The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  “You are less of a fool than most,” Lemuel assures Word Perkins. “You admit it when you are wrong. Besides which, Backwater turned out to be a randomnists’ paradise after all.”

  “If it ain’t about snow, what is this randomness that was God all about?” Word Perkins sucks in his cheeks. “Bein’ as yaw a visitin’ egghead at the chaos school, I’ll lay odds randomness’s gotta got somethin’ to do whit chaos.”

  “Randomness and chaos are related, but not the way you think. Chaos is the opposite of randomness, Word. In its heart of hearts, chaos contains the seed of order. Even if we cannot see it, the order is there. Pure randomness, on the other hand, conceals in its heart of hearts—”

  “I’m startin’ in to get it. The randomness that’s got nothin’ to do whit snow conceals disorder.”

  “Not so much disorder, which implies a deliberate effort to avoid order, but a simple, elegant, perfectly natural absence of order.” Lemuel is talking to himself now. Pieces of a puzzle are falling into place. “Yo! The Rebbe, who is viscerally uncomfortable with randomness, who sees it as a vice, discovered traces of randomness in God, which is why he loves God but does not like Him. Me, I see randomness as a virtue, so when I discover traces of God in randomness, it permits me to like Him even though I am not a hundred percent sure He exists.”

  Word Perkins is confused. “How can you like somethin’ that don’t exist?”

  “I can say you it is not easy.” Lemuel plunges into the labryinth of his own logic. “Dostoevsky got it wrong when he had Ivan Karamazov say that if God was dead all things would be permitted. It is because God is alive, because He is randomness incarnate, that all things are permitted. Don’t you dig it, Word? Goddammit, if He can be when and where He will be, then, since we are made in God’s image, we can too.”

  “Yeah, well, what I ‘predate about you, professor from Petersboig, is you don’t own what you know, you spread it around.” Word Perkins slips off the desk and starts for the door. “Don’t think I didn’t get a kick outa our little yak, but I gotta move on whit my rounds. Holler when yaw ready to call it a day, huh? so as I can double-lock the front door behind you.” His cackle reverberates in the long corridor. “We don’t want no unauthorized person or persons sneakin’ in an’ monkeyin’ whit the Institute’s chaos, do we?”

  “Not,” Lemuel agrees absently, swiveling back toward the computer screen.

  He punches some computer codes into his workstation, sits back to watch an endless series of digits parade across the screen; the Institute’s Cray Y-MP C-90 supercomputer, programmed from Lemuel’s keyboard, is comparing the two most recent serial murders with the eighteen murders that came before. The supercomputer is coming at the crimes from different directions, comparing the ages and occupations and physical descriptions of the victims, the time of day of the murders, the day of the month, the phase of the moon, the scenes of the crimes. Working from the case files of the two new murders, Lemuel—searching for the seed of order buried somewhere in all the disorder—has programmed in additional elements: the height and weight of the victims, the color of the clothing they were wearing when they were murdered. Scrambling and rescrambling numerical equivalents, sorting through the endless variations on a theme, the supercomputer fails to detect a trace of order in the clutter of randomness.

  Frustrated, still convinced he is missing something, Lemuel glances anxiously at the wall clock; according to the worksheet posted outside the Director’s office, he can access the Institute’s supercomputer from his workstation until midnight, at which point the Cray is scheduled to go offline for routine maintenance of its cooling system. Stabbing at the keyboard, punching in more computer codes, he programs the Cray to come at the problem from yet another direction, then sits back and stares at the screen as a new series of numbers begins to flash across it. Each victim appears to have been selected at random; the software fails to turn up a seed of order, a method to the madness of murder. All the supercomputer comes up with is … disorder.

