Jezebel's Ladder (23 page)

Amy stared at him in disbelief. “That
is the most harebrained plan I’ve ever heard.” Lacking a better alternative,
she asked directions to Nick’s place.

On the way, PJ pumped her for more
details about the Sandia incident.

She seemed relieved to have someone
to share the story with. “Getting the field effect jumpstarted takes an
enormous amount of energy. Though, once established, the oscillation can keep
going for a long time before it drops below the critical threshold. After the
prototype team successfully deflected alpha particles, the whole team went out
to celebrate their rousing success. Cassavettis miscalculated the energy decay
rate, and the field had stopped sparking by then.”

He took a guess where this was
heading. “The Icarus field was still powered up while they were gone, just
invisible.”

She nodded, pausing before
delivering the morbid conclusion. “Mr. Mendoza, a technician, had been ordered
to set up equipment for the next day’s experiments in that test chamber. That’s
when we discovered that people explode on contact with the Icarus field.”

“Holy sh…” he blurted, stopping
himself this time.

She softened at the belated
gallantry. “The true intensity of the explosion is still Top Secret, but we
heard reports that it blew out all the windows on the installation and fused
sand for a city block. The prototype was unharmed. We don’t know why yet. No
one but Cassavettis seems to know why the field works at all. A friend on the
committee told us that the Pentagon immediately made plans to install these
prototype fields in high-security installations to prevent theft and sabotage.”

“Why not just use them as car
alarms? That would save on prisons.” Nick had been trying for
Star Trek
,
but this was more like a
Monty Python
skit gone bad.

She shared his sense of outrage. “Exactly.
It took an Executive Order to stop these nimrods. They were supposed to halt
production. Now we find out NASA is sending one into space on the latest spy
satellite. Someone not only lied to us, but they disobeyed a Presidential
Directive.”

PJ shook his head. “Frankenstein
never thought about how he would control the monster; he just wanted to prove
he could build it.”

****

When they got to Nick’s apartment,
Amy wanted no part of the break-in.

“Just keep watch, then. Two short
honks followed by a long means trouble.”

Amy agreed reluctantly.

Nick lived on the first floor. PJ
grabbed the key from under the ceramic frog in the bushes and let himself in.
The place had already been tossed by experts. The cushions had been turned
inside out, the trash was gone, the answering machine taken, and all the vents
had been unscrewed. Someone had vacuumed recently, too.

There was a big dust void on Nick’s
kitchen table where his computer had been. The computer, peripherals, and even
his game CDs were all gone. Neither the napkins atop the refrigerator nor the
pad by the phone had any writing on them. On an impulse, PJ hit redial on the
phone. He got an answering machine for Clarence Murphy. Murphy was an apt name
for everything that had gone wrong with this venture to date.

The next place PJ looked was in the
now-jumbled book collection on the floor. Nick’s Bible was gone from its
protective box. The only time PJ had ever seen it open was to settle a bet. He
found the missing Bible on a nightstand in the bedroom. There were several makeshift
bookmarks stuffed in it, but the one from the Book of Revelation was the most
interesting. The tiny slip of paper was from a fortune cookie. “Many eyes are
upon you. Behave accordingly.” On the back were lucky lottery numbers and the
single handwritten word “Mycroft.” This was the name of a self-aware computer
in a Heinlein novel—the sort of place where Nick would cache his information.

PJ poked through the books with no
real interest until he spotted the name Einstein on the spine of one. Jackpot!
PJ flipped through the book until he found a large, gold
Ex Libris
sticker in the back stamped “from the library of Dr. Eric Reuter.”

On the back flap, PJ saw the
equation. He recognized some of the symbols from statistics and others from
physics. In the space beneath, Nick had added some notes. Most of them dealt
with special cases and simplifications of the formula. “Assume g (the
gravitational constant) is 10 m/s.” The rounding didn’t bother him, because the
strength of gravity varies a little over the Earth’s surface and somewhere it
is exactly 10. The errors he made must have all canceled each other out,
because the prototype worked. What bothered PJ was that gravity is not
constant, especially not in space.

The key simplification was “let
hydrogen = 1.” PJ could see now why it had been such a revelation to him on the
plane. Most of the variables dropped right out when this substitution was made.
He couldn’t even begin to grasp the complexity for inputs other than one. Had
Nick even bothered to solve the system of equations completely? Certain values
could result in division by zero or dueling infinities in the numerator.

Just then, PJ heard a honk from the
parking lot. In a panic, he scooped up the book, and ran out to Amy’s car. He
arrived panting, ready for a high-speed car chase. However, he was
disappointed. “Where are the squad cars?”

“Sorry. It was getting near the
twenty-minute mark, and I thought you ought to know.”

“You almost gave me a heart attack
because your watch is fast?” He slammed the door in a snit.

“Look, I couldn’t reach my contact.
Your phone is dead. We have to leave now if we’re going to get there on time.
We can’t afford to miss this meeting,” she said, accelerating over the speed
bumps. She swerved so that the tires on her side went through the gap in the
asphalt barrier, but his side bounced hard enough to slap his head into the
roof. PJ heard the muffler scrape as he buckled up.

