Class Fives: Origins Page 9

  “And you can’t… turn it off. Stop it.”

  Roger shook his head.

  “No. But I’m aware of it. I’m very careful. Every minute of every day. If I slip, if I let myself forget about it…”

  “Right,” Dan responded quietly. “Like I said. It must be Hell.”

  Roger actually smiled.

  “You haven’t a clue,” he said sadly.

  They sat in silence for several minutes, then Roger looked up at Dan, his expression growing tense again.

  “So what now?” he said flatly.

  Dan drew in a thoughtful breath and gave a small shrug.

  “Now,” he responded, “I have to figure out how to explain how I lost you. We’re not supposed to do that… lose people we go after. But don’t worry about that. I’m pretty good at fudging paperwork. And those police radios can sure suck sometimes.”

  Roger’s brow furrowed.

  “You’re not going to try to turn me in?”

  “For what? Saving a couple of kid’s lives? Sorry, but I don’t think that’s even a misdemeanor.”

  “I don’t understand,” Roger replied. “Why’d you chase me down?”

  Dan felt a twinge of embarrassment, and leaned forward, planting his elbows on the table and fixing on Roger intently.

  “I really did just want to thank you. I know, I should report it to somebody, although how I’d explain it I don’t even want to think about. But you didn’t do anything wrong. You did a good thing. No, a great thing. And you didn’t have to. You could have just kept driving. But you didn’t. You stopped. And you helped. You shouldn’t be punished for that, or have your life screwed up because of it. But I hope you’ll think about it. I hope you realize how proud you should be of it. Not it, but what you did. You’re a special man, Roger. And you should be proud of who you are.”

  He could see the moisture collecting in the other man’s eyes just before Roger turned his head away as if to look across the room, and blinked rapidly.

  “Look,” Dan said, reaching into his shirt pocket and retrieving one of his business cards, “This is my work number. My cell number is on the back. If you ever need anything, or just want to talk, which I don’t guess you have much chance to do, especially about this, then you call me, okay? I’m serious.”

  Roger nodded sharply, now shifting in his seat as if unsure whether he should bolt for the door or not.

  Dan slid from the booth, dug into his pocket to extract a few bills and place them on the table.

  “I’m very honored to have met you, Roger. You take care, all right?”

  Roger looked up at him, and a slow half-smile gripped the corner of his mouth.

  “Every single minute of my life,” he said.

  Dan gave one final nod of farewell, turned and walked away.

  After he had gone, Roger slid carefully from the booth so as not to shred it with an uncontrolled, sudden motion and turned toward the door. Then he stopped, turned back to look at the table and, after a moment's hesitation, carefully plucked up the card and slid it into his pocket.

  Dan was trembling by the time he reached the cruiser, and after he slipped the key into the ignition, he had to settle back against the seat and let himself calm down.

  My God, he thought, it was incredible. The kind of thing that, if you hadn’t seen it yourself, would make you wonder what the person telling it to you was smoking.

  He had seen a true act of superhuman heroism. He’d watched this ordinary man, who just wanted to be left alone to live a normal life, throw away his anonymity and save a pair of children from a death so horrible Dan couldn’t even conceive of it without feeling sick. He had saved those little lives. He had done the very thing Dan had always longed to be able to do, the kind of thing that had made him join the police force in the first place. And the guy didn’t want it. Amazing.

  But then, if he really was trapped inside this incredible thing, unable to shut it off, give it up, even for a little while, just so he could have a normal life… if it forced him to a never-ending vigil, watching every motion, every touch, because if he slipped for one instant he might literally kill someone, then his life must be an unending nightmare.

  That was the concept that he simply couldn’t process, a side of that longed-for fantasy of power and responsibility he had never even thought of before now. We think the hero is this upstanding, happy figure of goodness and justice. We never consider that he may go home and spend the night sobbing his eyes out at the pure misery of his own existence.

  My God, he thought. My God in Heaven.

  And then the image popped into his mind and he groaned.

  “Oh shit. Jim.”

  What would Jim have told the back-up when it arrived? And what would it sound like to them?

  Well, Dan reasoned, he would tell them it just looked like the guy had walked into that inferno and pulled it apart with his bare hands. But that was, of course, impossible. Most likely he was one of the victims, who had managed to wriggle out of his vehicle, crawl out of the wreckage and run off. Some idiot had stopped to do a Lookie-Lou at the carnage and stupidly left his car just sitting there, in the middle of the highway. And this guy, this dazed, hysterical survivor, had jumped in it and roared off to God knows where.

  It was a ridiculous story, totally incredible. But they would accept it, because they had themselves surely seen some crazy things while working on various cases of their own. And if the alternative was some guy pulling cars around like they were candy wrappers, then they’d jump on the survivor idea like rats on cheese.

  Okay, he told himself. He had to get back, start trying to straighten the whole mess out.

  He leaned forward to turn the key, gunning the engine to life, and then hesitated.

  Oh Hell, he told himself, and reached to where the small notebook and pen were tucked into the little indentation beneath the dashboard.

