The Probability Broach
Once out of dispatcher range, I switched to the commercial band. There was a Jim Kweskin revival underway—beat hell out of what they’d been playing last year. Too soon, though, the real world horned in—what passed for news from New Guinea, Japan breaking relations, more ration reduction. I flipped over to CB for some amateur entertainment.
There was plenty: farmers swapping yarns along their lonely furrows; truckers seditiously exchanging tips. Suddenly the band exploded with obscenity: President Jackson is a——, four or five unpopular federal agencies are——. The diatribe began to repeat itself. I slowed, listened—yes, there it was again: a CB “bomb,” a cheap, battery-operated tape player with a seven-minute loop, and an equally expendable transmitter, buried by the roadside and simmering up through a ten-foot copper wire, waiting for FCC gunships to triangulate and blast it to pieces. Remote-control radicalism. The People’s Committee for Free Papua entertained me almost all the way to Fort Collins, then quacked suddenly and went off the air.
Spread across ten miles between I-25 and the foothills, to the south Fort Collins is a virtual ghost town of abandoned tract homes. The older section is a pleasant Edwardian-vintage hamlet with broad, tree-lined avenues. I’d been there before, and I liked it. Unfortunately, it takes federal permission to change a cop’s location, and seniority—meaning pensions—isn’t transferable. I stopped briefly for a Jaycee city map, then navigated my way to Colorado State University.
I wasn’t GOING to like Dr. Otis Bealls or his little Errol Flynn mustache. A nicotine-stained yellow-gray, it was the only hair he had—except for a scraggly fringe around the back of his head—and appeared to be growing from his nostrils. Affecting baggy tweeds, cheap velveteen waistcoat, and rimless plastic spectacles he fiddled with continuously, he failed to convey the academic impression he aspired to. The whole ensemble reminded me of the proverbial dirty old man who “carved another notch in his gold-handled cane.”
The bastard wouldn’t see me for an hour and a half. My idea of hell is a waiting room, plastic and tubular steel, a busy-busy secretary pointedly oblivious as you riffle through six-year-old copies of Today’s Health and Wee Wisdom. Only in this case it was journals filled with squiggles I wasn’t even sure were numbers. The street map was more entertaining. All that time, the fancy telephone blinked on and off like a horror-movie computer, burning up the lines.
When he finally condescended, it was like being sent to the principal. He lounged behind an aircraft carrier of a desk, playing with his glasses and shuffling papers. Finally, glancing at his watch, he asked without looking up, “Well, what can the CSU Physics Department do for the Denver Police?”
“Then you haven’t heard about Dr. Meiss?”
“Heard? What kind of trouble is he in now?”
“The worst. He was killed yesterday. I understand he worked—”
“Officer, please! Ph.D.’s do not work here! Janitors, stenographers, other menials work here. If I may optimistically exaggerate, undergraduates work here. Professors pass the Torch of Civilization, deliberate our Vast Body of Knowledge. They Labor in the Vineyards of Science, pushing back the Barriers of the Un—”
“Dr. Bealls,” I interrupted. “One of your Laborers won’t be hanging around the Vineyards anymore. He’s lying on a sheet-steel table at the Denver City Morgue, so full of machine gun bullets, he’s gonna need a forklift for a—”
“Bullets? My dear fellow, certainly no one in this department—” He keyed the intercom, which was stupid—the office door was open, secretary sitting eight feet away. “Shirley, ascertain whether Dr. Meiss is in his office or in class. Have him come immediately if he’s free.”
She swiveled and looked right in the door. “Vaughn didn’t meet his eight-o’clock, sir, and he hasn’t called in. I mentioned it when you came in at eleven.” Score three points for Shirley.
“Thank you, Mrs. Binh.” He purpled. “That will be all.” Rising abruptly and skirting the desk, he closed the door and hustled back. “I’m sure there’s a more reasonable explanation for this. He’s punctual, at least that can be said.”
I made curiosity grimaces. “You feel he had some failings?”
“My good man, you simply don’t know!” He leaned back, polishing his glasses with an edge of his jacket. “In a field already overcrowded with nitwits, mystics, and Bohemians, he is—where can I possibly begin?”
