Nightstalkers a5-10

by Bob Mayer

  Perhaps it was a midlife crisis?

  What is a midlife crisis for a physicist? Not a red sports car or dewy-eyed grad students. He’d already been through both those, the latter several times.

  But the Nobel?

  The ultimate prize for a physicist whose career was on the way down, because they aged like ballerinas, the youngest and the brightest getting all the attention. He’d struggled through enough productions of Swan Lake with his wife to see that the leads never had crow’s-feet. Not around their eyes anyway. The old physicists tended to stick ever tighter to what they thought they knew, never reaching out for the new for fear of learning that what they’d believed for decades was wrong.

  He could admit he was wrong if this turned out right.

  He’d arranged the dinner party to empty out the lab this evening except for Ivar, so the student could move the final pieces downstairs at UNC. He trusted Ivar to an extent, because behind his bland expression, Winslow could see the intelligence minus the same hungry ambition eating away at most grad students’ chests. The perfect combination to be used. Winslow found it a bit amusing that Ivar had taken the lack of an invitation to the party as a deliberate slight, when it was really an invitation to share greatness. Rather, more to touch it, as there would be no sharing. One did not share with students. One took.

  Ivar was willing to work eighty hours a week like the rest of them for no pay so they could get their doctorates, so they could work other kids behind them for eighty-hour weeks while they tried to invent something they could sell to the corporate world they all professed to despise, or, even better, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, since everyone knew the government overpaid for everything.

  But Ivar was meticulous, so the professor felt reasonably secure knowing the kid was the one in the special lab he’d secretly designed earlier today in a remote corner of the basement of the physics research building for the beginning of this. It was the perfect setup, used years ago for experiments with toxic and radioactive materials and perfectly shielded. More importantly, Winslow needed someone he could trust and who had the smarts to deal with things, since this was the first time he had ever gone off the grid; the first time he hadn’t followed the instructions.

  The laptop Winslow now held was old, one that had been in the lab forever. Passed beneath the fingers of countless grad students and postdocs. The top was layered with faded stickers of bands long defunct. The key to the laptop was that it was linked to the mainframe that Ivar should have finished moving by now, so its own capabilities weren’t important. It was just the originator of the program. The mainframe in the secret lab was going to do the crunching and run the program. Winslow dug deeper in the sock drawer, behind the specially padded ones he’d used during his running phase. He retrieved the hard drive, meticulously labeled by Ivar: Dr. Winslow.

  Ivar labeled everything that came in and out of the lab and had already fastened the label on the drive during the five minutes Winslow had left the disk in the lab in order for its contents to be copied into the mainframe. Ivar hadn’t even asked about the ASU label, his level of curiosity nil.

  Winslow dug his thumbnail under the label and peeled it off. He pressed open the slide on the left edge of the laptop and gingerly pressed the hard drive in. He smiled as he watched the computer buzz to life, much like his toothbrush.

  He pulled out his cell phone and sent the e-mail he’d saved in draft, with the specific instructions on what Ivar was to do in the secret lab at the same time. Based on the e-mail he’d received from Craegen, and his own examination of the algorithms, it would take weeks for the program to crunch the algorithms and be ready to activate, but they’d be weeks well spent. He put the laptop back in the drawer, making sure the power cord was still connected and leaving the lid open enough so it would stay on. On second thought, he wedged a pair of socks in between the top and the blank spot next to the touch pad, ensuring that it wouldn’t accidently close and shut the program down. He covered the laptop with socks. Then he had second thoughts. The laptop might overheat, buried like that, and no one came in here anyway. He cleared the socks off the top.

  He put on his suit pants, shirt, tie, and jacket. Then he went back to the sock drawer. He could see the slight glow from the partially open laptop as he did the choosing of the socks. It made him smile. He pulled out his favorite pair.

  Then he hovered over the watch winder, mesmerized as it rocked back and forth.

  Tonight was a Rolex night.

  * * *

  Ivar was splitting his attention between watching the mainframe monitor set on a table in the middle of the room, waiting to start a replay of this evening’s Duke — UNC alumni charity basketball game, and labeling things. It was after eight and he knew the game was probably over, but he’d studiously avoided accessing any social media on his iPhone or laptop so that he wouldn’t accidently find out the score.

  Unfortunately, by not checking either, he also hadn’t received the e-mail from Doctor Winslow about changing the setting on a critical dampener and shutting down the Internet connection from the mainframe to the old laptop once they both initiated.

  For lack of a nail.

  It was a saying that would have been lost on the student.

  Instead, he was using a label maker. Things had to be organized. This room was below ground level, in the subbasement that was mainly used to store old tables and chairs and desks. Even the building’s maintenance people rarely came down here. Why Doctor Winslow had chosen this room off the beaten path, Ivar didn’t consider worth pondering. Winslow could have explained to him why he’d chosen this particular room — that the room was shielded and that a single trunk line brought in power and Internet and a landline for a phone — but Winslow didn’t believe in explaining to grad students. Besides, Ivar’s main concern was that all this gear, new and old, lacked labels. He’d just spent two hours simply hauling the last of it down here from the main lab upstairs.

