by Dan Simmons
“I guess it wouldn’t require much target practice to hit someone with a shotgun,” agreed Dar.
“More than that,” said Syd. “The sound of a pump shotgun being racked in a dark house is absolutely unmistakable. You’d be amazed the deterrent effect it can have on burglars and ne’er-do-wells.”
“Ne’er-do-wells,” repeated Dar, savoring the word. “Well, if the sound of the shotgun being racked is the important thing, one wouldn’t have to have shells for it, would one?”
Syd said nothing, but her expression showed her opinion of keeping weapons around with no ammunition.
“Actually,” said Dar, “all I’d need would be a tape recording of a shotgun being racked, wouldn’t I?”
Syd set her glass down and wandered over to Dar’s main worktable. There were few loose papers there but several paperweights—a small piston head, a small carnivore’s skull, a Disneyland paperweight with Goofy in a snowstorm, and a single, green shotgun shell.
Syd lifted the shell. “Four-ten gauge. Significance?”
Dar shrugged. “I used to have a Savage .410 over-and-under,” he said quietly. “A gift from my father right before he died. It was an antique. I left it behind in storage in Colorado.”
Syd turned the shell over and looked at the brass end. “This hasn’t been fired, but the hammer’s fallen on it. The firing pin missed the center.”
“It happened the last time I tried to fire the gun,” said Dar even more quietly. “The only time that weapon ever misfired.”
Syd stood holding the shell and looking at Dar for a long moment before setting it down under the windowsill. “That shell is still dangerous, you know.”
Dar raised his eyebrows.
“I know from your file that you were in the Marines…in Vietnam. You must have been very young.”
“Not so young,” said Dar. “I’d already graduated from college by the time I enlisted and was sent over there in 1974. Besides, there wasn’t much for us to do that last year except listen to bits of the Watergate hearings on armed forces radio and go around the countryside picking up the M-16s and other weapons that the ARVNs—the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, our team—were dropping as they ran away from the North Vietnamese regulars.”
“You graduated from college when you were eighteen,” said Syd. “What were you…a prodigy?”
“An overachiever,” said Dar.
“Why the Marines?” asked Syd.
“Would you believe it was out of sentiment?” asked Dar. “Because my father had been a Marine in the real war… World War II?”
“I believe that he was a Marine,” said Syd, “but I don’t believe that’s the reason you enlisted in that service.”
Correct, thought Dar. Aloud he said, “Actually, it was partially to get my service out of the way and get back to the States for graduate school, and partially out of sheer perversity.”
“How so?” said Syd. She had finished her Scotch. Dar poured her another two fingers.
Dar hesitated and then realized that he was going to tell her the truth…sort of. “As a kid, I was obsessed with the Greeks,” said Dar. “The obsession lasted through college, even while I was pursuing a degree in physics. All of the liberal arts majors were studying ancient Athens—you know, sculpture, democracy, Socrates—while I was always obsessed with Sparta.”
Syd looked quizzical. “War?”
Dar shook his head. “Not war, although that’s all the Spartans are remembered for. The Spartans were the only society I knew of that made a science out of the study of fear—they called it phobologia. Their training—which began at a young age—was all geared at recognizing fear, phobos, and defeating it. They even taught of parts of the body that were phobosynakteres—places where fear accumulated—and trained their young men, their warriors, to be able to put their minds and bodies in a state of aphobia.”
“Fearlessness,” translated Syd.
Dar frowned. “Yes and no,” he said. “There are different forms of fearlessness. A berserker warrior or a Japanese samurai caught up in mindless rage, or, for that matter, a Palestinian terrorist on a bus with a bomb, they’re all fearless—that is, they don’t fear their own deaths. But the Spartans wanted something more.”
“What could be better for a warrior than fearlessness?” asked Syd.
