He followed the sidewalk encircling the undulating floor plan to the main entrance, where another guard checked his ID, then led him to an elevator. He rode up—alone—to the top floor and stepped into a front office of rich scarlets and turquoise. The air itself seemed custom-fabricated; all his senses felt heightened. A receptionist came smartly around her oversized glass desk, professional smile and hand ambiguously extended, either to shake his or take his elbow or return to her side, whatever his body language might tell her to do.
He shook her hand.
“Mr. Philicos, welcome to Destry-McMillin. Mr. McMillin is expecting you. This way, please.”
He entered a much larger office, floor-to-ceiling windows curving around almost 120°, giving a spectacular view of the company campus. To the southwest, a huge block of a structure rose up out of the surrounding trees, off-white and windowless.
A large, gray-haired man stood in front of the immense black desk, his back to the view. A white beard framed a squarish face that featured wide-set, small eyes, and a broad nose that had been broken once or twice.
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“Mr. Connor to see you, sir,” the receptionist announced, then retreated from the office.
“Mr. McMillin, I presume?” John said, stopping a few feet from him.
“And you are the John Connor,” the man said. “I may be the only one in the state who knows that.” He grinned. “So please, don’t demolish my life’s work.”
“I didn’t bring a single explosive device with me—except, perhaps, my temper.”
McMillin’s laugh burst out, loud and full of surprise. He gestured to a set of comfortable armchairs around a low coffee table. “Sit, sit.”
“There’s an explanation, of course?”
“Of course. But first…” He leaned over his desk and pushed a button. “Tess, could you see some refreshments are brought in? My usual, and—” He looked at John. “Coffee? Something stronger?”
“Coffee’s fine.”
“Coffee, two cups. Thanks, Tess.” He waved at the chairs.
“Please.”
As he sat down, John saw a man past an athletic prime, who might once have been physically formidable. Football, perhaps, or even rugby. He retained much of the aura of the powerful body, but he was in his fifties now. According to the information Jenny had managed to gather on such short notice, most of McMillin’s work had been in research and, in the last ten years, building a company.
“First off,” McMillin said, “I want you to know, I do require your services. I’ve got a small problem that needs tending and I can’t do it internally. I’m familiar with your company, your work, and I’m impressed. I know your rates.
There’s a bonus in this at the end of a successful commis-sion. So I have not gotten you here on false pretenses.”
“But there must be a dozen first-rate firms like PPS right here in L.A.”
The door opened, and a porter rolled in a tray. He set a coffee service on the table, placed a cup before each man, then set a tall glass filled with light brown, creamy liquid 20
HOUR OF THE WOLF
in front of McMillin. He placed a last tray filled with cheeses, crackers, and cookies, then left.
“There are,” McMillin said as the door closed. “But I want you.”
“For reasons other than our expertise?”
McMillin poured John’s coffee, then filled his own cup.
“After I investigated you, I find that it is precisely how good you are that recommends you most. Not in the security business—as you say, there are a dozen firms here as good, if not better—but in your own abilities to…work the system?”
John stared silently at him for a few moments, then decided he’d been polite enough. “How do you know who I am?”
McMillin took a long drink from his glass, then leaned back. “Philicos. Interesting name. You’ve chosen less sym-bolic ones in the past, but maybe you’re tired of being Bill Smith. Philicos means, loosely, ‘wolf lover.’ The Gaelic root of Connor is Conchobhar, which means ‘lover of wolves.’
Sean is one of the more common derivations of John, of which most people are blithely unaware. So you’ve come back to America wearing your own name for no one to recognize. I admire that.”
“My cover’s been broken by etymology—imagine that.
But unless you do this sort of thing as a hobby, I doubt you would have simply stumbled on it.”
“Correct. I was told to look for you.”
“By whom?”
McMillin’s eyebrows rose. “Why, by you.”
21
THREE
Deirdre dropped her backpack on the couch and rolled her head around to work the soreness out of her neck. Across the apartment, Bobby Porter sat at the kitchen table, legs pulled up with his heels on the edge of the chair, legal pad in his lap; the Macintosh sat on the table, screen glowing into his face.
Evening sun teased through the drawn blinds behind him.
“Your eyes will melt,” Deirdre said, and stepped out of her sandals.
“Someday, maybe,” Bobby said. He frowned at the legal pad, then at the screen, and made a sudden series of notes on the pad. He touched the mouse and studied the screen for a time, still frowning.
Deirdre sat down on the sofa, sighing loudly. The mail was laid out neatly on the coffee table. She picked through it until she found an envelope addressed to ROBERT PORTER, CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, PHYSICS DEPT. C/O PROF.
MICHAEL COJENSIS from Cyberdyne Technologies.
“What’s this?” she asked, sliding out the folded sheet.
“What’s what?” Bobby asked.
“You know what. What else would I ask about?”
He glanced over at her. “Do you have no sense of my privacy?”
“Of course I do—it’s mine. This is not private. This is significant.” She opened the letter.
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“Did you have a good workout?” he asked.
