Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  Maria had heard the noise from another room of the apartment—she could have heard it from any room, and maybe out in the street. She appeared at the door and politely asked us if we were ready to leave. We were. Both of us became subdued. Thomas Walton Shellstock (the Fourth) drove me back to my apartment on Connecticut Avenue. We didn’t speak.

  As he stopped in front of the building he said: “I hate all this, Rachel. Really hate it. I’m not interested in looking for Jason Lockyer, and if I see his wife ever again that will be too soon.”

  I reached over and switched off the ignition key. “I know how you must feel,” I said. “But I hope you’ll decide to stick with it. It would be easy for you to say to hell with it, and quit. I feel the same way myself, but you know I can’t do that. For one thing I need the money, and for another I could get a complaint that will cost me my license. And I need your help on this—you can see I’m floundering. Please, Tom. Don’t back out now.”

  It was unfair pressure, and I knew it. After a couple of silent moments Tom lifted his head to look up at the front of the building.

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “If you want to, bring that lousy golliwog stamp around to my store tomorrow morning.”

  (Looking back, I see this as the critical moment when I began to use Tom Walton’s essential niceness to ease him out of his shell. And if it was also the first step in saving or destroying the world, that’s another matter—I certainly didn’t suspect it at the time.)

  I opened the door and stepped out. “Thanks, Tom,” I said. “You’re a real nice guy and I won’t forget this. See you about ten o’clock. Good night.”

  I walked away quickly. I wanted to be inside the lobby before he could tell me he had changed his mind.

  I had taken the liberty of carrying Jason Lockyer’s newly arrived mail away in my purse from the Lockyer apartment. After all, Eleanor had just about ordered me to take it away and study it.

  After two coffees and that conversation with Tom Walton I knew it was going to be difficult to go to sleep (yes, I have a conscience, too). I didn’t even try. I spread out the mail on the kitchen table and began to go through it piece by piece. About half-past eleven I had a breakthrough, courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service. It’s rare to thank the USPS for slow service, but I was ready to do it.

  Although the letters had all been delivered to Lockyer’s apartment that morning or the day before, one of them had been mailed nearly three weeks earlier. It should have reached Jason Lockyer long before he left for parts unknown, but of course it hadn’t.

  It bore a first-class postage stamp and a near-illegible postmark. I could make out the date and the letters “CO”—Colorado—at the bottom, but the town name was impossible. The handwritten envelope was addressed to Professor Jason Lockyer. Inside was a second envelope, this time with nothing written on it—but there was a golliwog stamp in the upper right corner. And inside that was the following typed message:

  I think it’s time to give you another progress report, even though it’s sooner than I said. Seven and Eight are running along so-so, nothing much different from what you heard about in my last report. But Nine—you’d never believe Nine if you didn’t see it for yourself. It’s still changing, and no one can estimate an end-point. The crew are supposed to go inside in another week. Marcia says we’ll be in no danger and she wants us to stay there longer than usual. She’s done something new on the DNA splicing, and she believes that Nine is moving to a totally different limit, one with a Strange Attractor we’ve never seen before. She thinks it may be the one we’ve been searching for all along. Me, I’m afraid it may be the ultimate boss system—the real Mega-Mother. Certainly the efficiency of energy utilization is fantastic—more than double any of the others, and still increasing.

  I tell you frankly, I’m scared, but I’ll have to go in there. No way out of it. You told me that if I ever wanted advice you’d give it. I think that’s what we all need here, a new look without any publicity. Any chance you can arrange to come? I’ll write again or telephone in the next few days to keep you up-to-date. Then maybe you can tell me it’s all my imagination.

  The one-page letter was unsigned and undated, but I had the date on the postmark. And I had the log of Jason Lockyer’s incoming long-distance phone calls at the university and at each apartment. It should be straightforward to find out who had written the cryptic note.

