Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (17 page)

"Tell him, Jeremy."

"I can only come up with one explanation. It's an explanation so far-fetched that I'd like to invite you to laugh at it, Inspector. I would have laughed a week ago, if anyone else had put it to me."

"Go on."

"Given the number of infinitesimal collisions that appear to have produced this final effect, I can only think of one thing passing through him in such quantities and in such a short time. The organic matter on the forehead would appear to have acted as some kind of neutrino gauze. As the neutrinos that pass through us—millions every instant—never interact with other particles inside us, we don't normally need to notice them. But somehow it seems the neutrinos passing through Beers were fluked—endowed with some sort of new identity, as though a deviant Higgs had started bestowing mass at will. The millions of neutrinos passing through our friend every second began interacting with the matter in the brainstem, with the lethal results you see over there."

Banks had started making notes, but had stopped again. Now he was simply staring at the two people in white coats.

"Let me get this right. An element unknown to earthly science has been woven into Beers's forehead by an unknown agent. It has the effect of imparting extra mass to neutrinos—something that's never happened anywhere else in the universe as far as we know. This mass then interacts with selective parts of the brain, so as to destroy it. Am I getting this right?"

"A very lucid summary, actually."

"So where does that leave us?"

"Right here," Renata said. "Wherever here is. There's something else. Something that only became apparent an hour or so back. When I phoned you."

She walked over to the slab where the earthly remains of the scientist were lying, covered in a green sheet, which she slowly lifted up from the right-hand side of the body. Banks walked across and stared down. On the inside of the corpse's arm were three letters, seemingly inked in grey, and printed vertically. They spelled out "T H A."

"A tattoo?"

"A tattoo he didn't have when he died. We checked every inch of him."

"So how?

"We don't know. Seems to have been formed by the minutest punctures on the skin. Far more minute than any tattooist's needle."

"Spidery, you mean?"

"That's a very good word to describe the incisions, as a matter of fact. They would seem to have been formed by a minuscule proboscis, or the finest spider legs."

"And the ink?"

"It's not ink. As far as we can make out, it's the same stuff that's on his forehead."

"And T H A?"

"Absolutely no idea. Over to you on that one, Inspector. Maybe you could trace the curious agency that's currently baffling modern science. Then we can have a christening party, and give the little fellow a name."

***

Baffling modern science. The phrase kept flicking back and forth in his thoughts. Baffling modern science. Then he remembered. In some film he had seen, more years ago than he could now recall, he had watched W.C. Fields play the role of a circus shyster and conman. He'd had a show in a tent. It cost the punters a dollar a time to get in, and it carried the banner:
The Greatest Wonder on Earth.
Inside finally, two identical twins appeared and stood in silence side by side. Fields stepped up and spoke in his finest tone of alcoholic gravity.

"Ladies and gentlemen. What you see before you today is nothing more and nothing less than the greatest wonder on earth. The tallest dwarf in the world now stands shoulder to shoulder with the shortest giant. Science is baffled."

And science, it seemed, was baffled once more. Back in his office he set the police machinery moving. Any contacts of Dr. Beers carrying the initials THA. Any person, any company, any debt collection service. Anything at all. Get a move on, boys and girls, this one won't wait. Just one contact, that was all he needed. Just one. So as to get him started. But started on what, exactly? And what had Dibdin meant when she said that whatever force had killed him, it probably hadn't been anybody?

Renata Dibdin was asking herself precisely the same question at precisely the same moment. She wouldn't have minded that glass of Sauvignon now. But she couldn't very well drink white wine at nine o'clock in the morning, now could she? Then it struck her that this was, for her, incredibly late the previous evening, rather than early the following day. So she poured herself that glass anyway. Soon she would go to bed for a few hours. Gossamer graphite. Neutrino gauze. Two new scientific concepts in twenty-four hours. She took a swig of liquefied sunlight from her glass and toasted herself: Here's to you, Renata. So where's the periodic table when you really need it? Gone to the French polishers. There might be gaps there after all, it seems. A period missed. Something's been chewing holes in our taxonomic tapestry. Do spiders eat tables then? And have they started running tattoo parlors on the side? I am actually awake, am I? It's starting to get a little hard to tell.

So Frankie was dead. A revered teacher and a less revered lover. He'd loved her more than she'd ever loved him. But maybe he'd been a bit worn out by the time she'd let him climb between her sheets, or perhaps he'd always been that way. She still felt some residual fondness for him. But she was glad the crocodile inside his head had been annihilated, all the same. She had told him only a week before he died that she would like to see that reptilian monster in his skull put out of action for ever. And now the big green beast had gone. Shame that the rest of him had had to go with it. But at least he couldn't go any further with that scheme of his, now could he? As Renata dozed off at last, there was a smile on her face.

