Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  “Well,” I said, leaning back in the papasan chair and putting my hands behind my head, “she called that pool-cleaner guy ‘Calvin.’”

  Travis nodded vigorously and tapped his nose with his forefinger. “Exactly, just exactly.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Two hours, still, till the earliest that I’m sure it would be okay for me to go to sleep. I guess, like it or not, I am going to get to the weird part.”

  “After all this buildup,” I asked him, “don’t you think you owe it to me?”

  “Guess I do, at that.”

  “Well, that was great,” I said, “and I see what you mean about the god pills. I don’t suppose a fella could buy some from you?”

  It turned out a fella could. “A hundred twenty-five a pill,” she said, “or twenty for two thousand.”

  “Pricey, but I got it,” I said. “Can I get ten? It’s my whole sex on the road budget but it’s worth it.”

  “Sure, if you want. You take that much money to a new incall? I mean, I’m pretty ethical, but you don’t worry about getting robbed or anything?”

  “Well, I can afford to lose it—it’s about a day’s commissions—and you never know when something special might be offered.” I calculated that that was just stupid enough to sound exactly like Evan Gardenaire, as I’d built him up.

  Lena Logan pulled out the big bottle and counted out ten, carefully, putting them in a little plastic prescription vial, one that was too dark to see into. “This vial isn’t much in the way of concealment, by the way,” she said. “If you get stopped and they look inside they’ll know it’s not Viagra. But they usually won’t look inside a vial with that label, if it’s a middle-aged man. You might want to move them to a better hiding place, though, soon as you can.”

  “Good idea! That’s what I’ll do, yep.”

  “Now, if you take one just before bed, you’ll have a whole night of vivid sex dreams, full sensory detailed hallucination, different every time, usually involving people you don’t know. If you take it before sex, and your partner does too, you’ll have an experience like you and I had. There’s no side effects and the pill’s good for about three days—some guys get only two days to a pill, some get five—and after that you have to take another one if you want the same effect. The fading is very unpredictable. A pill every night will give you very high intensity, which just keeps building. Don’t take more than that—you’ll just pee it away without it doing you any extra good. If you don’t have the money to take it nightly, taking it twice a week, spaced a few days apart, will still make most of your nights really nice.

  “And that’s about all there is to it.

  “You’ve got my number so call anytime. We can do goddies together, or I can supply you, or we can just do plain old sex. Whatever you have cash and time for.” She kissed me again, firmly and well, but not trying to start anything. “Love you, baby.”

  So I drove out of her parking lot and went the long way round, in the car I had rented on the Evan Gardenaire MasterCard. I knew her next appointment was in an hour and a half, so I didn’t want to come back into the neighborhood in less than two hours—didn’t want her to spot the car I had come to her place in, if she went out to get milk or something.

  Evan had rented his car for pickup and dropoff at a downtown hotel. While I’d been in their lobby to pick up the car, I’d quietly lifted a key card out of the express checkout at the front desk, and slipped that into my Evan-wallet. I was carrying nothing he wouldn’t have.

  I drove the rental car back down Montgomery—the way an out-of-towner would do to not get lost. And on the way—hey, remember the old dorm room poster about not getting a blow job while driving? “Coming and Going Don’t Mix?” Well, I found out one drawback to goddies right then. I was driving on a busy main traffic artery, early evening, maybe eight o’clock, on a week night, all stop-and-go and lights and lane changes, and suddenly I was having vivid hallucinatory sex, better than some real sex I’ve had, sort of like when a fantasy crosses your mind—I didn’t stop seeing the road or anything—but overwhelming, and full sensory, and all. And it was about sex with Lena.

  At first it just felt like I was having sex with Lena, wild and good and totally different from what I had just done an hour ago. I felt myself having a flabby, out of shape, overfed goopy-doughy body, the kind that a guy always thinks is basically okay and is basically not. On the other hand, my flabbier body was younger than I was, and it had a bigger dick. It was less vigorous and if I do say so myself less imaginative.

  I was also having sex as Lena, not just with her, and she wasn’t comparing, she was just enjoying. I could feel my pussy squeezing around that big thing of his, and the way his chest brushed my nipples was great—while I was trying to stay in my lane and deal with a stop-and-start geezer driver in front of me while a bunch of Harleys roared by on my left. And I had a stray brain cell to think that Lena had something else going on entirely. I could feel her thinking that this was nice enough and for a soft pasty-skinned guy with that funny fat clean white boy smell he isn’t bad, but I really need to get him out the door. All those feelings and thoughts were ghosting over my irritation, as I drove west and south, at some asshole who kept speeding up and slowing down to stay in my blind spot.

  Then the sex hallucination stopped like a light switching off. All that was left was a vague feeling that somebody, somewhere, was really pissed off at me. Swear to god, John, I looked around but didn’t see any drivers I’d cut off or anything; that was my first thought.

