The Footprints of God

by Greg Iles

  A sentry buzzed open the archway door, and I walked up to the security desk, my face revealing none of the anxiety I felt.

  “Morning, Doc,” said a middle-aged guard named Henry.

  I sometimes thought Henry had been hired through central casting. The other security personnel were all in their late twenties, lean young men and women with smooth faces, avian eyes, and zero body fat. Only Henry, the gate man, ever said a word of greeting.

  “Good morning, Henry,” I said.

  “There’s a meeting in the conference room at nine.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You got four minutes.”

  I looked at my watch and nodded.

  “Still can’t get over Professor Fielding,” Henry said. “They say he was dead before the ambulance got here.”

  I took a careful breath. This exchange was being recorded by hidden cameras. “That’s the way it goes sometimes with strokes.”

  “Not a bad way to go out. Quick, I mean.”

  I forced a smile, then laid the pad of my right forefinger on a small scanner. After the unit beeped for a match, I passed through the gauntlet of threat-detection equipment and took the stairs to the fifth floor, which housed the administrative offices and conference room.

  Yellow police tape stretched across the closed door to Fielding’s office. Who had put it there? Surely the NSA hadn’t allowed local or state police to enter this facility. Glancing up and down the empty corridor, I quickly tried the knob. Locked. And not with some lightweight mechanism from a hardware store. If Fielding’s pocket watch was inside his office, I couldn’t get it.

  I walked a few doors down to my own office, closed the door, and sat down at my primary computer. Part of a closed network that served only the Trinity scientists, it had no connection to the outside world. To access the Internet, I had to use a second computer that had no ports or drives through which files could be exported from the building.

  My primary screen showed one interoffice e-mail: a reminder of the meeting scheduled to begin in the conference room in two minutes. With a macabre chill I realized that I’d half-expected a humorous e-mail from Fielding. He often sent me little jokes or ironic quotes from dead scientists or philosophers: Scientists over 60 do more harm than good!—T. H. Huxley—like that. But today there was no message. And there would never be another. I looked blankly around my office. Fielding was gone, and I was profoundly disoriented. Together, we had stopped Project Trinity for six tense weeks, angering our colleagues while we tried in vain to discover the cause of the MRI side effects experienced by the six Trinity principals. Today that issue remained unresolved.

  I hadn’t volunteered to be scanned by the Super-MRI unit out of stupidity. The theory was simple: since Homo sapiens had evolved in the earth’s magnetic field, an MRI’s magnetic energy did not pose a health risk. This had been proved countless times by conventional MRI machines, which generated fields thirty thousand times more powerful than that of the earth. But the Super-MRI developed at Trinity—using superconductivity and colossal magnets—generated fields up to eight hundred thousand times greater than that of the earth. Gross side effects such as tissue-heating had been solved in animal tests, but within days after undergoing our “superscans,” all of us had begun experiencing disturbing neurological symptoms.

  Jutta Klein, the designer of the Super-MRI, suffered short-term memory loss. Ravi Nara endured extreme sexual compulsions (he had several times been caught masturbating in his office and in the rest room). John Skow developed hand tremors, and Godin himself had suffered epileptic seizures. Fielding had developed, of all things, a form of Tourette’s syndrome and frequently blurted out inappropriate words or phrases. And I had narcolepsy.

  Ravi Nara, our Nobel-winning neurologist, could find no medical explanation for this sudden flurry of symptoms, so all Super-MRI scanning had temporarily been halted. Work on the Trinity computer continued, but with the Super-MRI removed from the chain, Godin’s engineers had only the six original scans to work from, and no one knew whether those were of sufficient resolution to “make the leap” into the prototype computer. With Nara at a loss, Fielding began investigating the side effects in his spare time. Six weeks later, he suggested that they had been caused by a disruption of quantum processes in our brains—and backed up his theory with twenty pages of complex mathematics. Nara argued that nothing in the history of neuroscience suggested that the human brain carried out quantum processes. Only a few physicists subscribed to this “New Age” theory of consciousness—Roger Penrose among them—yet Fielding toiled on, trying to prove his theory.

  Peter Godin initially supported Fielding, but before long he resumed MRI testing on primates. Chimps and orangutans suffered no ill effects. Fielding argued that primates weren’t conscious in the human sense, and thus their brains had no quantum processes to be disrupted. Godin ignored him. I then reported Fielding’s suspicions to the president, who officially suspended the project pending an exhaustive investigation of the side effects.

  That was six weeks ago. Since then, Fielding and I had worked almost around the clock to prove his theory of quantum disturbance. I felt like an assistant to Albert Einstein, sharpening pencils and taking notes while the genius worked beside me. Yet despite Fielding’s formidable intellect, he could not prove his theory. Too much remained unknown about the brain. Now he was dead, and without a demonstrable link between the MRI unit and our “side effects,” I couldn’t hope to hold back the collective tide of wills set on resuming the project. Without proof of foul play, Trinity would continue.