“The Greeks, the Spartans, called such fearlessness brought on by rage or anger katalepsis,” said Dar. “Literally, being possessed by a daemon—a loss of control by the mind. They spurned that completely. Their hoped-for aphobia was a completely…well, controlled, minded thing—a refusal to become absorbed and possessed, even in the midst of battle.”
“And did you learn aphobia in the Marines…in Vietnam?” said Syd.
“Nope. I was scared shitless every second I was in Vietnam.”
“Did you see much action there?” asked Syd, her eyes intent. “Your Marine Corps files are still classified. That must mean something.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he lied. “For example, if I was a clerk typist and typed a lot of classified material, you wouldn’t be able to get access to my files.”
“Were you a clerk typist?”
Dar held his Scotch glass in both hands. “Not all of the time.”
“So you saw combat?”
“Enough to know that I never wanted to see any again,” said Dar truthfully.
“But you’re comfortable around weapons,” said Syd, getting to the point.
Dar made a face and sipped his whiskey.
“What kind of weapon were you issued in the Marines?” asked Syd.
“Some sort of rifle,” said Dar. He did not enjoy discussing firearms.
“Then an M-sixteen,” said Syd.
“Which all have a tendency to jam if not kept perfectly clean,” said Dar, a bit disingenuously. He had not been issued an M-16. His spotter had carried an accurized M-14—an older weapon, but one that shared the same 7.62 millimeter ammunition as the bolt-action Remington 700 M40 that Dar had trained with. And train he had—120 rounds a day, six days a week, until he was able to hit a man-sized moving target at five hundred yards and a stationary one at one thousand.
He finished his Scotch. “If you’re trying to palm a handgun off on me, forget it, Chief Investigator. I hate the goddamn things.”
“Even when the Russian mafia’s trying to kill you?”
“They tried to kill me,” corrected Dar. “And I still think it may have been a case of mistaken identity.”
Syd nodded. “But you’ve handled weapons,” she persisted. “You were taught what to do if a shell misfired…”
Dar looked up at her. “Aim your weapon at a safe, neutral target and wait. It may still fire without warning.”
Syd pointed to the. 410 shell. “Should we throw that away?”
“No,” said Dar.
They each had a final glass of Scotch and watched the fire. The bit of smoke that stayed in the room was aromatic, mixing with the smoky peat taste of the whiskey.
The tension of the earlier conversation had almost disappeared. They were talking shop.
“Did you hear about the directive from the last political appointee to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency?” asked Syd.
Dar chuckled. “Absolutely. The word accident is never to be used in any official reports, correspondence, and/or memos.”
“Doesn’t that seem a little odd?”
“Not at all,” said Dar. A log broke and crumbled into embers and he glanced at it for a second before looking back at his guest. Syd’s face appeared younger and softer in the firelight, her eyes as alive and intelligent as always. “You have to follow their chain of logic,” he said. “All accidents are avoidable. Therefore they shouldn’t happen. Therefore the agency can’t use the word accident—they don’t exist. They have to circumlocute and say crash or incident or whatever.”
“Do you agree that all accidents are avoidable?” asked Syd.
Dar laughed heartily. “Anyone w
ho’s ever investigated an accident…whether it’s the space shuttle or some poor schmuck who runs a yellow light and gets broadsided…knows that they’re not only not avoidable, they’re inevitable.”
“How so?” said Syd.
Dar looked at her. “They happened. The probability of the series of events that led up to the accident may each be a thousand to one, or a million to one, but once those events occur in the right sequence, the accident is one hundred percent inevitable.”
Syd nodded but did not look convinced.
“All right,” said Dar, “take the Challenger accident. NASA had become the careless driver who runs yellow lights. You get away with it once—five times—twenty times—and pretty soon you assume it’s a natural and safe behavior. But if you keep driving, the odds of being hit by some other sonofabitch with the same intersection philosophy become almost one hundred percent.”
“How was NASA taking extra risks?”