  I got onto 25, took it south to the downtown, hooked over onto 40, and headed east into the area where all the big chain hotels cluster, the kind of place that not only would old Evan stay, but where if I had a tail I hadn’t spotted, and shook him, he’d go nuts trying to cover all the possible places I might be headed. I deliberately got off onto the wrong frontage road and wound through a few streets like a little lost businessman, and finally made a sudden, unsignaled turn into the Marriott parking lot.

  Evan Gardenaire was definitely the kind of traveling man who sees the ho before he checks in at his hotel, so I’d picked up three moderately worn bags at the Salvation Army earlier, stuffed them with rags, crazy-glued them shut, and left them in my trunk. They were untouched, so probably nobody had messed with the car while I was in Lena’s parking lot. Anyway, I hadn’t talked to myself, and if they’d put a bug in the car, all it had picked up was NPR news, which I had playing really loud because that’s the kind of thing an affluent loser who wants to feel hip plays.

  I walked into the Marriott, grabbed one of the rental car return folders, scribbled an incoherent note about not being able to find the rental car return and just leaving it in a parking slot on the side of the building, and dropped the key in the folder into the express return. They’d come up with a bunch of charges, but “Evan” was being covered by Xegon’s expense account, so it didn’t matter to me, and this way, it would probably be hours before they got around to retrieving that rental car. Anyone staking it out was going to be watching that car for a while.

  Then I walked into the bag check and checked those faked-up suitcases, which are very likely still there and might be for a few more months if you need a glued shut suitcase full of rags. I went into the bathroom, took a pee, caught the rhythm at the bag check counter so that I got a different attendant, and claimed the gym bag that contained my own wallet and keys and so on. I flipped the key card back into the front desk’s express checkout, swapped Evan’s wallet and cell phone for my own in the gym bag, and Evan Gardenaire was gone again till the next time he needed to appear. I caught the elevator down to the parking garage where I’d left my rental car.

  At least if I’d been shadowing me, I’d’ve lost me.

  As I was pulling out onto Louisiana, my phone beeped with a voice-mail message. It was only fifteen minutes or so old, so I figured I was still on top of things.

  It was Hale. “I don’t know where you are, but I need to talk to you as soon as you get t
his. We have an urgent job for you, over and above what you’ve been doing for us. Call me back at this number—it’s my private cell.”

  I called him. “We can’t talk about this over the phone,” he said. “Go to where you’ve met me before, not the office but the facility. You will be let through at every checkpoint, but they might hassle you a little, if they haven’t received the word yet. If they give you any more than a little hassle, call me and get it straightened out. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Right, I’m on my way.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bismarck.”

  Well, I got out to the Xegon test facility as quick as I could—I didn’t break any traffic laws, and I didn’t even bend any very far, since getting stopped would’ve been a disaster, but I stayed focused and efficient and I did it quick.

  Things were no different than the last time at the general test area guard booth, just over the hill from the highway. They looked at my ID and sent me through, reminding me which turn to take for Xegon’s area.

  Under the glaring sodium lights the white gravel road might have been the only thing that existed in the universe. For a few timeless minutes, there was only the crunch under the tires; then the guard booth and fence seemed to leap out of the dark at me. I hadn’t realized how fast I was driving, and braked hard to slow down. Probably not the smartest thing to do around nervous men with guns.

  I pulled up to the Xegon guard booth, and instead of one nice guy leaning in my window like last time, I had a very serious guy standing in front of the car, holding a Spectre M4. He wasn’t pointing it at me, but he cradled it like it was definitely more his friend than anyone coming in the gate would be, and it’s a brutal-looking weapon, makes you think about holes blown in your body no matter where it’s pointed.

  Another guard leaned in my window. “Open your door please sir.” His delivery was more emphatic than “Open the fucking door” ever could be.

  I opened it. He moved in to where he could shine a light on my face and look me over from head to toe.

  “Identify yourself please sir.”

  “Travis Bismarck. I’m a private investigator under contract to Xegon.”

  The guard with the M4 came around and peered in at me; I recognized him from the time I’d been there before. “It’s him.”

  “Unlock all doors, Mr. Bismarck.”

  I hit the button. The guard standing by me shut the driver’s side door just as a guy in a suit slid into my passenger seat, picked up my gym bag, peered into it with a flashlight, and said, “What’s in here?”

  “Materials for a false identity—wallet, cell phone. A recording from a wire I was wearing while I was with a prostitute. A probably-illegal drug, not yet identified, that I bought from her.”

  “Okay, just so it’s nothing to worry about. I’ll give it back to you when you come out.” So he took my bag and waved me through.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  My stop at the guard station had been just long enough for other people at Xegon to get their act together, and a nice young woman wearing a stewardess suit, referee shoes, a shoulder holster, and an ear dingus met me in the parking lot to walk me through the building to Hale’s office.

  Hale was wearing a Dickey Pocket-T with tiny dots of paint on it and a small hole in one armpit. It hung untucked over his chinos, which slumped over his Bass moccasins. He seemed to have thrown on whatever was handy; there were so many different colors of paint, in such small spots, that I wondered if he painted for a hobby. Maybe he was regretting having stayed up an extra hour to finish a landscape.