  He wrote down the license plate number of the car that he had followed to this diner, feeling both logical and ashamed at what, now that he’d met the guy, seemed a betrayal, and silently hoped Roger would call him some time.

  Then he put the pen and notebook aside, dropped the cruiser into gear and pulled out of the lot.

  4

  Noticed

  Marvin stepped back from the long blackboard that made up the wall of this classroom, and stared at the equations. He took them in, operation by operation, letting his mind settle them into the chain of events they represented, making sure each one fit snugly with the one preceding it before turning his attention to the next.

  So far it was all pretty routine, he reasoned. The forces all balanced, the effect followed what was expected. The math seemed to work. Right up until that one operation smack in the middle of the calculation. That was where it all broke down. From that point onwards the numbers seemed to crumple like powder, into meaningless nonsense, and what came out at the far end was little more than gibberish, ending in a final result of infinity. In physics a result of infinity was, essentially, a non-result, utterly meaningless or, at least, completely useless. The very idea itself invalidated the entire formula, or in the current case, everything beyond that flawed operation.

  He’d been trying to see if some other concept might replace it and make the calculations fall into line, but so far nothing was even remotely relevant to the problem he was attempting, for going into a second week now, to solve. And every avenue he tried just slammed him into a metaphorical brick wall of meaningless numbers.

  Even attempting to fudge the numbers representing the mass, which drove the entire formula, seemed only to throw the final result further and further off-target. Which had to mean that whatever it was that had erupted from somewhere on the planet three and a half decades ago, it wasn’t Dark Matter. Dark Energy, perhaps, he mused? That equally mysterious something that worked on, and through, the mass that Dark Matter surely was. But he had no means of even calculating how to represent it here in this lengthy scribble of symbols and numbers. No
one had ever managed to measure it, witness its direct effects, or pick it apart to the point of knowing what units to count it in. If Dark Matter was, at least, noticeable by its gravitational effects on objects in the visible universe, Dark Energy was a complete mystery. It was a crude place-holder, the mathematical equivalent of a glaring question mark, stuck into a formula to simply keep it temporarily propped up until enlightenment of some kind revealed itself elsewhere in the calculations. For what Marvin was attempting, it was worse than useless.

  He had already run and rerun the software, letting the swirling cascade of numbers track their way back along the path the unknown force, which had scattered the now-errant asteroids, had come from and the system had finally stated, definitively, that at the moment it would have been emitted, it was the Euro-Asian continent that had been pointed to that portion of the sky.

  So it had originated in Russia. Either seemed possible, and as the software was only making a very educated guess to where this mystery force had spewed from, it would be impossible to narrow down the specific origin location any further.

  Just to be certain, he had already used his security clearance to obtain logs of all emissions, all readings of any significant energy, that might have been recorded from the Eurasian continent for the entire decade surrounding the date the software said the discharge would have occurred. But there had been nothing. No burst of electromagnetic energy or radiation of any kind had been picked up by the constantly watching satellites that remained parked over that landmass, suspiciously scanning for anything of note. There weren’t even any rocket launches within a month to either side of the date the software kept insisting was when the stream of energy had been unleashed.

  His features slowly screwed up into a sour expression and he stepped back up to the blackboard, dropping the little fragment of chalk into the tray that hung below the flat, wide piece of slate.

  At this rate, he realized, he would never figure it out. And there was something about it that was telling him this was something he really should try to understand. That was important, not just for its scientific mystery, but for the uncomfortable possibilities it caused to flit through his mind.

  An energy powerful enough to literally knock asteroids, millions of miles away, out of their orbits, yet was utterly undetectable by current scientific instrumentation, would give anyone pause. As one of the people charged with scanning the endless skies to try and alert all of humanity about an approaching cosmic threat, it was positively unsettling.

  It had to be Dark Energy, he told himself again, feeling the thought burrow further into his mind, rooting itself, slowly making itself something as close to a solid fact as the unprovable could ever be. And if that’s what it was, and if somehow someone had managed to find a way to control it, unleash it, then there was no telling what kind of universal havoc could be wrought by its misuse, or worse, by design.

  At last he heaved a tired sigh, turned and moved to the door, leaving the hopelessly crippled equations stuck uselessly to the dark surface.

  The moment he reached his office just down the corridor he picked up the phone and dialed. It was answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?” the familiar voice said crisply through the flatness of the little speaker next to his ear.

  Marvin felt a tiny flush of some good feeling, comfort and relief, at the sound of the reedy tone with its moderate Germanic accent,

  “Professor Manstein, hi. It’s Marvin Henry. How are you?”

  “Marvin!” the voice brightened instantly. “My dear boy, I’m quite well. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, Professor, thank you. Listen, the reason I was calling was…”

  His voice trailed off as he suddenly realized he didn’t quite know how to ask what he wanted to.

  Would it be a security violation to even broach the subject with his old teacher? Was someone even now listening in on the conversation, sitting in some little room somewhere and keeping an eye on what he said, whom he talked to?

