The Fold: A Novel Part 8

"Not exactly, no."

They studied each other for a moment.

"I'm not here to steal secrets or learn your methods," said Mike. "I could've kept quiet, let you think I was an idiot, and just stored up everything for the trip back. But that's not what this is about. Reggie just wanted someone who'd be able to get a larger sense of how things are going out here. I can take in more and get up to speed faster than anyone he's got on staff."

"Of course."

They stood across from each other for a few more moments. Mike glanced at the picture next to the laptop. "Your wife?"

"Yes."

Mike weighed his options for a moment, then let a few ants loose. "Violet. Married in nineteen ninety-eight, while you were both doing postdoctorate work at MIT. You were already a bit of a scientific celebrity."

"You'd make a fantastic stalker."

"Reggie gave me dossiers and copies of all your files to review. Well, all the files you've given him."

Arthur's shoulders shifted a bit. His lips pulled into another faint smile. "I do envy your memory. I forgot my anniversary last month. Could've sworn I had another week, and now I'm still in the doghouse." He pulled a bottle from his desk drawer. "Scotch?"

"Love some."

"I have options."

"Scotch is fine."

Amber liquid splashed into the gla.s.ses. "This has been my life for the past decade. Four years of work before we even started on SETH. Two years of that and then we carried a good chunk of it over to the Albuquerque Door. Three years of testing and refining since then. It's been all-consuming, to say the least."

He handed a gla.s.s to Mike. They raised them politely to each other and then each man took a sip.

Mike lowered his gla.s.s. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Of course."

"Why do you think Reggie's worried something's gone wrong here?"

Arthur laughed and swirled the scotch in his gla.s.s. "Not much for small talk, are you?"

"It comes from spending too much time with sixteen-year-olds." He sipped his scotch. "So, why, do you think?"

The older man shrugged. "Well, you may not have noticed, but we're a bit insular here. You get a group of people like that, put them under a lot of stress-most of it self-imposed, granted-and then start peering over their shoulders. It doesn't help that we actually were hiding a secret for a while."

"The animal testing they mentioned at the review board?"

Arthur settled into the chair behind the desk. "How much do you know about the whole incident?"

"Not much," said Mike. He tugged one of the spare chairs closer to the desk and sat down. The ants carried out the seventeen reports that mentioned the incident and set out the relevant lines and paragraphs. "All the reports seem happy to brush it under the rug, so I just know the very bare facts."

The older man nodded. "I suppose we might as well begin at the low point." He took another taste of his drink. "This was all originally the SETH project, a straight teleport-"

"What the h.e.l.l is this?" barked a voice behind Mike.

Olaf stood in the doorway, his icy glare shooting back and forth between Mike and Arthur. "Is this another one of Bob's stupid jokes? Where are my things, dammit?"

Arthur looked from the other scientist to Mike, and then to the gla.s.ses of scotch. "What are you talking about?"

"What did you do with my computer? And all my files? I swear to G.o.d, if that idiot has messed up any of my files, I'll smash his head in."

Arthur stood up. "Bob did something to your office?"

"Don't patronize me! Are you part of this nonsense, Arthur?" He shot a frosty look at Mike. "I thought we were all supposed to be on best behavior."

Arthur locked eyes with Mike for a moment. Then he marched past Olaf to the door across the hall. He swung it open and glanced inside. "Everything looks fine to me."

Olaf glanced over his shoulder. "Switching offices? What the h.e.l.l! Is this a freshman dorm?"

"Just calm down," Arthur said, walking back into his own office. "Bob knows the rules, and if he did something wrong, he'll be disciplined."

"If?"

"You know where the professionalism forms are, Olaf."

"Did I mention I have a conference call? I don't have time for this juvenile c.r.a.p!"

"Make your call. Let me know if anything's damaged. I'll talk to Bob."

The scientist stomped into the hall and a door slammed.

Arthur settled back behind his desk and had a longer drink of his scotch. "Sorry about that."

Mike looked back at the door. "Is that normal?"

"He's a pain in the a.s.s, but he also has one of the greatest theoretical minds on the planet. I'd put him in a cla.s.s with Hawking. We're under a lot of pressure here, and sometimes a little mistake can set any of us off. Olaf just goes off more than most."

"Doesn't deal with the stress well?"

"That is how he deals with stress. He runs and he complains about everyone. Pretty much the only reason we have professionalism forms is for Olaf."

Mike turned to look at the blueprint again. "Is Reggie after you that much for results?"

"Not that bad, but we're also pressuring ourselves. What we're doing here is going to change the world forever. A lot of people say it, but...well, we're actually doing it. And we all know it."

"Understandable," said Mike.

"Where were we?"

"The SETH project."

"Right. At that point we were working on pure teleportation. We had a series of breakthroughs. Some huge intuitive leaps. It was the fastest and furthest our work had gone to date. Over three weeks or so, we became convinced we'd cracked it, that we'd made a true IMT system."