  Before he spoke, he poured a gigantic mug of coffee from the thermos on the sideboard, and drank about half of it straight down. “Any for you?” he asked.

  “There won’t be at that rate. Sure, I’ll take a cup.”

  He filled another mug and set it down in front of me. On one side of it, O. B. Joyful was holding up a middle finger (out of three), and on the other side, Monique from Sinfest was also giving the finger. Around the bottom, it said “Coincidence? How did you happen to think of that?”

  “We have Bad Attitude Friday once a month,” Hale said. “People bring in things to work out their hostilities.” He held up his own giant cup, which read “COFFEE consumes FIFTEEN TIMES its weight in Excess BULLSHIT!!!”

  “Very cool. I’ve worked a lot of places that should’ve had that,” I said. I dumped in three teaspoons of sugar and stirred so that the coffee cup tinkled like a dinner bell. “And it holds coffee, too. Now, what’s up, what do you need me for, and what will you pay?”

  Hale tented his fingers in front of his face. “We’ve had something vital stolen.” Then he made himself rest his hands flat on the desk—probably practicing for something unpleasant he was going to have to say to people who were going to be much less pleasant than me. “For all practical purposes, with a little reverse engineering, whoever has it, has all of Gaudeamus. We certainly know how they stole it—the actual theft was a pure brute force job. I need you to find out who they are, how they knew as much as they did about our security system, and where they took it. ASAP.”

  He set a number that would have seemed impossible a couple of weeks ago, with a bonus if I got all the information within seventy-two hours. “This is probably beyond hope, but if you recover the object itself, we’ll come up with some reward—it will be considerably more than that, but I don’t have any idea how much more. Enough that we’d have to do some kind of special budget thing to pay you even remotely adequately.”

  “Why me?”

  “You already know just about everything I would be allowed to tell you. And you’ve already got as much clearance as I can give you. And you don’t have to keep the kind of idiotic records that my own people do, or report to superiors six times an hour, or waste all the time they’re going to make me and my people waste.” He sighed. “I was private for some years before I took this job, and there are times when I’d give anything to be private again. I used to specialize in child recovery. And as far as I can see, the problem I have here is sort of like a stranger abduction—what’s really essential is going to be moving fast, before they get it too far away or too well hidden.”

  “I’ve done some child recovery too,” I said. “So I know what you mean. There’s no chance they’d destroy it?”

  Hale shook his head. “They’d be about as likely to burn the Mona Lisa, if they’d stolen that. A Gaudeamus machine—that’s the object—is only of value to them intact. And they have to keep it long enough to get it to a real heavy-lifter of a physics lab, and work on it for a while, before they’ll be able to copy it, which is when all the payoffs come in. So it’s only extremely unlikely that you’ll recover it, but not impossible. Let’s get you out working on it. Here’s what you’re looking for.”

  Hale turned around and opened up a big black briefcase, one of those hard-sided rectangular boxes that’s designed to get a computer through airline baggage check. He pulled out a flat white enameled-metal box, the kind of thing you get at an electronics shop to build your own stuff into, the same height and about twice the area of a cable box. It had three buttons, labeled X, Y, and Z, each with an LED above the button. There was a red button labeled “ACT” on the left, and a white Edison 3-prong socket on the right. Across the top of the white box, along the edge, a thin black strip with silver letters read XEGON CORP at one end and GAUDEAMUS at the other. It sat on small black rubber feet.

  I stood up and looked it over. There were eight USB ports and two big multipin ports along the back.

  “Those back ports are for instrumentation and telemetry,” he said, which told me exactly nothing.

  The top of the box was marked with two red arrows that bled slightly, like they’d been done with a Sharpie and a steel rule; one pointing to the back was labeled Z, and one to the right was labeled X, scrawled in the same red ink. On the right side, as it faced me, there was another arrow, labeled Y. At the base of each arrow was a more carefully applied tiny black dot—no, a hole. I lean
ed over and saw the shiny, melted beading around the holes—laser-drilled.

  The whole thing was put together with ordinary recessed Philips screws. Except for the incongruously precise tiny holes, it was a standard piece of shopwork that any proficient Heathkit builder might have done to finish off something he wanted to keep. In the reflected glare of the fluorescent lights I could see some smudgy gray fingerprints, and it was stained a little with ink and pencil dust; this little machine worked for a living.

  When I got to that stage of detail, I figured I’d seen enough to be able to tell a Gaudeamus machine from a washing machine, and looked up.

  Hale said, “We had ten of these, and now we have nine. We also have a senior engineer who’s had a terrible beating, and fifty security people who keep trying to tell me that since this couldn’t have happened it must not have and therefore it didn’t.”

  Hale carefully positioned the box on the corner of the desk nearest me and said, “All right, now let me show you what it does.” He pushed the X, Y, and Z buttons, and all the LEDs lit up with zeros. Then he pushed the ACT button once. “That tells it to mark its present position as zero,” he said.