Dar shrugged. “The Commission documented it pretty well. They knew about the O-ring problem—even the Crit-One severity of it—but didn’t fix it. They knew that cold weather made the O-ring problem much worse, but launched anyway. They violated at least twenty of their own no-go guidelines because that teacher was on board, and they were feeling political pressure to get her launched into orbit so President Reagan could mention it in his State of the Union Address that evening. The odds caught up to them.”
“You believe in odds, then?” said Syd. “Do you believe in anything else?”
Dar looked at her quizzically. “Are you asking me a philosophical question, Chief Investigator?”
“I’m just curious,” said Syd, swallowing the last of her whiskey. “You see so many accidents, so much carnage. I wonder what philosophical framework you apply to it.”
Dar thought a moment. “The Stoics, I guess,” he said. “Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius and his ilk.” He chuckled. “The one time I ever felt political enough to drive to Washington and throw a brick at the White House was when Bill Clinton was asked what the most important book was that he’d read recently—and he said Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.” He chuckled again. “That love-handled mass of appetites…quoting Marcus Aurelius.”
“But what do you believe?” pressed Syd. “Other than a Stoic point of view.” She paused a moment and recited quietly, “‘To the rational creature, only the irrational is unbearable; the rational he can always bear. Blows are not by nature intolerable.’”
Dar stared at her. “You can quote Epictetus.”
“So would you say that’s your philosophy?” repeated Syd.
Dar set his empty glass down and steepled his fingers, tapping his lower lip. The dying fire crumbled again and the embers glowed in their final brightness. “Larry’s older brother, a writer who lived in Montana until his marriage broke up, came to visit several years ago; I got to know him a bit. Later I saw him interviewed on TV and he was asked about his philosophy; his novel was about the Catholic Church, and the interviewer kept pressing him on his own beliefs.”
Syd waited.
“Larry’s brother—Dale’s his name—was going through a rough patch then. In response to the question, he quoted John Updike. The quote went something like—‘I am neither musical nor religious; each time I set my fingers down it is without confidence of hearing a chord.’”
“That’s sad,” said Syd at last.
Dar smiled. “It was Larry’s brother quoting another writer—I didn’t say it’s what I believe. I subscribe to Occam’s Razor.”
“William of Occam,” said Syd. “What…fifteenth century?”
“Fourteenth,” said Dar.
“Maxim,” continued Syd. “The assumptions introduced to explain a thing must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”
“Or,” said Dar, “all other things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the right one.”
“Rules out alien abduction,” laughed Syd.
“Area Fifty-one, kaput,” said Dar.
“Kennedy conspiracy shit…adios,” said Syd, her smile very wide.
“Oliver Stone, bye-bye,” agreed Dar.
Syd paused. “Did you know you’re famous for Darwin’s Blade?”
“For what?” said Dar, blinking in surprise.
“Some statement you made a few years ago—I think it was at the meeting of the National Association of Insurance Investigators.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Dar, putting his hand over his eyes.
“You had a corollary to Occam’s Razor,” persisted Syd. “I think it went—‘All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity.’”
“Which is stupidly obvious,” muttered Dar.
Syd nodded slowly. “No, I know what you were saying. It’s like those guys in the pickup trying to crash that rock concert…”
Dar suddenly looked over at the box of files and stacks of Zip drives and floppy disks that still awaited them. “Maybe we’ve been looking for the wrong thing in our files,” he said.
Syd cocked her head.
“Maybe it’s not my investigation of stupid accidents—even fatal ones—that drew someone’s attention to me,” he said. “Maybe it’s murder.”
“Have you solved a murder recently?” said Syd. “Other than the Phong swoop-and-squat, I mean.”
Dar nodded.
“And are you going to share it?” said Syd.
Dar glanced at his watch. “Yeah. Tomorrow.”
“You bastard,” said Chief Investigator Olson, but she said it with a smile. “Thanks for the Scotch.”
Dar walked her to the door.
Syd paused. Dar had the sudden, wild thought that she was going to kiss him.
“Sleeping up in my wonderful sheep wagon,” she said, “how will I know if the bad guys have come and you’re in deep shit?”
