Mercy 6 (21 page)

Covey was not in his office, though the door was open. A tech stood just inside, her lab coat nicely tailored, flattering her thin waist and graceful hips. The young woman seemed aware of this, the way she stood, as though about to dance. She was counting gel samples lined along a bookshelf, using the eraser end of a pencil.

She flashed Mendenhall a look and, unimpressed, returned to her task.

Mendenhall leaned into the doorway, checked the office. She was hoping for some volunteer information. The tech ignored her.

Mendenhall thought she might be humming, though it could've just been her look.

Covey had a sign-up pad pinned to the door's bulletin board.

The cork surface appeared quaint, filled with postcards from various collecting posts. A bumper sticker in the lower left corner: “Matter Sizes.”

Mendenhall signed in, startled to find that the pen and pad were digital, her signature and time no doubt forwarded to Covey—

wherever he was. She wandered back toward the elevator, that student she once was, frustrated because professors never kept their office hours, always had something else more important to do, to ponder.

A student in a hoodie slipped out of the elevator, headed away from Mendenhall. She couldn't tell if the figure, flinty inside loose clothes, was a man or woman, the hood pulled down by hands jammed into the kangaroo pocket. Earbud wires, one green, one red, looped and flopped atop each shoulder.

“Excuse me,” Mendenhall called. She was going to ask about Covey, how maybe to find him. The figure continued walking straight away, not hearing or not caring. In the ER she would have released the hounds. Here she was just that student again, insecure, lost, second-guessing every decision in her life, certainly whatever set of them had brought her to this hall.

She realized one thing, then the other, one in the focal point, the other peripheral. The person ahead of her moved in a familiar manner, a reminding tilt in the walk and carriage. And the woman in the tailored lab coat was Covey. She moved, as usual, to the peripheral.

Jude Covey.

Mendenhall returned to the doorway. The woman with the pencil ignored her, tap-counted three more gels. Mendenhall leaned against the jamb.

“You're Jude Covey. Why didn't you tell me?”

Covey paused and considered her. “You figure it out. Or you don't.”

“I knew someone who always said that.”

“Knew or still know? It's a big thing to stop knowing somebody.”

“Know. Still know. My mentor.”

“Did he—or she—show you how to dress?” Covey looked her over again. “Your soulmate is two floors up, by the way.”

“We met.”

“Schrader. How long before he hit on you?”

“I escaped the elevator just in time.”

Covey squinted, drew the eraser along Mendenhall's striped sleeve. “You two might hit it off.”

Mendenhall removed the ball cap, shook her hair. “I'm Dr.

Mendenhall. I'm from the ER at Mercy General.” She let this register.

“You figure it out. Or you don't.”

Covey's other lab was in a basement. Part storage room, it held dozens of mechanical microscopes, aligned neatly enough to make them appear alive, stabled. A cement lab table fitted with unconnected plumbing and capped Bunsen burners was covered with five bowls, as big as birdbaths. On closer inspection Mendenhall saw that they were glass-lined—empty collecting pools for Covey's research. Each pool was labeled with its point of origin: Oslo, Reykjavik, Melbourne, Las Vegas, Jakarta. Three had at least one pit mark; two had several. The pit marks ran in a straight line, or close to it.

The desk area Covey had fashioned in the center of the room had nothing quaint about it. The table was titanium with built-in power supplies. The PC had two large side-by-side screens, with one laptop on either side. A green exercise ball made for a movable seat.

Covey eased herself onto it, bounced a little, straightened her back. The pleated tails of her lab coat draped over the back of the ball. Mendenhall thought of the black cocktail dress hanging in her locker back at Mercy, the one she kept for overlooked fund-raisers and retirement parties.

“Have you scanned those pit marks?”

Covey answered by filling the two main screens with side and overview resonance images, or whatever was the astrochemist equivalent. They were not pit marks. Instead they were drop formations, tiny fountains in freeze-frame, liquid heaved up, a single ripple.

“Why are they like that?”

“The glass is very soft—the softest we can make. Almost water.”

“Do all the particles do this?”