“How about—”
“—His disgraceful activities! My deepest frustration, as head of this department, is to be obstructed from assuring the, um, gratitude of its employees. Variant opinions, particularly in these times of economic reappraisal, betray a certain inhumility. Nor have we room for contumacious individualism. Socially Responsible Science cannot proceed in such a manner.”
And Mac had asked where I had been! “What form did his particular contumaciousness take?”
“He writes letters—wild, irresponsible things, absolutist, subversive! Do you know, he claims this institution would be more efficient run for profit? As if efficiency were a valid criterion in education!” He peered confidentially over the tops of his glasses. “Let me tell you—not even the department’s Trotskyites and Birchers willingly associate with him.”
I grinned. “He was a Propertarian. A book I’m reading said they think the whole right-left political spectrum is eyewash. That might rankle your garden-variety radicals a little.”
“As may be. He was dangerous, antisocial … some sort of Bolshevist!”
“Bolshevist?” I hadn’t missed the sudden change of tenses. “I wonder how Mary Ross-Byrd would like that?”
“Who? Oh, I see—just like all the others. Well, I warn you, I’m an old hand. Not a man on this faculty isn’t anxious to pull me down. Daily I withstand ridicule, plot and counterplot. I’ll cooperate fully with responsible authority—my happy duty as a grateful citizen—but I will not suffer abuse from a public servant, do you understand?”
“Sure, Doc, I understand—that’s a mighty fine pair you’ve got.”
“Pair? Pair of what?”
“Noids—skip it. What else was unconventional about Meiss?”
“Ahem … Well, he used to—tends to—confuse his proper role on the faculty. He’s completely aloof from his colleagues.”
“You mean the Trotskyites and Birchers who wouldn’t associate with him?”
“I mean they frequently complain he goes out of his way to make his professional undertakings vague and esoteric. They—”
“Couldn’t understand what he was doing.”
“I would find other words. He has no right to set himself above his peers.” He fumbled nervously through a desk drawer, glanced up at me, and thought better of it, regretfully shoved the drawer closed.
I laughed. “Go ahead. I’m a nicotine fiend, myself.”
He colored. “We were speaking of Dr. Meiss!”
I considered lighting up, myself, decided not to push things. “So we were.”
“Yes. He seems to be more candid with his students than his colleagues, mixing in a vulgar and undisciplined fashion—they call him by his first name! I’ve even heard it said he sees them socially, drinks with them in utter disregard for decency and the law.”
“Prohibition’s tough on everybody. Think any of these colleagues’ d like him a bit less candid—via several dozen nasty little bullet holes?”
He sat up, really shocked, I think. “Officer, please!”
“Lieutenant, Dr. Bealls, homicide lieutenant. I wouldn’t want abuse from a public servant, either. What about Meiss’s extracurricular activities?”
He assumed his frostiest expression. I gave it a B-minus. “I assure you, Lieutenant, I do not meddle in the personal lives of my subordinates.”
This was getting me nowhere. “Listen, Bealls, I’m just doing my job, and it isn’t very easy. Everybody I work for is dead, and it depresses me. What do you say we call a truce?”
He sat a moment, color returning to normal. Then he nodded microscopically. So
I rushed him: “Okay, tell me what sort of physics Meiss was up to lately.”
He surprised me: “May I see your identification again? I assure you, I’ve good reason.” I handed my badge case over. He looked at the shield, weighing it in his hand—amazingly heavy, wouldn’t feel like authority, otherwise—then flipped over the felt liner and spent more time on the plastic ID. “I don’t suppose you’d mind if I called your department to confirm this?”
I recognize a National Security reflex when I see one. I sat tight, practicing my poker face. If they told him no, Lieutenant Bear’s in Manitou Springs, it’d take weeks to talk my way out. “Not at all. 226-2421—better get it from the operator, just in case. Ask for Lieutenant James J. James. The J stands for—”
“I don’t think that will be necessary.” He sneaked a peek at his watch. “You see, Dr. Meiss once pursued investigations of a … sensitive nature. He no longer does that sort of thing—of course, if he’s really dead, I suppose that’s the case anyway, ha ha. Ethics, he maintained, but you can see how they were just as happy. They were disturbed by the turn in his views.”