Dar reached under a heavy coat on a wall hook and pulled down a bright orange whistle on a string. “It’s for hiking, in case you get lost in the woods. You can hear this damned whistle two miles away.”
“Like a rape whistle,” said Syd.
“Yeah.”
“Well, if the murderers show up tonight, just whistle.” She paused and Dar could see a glint of mischief in her blue eyes. “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?”
Dar grinned. The nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall had said the line to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. He loved that movie.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just put my lips together and blow.”
Syd nodded and went up the path with her flashlight, blowing out each lantern as she passed.
Dar watched until she was out of sight.
CHAPTER NINE
“I IS FOR WITNESS”
SYD CAME KNOCKING early on Saturday morning, but Dar was already up, showered, shaved, and with coffee and breakfast ready. Syd ate bacon and eggs happily and refilled her coffee cup twice.
Before starting work, Dar took her on a long walking tour of the property: the ravine to the east with its abandoned gold mine, the stream that fed into the canyon, the small waterfall up the hill bridged by a fallen tree that looked too slick and mossy to cross, the rock slabs and boulders along the high ridge to the north, the stands of birch trees and acres of thick pine on the hillside just above the cabin, and the endless fields of grass in the valley below. All during the walk, Dar felt the same pleasure that had shocked him so much the night before—the strange awareness of Syd’s physical self, the warmth of her smile, the glow that her tone of voice and laughter gave him.
Cut it out, Darwin, he warned himself.
“I know this is a forbidden question between men and women anymore,” said Syd, stopping and looking straight at him, “but what are you thinking about, Dar? I can hear the gears meshing from two feet away.”
She was only two feet away. When Dar stopped, he almost surrendered to the urge to put his arms around her, draw her closer, set his face against the curve of her neck just beneath her ear, just where her hair curled onto her neck, jus
t to breathe in her fragrance.
“Billy Jim Langley,” he said at last, taking half a step back.
Syd cocked her head.
Dar pointed to the south. “An accident I worked a year or so ago way back in the national forest there. Want to hear it? Want to solve it?”
“Sure.”
Dar cleared his throat. “OK—I was called out to the scene of a suspected homicide about five miles back in the woods there—”
“This isn’t the murder you promised me last night, is it?”
Dar shook his head. “Anyway, a Mr. Billy James Langley, one of Larry and Trudy’s CalState insureds, was reported missing a day after he should have returned from a fishing trip. The sheriff drove back toward Billy Jim’s favorite fishing hole and found his pickup—a seventy-eight Ford 250—upside down in a creek. Billy Jim was inside. Drowned. It looked as if he had run off a little bridge in the darkness the night before and not been able to get out of the cab of the pickup in time. The coroner confirmed the time.”
“Where’s the suspected homicide?” she asked.
“Well, when the coroner removed Billy Jim’s body,” said Dar, “he pronounced the cause of death as drowning. But it seems as if Billy Jim had also been shot with a 22-caliber bullet…”
“Where?” said Syd.
“While driving his truck,” said Dar.
“No, I mean where on his body?”
Dar hesitated. “Once. In the…ah…groin area.”
“Testicles?” said Syd.
“One of them.”
“Left or right testicle?” said Syd.
“Do you think it matters?” said Dar.
“Doesn’t it?”
“Well, yes, but…”
“Left or right?” said Syd.
“Right,” said Dar. “Can I get on with the story?”
They walked down the hill together.
“OK,” said Syd, “we have a Mr. Billy James Langley coming back from a fishing trip in the dark. Suddenly he gets shot in the right ball and—not surprisingly—is startled enough to drive his pickup into the creek and then drowns. Let me guess: no. 22 rifle or pistol in the pickup?”
“Right,” said Dar.
“Entrance or exit holes in the truck?” said Syd. “It’d have to be a pretty flimsy pickup to let a .22 pass through, and Ford 250s aren’t flimsy.”
