It was no great surprise that he was here; the SCS promised energies higher than those attained by any other collider in history, insights into impossibly tiny and fundamental corners of Creation, but the thought of Professor Delahaye working with him, willingly or otherwise, was out of the question, and anyway, when all was said and done he could just read the results in the science journals like everyone else. And why, if Larry was here, working on some weird fold of physics only half a dozen people in the world had even heard of, had nobody bothered to mention it?
“HE COMES AND goes,” said Wendy. “Sometimes we don’t see him for months, and then suddenly he’s there, poking at things, being rude to people. I mostly try to stay out of his way.”
They were sitting in the commissary in the Facility’s main building. The food was as good as Mickey had promised. Alex said, “Somebody must know what he’s doing.”
She sighed and poured herself a glass of water from the carafe in the middle of the table. “I don’t think he knows. I think projects like this are like attractors for him; he just orbits from one to the next looking for stuff that gets his juices flowing and eventually he grinds out a paper and everyone thinks he’s God.”
“You don’t think he’s God.”
“I think he’s an asshole. He’s got that Hunter S Thompson gonzo schtick going on, but he’s really just a big spoilt kid.”
He poked his fork into his spaghetti carbonara. “I thought maybe he was working on the defence stuff.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Defence stuff?”
“I bumped into some sort of general here the other day.”
She waved it away. “There’s no defence stuff. We’re doing pure research here.”
“But Defense has put a lot of money into the project.”
Wendy gave him a long, level look. “Are you interviewing me, Alex?”
He chuckled. “Force of habit. Sorry.”
“Defense always puts money into projects like this,” she said. “Just so they have rights in case something bangy spins off. They can’t afford to build their own collider.” She took a sip of water. “And anyway, can you imagine the military letting Larry Day anywhere near classified stuff?”
This was a fair point. Kitson seemed to believe some kind of military research was going on at the SCS, but maybe he, like the Defense Department, was just covering all bases, placing an asset just in case something useful popped up. Maybe all these people were just chasing each others’ tails. He sighed and looked across the commissary. Over at a corner table, Professor Delahaye was in earnest conversation with Mickey Olive and Danny Hofstadter. Alex played a little game, trying to imagine all the possible Venn diagrams which would result in those three sharing a table. Rosewater County was like that. Everything was connected. Even the stuff that wasn’t connected was connected, because Stan Clayton owned it all.
Their meeting over, the three men stood and shook hands. Danny and Mickey headed for the exit, but Delahaye, spotting Wendy and Alex sitting at their table, came over.
“Mr Dolan,” he said. “Dr McCoy.” Paul Delahaye was basically an event horizon of mindbending neatness enclosing a singularity of intellectual snobbery. Today he was wearing a three-piece tweed suit, a cream cotton shirt, and a plain grey tie. A silver chain curved between the watch pockets of his waistcoat over the smooth swell of his little pot-belly. His nails were immaculately manicured, and there was not a single visible hair anywhere on him that was out of place. “How are we today?”
“We were just talking about Larry Day,” said Wendy.
“Yes.” Delahaye was one of those Englishmen who pronounced it ‘ears’. “Is he here today?”
“Haven’t seen him.”
“Good.” It was some considerable time since Delahaye had done any kind of science; these days he was an administrator from the ground up, and Larry’s on-off presence threatened the smooth running of his life. “Mr Dolan, I was promised a sight of the first draft of your book.”
“You were?”
“I was. And I was wondering when I might have a chance to read it.”
Unlike the NDA Alex had signed when he first arrived in Sioux Crossing, his contract of employment was not a masterpiece of concision. It ran to over a thousand closely spaced pages and he’d only managed to skim it before its legalese stunned his brain. He didn’t remember anything about Delahaye having advance reading rights, though.
He said, “I’m still quite a long way from having a first draft finished, I’m afraid, Professor.”
Delahaye made a little hmphing sound. “You’ve been working on this book for more than six months. I do hope you’re not one of those writers who contracts for a deadline and then has to beg for an extension.”
Down the years, Alex had met any number of people he hadn’t liked, but he had never met anyone he’d wanted to punch quite as much as he wanted to punch Delahaye. He said, “It’s not rocket science, Professor. You of all people should appreciate that.”
“What was all that about?” Wendy asked, stepping in before they grabbed cutlery off the table and started stabbing each other.
Delahaye held eye contact with Alex for a couple of moments longer before breaking off and looking at her. “All what?”
“All that.” She nodded towards the corner table.
“Oh. Just a liaison meeting.”
“No it wasn’t. Liaison meetings are on Tuesdays.”
Delahaye tugged down on the front of his waistcoat. “We’re all busy men,” he said. “We have to meet when we can.”
“Why weren’t the rest of the Committee informed?” Wendy claimed to be baffled that she was a member of the committee which liaised between the town and the SCS. It was, according to her, a committee of staggering dullness.
Delahaye opened his mouth. Closed it again. “I’m sure minutes will be circulated,” he said finally. “Please excuse me.” And he walked away.
