I glance around idly, just in case he's already here. There are two grunge metal skateboard types in the far corner, drinking Bud-Miller-Coors and comparing body piercings; the town's swarming with 'em, nothing to take note of. A gentleman in a plaid shirt, chinos, and short haircut sits on a bar stool on his own, back ramrod-straight, reading the San Jose Mercury News. (That dings my suspicion-o-meter because he looks very Company in a casual-Friday kind of way-but if they were tailing me why in hell would they make it so obvious? He might equally well be an affluent local businessman.) A trio of nrrrd grrrlzz with shaven scalps and unicorn forelocks compare disposable tattoos and disappear into the toilet one by one, going in glum and coming out giggly: must be a Bolivian marching powder dispenser or a mendicant sin-eater or something in there. I shake my head and sip my beer, then look up just as a rather amazing babe with classic red hair leans over me.
"Mind if I take this chair?"
"Um-" I'm trying desperately to think of an excuse, because my contact is looking for a single man with a copy of PTUT on the table in front of him. But she doesn't give me time:
"You can call me Mo. You would be Bob?"
"Yeah. Have a seat." I blink rapidly at her, stuck for words. She sits down while I study her.
Mo is striking. She's a good six feet tall, for starters. Strong features, high cheekbones, freckles, hair that looks like you could wrap it in insulation and run the national grid through it. She's got these big dangly silver earrings with glass eyeballs, and she's wearing combat pants, a plain white top, and a jacket that is so artfully casual that it probably costs more than I earn in a month. Oh, and there's a copy of Philosophical Transactions on Uncertainty Theory in her left hand, which she puts down on top of mine. I can't estimate her age; early thirties? That would make her a real high-flyer. She catches me staring at her and stares back, challenging.
"Can I buy you a drink?" I ask.
She freezes for a moment then nods, emphatically. "Pineapple juice." I wave at the bartender, feeling more than a little flustered. Under her scrutiny I get the feeling that there's something of the Martian about her: a vast, unsympathetic intelligence from another world. I also get the feeling that she doesn't suffer fools gladly.
"I'm sorry," I say, "nobody told me who to expect." The local businessman looks across from his newspaper expressionlessly: he sees me watching and turns back to the sports pages.
"Not your problem." She relaxes a little. The bartender appears and takes an order for a pineapple juice and another beer-I can't seem to get used to these undersized pints-and vanishes again.
"I'm interested in a teaching post," I find myself saying, and hope her contact told her what the cover story is. "I'm looking for somewhere to continue after my thesis. UCSC has a good reputation, so…"
"Uh-huh. Nice climate too." She nods at the pelicans outside the window. "Better than Miskatonic."
"Really? You were there?"
I must have asked too eagerly because she looks at me bleakly and says, "Yes." I nearly bite my tongue. (Foreign female professor of philosophy in the snobbish halls of a New England college. Worse: non-WASP, judging from the Irish accent.) "Some other time. What was the topic of your thesis again?"
Is it my imagination or does she sound half-amused? This isn't part of the script: we're meant to go for a walk and talk about things where we can't be overheard, not ad-lib it in a café. Plus, she thinks I'm from the Foreign Office. What the hell does she expect me to say, early Latin literature? "It's about"-I mentally cross my fingers-"a proof of polynomial-time completeness in the traversal of Hamiltonian networks. And its implications."
She sits up a bit straighter. "Oh, right. That's interesting."
I shrug. "It's what I do for a living. Among other things. Where do your research interests lie?"
The businessman stands up, folds his newspaper, and leaves.
"Reasoning under conditions of uncertainty." She squints at me slightly. "Not prior probabilities stuff, Bayesian reasoning based on statistics-but reasoning where there are no evidential bases."
I play dumb: suddenly my heart is hammering between my ribs. "And is this useful?"
She looks amused. "It pays the bills."
"Really?"
The amusement vanishes. "Eighty percent of the philosophical logic research in this country is paid for by the Pentagon, Bob. If you want to work here you'll need to get your head around that fact."
"Eighty percent-" I must look dumbfounded, because something goes click and she switches out of her half-sardonic Brief Encounter mode and into full professorial flow: "A philosophy professor earns about thirty thousand bucks and costs maybe another five thousand a year in office space and chalk. A marine earns around fifteen thousand bucks and costs maybe another hundred thousand a year in barrack space, ammunition, transport, fuel, weapons, VA expenses, and so on. Supporting all the philosophy departments of the USA costs about as much as funding a single battalion of marines." She looks wryly amused. "They're looking for a breakthrough. Knowing how to deconstruct any opponent's ideological infrastructure and derive self-propagating conceptual viruses based on its blind spots, for example. That sort of thing would give them a real strategic edge: their psych-ops people would be able to make enemies surrender without firing a shot, and do so reliably. Cybernetics and game theory won them the Cold War, so paying for philosophers is militarily more sensible than paying for an extra company of marines, don't you think?"
"That's"-I shake my head-"logical, but weird." No weirder than what they pay me to do.
She snorts. "It's not exceptional. Did you know that for the past twenty years they've been spending a couple of million a year on research into antimatter weapons?"
"Antimatter?" I shake my head again: I'm going to get a stiff neck at this rate. "If someone figured out how to make it in bulk they'd be in a position to-"
"Exactly," she says, and looks at me with a curiously satisfied expression. Why do I have a feeling she's seen right through me?
(Antimatter isn't the most exotic thing DARPA has been spending research money on by a long way, but it's exotic enough for the average college professor; especially a philosopher who, reading between the lines, has any number of reasons for being cheesed off with the military-academic complex.)
"I'd like to talk about this some more," I venture, "but maybe this isn't the right place?" I take a mouthful of beer. "How about a walk? When do you have to get back to your office?"
"I have a lecture to deliver at nine tomorrow, if that's what you're asking." She pauses, delicately, tongue slightly extended: "You're thinking about coming to work here, why don't I show you some of the sights?"
"That would be great." We finish our drinks and leave the bar-and the bugs, real or imagined-behind.
I CAN BE A GOOD LISTENER WHEN I TRY. MO-A diminutive of Dominique, I gather, which is why I couldn't find her on the university's staff roster-is a good talker, or at least she is when she has a lot to unload. Which is why we walk until I have blisters.
Seal Point is a grassy headland that abruptly turns into a cliff, falling straight down to the Pacific breakers. Some lunatics in wet-suits are trying to surf down there; I wouldn't want to underwrite their life insurance policies. About fifty feet away there's a rocky outcrop carpeted in sea lions. Their barking carries faintly over the crash of the surf. "My mistake was in signing the nondisclosure agreements the university gave me without getting my own lawyer to check them out." She stares out to sea. "I thought they were routine academic application agreements, saying basically the faculty would get a cut from any commercial spin-offs from inventions I made while employed by them. I didn't read the small print closely enough."