“Did you find the data?” Amy asked
as they broke the 45 mph speed limit.

“Almost.”

“What did you get?” she asked
impatiently.

“One of the original Reuter
equations and the name of a computer,” he announced proudly.

“I stand corrected. We’ll connect
to it when we get to the director’s house. Where did you find it?”

“In the Book of Revelation, in the
gloom and doom section where they talk about breaking the seven seals at the
end of the world.”

“I think I’ll leave that part out
when I talk to NASA,” she said.

“The last person he phoned was some
guy named Clarence Murphy. He could probably tell us more.”

“He was an Icarus team member who
committed suicide yesterday,” she said grimly.

“Or someone helped him do it,” PJ
suggested.

“Sometimes a banana is just a
banana, Dr. Freud.”

“Sometimes a zebra is just a horse
with a bad dye job,” he said weakly, unable to find a suitable cliché on such
short notice. This mistake got a giggle out of her and lightened the mood in
the car. He really liked her smile.

Amy and PJ turned off the highway into an affluent suburb.
They drove around a walled community until they came across a huge, iron gate.
He mistook the estate for a cemetery till Amy honked and the gate opened. He
was dying to ask how a bureaucrat could afford to live in this sort of luxury.
At the front door, Amy introduced him to the butler. “This is Mr. Smith, a
friend of Nick Cassavettis, with some interesting documents the director should
see.”

“Oh, by all means, interest me,”
someone sneered from the other room.

“Mr. Paulson,” Amy said, leading PJ
into the den.

A slender man in a light-gray suit
sat in a wingback chair in front of a fireplace. He was bald on top, with a
two-inch wreath of curly, salt-and-pepper hair remaining at ear level. He was
unremarkable except for the incredibly sharp narrowness of his nose. His slender
tie only accentuated his caricatured features.

Amy shook his hand and sat in a
leather chair, and PJ plunked down on the sofa beside the delicate, cherry
table holding the phone. He put his computer on the end table and held up the
phone cord. “With your permission?”

Paulson nodded for him to continue.

While Amy exchanged pleasantries
and laid the groundwork, the programmer powered up his computer and logged in.
Paulson listened quietly, with his slender fingers steepled in front of his
chin. By the time she showed him the printout of the incomplete e-mail, PJ was
firing up his browser to contact Mycroft.

Director Paulson chuckled at the
short message of doom. “How clever. What else did he have to say?” He neatly
folded their only copy of the e-mail message and placed it on the arm of his
chair.

Amy turned to PJ for his part.

He clicked a few more buttons and
got a file menu. “I’m in.” He clicked on the first file with the Icarus name
attached. Black script on a white background sprang to life. Symbols and
letters he’d never even seen before crowded onto a single line. Before he could
memorize it, Paulson shrieked, “Shut it down!”

The butler came out of nowhere and
slapped the laptop shut so hard he damaged the liquid-crystal screen. “Hey!” PJ
shouted as security types came pouring into the den. Someone had grabbed his
wrist.

He was trying to decide how
violently to object when Amy intervened. “Director, there’s no need for this.
We came to you with this first.”

PJ had a goon on each elbow when
Paulson came over to examine him. “How high is your clearance?”

Amy looked surprised when he
answered, “Secret.”

“We’re a little beyond that now, my
boy,” the special projects’ director said. “Do you know anything about quantum
mechanics?”

“Only that the first thing they do
is make you unlearn all the lies they taught you in low-level Chemistry and
Physics classes,” PJ said.

“We’ll send for your file and have
it amended immediately. This is a State Secret.” Paulson motioned to the guards
to release him. “He has no idea what he’s seen. Tell the damage-control team
Cassavettis hid them on the JPL mail server. Get the standard forms for Mr.
Smith to sign before he leaves. Use the laptop for fingerprints.”

Before the goons grabbed his gear,
the programmer begged, “Do you mind if I get some CDs and the book I’ve been
reading out of the case first?”

Paulson smirked and said, “No CDs.”
The director then proceeded to pillage PJ’s computer case himself until he came
up with the Einstein book. “
Ideas and Opinions
. There’s hope for you
yet, boy.”

When he handed the prize over, PJ
immediately felt more confident. Director Paulson had a seat. “You’re either
very good or very lucky to find this information before we did. Which is it,
Mr. Smith?”

“I just know computers and I know
Nick.”

The bureaucrat mulled that over
before volunteering, “He’s now in a very exclusive, private asylum near Cape Kennedy. He had no right involving anybody from outside. Who else knows about this?”

PJ almost answered truthfully,
until he remembered the goons and how he could disappear even more cleanly than
Nick. “Just the senator.”

Ill at ease, Amy improvised, “Braithwaite
was pretty angry. You were given a direct order from the president not to
pursue this technology till it was safe.”