  By half-past one I had changed my ideas about that. The incoming log showed nothing from Colorado anywhere near the right dates. As a final act of desperation I at last went to the log of Jason Lockyer’s outgoing calls, ones he had placed himself. I had looked at this log before, but he made so many calls to so many places that I had not been able to see anything significant.

  Sweet success.

  It jumped out at me in the first ten seconds of looking. Six days after this letter had been mailed, Lockyer had placed a series of four phone calls in one day to Nathrop, Colorado. One call had lasted for over forty minutes. I checked in my National Geographic atlas. Nathrop was a small town about seventy miles west of Colorado Springs. It lay on the Arkansas River with the Sawatch Range of the High Rockies rearing up to over fourteen thousand feet just to the west.

  Nathrop, Colorado.

  For the first time, I had a place to look for Jason Lockyer that was smaller than the continental United States.

  Within two minutes I knew I would be going to Nathrop myself. Calling that telephone number was a tempting thought, but there was a danger that it might make Jason Lockyer run before I had a chance to talk to him face to face. The real question was, would I tell Eleanor Lockyer what I was doing? She was my client, so the natural answer was, yes, she had to know and approve. But now I had to face Tom’s question: did I want to find Jason Lockyer for her when he didn’t want to be found?

  I went to bed. I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning in mixed feelings of satisfaction and uneasiness.

  I was standing at the door of Tom’s shop on 15th Street by eight-thirty. Nice district. I was propositioned twice, and would have been moved on, too, if I hadn’t been able to show the cops my license.

  Tom’s white Dodge wheezed around the corner at nine o’clock. He saw me and waved before he turned to park in the alley behind the building. He was eating an Egg McMuffin. I’m not a breakfast person, but I wished I had one.

  “Got the stamp?” he said as soon as he came out of the alley. He was wearing a tan sports coat and matching flannels, and a well-ironed white shirt. His hair was combed and he was so clean-shaven his skin had a scraped look.

  “Better than that. I have two of them.”

  I explained while he was opening the front door of the store.

  “Good,” he said. “It’s nice to have a spare. It means I won’t have to be quite so c-careful with the first one. And if you want my opinion, you ought to find Jason Lockyer and hear his side of the story before you tell Eleanor Lockyer a damned thing.”

  He went straight past the counter, unlocked the inner door, and waved me through.

  It was just as well that I had learned the previous night that Tom was from a wealthy family. Otherwise, the word that would have entered my head when I stepped through the beige-painted wooden door into the rear of the store would have been: drugs. Money had been spent here, lots of money, and in downtown D.C. big money says illegal drugs more often than you would believe. At the back of the store was a massive Mosler safe, the sort of thing you’d normally see in a top-secret security installation or a bank vault. There was a well-equipped optical table along one wall and a mass of computer gear along another. Tom explained to me that it was an Apollo image analysis workstation, with a digitizer and raster scanner as input devices.

  “I can view a stamp or a marking ink with a dozen different visible wavelength filters,” he said. “Or in ultraviolet or multiband infrared. We can do chemical tests, too, on a tiny corner, so small you’d never know we’d touched it. I have calipers that will measure to a micron or bett
er, and the raster scanner will create a digital image for computer processing. I can do computer matching against all the standard papers and inks.”

  “And the safe?”

  “Stamps. They’re negotiable currency, of course, but that’s not the point. The old and rare ones have a worth quite unrelated to their face value.”

  Just like Tom Walton.

  He took the envelope containing the first golliwog stamp and placed it carefully on a light-table. Those fat fingers were surprisingly precise and delicate. As he placed a high-powered stereo lens in position and bent over it, he said: “Why are you rejecting the most obvious reason of all for Jason Lockyer running off—that he c-can’t stand his wife? Seems to me he has an excellent reason, right there.”

