Death Qualified (25 page)

    Barbara waited in her chair while Frank went to answer the doorbell and admit Tony that Friday afternoon. She did not rise or offer to shake hands when he appeared. She nodded.

    "Hello, Tony. Sorry I was so rushed the other day."

    "Not just rushed," he said, examining her face with the same kind of intensity she remembered, as if he had to rememorize her features time and again.

    "Not just rushed," she repeated lightly.

    "Mad as hell, was what. Sit down, help yourself to the booze, coffee, whatever. We're very informal out here in the boonies."

    He was dressed in a gray suit with a red tie that he now loosened. He hated ties, always had. Prank took his usual chair and tasted his coffee to see if it was still hot.

    "How are things. Tony?" Frank asked.

    "It's been a long time."

    "Very long time," Tony said. He pulled another chair closer to Barbara's and shook his head as if in wonder.

    "I

    can't get over how marvelous you look. You went off and found the Fountain of Youth or something."

    "Or something. Do help yourself to a drink."

    He poured coffee but kept his gaze on her.

    "Have dinner with me later?"

    "Can't. We have a guest coming. Sorry, but thanks."

    "Another time, then. I'll give you a call."

    She sipped her coffee and looked at the molten river.

    "I think I'm going to be pretty busy."

    There was a silence of several seconds. When she glanced at him again, his eyes were narrowed, and a watchful expression had chased his openness and friendliness of moments before.

    She regarded him candidly, waiting for whatever he 5 intended to say, making not the slightest pretense at real interest. She knew his expressions so well, she realized, when it changed again, and subdued anger made his sharp face look even sharper; his cheekbones, his nose, his chin all seemed more prominent, as if the skin had stretched tighter over them. She found herself thinking he looked like a man whose corset pinched unmercifully. She knew this controlled anger had been one of the things about him that had attracted her in the beginning. It was dangerous, she had suspected; such anger so close to the surface, too tightly suppressed, would erupt and ignite everything in its way. That had been exciting.

    "We'll be sending you an official notification," he said then, very cool, the anger still there, still stretching his skin too tight.

    "I thought I might as well bring it up while I'm in the neighborhood, give you time to object if you want to. We're planning to obtain perpetuation of testimony from the psychiatrist, Ruth Brandy wine, probably on video, as soon as we can arrange a time with her."

    Barbara turned away and raised her cup to her lips. After a few seconds, she said, "Shaky case. Tony? Need more ammunition? I'll fit it in somehow, of course."

    "So glad you can find the time," he said coldly.

    "Well, it's been interesting, seeing you again after so many years.

    Thought you'd have found yourself an accountant or something by now."

    "And you? Find a glamorous heiress yet?"

    "As a matter of fact, there is someone, and she is quite well off." He stood up.

    "Good to see you, Frank. Beautiful place you have here."

    Frank got up to walk out with him. Barbara murmured, "So long, Tony. See you in court." He nodded. As soon as they were gone and she heard the car crunching gravel in the driveway, she stood up and poured herself a shot of bourbon and drank it down neat.

    "Nerves?" Prank asked, returning to the terrace.

    "My God, you didn't show a sign of nerves."

    She grinned.

    "Celebration."

    Once or twice a week Barbara cooked dinner, and they went out to a restaurant at least once a week, but Frank made dinner the other nights. Her suspicion that he merely tolerated her cooking was confirmed when he said incredulously, "You're going to make dinner for the young man?

    Must be easier ways than that to get rid of him."

    "It seemed fair; he's my guest, after all."

    "And it's our reputations. I'll cook."

    She kissed his cheek.

    "You're really not bad as a parental figure, you know? I wonder if I can do anything about the dining room table." She went to the doorway to look at it, then shook her head. The table was covered with her papers, books, maps, her little computer .. .

    "Okay, kitchen it is."

    When Mike arrived, Frank was putting the finishing touches on a duck in pumpkin seed sauce, and the kitchen table was perfect since she could sit there with Mike and they could all talk. She was ridiculously glad that Mike did not bring a bottle of wine, or a token flower, or any thing else. And she was glad that he was in jeans and a sweater. Himself. Within five minutes he and Frank were arguing about whether children should be forced to study math.

    "I never would have got out," Frank said.

    "The law would have lost a brilliant attorney, and for what? So I can get the right change in the supermarket?"

    "I can't always do that," Mike said.

    "But you would have got out. If you had known without a doubt that math was required, you would have mastered it exactly as you mastered whatever it is that lawyers have to study."

    Frank laughed.

    "Law. The Constitution. Civics. His tory."

    "Give me a quadratic equation any day."

    Frank came to the table and poured himself a glass of wine.

    "What's so great about chaos? Barbara showed me the pictures, and I said, "So what?" She didn't really know so what."

    "We're finding out so what at a pretty good clip," Mike said.

    "We have tools we never had before to measure and predict aspects of nature that were out of bounds for centuries." Barbara had put candles on the table; he picked up the matches she had put down and lighted one.

    "Watch the smoke," he said. A column of silvery smoke rose straight up, then started to swirl around and disappeared.

    "Turbulence," Mike said and blew out the candle.

