used for administrative purposes, the Santa Fe trains didn’t come into Atocha anymore, only served to connect the Atocha copper pit with El Paso. And now that the pit was closed, the trains would vanish altogether, taking up the iron rails behind them. The station might be boarded up and left to the weather and the vandals, like most of the old Santa Fe stops in the Southwest, while local people removed the ties for use in construction.

Loren wondered if ATL would buy or rent the old station then, just to keep their terminus from looking ratty. Replace the blue and white Santa Fe logo with their own gray-on-red sigil, a nineteenth-century monolithic symbol with its twenty-first-century equivalent.

The scenery darkened. The bright sun had been hidden by a cloud.

“The doors are closing,” a female voice said. “Stand clear of the doors.”

Loren looked behind him as the doors rumbled shut. The voice repeated the instructions in Spanish. “Thank you!” said the voice cheerily. “Muchas gracias!” It sounded as if the woman were right over his shoulder, and had perhaps received her training in human relations at Walt Disney World— it had a kind of forced cheerfulness that Loren had only heard in totally artificial environments where people had to work hard at being ingenuous. Beyond that slightly emphatic quality, her voice was natural and didn’t seem computer-generated. Loren might have been more comfortable had it been otherwise.

“Please take your seat,” the voice said. “Please remain in your seat for the entire trip. Do not attempt to move or stand during acceleration or deceleration. The ATL Maglev Express is designed to travel in excess of two hundred forty miles per hour, though this journey is so brief that speeds will not exceed two hundred. Thank you.”

The message was repeated in Spanish. The humming noise increased. And quite suddenly the train was moving, slowly because it was still in town. And the humming noise dropped away entirely, creating an illusion that the train was already going faster than sound.

The future, Loren thought. This is what all the old science-fiction movies thought the World of Tomorrow was going to be like. Everything automated, everything perfect. Silent. Efficient. Clean.

He looked behind him again. It was eerie. There was absolutely no one else on the train.

Everything was so perfect, Loren thought, that human beings could be left out completely. There wasn’t even a brakeman— scanners on the tracks were supposed to signal the train whenever there was an obstruction ahead. Even instructions to the passengers were given by a computer voice, however human it sounded.

The future. Right.

He wondered if it was a sin to plan a future without people in it, and if so which one. Covetousness?

No, he thought. Pride.

The cinder-block and galvanized-steel buildings of Picketwire passed by on the right, separated from the tracks by a sturdy chain link fence topped with razor wire. Having left untidy humanity behind, the train picked up speed. Loren felt himself pressed back into his seat. Naked desert shot by, marked by flashes of cholla, yucca, creosote. The absence of sound was striking— only when the train was passing through a cut or beside an embankment was there the sound of wind, and then only a distant, forlorn cry.

Then the train was decelerating into the Vista Linda station. Gravity tugged at Loren’s belly. The humming started again, and the doors rattled open.

“One-minute stop,” said the computer voice.

No one got on during the interim.

The voice spoke its piece, the doors rattled shut, and the train began to accelerate, much faster this time. Gees pushed Loren back into his seat. Brown desert blurred by. The bridge over the Rio Seco was a flash of silver. Then Loren was on ATL land, part of the old Figueracion Ranch, and the train was decelerating.

“The train will return in half an hour,” the voice said. “Thank you for following instructions and being a good passenger!”

Loren, rising from his seat, found himself wanting to determine the source of the cheerful voice and crush it under his heel.

The station was marked by a dark polycarbon arch thrice the height of a man. There were little precise diamond-shaped cuts in it, matching brass scrollwork on the concrete and pebble floor beneath. The arch was an elaborate sundial, helping to keep the nonexistent commuters adhering to their schedule.

A blustery wind had come up. Half the sky was shaded by cloud. There would be a thunderstorm before long, one of those spontaneous, violent rainfalls generated in the New Mexico sky, that filled arroyos and caught strangers by surprise. Parts of the state had road signs that read WATCH FOR WATER, amusing with only a desert as backdrop, amusing till you saw your first flash flood.

Still. Any water was welcome after the three-year drought.

Beyond the arch was a booth with a pair of guards, a man and a woman. The pair were seated and listening to a portable radio. Unlike the pairs who traveled in the jeeps, these wore neat khaki uniforms and baseball caps with the ATL logo. The holstered pistols, Loren saw, were Tanfoglios.

The woman rose from her chair and suppressed a yawn. “Yes, sir?” she said.

“Loren Hawn. I’m here to see your boss.”

“Could you sign in?”

Loren did so. The layout of the book, he saw, was similar to the phone log that he still carried guiltily in his breast pocket. The woman handed him a red pass with VISITOR on it and a large number 11.

“Could you tell me where Mr. Patience has his office?”

“If you’ll wait a moment, we’ll call and get you an escort.”

Loren sighed. First the Disney World cheerfulness of the computer voice on the train, now this institutional uniformed paranoia. What did they think he was going to do, plant a bomb somewhere?

“Not necessary,” he said. “Just tell me the way.”

“If you’ll just wait . . .”

Loren pointed a finger randomly at one of the buildings. “That building, I think he said.” And took off.

“Ah. Sir. Sir!”

Loren increased his pace and put on his shades. Right in front of him was a wide, blacktopped avenue with a green landscaped lane divider. At its terminus, right in front of the arch, was a tall modernistic piece of sculpture, long jigsaw forms of dark polycarbon and bright aluminum twisting up into the sky. Loren had seen pictures of it and knew it had some vaguely scientific name— was it Hidden Symmetries? Something like that, anyway.

Brown buildings flanked the avenue. Some were obviously administrative, three-storied, windowed, flat-roofed structures of cinder block, stuccoed in imitation of New Mexico adobe. Others were blank-walled, with large, heavy steel doors at either end and barrel-vaulted roofs vaguely reminiscent of Quonset huts. One of them, for some reason, had the word FIDO printed on it in huge blue letters. Presumably these contained heavy apparatus. Other buildings were low, built into the ground like bunkers, with heavy flat roofs covered with solar cells. Loren wasn’t even going to guess at what might be inside these last.

Each building was painted the same desert-brown and had a large blue number twice as tall as a man. They weren’t taking any chances on people getting lost.

“Sir! Sir!”

The woman caught up with him. A long blond braid, hanging down her back, swung madly left and right as she bounced up next to him. “I’ll just go with you, shall I?” Her voice had a condescending, false heartiness as distasteful as that on the maglev.

“Suit yourself,” said Loren. He walked past the sculpture. The wind made a hollow whistling sound as it gusted through the metal structure.

“Interesting sound, huh?” the guard said. She had to adopt a kind of skipping step to keep pace with his long strides. “Do you like our Discovered Symmetries?”

Loren glanced up at the structure. He’d got the name almost right. “It’s okay. I don’t know much about art.”

“I like the noises it makes, different depending on where the wind is coming from. We want to turn left here.”

They turned between a pair of Quonset-like buildings and headed down a bare concrete walk lined by naked brown soil on either side. A gust of wind funneled between the buildings and spat desert grit into Loren’s eyes in spite of his shades. He blinked and put a hand in front of his face. A spatter of rain impacted the back of his hand. Other large drops exploded on the concrete nearby.

