The north wing was mirror-imaged from his. Looking through an open office door and out the window, he saw the ivy-covered wall of the south wing. Sure enough, there was a raw scar where the brick had come apart. The newly exposed inner surface of the brick was clean and notably lighter.
Glancing at his watch, he found that he'd taken longer to tour the third floor than he'd intended, and would have to hurry to get down to the first floor lecture hall on time. Something bothered him as he trotted down the stairs, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He chalked it up to the trouble with his office and forgot about it.
* * * *
Christopher Arken heard the siren midway through his lecture. It came from afar and got quite close before it cut off—close enough that his students began glancing at one another and the doors leading out into the hall, as though expecting emergency personnel to come bursting in at any moment. No one interrupted them, however, and they went back to the Lorentz contraction equations without further interruption.
When class ended Arken left for his office, but ran into Bob Tindall before he'd made it ten paces down the hall. “What a week, Chris! First your office falls apart, and now this.”
“Now what, Bob?”
Tindall's eyes opened wide. “Oh, wow, you haven't heard? Guy died in your office, not half an hour ago.”
“Died? Who died?”
“One of the workmen doing the wall stuff.”
Arken was shocked. “What happened? Did he fall off a ladder or something?”
“They don't know. It's complicated. The room's a mess and the guy, well, they say he looks pretty bad.”
“Of course the room is messy, it's a construction zone.”
“Chris, the wall exploded.”
Arken shrugged. “I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that the wall actually exploded—all that happened was that the plaster fell off. That's why they're putting up new walls.”
Tindall said very slowly and carefully, “Man, your wall exploded. Today. Just a little while ago. I'm not making this up. Go see for yourself.”
When Arken got to his office, there were campus police, city police, and paramedics all crowded into the room. There wasn't room for him to enter.
A female officer looked up and saw Arken standing in the door. “I'm sorry, sir, but you can't come in here. Move along, please.” She was already moving to eject him from the scene.
“This is my office,” he said simply. “Or at least it was until the walls needed repairing.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Did you know this man?” she asked, pointing at the floor.
Arken craned his neck to look between some of the people standing around the body. He was shocked by the body's condition, but forced himself to concentrate on the face. “It looks like—maybe—the man I talked to yesterday, but I can't be certain. He wasn't ... uh ... well, he didn't look like that.”
“According to the driver's license in his wallet, his name was Patrick MacGillivray. Does that name mean anything to you?”
Arken shook his head. “No. I never got around to asking his name.”
“You said this is your office?”
He nodded.
“Did you keep anything explosive in here?”
“Explosive? No ... why would I?”
The officer looked up from the notes she was taking. She waved her pen vaguely in the air. “You're a physicist. You might be doing an experiment.”
Arken had run into this before—the blind assumption that scientists routinely blew things up just to put some excitement into an otherwise boring day. “Uh, no. All the labs are down in the basement or first floor. If there's anything explosive in the building, it would be downstairs. Nobody keeps anything rough in their office.”
“Care to explain how this could happen?” she asked, using her pen to point at the nearest wall. Her tone was just shy of accusatory.
The body on the floor had consumed all of Arken's attention so far. Now he saw that large, gray sheets of what he assumed were wallboard had been put up, but the seams between adjacent panels were ragged and torn, as though they had indeed exploded. There were rows of circular divots out of the interiors of each of the panels as well, each with a black screw head exposed in the center of a ripped area.
He squeezed past a paramedic to closer examine the wall, then turned back to her and said, “I have no idea. As I understand the process, they hold up the sheets of wallboard, use screws to fasten them into place, then use some kind of glop to smooth over the heads of the screws and the edges of the boards. Looks as though some sort of chemical reaction took place and it exploded, although I have no idea how that could happen. I don't know what's in the stuff.”
“If you ask me, it looks like pudding, but the tub says it's called joint compound. The label on the side of the container says it's mostly crushed limestone and gypsum,” she volunteered. “That help any?”
He thought for a moment. “Those are both pretty stable compounds. I can't see any reason why either one would explode.”
She questioned him for a few minutes longer, but it was perfunctory by that point. She'd already ruled him out as a suspect in whatever crime she thought had taken place. Her last question, however, took him by surprise. “Can you think of anyone who might want to kill you, Mr. Arken?”
He turned from examining the frayed edges of the wallboard and gave her his complete attention. “Are you suggesting this was murder?”
“It's a possibility, sir. This is your office. Under normal circumstances, you might have been in here this time of day. That,” she paused to point at the body on the floor with her pen, “could have been you.”
And that put an entirely different slant on things.
* * * *
Christopher Arken walked slowly towards his temporary office, numb to the external world. The police officer's suspicion that someone might be trying to murder him was worrisome, but with a man lying dead on the floor in his office, it was difficult to ignore the possibility. It would be one thing if it was just ugly graffiti scrawled on his door, as had happened to a colleague of his, but death ... that was a another matter entirely.
