The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  But occasionally some nocturnal driver would pull up on a cross street and trip the sensor, throwing the entire chain of traffic lights into a state of chaos. Since the land was flat and Lincoln Way was straight, all of the lights, for miles into the distance, were visible at once. The results were almost palpable. Clyde could see the headlights of the interloper, lurking in the side street, and he could watch the lights turning red in chain reaction up and down the length of the street.

  Attached to each light was an apparatus that consisted of a little electronic box with a long, narrow tube sticking out of it in each direction, pointing down the street. Recessed way back in each tube was a photocell. The photocell stared up the tube, looking at the street with tunnel vision.

  Emergency vehicles all had strobe lights tuned to flash at a particular frequency. When the photocell noticed such a light, it would trip the stoplight and make it turn green. This was how emergency vehicles were able to scream up and down the length of Lincoln Way even at rush hour without ever encountering a red light.

  Whenever Clyde saw lights beginning to turn red on Lincoln Way in the middle of the night, he would reach down and wrap his fingers around the knob that controlled the station wagon’s headlights. He would jerk the knob back and forth several times, rapidly flashing the headlights, and as if by magic, lights would turn green, in chain reaction, all the way down the length of Lincoln Way, all the way (he imagined) to the East Coast, and he would glide by in the big station wagon, glancing at the interlopers stopped at the cross streets, glaring at him suspiciously.

  Once he found himself stopped at a red light anyway, because he was thinking so hard about Marwan Habibi that he had forgotten to flash the lights. He glanced at the cross street to see who the hell was out at three o’clock in the morning, screwing up the preordained behavior of the traffic lights. It was a powerful, jacked-up Trans Am belonging to one Mark McCarthy, a misdemeanor specialist whom Clyde had arrested on several occasions. The Trans Am was departing an especially inexpensive neighborhood of Nishnabotna, where he was known to live, from time to time, with his common-law wife and occasional children.

  Someone—or something—was definitely in the passenger seat next to Mark McCarthy. But Clyde was unable to tell who, or what, it was until McCarthy pulled forward and made a left turn directly in front of him. Looking in through the windows of McCarthy’s Trans Am at close range, Clyde was clearly able to make out a pale-pink baby seat with an infant strapped in it, wrapped in its fuzzy blanket sleeper, sucking on a fresh bottle.

  The key witness was Vandeventer, who had seen Marwan Habibi carried out of the lab early on the same night he had been murdered (the same night that the rowboat had been stolen). Vandeventer had got a good look at Marwan and was sure that his skull had been intact at that point—and, indeed, there could be little doubt of this, because the damage observed by Barney Klopf during the autopsy had been severe, and obvious even to Barney, a notorious abuser of pharmaceutical substances.

  Vandeventer had ID’d the other Arab students who had been present at the party in Lab 304, and all of them had been interviewed—but their words were taken with a grain of salt, because all of them were suspects. The students agreed that after leaving Lab 304 they had proceeded to a house, where Habibi had woken up and continued with the celebration.

  Fingerprints were lifted from the rowboat and the fatal oar and matched with those of one Sayed Ashrawi, who was one of the students ID’d by Vandeventer. Further interviews with the other students established that, at about one o’clock in the morning, Ashrawi had volunteered to take Marwan Habibi home—he was relatively sober, the designated driver of the bunch, and Habibi had once again lapsed into incoherence. After that neither Ashrawi nor Habibi had been seen until eight o’clock the next morning, when Ashrawi had shown up for a meeting of a local Islamic students’ group. But a look at Ashrawi’s credit-card statement showed that he had purchased gasoline at an Exxon near Lake Pla-Mor at five in the morning.

  All of the other students had alibis. Ashrawi was arrested and even now languished in the Forks County Jail, refusing to eat the unclean jailhouse food and praying to Mecca five times a day as the other inmates flung curses at him.

