The expression on Higby’s face made sense. He had no idea who I was.
“I’ll take it at a private station,” I said to Rickets.
He gestured to a console in the corner. “Use the ear jack if you want.”
I sat at the indicated station and inserted the ear piece. “I’m Lieutenant Kyle Tanner, Homicide. I need to ask you a few questions about one of your patients.”
Higby appeared on the console’s screen and nodded. “Go ahead.”
“Four weeks ago you received a patient named Jarvis Riddel. He was a crewman here at SOLEX. Apparently he suffered something of a psychotic break. The captain sent him to you on Mercury.”
A look of understanding replaced the one of bewilderment. “I remember the case well. The man was very sick when he arrived.”
I leaned forward. “What can you tell me?”
“When he got here, he was heavily sedated. The transport had been rough. Riddel had been hallucinating, screaming about being burned alive, the radiation, and so forth. It’s a pretty tense situation where you are, I understand.”
I grunted. “Go on.”
“I slowly lowered the dosage during the first few hours. He was still paranoid, mind you, but easier to control when we convinced him he was no longer in close proximity to the sun. We had to be careful not to let him see any outside views. We had to keep his room cool as well.”
“How long did treatment last?”
“Well, the funny thing is, he got better all of a sudden. Very quickly, in fact.”
I frowned. “How so?”
“He arrived in the morning. By late afternoon he was noticeably better. By evening, he was calm, relaxed and lucid.”
“Did the meds do that?”
“No, I was reducing the meds, which were just relaxants. I didn’t really do anything at all.”
I did a mental calculation. “So within, say, twenty hours of leaving SOLEX, he was completely fine.”
“Before he died, yes.”
Two dead crewmen meant that there was a possible connection between them; it was an obvious assumption. I needed more information about the circumstances surrounding Riddel’s death.
“Some gentlemen from the CCF came for him that evening,” he continued. “I told them he wasn’t in any condition and so on, but they ignored me. I had no choice—I had to cooperate. They took Jarvis away, and it was the last time I saw him alive.”
“He died in their custody?”
“Yes.”
“Did you try to contact these men or their superiors?”
“Sure, just as a matter of routine. I was concerned about my patient.” He paused. “That’s when I found out.”
“They didn’t tell you how he died?”
“They said it was a heart attack.”
“What are the chances of that?”
He pursed his lips. “Well, he was under a lot of stress on SOLEX, most of it mental, but that does translate into physical stress as well. Increased heart rate, blood pressure, and so on. It’s not inconceivable.”
Still, the doctor had said he’d been calm and relaxed when the men took him away. Had they tortured him to find out...what, exactly? What did he know that was so important? As usual, this case was creating more questions than it answered. I reached out to terminate the connection.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I haven’t finished yet.”
I froze. “There’s more?”
“Indeed. When I found out, I demanded the return of the body. After all, I was the physician in charge. I wanted to see the body and determine the cause of death.”
“Let me guess, they wouldn’t let you—”
“Quite the contrary. You see, I have quite a bit of pull in the Confederacy.” He paused and, while chewing his lower lip, watched me silently. It was almost as if he were debating with himself about whether to disclose something important.
“And why’s that?” I asked, growing exasperated.
“My position. Let’s just say some of my patients would rather knowledge of their stays in my ward remain private.”
“Oh.” In other words, he had treated high-ranking officers who had mental illnesses and wanted it kept secret.
“I couldn’t get Riddel back, but I got permission to go view the body at CCF headquarters here on Mercury.”
“And what did you find?”
“Oh, the corpse seemed perfectly normal...”
I sat up straighter, suddenly anxious.
“...except that its head and hands were missing.”
* * *
“What?”
Startled at my outburst, both Manny and Rickets turned to me.
“Yes,” Higby continued. “The body was missing its head and both hands! I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“And what did they tell you?” I asked.
“No one knew anything. They said the people who took him from my hospital weren’t from Mercury—they were from Earth. After Riddel died, they examined him, removed the head and hands, and shipped out an hour later.”
“No mention of why they did that?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Do you think they killed him?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
The development was, frankly, stunning. I hadn’t anticipated it. The mystery had begun well before my arrival. Four weeks before, in fact.
“Thanks, Dr. Higby,” I muttered. “You’ve been a great...help, I guess.”
The elderly man grunted. “If you need more information, just call. And if you find out why they did that to his body, please let me know.”
We severed the link, and I sat for several minutes, too stunned to speak. The captain and first officer watched silently with odd expressions on their faces. They had heard only my side of the conversation, but no doubt were intensely curious about what Higby had said. They were aware he was a doctor at the hospital where they’d sent Riddel. They were probably trying to add this piece of the puzzle to their own mental picture of what was going on. Thankfully, they knew not to ask me what he had said. They knew I wouldn’t tell until I had solved the case, or until I could learn something new by revealing the information.