“Only one in two hundred seventy-five million. The others remain suspended in the water.”

“Where are those particles?” Mendenhall nodded to the images.

“The ones that do that.”

Covey shrugged. The ball bounced. “Somewhere in the mantle.”

“The Earth's mantle?”

“Yes. That huge green mass of perodite.”

“They make it that far in?”

“They're heading somewhere else. We're just an acceleration, a vector that helps form a crush line.”

Mendenhall felt her own earlobes, forgetting. “What is a crush line?”

Covey answered this by putting up a stop-action version of a line of objects hitting Jupiter as it spun. “This is the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy impact. The comet was crushed by the sun and Jupiter's gravity; then the resultant smaller masses were pulled into a line.

Twenty-one visible objects. Probably millions of microparticles. All in a line, under a sewing machine.”

Mendenhall bit her lip, almost cringed.

“I gave up that fight long ago,” Covey said. “Regular people find metaphors smart. Smart people find them amusing, sexy, even. It's a skill with a big payoff.”

Mendenhall started to argue, but Covey turned away from her and drew her finger across the screen, across Jupiter. “See, what's interesting is how the crush line creates its own latitude as the sphere spins. It doesn't bend to the equator. It forms a trajectory that extends beyond the planet. To here.”

“That's going on? Here?” She pointed to the floor, felt silly

“In a way. There are seven groups in our study.” Covey nodded to her collecting bowls. “We're trying to put it together.”

“When did this bombardment start?” Mendenhall fell into ER

mode. “And how long will it last?”

Covey shrugged. “That's what we're trying to find out, Dr.

Mendenhall. It's difficult to gauge origin and duration. I'm a small part of a study that began forty years ago. Now that they're here . . .

this city is a crowded place.”

“Why aren't you telling people? Us?” Mendenhall clutched herself.

Covey nodded to the images on her screen. “We are. All the time. But . . . they estimate that Jupiter caught the Shoemaker-Levy comet thirty years before crush and impact. For thirty years it was simply that which will be. Unchangeable.” She shrugged. “It's the same here.”

Mendenhall blinked, looked at the ceiling.

Covey jabbed Mendenhall's shoulder.

“Look, as soon as I and others published our first findings—in just tiny interdisciplinary papers—we were contacted by the NSA.

They wanted whatever we had and cautioned—warned—us about releasing it. Assured us they would do it the right way. A safe way.”

“You trusted that?”

“I love my work. We love our work. They would have stopped me. That was made clear. I assume you're getting a taste of that now.” She nodded to Mendenhall's disguise, the fallen cap.

“To say the least.”

“You,” said Covey.

Mendenhall gave her a confused look.

“You must know what it's like,” explained Covey. “My colleagues around the world take my work seriously, use my field data. All I need to do is offer what I find. No conjecture. Way too early for predictions.”

“But what about people?” Mendenhall dipped in frustration, opened her hands.
“
Didn't you—any of you—think of that?

Study that?
”

“The particles pass through everything. The ones we're talking about. They're too small and too fast to really do anything.”

“You really believe that?”

“It's a virus,” replied Covey. “I should put on a mask and turn you in.”

“I don't think it's coincidence,” replied Mendenhall, “that you're here. That I'm here. Someone like you should have contacted someone like me years ago.”

“You would have thought me nuts. You would have dismissed me. You still would if you hadn't seen it firsthand.” Covey shrugged.

“Besides, there's nothing we can do about it. So it's a virus. I'm turning you in.”

Mendenhall eyed Covey's reflection in the screen. Twenty-one pieces of Shoemaker-Levy shot into Jupiter, a straight line of lights, pulsing into the spinning sphere. The event drew a diagonal across Covey's reflection, swept her hair across her forehead, lifted one corner of her mouth, stroked her neck.

Mendenhall put high-resonance amygdalae on Covey's main screens. The laptops continued to show Jovian impacts, crush lines stitching straight seams across bands of orange and cream and red.

She explained the limbic system, even though Covey claimed to know it.

With her finger Mendenhall circled the almond shapes inside the coronal view of the brain. “No. They do even more. They use sensorial memory to help the nervous system react to intrusion, pain.”