  Clyde didn’t dare say so in public, but he was pretty sure that Ashrawi was an innocent man.

  thirteen

  SAVING A hundred million lives, or at least believing that he had done so, was not half-bad for a man who had begun life in a bootlegger’s hut in the hills of McCurtain County, Oklahoma. Arthur Larsen’s father had taught him one lesson and one lesson only: how to dodge. How to circumvent the bizarre and meaningless hurdles that were constantly thrown in one’s path by Authority. And, where dodging wasn’t possible, how to jump through the unavoidable hoops with the absolute minimum of effort.

  It was an ideal philosophy of life for a bootlegger, but Arthur Larsen found that it worked even better in the academic world—even as early as grade school. He was valedictorian of his high-school class, not because he was the smartest but because he had sussed out the system and had no qualms about manipulating it. He found his way to Oklahoma State University, where he worked a full-time job and still managed to complete the B.S. and vet-med requirements in six years. His record was so outstanding that Cornell gave him a full E-ticket ride for his Ph.D. studies in veterinary pathology.

  By this point he was doing serious science. You couldn’t fake that. But as long as that one rule was followed, you could dodge within that system as well as any other. Larsen developed a shrewd sense of just how little substance you could put into a research paper and still get it published. His first efforts were not well received, but he kept cranking them out anyway, and after a few years the minuscule flakes of data began to pile into drifts. By the time he got his Ph.D., the snow job was complete. He moved to Eastern Iowa University and, having conquered the research racket, turned his attention full-time to what would become his crowning achievement: supreme mastery of the black art of grantsmanship.

  And where grants weren’t enough, he found other ways of making money. Larsen and the Iowa State treasurer ran a four-hundred-head herd of Black Angus as an experiment, sold the proceeds—sans taxation—and cleared a small fortune. By the time 1990 had rolled around, Arthur Larsen had raised two monuments to his achievements: one, the Scheidelmann AgriScience Research Center, and two, a research park south of town that served as home for two dozen small high-tech start-ups. At least half were spin-offs of Larsen-sponsored research and had Larsen on their board of directors. The research park was a small masterpiece in and of itself; it was built with state money on university land and lavished with tax breaks and sweetheart loans by the state legislators, whom Larsen herded through the place like so many Black Angus, dazzling them with visions of a Silicon Barnyard.

  What he could do within the framework at EIU he did at Scheidelmann, and what he couldn’t he did in his spin-offs. These were the two pillars of the Larsen colossus, a fabulously complex web that occupied a six-person law firm full-time just to keep all the taxes paid and all the important laws more or less unbroken.

  Kevin Vandeventer had plenty of time to review these facts and statistics in his mind as he sat in the waiting room of Professor Larsen’s office suite one morning in early May, waiting for a ten A.M. appointment that kept getting pushed back, five and ten and fifteen minutes at a time. He was slowly working his way up a queue consisting of some half a dozen other graduate students—all South Asians and Africans. Each of them, including Kevin, was responsible for some of Larsen’s grant money—half a million here, three million there. Each was responsible for making sure that those dollars were reprocessed and converted into a certain number of published research papers, and, wherever possible, press releases extolling the lifesaving benefits of modern agricultural technology. Each had to check in with Larsen every few weeks and brief him on recent progress. Larsen tended to schedule all such appointments in a block so that he could sacrifice a whole day to it and
keep other days free for golfing with the board of regents, piloting his Beechcraft to Taos, hornswoggling venture capitalists, taping interviews with national news programs, or jetting off to China or India to be feted by the highest echelons of those governments. Those things were the fun part of being the Rainmaker. Managing these grants, and grinding out Ph.D.’s, were like the compulsory figures in an ice-skating competition.

  There was not much friendly small talk in the waiting room. These people had been sent there because they were smart, not because of their social skills. Many of them were probably competing against each other for the pool of grant money hauled down by the Rainmaker, and those who weren’t might be from nations that were mutually hostile, or even at war.

