“Can’t or won’t tell me.”
Peter stole a nervous glance away from Bill. “Four out of the five remaining committee members are dead. All within a half a year. Actuarially, those are lottery ticket odds. Bill, something is going on. I need you to help me.”
“Help you? What this got to do with you?”
“I think I might be next.”
“Why? You aren’t a professor, are you?” Bill realized there was a lot about “Peter Robot” he didn’t know. In fact, all Billy remembered about Peter before this meeting on the steps was that he had built a robot in sixth grade (hence his schoolyard nickname) and won all kinds of science fairs with a computer he built. He had faded into the haze of Bill’s Bronx memories until Cheryl said his name this morning.
Today a guy like Peter would set off alarm bells in every quarter of society, but back in the ’60s and ’70s people were still considered innocent until proven perverted. So it was, that, the mentally-advanced Peter was socially-retarded; outcast from his age group in the first known case of a nerd-ectomy in the U.S.A. Although jocks and cool guys shunned him, Peter actually had no need for them as well. On any given Friday or Saturday night he was content soldering and inventing in his room. But there was one group to which Peter Remo was the coolest guy, mostly because he was older — his younger brother Johnny’s friends, like Bill. These younger guys were enthralled by his stories and science wizardry. In addition, because he was older, he could take the rap for one of Johnny’s group and, for example, claim that the pack of Parliaments that hit the floor were his, or maybe give you a swig of beer. And if you hung with Peter, the bully guys, who were maybe a year older than you, were ‘a-scared’ of him.
So it was that Tommy Mush, Joey Plum, Billy Hic, Larry Soch, and B.O. all related to Peter as if he were also in the seventh grade.
The neighborhood was close knit. Everyone knew everyone and each parent was the parent of every kid as they played in the courtyard or on the sidewalks. Therefore, every parent knew Peter, his good nature, and his brains. In a word no one would ever use today, Peter was “harmless.”
In many ways, Peter was Bill’s entry point into the wonders of science. Bill spent many hours on the stoop of the apartment house with tape, wood, motors, batteries and buzzers building “electro-cities,” actually electric busy boxes that rang, beeped, lit up, spun, and blinked. At first, done under Peter’s careful guidance, they soon became a canvas upon which Bill would create newer and more complex circuits and combinations, at times surprising Peter with his ingenuity. Yet, Peter always had the next challenge, such as challenging him to make two lights alternate every time the buzzer rang. That one took Bill a week to figure out, but when he finally got it, the praise he got from Peter was like his winning the Nobel Prize in Science.
After Bill reached high school, he only saw Peter around the neighborhood from time to time. Their age difference guaranteed they never traveled in the same social circle. In his teens, Bill was the geekiest guy in the “football” crowd, but the older Peter spent his formative years as a true mainline geek — no sports, no girls, no nothing other than science. Upon reflection, Bill realized that was how he could have been described today if he hadn’t let Janice finally get through to him.
Today on the steps of the Memorial, the look in Peter’s eyes was hard for Bill to decode. It could either be the deep-set hollowness of a man in mortal fear or the warning signs of insane indifference to reality of the delusional. This was more Janice’s area than his. He’d discuss this with her tonight.
“Bill, Professor Ensiling and I kept in touch after the committee was disbanded by Kurt Waldheim. Ensiling was working on super-conductivity and I was asked to join his team as a ‘theorizer.’”
“A what? I’ve two degrees in the sciences and I have never heard of a theorizer.”
“He liked my opinion on things that many felt were already settled as science or proven as fiction.”
“I know a little something about outside the box thinking myself, Pete.”
“Like, I told the engineers once about relative absolute zero.”
“Wait — you can’t have a relative absolute anything.” Bill then relaxed. After all, this was Peter the Great, as Billy the Kid had called him. He was the great science whiz who fed into Bill’s hunger for science and answers. So Hiccock once again became what he had been on the stoop of the apartment house, now the stoop of the Lincoln Memorial… an apt pupil.
“See, that’s where I came in. I theorized that at around -273 degrees Celsius the temperature coefficients of likely super-conducting materials aren’t linear but are skewed by the specific gravity and mass of the sample being tested. Therefore…”
“Therefore, their molecular stasis points don’t necessarily follow the degree intervals.”
“Exactly. Believe it or not, those scientists would never consider that and whole reams of data was discarded as being junk or polluted.”
“So are you saying super-conducting got the Professor killed?”
Peter paused before speaking again. “Bill, did you ever hear of the Jesus Factor?”
“What is it, some bible-thumping fad?”
“No. But if you’ve never heard of it, and you’re the one in the White House, then I am really fucked out on a limb.”
“What are you talking about?”
Peter looked at Bill. Twice he started to form a sentence and then stopped. “I did some preliminary work for the professor on instantaneous values of Epsilon H33,” he said at last. “He told me to destroy my notes and then they killed….” Peter pulled up short.
“What?” Bill’s interest was thoroughly piqued.
“Nothing, Bill. I don’t think we should talk any longer.”
“Why?”
“I should go.”
“Peter, you are starting to weird me out here?”
“Thanks for the time, kid. I’ll see ya round.” With that, Peter trudged down the steps of the Memorial.
Chapter Ten
There were 14 messages on Bill’s personal cell phone as he glanced at it sitting in the back seat of his government supplied Town Car. His government cell would have rung, or Bill’s driver, Secret Service Agent Brent Moskowitz, would have been beeped to retrieve him from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial if anything of national consequence had occurred. He scanned the messages quickly and decided to ring back Janice.
“Hey, Bill. How’s your day going?”
“I got to tell ya, a really weird thing happened. I met up with an old friend… acquaintance…from the neighborhood and the guy goes on and on and tells me a story that sounds like a science fiction author wrote it. Then, for no reason, he suddenly runs away!”
“Schizophrenia?”
“Maybe, but it was more like he suddenly didn’t trust me.”
“What triggered this?”
“I dunno, one minute we’re talking… he’s talking, I’m listening, then he asks me a question. Then he freaks.”
“What was the question?”
“He asked me if I ever heard of the Jesus Factor.”
“You mean ‘W W J D?’”
“What’s that?”
“What would Jesus do?”
“Oh right. No, I don’t think they call that the Jesus Factor. Besides, I asked him if it was a religious thing. That’s when he freaked.
“Maybe he’s in a fundamentalist cult. And you were suddenly an outsider.”
“Maybe, but he’s a real science nut. Religion has to have faith. I don’t see him as a holy roller.”
“Then back to my initial instinct: schizophrenia.”
“You’re probably right. What a waste of time. Anyway, how’s your day going?”