Tim Allen, Theresa Andrews, Tom Atherton. They were all checked out. Nothing. T H A. Another blank.

"Doctor Dibdin, I want our pathologist to come over and have a look at Beers. Is that all right?" There was a slight pause at the other end of the phone.

"You normally send your DOAs to us for expert appraisal."

"I know. It's just..."

"You'd like to make sure I'm not pulling your leg."

"All of this is so unusual."

"No problem. Send him down. But tell him to exercise a little discretion, a little delicacy, will you. I don't want that forehead hacked away. One day it might represent a new type of historic fossil."

Early in the evening, Banks's man was back. He shrugged as he sat down.

"Can't add anything to what they say in their report, Joe."

"Could it be faked?"

"By someone with a trick periodic table, you mean? Just funning you with an undiscovered element? Or maybe old Frank bought an internal brain disguise at the joke shop, and he's lying there pretending his brainstem's crystallized. Like Mr. Punch when the policeman calls. He'll pop up again any minute and say, 'That's the way to do it.'"

"All right. Only one thing though: this neutrino gauze stuff. If it's bona fide then it could make a pretty formidable terrorist weapon, surely. Should I be getting on to Special Branch?"

"Have you thought how you're planning on pitching all this to them?"

After a pause Banks said, "See what you mean. They'd put me in the warlocks and wankers cabinet, wouldn't they? So what do we do next? Check out everything we can on Beers, I suppose."

"He had our good friend Dr. Dibdin over the lab table, you know that, do you?"

"Yes, she told me. Though she said she was also having it off with others at the same time. Versatile girl."

"Put it about a bit back then, did our Renata. Not now."

"Went knocking, did you?"

"I did. And the door was firmly locked."

"Wait till Christmas Eve and try climbing down her chimney. She'll go for you in that red suit of yours. I'd give you one myself as long as you kept saying Ho-ho-ho. Did you do that bit of library work for me?"

"I did. So here we go." He took the notes from his bag.

"First, gossamer. Impressive stuff. I shall look at the spiders in my garden with a bit more respect in future. Bulletproof vests are made out of Kevlar, but spider silk is more elastic and more durable. If we could work out a way to do it, we'd use that silk instead. Can stretch to 140 percent of its length. This is a lightweight miracle: a strand of it long enough to circle the whole earth would weigh less than a toothbrush."

"So what is it?"

"Protein fiber. They use it sometimes to get carried away by the wind. Or entrap oncoming insects, so as to make sure there's always something decent for supper—we coppers are not the only ones who go in for entrapment, Joe. You can even eat it, and so be ecological and recycle what comes out of your own insides—as long as you're a spider, obviously. Cranks in Covent Garden could make a fortune out of that one.

"The protein molecules are actually very complex. Iterative DNA sequences. The fiber hardens inside them by acidification. We do something similar when we make man-made fibers. Water's drawn away inside the spider's duct and hydrogen gets sluiced in instead. Result: a little organic acid lake. Then this stuff gets squeezed through the spinneret glands. They have up to eight of these glands apiece. Some of the stuff that comes out is sticky; some isn't. All depends on the individual spider and its particular requirements.

"But if any one of us had ever created something as good as this, we wouldn't be standing around here examining dead bodies, believe me. We'd be sailing around the Caribbean, being served long drinks by smiling faces in white jackets."

"And the graphite component? What's that about?"

"Graphite is an allotropic crystalline form of carbon. What seems to be happening here is that the gossamer and the graphite meet in some kind of acid marriage. Only problem is, we don't understand the molecular process by which the fusion is taking place: it doesn't accord with our understanding of molecular possibilities. And there does seem to be some unrecognized atomic component in the gossamer. Unknown to our spectroscopic charts anyway. Not there in the periodic table as it stands."

"So we'll be needing another periodic table then?"

"Either that or we need another classification for death. We certainly need another Frank Beers. Maybe one who can keep his pecker in his pants this time. Beers. Why would our lovely Dr. Dibdin say yes to that antique and no to me, I wonder? What was your secret, Beers? Shall we go have a couple?"

"First, fill me in on the neutrinos."

"No, I definitely need a beer inside me before I can face that."

They sat in the pub, and Banks's police companion began reading from his notes.

"All right. Neutrinos. Here we go. They're so light everyone thought for years they had no mass at all. Now we know they do—a tiny amount anyway. But it only ever interacts with the weak nuclear force. Just as well, really. As we've seen with Beers."

"How do you mean?"

"Millions of these neutrinos are flying through us every second. Should they ever start interacting with what's inside us, that's the end of the human race."

"The way it was the end of Beers?"

"Exactly. Some reckon they must be a major contributor to the dark matter in the universe."