  The receptionist’s intercom chirped. Kevin blinked and tried to shake off the midafternoon lethargy; he was at the top of the queue. The receptionist spoke on the phone for a few moments, looking straight through Kevin, and then hung up. “He apologizes again—a call just came in from New Delhi that he absolutely has to take—just a few more minutes.”

  Kevin made himself comfortable and did not fret about it. His role in life was to get shunted from one grant to the next, a pawn on Larsen’s giant board, filling whatever roles Larsen needed filled at the moment. Now it was his role to wait.

  As a case in point, he had, sometime in the early part of 1989, been written in as a research assistant on a three-hundred-thousand-dollar NSF grant. He didn’t know this during the life of the grant. He had first become aware of it a couple of months ago, when he had received a W-2 form claiming he had been paid twenty-five thousand dollars that he had, in fact, never received.

  He had gone to Larsen’s comptroller, who worked in downtown Wapsipinicon, at the law firm that handled his affairs. He had pointed out, with all due respect, that he shouldn’t have to pay taxes on money he had not received. He had done this, he’d thought, with great good humor, thinking that the whole absurd situation might be good for a chuckle. But the bookkeeper wasn’t amused—he wasn’t even surprised.

  “Do you have a tax man?” the bookkeeper said.

  Kevin laughed. “Heck, no. My taxes are so simple, I—”

  “You do now,” the bookkeeper said. “Bring me all your other W-twos, ten ninety-nines, business expenses, and so forth, and I’ll take care of it.”

  “Take care of it?”

  “I’ll make sure that your tax return is filed properly, and on time,” the bookkeeper said, slowly and clearly. “And the taxes on this”—he wiggled the mysterious W-2—“will not trouble you.”

  “Dr. Larsen will see you now,” the receptionist said.

  Kevin scrambled to his feet, snatched up his laptop, and strode down the marble-lined corridor to Larsen’s office, a basketball-court-sized room in the corner of the building with a 180-degree view over the Wapsipinicon Valley and the EIU campus. The walls that were not made of windows were lined with honorary plaques, and with autographed photos of Larsen hobnobbing with secretaries of agriculture, Nobel prizewinners, and foreign heads of state.

  He had done these meetings before—he knew the drill. First of all, thirty seconds of chummy small talk with the Rainmaker. After that some kind of internal alarm went off in Larsen’s head, his eyes glazed over, and he became clipped and distracted. If you saw it coming, and got down to brass tacks before Larsen had time to become irritated, you were golden.

  Today, though, was a little different: there was an unusual item on the agenda.

  “This Habibi thing,” Larsen said. “You’ve handled that well so far. Nice work.”

  Kevin shrugged. “Cops asked me questions, I told them the truth.”

  Larsen gave him a wink and a knowing chuckle, which Kevin found disturbing. “You’ve handled it well,” he repeated. “DA wants to throw the book at Ashrawi and keep him down at Fort Madison until he dies of old age. Looks like he’ll probably just be deported instead—then he’s the Iraqis’ problem.”

  “Uh, I think that Ashrawi is Jordanian.”

  Larsen stared fixedly at Kevin for a few moments. “All those borders are bullshit—drawn by imperialists in the recent past. So don’t waste my time quibbling about whether he’s Iraqi or Jordanian or Kuwaiti or what have you. All I want is for him to go back over there and not trouble me and my operations again. And if you hear any hints or rumors about further developments in this case, you come to me first—you understand? We’ve dodged a bullet here, but we can’t afford to let down our guard just yet.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Kevin that they had dodged any bullets. A murder had happened, the bad guy was in jail. But he could see Larsen’s point. This kind of thing could have serious repercussions for Larsen’s finely tuned PR operations.

  “Out with it!” Larsen snapped.

  “I’ve had a couple of visits from Clyde Banks—one just yesterday,” Kevin said.

  “Clyde Banks? What the hell is he doing coming here?” As a pillar of the local GOP, Larsen knew very well who Clyde Banks was.

  “He was asking me about some of the details in my statement to the detectives.”

  “Which details?”

