Superposition (6 page)

“He was shot a total of three times? Was one shot not enough to kill him?”

“No sir, it would have been enough. The first shot passed through Mr. Vanderhall's heart, almost certainly killing him before either of the other two shots was fired.”

“In your expert opinion, what do those extra shots suggest?”

“It's what we call overkill. One shot might indicate an accident or a thoughtless action taken in a moment of passion. Multiple, unnecessary shots suggest that the murder was intentional. They suggest that the first shot, while sufficient to cause death, was not sufficient to complete the emotional experience. It means that this killer wanted to be very, very certain that Mr. Vanderhall was dead.”

CHAPTER 7

UP-SPIN

Marek Svoboda was my brother-in-law, married to Elena's sister Ava. He was Romanian, a carpenter by trade, and a genius with crown molding. He had immigrated to the States ten years earlier, when the Russo-Turkish war over the Balkans in the twenties had devastated his country's economy. The retirement of the Baby Boomer generation had caused a serious shortage of working-age people in the United States, and Marek had taken advantage of the immigration incentives the United States was offering at the time. For years, he worked in construction, sending most of his paycheck back to his family in Romania, until he discovered that his wife had married another man and kept it a secret so Marek would keep sending her money. Now he was married to Ava, and he didn't send his salary anywhere if he could help it.

He was nearly as big as I was and more densely muscled. He'd helped me with a lot of carpentry work at our house over the years and had come to be a good friend.

“How far away is it?” he asked. I was driving; he was picking the music. At the moment it was some kind of Latin/Slavic fusion rock that sounded like a family of cats caught on a firing range.

“Not far now,” I said. It had been nothing but pine forest on either side of us for miles. The New Jersey Pine Barrens covered over a million acres, and every acre of it looked pretty much the same. For large portions of it, there wasn't even any cellular phone coverage. It was considered an International Biosphere Reserve by the United Nations and protected from most development. Despite this, we were actually driving over the particle accelerator, which ran underneath the trees, a huge ring buried two hundred feet beneath the surface and stretching thirty miles in circumference.

I had spent most of the trip trying to explain to Marek how it worked. “It's like a big racetrack,” I said. “We use thousands of magnets to get little particles zipping around at the speed of light and then, bang! They smash into each other.”

“Little?” Marek held up his thumb and forefinger with only a small space between them. “Like this big?”

“Um . . .” I grinned. “Actually, you could line up a few million subatomic particles between your fingers right now.”

Marek took being off by six orders of magnitude in stride. “And you shoot them as fast as light?”

“Well, it's more like 0.999999 times the speed of light, but close enough.”

“So, millions of dollars, to smash little bits together,” Marek said.

“Actually, it's more than ten
billion
dollars. But yeah, pretty much.”

Marek's eyebrows knitted together as if in pain. “And the point is?”

Marek had a thing about money. He complained about every dollar of taxes he had to pay and raged about government waste, seeing his own salary being spent on things he didn't care about. He always thought products were overpriced, though math wasn't his strong suit. He would drive ten minutes out of his way to save two cents on a gallon of gas.

“It's trying to answer some of the deepest questions we have about the universe,” I said. “Questions like, ‘Where does mass comes from?' and ‘Why can't we see most of the matter in the world?' and ‘What happened during the first few fractions of a second of the beginning of the universe?'”

The endless trees finally gave way to housing developments and strip malls. A sign with a picture of the Hindenburg said, “Welcome to Lakehurst, Airship Capital of the World.” In the distance, a jet took off from McGuire Air Force base.

Marek frowned. “You are trying to find God?”

I shook my head, ready to correct him, but Marek's family had been Orthodox for centuries, their faith surviving even through the Communist regime. As far as I knew, Marek himself never went to church, but religion was a fundamental part of his ethnic and family identity. “Something like that,” I said instead.

The buildings of the NJSC loomed ahead of us, twelve of them in all, dominated by the silver-domed Feynman Center. I had called ahead and arranged with Jean Massey, a friend from the days when I'd worked there, to get us in. We entered through the employee gate, and security waved me through when I showed my ID. I turned left beyond the Einstein Building onto Strange Street, and parked in front of the Dirac Building, where I had worked with Brian before I left. I turned off the car but made no move to get out.

“Are you okay?” Marek asked.

“Fine,” I said. “Just some people in there I haven't seen for a while.”

We got out of the car. The doors all required card readers to get in, but I called Jean and she buzzed us through.

The girl at the front desk said, “Hey, are you guys from the police?”

“Not hardly,” said Jean, coming around the corner. She handed each of us a visitor's badge.

“Jeannie,” I said. “Good to see you.”

We shook hands, and she gave me a quick peck on the cheek. Jean Massey was about thirty-five, thin as a rake, with big glasses and flyaway brown hair that already showed streaks of gray. She was about the most brilliant person I remembered working with in my old career, though she was so unassuming you could miss her at a party. We walked through the building toward Brian's office, things looking pretty much as I remembered them.

“How are you?” I asked. “How's Nick?” Shortly before I had left the NJSC, Jean had married a young genetics professor from Princeton. The office staff had oohed and aahed over her wedding dress and all the plans, and everyone seemed to think it was a match made in heaven. I was a bit afraid to ask, given how quickly marriages sometimes fell apart, but Jean just smiled.

“Doing fine,” she said.

“And did I hear you had a baby?”

“Yeah, that's right.”

“I'm sorry, I forget. Girl or a boy?”

“A girl. Chance.”

“Chance?”

She answered wearily, as if tired of explaining. “That's her name.”

