The God Patent (13 page)

As her car climbed the hill to the black-and-red Victorian, she caught herself laughing. Dodge must have blackmailed one of the ladies on the Heritage Homes Committee into allowing those colors. She could picture him hiring a private investigator to turn up some ancient dirt and then threatening to “go public.” Dodge, please. Why did he work so hard to suppress his innate decency?

She parked, and when she was halfway up the porch stairs, the door opened. Dodge waited at the threshold in a ratty beige sweater, the frown lines etched into his cheeks cracked into a smile, and all at once she felt like a five-year-old.

“You’re going to love McNear. He’s like an overgrown leprechaun. You’ll want to pack him up and take him home.”

“Dodge, I’m here to see
you
.” Walking through the living room and down the hall, Emmy looked back. He was older and fatter and balder than the last time she’d seen him. At least he’d quit smoking.

In the kitchen, Emmy turned on a burner under an old iron kettle, and Dodge assembled an antique bone china tea set—the
very tea set their grandmother had given the two of them when Emmy was three and Dodge was eighteen.

They talked about their parents, still living in Los Angeles, still in need of help around the house and too proud to admit it, and still sending Emmy a card every month telling her how proud they were. Maybe that was it. Maybe she worshipped her mean old brother out of guilt. The second she was born, all attention had focused on the brilliant baby girl. Dodge must have been jealous, but then, Dodge had lavished more attention on her than either of their parents.

Dodge snickered. “I have a brilliant plan to make a ton of money. Are you in?”

“Dodge, please be nice to the other children.”

“You’ll love this caper. It’s right up your alley.” The kettle whistled, and Dodge hopped out of his chair cackling like a yenta with fresh gossip. “We’re going to screw a bunch of fundamentalist right-wing Bible-thumpers and help a really decent guy put his life together.” He poured tea into their cups. “Creation Energy is about to get major corporate funding. They’ll have the resources to sell the public on bogus science. You think it’s tough to get intelligent design out of the schools? Wait until the Department of Energy starts investing in Creation and the soul.”

Dodge knew that the DOE funded her research. She stirred some milk into her tea and took a sip, trying to withhold her response.

Dodge continued his con. “All you have to do is fight the mock-science—you’re doing that anyway.”

“And you?”

“As Mr. McNear’s attorney, I’ll file a suit naming Creation Energy in a conspiracy to defraud Mr. McNear of the income resulting from his intellectual property.” He looked away from her and added, “At the trial, you’ll be my star witness—think about it, the perfect stage for you to tear them down.”

“You’re leaving something out.” She waited until he looked at her. “Dodge, those patents will never produce income.”

“Then why is Creation Energy investing in them?”

“Simple: they believe their own propaganda. They’re like, so greedy—whether for money or fame or maybe just recognition—that they talk themselves into absurdity. Pons and Fleischman are still pushing cold fusion. There’s a doctor named Robert Miller who doesn’t understand the basic principles of physics, and he’s gotten over twenty million in venture capital to produce energy by forcing hydrogen atoms into energy states
below
the ground state. If he remembered his freshman chemistry, he’d know how absurd the idea is.”

She sipped her tea, and it occurred to her that she might be using this opportunity to dispel the ghost of embarrassment she had suffered when she proposed that cold fusion experiment in front of the whole physics department back when she was a student.

She said, “I’ll testify,” and stared at Dodge. He looked back at her. She knew that he wasn’t telling her everything. “Dodge, everything I say is on the record.”

“Emmy, we’ll do it however you want. Have I ever led you astray?”

She laughed. “Please. If you try to trick me…”

Dodge poured himself another cup of tea, stirred in some sugar, and spoke very softly. “Ryan believes they can do it. In fact, just before I called you, he said that he’s worried Creation Energy will start a matter-antimatter reaction that will get out of control…”

Emmy could tell that he was lying, but his words were so well chosen that they touched all her buttons—buttons that, mostly, he had programmed. She sighed. “Don’t say it, please, don’t.”

“…he thinks they’re going to start the apocalypse, and he’s worried that he won’t have a chance for repentance. Of course, he’s impressionable, what with his string of bad luck. It’s really a shame to see a gifted engineer, a former company director, a handsome man, fall for something like that.”

“Someday I’m going to visit you and we’re going to talk about our lives, things that actually matter to us.” She finished her tea, amused by her own reaction. “Okay, I’ll talk to him. Where is he?”

Dodge let loose his raspy chortle. “I control you.”

Emmy reached over and pretended to slap him. “I hate you.”

Ryan started up the stairs, but a sound stopped him. He noticed a light, sweet fragrance, like honeysuckle. Dodge was in the kitchen talking to someone. He’d never heard Dodge actually laugh before. Laugh as if he were happy. He went the rest of the way upstairs to his apartment. The notes he’d scribbled from Foster’s book the day before were piled next to Katarina’s scratch paper. He caught himself musing on an image of Katarina: her dirty brown hair tied in a series of random ponytails and a pencil dangling from her mouth, her feet tapping along without any rhythm in those goofy black sneakers. He mentally kicked himself, stood up, dipped into his rapidly waning savings for a twenty, and headed back out.