  “Well, for example, when the others were carrying Marwan out of the lab, one of them said, in English, ‘Don’t bang Marwan’s head.’ Clyde was asking me about that.”

  “What kind of questions was he asking?”

  “He wanted to know whether the Arab students normally talked to each other in English, or if they normally spoke Arabic.”

  “And you told him?”

  Kevin shrugged. “I said normally they spoke Arabic.”

  Larsen’s face began to turn red.

  “But,” Kevin hastened to add, “I mentioned that there were many dialects of Arabic, and so if Arab students from different countries were trying to communicate, they might occasionally lapse into English.”

  Larsen took a deep breath. “You did good. You did good.” Larsen swung his chair around ninety degrees and looked out the window. “Clyde ask any other goddamn questions?”

  “He was curious about the habits of the Arab students. Such as, Was it normal for them to drink alcohol? And I said that they drank on occasion. Um, he asked whether they normally left door 304 open. I said no, but they were having a party that night, so maybe they left it open to get some fresh air. And he sort of poked around my lab for a little.”

  “What do you mean, ‘poked around’?”

  Kevin shrugged. “He’s just curious. Most people have never been inside a working laboratory. I remember he noticed that I had a box of latex surgical gloves in my drawer, and he asked me whether that was a common thing.”

  “Shit,” Larsen said, and spent a full minute staring out the window in silence.

  “Well,” Larsen finally said, “your research.”

  Kevin stepped forward to place two documents on Larsen’s desk: a thin one and a thick one.

  “The thin one is mostly graphics,” Kevin said. “If you flip through it, it’ll give you a general sense of the key milestones we’ve passed and the key challenges we face.” “Milestones” and “challenges” were two of the primary Larsen buzzwords. “The thick one is a complete report on the progress of the research to date, for your files.”

  Larsen picked up the thin one and opened it. A loose sheet of paper slid out into his lap. “That’s kind of like the executive summary of the executive summary,” Kevin explained. “A bullet chart of milestones and challenges, and some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the body uncount.”

  “Body uncount” was the ultimate Larsen buzzword. He had become obsessed with it during the run-up to the National Geographic article, when he had spent many a long night and weekend cracking the whip over his graduate students, getting them to work up an estimate of how many lives he had saved, which they could feed to the university public-relations department, which could feed it in turn to the reporter who was writing the article. So the body uncount had officially started five years ago at a round hundred million and ha
d been climbing steadily since then. It was now a part of standard operating procedure with all of the Rainmaker’s projects that his lieutenants had to keep a running tab on the body uncount as they went along—how many lives they could save by developing and implementing whatever new idea they were working on. Anything less than ten million was considered not worth the overhead.

  The number on the summary sheet was twenty-five million. Larsen pulled a face and nodded appreciatively, then flipped through the thin document. “Holy cow,” he blurted, and flipped through it again. The graphics were computer generated, three-dimensional, in vivid color.

  Kevin shrugged. “I was playing with some new graphics packages on my Mac. Hooked it up to a color printer down at Kinko’s. Hope you don’t think it’s too, uh—”

  “Too what?” Larsen said.

  Kevin had gone and got himself into a tight spot. He squirmed and said nothing.

  “It looks fine to me. Hell, it looks better than fine,” Larsen said. “This is exactly why I like you, Kevin, is that in addition to being a fine scientist you have a creative flair—you can actually communicate your results. Believe you me, that is an unusual trait.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Larsen.”

  A phone call came through. Larsen picked up the handset and said, “Yep,” six times in a row, then hung up. “By the way,” he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice, “thanks for being understanding on the tax thing and for not making waves. It was a bookkeeping screwup.”

  One of Larsen’s flock of secretaries scurried in and gave him a letter, which he signed. Then Larsen gave his full attention to Kevin. “When you were waiting to come in here, what kind of folks did you see in the waiting room?”

  “My fellow graduate students.”

  “Notice anything about them?”

  “They’re all really smart.”

  “C’mon, man, what color were they?”

  Kevin shrugged uneasily. “A variety of browns.”