An hour later he straightened up in his chair, trying to work the cramps out of his fingers and the knot out of his stomach. If ever he'd needed confirmation of Garwood's story, he had it now. The amount of wrecked equipment coming up from the offices and experimental areas to Maintenance was simply staggering: computers, all kinds of electronic equipment, plastic-based items—the list went on and on. Even the physical structure of Backdrop itself was affected; a long report detailed instance after instance of walls that had been replastered and ceilings that had had to be shored up. That it was a result of Backdrop's work was beyond doubt: a simple analysis of the areas where damage had occurred showed steadily increasing frequency the closer to the experimental areas one got. To the experimental areas, and to Garwood's office.
And the analysis had yielded one other fact. The damage had been slowly increasing in frequency over the two years Garwood had been with Backdrop... until the point three months back when he'd left. After that, it had dropped nearly to zero.
Which meant that Garwood hadn't been lying. He was indeed at the center of what was happening.
A walking time bomb. Davidson felt a shiver run up his back. If Garwood remained at large... and if the Garwood Effect continued to increase in strength as it had over the past two years...
With a conscious effort he forced the thought from his mind. Worry of that sort would gain him nothing. Somewhere, somehow, Garwood had to have left a trail of some sort. It was up to Davidson to find it.
He fumbled for a cigarette, swore under his breath. Leaning back in his seat again, he closed his eyes. I am James Garwood, he told himself, dragging his mind away from the irritations of nicotine withdrawal and willing his thoughts to drift. I'm in hiding from the whole world. How exactly—exactly—have I pulled it off?
III
...times e to the gamma one t.
Garwood circled the last equation and laid down the pencil, and for a minute he gazed at the set of equations he'd derived. It was progress of a sort, he supposed; he had gotten rid of the gamma zero factor this time, and that was the one the computer had been having its latest conniption fits over. Maybe this time the run would yield something useful.
Or maybe this time the damn machine would just find something else to trip over.
Garwood gritted his teeth. Stop it! he ordered himself darkly. Self-pity was for children, or for failures. Not for him.
Across the tiny efficiency apartment, the computer terminal was humming patiently as it sat on the floor in the corner. Easing down into a cross-legged sitting position on the floor, Garwood consulted his paper and maneuvered his "remote arm" into position. The arm was pretty crude, as such things went: a long dowel rod reaching across the room to the terminal with a shorter one fastened to it at a right angle for actually hitting the keys, the whole contraption resting on a universal pivot about its center. But crude or not, it enabled him to enter data without getting anywhere near the terminal, with the result that this terminal had already outlasted all the others he'd used since fleeing Backdrop. He only wished he'd thought of this trick sooner.
Entering the equations was a long, painstaking job, made all the more difficult by having to watch what he was doing through a small set of opera glasses. But finally he hit the return key for the last time, keying in the simultaneous-solutions program already loaded. The terminal beeped acknowledgment, and with a grunt Garwood got stiffly back into his chair. His stomach growled as he did so, and with a mild shock he saw that it was ten-thirty. No wonder his stomach had been growling for the past hour or so. Getting up, rubbing at the cramps in his legs, he went over to the kitchen alcove.
To find that he'd once again let his supplies run below acceptable levels. "Blast," he muttered under his breath, and snared his wallet from the top of the dresser. There was a burger place a few blocks away that might still be open... but on the other hand, his wad of bills was getting dangerously thin, and when this batch was gone there wouldn't be any more. For a moment he studied the terminal's display with his opera glasses, but the lack of diagnostic messages implied that nothing immediate and obvious had tripped it up. Which meant that it would probably be chugging away happily on the equations for at least another half hour. Which meant there was plenty of time for him to skip the fast food and walk instead to the grocery store.
—
The overhead lights were humming loudly as Garwood started across the store's parking lot, and for a moment he fantasized that that he was out in some exotic wilderness, circled by giant insects made of equal parts firefly and cicada. Out in the wilderness, away from Backdrop and the curse that hounded him.
It might come to that eventually, he knew. Even if he was able to continue eluding the searchers Saunders had scouring the area, he still couldn't stay here. His carefully engineered sublet would last only another five weeks, his dwindling bankroll dropping near zero at about the same time. Leaving him a choice between surrender and finding a job.
Both of which, he knew, really boiled down to the same thing. Any job paying enough for him to live on would leave a trail of paper that would bring Saunders's people down on him in double-quick time. Not to mention the risk he would present to the people he'd be working with.
He grimaced. A walking time bomb, that Intelligence major—Davidson—had dubbed him. A part of Garwood's mind appreciated the unintended irony of such a characterization; the rest of it winced at the truth also there.
The grocery store, not surprisingly, was quiet. Wrestling a cart that seemed determined to veer to the left, he went up and down the aisles, picking out his usual selection of convenience foods and allowing his nerves to relax as much as they could. There were probably some people somewhere who truly disliked supermarkets and the efficient long-term storage of food that made them possible; but if there were, the number must be vanishingly small. As a result, grocery stores were near the top of the short list of places where Garwood could feel fairly safe. As long as he stayed away from the cigarettes and smoking paraphernalia, he could be reasonably certain that nothing would break or crumble around him.
He collected as many packages as he estimated would fit into two bags and headed for the checkout. There, the teen-aged girl manning the register—or possibly she was a college student; they all looked equally young to him these days—gave him a pleasant smile and got to work unloading his cart. Listening to the familiar beep of the laser scanner, Garwood pulled out his wallet and watched the march of prices across the display.
The cart was still half full when a jar of instant coffee failed to register. The girl tried scanning it four times, then gave up and manually keyed the UPC code into her register. The next item, a frozen dinner, was similarly ignored. As was the next item... and the next... and the next...
"Trouble?" Garwood asked, his mouth going dry.
"Scanner seems to have quit," she frowned, tapping the glass slits as if trying to get the machine's attention. "Funny—they're suppose to last longer than this."
"Well, you know how these things are," Garwood said, striving for nonchalance even as his heart began to pound in his ears.
"Yeah, but this one was just replaced Saturday. Oh, well, that's progress for you." She picked up the next item and turned back to her register.
Almost unwillingly, Garwood bent over and peered into the glass. Behind it, the laser scanner was dimly visible. Looking perfectly normal... No, he told himself firmly. No, it's just coincidence. It has to be. Nobody hates laser grocery scanners, for God's sake. But even as he fought to convince himself of that, a horrible thought occurred to him.
Perhaps it was no longer necessary for anyone to hate laser grocery scanners directly. Perhaps all it took now was enough people hating the lasers in self-guided weapons systems.