  The battle would begin in minutes, after a few hollow words of regret over Fielding’s “untimely passing.” Perspiration filmed my face as I walked toward the conference room door.

  The room was empty.

  I had never arrived first at a meeting. The other principals were compulsively punctual. I poured coffee from the urn on the credenza, then sat at the far end of the table and tried to stay calm.

  Where the hell was everybody? Watching me from the security room? Where would they hide the camera? Behind a picture? Hanging to my right was a rare black-and-white photograph of the core physicists of the Manhattan Project: Oppenheimer, Szilard, Fermi, Wigner, Edward Teller. They stood in a friendly knot before the Oscura mountains of New Mexico, giants of science, each destined for fame or infamy, depending on one’s point of view. Some, like the hawkish Teller, had wound up wreathed in glory and the flag; others were not so fortunate. Oppy was stripped by lesser men of the security clearance he needed to work, and lived but a shadow of the life he might have had. But in 1944 they stood together, wearing dark European suits in the stark white sand of the desert. They gazed over the Trinity conference table like patron saints, their eyes communicating an inscrutable combination of humor, humility, and hard-won wisdom. The only Trinity scientist who displayed those qualities had died yesterday on his office floor.

  Voices filtered from the hallway into the conference room. I straightened in my chair as my colleagues began to trickle in with an air of forced casualness. I had a feeling they had just adjourned a private meeting whose only order of business had been “handling” me.

  First in line was Jutta Klein, the team’s sole woman. Chief research scientist for the Siemens Corporation in Germany, the gray-haired Klein—also a Nobel laureate, in physics—had been loaned to Trinity for the duration of the project. With assistance from Fielding and a team of engineers from General Electric, she had designed and built the fourth-generation Super-MRI machine. Now she oversaw the smooth operation of the temperamental behemoth.

  “Guten Morgen,” she said stiffly, and sat at my right, her matronly face impossible to read.

  “Morgen,” I replied.

  Ravi Nara followed Klein through the door. He sat three chairs away from me, emphasizing the distance that had recently marked our relationship. The young Indian neurologist held a chocolate doughnut in one brown hand, but his right protruded from a cast. I suppressed a smile. Fo
ur days ago, he had taken a coffee mug partly made of lead into the Super-MRI room and set it on a counter. When Klein activated the machine for a test on a chimpanzee, the mug had flown across the room and smashed Nara’s arm against the machine’s housing, shattering his ulna. Klein told him to consider himself lucky. On the day the Super-MRI went operational, a technician on loan from Siemens had been killed by a metallic EKG cart that slammed her against the machine and crushed her skull.

  “Good morning, David.”

  I looked up to see the trim, Brooks Brothers–clad figure of John Skow take the chair at the head of the table. A deputy director of the NSA, Skow was America’s foremost authority on information warfare, and the titular director of Project Trinity. Yet it was Peter Godin who determined the direction and pace of Trinity research. The relationship between Skow and Godin mirrored that of General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. Groves had been a ruthless taskmaster, but without Oppenheimer’s cooperation, he could never have delivered the atomic bomb. So, the ultimate power had lain with the civilian scientist, not the soldier.

  “Skow,” I said, not even attempting a smile.

  “Yesterday was a terrible blow to all of us,” he intoned in his aristocratic Boston accent, his thin lips barely moving. “But I know it’s a particular loss for you, David.”

  I searched for genuine grief in his voice. The NSA man was a practiced bureaucrat, and his sincerity was hard to gauge.

  “Peter will be here in a moment,” he said. “I guess he’ll be the tardy boy from now on.”

  I smiled inside. In the past, Fielding had always been last to arrive, when he bothered to show up at all. Some days he went AWOL, and I would be sent in search of him. I usually found him poring over equations in his office.

  A faint curse drifted through the open door, announcing Peter Godin’s approach. Trinity’s lead scientist suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and merely walking was a burden to him on some days. At seventy-one years old, Godin was by far the senior scientist on the project. Vacuum-tube computing machines had not even existed when he was born, yet for the past forty years, the “old man” of Trinity had pushed the envelope of digital computing further and faster than any CRT-dazed savant who ever skateboarded out of Silicon Valley.

  Like Seymour Cray—the father of the supercomputer—Godin had been one of the original engineers at Control Data Systems in the early 1950s. In 1957, he left the company with Seymour to help found Cray Research. Godin had been part of the teams that built the famed 6600 and the Cray 1, but when Cray began to lose control of the bloated Cray 2 project, Godin decided the time had come to step out of his mentor’s shadow. He quietly made the rounds of investment bankers, raised $6 million, and sixty days later opened the doors of Godin Supercomputing in Mountain View, California. While Seymour struggled to bring the revolutionary Cray 2 into being, Godin and a tiny team built an elegant and reliable four-processor machine that outperformed the Cray 1 by a speed factor of six. It wasn’t a revolutionary advance, but it was one government weapons labs were willing to pay for. At $8 million per machine, Godin quickly paid off his debts and began designing his dream supercomputer.