“And pleasure,” added Covey. “So?”

“So.” Mendenhall again lifted her hands. “So your particles.”

“I'm sure people and buildings and trees and animals are hit with them from time to time. More as the planet crowds. But mostly nothing would happen. Just a little ripple.” Covey pointed to the bowls.

“What would happen if one passed through a fluorescent tube?”

Mendenhall nodded to the low lights of the basement lab.

“The mercury vapor would anticipate a sudden influx of energy.

The tube would explode. It's probably happened a time or two.”

“We're fluorescents,” said Mendenhall. “Not limpid pools.”

“I have a colleague,” said Covey, looking at the ceiling light.

“Actually, I'll call him a friend rather than a colleague. He calls them my particles, too. Jude particles. He claims we should approach them as a-life. But that's only when he's drunk. Which is much of the time.”

“We see what we are.” Mendenhall felt as she did when the big doors slid open, the ambulance releasing, ramp clattering down.

She needed to move, to see, to snitch a pulse.

“They're bullets, Jude.”

“Not really, Doctor. They have no mass. Just velocity. A near-infinite velocity.”

“Let's not split hairs. Let's not split anything. Show me the line.

The line from here to Mercy. Small scale. Can you do that? Using the location of a hospital in Reykjavik?”

“How small?”

“Street level.”

Covey laughed, her smile lingering, almost too pretty, would melt to the touch. “That's not small. I can use Reykjavik and Mercy to pinpoint a line across your thumbnail.”

“Will I be able to read it?”

“It'll be a string of coordinates. A bunch of numbers.”

“I like numbers. And I have someone who will be able to read them.”

“You have someone?”

Mendenhall was tempted to follow that direction, to make girl talk. Just something to convince herself she was normal enough, not mad. Instead she returned to business. “How many crush lines can there be?”

“Not many. Two or three. They would slide into one. The one you suggest would be new to my research. If it's really there, then maybe it just started.”

“Just started?”

“Or it's ending. A crescendo of sorts. Time is the hardest thing to figure. Shoemaker-Levy went on for thirty years, and we only noticed it for a few last days. The crescendo. No one looks for this stuff. Just a few trombone players like myself. A thousand hotshots around the world can locate a particle of dark matter for you, pinpoint it in some salt cave deep underground. Smash atoms and isolate their particles. Or they can show you the nearest black hole or measure the microwave background of the universe. But no one looks for regular matter, dust. Even when it's hitting us in the face.

Just me and some others. We're just not sexy enough.”

“But you're here. Right here in this particular spot. Here now because you know where the crush line is. Today it runs through this city.”

Covey offered one deliberate nod, a patient's reluctant answer.

“So,” said Mendenhall, “we're either in the beginning, middle, or end?”

“Probably near to the end.”

“You mean it will worsen?”

“Thicken,” said Covey. “Though quicken is more accurate.”

There's someone in my lab.”

Mendenhall checked the doorway, the line of microscopes, the collecting bowls. Then she turned to Covey, who pointed to the ceiling.

“The lab up there. Not in here.” She motioned to one of the side laptops. The screen showed a man in Covey's fifth floor office. He was scanning the room, looking at the gels.

“But you locked up.”

“People get through locked doors.” Covey leaned closer to the screen. “That's why I have this.” She pressed her hands above the laptop.

Mendenhall was skeptical, started to speak but was interrupted.

“You're thinking I'm nuts. But I'm not crazy. See? Someone broke in.” With her cell she got ready to notify security.

Mendenhall leaned in, studied the man. A drunk, paralyzed, dragged himself to her on his elbows. A hitchhiker, filed into a half person, spoke to her. Albert Cabral sat on the floor and asked her how she had found him. Lual Meeks curled himself into the brass cup of the boiler, kept his eyes open as his nerves whiplashed to death. The man in Covey's study was from government security, one of those new guys sent in after containment. He wasn't in uniform, but he had the same haircut and expression as the others, the ones she had encountered. He wore a t-shirt and sports jacket, like a lot of men in this city. She hated that look.