“That guy is such a malignant dicksplash,” Wendy said, watching him go. “When’s Ralph coming home?”
“There’s a car picking him up from County General at six.” They’d been taking turns to visit the old man at the hospital every couple of days, as soon as it was possible to travel around the county again.
“They kept him a long time,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “They did.” Ralph’s doctor had been unwilling to discuss his condition in anything but the most general terms with someone who wasn’t a close family member. Alex had thought he detected subtext, but he hadn’t pushed it and Ralph, though tired, seemed as cranky as ever.
“I’d like to be there,” she said. “When he gets back. If that’s okay.”
He smiled. “I think he’d like that.”
She nodded. “Okay.” She checked her watch. “I have stuff to do,” she told him, standing up. “Thanks for lunch.” She picked up her bag and started to go, but she thought of something and turned back. “Just out of interest, how much of the book have you written?”
“I have a lot of notes.”
She chuckled. “Thought so. See you later, Dolan.”
AS IT TURNED out, it was Danny Hofstadter who brought Ralph home from the hospital. Of course, they were related by marriage. Everything in Rosewater County was connected.
They went out to meet the car as Danny helped Ralph out. The old man had lost weight, although the doctors had assured Alex that was mostly due to physio and eating a healthy diet for the first time in about twenty years.
“Place looks different,” he said, standing beside the car and looking around him.
“That’s because it was under a glacier the last time you saw it,” said Alex.
Wendy gave him a gentle hug. “Welcome back, you stupid old man,” she said.
“Hey, kid,” he said, hugging her back. “Haven’t you gone home yet?”
“I have a nice comfortable apartment with a PX and a three-star restaurant on the doorstep,” she told him. “If you think I’m moving out here to the frontier
to live in a sod hut, you’re crazier than I thought.”
He chuckled. “Good for you.”
Danny handed Alex a small zip-up tote bag. “He comes with optional extras,” he said.
“What, like power steering and air conditioning?” said Alex, unzipping the bag. Inside were dozens of pill bottles and little white cardboard boxes.
“Vitamins,” Ralph said.
Alex took one of the bottles out and squinted at the label. “Oh aye?”
“Dietary supplements,” Ralph went on. “Dieticians aren’t real doctors.”
“They really are, you know,” Wendy told him seriously.
“I’ve got to go,” Danny said, hauling a larger tote out of the car and putting it down on the pavement. “Town Hall stuff. I’ll come by later and see he’s okay.”
“Thanks, Danny,” Alex said, shaking his hand.
“Hey, I couldn’t let my favourite uncle just walk home, could I?”
“You’ll only ever be a small-town politician, Danny Hofstadter,” Ralph told him, as if revisiting a conversation they’d been having on the way from the hospital.
Danny sighed. “I’d say he’s feeling better,” he told Alex. “See you later.”
Danny drove off, and the three of them started to walk up the path towards Ralph’s front porch, but he stopped and looked along the lane, to where a police cruiser was still, even after all this time, parked outside Number Thirty. “Amy finally had enough of Simon, huh?” he said.
“Let’s not think about that,” Wendy told him. “Come on. It’s still not very warm.”
“Warmer than the last time I was here,” Ralph snorted. “You’d better not have cleaned up,” he told them as Wendy opened the front door. “I’ll never find anything.”
As they stepped into the hall, Homer came waddling out of the living room and stared at them.
“Hey,” Ralph said, bending down to let the dog sniff his hand. “He lost weight. Have you been feeding him?”
Not only had Alex been feeding Homer, he’d built a litter box in his living room for the dog, which he thought was above and beyond the call of duty. It was going to take weeks to air the house out. “He’s overweight, Ralph,” he said. “It’s not good for him.” He decided to wait before discussing the results of the vet’s checkup.
Homer finished sniffing Ralph’s fingers, and his eyes went wide. The dog took a single step back, sat down, lifted his head, and howled.
The three of them stared. Apart from the continual flatulence and a tendency to slobber at mealtimes, it was the first sound Alex had ever heard Homer make. He just sat in front of them, yowling.
“He’s probably confused now you’re back,” Wendy said doubtfully.
“Stupid dog,” Ralph grumped.
Abruptly, Homer stopped howling, got up, and went back into the living room. They heard the sound of a single massive fart.
“See?” Ralph told them. “See what happens when you don’t feed him right?”
LATER, WHEN RALPH had settled down for a nap, Alex and Wendy stood outside the house. “He’s still not well,” she said.
“It’s hardly surprising,” said Alex. “I’m still not well.” He didn’t mention the bag of pills.
“Well, you’re just a typical ninety-pound weakling.” She looked down towards Number Thirty. “Why are the police still here?”
“Bud says it’s still a crime scene.”
“After all this time?”
“Something about forensics.”