  Ivar glanced over at the monitor. All within parameters. Organized. Doing what it was designed to do, which Ivar knew was something that could be very, very original, although the professor had been rather vague on what the end result should be.

  Since he had to miss the game live, he should have been invited to the dinner party, Ivar thought as he labeled a drawer Label Maker. It held the extra cartridges to load into the machine. He saw no irony in this.

  He checked the clock on the wall. The game had to be over by now. Even if it went to overtime, which would be cool, but fuck those Duke Blue Devils anyway. He’d attended a lecture up there in Durham and one could feel the snobbery slithering off the Duke professor at being made to talk to a bunch of dumb UNC grad students. Everyone had been looking forward to this off-season charity game because it would be played by some of the most famous graduates of both programs.

  Okay, Ivar decided. He sat down on the old Naugahyde couch and picked up the remote.

  Game time.

  Behind him, the first crackle of a golden spark arced around the mainframe.

  * * *

  Inside Doctor Winslow’s sock drawer, the screen of the laptop shimmered out of the darkness and took on the faintest hint of gold.

  * * *

  Deep under Area 51, it sounded like a hundred angry grasshoppers had been loosed in the cavern holding the Can. Several cycles ago, someone had remembered from an undergraduate physiology class that a clicking sound activated the reticular formation with a higher degree of success than any other form of alarm. They had then taken that to the extreme, just in case both people on duty had fallen hard asleep or into a coma during their duty shift.

  Both, however, were awake, and while one turned off the clicking, the other activated the alarm to be transmitted to the Nightstalkers, Japan, and Russia.

  * * *

  Nada was sharpening his machete, Eagle was reading, Kirk was fiddling with his PRT, Doc was taking pills out of bottles and placing them in various slots on a fishing tackle
box (which he had discovered was the perfect way to carry the max array of possible pills efficiently), and Mac was toying with a Claymore mine, modifying the contents.

  “Really,” Mac said. “They have to print ‘front toward enemy’ on the front? How stupid are people?”

  Nada didn’t even look up. “In Afghanistan, one of the Afghan army fellows pulled in his Claymore after an overnight patrol base, just rolling the cord around the body of the mine, and put it in his ruck without removing the fuse. The first time he did a rucksack flop, he blew himself in two and killed three others around him. People are pretty stupid.”

  Eagle lowered his Kindle. “That doesn’t connect directly with Mac’s complaint about the printing. It’s more in line with the warnings they put on plastic laundry covers: Don’t wrap this around your head: could be bad for you. I think Darwinism has to get a chance to work. The more we protect stupid people from themselves, the more we ensure the long, slow descent of the human race into idiocracy.”

  Roland was doing chin-ups on the bar next to his locker. It was either chin-ups or push-ups for Roland most of the time he was in the Den. If he wasn’t breaking down a weapon and cleaning it. Moms was in the CP, doing whatever it was Moms did in the CP when she was alone.

  Everyone looked up as Nada’s cell began playing the tune Kirk had heard once before. Then Doc’s, Mac’s, Eagle’s, and Roland’s went off. Barely two seconds later, his PRT began playing “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”

  Moms came flying out of the CP. “We’ve got a pre-Rift alert from the Can.”

  They were already moving toward the exit.

  * * *

  Downstairs, Doctor Winslow picked at the tiny bit of salad on his plate. It was all strange stuff that he hated, without even knowing what it was called. The farm had its detractions, but normal, hearty food had not been one of them. One had to eat solid food in order to do all those chores. This food was for people who thought pine nuts and cranberries made a salad.

  He had a bit of a buzz going from three glasses of champagne he’d gotten down before meeting his wife on the main floor. A quiet celebration all his own. On top of the program initiating at the secret lab, there was the added satisfaction that UNC had won the alumni game handily, and it was fun to rub it in the faces of the Dukies, one of whom was a guest.

  The table held fourteen, and he had been able to concoct his favorite mix. Three couples who might be considered his peers, but he secretly knew weren’t now, because they didn’t know about the laptop upstairs and the program it was running. There were also six grad students. He always invited over a fresh batch each time, because Lilith loved seeing their faces when they had to pick up their passes from the guard at the gate and then pull up in their beat-up little cars and see the huge double staircases and the chandeliers. It was petty, but it kept her happy, and when she was happy she didn’t care what he did in his closet. Winslow would never admit to her that he enjoyed seeing their faces, too. He also enjoyed that specified on the gate passes was that they expired at midnight, adding a fairy-tale edge to all of it. Poof and they would return back to their miserable little apartments.

  Lilith had called him a sadist when she walked around the table. Mixing the haves with the have-nots. His point, which he knew was a waste of time to explain to her, was that a have-not would not make it to a have if they didn’t get to see what they had. There was some pronoun confusion there on his part, but Lilith understood the base drive to cause turmoil. As Gore Vidal had once famously said: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” Winslow had understood the sentiment the minute he heard it, and he always remembered it, not even needing his recorder app to remind him.