The gust fell away. Loren lowered his hand and saw William Patience appear from out of a wind-whipped cloud of dust and gravel, walking hastily with his head down and his hands in his pockets. Patience looked up as rain began falling like a barrage.

“Loren!” he shouted. “I’m not surprised you didn’t want to wait! This way!”

He turned and began sprinting down the walk. Loren grabbed his pistol holster to keep it from bouncing and followed at a lumbering run, water spattering the lenses of his dark glasses. His escort, braid swinging, turned to run back to her station.

Loren sprinted past a large asphalt parking lot, part of which was fenced off with chain link and filled with brown Blazers, then into a large steel-walled building sitting beside it. Loren noticed a security camera set over the door. Patience was waiting for him, breathing hard and brushing water off his gray jacket. He pulled the elastic band off his ponytail and shook out his long, wet hair. With the hair hanging to his collarbones and his carefully cut uniformlike clothes, he seemed a unique combination of respectability and menace, like some retired, well-heeled drug dealer sunning away his days in Cancun.

“I’ve got the logs for you,” he said. “For Friday and Saturday both.”

“Thanks.”

“They’re on computer.”

“I’d like to see the originals.”

“It’s the originals that are on computer. I’ll show you.”

Loren was in an anteroom that featured white ceiling tile, desert-tan steel walls, and a gunmetal desk with a dozen television monitors presumably keeping track of various sensitive parts of the complex. There was no one watching the monitors. Heavy steel doors, painted government green, pierced three walls. On the walls hung a number of posters concerning security: COMPUTER SECURITY IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY; and YOU NEVER KNOW WHO’S LISTENING, with a picture of a couple of people, one in military uniform, gabbing on the phone with a sinister character grinning evilly as he listened on a line tap.

Rain drummed on the metal roof. Patience sliced a card through the reader on one of the doors, and there was the sound of a buzz lock; Patience yanked open the door and held it for Loren to pass through. Walking past the man, Loren had the intuition that Patience was running him through some obscure test and intently observing the results. Loren’s performance so far, he suspected, had been disappointing.

The corridor beyond was empty, fluorescent-lit; there was a corkboard on one wall with notices pinned heedlessly to it, fluttering in the air-conditioning, and a camera at the far end. Patience resumed the lead.

“Did you say the original logbooks are on computer?” Loren asked. “At the station I just signed a real book.”

“It is the originals that are on computer,” Patience said. “There’s a scanner at each security station— we read the information and signature into our data banks as soon as it’s on paper. Then the computer compares the signatures to the ones in each employee’s files.” Patience turned into a brightly lit room. “You want some coffee? I could use some.”

The room was a small cafeteria with half a dozen tables and bench seats. Vending machines and a couple of video games, one with a pistol attached to the machine with a cord, sat next to the wall. The video games made combat noises that were largely overwhelmed by the drum song of rain on the roof. On the walls were posters advertising elite military units, each featuring a soldier with his weapon in a combat-ready stance. Special Forces, Loren recognized, Marine Force Recon, SAS in black balaclavas that concealed everything but their eyes, somebody in an obvious Russian uniform, carrying a Groza bullpup assault rifle and identified by Cyrillic lettering and multiple exclamation points.

Patience beneath a picture of a Green Beret, pouring into a thick insulated cup with his name on it. The Green Beret was wearing camouflage face paint.

“It’s good coffee, by the way,” Patience said. “We filter our water.”

“In that case,” Loren said, “I’ll have some.”

“Cream? Sugar?”

“Black.” Loren looked at the vending machines. One was for soda, one for snacks— peanuts, chips, crackers— and a third for plastic-wrapped sandwiches. Loren looked closer at the last one.

Coffee, potato chips, ham and American cheese on white bread.

John Doe’s stomach contents.

An electric current crackled in Loren’s nerves. He crouched to look at the labels on the doors of the sandwich machine. Egg salad, tuna salad, ham and cheese. There it was.

“Want something to eat?” Patience asked.

“No. Thanks.” Loren realized he was still staring at the cellophane-wrapped sandwich, and he straightened. There was a crackle from the stolen log sheet in his breast pocket and he gave a start at a sudden, guilty memory of his theft.

Patience, he observed, was watching him intently.

“I’d like to see the original logs,” Loren said.

Patience cocked his head slightly, then cast a look up at the roof. “Let’s wait till the rain dies down a bit,” he said, “and I’ll run out and get them. In the meantime I’ll show you how the computer works.”

He handed Loren his coffee and gestured for Loren to follow him. They went down the corridor again, past closed steel doors with cardboard tags inserted in metal slots in the center of the door. Loren read people’s names on individual office doors, then ARMORY, all in caps, and DETENTION. He paused by the last one.

“You keep prisoners in here?” he asked.

Patience gave a dry little laugh. “It’s never been used. It’s intended mostly as a drunk tank. If one of our employees gets loaded and has to be held until he sobers up.”

Loren looked at the heavy buzz lock. “You don’t have powers of arrest,” he said.

“When someone works here, they sign a waiver giving up certain rights,” said Patience. “We can hold them for up to twelve hours.”

Loren scratched his jaw and looked at the door. “I don’t think that’s legal. Waivers get broken in court all the time. A person can’t give up his right to due process just by signing his name.”

An unreadable expression flickered across Patience’s face. “Let’s just call it a gray area in the law, okay?” His voice was flat, brooking no further argument. Loren decided the point wasn’t worth contesting. If Patience wanted to court a lawsuit from the ACLU, that was fine with Loren.

Patience led him past the office of his secretary— a trim middle-aged woman whose bearing seemed as military as that of her boss. She had decorated her room with large travel posters. Patience opened another buzz lock with his card, then led Loren into his office. “You can use my terminal,” Patience said. “I’ve got it set up for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Sit down here.” Indicating the dark fine-grained leather of his padded chair.

There was a Turkish carpet on the floor. The lighting was from floor lamps, not overhead fluorescents, and the lamps had intricately designed brass-framed lampshades in the same style as the carpet. There was an elaborate brass coatrack and two bookshelves crammed full of books. The desk was a wide, modern hardwood rolltop, designed to hold a computer terminal. In one corner stood an American flag, the pole capped with a gold-plated eagle; in another corner was a flag Loren didn’t recognize. There were a pair of filing cabinets in military matte black, and on the wall were framed certificates and a plaque with the Special Forces shield and the motto DE OPPRESSO LIBER. There was another plaque featuring a black stylized helicopter on a blue background, with a bloodred lightning bolt, all in murky colors that made the design hard to make out. UNIT 77-112, it said. ABRACADABRA.

There was a picture on the wall of a young, round-cheeked Patience with short hair, a mustache, and a green beret, and a second photo of a ten-man Special Forces team. In both photos the young man’s expression was intense, unsmiling, and uncompromised— essentially unchanged from the older Patience who used the office. There was another photo on another wall, a picture of a hawk-nosed, eagle-eyed man in a gray uniform.