  Disorder …

  Not so much disorder, he remembers telling Word Perkins, because disorder implies a deliberate effort to avoid order. …

  The numbers flashing across the screen blur. A pulse throbs in Lemuel’s forehead. He knows what is missing from the computer study of the twenty serial murders. Yo! What is missing is what he discovered in pi somewhere around the three hundred millionth decimal place, namely, eight eights. What is missing is the faintest trace of occasional order, which is an essential ingredient of pure, unadulterated randomness. My God, Lemuel thinks, I could kick myself I didn’t see it before; this is definitely the kind of information I need rattling around in my brain. If the serial murders were characterized by a simple, elegant, perfectly natural absence of order, which is to say if they really were random, they would contain random repetitions. Granted the sampling is small, but somewhere in the twenty murders the serial killer would have struck at the same time of day or the same day of the month; he would have murdered someone who had the same age or occupation as a previous victim; he would have killed two people wearing red flannel shirts.

  Which means the murders were not random at all, but rather the work of someone who is trying to make them appear random. But why would the killer go to such lengths to make the murders appear random? There can only be one answer. The common denominator in the serial killings, the thread running through the crimes, has to be the killer’s unspoken theory that if he or—why not?—she appeared to select victims randomly, the police would never look past randomness for the motive, and the crimes would be impossible to solve. Which suggests that the opposite is true: Since the victims were not selected at random, one of the crimes must be easy to solve.

  But which one? All Lemuel has to do is go back into the case files and look beyond randomness for a motive in each murder. One of the murders will betray a motive so apparent that the killer had to mask the crime as just another in a series of random or motiveless murders.

  Lemuel keys the supercomputer, calling up the original files starting with the first murder. All of a sudden the screen goes blank. Then a message appears: “Your connection to Cray has been cut,” it says. Lemuel glances at the clock. It is twenty-five to twelve. He should still have another twenty-five minutes of access to the Cray. He punches in his personal code and tries to network with the supercomputer, but all he gets is a flickering “Sorry. Access denied.” Furious, he grabs an Institute directory from a shelf, runs down the list with his thumbnail until he finds the number of the Director. He snatches the telephone off the hook and dials the number. After seventeen rings the Director comes on the line.

  “Goodacre here.”

  “L. Fucking Falk, one of the world’s preeminent randomnists, is on this end of the line. Remember me? I am supposed to have access to the Cray from eight at night until twelve. I am supposed to be able to burn midnight oil.”

  “Are you inebriated? Do you have the slightest idea what time it is?”

  “I can say you it is eleven thirty-eight, give or take thirty seconds. Which means I should have another twenty-two minutes of computer time. You have been squeezing me out of the Cray loop ever since we had our little conversation in your office about me and Rain. First I could only network in the afternoons. Then in the evenings. Now I have to come in at night if I want computer time.”

  The Director clears his throat. “Can I inquire what chaos-related project you are working on?”

  Lemuel clears his throat. “I can say you the sheriff asked me to do some correlating of his serial murders—”

  “You are correlating serial murders?”

  “Right. To see if they are really random crimes.”

  There is a moment of strained silence. Finally the Director says, “I would like to submit that solving serial murders on Institute computer time is not what you were brought all the way from St. Petersburg to do.”

  Lemuel holds the phone away from his face and stares at it. The Director’s voice, tin
ny, continues to issue from the earpiece. “You are supposed to be patrolling your famous Pale, looking for the randomness that is a footprint of chaos. Instead you wind up free-lancing for the sheriff on the Institute’s supercomputer. Do you have the slightest idea what computer time costs? People kill for half an hour’s access to a Cray Y-MP C-90 …”

  Lemuel feels himself being sucked into a flamboyant fiction. In his mind’s eye he is A. Nevsky, barring the Nazi-helmeted Teutonic Knights from crossing a frontier, which happens to be a frozen lake. Various shots of the ice splitting into floes under the enemy’s feet, of horses losing their footing and slipping off into the water, of Teutonic Knights, dragged down by their heavy armor, disappearing beneath the surface of the wintry water. Long ground-level shot of mist rising from the churning lake. Pan to a triumphant A. Nevsky surveying the scene. On the now calm lake, from A. Nevsky’s POV.

  Fresh from having defended a territory at its goddamn frontier, Lemuel brings the phone back to his lips and cuts the Director off with a primal yowl. “People also kill for tenure at the V A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics. So what does this tell us about Homo mathematicus that we are better off not knowing?” Suddenly toast, A. Nevsky reverts to his L. Falk voice. “Hey, doorknob, murder is generally considered to be chaos-related,” he mutters. “If I am lying,” he adds with a bitter snicker, “I am dying.”