I stared at the blank communit.
My heart was pounding.
Chapter Fourteen
Before long there was another signal, this time from Shaheen. She was still down in my quarters, researching the bacterium Reggie had discovered.
Her face appeared on the screen. “Please come here immediately,” she said breathlessly.
“You’ve found something,” I whispered.
“Get over here right now.”
The image turned blue; she had broken the connection. As I stalked from the command center, I passed a very perplexed captain and first officer. Rickets in particular looked like he was about to burst from curiosity.
I blew by him without a word.
* * *
“What is it?” I asked as I entered the cabin. She sat poring over Reggie’s papers at the metal table. The picture of the bacterium shone brightly on her reader. I noticed that a smaller window had been opened on the display: it was a closer view of the organism’s interior. I peered at it momentarily, but didn’t know enough biology to note anything of interest.
She looked up from the mess on the table. “I’ve made some important discoveries, Tanner.” She didn’t show any anger at what had happened earlier between us; she had either forgiven me for my outburst or ignored what had occurred. “This bacterium...the computer has been unable to find a match, but there’s good reason for that.” She stood and began to pace. “What do you know of exponential growth?”
Her question threw me off. I sat next to her. “I...I guess the same as most p
eople. Two, four, eight, sixteen, and so on.”
“Basically that’s true, yes. But there’s so much more. It’s frightening, really.”
My forehead creased. “Exponential growth?”
“In certain circumstances, yes. No, no—wait. Hear me out before you start asking questions, okay?”
I shut my mouth and kept my numerous questions—like what exactly this had to do with murder—inside for now. I fidgeted uncomfortably. Withholding important questions about the case was more difficult than I’d expected. I now understood exactly how the command staff felt.
She continued. “Something increasing in numbers by exponential growth can grow enormously fast. Faster than most people can comprehend, really.”
“Like that bacteria?”
“Hush. I said no questions. Now picture this scenario. Imagine taking a sheet of paper like this.” She pulled a standard-sized page from the table. “Now let’s fold it in half.” She did so. “Now, what if I did that a hundred times? Would you believe its thickness would be that of the radius of the known universe?”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true. Its thickness would be twelve billion light-years.”
I shook my head. “Maybe if the paper were a thousand kilometers thick to start with.”
“No, I started with the assumption that the paper was point-one millimeter thick, the common size.”
I stared at her, not completely comprehending. I was an instant from halting the discussion when something inside made me stop. Instead, I waited in silence.
“Look,” she said, stern. “I didn’t make this up. The idea was first published a long time ago. Every time the paper is folded, its thickness doubles.” She picked up a pen and began scrawling figures on the piece of paper she’d demonstrated with. I watched as she drew a table with three columns.
She moved back to admire her handiwork. “Okay. That’s before the folding begins. The paper is only one sheet thick, or point-one millimeter.”
“Got it,” I said, still dubious.
“Now let’s begin folding.” She added more figures to the table, as well as a new column.
“What’s that?”
“Shut up and watch.”
“Okay,” she said. “I just folded the paper five times. It’s now thirty-two papers thick, or three-point-two millimeters. About the thickness of cardboard. Got it?”
I noted that the thickness in kilometers also doubled with every fold: from point-one to point-two to point-four and so on. It seemed correct. “Sure.” I still failed to see how she could reach the radius of the universe by doing this only a hundred times but had decided to humor her.
“In reality we wouldn’t be able to fold it much more. The maximum you can fold a piece of paper is about eight times, but let’s assume we can.” She continued to fill in the chart; my amazement grew with each iteration. She’d skipped forward to fifteen folds.
“Here we are at twenty folds,” she said. “It’s now over one million pieces of paper thick, or one hundred meters. Agree?”
I nodded. “I’m following so far.” While folding the paper seemed harmless at the beginning with two, four, eight pieces and so on, by the time she was into the thousands, the increase seemed to happen pretty damn fast. “You hit a hundred meters sooner than I thought you would. A lot sooner.”
“I’m skipping ahead here,” she said as she continued with the chart. She had to widen the columns for the larger numbers.
She stopped, put the pen down and looked at her handiwork. “See? At a hundred folds, it’s hit twelve billion light-years!”
I studied her chart, not fully understanding where the numbers had come from. “I’m not sure I believe this.” I paused. “You jumped ahead quite a bit. I can’t tell if that’s accurate.”
“There’s a simple formula you can use.” She wrote it below the table.