“Who’s he?” Loren asked.

“Mushegh Abovian. Armenian freedom fighter.”

Loren looked at the flag he hadn’t recognized. “And the flag? It’s Armenian, too?”

Patience tapped keys on his computer. “We had a big interest in the Armenian revolt when I was in Special Forces.”

“Huh. Which side were we on?”

Patience glanced up, gave another quick, humorless smile. “I can’t say. Everything’s still classified.”

“Yeah.” Loren sat down at the computer and put his coffee cup on the desk. There was a picture of Timothy Jernigan on the screen, staring at Loren through his thick lenses. Patience hovered over Loren’s right shoulder, pointing at icons on the screen. Loren detected the faint scent of gun oil from the pistol under Patience’s arm.

“I’ve called up the file on people going in and out the last few days,“ he said. “Here’s Dr. Jernigan’s name, ID number, job assignment, signature, and comparison signature from computer memory. We use a hypertext system that can call up additional information— here.” He leaned forward and punched the button on the mouse. The flickering image on the screen changed, began to scroll down an image of a standardized form. “Here’s Jernigan’s employment file and personal history. You won’t be able to get at anything that’s classified, but with this system you have access to everything else.”

“How about Sondra Jernigan?” Loren asked. “I’ve been wondering if our John Doe knew her rather than her husband.”

“Just use the hypertext. Here.” He pressed the button again; the screen altered again. Sondra Jernigan’s picture appeared. She was smiling prettily, with faintly flushed cheeks— not Loren’s view of the woman at all. “Here’s our file on the wife. We don’t have much. If you want hard copy of anything, just tell the system to make one for you. Or if you want to copy something onto disk to read later, you can do that.” He handed Loren a stick of portable memory.

“Thanks.” A cold suspicion filled Loren. Patience was making this all too easy, giving him vast amounts of data. It would take weeks to check everyone’s story, and in the end it would probably amount to nothing.

Patience straightened. “I don’t envy you,” he said. “We had thirty-odd extra Ph.D.’s on base during that accelerator run. Some flew in from California, Massachusetts, and Illinois.”

On base, Loren thought. An interesting slip. Patience went on:

“After seeing this, you still want the original logs?”

Loren looked at him. “Sorry, Bill. But yes.”

Patience looked at him for a long, intense moment. Jesus, Loren thought, doesn’t the guy ever lighten up? “Okay,” Patience said finally, and opened a drawer on a cabinet to pull out a plastic bundle wrapped with a large rubber band. He pulled off the band, then shook out the bundle. A hooded plastic poncho in desert camouflage.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” he said. “Annette can look after you in the meantime.”

“Thanks,” Loren said.

Patience didn’t answer, just breezed out through the heavy door. Loren pondered for a moment how awful it would be to have William Patience as a boss, then rose from his seat. He stepped over to the bookshelf beneath the window, then scanned the titles. Shooter’s Bible. Improvised Munitions Black Book— three volumes. Escape and Evasion Manual. Guerrilla Warfare and Special Forces Operations (FM 31-21). Loren’s eyes dropped a few shelves. History of Modern Turkey. The Armenian Struggle for Statehood. Disintegration of the Soviet Empire. History of the Transcaucasian Republics 1918-1921. The Glory and Resurrection of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Armenian, Russian, and Turkish dictionaries and phrase books.

Nothing here. He looked out the window and caught a glimpse of Patience dashing across the parking lot in his hooded poncho, his polished wing tips leaving brief footmarks on the wet asphalt before being obliterated by the downpour. He thought about looking through the man’s desk, but knew there’d be no point to it. If there were anything to find, Patience wouldn’t have let him in here, let alone let him stay here by himself.

He was just here to be impressed by Patience’s computer system and Patience’s personality.

Assholes, he thought, always advertise.

Loren circled the room, the soft Turkish rug cushioning his steps. UNIT 77-112, he read as he looked at the plaque. For someone who had participated in an undeclared, top-secret Special Forces action as part of a unit that didn’t even have a name, William Patience sure did everything he could to let everyone know about it. It enhanced the mystique, no doubt. ABRACADABRA.

The certificates on the wall were from an M.A. in psychology from Boston University and a number of graduation certificates from survival courses. One of them graduated him from the “Advanced Course” on “Interrogation Resistance and Escape Techniques.”

Great. The guy had himself tortured on his vacations just to see what he was made of.

Loren looked at the other bookshelf. Managing Stress. Breath Control for Yoga Mastery. Fifteen Deadliest Strikes. Sharpening Your Mind for Effective Action. Relax! Survival in a Desert Environment. Manual of Sudden Death (three volumes). Secrets of Concentration. How to Beat Ulcers.

Ulcers, Loren thought, no shit. The guy was so tightly wrapped it was a miracle he hadn’t detonated by now.

He returned to the computer and began putting data into the memory stick, his eyes scanning the screen and his fingers working the mouse while his thoughts drifted elsewhere.

Detention. Ham and cheese sandwiches. Coffee.

Right. Suppose that at some point Friday or Saturday Patience or his men put someone in the detention room. Suppose they fed him dinner, and when a guard arrived to take away the tray, the prisoner clocked him, scraping a couple knuckles in the process. Suppose the prisoner ran out into the parking lot, yanked Jernigan out of his car, and drove off. Suppose he got shot making his escape.

No, Loren thought, because it doesn’t make any sense. ATL had a perfect right to shoot at someone in those circumstances. If that’s what happened, why hide it?

The drumming on the roof diminished, then ceased. There were footsteps in the outer office, then the sound of the buzz lock. Patience came in carrying a pair of ledger-sized books. He’d left the wet poncho outside.

“Here you go. I’ve marked Friday for you.”

Loren looked up. “Thanks.”

Patience looked over Loren’s shoulder. “Getting anywhere?”

“Vastly increasing my paperwork.”

“My sympathies. But you did volunteer.” Patience walked to the center of the office, then bent and took off his shoes. He took off his coat and shoulder holster, then put them both on the coatrack. “Unless you have some questions,” Patience said, “I’m going to do some stretching.”

“Fine.”

Patience lowered himself to the carpet. The desk blocked Loren’s view of most of what he was doing, but whatever it was seemed to require a lot of grunting, as if someone was hitting Patience repeatedly in the breadbasket. Breath control, Loren thought, for torture subjects. Maybe Patience could write a book about it.

He finished loading his disk and removed it from the drive, then turned to the two logbooks Patience had brought, one from the vehicle entry, the other from the maglev station. He opened the first to the spot Patience had indicated with a white slip of paper, saw scribbles of signatures in blue or black ballpoint, the confusion of names, addresses, and ID numbers. He paged through, looking carefully, guiltily, at the binding to make certain nothing had been torn away. Apparently nothing had. He looked at the other logbook and found much the same. He hefted them both and peered over the desk at Patience.

“Is there a place where I can Xerox these?” he asked.

Patience was lying on his back with his knees bent and feet under his butt, a position Loren recognized from his high school football days as one that could tear out knee tendons if you weren’t limber enough. His long hair was spread out on the carpet like that of a swooning Victorian maiden. There was a light dotting of sweat on his forehead.