Paulson smiled like an evangelist. “I
assure you, we’ve solved the problems of the prototype. The president knows how
badly we need advanced defenses on our new anti-missile platform if we have any
hope of dealing with these latest threats from Asia.”

Amy steeled herself to push the
bluff as far as it would go. “With all due respect, sir, we need more than your
word.”

Director Paulson wore a martyred
expression as he said, “Well you’re not cleared and you can’t hope to
understand the equations. Let’s see how bright your new, little friend is,
shall we? We’ll try the Socratic Method, and you’ll tell me what was wrong with
the prototype. You have most of the facts already.”

She agreed, and Paulson leaned over
PJ’s chair, propping his hands on the arm. “Mr. Smith, when the prototype first
started out, it coughed and sparked so much that it almost tore free of the
bolts mooring it to the cement. Yet later, what happened?”

“The field faded to near
invisibility.”

“Give me three possible scientific
reasons for this,” he ordered.

PJ balked at his leading. “Were you
a Latin teacher or something?”

“Headmaster, actually. I find that
the average boy can think if pressed hard. Try not to disappoint me. You now
owe me four reasons.”

The programmer ran his fingers
through the front of his hair, both as a thought stimulator and as a subtle dig
at Paulson’s inability to do the same. “The obvious reason is that Nick took a
lot of liberties with the equations and the error was almost large enough to
prevent functioning at all. Many of the second derivatives in his
simplification are assumed to be zero. This just isn’t true at start-up. As
time went on, the system reached a steady state, where his model was accurate
enough.”

“That’s one. Do try to be more
succinct.” Paulson steepled his fingers again, awaiting the next response.

“I was elaborating for Miss Reese,”
PJ said. “Since we are dealing with quantum levels of energy, it might be that
the initial energy boost provided to the system wasn’t the right amount for a
stable orbit. The sparking was an attempt to bleed off the extra to attain the
next-lowest, stable quantum level.”

He followed up with a quick third. “Of
course, like with electronics, or even a car, there are certain speeds which
are resonance frequencies in the system. When my tires vibrate at 63 mph, the
whole car shakes.”

The director waved his hands
impatiently. “Yes, yes, but none of that explains the later effects. Think in
terms of cause and effect. What could cause this behavior in an experiment?”

“Contamination?”

The director nodded.

PJ stalled for time. “The
contamination, although strong at first, dissipated over time. This contaminant
caused the violent episodes, both at the start-up and the later fatality.”

“What contaminant was both in the
room and in a human being?” Paulson spread his hands like a magician.

The programmer had a guess, but it
was too awful. “The final clue is that the contaminant is not found in space,
which is why they allowed you to deploy it.”

“Bravo,” said Paulson, satisfied.
Amy still looked puzzled.

PJ explained. “Humans are mostly
water. Being in the desert, in a controlled environment, the air in the
experiment chamber was probably at a very low humidity level before it was
sealed. The airborne water molecules colliding with the field caused miniature
explosions. As the humidity dropped, the explosions became less frequent, and
the field became invisible.”

“But how?” Amy asked.

PJ followed his hypothesis. “The
field was built to repel hydrogen, probably at relativistic velocities.” He
pointed to his Mickey Mouse shirt. “Say Mickey’s head is the oxygen atom, and
his ears are the two hydrogen atoms in a water molecule. When they touch the
Icarus field, his ears shoot off in different directions, releasing enough
energy to make the oxygen ignite.”

The former head master seemed
pleased. “Highly efficient, really.”

Amy went pale. “That poor man!”

Paulson dismissed her. “It was over
in a microsecond. He didn’t even have time to register the light coming from
his hand as it converted to energy.”

Far from making her feel better,
the image horrified Amy. She choked out an accusing, “He was a human being. You
monsters ordered more of those things when you found out.”

“It’s perfectly safe in space,
where there’s no water at all. The laser it’s guarding is far more of a threat.
This is the biggest step toward global peace and national security we’ve made
this century. Think of the possibilities!” Paulson exclaimed.

Amy said, “I have. That’s why
you’ve got to stop it!”

His voice took on an apologetic
tone that couldn’t hide the smugness. “That’s impossible, I’m afraid. Due to
the security leaks and the attempted sabotage, we used our alternate launch
window today at five o’clock. It’s already gone.”

Amy slumped in defeat.

Mutely, the two visitors signed all
the documents his staff brought. After the signing, Paulson informed PJ, “Don’t
bother to return to work on Monday. You’ve been fired. Any attempt to explain
the extenuating circumstances to your employer will land you in Fort Leavenworth prison.”

Amy was despondent. She couldn’t
talk. PJ drove them back to the restaurant first, but his car had been towed.
Great. He decided to take her back to her apartment and take a taxi to a hotel.
He’d see where his vehicle was impounded the next morning. They got to her
place at nearly midnight. Originally, he only went in to borrow her phone, but
then she started crying on his shoulder. Even though he had just met her that
day, he couldn’t leave her alone like that. PJ held her for another twenty
minutes until she fell asleep against him, sitting on the sofa.