“Don’t change the subject. Yes, I did.” She skimmed the opening, then came to the body of the letter. “They want to interview you.”
“They do.”
“Did you send them an application or something?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then how—?”
“I wondered the same thing, considering.”
“Did you ask Cojensis?”
“Not yet.”
“You’re not going to the interview, then?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
Deirdre looked at him. He closed down his computer and rubbed his eyes.
“Is that a real question?” she asked.
Bobby stood, stretched, then went to the coffeepot. He swirled what was left pooled at the bottom, scowled, and took the urn to the sink. He rinsed it out, then began to make a new pot.
“Cyberdyne does government work,” Deirdre said.
“Translate that as military.”
“Your dad does government work.”
“Not military.”
Bobby gave her a skeptical look, then continued preparing the coffee.
“Maybe peripherally,” she said, “but so what? That doesn’t mean I’d approve of you working for him, either.”
“I never said I intended to accept a job from Cyberdyne.”
“Then why go to the interview?”
“I want to see if I can get the job.” He flipped the BREW
switch, then came over to the sofa. “It’s a test. I could use the ego boost.”
“Why? You’re the best student Cojensis has.”
“I don’t know that.”
“Why else would he steal from you?” When Bobby’s face went rigid, Deirdre felt guilty. “Look, this doesn’t sound 23
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like something you should even play with. I mean, what if there’s a security check?”
Now Bobby looked embarrassed. “Well, maybe they already did that. Maybe t
hey think they can get me for Cyberdyne because I’ve got a problem. In any case, if I don’t show up, they might blow the whistle out of spite.”
“And if you turn them down, why wouldn’t they blow the whistle then? Out of spite, as you put it.”
“But then I know it won’t matter. I’ll know I can land something.”
“Without your degree? What good—”
“Look, I’m going, okay? I feel I need to do this, okay?”
Deirdre’s ears warmed. Bobby almost never raised his voice, not to her. She dropped the letter back on the coffee table and headed for the refrigerator. For nearly a minute, the tension pressed around her. She found a bottle of water and twisted the cap off. Leaning against the sink, she guzzled half of it down. She sighed explosively, glaring at the back of his head, and the dark, nearly black hair that curled delicately at his collar. She could tell by the set of his shoulders that he felt the bad air between them, and was looking silently for a way to alter it, bring it back to their normal condition.
Normal condition—whatever that might be. Deirdre ran through it again. Lower middle class boy from a blue-collar neighborhood with a natural aptitude for theoretical math, living with a rich girl off-campus—at her expense—while usurping a relative’s scholarship; a relative whose where-abouts no one knew. The real Robert Porter might be dead, might be in the Far East, might have joined some borderline psychotic religious group; no one knew. As far as Deirdre knew, no one had ever called the police. She imagined they had, but Bobby—this Bobby, this near stranger she could not keep away from—had never said. He also had never said he resented her money, her class, her ease with all the rest of campus life. Never said it, but sometimes it surfaced when least expected, like now. He needed to feel, to know, 24
HOUR OF THE WOLF
he could do something substantial without cheating or relying on her status to get him through.
But he never had relied on her status, that was the thing.
He treated her like an equal, a person he liked—loved—being around. She had never received that kind of consideration from any of her peers before. Sometimes he seemed embarrassed on her behalf, that she had to exist with the burden of family wealth along with all the other things she carried—and carried well, she thought.
Ninety-five percent of the time, they shared a common space with each other free of all possible obstacles. It was good. Really good. Now and then, though, something snapped, and he became defensive and irascible. She thought she understood. Maybe she did, slightly, but she had never lived any part of his life. Empathy went only so far.
Just as she opened her mouth to apologize, he said, “I’m sorry.” The tension went out of his shoulders, his head slumped a little forward, and Deirdre felt the good space embrace her again. She set the bottle down and went to him. Her fingers dug into his shoulders, worked at his neck.
She looked at the monitor on the table.
“What were you working on?” she asked.
“Visser transforms,” Bobby said. “Seems to me there’s a conservation-of-mass violation in my last set of equations.
I’m trying to see if it’s compensated for through n-space folding.”
Deirdre hesitated, working through the language. If there was any resentment on her part in this relationship, it was over the seemingly effortless way he slipped in and out of this level of theory. “Wouldn’t it be just a relativistic shift?
Frame of reference?”
“Maybe. But we’re actually removing mass from one frame and inserting it into another that has no other connection than that it exists along the same timeline. In order to do that, I treat time as just another frame, but I’m not sure if I can do that. I’m removing a frame from the other 25
TERMINATOR 2
three to which it was originally connected. Look.” He got up and went to the table. Deirdre followed.
“Happens at the subatomic level all the time,” she said.
“We assume it does.” Bobby straightened in the chair and pointed at the screen. “It may be that what we’re describing there is just a convenient way to make the numbers come out. We don’t really know if there’s any temporal flux going on.”
“Didn’t you say once that in order for the universe to move through time, there had to be a wavefront? Something to precede the universe to sort of open the door?”
He waved a hand impatiently. “Play. I was tossing around ideas to see where they landed.”