Number of paper thicknesses = 1 × 2g
“The g in the formula represents the generation, or the number of folds,” she continued. “You can see by plugging in a hundred for g—meaning folding the paper a hundred times—the result is exactly as I’ve shown.” She looked at me for a minute. “Or try this. Just plug it in for fifteen folds—see if it follows what I’ve done.”
I picked up her reader and used the formula to calculate the thickness of the paper for fifteen folds. Sure enough, I got 32,768 paper thicknesses.
“Now to calculate the span in kilometers, you have to multiply that number by .1 × 10-6, or point one millimeter.”
I did it and got three-point-three meters. I checked it with her chart. “Seems to work.”
“Of course it does.” She gave me a sly smile. “Still don’t believe me?”
I frowned. “Not yet. What does the two mean in the formula?”
“That’s the doubling notation, meaning that with every fold the paper doubles.”
“How do we know the radius of the universe is twelve—”
“We don’t. In fact according to Einstein, space is curved, so if we traveled right across the universe we’d actually pass the ‘edge’ and reemerge where we began.”
I scratched my head. “I think I heard that in school once. But where’d the twelve billion come from?”
“Well, if you accept that the big bang occurred twelve billion years ago, and the light from that explosion—which is traveling outward at light speed, of course—represents the farthest extent of the universe, then—”
“The radius can only be twelve billion light-years.”
“Yes. Give or take.”
I leaned back and exhaled. It meant it would take only one more fold to reach the entire width of the universe!
“What if I told you that, according to Reggie’s notes, the bacterium in the photo could double every thirty minutes?” she asked.
“But isn’t that normal?”
“Of course. Perfectly normal.” She began to pace once again. “There are numerous tales in every culture about exponential growth. Rice on a chessboard in China, or a raja’s rice in India and how a bet with a young girl ended in the collapse of his kingdom. And there are plenty of scientific discoveries that depend on it or even seem to follow its pattern. An atomic detonation and the release of neutrons is one. Computer processing power—”
I sighed. “Dammit, Shaheen! I don’t know why you’re telling me all this. What does it have to do with the bacterium Reggie found?”
“I was getting to that.”
“It’s taking a damn long time!”
She looked at me and grinned. “Sorry. Simply put: he found a nano in that blood sample.”
I stared at her. “I already know that. He wrote that.”
“What I mean is, the picture is the nano. It’s not bacteria.”
I still didn’t understand. “What?”
“Completely foreign technology, Tanner, as he wrote. It’s a biological nanomachine, capable of replication. And it does so at an exponential rate.”
* * *
A long moment passed as I digested what she had said. It didn’t make sense. Nanos couldn’t replicate. They were tools used by human beings, and they had finite life spans. The medical variety did their job and then were lost forever, expelled by the human body through natural processes. The engineering varieties performed their functions until they exhausted their internal power supplies. Scientists had been trying to create a replicating nano for decades, but it had proved too difficult to achieve; they predicted it would remain so for the next fifty years at least.
“Shaheen,” I said. “He found bacteria in the blood. He took a picture of it! He made a comment about a nano, but he didn’t include a photo, and there’s no other evidence of it.”
“But he did include a photo.” She held up the picture that Reggie had taken. “
This is it. It may look like bacteria, but it’s actually a nano.”
I looked at it: a rod-shaped bacterium with flagella trailing from one end. It couldn’t be man-made. Still, deep down, I realized there must have been a reason why the computer couldn’t classify it, and it had every known bacterium in its database.
“Look at this.” She pointed to the enlarged picture of the bacterium. “See those black squares inside the organism? The computer couldn’t match it with the database because of those. I enhanced the picture and got this.” She pulled up a stylized diagram of the bacterium’s interior. I leaned in, squinting.
“Those look—”
“Mechanical! Yes. Tanner, someone has fused a biological organism with a nano-scale computer processor!”
“But not really,” I protested. “It’s bacteria.”
“I’m assuming it’s being controlled. Think about it: the flagella on the bacteria provide movement. The bacteria can multiply, and perhaps the processor would be duplicated in the division as well. So yes, it’s biological, but it’s probably taking instructions from that processor. It can’t do everything our nanos can, like destroy tumors and so on, but it’s revolutionary! Scientists haven’t come close to getting them to reproduce.” She paused. “This one can.”
Skeptical would be an understatement for what I thought of her theory at that point. “So what exactly do you think it can do?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea. It’s a mystery.”
“Can you find out? Decipher the processor’s code? You’re an engineer.”
She looked doubtful. “It’s nano scale. I wouldn’t have the first idea. Whoever made it would have the necessary machinery, I’m sure.”
“But can you do it? It’s critical, Shaheen.”
She sighed and thought for a long moment. “I’ll try.”
The Furnace Page 15