  Distracted, Lemuel closes down his workstation, locks his office and heads for home. Making his way down the corridor, he notices the light is extremely dim, particularly on the landing. He could have sworn the corridor was better lit when he turned up earlier in the evening. Could half a dozen bulbs have burned out between then and now? He gropes for the swinging door leading to the stairs.

  Two figures materialize out of the shadows on the landing.

  “Falk, Lemuel?”

  Startled, Lemuel shrinks back. “What do you want?”

  “Your money and your life.”

  Lemuel gasps. The second shadow, taller, leaner, meaner than the first shadow, so it appears to Lemuel, laughs under its breath. “You oughtn’t to go and say things like that, Frank. It could scare him shitless. The last thing in the world we want to do is scare him shitless.”

  “It was probably a joke,” Frank announces solemnly.

  “Ha ha,” Lemuel says weakly. “Like who are you? How did you get into the building?”

  The second shadow says, “Mr. Word Perkins let us in after he got a look at our credentials.”

  “What credentials?”

  “We are both armed with pistols,” Frank says. “The pistols are equipped with silencers.”

  Lemuel’s palate goes chalk dry. In the dark, he can feel the two men looking at him in the peculiar way people who are armed look at people who aren’t. “Hey, you are making another joke, right?”

  “We have come all the way from Reno, Nevada, to have a discussion with you,” says the shadow named Frank.

  “About what?” Lemuel tries to keep the fear out of his voice. “What about?”

  “About your future,” Frank replies. “Isn’t that what we want to talk to him about, Fast Eddie?”

  “It is,” Fast Eddie agrees. “We have come all this way to make sure he has a future.”

  “You are not here about the random murders?”

  “Do we look like we are here about random murders?”

  Fast Eddie strikes a match and holds the flame to the tip of a thin cigar. Lemuel notices that both men are wearing fedoras. “The handful of murders we have personal knowledge of,” Fast Eddie explains, his words filtering through a cloud of cigar smoke, “have not been random.”

  Lemuel yells into the stairwell, “Yo, Word!”

  A faint echo spirals back up from the ground floor. “Yo, Word!”

  Sucked into an agitated fiction that fills his head like a disjointed nightmare, Lemuel hears a voice spiral up from his lost childhood. Tell us where your father hides his code book. Backpedaling until his back is flat against a wall, mopping perspiration from his forehead with a sleeve, he cries out, “For God’s sake, Word, where the hell are you? You are going to get yourself in deep excrement if you let an unauthorized person or persons monkey with the Institute’s chaos.”

  “We are not interested in the Institute’s chaos,” the shadow named Fast Eddie says quietly. “We are interested in your chaos.”

  “Lots of people we know have been telling lots of people we know about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Sometimes it seems as if all anybody upstate New York wants to talk about is you.”

  “All roads lead to Backwater,” Fast Eddie says with a laugh.

  “What are people saying about me?”

  Frank takes a step in Lemuel’s direction. “That you can make numbers dance.”

  “It turns out you can read other people’s mail,” Fast Eddie remarks.

  “There are certain people—federal prosecutors, FBI lawyers, CIA agents—who write things about the organization we work for.”

  “We got no problem getting our hands on what they write,” purrs Fast Eddie. “The trouble is it’s always in gibberish. A-x-n-t-v, r-1-q-t-u, z-b-b-m-o. You get the drift?”

  “Random five-letter groups,” Lemuel says weakly, “mean that the original was enciphered.” He is sure the two men in the shadows are wearing steel-toed shoes.

  “We hear on the grapevine you can read gibberish.”

  “We hear on the grapevine the gibberish in question uses a U.S. government code system known as the Data Encryption Standard. The people who encode messages they do not want us to read use a secret number, called the key, to garble the message. The people who decode the messages use the same secret number to ungarble the message.”