I didn't mention that Elena used to have a cat named Chance. It had been run over by a car shortly after we started dating, to Elena's great distress. I didn't mention that either. “Um, that's cool, actually,” I said. “Sounds like a quantum thing. Or a genetics thing, maybe. Or both.”

She brightened a little. “Yeah. That and Nick likes to play the slots in Atlantic City.”

“Well, come on,” I said. “Don't you have any pictures to show off? What does this quantum baby look like?”

We reached Brian's office and stepped inside. Jean pursed her lips. “I don't want to be rude,” she said, “but I'm going to have to run and leave you to it. I have a panel review meeting in about an hour, and I'm not quite ready for it.”

“Sure,” I said. “Good luck.”

She gave us a tired smile. “Thanks. Good luck yourself. You'll need it to find anything in here.”

I looked around the office. The desk surfaces were cluttered with papers, sandwich wrappers, empty soda cans, and office supplies, with half a dozen smartpads scattered amidst the debris. There wasn't much else. His office was sparsely decorated: a few diplomas, badly mounted and hanging askew, but no artwork, no photographs, and none of the squirrely knickknacks that covered most people's desks. The smartpads might contain something interesting about his research, but they were likely to be encrypted.

“Has he said anything to you about what he's been working on lately?” I asked.

Jean shook her head. “You know how Brian is about people stealing his ideas. Lately, he's been even worse.”

“Secretive?”

“Ridiculously so. People have been making complaints. That's just not how science is done anymore, with one maverick genius locking himself in a room and coming out twenty years later with a breakthrough. There's process, teamwork, accountability. Anyway, good luck.”

She stepped out, closing the door. The motion revealed Brian's leather jacket hanging from a hook. I thought of what he'd been wearing when he showed up at my house and picked up the jacket. I felt around, and in one of the pockets I found an envelope. The words “Jacob Kelley” were penned on it in Brian's handwriting.

I tore it open and pulled out a single sheet of folded smartpaper. The only words were a single line of printed text: “What is your favorite number?”

Marek looked over my shoulder. “What's that, some kind of password request?”

I smiled. “Something like that. You have a pen?”

Marek fished a Bic pen out of his pocket, and I wrote “137.036” on the paper. When I stopped, the printing disappeared and was replaced by a longer message:

Dear Jacob:

I wanted to come and tell you about all this in person, but I didn't have the nerve. I think it's for the best this way. You're smart; you'll figure it out, and maybe someday you'll join me.

Say goodbye to Cathie for me.

Brian

I showed the letter to Marek.

“I thought he did come see you in person,” Marek said.

“Yeah. I don't know what he means. Maybe he changed his mind after he wrote this.” I replaced the jacket on the hook on the back of the door, and a small mirror to one side caught my eye. Something about the light reflected from it seemed wrong. Marek moved in front of it, and his reflection flitted across the mirror in the opposite direction of his movement. Definitely odd. I stepped in front of it, so I could see my own reflection, and saw right away that my hair was parted on the wrong side. It was like looking at a photograph of myself instead of a reflection. I raised my hand, and the wrong hand went up. This wasn't really a mirror.

“What's going on with this?” I asked. I reached out to lift it off the wall. My reversed reflection in the mirror did the same, though with the wrong hand. I looked in my face, only there was something wrong, so horribly wrong that for a split second I couldn't figure out what it was. My eyes were missing. In their place, there was only a smooth expanse of skin, unbroken, with not even a cavity where the eyes should have been.

It was like when a child in a crowded room reaches up and grasps, with easy familiarity, her father's hand, only to discover that it is not her father after all but a complete stranger. A moment of calm reassurance is transformed into a moment of horror as she realizes that, not only is she holding the hand of a man she doesn't know, but she has no idea where her father is.

I jerked away from the mirror, letting it fall back against the wall, and touched my eyes. The reflection in the mirror was normal again, too. “Did you see that?” I asked.

Marek peered in the mirror, then back at me. “See what?”

“Come on,” I said. “Time to go.”

“Where are we going?”

“To say goodbye to Cathie, like the letter says.”

“Who's Cathie? Someone who works here?”

“Cathie's not a who,” I said. “She's a what.”

Underneath the Feynman Center were several levels of subbasement and the main access to the collider ring. The badges Jean had given us granted access to the elevator that descended into the collider tunnel itself. The tunnel was a huge concrete borehole similar in size to a highway tunnel—the same kind of earth-borer machines had been used to dig it out—except that this one was thirty miles long and ran in an ellipse. A large portion of the space was taken up by the particle ring itself—in which the subatomic particles orbited—and the huge electromagnets that straddled it, along with their entourage of other coolant pipes and snaking electrical cables.

There was a pedestrian path, about fifteen feet wide. Scientists who had to get from place to place along the ring usually rode bicycles, but there were a few golf carts used for VIP tours or maintenance runs. The whole thirty-mile track had to be checked regularly for cracking concrete, for rats or other animals that might chew on the cables, for signs of shifts in the bedrock that might cause problems, or any other potential problems with the machinery. We took one of the golf carts and headed out.

CATHIE was the Controlled Acceleration and Temperature Heavy Ion Experiment, a brainchild of Brian's and mine when I was still working at the NJSC, but one that had never been fully funded. We had pushed it far enough that an underground bunker along the path of the collider ring had been dug to house it, but the project had been scuttled in favor of an experiment controlled by another colleague who was poor at experimentation but gifted at playing the game of politics. It had been the beginning of the end for me, to see our financing and most of our equipment taken away. The bunker had remained a concrete shell, emptied of its scientific apparatus, but Brian's letter suggested there was something there he had wanted me to see.