“Just ask Annette,” he said.

Loren rose and went into the secretary’s office. Patience’s poncho dripped rainwater in one corner. The secretary— Annette, he presumed— pointed out the copy machine, a beige box sitting beneath a swirling color photograph of masked Chinese dancers. Loren declined her offer of assistance and made copies, then returned to Patience’s office.

Patience was on his feet, tying his hair back. He was breathing hard, dabbing sweat with a handkerchief.

“I guess I’ve got what I came for,” Loren said.

Patience looked out the window. Sunlight gleamed off puddles on the asphalt. “Would you like a look at the proton accelerator?”

“Very much.”

“We’ll take my jeep. You wanted me to show you how the SMGs are stored, anyway, right?”

Loren had forgotten. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

They left by a back door that opened by a push bar, like a door in a theater. It led directly into the parking lot. Loren considered how easy it would be for a fugitive to slip through the door without anyone necessarily seeing him.

The sun blazed on the parking lot, reflected on spilled oil and puddles. A dark shroud of water obscured the mesa east of them, but here the thunderstorm was over. It wasn’t enough, Loren thought, to alleviate the drought conditions. The lightning would just start more forest fires.

Patience led him to a gate on the fenced-off chain link parking lot, then opened the gate with his holocard. The fleet of Blazers, together with the weaponry in them, was fenced off from anyone not possessing a card. Like, Loren thought, escaping prisoners.

Patience led Loren to one of the jeeps, opened the door with a key, and got in. Loren got in the passenger seat.

“We keep the UZIs in here,” Patience said. His knuckles rapped a featureless black aluminum box set between the front seats, just abaft the emergency brake. He pulled on the front box lid and the box folded back on hinges. Beneath lay two submachine guns with their pistol grips up, a position that allowed them to be seized easily in an emergency. Each had a magazine inserted in the pistol butt, and additional magazines were clipped underneath. Both weapons were locked down with a heavy metal bar that crossed just forward of the trigger guard. A ten-key pad, white plastic keys beneath a red LED, sat atop the bar.

“That bar is heavy alloy,” Patience said. “Hacksaw-proof. You’d need to work at it with a torch for ten minutes. In order to open the lock you have to know the right three-digit combination.” He reached for the pad, his index finger pointing.

“Let me,” said Loren.

The hand hesitated. “Okay,” Patience said.

Loren reached down and punched 571. The red LED went off and a green one winked on. Loren yanked up on the pad, pulling the bar away, then took one of the UZIs by its grip and pointed it at Patience.

“Bang,” he said, “you’re dead.”

Patience stared at him, eyes wide. Loren smiled.

Patience’s hatchetlike face froze in an expression of vast, cold anger. “Who told you?” he said. His voice had a tremor in it, a stammer on the t— he’d been scared, Loren thought, when the muzzle came in line. And Loren didn’t blame him.

Loren returned the weapon to its cradle. “No one,” he said.

“I’ll fire the son of a bitch.”

“Look at the keypad,” Loren said.

Patience’s eyes dropped reluctantly to the locking device. Loren slammed the bar down on the SMGs. The red LED winked on, the green off.

“Three of the keys are dirty,” Loren said. “It had to be that combination or one of a couple others.”

Loren heard the breath going out of Patience, a soft hiss. Then a humorless laugh.

“You’ve taught us a lesson, Loren. From now on everyone gets a bottle of Windex to keep the keys clean. Thank you.”

“You can thank me more by keeping these guns out of my town.”

Patience gave him a quick glance, then an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

“You’re gonna have some of these stolen sooner or later. I don’t care how good your security system is. The thief’ll probably be some snot-nose kid who’ll use them to shoot up the high school or some other kid’s car, but I don’t even want a minor-league bad-ass in my town with that kind of firepower.”

“I can’t remove the guns,” Patience said. “It’s not consonant with my mission.”

Loren squared himself in the seat and looked out a windshield spattered with connect-the-dots raindrops. Futile anger buzzed in his brain like a wasp battering its brains out against a car window. “We’ll see,” he said.

Patience looked at him for a moment, then replaced the metal box over the machine pistols. He started the Blazer, backed out of his parking place, hit the button that would open the fence. The route took him back to the main drive, past Discovered Symmetries again, then down the boulevard past an administrative building and a pair of the barrel-roofed structures, including the one labeled FIDO.

“Black labs,” Patience said. “Where they do the classified work.”

One of the bunkerlike structures was labeled PRINCE. Another was SHEP.

“Black labs,” Loren said. “I get it.”

Patience gave him a puzzled look. “Get what?”

“Black labs.”

“Yes. They’re black laboratories. What about it?”

“Black labs? As in Labrador dogs? SHEP? FIDO? Physicist humor. Get it?”

Comprehension dawned in Patience’s eyes. He gave a polite and completely humorless laugh. “I see it now. A pun. I see.”

Loren watched beaded raindrops bleeding across the windshield. What kind of person was this? he wondered. He must pass by those buildings every damn day.

He probably just assumed it wasn’t his job to figure it out.

“I don’t know exactly what they do in there.” Patience sounded aggrieved.

“You don’t need to know, do you?”

“I guess not. But if I hear someone with black-lab access talking shop to someone in a bar, I don’t have any idea whether he’s blabbing classified information or not.”

“Depends on who he’s blabbing it to, I suppose,” Loren said. “If it’s someone in a baggy suit with a Russian accent, I suppose you’ve got a problem.”

That humorless laugh came again. “You know it was Kim Philby who taught Russian spies how to dress? And most of the scientist types are so happy to talk science, they’ll talk it with anyone. And though they don’t necessarily disregard security classifications, they’ll just talk around the classified stuff and leave it to their audience to infer what they’re leaving out.”

Not Jernigan, Loren thought. The guy just sweated and stuck to his story. And it looked like Dielh wasn’t going to talk at all.

The Blazer reached the end of the boulevard, then turned left. At the end of a quarter mile of blacktop was a low flat-roofed building, poured concrete painted brown, that looked like an Indian pueblo built by monomaniac German perfectionists. Beyond the building the high desert with its surreal towers of interweaving ocotillo spines and waving tufts of yucca.

“Why’s this one by itself?” Loren asked.

“The black labs and administrative buildings are clumped together for security reasons. This one’s closer to the boonies because that’s where the accelerators are. And the magnetic fusion device and the high-explosive site are way the hell out by themselves.”

“High-explosive site?”

Patience parked in front of a wooden blue-on-turquoise sign that said LINAC. “Yes.” Yanking back the emergency brake. “Down at the MCG— magneto-cumulative generator. You create a magnetic field in a specially shaped chamber, then compress it with an explosion. Channel the force onto a target. It’s something the Russians got a head start on.” His fingers did a little dance in the air, tracing an explosion. “Boom. Target vaporized.”

“Great.” Without enthusiasm.