The truth was, no one was entirely sure what had happened. The Abrahamsons had been, on the face of it, a perfectly ordinary, quiet, middle-aged and middle-class couple. On the day Bud had flown in to rescue them, his officers had found Simon Abrahamson lying on the floor of his kitchen with massive blunt trauma injuries to the back of his head. Amy was nowhere to be found until the snow began to thaw, when her body was discovered almost two miles away, still clutching a bloody claw-hammer in her fist. Judging by the amount of frozen snow under her body, she had been there since the day after the storm began.
“Surely there’s no doubt that she did it?” Wendy said.
“Bud’s just trying to be thorough. Everyone’s upset about it; he wants to make sure he has all the boxes ticked.” People in town were still gossiping about what might have gone on at Number Thirty, but as far as Alex was concerned, his memory of trying to cross between his property and Ralph’s was still painfully strong and they all missed the important point, which was that Amy, who stood about five foot three in her socks and weighed almost nothing at all, had managed to get two miles from the house before she dropped.
“Did you know them?”
Alex shrugged. “I saw them about. Said hello once or twice.”
“They were on the Liaison Committee for a while. I thought they were sweet. Always holding hands.”
“Hm.” He put his hands in his pockets, lost for words.
“Larry’s back,” she said. “I saw him this morning having an argument with Delahaye.” She thought about it. “Well, Delahaye was doing the arguing; Larry was just standing there looking at him.”
Alex had lately been formulating an idea to interview Larry, either for the book or for an article for the New York Times which Stan was keen on him doing. Stan was disappointed that Alex hadn’t managed to place more pieces in the popular press; he was currently trying to buy his way into the LA Times, The Atlantic, and the Chicago Tribune with a view to gently persuading them to run Alex’s articles. Mickey Olive seemed to acknowledge Alex’s horrified opposition to this, but if the message was reaching Stan he was choosing to ignore it.
“Do you know how long he’s going to be around?” No one seemed to know where Larry was when he wasn’t at the SCS; it seemed best to catch him while he was here.
Wendy shrugged. “For all I know, he’s already gone again.”
Alex sighed.
THERE WAS A mall a couple of miles outside town. The sign at the entrance proclaimed it to be The Hundred Acre Mall, but Alex suspected that referred to the size of its car park, which seemed easily large enough to accommodate a rocket launch facility. The mall itself was a modest group of buildings clustered in the middle of the great wilderness of asphalt. Alex had visited a mall outside Washington into which the Hundred Acre would have fitted maybe a dozen times. But it had a bowling alley and a three-screen multiplex and a couple of restaurants and some chain stores.
It was also, he discovered, where the locals went. He’d started to notice that, apart from the people who actually worked in the stores and cafés and so on, pretty much everyone he saw around town worked at the Facility. There were locals about, of course, but he suspected that there were some days when he could have stood on Main Street and thrown a rock and been more likely to hit a particle physicist than someone who drove a tractor for a living.
“Yeah, it’s been commented on,” Wendy said. “Nobody knows why that happens. We get on pretty well with the townsfolk, there’s certainly no friction between us, but we do seem to drift apart.”
They were sitting in the mall’s bowling alley, which called itself, with admirable directness, The Twenty Lanes. Except this evening it was only nineteen, one of them being out of action. It was packed with locals, most of whom seemed to take the business of bowling very seriously, with the exception of a group of teenagers down the far end, who were being politely rowdy.
There were a number of bowling teams at the Facility, and Alex and Wendy were watching a match between two of them, The Strange and The Charm. Alex, who did not understand bowling, had no idea what was going on and who was winning, if indeed anyone was winning at all, but everyone seemed happy and relaxed.
“We’ve been trying to get a mixed league going,” Wendy went on. “Teams from the town playing teams from the Facility. We go to church events, give regular tours. We’re doing our best.”
“Pretty much everyone here works for the Facility, though, one way or another,” Alex said.
&n
bsp; “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Maybe they’re all just trying to get away from it for a while.”
She watched while one of the Strange team members—green silk shirts—sent a ball down the lane and demolished the pins. The red-shirted Charm team booed goodnaturedly. “I did wonder about that,” she said. “We’re always going to be outsiders, but I don’t like the idea that we’re crowding them out.”
“I don’t think I’ve met anyone who’s ungrateful about you being here.”
Wendy sighed. “No. That makes it worse, somehow.” She sipped some Coke. “Is East Walden still a crime scene, by the way?”
He shook his head. The last remaining law enforcement presence on the lane, a sheriff’s deputy, had departed a couple of days ago.
“Did they work out what happened?”
He nodded. “Simon had an affair,” he said. “About twelve years ago. Amy found out about it somehow, the storm was going on, they were cooped up in the house, and she snapped.”
Wendy thought about it. “I never heard of anybody killing someone because of an affair they had twelve years previously.”
“Ralph says it was Amy’s sister.”
She shook her head. “How does Ralph hear this stuff? He never goes anywhere.”
“He’s been pestering the deputies Sheriff Brandt posted at the house. You know what he’s like. Eventually one of them caved and told him about it to get him to go away.”
“Well,” she said. “I liked them.”
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man Page 13