The bookstore had three used calculus textbooks, including a really old one for three dollars. Bound in red and just under three hundred pages, it was written by an Oxford professor in a formal style that concentrated on theorems with short, elegant proofs—a purist’s math book. After paying for it, Ryan walked
along the river. Wind blew the clouds south, and the river carried away the morning rain.

Three blocks from the river, he walked onto the courtyard of a Catholic church. The creamy white steeple reached into the sky, and stained-glass windows told the story. He went inside. It was quiet and cool and smelled of frankincense and myrrh, the smell of Sunday morning. He sat in a center pew. There were candles burning, and someone sat at the bench of a pipe organ. Other than that, he was alone.

The calculus book’s red binding was worn at the corners, and cardboard showed through. He pulled a prayer book from the back of the pew in front of him and weighed the two books, one in each hand. Each book was filled with short passages—prayers and theorems, hymns and proofs. The arcane symbols and language of each was perfect and elegant. Ryan wondered about mathematical prayers. Was that what Foster’s book was?

He set the prayer book back in the stand, tapping it down with affection, then tucked the math book under his arm and walked outside.

Crossing the street in front of a brand-new BMW, he felt a familiar pang. He should be at work in a cubicle pounding a software program through a debugger, not wandering around town in the middle of the day.

Katarina was walking home from school, dragging her skateboard and lugging her backpack. Meandering up the hill, she stopped every few feet to look at flowers or birds or trees or the little concrete statue of an owl at the old school that had been converted to condos. She saw Ryan waiting. When she passed, he fell in step with her.

Half a block later, he said, “Nice day at school?”

It sounded more like something to say than a question. She looked up at him, squinted in the sunlight, and turned away.

His arms swung as he walked, and he had a book tucked under one of them. His square chin had little red stubble on it. He glanced down at her and put his hand on her shoulder as though it were a reflex. It was the sort of thing her father used to do. Katarina avoided thinking about her dad and Ryan at the same time. She didn’t want to jinx Ryan. There was always that nagging feeling that if she’d done something different, avoided cracks in the sidewalk or something, that her father wouldn’t have died.

“Can I carry your backpack for you?”

“No.”

They passed a shiny red Acura parked next to Ryan’s beat-up car and went up on the porch. Ryan said, “I got you a book.” He handed it to her.

She opened it close to her face and took a deep breath. It smelled like old paper and floor wax, the way a library smells, the smell of cool and quiet, like something separate from life and death and people. She set her skateboard under the bench and let her backpack slide off. Flipping through the pages, she paused on symbols she’d never seen. She wanted to inhale them, and she would too. The great thing about math books, the thing that makes them better than any other kind of book, is that when they prove something, that’s it. She looked in the first chapter. Under the proof of the first theorem, it said
quod erat demonstrandum
. To Katarina it meant “end of discussion.”

“Isn’t it weird how math works?” she said, but Ryan obviously didn’t understand what she meant. Big surprise. She tried to define it for him. “If people spoke mathematically, there wouldn’t be any arguments. Just long proofs with tons of scratch paper and
then one guy going ‘See?’ and the other guy going ‘Well, I guess,’ and that’s that.”

Ryan shrugged. “You’ll love this book. Old math books are way more elegant than new ones. Nowadays they try to spoon-feed people as if everyone’s afraid of math.”

“Hate that.”

“Me too. Mathematical wusses.”

“Word,” Katarina said and opened the door. “Know what’s best about math?”

“What?” Ryan said, holding the door for her.

“It’s neither alive nor dead.”

R
yan’s eyes took a second to make the transition from daylight to Nutter House dim. He noticed that smell again. Not like honeysuckle after all, more like those purple flowers that hang from wisteria but with a bit of earth to it, almost salty.

Dodge was sitting on the couch next to a woman. “McNear, this is my sister. She’s a real physicist at a real university, and she has offered to help you.” At the word
help
, the woman cast a quick glance at Dodge. He added, “She’ll tell you how full of crap your Bible-thumping pal is.”

She looked almost frail but had a serious countenance, as though she knew what you were thinking and didn’t care. She had thick, wavy black hair with brown streaks that framed her broad forehead and long sharp nose—very much like Dodge’s, but that was the extent of their resemblance. She wore jeans, white tennis shoes, and a tight black T-shirt with the image of a galaxy and an arrow pointing to a spot with the words “you are here” that drew Ryan’s eye to her right breast and then, naturally, to her left breast.

She held out her hand. “I got a kick out of your patents.” In the time it took her smile to form, she transformed from a serious professional to one of God’s cutest creatures. “It was some of
the most amusing nonsense I’ve ever read.” Her voice was strong and direct, a total contrast to her fragile-looking self.