“So I’ve been told. About when did all this happen?”
“Not all at once. I gather he made it final two, two and a half years ago.
I remembered the date on his Party card. “So why the panic now? That’s a long time, as government secrets go.”
Bealls went into his spectacle-scrubbing bit again. “Understand, sir, he was—considering his mediocre talent—quite far ahead in the field. The price of catering to reckless independence. I’m afraid no one else has been able—and if that weren’t enough, walking around with all that information in his brain—”
I couldn’t help it. “Was he supposed to turn it in? His brain, I mean. The usual practice is to do that before you start working for the—”
“—abandoned everything, charging off on some trivial commercial track, leaving nothing behind but—”
“What do you mean?”
“A series of lucrative grants from private industrial sources. Not general endowments, mind you, but personal carte blanche. Anything his whim desired! He was bought, simple as that, out of his proper field and service to his country. I dare say he had more resources available than the rest of this—”
He fumbled with his glasses, putting them on upside down. “Well, I can tell you, serious consideration was being given certain measures. There were those who could see he was denied tenure,” Bealls added brightly. “They would have thanked me for that. It is not beyond consideration.” He blinked and rearranged his spectacles.
Before he could open his mouth again, I said, “Would it be possible to examine his office, you know, for clues and things?” I expected resistance, but was prepared to argue.
An examinatory stare and thoughtful pause. Bealls probably intimidated a lot of undergrads. “It’s quite irregular, Lieutenant. I ought to insist on a warrant or something, ha ha. But we don’t want it said we failed to cooperate, do we?” He looked at his watch again.
“We most certainly don’t,” I chimed. “How about his lab—or is that from watching too many Frankenstein movies? Maybe he was one of those mathematicians who work it out with a—”
“No, Dr. Meiss did have facilities. I suppose you may examine them.” He peeked again at his watch. “I can scarcely see any objection to that!”
BEALLS LED ME through his outer office, stopping to tell his secretary where he’d be if anybody wanted to know. Anybody important. She looked at me as if to ask whether I knew what I was getting into, but when her boss removed his glasses once again, I winked and patted my coat lightly where the hammer of the forty-one wears out the lining.
I’ve been accused of lots of things, but never of stupidity. In a business lucky to solve one out of twenty, I get my man about half the time, and, unlike fictional detectives, I’ve never been clubbed from behind or slipped a Mickey Finn. Not yet, anyway. The one time I got burned, some puke was shooting through a tiny window in a fire door, and my miserable .38 couldn’t punch through. I bought the .41 Magnum the day I got out of the hospital.
Bealls was still watching his watch. With a ninety-minute stall, the busy phone, and his utter delight at getting me into another part of the building, I wasn’t exactly without suspicions. I was the good guy, and couldn’t shoot first, that being the Code of the West or something, but whenever Bealls’s visitors showed up, they weren’t gonna get a chance with that machine gun—not if Smith & Wesson, Inc. had anything to say.
Vaughn Meiss’s office was a cinder-block cubicle in a nest of cinder-block cubicles along a cinder-block hall, all painted a depressingly familiar government gang-green. Bookcases teetered to the ceiling on all four walls, and a desk heaped with books and papers was crammed into the middle somehow. On the ceiling, over crumbing acoustic tile, he’d taped a Propertarian poster: IRS—IT REALLY STEALS! A small blackboard was covered with much erased squiggles like those in Bealls’s magazines, plus, for a nice human touch, the word “Shit!”
Bealls ushered me in like a hotel bellboy, turned the keys over, then excused himself—which was honest, people like him need a lot of excusing—to hustle off for “another appointment.” I peeked around the corner and watched him scurry away, staring at his watch.
I mugged around, wondering if I’d recognize a clue written in Meiss’s academic Sanskrit if it jumped off the board and started chewing on my tie. A quick once-over of the bookcases: fairly predictable—lots of math and physics, a couple of shelves of Propertarian stuff, a little science fiction. No secret panels, mysterious codes, or hollowed-out volumes.
One strange datum: the desk was piled with histories covering the Revolution and two or three subsequent decades. Bookmarks—campus parking tickets going back to 1983—indicated special interest in Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Party, and, by golly, Albert Gallatin.