  “If he just wanted to get away from her he wouldn’t need to disappear. He had good legal advice before they married. They have a marriage contract, and if they split up he knows exactly how much it would cost him. He can afford it. All he would have to do is stay over in Baltimore and tell his lawyers to go ahead with the separation papers. If he were to die, that’s another matter. She gets a lot more. I think that’s one reason why Eleanor is willing to pay me to find out what happened. She wants that money so bad she can taste it.”

  I watched as Tom grunted in satisfaction and straightened up. He fed the second envelope carefully into a machine that looked like a horizontal toaster.

  “The thousand dollar version of the old steam kettle,” he said. “It takes the stamp off the cover with minimal damage to the mucilage. Here it comes.” The stamp was appearing from the other side of the machine on a little porcelain tray. He removed it, placed it between two pieces of transparent film, and secured it in position on the scanner.

  “There’s one other reason why I’m sure Lockyer’s not planning to stay away forever,” I went on. “He didn’t take any checkbooks, and he hasn’t used any credit cards. What will he do when he runs out of money?”

  “What about coupon clipping?” asked Tom. And then, when I looked puzzled, “I mean dividends. If he’s like me he gets dividend checks all the time, and he can cash them easily. All he would have to do is change the mailing address for receipt of those, and he could live off them indefinitely.”

  “Damn. I never thought of that. I’ll have to check it.”

  He closed the cover on the scanner, leaned back, and stared at me. “It’s none of my business, but how did you get into this detective work? And how long have you been doing it?”

  “Six years. Two years on my own, since my uncle died. It was really his business, and I used to help him out in the summers when I was still in school. When I graduated a job was hard to find. Tell an employer you have a double degree in English and psychology and it’s like saying you have AIDS and leprosy.”

  “But why do you stay in it?”

  “Well, I’ve got an investment. There’s a hundred and fifty-eight dollar fee for the application for a D.C. license. And another sixteen-fifty for fingerprinting, and thirty for business cards. It adds up.”

  I was trying to tease him, but he was too smart and it didn’t work.

  “Do you make any money?” he asked.

  He wasn’t teasing at all, he was just making conversation while the scanner did its thing on the stamp. But unfortunately it did work. I’ve grown hypersensitive about what I do for a living. I broke up with my last boyfriend, Larry, over just this subject.

  “I pay the rent,” I snapped back at him. “And I bought your dinner last night. You say you’re rich but I didn’t see you itching to pick up the tab.”

  “I’ve been trained not to,” he said quietly. “That’s one of the things I was told at my mother’s knee—everyone in the world will try to soak you for a loan or a f-free meal, as soon as they find out you’re a Shellstock. I guess that’s another reason why I’m Tom Walton. But I’ll buy you dinner anytime you want me to, Rachel.”

  Which of course left me feeling like the ultimate jerk. I hadn’t bought him dinner—the Lockyers had, since it would be on my expense account. And he knew that, yet he offered to buy me dinner out of his own pocket. I’d slapped him and he was offering the other cheek.

  “Let me tell you about the golliwog stamp,” he went on. I was quite ready to let him change the subject. “There’s more to be measured, but a few things are obvious already. First, look at the perforations on the edge of the stamp. Even without a lens you can see that only the top and bottom are perforated, with the sides clean. That means this stamp is from a vertical coil—a roll of stamps rather than a sheet, with the stamps joined at top and bottom, not at the sides. And even without measuring I can tell you this is ‘perf 12’—twelve perforations in twenty millimeters. Nothing unusual about any of this, though horizontal coils are more common. What’s more interesting is the way the stamp was produced. Take a look.”

  He moved me to the light-table and showed me how to adjust the binocular lens to suit my eyes.

  “See the pattern of lines across the stamp? That’s called a laid batonné paper, a woven paper with heavier lines in a certain direction. And there’s no watermark—that’s a pretty sure sign that these stamps were never intended for use as commercial postage.”

  “So what’s the point of them?”