Loren followed Patience toward a pair of twelve-foot-tall steel doors set into an alcove in the front of the building. Patience didn’t need his card to open the lock; he just pulled back on the unlocked beige steel door and stepped inside. Loren was surprised.

“No security out here?” he asked.

“Nothing classified goes on in this building. So all they do is lock it at night if there’s no one around.”

“Huh.”

“But someone’s almost always here. These guys keep all kinds of hours— you’ll see that when you get a chance to study the logs. People check in at two in the morning and pull eighteen-hour shifts.“

The interior walls were nonprettified concrete with the impressions of the wooden forms still on them, all painted a sickly government green. Corkboards hung on them, and the boards were full of notices, put on four or five deep. Some announced conferences on one obscure subject or another. Many were headed A CALL FOR PAPERS. Some appeared to be the papers themselves. Loren squinted at one of them. Insights into the Nature of Classical and Quantum Gravity via Null-Strut Calculus. Loren gave up on that one and looked at the next. Multi-Megampere Plasma Flow Switch-Driven Liner Implosions.

No help.

The first few rooms they passed were empty offices with whiteboards, corkboards, and steel desks with computer terminals. In the intervals between these and pastel-green steel bookshelves were more travel posters. Loren wondered if ATL bought the posters wholesale. He was beginning to feel oppressed by the constant overhead fluorescent light in all these installations.

“In here,” Patience said. He opened another of the doors, one with CONTROL ROOM stenciled on it. Below the stencil was a bright fluorescent green-on-orange bumper sticker with the by-now-familiar message about Heisenberg and where he may or may not have slept.

“Good Lord,” Loren said. He had stepped into what looked like a Pentagon situation room, at least half the length of a football field, all subdued lighting, dark consoles, unwinking high-resolution monitors. All that was needed was a giant map of Russia overhead.

Loren was standing on the second level, on a kind of balcony running around the entire room. Ventilators made a continual, hushed white-noise sound. Thirty-inch video monitors, lining the walls, gazed at him with bright, unblinking eyes. Brushed-aluminum railings set into polycarbon supports kept any hypnotized bystanders from toppling into the lower level. The area below was lined on all sides by matte-black control banks and more monitors, most of which showed only a test pattern, a computer-generated version of the ATL logo that went through constant, slow changes in color to prevent phosphor burn. Half the monitors were holotanks on which the logo rotated slowly, in three dimensions. There was another bank of monitors in the center of the room, each side sloping toward the center, permitting two sets of technicians to face one another during operation.

It’s the goddamn starship Enterprise, Loren thought.

Intent on one central-bank monitor were two young men, both muttering intently as they leaned forward from contoured leatherette chairs to stare deeply into a holographic image. Plush carpet absorbed Loren’s footsteps as he followed Patience down a cantilevered stairway and out onto the floor.

“You’re losing it!” one of the men said. He was Asian, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. “You’re gonna crash and burn.”

“Motherfucker!” A flash lit the other man’s face from below. He was a burly man, with corded muscles and a thick neck, obviously a weight lifter.

“Commit!” the first man urged. “Commit!”

“I don’t have my ears on!” Frantically tapping keys.

“You don’t have a choice!”

“Shit! Shitshitshit!” Another flash highlighted his profile. Both men slowly relaxed, reluctantly leaning back in their padded chairs. Both appeared to have suffered an inconsolable loss.

“Sixteen thousand,” the first said. “That’s not bad.”

“I’ve done better.”

“If I can interrupt,” said Patience. Both men glanced up.

“Hi.” The first man, the weight lifter, rose from his seat. He wore Levi’s, brown work boots, and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to show off the curve of his biceps. He had a turned-down brown mustache and wore dark-rimmed spectacles— he looked like a well-off rancher on his way to town.

“I was looking for someone to give Chief Hawn a tour,” Patience said.

The man looked at his friend and grinned with a silver front tooth. “I guess we can spare the time.” He stepped forward and offered a hand to Loren. “I’m Kelly Steffens.”

“Loren Hawn.”

“Yoshi Kurita.”

Loren shook hands with them both. Kurita had a thin, enthusiastic face and spectacles held together with tape over the bridge of the nose. His T-shirt had a holo picture of the Galileo explorer firing an instrument package into one of Jupiter’s moons. It looked as if there were a square, black hole in his chest, with planets and the probe floating eerily inside.

“Nice shirt,” Loren said.

“New process.” Grinning. “You’ll see it on every street corner in six weeks.”

“I bet.”

“I’ve got some phone calls to make,” Patience said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Don’t worry, I’m just going upstairs.”

I won’t worry, Loren thought, but didn’t say it.

Patience went back up the stairs two at a time. Loren felt as if he were swimming deeper into quicksand. He knew now he wouldn’t find out anything important. The tour was like the computer files— if there was anything important to discover, Patience wouldn’t have left him alone with it.

Loren put his Xeroxes down on the smooth cool surface of the control bank. At a loss for what to do next, Loren looked into the holotank and saw, in gleaming chrome-steel letters on a background of depthless blue sky and scudding cloud, the words HOLO CYBERCOPS III. A computer game.

“So,” he said, “this is what the taxpayers’ money is going for.”

Steffens grinned. Holo images glowed in his silver front tooth. “I’m being paid by one of the contractors, not the government.”

“That’s okay, then.”

“Actually, I’m just a techie, not a Ph.D. They pay me to fix things, but they didn’t manage to break much today.”

“We completed our checklist,” said Kurita. His tone was defensive.

“Was there anything in particular that you wanted to see?” Steffens asked.

“I don’t suppose you were here on Friday.”

Another grin. “Everyone was here on Friday.”

Rolling through Loren came the realization that Steffens had a cleft palate. That’s why he had a missing tooth. And the mustache covered the scar on the upper lip.

“Dr. Jernigan?” Loren asked. “Dr. Dielh?”

“Especially them. They were running the show.”

“Amardas Singh?”

“Sure. He’s someone you can’t miss.”

“And,” looking back over his shoulder at the softly closing door, “Mr. Patience?”

Steffens gave a puzzled little scowl, then looked at his partner, who shrugged. “I didn’t see him.”

“Hey,” said Kurita. “Show him the Big Bang.”

“Good idea. You want to see the creation of the universe? We’ve got a recording, and it’s pretty good.”

Loren looked from one to the other and tried to make up his mind whether they were playing some kind of joke.

If they were, he thought darkly, woe unto them.

But they were both bending over the console, tapping with rapid-fire enthusiasm on the keyboard.

“There,” Kurita said. “We’re out of the games file.”

“Use Version D. That’s the most complete.” Steffens looked up at Loren. “It’s got great special effects.”

“Look up there,” said Kurita, pointing.

Something had come into existence atop the long console, a cube-shaped shift in the light, a quality of emptiness, marked by brief specks of light, somehow different from the emptiness that had been there before. Like Kurita’s T-shirt, it seemed a window into something else, an emptiness that was somehow projected from another place, perhaps another world . . .

“Another new process,” Kurita said.

“Holography without tanks,” Loren said. “I saw it on the news.”

“Right.”

“Fire one,” said Steffens. Kurita hit the Enter button.

