"What is it?" He looked Gideon up and down, as if trying to make sense of his appearance here.
"Doctor Michael Nolan?" Gideon asked.
"What do you want from me?" His voice was sharp, and he didn't open the door any further.
"My name's Gideon Malcolm. I'm a detective with the Washington D.C. Police Department—"
"So?"
"—I want to ask you a few questions about your work."
Nolan shook his head and began closing the door. "I'm on sabbatical."
Gideon stuck out his cast, blocking the door. "I want to know about the Evolutionary Theorems Lab."
The door stopped closing, and Nolan stared at him. "Let me see some identification."
Gideon pulled out his badge and handed it to Nolan. The man pulled out a pair of thick bifocals and stared at it. He kept shaking his head. "Why does anyone care about that anymore?" He shoved the badge back at Gideon and backed from the door so it opened fully. "Come in."
Gideon followed Nolan into the darkened house. The shades were drawn against the afternoon light, and the only lights in the living room were from a pair of low wattage table lamps flanking the couch. They didn't do much to push away the gloom. The room smelled musty, like a book that hadn't been opened in twenty years.
Nolan wore a suit that seemed a size or two too big. When he sat down, he sank into himself. He stared up at Gideon.
Gideon stood for a few moments until he realized that Nolan wasn't going to offer him a seat. Gideon took a seat in an easy chair that more-or-less faced the couch where Nolan sat. The doctor kept staring at him, through him. His face was lined with what might have been pain.
"Are you all right?" Gideon asked.
Nolan laughed. The sound was laced with an almost obnoxious irony. "Son, I had a prostate ripen way past its due. They took it out, and a rotten kidney. They didn't get it all. The cancer's going to get me within a year. I'm not all right."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't give me your damn sympathy. I don't even know you." Nolan leaned forward and said, "Now tell me what you want to know and get out of here."
"The Evolutionary Theorems Lab—"
"That thing destroyed my career."
"How?"
"The whole Riemann debacle—even after I tried to distance myself from that, no jury would publish my work. And after what Zimmerman did, I was lucky I didn't lose tenure . . ." Nolan coughed, a hacking wet cough that shook his body. "The bitch should have gone to jail."
Every instinct Gideon had as a cop told him that he was damn close. This Dr. Zimmerman woman was involved in this. Gideon felt it in the way Nolan talked about her.
Yeah, but the connection is so damn tenuous.
He had Mike. He had aleph-null. He needed more to help pull them and the Daedalus together. He leaned forward and said, "Explain to me what the lab was doing. What happened to it?"
Nolan pulled a wad of tissue from a box on an end table and wiped his face, coughing again. "Why? Why the hell should you be digging into this? Ancient history, and out of your jurisdiction."
Gideon debated if he should be completely forthcoming. Nolan was part of the ET Lab, and for all Gideon knew, he could be part of whatever was happening.
Gideon found his own paranoia disturbing, justified or not.
"Are you familiar with the recent theft of a Daedalus supercomputer outside Arlington?"
"I don't live in a cave—" He hacked into his tissue. "And you're going to explain why that has anything to do with the lab?"
"I think someone from the lab, probably more than one person, may have been involved in the theft."
Nolan shook with his ironic laugh again. "That wouldn't surprise me. God help anyone who stands between Julia and anything she wants."
Gideon looked into Nolan's face, and saw what had to be a trace of amusement. Two thoughts occurred to Gideon, one was that Nolan really hated Dr. Zimmerman. Second, that if he was involved in the theft, he was one hell of an actor.
"Tell me about the lab," Gideon said.
"Have you ever heard about the genetic algorithm?"
Gideon shook his head. "Outside a few papers I copied today, no."
"The genetic algorithm has been used for decades in the computer sciences," Nolan said. "Putting the idea in layman's terms—you start with a large pool of computer programs with random instructions. The person running the experiment grades each program proportionally on the extent each is able to complete some task. Those that grade in the top ten percent are allowed to 'breed' to create a new pool of computer programs—"
"Breed?"
"In the most basic example of the algorithm, a pair of high scoring programs are split at the same point, a point chosen at random, in their instructions. Their 'children' are produced by appending the end of one set of instructions to the beginning of the other's."
"How the hell can something like that work?"
"How does evolution work? The genetic algorithm is probably one of the most powerful computational tools developed in the past fifty years. There are trading programs on Wall Street that are generated by using a genetic algorithm. Any problem where someone can give an objective numerical score to success can be attacked with the genetic algorithm."
"So it works? Does something like this require a large computer?"
Nolan smiled, it looked like a grimace. "Like the Daedalus? No. The first practical application of the genetic algorithm was run on an Apple II. All the ET Lab's experiments were run on our own small network. Ten desktop machines, and a server running at 200 megahertz—kids play video games on faster equipment.
"What the lab was, what it did, was all thanks to Zimmerman. She was the mathematician. Everyone else was Comp. Sci. All credit, and all blame, go back to her. She came to MIT to start the lab, and I had the bad sense to hook my wagon to her star.
"She had a reputation for genius before I ever met her, and she had published papers in number theory that made a few people say she was another Ramanujan. By the time she came to me with the idea for the lab, she hadn't published anything in at least three years. At that point I didn't care about that—though I think now it may have been the first sign of her instability."
"Why's that?"
"Mathematics is one of the few sciences where publication is relatively easy. Many papers are distributed on the Internet. But here we have a reputed genius in the field, who hasn't published any original work in three years. She enters Computer Science out of left field."
"But you worked with her?"
"I'm riot a genius, Mr. Malcolm." Nolan shook his head. "My sin was to be discontented with my own mediocrity. To have someone of that reputation . . ." He shook his head. "I was a fool."
"What was she trying to do? "
"The application of the genetic algorithm to pure mathematics. She needed the lab to do what she had envisioned. She didn't, then, have the expertise in Computer Science to do it on her own."
"You make it sound as if she'd prefer to work on her own."
Nolan snorted. "That is understating Julia's arrogance by several orders of magnitude. She was working on her own in a room of twenty people. It was her own private world, and everyone was there only on her sufferance."
"But you both ran the lab—"
Nolan shook his head. "Only on paper. My work in the lab was the unenviable task of distilling the work of Julia Zimmerman and her clique into some sort of publishable form. It wasn't easy. Her disciples' work was as scattershot and random as the genetic algorithm itself."
"Disciples?"
"I'm not the only one, or the last one, to've believed in her genius strongly enough to throw a career, a life, to her whims. I just came to my senses, a little too late."