He decided that he was in no condition to teach a class, taped a note to the door of the classroom to notify his students that it was canceled, and went for a walk. Without any particular destination in mind, he simply went out the nearest door and wandered aimlessly around campus. The idea was bizarre. Murder was something that happened to other people. He hadn't had an affair with anyone's wife. He didn't owe anybody money. He hadn't shafted anyone on a drug deal. He didn't know anything about top secret government research projects. He kept circling back to the unbelievability of it, then would realize yet again that a man had died in his office, wonder how it had happened, come to the point in the conversation where the officer had suggested the possibility of murder—her facial expression was stuck in his mind—only to return to the impossibility of it all. Round and round in circles. If he managed to get off the endless treadmill, his mind went to the mysterious manner in which the workman had died. Arken was also beginning to feel a latent sense of guilt that an innocent man might have died in his place. Not that he wanted to die, but if some innocent third party had been killed in an attempt to murder him, it was going to be hard to live with.
It wasn't until he was halfway across campus that it occurred to him that he was a rather conspicuous target if someone actually was trying to kill him. Being out in public offered a sort of protection, but hardly enough for him to get complacent.
He turned around and started back towards the physics building, moving more rapidly, hating himself for the helpless dread that he felt. He couldn't live his life in fear. He had to know if there was actually someone trying to kill him and if so, why.
He was approaching Phillips Hall from the west. Involuntarily, his eye strayed up to the window of his office. The shattered brick on the outside wall was immediately obvious. He stopped so suddenly that a young man cra
shed into him from behind, muttered an apology, and went on, intent on his own problems. Arken stood and stared at the pieces of brick on the ground, some a fair distance from the wall. Broken brick, fallen plaster, exploding joint compound, and a dead man. And no obvious connection between the various facts.
Arken took a deep breath and told himself to get a grip. There had to be some connection. Things are only mysterious until they're explained. Afterwards, it's easy to see how it all fits together. The trick is to find the links that complete the chain of events.
He studied the wall outside his office carefully. It wasn't until he turned to face the north wing that the first piece of the puzzle fell into place. There was a small patch of dead ivy at the base of the north wall, almost exactly opposite his office window. Not just dead, but positively scorched. Arken approached the telltale dead spot cautiously, wary that it, too, might explode or do something unexpected. Nearly buried in the ivy was a window, just above ground level. Glancing up and down the length of the wall, he marked the spot in his mind and entered the building through the door in the end of the north wing, a suspicion growing in his mind.
He had paced the wall as he retraced his steps. Now he paced off the basement hallway until he was approximately even with the dead ivy outside. There wasn't a door there, but there was one a few paces behind him. He opened it quietly and slipped into the lab.
There were a half dozen standard 19-inch equipment racks side by side to his left, each full to capacity with electronic gear. Another five racks stood against the wall in front of him. In the center of the room was what appeared to be an optical bench pressed into service as a test bed. Bolted to the metal top of the bench was a tripod supporting a cylindrical stainless steel cylinder with cables going to it from the equipment in the racks. There were also what appeared to be cooling lines.
“Ah, Chris! How're you doing today?” boomed a voice from the corner. “What brings you to this dim and dusty corner of the dungeon?”
Even now he wasn't certain, so Arken proceeded carefully. “I wanted to see how you were getting along with your stasis games.”
“Doing well. Real well. In fact, we've been at it hammer and tongs for the last three or four days now, working around the clock. I sent Chu home a little while ago. He's been up for something like thirty hours straight. So have I, for that matter, but it's hard not to be excited when you're finally getting results.”
Arken spied a small pile of greasy cardboard pizza delivery boxes next to a trash can filled to the brim with stained paper coffee cups and soda cans. “Eating well, I see. And a firm believer in the caffeine diet, too.”
Mark Wellington stood, stretching, as he unfolded himself from behind the rack he'd been crouched behind. “Oh, man, that feels good!” He reached up and grasped a heavy metal conduit overhead, then lifted his feet free of the floor and allowed himself to swing from his fingertips. An impressive array of pops and crackles sounded as his vertebrae settled back into place. He grinned. “Who needs a chiropractor, anyway?” He got his feet back under himself and gestured at a stool. “Sit! Sit!”
Arken warily hitched himself up on the stool, still unsure whether he wanted to be here or not. “Let's see, I talked to you about two, maybe three weeks ago. At that point you thought you were going to be able to get up to a one centimeter diameter stasis field by the end of the week.”
Wellington ran his hands through his hair, causing it to stand upright for a moment before it fell over. “The best laid plans, and all that. If you'll pardon the expression, this ain't your father's concept of time we're working on, and the more we pick at it, the more we realize what a hairball the whole thing is. When you and I talked, I was still hoping for a general stasis field. I had a field a little under a millimeter in diameter, but things were acting unpredictably. Parts of the field would enter a pure, complete stasis, where time would stop. Other parts would slow down somewhat, or not at all. All very random, or so it seemed at the time. Chu and I nearly beat ourselves to death trying to figure out why the field wasn't uniform.” He took a deep breath and let it out as a long sigh. “A little more work and it turned out that we weren't getting a general stasis field at all. Certain molecules were more affected than others.”