  “My guess is that they were made to identify a certain group of people—like a secret sign, or a password. Put one of these on the envelope, you see, and it proves you’re one of the inside group. I’ve seen it done before, though this is an unusually well-executed design for that sort of thing. The choice of a golliwog supports my idea because it’s not a symbol I’d ever expect to see on a commercial stamp. Now, look at the actual design of the golliwog.”

  I stared at it and waited for revelation.

  “There are five main processes used in manufacturing stamps,” he went on. “First, engraved intaglio, where a design is cut directly into the surface of the plate—that’s been used for as long as stamps have been made. Second, letterpress, in which the design is a cameo, a pattern raised in relief above the surface of the plate. Third, lithography, which uses water and an oily ink drawn on a stone, or actually on a metal surface prepared to simulate stone. Fourth, embossed, where a die is used to give the stamp a raised surface. Fifth, photogravure, where the lines are photographed onto a film covering the plate, and then etched onto the surface as though they were an engraving. Clearly, what you are looking at there is a photogravure.”

  Clearly. To him, perhaps. “I’ll believe you. But I don’t see where that takes us.” I was losing interest in stamps and itching to head off for Colorado. I didn’t have the gall to tell him, though, not when he thought what he was doing was important.

  “It takes us to a very definite place.” All signs of stammer had gone from Tom’s voice. “To Philadelphia. You see, there aren’t all that many people who do the design work for stamps. And I’m ninety-five percent sure I recognize the designer of that one you’re looking at. I know his style. He likes vertical coils, and he likes to do intaglio photogravure. His name is Raymond Sines, and if you want me to I’ll call Ray right now.”

  Why hadn’t he told me that to start with, instead of giving me the rigmarole about intaglio and cameo? Because he liked to talk about stamps, that’s why.

  I stopped pretending to look at the golliwog. “I’m not sure what talking to Raymond Sines would do for me. How well do you know him?”

  He hesitated. I was learning. Hesitation in Tom Walton usually meant uneasiness.

  “So-so. I’ve met Ray a few times informally, at the Collectors’ Club in New York City. He’s a pretty peculiar guy. Very smart, and a terrific artist and designer. But when he gets away from stamps he’s a one-subject talker. He’s a space nut, and a founder member of Ascend Forever—a group that designs space habitats.”

  “I don’t see that taking us to Jason Lockyer. Do you realize that yesterday I had no leads and now I have two? And they go off in wildly different directions.”

  “Two’
s a lot better than zero. And I think you may need them both.”

  I saw his point. Nathrop showed a population of less than five hundred people, so if Lockyer was there I couldn’t miss him; but it was also a wilderness area with hundreds of square miles of land and very few people. So if he wasn’t in the town…

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” I said. “It could be that whoever wrote the letter to Lockyer was just using the Nathrop post office mailbox and telephone. What do we do if we go there and find nothing?”

  “We come back. Do you have the letter with you? If so, I’d like to see it for myself.”

  I handed it over and watched while he read it. “Make any sense to you?”

  He shook his head. “Strange Attractor?”

  “I know. I’ve never heard the phrase before.”

  “I have. I can tell you what it means at the Scientific American level. It’s a math-physics thing, where you keep feeding the output of a system back in as a new input. Sometimes it converges to a steady state—an attractor; sometimes it goes wild, and ends up unstable or with total chaos; and sometimes it sort of wanders around a region—around a strange attractor. The type of behavior depends on some critical system variable, like flow rate or chemical concentration or temperature. It’s obvious from this letter that the writer is involved in a set of experiments—but it’s anybody’s guess as to what field they’re in. And Mega-Mother?” He placed the letter back on the light-table. “Maybe he’s using ‘Strange Attractor’ to mean something different from what I’ve seen before. I don’t think we’re going to get much out of this.”

  “I’m not, that’s for sure. And it’s irrelevant. I’m trying to find Jason Lockyer, not solve puzzles. Useless or not, I guess I have to head for Colorado.”

  “Will you hold off for one day—so I can make a quick run up to Philly. Ray Sines has his own engraving shop there and I want to drop in on him.”