  Still, the guests seemed happy and his buzz was growing and he was considering a fourth glass of champagne. He had much to celebrate although he could not speak of it. He’d never been much of a drinker, not like Lilith, who could put it away faster than you could pop the cork. Looking down the long table he could see the flush of her cheeks and the liquid glaze in her eye that meant she’d also had more than three while awaiting their first guests.

  Winslow sighed. Her drinking could go one of three ways later in the evening, after the last guest departed. From the very low chance of an enthusiastic blow job, to the higher possibility of torrents of tears and recriminations on how he’d destroyed her career, her life, and her one chance of happiness, to the most likely — and optimal — result of her simply passing out on the bed, leaving him free to go back to his closet. He idly wondered — for the first time, perhaps because of his own inebriated state — what that one chance had been? He felt like she’d pretty much let her chances pass her by well before he met her.

  Winslow poked at his sliver of purple lettuce and thought of her in a long gown in Sweden sitting at the table as he accepted his award and made a short (but smart) speech that was just about complete on the recorder on his phone. He knew she’d be happy then, because the Nobel, despite high-minded protests to the contrary, was a prize. And when one won a prize, it meant many others had lost. He must have smiled at the thought, because the physicist seated next to him asked:

  “What are you so happy about?”

  “Ah, a new experiment,” Winslow said. The four grad students who worked in his lab and his one physicist competitor from Duke all frowned, wondering what he could be talking about. Winslow abruptly grabbed his full glass of champagne and downed it. “To knowledge!”

  Startled, the others at the table awkwardly followed suit.

  Feeling emboldened, Winslow gestured for one of the wait people to load his glass once more.

  * * *

  The Snake lifted out of the Barn and Eagle wasted no time shifting the wings from vertical to horizontal. Eagle took them up to high altitude to fly a waiting racetrack, making sure the cabin was pressurized, because once they got a location for the Rift, the higher they were, the faster they could move. They all knew that on the other side of the world the Russian team was also airborne, but because of the recent theft of the hard drive, odds were the Rift was going to be on this side.

  Moms was on the link with Ms. Jones, running through the things they always ran through on a Rift alert. Air Force refuelers were being scrambled at all points of the compass to top off the Snake if the distance to the target was greater than the craft’s range. For the moment, the number-one priority of the entire US military and the Support staff at Area 51 was to back up the Nightstalkers. At various military posts around the country and overseas, Quick Reaction Forces were being alerted, with no clue what they might be involved in.

  Mac was kicking back in his seat and on the team net. “Hey, Doc. What’s the number, given that we got human error already involved courtesy of our stupid Courier?”

  “I’d say it’s grave, perhaps at four.”

  Kirk looked across at Mac and raised his eyebrows in question.

  “Doc got a Rule of Seven,” Mac explained. “We could be in the middle of some heavy shit, bullets flying, Roland flaming things, and Doc will be trying to figure out how bad it could get. He says true disasters, like the Titanic, or a plane crashing—”

  “Hey!” Eagle yelled from the cockpit. “None of that.”

  “—require a minimum of seven things to go wrong, one of which is always human error. So far we ain’t never hit higher than a five, but that was pretty bad.”

  “Forget the Rule of Seven and focus on the Rule of One.” Nada was writing in his Protocol, having figured out a way to save six seconds during loading. “It don’t take seven things to kill you. Once is bad enough.”

  * * *

  The waitstaff came out with dinner, pretending it came from the kitchen, which was a joke because Lilith couldn’t boil water without burning a hole in the pan, despite the Viking stove and whatever fridge, some big name, that she absolutely had to have. Lilith was on her feet, chattering, as if she might have to dash to the kitchen to correct something.

  Winslow would have laughed, but instead h
e turned to the cute grad student, Mary, next to him and thought she might be someone who would dash in to tend to something, but not food. Mary was short, toned, and had wavy red hair that attracted lots of attention.

  “When are your orals?” Winslow asked Mary.

  She blinked.

  “They can be right now,” the drunker professor to her other side said.

  His wife glared from across the table. “Remember, you don’t have a prenup, dipshit.”

  So they all started talking about prenups, which didn’t bother Winslow because he knew Lilith would gut him before she’d get a divorce.

  “We don’t have a prenup, do we, darling?” Lilith said. That silenced the table.

  His wife held up her glass and a waiter refilled it.

  “I do love my Champers,” she said, calling the champagne by a name that generally set Winslow’s teeth on edge. She lifted the glass, some spilling over the edge of the Waterford crystal. “If I leave you, I get nothing, correct?” She looked around the table, stopping at the three pretty grad students, each for a moment. “Nothing.” She smiled coldly. “Which is why I will never leave.”

  Everyone started asking for their dessert. The haves had seen this before, while the have-nots were appropriately embarrassed.

  The professor raised his glass to Lilith, thinking, I’ve got to get rid of her. He glanced at Mary and thought she might make a nice third ex-wife. But his mind kept sliding back to the computer. He put the glass down and went all the way upstairs to take a leak, but really to look at the laptop. He realized he was staggering slightly and there was a slur in his speech, but he didn’t care. He paused in the closet and checked the computer. He was surprised to see the golden glow on the screen.