Twistor (17 page)

'What in Hell . . . ' Saxon began, but Harrison signaled him to silence with a wave and a finger on the lips. He moved slowly around the room, stalking an invisible prey, and soon repeated his actions, this time removing a similar object from the undersurface of a low shelf of the built-in bookcase. He deposited the new object before Saxon on the desk with the others and walked once more around the room, watching the meter. Finally satisfied, he sank into the straight-backed chair. 'Bugs,' he said.

'What do you mean, "bugs"?' Saxon asked, although the significance of the little objects was already becoming apparent to him.

'The lab and your office,' said Harrison, 'have been the recent objects of electronic surveillance. These things on your desk are bugs, clever state-of-the-art electronic
listening
devices that broadcast everything said in both rooms on high-frequency FM. By a lucky accident our new ultrahigh-frequency oscilloscope picked up the signals, and Vickie found them. We thought perhaps there might be some in here too, and indeed there are. Allan, somebody is so interested in what we're doing that they've bugged the lab and your office. Do you have any idea what the Hell's going on?'

Saxon felt suddenly sick, as if he'd been punched in the stomach. He looked down at the devices. His mind whirled. Pierce would do this, that filthy son of a bitch, he thought. He turned to Harrison, looking him straight in the eyes. 'I know nothing of this, Harrison, nothing at all. You're sure they're bugs?'

'We could see on the 'scope that they were broadcasting our voices, and a few minutes ago Sam Weston cut one of them open and found a tiny microphone inside. We're as sure as we can be without catching the guy who planted them. I'd be careful about what you say on the telephone, too. Sam says telephone surveillance and voice surveillance usually go together. Allan, could this have anything to do with your business ventures?'

Saxon spread his hands. 'I would not have thought anything connected with my business was worth spying on. Our new work here is the only thing that makes any sense. But I haven't mentioned it to a soul.' He looked sharply at Harrison. 'Have you?'

Harrison ignored the question. 'Look, Allan, this bugging incident demonstrates the futility of trying to keep our twistor discovery secret. These little things aren't cheap.' He gestured at the bugs. 'Sam says they probably cost a thousand dollars each. Somebody with enough money to buy sophisticated, expensive equipment is out there on the other end of those bugs. They've heard everything we've said for the past few days, and they surely know what we've got. If there ever was a reason for keeping our work under wraps, that reason no longer
exists.
We've got to get our discovery out in the open, where it belongs.'

Saxon glared at Harrison, searching for a way to refute his argument. 'What are you driving at?
'
he said finally.

'I've been writing papers,' said Harrison. Tm almost finished with one describing the experiment and one about the equipment. I'd like to finish them off, with your help if possible, and send them off for publication as soon as we can. Once that is done, there won't be any point in bugging anyone.'

Later, when Allan Saxon calmed down, he remembered losing his temper at that point. He couldn't quite remember all that he had said to Harrison, but the gist of it was that they needed tighter, not looser, security. The only way to achieve it was to move the whole experiment to the company laboratories in Bellevue so that it could be better protected. Harrison had objected and he'd ordered him out of his office. You just can't get good, loyal, respectful postdocs any more, he thought.

On Fifteenth Avenue Northeast at the western edge of the main campus a nondescript commercial van was parked. The balding man eased into the driver's seat, started the engine, and drove unhurriedly away from the university in the direction of the 1-5 freeway.

He shook his head as he drove, wondering what could have gone wrong. Something must have alerted the subjects in the physics laboratory to the fact that their room had been bugged. They must have found both of them, too. The devices had gone dead within five minutes of each other. About half an hour later he had heard someone come into the professor's office, and the units there had gone dead, too.

But dammit, these people were supposed to be amateurs! It required the latest and most sophisticated detection equipment to find bugs like these. It just didn't make sense.

Well,
at least the telephone taps were still in operation. Those didn't broadcast. One simply dialed into them and
'
milked' them once a day. He'd need advice now from Broadsword on how to proceed. Broadsword was not going to be pleased.