There was a dazzling flash of white light in the empty cube. Bits of brightness seemed to scatter, tumbling, some of them doing weird loops like uncoiling springs. Loren blinked. Steffens gave a playful open-handed slap to the back of his friend’s head.

“Idiot. Use slow motion.”

“That was slow motion.” Rubbing his head resentfully.

“Another order of magnitude.”

“Just a sec.” Tapping keys.

“Make that two orders of magnitude. Slow it right down.”

Steffens glanced from Loren to the holographic cubes and back again. “With the room-temperature superconductors, our linear accelerators can get higher energies than CERN, and without any damn silly twenty-seven-kilometer circle, either. And the whole thing happens at far less expense in electricity— an older-generation collider takes enough power for a major city, and the electricity is used mainly to run the compressors and pumps for the old-fashioned superconductors, and we don’t use those.”

“So what are you doing now?” Loren said. He felt he’d been lost the second he walked into the room. “You’re using the accelerators?”

“No.” Loren saw that silver-winking grin again. “It takes a lot of coordinated effort to run the accelerators— this room would be full of people. We’re just rerunning the highlights of Friday’s party.”

“Oh. It’s recorded. I see.” A trickle of interest lifted Loren’s spirits. Maybe he’d see something, after all. He frowned at the empty holo cube. “What was that you said about the beginning of the universe?”

“Oh, yeah. See, if you cook matter hot enough, you can duplicate the conditions just after the Big Bang, when the universe consisted of very energetic particles combining, coming apart, and recombining under conditions of extreme heat and pressure.”

“The Bang plus maybe a zillionth of a second,” said Kurita.

Loren looked at him. “Say again?”

“We can’t duplicate the exact conditions of the Big Bang. We don’t have enough energy. But we can get within a fraction of a second.”

“A zillionth?” Loren said. He gave a laugh. “That’s a scientific term?”

“Well.” Steffen’s eyes turned vacant for a moment. He seemed to be mentally rewinding his conversation, recalculating, starting over.

“Ten to the minus thirty-fifth second, which is a ten with a decimal point and thirty-five zeroes in front of it.”

“A one with a decimal point and thirty-four zeroes,” said Kurita. “Let’s not make it more difficult than—”

Steffens slapped him on the back of the head again. Loren could hear Kurita’s teeth clack together. “A damn short time, anyway,” Steffens said. “The theory is that the further back you go toward the beginnings of time, the more simple and symmetric nature becomes. The electromagnetic force and the strong force haven’t split off, though gravity has, so you get all kinds of particles and conditions that don’t normally exist in our relatively cool universe. You’ve seen Discovered Symmetries out on the Fairgrounds?”

Loren nodded. “Fairgrounds?”

“What we call the main area. There’s this famous statue called Broken Symmetries at Fermilabs in Illinois, which is supposed to represent the way nature became less symmetric and more, ah, fractured after the first few seconds of existence. Instead of having one unified force controlling things, you have electromagnetic force and gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces. And assuming that you give any credence to Kaluza-Klein theories, you get eleven dimensions falling into four, because there isn’t enough energy to sustain the others.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Loren said.

“At ATL we’re supposed to be able to crank up the LINAC to the point where the symmetries start becoming visible again. So we’ve got a more optimistic sculpture.” He bent toward Kurita, who was still working at the keyboard. “Thank you,” he said, “for not interrupting”

Loren watched this well-honed routine with a familiar amusement. Put a couple gimme hats on them and drinks in their hands, they could hold their own in the rustic comedy contest with Bob Sandoval and Mark Byrne down at the Sunshine.

“You’re making it too complicated,” Kurita said. “Kaluza-Klein theories are unnecessary to your point. And otherwise you’re too vague.”

“Hard to be both complicated and vague at once, huh? I must be a genius.”

“If you were a genius,” smiling maliciously, “you’d have finished your thesis three or four years ago.”

“You can’t finish a thesis when everything that happens at work changes my fundamental understanding of the things I’m writing the thesis about.”

Kurita looked up at Loren. “He has lots of excuses.”

Enough of this comedy, Loren thought.

“How do you—” Loren searched for a way of phrasing his question. “How do you do all of this, exactly? Cook your particles, or whatever it’s called.”

“Okay. We’ve got two linear accelerators, and they’re aimed at one another. We fire protons out of one and antiprotons out of another, and the two meet and annihilate one another. It’s like—” He peered at Loren. “Do you ever go duck hunting?”

“I’m going later this week.”

“Me, too. Now suppose we went duck hunting together. Suppose we put the muzzles of our shotguns together and pulled the triggers at the same instant.”

“Suppose we don’t,” said Loren.

Steffens went on as if he hadn’t heard. “There’d be an explosion as all the bird shot and the chemical and heat energy collided. That’s what we do with the LINACs. We slam bird shot— protons and antiprotons— into each other and take pictures of the explosion. And annihilations produce a lot of energy and heat and elementary particles and further annihilations and energy and so on, until you get to ten to the twenty-ninth degrees Kelvin, which is nearing the heat of the Big Bang that created the universe . . .”

“Okay. I see your point.”

“And the profusion of particles that constitute matter are simplified to a few, and perhaps we get glimpses of the higher seven dimensions as predicted by Kaluza a hundred years ago or whenever . . .”

Kurita looked up again. “Leave Kaluza-Klein out of it, okay? You don’t need it in this explanation.”

Steffens raised a hand as if to slap the back of Kurita’s head again, then thought better of it and dropped his hand. “It’s my thesis topic, okay?” He turned to Loren and gave an apologetic look. “It’s something I’ve been waiting to find confirmation for. But there’s no evidence so far. Everything keeps falling into what Tim calls this energy sump.”

“Tim Jernigan?”

“Yes. The energies keep falling away. No one knows what’s happening.”

Kurita looked up again. “The energy doesn’t fall away all the time. It’s intermittent. That’s why everyone’s so perplexed. Why my colleague is annoyed”— that malicious smile appeared again— “is that on those occasions when the experiments have worked perfectly, he still hasn’t found his six extra spacial and one extra time dimension.”

“It’s hard to find them,” Steffens said, more to Kurita than Loren, “because we’re using four-dimensional detector arrays and we can only detect the shadow of extra dimensions in our space, not the real thing.”

“I appreciate the explanation,” Loren said. “But this extra dimension stuff goes way over my head.”

Kurita smiled sunnily. “My colleague’s head, too.”

Steffens looked at him. “I haven’t noticed a published thesis from you, either, bucko.”

“Mine’s further along than yours.”

“Huh. We’ll see.”

“I’ve got the simulation cued up.”

“Then run it, moron!”

Loren decided he was going to have to introduce these guys to Sandoval and Byrne. They were clearly competitors in the same Bozo Sweepstakes.

Loren turned back to the holo cube as Kurita pressed Enter. A dim line, a silver trail, appeared along the center of the cube.

“That’s the angle of the beam pipe,” Steffens said.

In the bottom of the cube chrome-bright numbers rolled, a minus sign followed by a big number 10 with smaller numbers above the right-hand corner of the image, the scientific notation that Kurita and Steffens had been using and that Loren only dimly remembered from high school. The number reached zero, and the minus sign turned into a plus.