  Competing against national governments and Seymour Cray himself, Peter Godin had gained a foothold in the supercomputing market, and he never looked back. When the end of the Cold War virtually wiped out the supercomputing business, Godin switched to parallel-processing technology, and by the midnineties his computers had augmented or supplanted the Cray machines at NORAD, the NSA, the Pentagon, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and in missile silos across the country. In his day, Peter Godin had been both pioneer and follower, but he was first and foremost a survivor.

  Everyone looked up as the old man entered the conference room, but I nearly got to my feet. When I joined the team two years ago, Godin had looked scarcely older than Andrew Fielding, who was sixty-one at the time. But two years leading the Trinity team had aged Godin at a shocking rate. His face sometimes had the swollen look of a cancer patient on steroids. At other times, it was thinned to skeletal hollowness, and his hair almost disappeared. Today he looked as though he might collapse before reaching the table. He’d told me that during times of creative stress, his body always underwent physical changes. Godin often worked without sleep for fifty or sixty consecutive hours, and though he knew this was taking years off his life, he felt that was a fair price to pay for what he had achieved during his years on earth.

  His light blue eyes scanned the room, resting longer on me than on the others. Then he gave a general nod and settled into the empty chair beside Skow.

  “Now that we’re all here,” Skow said with an air of ceremony, “I would be remiss if I didn’t begin this meeting with a few words about the terrible loss that we—and this project—suffered yesterday. After a complete autopsy, the pathologist has confirmed that Dr. Fielding died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He—”

  “Pathologist?” I cut in. “The state medical examiner?”

  Skow gave me a look of forbearance. “David, you know we’re not in a conventional security situation. We can’t involve local authorities. Dr. Fielding’s cause of death was certified by an NSA pathologist at Fort Meade.”

  “The NSA has a pathologist?” I understood why the agency might need psychiatrists. Code-breaking was a high-stress profession. But a pathologist?

  “The agency has access to a full complement of medical specialists,” Skow said in the voice of a government tour guide. “Some directly on the payroll, others fully vetted consultants.” He glanced at Godin, whose eyes were closed. “Do you have some doubt about what killed Andrew, David?”

  There it was. The gauntlet on the table.

  “After all,” Skow said in a condescending tone, “you are an experienced internist. Perhaps you saw something inconsistent with a stroke?”

  I felt the tension in the air. Everyone was waiting for me to speak, especially Ravi Nara, who had diagnosed the stroke as Fielding died.

  “No,” I said at length. “Ravi said he observed paralysis, speech impairment, and a blown pupil just prior to death. That’s consistent with stroke. It’s just…it usually takes a while to die from a bleed. The suddenness took me by surprise.”

  It was as though the air had been let out of a balloon. Shoulders sagged with relief, buttocks shifted position, fingers began drumming on the table.

  “Well, of course,” Skow said generously. “It took us all by surprise. And Andrew was, quite simply, irreplaceable.”

  I wanted to strangle Skow. He had wanted to replace Fielding for the past six months, but there was no one remotely as qualified as the Englishman available for the job.

  “And to show how serious I am about that,” Skow said, “we will not try to replace him.”

  Only Jutta Klein looked as shocked as I. Fielding had known more about Project Trinity than anyone but Godin. He’d got us through a dozen major bottlenecks. Problems that had stumped software and materials engineers for weeks were but puzzles to the eccentric Englishman, something to be solved in a quarter of an hour. In this sense, Fielding truly was irreplaceable. But the quantum aspects of Project Trinity could not be ignored. Quantum physics was akin to alchemy in my mind—alchemy that worked—and to push ahead without someone qualified to handle problems like quantum entanglement and unwanted tunneling would be madness.

  “But what do you plan to do about the MRI side effects we’ve been studying?” I asked. “As you know, Fielding believed they were the result of quantum disturbances in the brain.”

  “Ridiculous,” barked Nara. “There’s no proof there are any quantum processes in the human brain. There never has been, and there never will be!”

  “Dr. Nara,” Skow said.

  I gave the neurologist a look of disdain. “You didn’t sound half so sure when you were in the room with Fielding.”

  Nara shot silent daggers at me.

  Skow gave me his patient smile. “David, both Peter and I feel that you and Ravi a
re quite capable of continuing to explore the medical anomalies. Bringing in a new physicist at this time would be a needless security risk.”

  I wasn’t going to argue this. I would save my efforts for the president. “Will Fielding’s body and personal effects be turned over to his widow?”

  Skow cleared his throat. “We can’t seem to contact Mrs. Fielding. Therefore, Andrew’s remains will be cremated as per his written wishes.”

  Along with any evidence of murder. I struggled to keep my face impassive. So Lu Li had made her escape. On the other hand…would they say anything different if they’d caught or killed her?

  Godin touched Skow’s wrist.

  “Would you like to add something, Peter?” Skow asked.

  Godin rubbed his nearly bald pate under the indirect lights. He sat with a Buddha-like centeredness, only the blue eyes in detectable motion. He spoke rarely, but when he did, the world listened.