11

Saturday Evening, October 9

David backed carefully out of his parking slot in front of his apartment on Fuhrman Avenue, drove west past the Red Robin, and turned north onto Eastlake. Half a block ahead, red lights began to flash on the University Bridge. Damn, David thought, somehow that bridge always decided to go up when he was in a hurry. But checking his watch, he saw that he had enough time.

The north end of Seattle is separated from the rest of the city by the Lake Washington Ship Canal, a man-made channel that cuts from Puget Sound on the west to Lake Washington on the east. The break is stitched back together by seven bridges. Two of these are high fixed spans, but the other five, the old University Bridge among them, are low to the water and must be opened whenever a sailboat toots its horn.

David drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, watching as the lights flashed, the red-and-white-striped barriers unfolded like Japanese paper cranes, and the steel lattice bridge spans levered upward, slackening the electric trolley wires they supported. He turned on the car stereo and pushed the selector button for KING-FM, a classical music station that he liked. The music soothed away his minor feelings of annoyance. He watched as the mast tip of a lone sailboat passed at a leisurely pace across his field of view. Then the bridge lowered and reassembled itself, the lights stopped flashing, and the barriers retracted. He was feeling pretty good after his shower, he decided, and he looked forward to the evening
ahead.
His feeling of paranoia after the bugging incident had passed. It was probably Allan's problem, he thought as he accelerated over the bridge to Eleventh Northeast, not his or Vickie's.

He turned west onto Northeast Forty-fifth Street and headed away from the university in the direction of the Wallingford district. After a while he began to look for a street sign indicating Densmore Avenue North. He found it just beyond Wallingford Avenue, but then had to circle around a playfield that interrupted the street before he reached Vickie's house.

From a previous visit he knew that the bell didn't work and that Vickie's housemates often didn't answer a knock at the front door, so he simply let himself in. Vickie's brother William, a textbook in his lap, was sitting on the faded orange living-room sofa facing the dim flatscreen wall TV, an MTV rock band gyrating in the background. He waved as David entered.

'Hi, Flash! Is Vickie ready?' David asked. He wondered if she'd had that kind of acne as a teenager. Probably not; her complexion was quite good.

'She said to tell you that she'd be a few minutes more. Have a seat, David.'

'OK,' said David, sitting gingerly on the sofa to avoid a protruding spring. 'How are things at Roosevelt High? You get into that science fiction class you wanted?' David had discovered last month that he and Flash shared an interest in science fiction. It had been the single contact point from which he'd been able to reach Vickie's younger brother. He remembered that Flash had been trying to get into an honors English class called 'Science Fiction and Universal Philosophy' or some such.

Flash nodded without enthusiasm. 'Yeah, but it's a mite weird-o. First we had to read some New Age crap about Hinduism. Then Mr Rebarth made us read
The Martian Chronicles.
I hated it even the first time I read it, which this wasn't. It's terminally artsy-fartsy dumb-o.'

David
nodded in sympathy. He'd never had much appreciation for Bradbury's free-form approach to scientific facts.

'After that we did a unit on Buddhism, and that was paired with
Starship Troopers.
That old Heinlein thing might be OK, if you'd never been shown the glaring holes in it by reading
The Forever War.'

David blinked. He'd enjoyed
Starship Troopers
when he read it years ago. He coveted some of those early Heinleins for his collection of SF hardcovers, but after the author died in '88 the prices for his first editions had become astronomical.

'Now we're doing
Neuromancer,'
Flash continued, 'which Mr Rebarth says signaled a new direction in the late eighties toward hi-tech cyberpunk. Yuck-o! Punk-tech is more like it. Jeese, this Gibson individual must never have heard about bandwidth or transmission-speed limits. He thinks that once you plug the wires into your damp little head, you can download the whole universe in zero time-o. He oughta try downloading a coupla megabytes over a 4800-baud line sometime, if he's got a few spare hours. But Mr Rebarth thinks cyberpunk is just wonderful because it makes you think about the disenchantment of the postmodern era, and it's so technologically realistic. Jeese-o!'

'I hope you're not letting him get away with anything,' David inserted noncommittally.

