“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.
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.
Fifteen minutes later, we reached it and parked the golf cart. The door into the bunker was closed and had a warning sign indicating it was not in use, but I tried the handle and the door opened. There was a bad smell, but it wasn’t strong, and the implications didn’t dawn on me at first. Inside, we saw half a dozen card tables stacked with scientific equipment and strewn with paper cups and food wrappers. Black and blue cables snaked across the floor and tangled around the table legs. Instead of overhead fluorescents, the room was lit by a half-dozen yard-sale lamps. Was this an approved project? It didn’t look like it. There were thousands of dollars’ worth of instruments here, though; I had no idea how Brian could have purchased or stolen this much. He must have used the maintenance elevator access from the pine forest above to get it all down here secretly.