There was a sudden speeding brightness, a horizon filled with primal fire, and then blasting out of the center of the explosion, like shrapnel from a grenade, were tiny objects— perfectly focused spheres, unblurred by motion and hyper-real, almost offensively real. Suddenly the image froze, hovering over the dark surface of the console like the harbinger of an apocalypse. The time counter was frozen at 10-56.

“The interaction’s almost ideal,” Steffens said. He stepped closer to the image. “Symmetry’s already broken, because gravity’s broken off from the superforce, but there’s plenty of other things to look at. The physicists haven’t had time to identify but a few of these particles— lookee here.” He crooked a finger at Loren, who obediently stepped closer. Steffens put his hand into the image. A dark tiger-striped cloak shimmered over his palm and fingers— strangely, the hand looked less real than the frozen image.

Steffens pointed at a blue marble. If Loren looked close, he could see a lowercase d written on the surface. “That one’s been identified as a d quark. Quarks possess this quality called color, okay, but the actual color of quarks in this simulation doesn’t signify anything— all quarks are coded blue in this simulation, and most of what’s been identified so far are quarks, because that’s mostly all that can exist at these temperatures.” Loren wondered idly what a quark might be. Steffens’s finger moved to a little orange sphere with Z written on it. “There’s an intermediate vector boson. If you look closely when we start the simulation again— I saw this earlier— you’ll see it decay into an electron-positron pair and a Higgs particle. Hey.” He peered into the image and gave a little hop, trying to see better. “Is that a Centauro event?” Speaking to Kurita. “Would you rotate the image one-eighty?”

“Which axis?”

“Y.”

Steffens turned back to Loren. “Bet no one’s noticed this yet.”

Kurita tapped keys and the image rolled over like an obedient dog. Steffens pointed at a bright fan of shining spearlike tracks. “See here? This spray of particles? That’s—” He hesitated, remembering his audience. “Well, it’s something you hardly ever see in nature.” He looked at Kurita. “Mark this and log it, okay?”

“I sure as hell will.” Kurita wore a smirk. “That’s my thesis.”

A cube appeared in the center of the holo image, then tracked (Kurita tapping keys) until it stood over the event. Kurita kept tapping keys.

“He’s got to log it in four dimensions, counting time,“ Steffens said. “Then we can get on with it.“

Kurita finished and the cube disappeared. The image rotated again until it regained its former alignment.

Steffens pulled his hand back. “Okay. Next.“

Kurita tapped a key and the simulation advanced, the bright fragments coiling outward like a time-lapse video of a thundercloud forming over an isolated New Mexico peak. The action was still happening too fast for Loren to follow, even assuming he knew what to look at.

“Stop!“ said Steffens.

The image froze. Time was 10-29.

“Here’s where it all goes to hell,“ Steffens said. His voice was heavy with disgust. “See these guys?“ He waved his hand through an expanding cloud of tiny bright particles. “Photons! Electrons! Neutrinos!“ He pointed an accusing finger deep into the mass. “And there’s a neutron! We shouldn’t have these things yet!” Another ferocious stab with his finger. “And over here’s a proton!” There was disgust in his voice. “They should exist only for an instant and then be blown apart!” He withdrew his hand and shrugged. “In a little while we’ll start forming deuterium, and then it’s all over. At this stage there should be a lot more energy in here. But it’s gone—most of the energy from this interaction got dumped somewhere.”

“The energy sump,” Loren said.

“That’s what Tim calls it, yeah.”

Kurita tapped a key again. The explosion grew, the brightness lessening as it diffused. Particles shot out of the frame of the holo. In the end there was nothing, just the shadowy image of the beam pipe. The cube disappeared. End of demonstration.

Loren tried to decide how he felt about all this. A vast complex, with the latest technologies, and all for the purpose of cataloguing the behavior of things no one could see. Was it salvation or a sin? And if sin, which one? Vanity?

They were trying to cook up the Creation. And what the hell did that mean?

It annoyed him that he didn’t know the answer.

“What happens if you get all the way back to the Bang itself?” Loren said.

“We won’t,” said Steffens.

“Do you see God?”

Steffens started to answer, then didn’t. He seemed uncertain what attitude to take to this question.

Kurita rose from his chair. “What do you mean, we won’t?” he said. “Remember what Pascual Jordan said back in World War II? He said he could create a star out of nothing, because at the point zero its negative gravitational energy is numerically equal to its positive rest mass energy.”

Steffens waved a hand near his ear, as if to brush off a mosquito.

“If you create a star, from there it’s just a tiny step to creating a new universe,” Kurita insisted. “With inflation theory it should be easy.”

“I’m serious, here,” said Loren.

“I’m not a cosmologist,” Steffens said. Loren couldn’t tell which person he was talking to.

“Create yourself a star,” Kurita urged, “you could become your own god.”

“Go back far enough,” Steffens began, definitely talking to Loren this time, “back before symmetry breaking, back before Kaluza’s eleven dimensions start to fade, and there the universe is simple and elementary, and if you don’t see God, you can at least see his handwriting. Because you’d see the fundamental laws of the universe, and you can’t get any closer than that.”

A spectral chill washed up Loren’s spine. These people, the two comedians and their superiors, were approaching the divine. Or had the divine, instead, approached them?

Loren was beginning to suspect that it had.

“Of course,” Steffens added, shrugging, “I’m an atheist, so I’m not exactly an authority on matters theological.” He fell silent for a moment, then added irrelevantly, “I was raised Quaker, though.”

“I was raised Baptist,” Kurita blurted, “but so what? Listen! We can make a universe! It’ll be terrific! Some thesis, huh?”

Steffens looked at him patiently. “Shut up, Yoshi.”

“What’s it like working with Tim Jernigan?” Loren said. Time, he thought, to get this interview back on track.

“I don’t work with him much,” Steffens said.

“Our job,” said Kurita, “is to fix things when they break. Not talk about experimental physics with Ph.D.’s. But I have talked to him. For a big shot, he’s pretty approachable.”

“You have to talk to him on his level, though,” Steffens added, “and his level is pretty high. He’s friendly, but the quality of his thought is kind of intimidating.”

“He’s brilliant,” Kurita said. “He and Singh are right at the top. Even Dielh talks to him.”

“Doesn’t look like Dielh’s going to talk to me,” Loren said.

“I’m not surprised,” Steffens said. “Joe Dielh is working hard on getting his Nobel, and he’s not dealing with anyone who can’t help him.”

“He’ll never get it on his own,” explained Kurita, “so he’s harnessed Tim and Singh to get it for him. That’s why he doesn’t do any research on the classified side— he couldn’t publish and get himself invited to Stockholm.”

“He doesn’t?” Loren was startled.

“No. The military offered him a lot, but he’s always turned them down.”

“I’ve been told he’s in Washington on a classified mission.”

Steffens and Kurita looked at each other, their puzzlement plain. Kurita was the first to speak.

“First we’ve heard of it.”

