“You’ve done a great job. What do I have to do?”
“Surrender it.”
“So I figured. A cop, a county detective, came by and hinted very strongly that federal agents were figuring out how to take it if I don’t.”
Bernie’s voice was measured, resigned. “That would be consistent.”
“I’m just finishing up what I really have to do. A few details—”
“They want it tomorrow morning.”
“Wow, that soon?”
“They’ve got a federal district judge in their pocket, the usual one who blocks state ballot initiatives if the Feds don’t like them. So this tame judge issued an order today giving them the Cosm, hands down. They can walk right in and seize it if they want.”
“I’ll need tomorrow. How about we meet in my office—7 P.M.?”
“I’ll try to set it up.”
“No TV, no reporters.”
“That’s in the deal, yes.”
“I do appreciate all your work. I’ll send you a check—”
“Forget it. Do me a favor. Call your father. He’s been riding me about this every hour on the hour.”
“Will do.”
“I think you might not want to be around later today, is all,” she said to Max.
He bristled. “I’m in this legally just as much as you—”
“Nope, you’re in the clear. I took the Cosm and this is my lab.”
“But I—”
“Bernie’s quite clear on this part, anyway.”
“Damn it, let me finish!”
By the pale glow of the Cosm, she could see the irked twist of his mouth. “Fair enough.”
“I want to be there because I’m with you.”
She felt a pleasing warmth steal through her. “I… I know. But it’s better if you go home and wait for me.”
An adamant set mouth this time. “Why?”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t want you to have to deny anything.”
“God damn, I hate it when you turn into a control freak.”
“Goes with being a goddess.”
His mouth relaxed, one tip inching up to grant her a point. “And lonely martyr. I don’t like it this way.”
“Neither do I, actually.” She sighed, leaning against him. Some minutes passed that way. Usually she felt the need to fill silences, but not now.
“I have some obligations at Caltech anyway.” Max peered somberly at the rippling vistas that flashed across the face of the Cosm. “I’ll go this afternoon. What’s all this moving around you and Zak arc doing?”
“Last rites.”
“How come I get the feeling there’s something you’re not saying.”
She smiled. “I don’t want to involve you if it doesn’t come off. Just get some sleep tonight, is all.”
He studied her for a long moment. “We aren’t going to have any secrets, I thought.”
“About us, about personal stuff, no.”
He smiled grimly. “So this secret isn’t of the squishy sort.”
“You’ll know within hours.”
His mouth worked uneasily, but then he shrugged. “I heard some coalition of fundamentalists declared you ‘an abomination.’”
“I think it was some of those who kidnapped me.”
“Sturges giving you any more information?”
“No, it just feels right.”
“I’m still irked that they can’t find out who did it.” He put an arm around her in a completely casual way that thrilled her. In silence they watched the sweep of events across the curved face of the Cosm, a shifting pearly light of the elliptical galaxy’s densely packed stars. The other end was working through a matrix of glaring suns. The jets that once had stabbed out from the galactic nucleus had faded. Their viewpoint glided with discernible velocity along an arm of aging stars, their ruby glows pinwheeling in complex orbits. The brilliant hub of the galactic center rose like a mountain of light above the foreground, growing larger by the hour.
Alicia let herself just watch for a while, held by Max. It was quite enough, and the weight of what was coming momentarily slipped from her.
Max began speaking, not love talk but physics, and somehow it had the same effect on her. Through his words she got a feeling of how he saw all this, events piling upon each other with bewildering swiftness. He had a way of showing her how a theorist felt, which had always been hard for her. She had seen his neat calculations, the delicate tapestry of tensor notation, his face compressed with an inner energy, a sublime concentration she well understood. Hard work took you out of yourself. He loved the power of pure calculation, when airy mathematics could congeal into the iron fist of inevitable logic. Behind the laconic equations lay cold immensities of gas and stars, dead but furious mass laced with cutting radiation, all bending to the will of gravitation and the brute curvature of space-time, stars dying like matchheads exploding in an uncaring vacuum.
Compared with the supple weave of the equations, the pictures of the world that people formed were crude and hazy. To peer through the quick stubble of mathematics and see the wonders lurking behind was to momentarily live in the infinite, beyond the press of the ordinary world where everyone else dwelled in ignorance.
“Y’know, what we’re seeing here is how the entire history of the universe is, in the end, the slow victory of gravity over all other forces.” When he explained, she saw it better: how the nuclear fires that burned through the strong force, how the rhapsodies of light and lacy plasma that sang through the electromagnetic force—how finally all were finally humbled before gravity’s blunt, relentless hammer.
With a sense of foreboding, she knew then why she was about to make a large number of enemies.
5
She gave herself plenty of time.
Everything was set by 6:15 P.M. Dusk had settled and she had her used compact car pulled up to the observatory, loading a few last things. She had bought it the day before from a newspaper ad, paying a hundred dollars more than she should have. She had the car nearly full when she saw the big fleet of vans coming onto the campus ring road a quarter mile away. They were big and conspicuous and when they stopped at the intersection below and turned uphill, she knew they were coming here. Of course; get in place early, be crisp and efficient.