"They certainly seem to be a major contributor to the dark matter in this sodding case. So where's all this neutrino gauze malarkey coming from?"

"Search me, Joe. No idea."

"We have to find out what Beers was doing. In the open and in his murky little closet. Could there be an Israeli connection? Is Beers a Jewish name?"

"Don't think so. De Beers is South African, isn't it? If it had once been a German name, Behre say, then maybe."

"Could Mossad have assassinated him? They seem to be getting good at topping scientists who might be about to discover something they don't like. Don't think I'd fancy being a scientist with a gift for developing new weapons of mass destruction in Tehran at the moment. But it feels like a long way from here to Tehran. I need to go and do some snooping. That's what they pay me for after all."

For the next few days that is precisely what Inspector Banks did. He talked; he listened; he scavenged around the local pubs, wine bars, cafés. Picked up some gossip, but nothing significant. All the time he was brooding. Was it in order for Dr. Dibdin to perform an autopsy on a man whose body she knew so well, in a different manner? It might not be against the law, but surely it was against some sort of medical ethics? And then there was that long streak of piss she'd called in on her own account: Jeremy Stone. Joe reckoned those two were at it. Was he in on the whole thing, too? Did they have a bit of necrophiliac jiggery-pokery when there was no one else around in Pathology? On the third day he interviewed Jenny Frisk. She had a fancy title, but as far as he could see she was a lab assistant. Nice, though. They had been talking for a while when he tried the depth charge tactic that had made his reputation.

"You know that Frank Beers and Renata Dibdin were lovers?"

"They didn't sound much like lovers last week." As soon as Ms. Frisk said this you could see spreading across her face the wish to recall the words. That's what depth charges are for: bring something hidden in the dark down there to the surface. Even if it's only the bodies of submariners.

"What exactly do you mean by that, Ms. Frisk?"

"Sorry, it just slipped out."

"Look, this is a murder inquiry, you know. Don't make me bring pressure to bear. I can if I have to, believe me."

"All right. Last week I was walking past Frank's door. It was early evening. Most of the other people had gone. I heard voices. The voices were raised and I..."

"You stopped for a moment to listen. We all do. Nothing to be ashamed of. Go on."

"It was obviously Renata. Don't often hear her talk so loud."

"And what did she say?"

"She said, 'If you do that, Frank, you deserve to die. That crocodile inside your fucking brain deserves to die.' I remember the words exactly. They were... they were pretty distinctive."

Joe was writing the words down in his notes. Now then, now then. Might we at last be getting somewhere?

He decided he'd have the evening to himself to think things through before confronting the good Doctor D on the morrow. He had two books he had taken out from the library, and was flipping through them. The first was about spiders. Still had a sliver of his childhood revulsion in him, and the female mating habits of some of these species reminded him uncomfortably of his first wife. Now why had he just called her that? Since when had he been planning on acquiring a second?

And then there were the neutrinos. He read how in 2011 the Gran Sasso lab in Italy had measured (fifteen thousand times, no less) neutrinos being fired at it through the earth from CERN, and that it had found each time that the particles appeared to be traveling faster than the speed of light. The reason the experiment was repeated fifteen thousand times was that none of the scientists, either in Switzerland or Italy, had been prepared to believe these results. It seemed that it had already been suggested by Alan Kostelecky of Indiana University that neutrinos could travel faster than light through interaction with an unknown field, hidden away inside the vacuum. And Heinrich Paes had developed yet another theory. Neutrinos, he reckoned, were shortening their journey by opting to travel via extra dimensions, thus reversing the normal expectations of how long it takes to get from A to B in the space-time continuum. A whole world of logic, the world of cause-and-effect itself, which produces all our timetables and maintains them, was at stake here. If we could travel faster than the speed of light then we could presumably arrive at our destination before we left home. A lot of people had seemed keen to associate neutrinos with uncanny forces at the time. And then it turned out that it was all a problem with the calibrations. They hadn't been traveling faster than the speed of light after all.

Banks poured himself a whisky. And what, he wondered, do neutrinos have to interact with, to crystallize a human brain? Only a particular portion of the brain, mind you; pass through the neocortex without doing any damage there at all, then hit the old stuff around the top of the brainstem and bang—there goes old Frank Beers and his unloved crocodile. Then leave a signature on the arm of the corpse. He shut the book. He wanted his old job back. A good old-fashioned homicide was what he needed. Who fired the gun at that lowlife and why?

The next morning he was on his way to see Doctor Renata when his cell phone rang.

"Banks."

"Better get over here, Joe. We've got another one."

"Another what?"

"Another DOA with a crystallized brainstem and some very fine pencil lines on his forehead."

"Twenty minutes I'll be there."