“Dr. Graves?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Brian Kyle Graves?”
“That’s right.”
“I wish to talk to you, please.”
Kyle rose and motioned for her to come in.
“My name is Chikamatsu. I wish to speak to you about your research.”
Kyle indicated another chair. Chikamatsu took it, and Kyle sat back down.
“I understand you have had some success with quantum computing.”
“Not as much as I’d like. I ended up with egg on my face a couple of weeks ago.”
“So I heard.” Kyle’s eyebrows went up. “I represent a consortium that would like to contract for your services.” She pronounced consortium “consorsheeum.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. We believe you are close to a breakthrough.”
“Not judging by my current results.”
“A minor problem, I am sure. You are trying to use Dembinski fields to inhibit decoherence, are you not? They are notoriously tricky.”
Kyle’s eyebrows climbed again. “That they are.”
“We have monitored your progress with interest. You are doubtless very close to a solution. And if you do find a solution, my consortium may be prepared to invest heavily in your procedure, assuming, of course, that you can convince me that your system works.”
“Well, it will either work or it won’t.”
Chikamatsu nodded. “Doubtless so, but we will need to be sure. You would have to factor a number for us. And, of course, I would have to provide the number—just to be sure it is not some trick, you understand.”
Kyle narrowed his eyes. “What exactly is the nature of your consortium?” He preferred the hard-T pronunciation himself, but matched Chikamatsu’s usage.
“We are an international group,” she said. “Venture capitalists.” She had a small cylindrical leather purse, with metal end caps. She opened it, removed a memory wafer, and proffered it to Kyle. “The number we wish factored is on this wafer.”
Kyle took the wafer but didn’t look at it. “How many digits in the number?”
“Five hundred and twelve.”
“Even if I can work out the current bugs with my system, it’ll be a while before I can do that.”
“Why?”
“Well, for two reasons. The first is a practical one. Democritus—that’s the name of our prototype—is hardware constrained to factor numbers exactly three hundred digits long, no more, no less. Even if I could get it to work properly, I can’t do numbers of any other length—the quantum registers have to be carefully jiggered for the precise total number of digits.”
Chikamatsu looked disappointed. “And the other reason?”
Kyle raised his eyebrows. “The other reason, Ms. Chikamatsu, is that I’m not a criminal.”
“I—I beg your pardon?”
He flipped the memory wafer over and over in his hand as he spoke. “There’s only one practical application for factoring large numbers—and that’s cracking encryption schemes. I don’t know whose data you’re trying to access, but I’m no hacker. Find yourself another boy.”
“It is just a randomly generated number,” said Chikamatsu.
“Oh, come on. If you’d asked me to factor a number whose length fell within a range—between five hundred and six hundred digits, say—and if you hadn’t shown up with your number all picked out, I might have believed you. But it’s pretty damned obvious you’re trying to crack somebody’s code.”
Kyle went to hand back the wafer, but now its other side was facing up. As he looked down at it, he saw its label, with a single word written on it in pen: Huneker.
“Huneker!” said Kyle. “Not Joshua Huneker?”
Chikamatsu reached out to retrieve the wafer. “Who?” she said, sounding innocent but looking visibly flustered.
Kyle clenched his fist, covering the wafer. “What the hell are you playing at?” he said. “What’s this got to do with Huneker?”
Chikamatsu lowered her gaze. “I did not think you would know the name.”
“My wife was involved with him when she and I met.”
Chikamatsu’s almond-shaped eyes went wide. “Really?”
“Yes, really. Now, tell me what the hell this is all about.”
The woman considered. “I—ah, I must consult with my partners first.”
“Be my guest. Do you need a phone?”
She extracted one from her funky purse. “No.” She rose, crossed the room, and began a hushed conversation that bounced between Japanese and what sounded like Russian, with only a few recognizable words—“Toronto,” “Graves,” “Huneker,” and “quantum” among them. She winced several times; apparently she was getting a royal chewing-out.
After a few moments, she folded up the phone and returned it to her purse.
“My colleagues are not pleased,” she said, “but we do need your help, and our purpose is not illegal.”
“You’ll have to convince me of that.”
She tightened her lips and let air escape loudly through her nose. Then: “Do you know how Josh Huneker died?”
“Suicide, my wife said.”
Chikamatsu nodded. “Do you have a Web terminal here?”
“Of course.”
“May I?”
Kyle indicated the unit with a motion of his hand.
Chikamatsu sat down in front of it and spoke into the microphone. “The Toronto Star,” she said. Then: “Search back issues. Words in article text: Huneker and Algonquin. H-U-N-E-K-E-R and A-L-G-O-N-Q-U-I-N.”
“Searching,” said the terminal in an androgynous voice. Then: “Found.”
There was only one hit. The article appeared on the monitor screen.
Chikamatsu stood up. “Have a look,” she said.
Kyle took the seat she’d vacated. The article was dated February 28, 1994. The words “Algonquin” and “Huneker” were highlighted everywhere they appeared in red and green respectively. He read the whole thing, telling the screen once to page down as he did so:
ASTRONOMER TAKES OWN LIFE
Joshua Huneker, 24, was found dead yesterday at the National Research Council of Canada’s radio telescope in Algonquin Park, a provincial park in northern Ontario. He had committed suicide by eating an apple coated with arsenic.
Huneker, who was studying for a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, had been snowed in alone at the radio telescope for six days.
He had been working in Algonquin Park on the international Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, scanning the sky for radio messages from alien worlds. Because Algonquin is so far from any city, it receives little radio interference and is therefore ideally suited for such delicate listening.
Huneker’s body was found by Donald Cheung, 39, another radio astronomer, who was arriving at the telescope facility to relieve Huneker.
“It’s a great tragedy,” said NRC spokesperson Allison Northcott, in Ottawa. “Josh was one of our most promising young researchers and he was also a real humanitarian, very active with Greenpeace and other causes. However, judging by his suicide note, he apparently had personal problems related to his romantic involvement with another man. We will all miss him.”
When he was finished, Kyle swiveled the chair around to face the woman. He hadn’t know the details of Josh’s death before; the whole thing seemed rather sad.
“His story remind you of anyone’s?” asked Chikamatsu.
“Sure. Alan Turing’s.” Turing, the father of modern computing, had committed suicide in 1954 in the same way, and for the same reason.
She nodded grimly. “Exactly. Turing was Huneker’s idol. But what the spokesperson did not mention was that Josh left two notes, not one. The first was indeed about his personal problems, but the second…”