  “We figure if you could figure out the key, we could ungarble the message and read the gibberish.”

  “What kind of name is Falk, Lemuel?”

  “Russian.” Lemuel swallows hard. “Jewish.”

  “We are an equal-opportunity employer, isn’t that the situation, Frank?”

  “You do not by any coincidence happen to have Italian blood? You do not by an coincidence happen to parlare Italiano?”

  “I told you it does not matter if he speaks Italian,” Fast Eddie informs his colleague. “The gibberish we want him to read is in English.”

  “I was only trying to get a fix on his qualifications,” Frank says defensively.

  “Let us put cards on the table,” says Fast Eddie. “The organization we work for would like to employ you. You could have a title—something along the lines of ‘officer in charge of reading gibberish.’ Now, we got branch offices all over the country. As for deciding where you want to work, you can pick your poison. Reno, Nevada, has a dry climate which is supposed to be very good for people with asthma and bronchial problems. Florida is sunny all year around, people who live there swear by it. Sure, New England gets cold in the winter, but the autumn is supposed to be very colorful.”

  “You need an apartment, you got an apartment. You need sharpened pencils, you got sharpened pencils. You need a secretary—I am talking young, I am talking good-looking, I am talking long legs and short skirt—you got a secretary.”

  “Normally I work with a computer. …”

  “You need a computer, you got a computer.”

  “Whatever they are paying you here, we will triple it.”

  “There are no deductions for medical care and retirement.”

  “We personally look after your health. You never retire.”

  In the dark, Lemuel clears his throat. “Like it is not that I do not appreciate the offer, right? It is more a question of having a lot of irons in a lot of fires.”

  “You want to be extremely careful you do not get burned by none of them,” warns Fast Eddie.

  “Concerning our offer,” says Frank, “I would like to have the opportunity to persuade you.”

  Lemuel is astonished to hear the A. Nevsky in him say, “You think you have a big enough
vocabulary?”

  Frank takes Lemuel’s insolence in stride. “In my line of work,” he says pleasantly, “we got a saying: ‘One bullet is worth a thousand words.’ “

  “He is probably making another one of his jokes,” Fast Eddie assures Lemuel.

  “Look, this is an important decision,” Frank says. “Do not feel you have to give us an answer right away.”

  Fast Eddie reaches out of a cloud of cigar smoke and punches Lemuel playfully in his upper arm. “Yeah, take your sweet time. Think about it a minute or two before you say yes.”

  Chapter Four

  Territory, you haven’t forgotten my rule of thumb, right? has got to be defended at the goddamn frontier. Which is why I wasn’t about to let L. Falk get away with a remark like that.

  “Where do you come off saying I planned the whole thing?” I shot back. “You’re listed on the masthead as a consenting adult.”

  Talk about a feeble defense. “I consented to try your dope,” is what he mumbled. “I did not consent to what came after.”

  “You didn’t say not, neither. You didn’t push her away.”

  “I did not want to be rude. I did not want to hurt her feelings.”

  I was, I openly admit it, getting hot under the collar even though I wasn’t wearing a collar. I was bare-assed, as they say in Backwater, nude, as they say in movie land. In the bathtub. Having a morning-after-the-night-before conference. With the Homo chaoticus in my life.

  “What a chuckle,” I said in a tone which made it clear I was not in a chuckling mood. “You pass out doing dope. When you wake up, Shirley’s going down on you and you don’t want to be rude? Hey, test-fly another one.”

  To tell the God-honest truth, you could have knocked me over with a feather when L. Falk agreed, the night before, to join us, us being Dwayne and Shirley and yours truly, Backwater’s legendary Tender To. L. Falk saw my hollowed-out Hite Report open on the table when he came back from the office, my cardinal New Year’s resolution about never doing your own dope doesn’t apply to Fridays, it was around midnight, the three of us were pretty mellow, we’d been smoking and yakking for hours. He watched Dwayne, who has talent in the tips of his fingers, I am speaking from first-hand knowledge, hand-rolling thick Thai truffles. Shirley lit a new one from what was left of an old one, took a long drag and held it out to L. Falk.