  Marvin knew his beloved former instructor was no more a security risk than he was himself. The old man had managed to escape from East Germany decades before, and had found a home here in the United States before Marvin himself was even born. And the work he had done for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had been crucial in getting human beings access to the vast reaches of the empty Heavens.

  “My boy?” the voice coaxed gently, “Are you all right?”

  Marvin shook himself to fling off the distracting thoughts that were beginning to collect in his mind, and fixed his attention on the problem he faced.

  “No, I’m fine, Professor. Listen, I’m going to be in your area tomorrow, and I was wondering if I could meet up with you for a bit. I have something I wanted to run past you, get your thoughts on it.”

  “Of course, Marvin, I’d be delighted to see you again. Tomorrow, you say?”

  Marvin quickly calculated that he could catch the first flight out in the morning, land in New York and make his way over to Princeton by early afternoon.

  “Yes,” he responded brightly, “I thought we could grab something to eat and catch up, if you’re free. Say, around five tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Certainly, my boy, I would be delighted. You know I always have time for my favorite students.”

  The old man’s chuckle caused Marvin’s lips to quiver up in a half-grin.

  “All right, then. Anywhere in particular we should meet?”

  “There’s a brand new restaurant just off campus, I believe it is called ‘Eddie’s Place’. We could meet there. I hear they have a very satisfying assortment of pastas I’ve been meaning to try.”

  “Okay, Eddie’s Place. I can look it up. Well, then I will see you tomorrow at five o’clock.”

  “I’m looking forward to it, dear boy.”

  “Me too, Professor.”

  After a brief, slightly awkward pause the voice probed gently.

  “So, everything is going well for you these days? You are enjoying your new position out there in the wilderness?”

  Marvin emitted a quiet laugh.

  “Yes, Professor, it’s nice out here. Good clean air. Almost no light pollution.”

  “Ah, I envy you. Around here the night sky is like bean soup. I can’t see a thing, not even with the fifty-inch scope. The only data I can get anymore is from those damned radio telescopes from the Bell labs, and I hate not being able to actually see what’s going on up there.”

  “I know what you mean, Professor. A lot of what I get is non-visible and it kind of takes all the fun out of it, you know?”

  “I do indeed, my boy. Ah, if only we could have another major blackout, I might actually get to see something exciting again.”

  “Listen, Professor, I have to go for now, but I will meet you at Eddie’s Place tomorrow at five PM, all right?”

  “Of course, Marvin. I look forward to it.”

  “Wonderful. Take care, Professor.”

  “And you, Marvin.”

  Marvin hung up, letting his mind pore over the gathering thoughts.

  Professor Maxwell Manstein had been one of the titans of astronomy and physics, having come into his own after being schooled under Werner Heisenberg himself, the man who had developed the Uncertainty Principle, which said that when observing subatomic particles, one could either determine where they were or which direction they were traveling, but never both. That the very act of observing events on those minute levels automatically changed the outcome. After graduating at the head of his class, Manstein had transferred to Leipzig where he was put to work helping the scientists there work out the calculations needed to develop a new generation of rockets whose purpose was, he later learned, little more than an attempt to deliver atomic weapons to targets around the world more efficiently.

  After a decade of toiling on this hateful effort, he had managed to slip across the border to the west and settled in the United States, quickly being incorporated into the theoretical team
working at NASA. After a distinguished career serving his new homeland, he had semi-retired to a tenured chair of Astronomy at Princeton University in New Jersey, the same college where Albert Einstein had spent the concluding years of his celebrated career.

  Now the old man was retired but was often presented as a guest lecturer for many of the science courses offered by the Ivy League university. Marvin had been drawn to the man’s energy, his boundless imagination and his wry sense of humor. They had formed a kind of bond as Mentor and Apprentice - which seemed to fulfill something in both of them - and had kept in touch over the years.

  Now Marvin needed the old man’s help.

  He wondered if he should now call and report the pending meeting to someone at the Pentagon, but quickly dismissed the thought. If the Professor couldn’t help him then there would be nothing to report. But if he could, the information he got would be more critical than simply a casual mention of an unstructured meeting with an old friend.

  He glanced at his watch, then picked up the phone to call the travel office at the university administration building, wondering if he would eventually be able to expense the trip back to the government.

  The moment his backside dropped into the passenger’s seat of the cruiser, and he had pulled the door closed with a slam, Jim was already whirling to where Dan sat behind the wheel, and balled his hand up into a frustrated fist.

  “All right,” he said hotly, “What the fuck was that in there?”

  Dan raised an arm and flapped it gently, if not to silence his partner, at least to fend off his anger momentarily.

  “I know, let me explain.”

  “You damn well better,” Jim fumed, pushing back against the seat, his temper simmering.

  It had been a rough afternoon for both of them.

  After he had left Roger and returned to the accident site, Dan hadn’t had a chance to get his partner aside and agree on how this most bizarre of incidents needed to be explained to those in the various departments that had been pulled into dealing with it, before Jim had been ordered by the Lieutenant to escort the woman and her kids to the hospital and take their statement there, while Dan remained on the scene to coordinate the various complicated elements that always arose in the wake of unforeseen disaster.