They labored slowly up Gabrielino Drive, three of them, with escort cars. Her world tilted. Move. But in the car she would have to drive right by them, as obvious as a roach on a linen napkin.
She called to the security man, “Good night. I’m walking back to campus now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t let anybody in, no matter what ID they have.”
“Uh, yeah.”
He frowned at this odd instruction, delivered in her patented nervous warble, but there was no time to make it more plausible, and it might buy her a few minutes. No Feds were going to be blocked by a rent-a-cop for long, though.
Quickly she walked into the darkness. The guard was a sleepy sort. She covered twenty meters along the gravel road, looked back; the guard was gazing off into the distance. Trotting, she angled off through the dry grass away from the observatory. Down the back side of the hill, away from the straining of the trucks. She tried to think, but the trucks suddenly sounded very close and darting panic made her break into a run. They undoubtedly would call upon others as soon as they knew that the Cosm was gone and her with it.
Ah, if only she were with it! Then she could scram out of Laguna Beach, where she had parked the Pathfinder. But no, there were files and data she had wanted, so she had buzzed back to campus to load up the compact. She had imagined that two cars, both bought used and so harder to connect to her, would be enough; but it was tempting to cram in just a little bit more.
With Zak safely away and the Cosm in the Pathfinder, she should have been smart, not pressed her luck, left the additional diagnostics and data behind. But enough of the shoulda, woulda, coulda. Focus, girl.
She might still reach the Pathfi
nder just by getting a lift into Laguna. But there were only a few ways into Laguna and they certainly would cover those, and fast. For that matter, there were few roads around UCI. They would be patrolling them within moments.
She headed downhill amid low scrub brush in sandy soil, toward Bonita Canyon Road, away from the university. Irvine prided itself on its well-lit streets. Well, now she was on the other side of the law, and the bright avenues looked like traps.
Thinking hard, she ran straight into a big knot of artichoke thistles. The barbs jabbed her legs and arms. She stopped, rubbing the scratches, and saw that there was a large grove of them here. Carefully she crossed the last dark portion of the UCI grounds and saw barbed wire looming up between her and the long loop of Bonita Canyon Road.
She lifted the lowest strand and looked back; something symbolic about leaving the university grounds? Out into a hostile world. She could see several figures around the observatory’s exterior lights: looking her way?
Gingerly, she slipped under the wire and loped toward the darker portion of the highway. Back on the hill, headlights went on, three sets. Leaving the observatory, broadening their search. She trotted across the darkest portion of the highway and plunged into some bushes. Crouched there, she thought anxiously. What next?
For a full minute she thought about giving up. They had her, after all. On foot at night, she might get to the home of a friend. But could she be sure they would jump at the chance to help her elude federal officers? And could she rightfully get them involved? Zak had readily assented, but her colleagues… And of course, they knew she was on foot on campus, so those faculty living on the hill near the observatory would be the first they would check.
She still had her portable phone clipped to her belt. Call someone for help? The Feds undoubtedly had her phone covered by now, just in case. This close to campus, they would nail her before any friend could get here.
Nope, face it.
Option one: give up and then lamely try to cover over why she had taken the Cosm away in the Pathfinder and parked it on a street in North Laguna.
Option two: try to get a lift to Laguna. Hitchhikers were conspicuous, and she had to cover the fifteen kilometers by road to Laguna faster than an energized officer would.
Two options: one disagreeable and the other impossible.
But there was an assumption here, she felt vaguely, one that itched at her. Something about hitchhiking, her forlornly trudging along a roadway. Everybody else on wheels, her on foot.
Once she stepped back from her assumptions, the answer seemed simple. She set off along Bonita Canyon Road, staying in the shadows and among the shrubbery lining the concrete block wall. Her long walks on the beach paid off; she kept a steady pace, devouring the three kilometers until the road turned left into a housing development. She was puffing but excited.
Then she had to confront her idea with the daunting reality. Above loomed the San Joaquin Hills, a brooding presence over the twinkling sprinkle of lights. Her pursuers would count on her using the easy ways, known streets. People trying to escape moved fast, after all. They used cars, ran lights. Who would think that she might hike her way out of the trap?
Instead she headed up Shady Canyon, past the darkened golf course. This was the only uninhabited way into the vast expanse of the Laguna Greenbelt, a preserve like a green moat around the sole remaining town with a real identity in the entire county. She had on a light jacket and had, of course, skipped dinner in the rush. She searched her pockets and found a Mars bar in a zipper compartment. At last, her hoarding habits paid off. She wolfed it down.
The dark did not bother her; in fact, its thick quiet was comforting. A crescent moon coasted behind thin, high silver clouds. She wished for more clouds, for darkness, and regretted missing the weather report that morning. She easily scaled an iron gate and quickly pressed on. The grade steepened and she began puffing, jogging and then just fast-walking along the single narrow path in the glow of faraway streetlights. Her night vision adjusted and she avoided more of the sharp-bladed artichoke thistles, the irksome by-product of grazing cattle. On the low ridge nearby million-dollar-an-acre lots were already marked off and she could catch the moist tang of raw earth ready for further editing by bulldozers.