“Think for a minute.” A pain shot through Loren’s back and he hitched his gun around, straightened one leg, stretched the muscles. “Did anything unusual happen on Friday or Saturday? Anything out of the ordinary.”

“There were a lot of people in and out,” Steffens said. “I didn’t know very many of them. I had to replace a malfunctioning calorimeter on the detector array, but that was last Thursday night, before anything started. And then Friday night I had to fix a ventilator in the conference room, where the buffet was set up.” He shrugged. “That’s all I can remember.”

“I can’t remember anything unusual other than the large numbers of people,” said Kurita.

“Can I see the accelerators?” Loren asked.

Steffens looked uncertain. “You can, I guess.”

“They’re miles from here, is what he means,” Kurita said. “This is just the control room. The accelerators themselves are way out on the mesa.”

“There’s not much to see,” said Steffens. “Other than the proton synchrotrons and the small storage rings, there’s mostly just a long tunnel with a pipe in it.”

Loren stretched his leg again, pain nagging at him. “Why isn’t the control room near where the collision takes place?”

“We’ve got a lot of electronics in here,” said Kurita. “It could interfere with the experiments. So the LINAC is way out on the ranch, and we control it by fiberoptic cables to minimize interference.”

Loren glanced around as he tried to think of another question, taking in the bright monitors, the workstations, the balcony from which supervisors could observe their underlings. It looked more like a motion picture set than anything real, and the objects the room was built to study seemed more unreal even than a movie.

“Wanna see the Cray that runs the show?” said Steffens. “It’s impressive.”

Loren took his Xeroxes and followed the two back to the upper level and then out of the room. A few bearded men in jeans and T-shirts passed by in the corridors and offered greetings to his guides. Another barnlike room, this one brightly lit and filled with desks, niches, and terminals, offered as its centerpiece the Cray, which was a twelve-foot-high clear-plastic tetrahedron largely filled with a black-as-midnight carbon solid on which bas-relief circuitry could dimly be seen. Other techs stood by like proud new fathers showing off their offspring. Someone had stuck a piece of cardboard on the Cray’s base, with an arrow pointing upward to the computer, that featured in red crayon the words Heisenberg Sleeps HERE.

“The whole structure’s filled with cryogenic fluid,” Kurita said. “That’s the only way you can cool circuitry this fast.”

Loren was surprised by the tall transparent tubes that arched above the computer, also filled with clear coolant. “Makes your computer look like a McDonald’s,” he said.

“Fast data, not fast food,” said one of the techs.

“It got knocked out by a fast-moving electron Friday morning,” Steffens offered.

Loren looked at him. “I heard there were computer problems.”

“See, the whole universe is full of electrons that we can’t see. Besides the ones in matter, I mean. That’s Dirac’s idea.”

Maybe Dirac, Loren thought, was on the log sheets somewhere.

“And sometimes an electron jumps out of this invisible sea and interacts with matter. It happens about once each week in the Cray. And crash goes the computer.” Steffens grinned. “Interesting, hey? That we can build a computer so sensitive that it can be knocked out by something invisible?”

“I guess. Do I really need to know this?”

Steffens looked sympathetic. “Probably not.”

Loren’s tour continued, to Steffens’s workshop, full of half-assembled equipment and crumpled potato chip bags, and another big room, filled with tables and benches and vending machines, where the buffet had been set up during the run. As they walked, Kurita kept on trying to convince Steffens of the value of creating their own universe.

“What happens,” Loren asked, “to our universe when you create your own?”

“We get blown away,” said Steffens.

“No offense,” said Loren, “but I hope your experiment fails.”

“Wait!” Kurita said. “Not necessarily!” He looked confidingly at Loren. “That’s why I need my colleague here. He’s the expert on Kaluza-Klein theory.”

Steffens scowled. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“You just arrange for different dimensions to collapse, see,” Kurita said. “You’ve got nine spacial and two temporal dimensions to work with, right? And ours are collapsed to four. So when you create the new universe, you arrange so that it collapsed into another set of spacial dimensions and the second time dimension. And then the new universe won’t interfere with ours.”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” said Steffens. “How do you make these arrangements?”

“That’s what I need you for,” said Kurita. “You’re the expert.”

“Uh-huh.”

They found William Patience in an office near the entrance. He was talking on the phone, looked up as he saw them in the hallway, nodded and waved, then went back to his business. Loren tried to eavesdrop, but the conversation didn’t seem relevant— something to do with Patience straightening out someone’s overtime. The man’s intensity gave the impression he was saving his employee from the electric chair. Outside in the corridor, Steffens and Kurita kept up their act.

Patience hung up. “Seen everything?” he said.

“I guess,” Loren said.

“Take you to the train?”

“Sure.”

Loren shook hands with Steffens and Kurita and thanked them, then followed Patience out into the parking lot. The sunlight was blinding. The parking lot was dry and there was no sign of the downpour only a few hours ago. Loren put on his shades.

Patience got in the Blazer and started it. “What did you think?”

“Those two guys should be wearing greasepaint and putty noses.”

“They’re just techs. You should see the damn scientists.” Patience backed out of his place, swung out of the lot. “I remember one of them asked me to repair his stapler once. His Swingline was broken, and I happened to be passing, and he wandered out of his office and asked if I could fix it for him.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder who’s in charge of the asylum.”

There should be humor in that, Loren thought, but somehow there wasn’t. Loren had the feeling that what Patience really meant was that he should be in charge, and that if he were, changes would definitely be made. Not least of all to the staplers.

Loren wondered if he should try to see Jernigan again, then decided against it. He’d try to corner Jernigan without either of his watchdogs, Patience or his wife.

“Did you see Vlasic on the maglev?”

“There was nobody.”

“It hardly ever gets used,” shifting into third. “A pity, since the technology’s so nice.”

“Yeah. People love their cars too much.”

“I guess some of the maintenance staff use it.”

“Yeah. The peons from town.”

Patience gave him an odd look.

“This Vlasic,” he went on, “he’s a theoretician of some sort. Came over a long time ago from Eastern Europe. And he likes to ride the train. Back and forth, all day sometimes, if he’s working on a tough problem. He sits right up front in a coat and tie and watches the world go by. It says it helps him visualize how things move at relativistic speeds.”

“I didn’t see him.”

The Blazer moved past Discovered Symmetries and toward the station. Loren handed in his visitor badge and shook hands with Patience.

The maglev was waiting. Loren got in the front compartment and saw that he was sharing it with someone. Sitting right up front was a small, bald, pink-faced man in a neat blue three-piece suit, complete with red tie. He was sitting hunched slightly forward, folded hands in his lap, like a contrite schoolboy. When Loren entered he glanced over his shoulder with watery blue eyes.

Loren nodded at him as he sat across the aisle. The man, Vlasic presumably, nodded back, then returned his abstracted gaze to the front.

Loren thought about the Xeroxes, the data he’d gathered from Patience’s files. All probably useless, unless Patience had let something slip, and that was unlikely.

He’d have to think of something else to do.

The train rose, humming, and began its fast ride into a former century.