Mike nodded. "So you wanted to start animal testing."

"We couldn't wait. Honestly, we couldn't. After three weeks of nothing but leaps and bounds, the idea of waiting months to get approval seemed ridiculous. After all, we knew it would work this time."

He took a sip of his drink.

"Tramp was a stray who'd been hanging out around the trailers. He'd sort of been adopted by the whole team. We fed him and played with him sometimes. He trusted us. And we put him on the platform, turned on the machine, and...killed him."

"Just like that?"

Arthur gave a grave dip of his chin. "He looked like...like road kill. Just a hunk of gristle and fur spread over the receiving platform. We were all...We were so caught up in being right we hadn't considered how dangerous it could be if we were wrong." He paused for another drink. His gla.s.s was almost empty. "It was a horrible way for anything to die. Anything."

He swallowed the last of his scotch.

"You tried to hide it," said Mike.

"At first, yes." He reached across the desk and poured another half-inch of scotch for himself. "It was clear to everyone that SETH was going nowhere, so we weren't worried about a bunch of intense scrutiny. As our focus shifted to the ideas behind the Albuquerque Door, though, we realized we had to come clean, so there was no chance of animal-rights groups spinning it into a scandal later on."

"Over one test animal?"

"One that we hid. Too many people would think, 'Who knows how many are still hidden, that died in even worse ways.'" He shook his head. "We wanted the Door to be as clean as possible, so we just confessed to everything. Olaf and Neil insisted on it before we moved forward."

Mike glanced across the hall. "Olaf insisted?"

Arthur nodded. "He doesn't make a good first impression, I know, but he's a good man at heart. I think the whole thing bothered him more than any of us. We had a long talk with Magnus-Reginald, paid some hefty fines, and we each ended up making a sizable donation to the Humane Society. With all that in mind, it's understandable that he'd continue to see problems here. Which just breeds more resentment and pressure from us, of course."

"Of course," agreed Mike.

They sat and looked at each other for a few moments.

"You seem like a decent person," said Arthur. "I'll try my best not to bite your head off when you ask questions. I'll ask everyone else to do the same."

"Thanks."

"But we're still not going to be revealing any technical information. Not one equation, not one line of code, not one blueprint."

"You said the same thing at the review meeting. Exactly the same."

"It's become kind of a mantra for all of us here. And to be honest, everyone's going to be more on guard with you once they hear about your..." He tapped two fingers against his temple.

"I get that a lot, don't worry. Again, I don't want to violate your agreement with Reggie, I just want to go back to him with a fair a.s.sessment of things."

"Then I think we'll get along just fine."

Mike turned his head to look at a small diorama on another bookshelf. A miniature Wile E. Coyote had a fan and a sail strapped to his back as he roller-skated down a plastic hill, a set of silverware held out in antic.i.p.ation. "I understand you're also a big Bugs Bunny fan?"

"Now the small talk?"

"Sorry."

Arthur smiled. Another real smile. "Almost any concept or idea in the world can be expressed through comparison with a cla.s.sic Warner Bros. cartoon."

"Even the Albuquerque Door?"

"Of course."

Mike waved him on.

"Do you remember Foghorn Leghorn?"

The scotch traced a warm path across Mike's tongue. "Think about who you're asking."

The older man settled back into his chair. "One of my favorite cartoons had Foghorn babysitting this tiny baby bird genius to impress the widow Prissy with a nice house. Do you know it?"

"There were a few with the widow Prissy. Her chick was named Egghead Jr. The first cartoon they were all in was 'Little Boy Boo' in nineteen fifty-four."

Arthur arched an eyebrow at him.

Mike's lips pursed. "Sorry. Annoying habit, I know." He tossed back some scotch. "You were saying?"

"I was saying, at one point Foghorn and the chick are playing hide-and-seek. Foghorn hides in the woodbin. Egghead looks around for a few seconds, writes out a page of mathematics, and sticks a shovel in the ground about ten feet away. Out pops Foghorn. He tries to argue that what's just happened is impossible, and the chick keeps showing him the page of calculations."

"And that's what you do?"

"That's what we do," Arthur said. "We take over six hundred pages of math and force-feed it to the universe through an electromagnetic funnel. We tell the universe 'I don't care what you think. I'm lifting my foot here and putting it down there.'"

"And the universe doesn't object?"

Arthur finished off his whiskey. "Not so far."

TEN.

"Here you are." Anne handed Mike a badge on a lanyard. "Your ID card. Dr. Cross gave you full coverage so you can open pretty much every door on campus."

"Pretty much?"

"Some of the hazardous substance lockers need two cards to open," she said. "If you need access to those, I can talk to Dr. Cross and update your privileges."

"Are you this formal with them, too?"

She smiled. "Sorry. Still not used to you. I'll try to be better."