“I'm not sure I'm following you. How can you slow down time for some molecules, but not for others? I thought everything in the field was supposed to slow down at once ... all at the same time ... er, to the same degree.” He gestured in frustration. “Oh hell, you know what I mean.”
“That's what we thought. It does seem reasonable, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way. We began tuning the thing and found that we could actually select which molecules we wanted to put into stasis. Meanwhile the other ones just keep right on truckin', just as though nothing was happening at all. I mean, we'd already thrown out everything we thought we knew about time in order to get that far, but at that point we had to start all over yet again. It's fascinating, I tell you. What we're doing now is trying to plot some of the more obvious molecules—”
“Like water,” Arken put in, as another piece of the puzzle fell into place.
Wellington nodded excitedly. “Yes, yes, water! We hunted around and found the tunings for nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and a few other things, but water is the one we've been playing with the last week or so. We've just about got that one licked. Once we get a good idea of the tunings for all the prominent molecular players, we intend to modify the system to produce a broadband noise field instead of a single, discrete frequency. Right now we don't know how much bandwidth will be required—it may be one order of magnitude, or it may be several. Anyway, once we get that question settled, we hope to achieve a true stasis for everything in the field.”
Arken nodded in turn, lost in thought. “Mark, let me ask you something. Your stasis field takes time out of the sample, right?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.” He paused, staring into the distance, choosing his words as he went along. “It serves as a receptacle for time ... somewhere where time would prefer to flow, rather than through the sample in the stasis field.”
“Then answer me this one, last question. Once you've removed the time from your stasis field, where do you put it? It doesn't just disappear, does it? There must be some place in your mechanism where you radiate the excess time.”
“Oh, sure,” Wellington said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder towards the wall behind him. “That's back here. The damned thing was getting really, really hot, so we put it next to an open window and let some of that chilly autumn air in to cool it off...”
* * * *
“We don't appreciate you trying to solve this on your own, Mr. Arken,” the police officer said with obvious disapproval.
“It wasn't so much that I was trying to solve it. It's more that the answer just sort of fell into my lap,” Arken protested.
It was the same female police officer he'd spoken to earlier in the day. Frankly, he didn't like her, and wished that she would simply go away. However, she seemed determined to make him sweat. She scowled at him. “And so you noticed the dead ivy and went to talk to Mr. Wellington,” she prompted.
“Professor Wellington,” he corrected. “I didn't know it was him, it was just a question of—”
“It was just a question of you counting paces until you located the laboratory behind the dead ivy. That sounds an awful lot like a conscious attempt to solve—”
“Look,” Arken said, allowing a bit of annoyance to creep into his tone, “you were the one who jumped to conclusions and decided that someone was trying to murder me. I think it's natural that I might take an interest in the matter.”
She moderated her tone somewhat. “All right. Fine. So you went into his laboratory and discovered him hiding behind some equipment.”
“Look, Officer, I've known Mark Wellington for years. We're not best friends, but we're on good terms. He may be guilty of negligence, but he certainly didn't set out to murder anyone. He
was just trying to get his stasis system to work.”
“And this stasis thing is supposed to stop time, right?” she asked.
“Right. But it wasn't stopping time for all the molecules in the field. Only for some of them. So he was trying to modify it so that it would work equally on everything.”
“I still don't see the link between that and what happened in your office.”
“He discovered how to tune the stasis field for water molecules. Water is common. It's inside you and me, in the ivy, in the air. It's everywhere. Once I saw that, everything else fell into place naturally.”
She couldn't bring herself to ask outright, so she prompted him instead, “And that was...?”
“Water was the key to the thing from the very beginning. The water in the pitcher in my office evaporated during the course of a single class period. Time in the stasis field had slowed down for water molecules in his lab, but for things to remain in balance, time had to speed up for water molecules elsewhere. That just happened to be my office. The destiny, so to speak, of the water in the pitcher in my office was to evaporate. The backlash from Mark's stasis field simply made it happen more quickly. Much more quickly. Due to inherent inefficiencies in the system, even more time gets expended on the back end than gets removed from the sample. It's an entropy thing.”
“But what happened to the joint compound—” she began, then paused, “Wait ... you're going to tell me that it was because it was wet—that there's water in the joint compound.”
Arken nodded. “The water content of the joint compound was going to evaporate, just more slowly. Under normal circumstances, it would evaporate over, say, twelve hours. There would be plenty of time for the water molecules to work their way to the surface of the joint compound and from there into the air. When the water tried to evaporate so quickly, there was no easy way for the water vapor to escape, so it expanded in place and burst the joint compound, as though it had boiled and turned to steam. Something like what happens if you try to fire pottery before it's completely dry. Some of the moisture had soaked into the wallboard, and it burst apart in the same way. That's pretty much the same thing that happened to the brick on the outside of the wall. It was raining the day the wall came apart. Enough rainwater had been absorbed into the brick—brick is more porous than you might think—that it simply blasted the brick apart.”
Analog SFF, March 2006 Page 15