“And the wavefront,” Deirdre went on in mock lecture voice, returning to the sink and her water bottle, “is what we see with the appearance and disappearance of element-ary particles in empty space—‘quantum fizz,’ I believe you called it. Suppressing that fizz in a small volume of vacuum will give rise to stable though small quantities of exotic matter with which we could prop open a wormhole of sufficient size to conduct limited time travel experiments. The fizz itself is the net distribution of time traveling—or ‘tunneling,’ I think you preferred—particles over sufficient volume to prevent, through some sort of conservation of energy function, the spontaneous formation of stable wormholes.”
Bobby laughed. “Very good, Ms. McMillin—you get a passing mark on your defense. You may go straight to Fermilab for a tenured position if you can explain to me how to suppress that fizz, and how to determine direction through the wormhole. And what exactly the wormhole leads to.”
“Got me there, Professor. Ain’t got a clue.”
“Me, either.” He switched off the monitor and stood. “And I can’t risk taking this to Cojensis for help.”
Deirdre grunted. “This is so off-the-wall theoretical, I doubt he’d risk stealing it.”
“If he helped me, he’d see it has potential.” He rolled his 26
HOUR OF THE WOLF
eyes. “Hell, who’m I kidding? If I don’t find a way around him, I’m screwed.”
“Change mentors.”
“And get found out?”
“By now, do you really think they’d throw you out?
You’ve been doing great work. I think they might make an exception—”
“I don’t want them to make an exception! I want—”
“You want the universe to be fair.”
“Well…yeah.”
They both burst out laughing simultaneously. Bobby stepped up to her and touched her hair. “God, you are so…”
She eased up against him and leaned her head back to let him kiss her neck.
“Salty,” he said, and licked her throat.
“Mmm, ready to cook.”
Later, unable to stay asleep, Deirdre opened the letter from Cyberdyne again. She was tempted to call her stepdad anyway. She knew he would take her advice about Bobby and offer him a position. He might even be able to intercede on his behalf with the university. But she knew that such an act would be the beginning of the end for them.
Still, a little information might be useful. She studied the name at the bottom of the invitation: Franklin Casse, Special Projects, Vice President. Maybe it would be a good idea to know who Mr. Franklin Casse was.
She returned the letter to its envelope and replaced it among the others. She sorted through the rest—bills, ads, requests for donations—but left them unopened. She picked up the television remote, then dropped it on the couch, unactivated. She ran her hands down her stomach and along her hips. Good workout today. Two good workouts…
From the picture window she had a clear view of the parking lot. Few cars remained at this time of day. One she now noticed she had never seen before—midnight blue, large, and backed into a slot just across from their apartment. Someone sat behind the wheel, but the late afternoon 27
TERMINATOR 2
sun glinted off the glass. Deirdre felt briefly like stepping back, but their windows were all polarized so no one could see in. She noted the license plate anyway, a habit she had carried with her since childhood. She used to turn them into puzzles to be solved—at first word games, then later num
ber problems.
She picked up the phone and poised a finger over the speed-dial button for her stepfather’s office.
No, she decided, returning the phone to its cradle. He needs to do this. I need to let him.
Still, the Cyberdyne logo troubled her. It had been a long time since they had been in the news with all the destruction at two of their facilities, the one in L.A. an almost total loss, the one in Colorado Springs compromised but…No public statement had ever been released concerning what had been lost at Colorado Springs, or even what they had been doing there. Secrecy and weapons, the dogs accompanying modern-day Mars on his way to war. And Cyberdyne was one of the kennels.
“He said he wouldn’t take the job,” she murmured. “Trust him.”
She did trust him. What he said he would do she could count on. She worried, though, that he could get hurt.
She checked the address where he was supposed to meet Mr. Casse, early next week.
He never told me to stay home that day…
His dreams unfolded with shapes he could describe in numbers. He had always done this, he had always recognized these landscapes. When he discovered mathematics, through his cousin Bobby, as a child—not yet twelve and playing games with differential equations—he knew he had found, if not his voice, his true language. The lattice-like way in which all his dreams seemed to order themselves began to make sense as matrices. He could not be sure which came first—the obsession with numbers or the mathematical nature of his dreams—but it no longer mattered.
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HOUR OF THE WOLF
Now he watched a string unfold itself from a tight coil of bright matter. Along the length of the string, planes attached. Through the planes, porous to the intrusions of certain colors, glowing threads coiled, following the main trunk, almost becoming helices, but never quite crossing over each other, encountering new planes and changing direction or ending. A few, in ways he could not quite make out, seemed to penetrate one plane only to emerge from one “below,” as if it had crossed to a before-place. He tried to go around the ever-complicating construct, to look at the specific planes where this happened, but the entire structure turned with him, locked to his frame—or he locked to its frame. There was something about the shape of those particular planes that made no sense, but he could not quite see how. They sprang from the main string, but curved away, as if dragged downward by gravity. They ought to have dimpled, and recovered their original level, but it did not appear to be the case. If only he could move around to the other side…
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