Ever since moving to Laguna, she had hated the incessant pressure of the developers, had hiked in the Greenbelt with locals who felt the same way and knew the terrain, and now it was paying off. The distant city shine helped her navigate along the trails. Shady Canyon began to earn its name as the night darkened around her under the trees. A scrabbling in the bushes told of a pursuit, then high-pitched squeaks of a catch, then silence. Not a great metaphor for her tonight.
An owl hooted. Coyotes yipped in the hills to both sides, maybe talking about her. She had heard stories of campers out here surrounded by a pack of them. Fair enough, it was their territory; it would be a relief to confront predators with more than two legs.
Gasping, she reached the top of Shady Canyon at Four Corners and knew to turn right, heading toward the broad tollway’s glaring lights and traffic buzz. Even if her pursuers were checking the tollway, the cars were below her here. She worked her way along a side road and got to the animal underpass, a muddy track peppered with the prints of coyotes, bobcat, deer, and roadrunners. Between north- and southbound lanes lay an open median. The divided four-lane segments cast a lot of light into the underpass. She reasoned that anyone looking for her would have to be in the fast lane, so the odds of being seen near the tollway—a slashing blemish that split the Greenbelt, isolating its animal populations—were small. But she felt eyes on her as she ran away from the eight-lane highway’s glare, into the blessedly shrouded canyons.
It had been two hours since she left UCI. Not bad, maybe ten kilometers covered. Her excitement was gone and the energy with it. Sweating, she labored up onto the ridge beyond and began to wonder if she had the stamina for this. With help, the federal agents could scout every street in her neighborhood, find any suspicious vans. Or would they wait for her to fall into a traffic check somewhere? By now they might very well guess that she had found some other method around them. Would they think that a physics professor would go for an escape that depended on endurance? She hoped they’d imagine some technical trick instead.
She was panting hard now, a stitch developing in her side, wishing for another Mars bar. A li’l ol’ unexpected weight-loss program here, she thought. At least the hard uphill parts were past.
Thinking about her weight somehow made her think of Jill. Of course—she should have called Jill back at the beginning. But the old argument worked for Jill, too: the Feds would have overheard and picked up both of them at their rendezvous. Unless…
On the fifth ring she heard, “Uh… this better be good.”
“It is. Remember the pledge? Well, I’m in deep trouble and I need a girlfriend.”
“I hope you’re talking about breakfast tomorrow.”
“Nope. Now.”
“Ooooohhh…”
“Remember where the little boy is giving water to his dog?”
“What?” Silence. “Yeah.”
“Meet me two blocks inland from there.”
“Somebody’s listening?”
“You bet. Let’s say, in two hours.”
“Oh great, I can go back to sleep easily now.”
“Leave now, before a tail can get to your apartment.”
A groan. “You’re serious?”
“I really need it, girl.”
She clicked off. Were phones that easy to tap? With the growth of federal police powers, probably so. She had watched a lot of cop movies, but she really had no idea.
A glance at her watch brought the incredible news that now nearly five hours had passed since she had seen the trucks coming up the hill. The hard exercise had focused her incessantly fidgety mind. Or maybe she was just tired. Dawn in maybe six hours. Surely they would be checking out the streets of North Laguna well before then. They should
miss the Pathfinder; she had curtained off the back and dirtied up the paint. But trudging along, she would be conspicuous. Groggy, too.
She was trotting doggedly along the ridgeline toward Guna Peak when she heard the helicopter. It came up Bommer Canyon, low, just one ridgeline over from her path. Floodlights lit the ground beneath it in actinic blue-white. She froze; she had not even thought of this obvious move. Then she went crashing into a mass of lemonade berry, ignoring the slashes and stabs of dried branches.
Had they figured her out? Very bad news.
A brilliant dazzle passed overhead noisily as she cringed. The engine’s hammering seemed to steepen and the hard incandescent stab of the searchlights played restlessly in the sky. For a long moment she thought that it was turning, coming back for her. She tried to burrow deeper, pulling shrubs over her head.
Its roar seemed right on top of her for an unbearably long time, a hovering weight. At last she felt from the rising whine of its engines that it was heading down one of the side canyons and away.
Probably checking each side route before returning to the exposed tops of the ridges. Not doubling back. Maybe.
She would keep her eyes and ears sharp after that—ready. The helicopter buzzed away, along the canyons leading to the sea in a repeating, systematic pattern. Probably a police chopper, called in. The Feds had all the men and time they needed.
She started running then. She was secondary here, the Cosm primary. If they suspected her route, they would cover the several ways she might get into the northern end of town. On the other hand, maybe they would drop the whole idea, since the helicopter had found nothing. That was her only real hope.
But where would they cover the exits from Laguna? There were only three roads out of town. Plans whirled in her head as she pumped along the ridgeline toward the town’s soft ivory glow. Coyotes yipped and called into the bowl of night.
The last mile drew raw, ragged puffs from her and seemed to take hours. Her forehead was crusty with dried sweat. Well, at least she was losing weight and would look quite fetching in prisoner’s garb.
COSM Page 31