'When it gets really deep-o, I mostly just hang quiet,' said Flash. 'After class I just mosey up to Mr Rebarth and get him to tell me what he wants me to tell him in the writing assignments. Then I just give it back to him verbate-o. He says he just loves my work because it contains so many good ideas, and it's so well thought out, so I get me a good grade-o. Teachers just love fresh new ideas, as long as they've seen 'em before. Isn't that the way it's always been in high school?' He looked owlishly at David.

David
paused for a moment, then nodded.
'
I guess it has,' he said finally. Well, that kills this topic, he thought. Wonder what we can talk about next.

At that moment, however, he was saved from further discursive struggles by the appearance of a transfigured Vickie. She was wearing a scoop-neck creation of white knit that looked both expensive and fashionable. She was very beautiful, he realized, and he felt suddenly disoriented, tongue-tied and awkward for the first time in recent memory. Then Vickie smiled her familiar smile and his perception shifted, his self-possession returned. He told her how wonderful she looked. She whispered some admonishment to Flash, and they walked together to David's car.

David glanced back at the house. Flash was standing on the porch watching their departure, a bemused expression on his face.

Ray's Boat House was on Shilshole Bay, just north of the channel to the Chittenden Locks that isolated the fluctuating tides and salt water of Puget Sound from the unvarying level of fresh water in Salmon Bay, Lake Union, and Lake Washington. The view from their table – of the sound backed by the snow-dusted Olympic Range – was breathtaking this evening as the sun lowered to meet the jagged horizon. This evening the view was spiced by the varied boat traffic traveling to and from the locks.

David liked Ray's. It was probably the best seafood restaurant in Seattle, though old-timers always claimed it had possessed more character before it had burned to the water and been rebuilt a few years earlier. He'd been lucky tonight; with only two hours' notice he had been able to reserve his favorite southwest corner table. David considered his sudden impulse to bring Vickie here. This was an upscale, pricey restaurant. Was he trying to impress her? Was he matching Vickie against Sarah, who didn't like the place? Sarah preferred the Windjammer
further
down, with its view of the yacht moorages.

He looked across the table at Victoria. He still couldn't quite believe the transformation. She was ravishing in that white dress. He took a deep breath. They had already ordered and were working on their salads, and the waiter now brought the bottle of the Hugel Gewürztraminer that David had selected. David sniffed and then sipped. 'Good nose, good balance,' he pronounced. This place has very good whites,' he said to Vickie, 'and this Alsatian is one of their best. It's light and flowery, and it tricks you into thinking that it's going to be sweet until your taste buds sort out its balance and finish.'

'Couldn't prove it by me,' said Vickie. She studied the sunset through the pale amber liquid, sniffed, sipped it gently, and nodded. 'It does smell a bit like flowers, though. I got that part, even though I come from a family of beer drinkers. Hmmm, Chateau La Tour and now Gewürztraminer. How does one learn to be a wine snob, David? Looks like fun.' Her compressed smile showed that she was teasing him.

'Just schtick with me, kid,' he said, Bogartesque, and winked. His wine expertise wasn't impressing Vickie as it had Sarah, he thought. 'My boss at Los Alamos,' he went on, 'was a devout enologist or, as you might put it, a first-class wine snob. He discovered that I have a very discriminating palate, and he helped me to educate it. If you want the unclothed truth, there isn't a whole lot else to do in Los Alamos. My taste buds are now well calibrated. You should see me in action at a blind tasting. My great-grandfather was supposedly a wine merchant and importer, so perhaps it's genetic.

'And it has proved to be a valuable skill since I came here. On Wednesdays I'm teaching the Ernsts about good wines, and they're keeping me well fed.' Might be fun to introduce Vickie to wine snobdom too, he thought.

'Paul is nice,' said Vickie, watching a passing boat. 'I like him very much. We're fortunate that he's willing to
work
with us on understanding our experiment. And he's so enthusiastic.'

'Yeah,' said David, 'Paul's been a good friend ever since I came to the department, but up to now it's been strictly outdoorsy or social things. I had no idea that I'd ever be working on something that connects with his brand of way-out particle theory. It had somehow never occurred to me that those guys were actually interested in experimental work. But it's clear that Paul is. You know, he thinks I goofed by not telling Allan that he knows about our results.'