Another curious thing: in an absolutely jam-packed office, one drawer of the desk, the second on the right, was conspicuously empty, or almost so—a half-empty box of Norma .357 Magnum ammunition, 158-grain hollowpoints; a felt-tip pen bearing the odd inscription LAPORTE PARATRONICS, LTD., LAPORTE, N.A.C., TELECOM GRAY 4-3122; a single pistol cartridge in an unfamiliar caliber marked D & A Auto .476; and—another coin! This one was about the size of a quarter:
ONE HALF METRIC OUNCE
SILVER 999 FINE
THE LAPORTE INDUSTRIAL BANK, LTD.
The other side was even weirder, a ferocious-looking elder in a Karl Marx beard:
LYSANDER SPOONER
A.L. 32-110 ARCHITECT OF LIBERTY
These dubious clues in my pocket, I resolved to stop by the city of Laporte after I finished here. If it was the Laporte in Colorado, something definitely funny was going on. Six or seven miles northwest of Fort Collins, Laporte boasted fewer than five thousand inhabitants—an unlikely place for a bootleg mint, industrial bank, or paratronics factory—whatever that was. It had once been considered—its sole distinction—a potential capital of Colorado Territory, back when Jack Slade ran the stage line and Denver only had one of those newfangled railroad things.
To the matter at hand: I found my way downstairs (more green cinder block), let myself in to Meiss’s lab, and turned on the lights—forty-watt or less by government decree. The windows were heavily painted over—national security. There was also a stout slide-up-and-down bolt, handmade from a concrete reinforcing rod. Not a bad idea, I thought, as I clanked it shut. It was good for a few seconds’ warning.
Vaughn Meiss’s lab made all the stereotypes come true. Remember The Fly? It was just like that—strung with wires and insulators, bulky pilot-lighted cabinets looming in the twilight. Only the posters were out of place. One on the back of the door read, GOVERNMENT SCIENCE IS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS—AYN RAND and, penciled below: Ayn Rand is a contradiction in terms. Another, on the far wall, was a still from some old Boris Karloff flick: THEY NEVER UNDERSTOOD ME AT THE UNIVERSITY!
There was a dark, steel-framed cubbyh
ole on the outside wall that might be a fire exit—I couldn’t see very well from where I stood, buried to the hips in infernal machinery. All but one fluorescent tube had been removed from the ceiling. Like everyone else these days, I was developing a caveman’s squint.
I worked my way to a console at the center, seemingly the command post, covered with knobs and dials. There were a couple of stained coffee cups and a half-filled ashtray I looked in vain for a pack of cigarettes. In the center of the console was a big gray metal notebook. You never know where the next clue is coming from—I peeked: nothing. Very curious, and like that almost-empty drawer upstairs, a sort of clue by omission. Somebody around here was a klepto.
A scraping at the doorknob—Bealls, no doubt making sure I didn’t arrest any electrons without reading them their rights—footsteps, and muffled conversation. I suppressed my original impulse to go undo the bolt, and stood still, shivering a little. Then a crash! The door bulged, glass shattering into paint-covered fragments. The forty-one flashed into my hand as I ducked behind the console. Again! The doorjamb burst, splinters flying, and a cataract of data disks fountained to the floor. A man stood framed in the doorway, tossed his fire-extinguisher battering ram aside, and drew a weapon from his right hip.
Shifting gently to one end of the console, I lined the intruder’s head atop my front sight like an apple on a post and waited, heart pounding painfully He scanned the dimly lit room, motioned to someone, left palm outward—stay back a moment—then moved in softly, head panning like a questing reptile. My hand was sweaty on the revolver grip.
As he drifted past, I swapped the Magnum to my left hand, laid the muzzle on the back of his neck, and rose. “Stand easy, asshole!” I whispered, trying to keep an eye on the door. He turned abruptly. I grabbed, jammed my thumb between the hammer of his automatic and the firing pin. The weapon pointed at my guts, the hammer fell. Pain lanced through my hand but the pistol failed to fire. I wrenched it away, smacked him backhand across the face with mine. Blood spurted, black in the dark, and he crumpled.