    "We've always known it was there, in smoke, in the flow of water, in the heart, the brain, but we couldn't do anything with it. We didn't have the tools. Now we do. We know now that it's not incremental, but catastrophic in nature. Turbulence arrives all at once, the way a pot of water boils all at once. Or the smoke breaks out of the smooth column

    Frank sipped his wine, listening with a careful expression.

    "You say predictions, but I read that no one can predict the weather any more than my grandfather could."

    "That's right," Mike said cheerfully.

    "But that's an important thing to know, you see. What we know now is how sensitive systems are to initial conditions, and we know we can't always^ predict those initial conditions, therefore no guaranteed weather predictions. But do you have any idea how much money has gone into research of weather with the goal of perfect predictions?"

    " No," Frank growled.

    "Me neither. But gobs and gobs. Now a lot of it can go into something more productive."

    "How do those pretty pictures figure in all this?" Frank took his wine back to the working half of the kitchen and began to stir something in a pot.

    "Those Mandelbrot images are derived from one of the simplest algorithms ever discovered " He stopped when Frank groaned very loudly.

    "Anyway, from this very simple instruction those sets are derived; they have fractal properties, that is, they are self-similar, no matter what the scale is, and they are infinite. From the simple comes the most complex. And that describes just about every natural object that exists, they all have fractal properties.

    The most complex dynamic systems can be described by another equation that is equally simple, and it has a universal application. That means it can be applied to all turbulent systems up and down the line. We used to think each one had to be considered independently and painstakingly worked out. Now there is a universal algorithm to use. What we're learning is that under the most chaotic-appearing systems, there is order and simplicity. And from order arises chaos. And the world is not what it seemed to be just a few years ago."

    Frank put the lid back on the pot and looked at Mike directly.

    "Can you see any way any of that could pose a threat to someone? Would anyone kill for any of that?"

    "No," Mike said.

    "I can't see anything like that. Not yet, anyway." He looked apologetically at Barbara, who shrugged.

    "Frobisher was a minor-league player," he said.

    "I looked up what he published, and it's not really much.

    Of course, he started before there were any clear indications where any of this would lead. He was one of the pioneers, but unfortunately he seemed to have a knack for dead ends instead of the mainstream."

    "Wasn't any of his work any good?" Barbara asked.

    "Why did Schumaker invite him to collaborate then? And Brandy wine? They seemed to think he had something."

    Mike pulled out a folded paper and glanced at it. He folded it again and wrote down a few figures.

    "Look, you have to understand something basic or nothing else will make any sense. This is the algorithum for the Mandelbrot sets. You take one number, C, and assign it a value. Say one and a half. Z is an imaginary number with a value of zero. You simply add Z to C and feed the result back in over and over and over. It's the iteration that creates the set. You don't even need a computer--that just makes it go faster, but they can be plotted by hand on a grid. An ordinary grid with a horizontal and a vertical axis. Each time you iterate the formula you put down a dot, and eventually you have a pattern. But sometimes the formula will give you a result that flies right off the grid, out to infinity, and that's what fascinated Frobisher. Not the sets, but the ones that sent the attractor into infinity. And he believed and was attempting to prove that there were visual cues that would lead a good perceptive observer to anticipate which sets would end that way. Remember that this was in the infancy of the research, no guidelines yet, no mentors to ask questions of, damn little in print, and a half dozen people who were obsessed by the whole field. All of them were interested in the transition zone, the phase space, where one thing becomes another. If Frobisher had been able to come up with an equation that would eliminate the ones that didn't work, he would have made his name. That's why Schumaker got interested in his work, I guess. He's an operator, an opportunist. He's worked with nearly everyone in the field at one time or another, just to keep his name up there, and now he's on the lecture circuit, the big bucks circuit. I think he's pretty much dropped out."

    "And Brandywine? She was into juvenile schizophrenia. How could that tie in?"

    Mike shook his head.

    "I just don't know. No way that I can see." He glanced at Frank, who was standing immobile with a woodea spoon in his hand.

    "Remember the time element," Mike said.

    "You're talking about seven or eight years ago, maybe ten or even twelve years ago. There just wasn't any money for chaos research. Schumaker swung a lot of weight and could have got funded for just about anything he wanted to do, but Frobisher and Brandywine? I don't think so. And if they were onto something big and important, something that could have brought fame and fortune the way it's happened to a few of the early researchers, if that was the case, why didn't they publish?

    Why did they all stop? And apparently they did stop what ever they were doing. Brandywine is back into her juvenile studies, as far as I can tell. And Schumaker hasn't done anything real for years. The other one, Margolis, he's into artificial intelligence, in computers, nothing at all to do with chaos."

    Frank had too much sense to say I told you so, but the unspoken words were in the air, and Barbara could feel only a deep frustration. She had learned that a strange attractor was not simply a point but could also be a pattern that repeated over and over, always similar, never exactly the same, and she felt that the pattern of those scientists circling around Lucas, the dead boy and the dead Probisher, all made up a strange attractor. It was all of a piece, and without that piece she had no case for Nell Kendricks. She, Barbara, was part of the pattern, she acknowledged, although she could not say how or why. But she was part of it and had to see it through to wherever it took her.

    A strange butterfly in Brazil had awakened, had floated off a leaf somewhere in a jungle, and she had been set in motion. So far, she felt almost certain, she had made the right movements, but with each new choice, each new decision, each new bit of information, there was the danger that she would be flung off the grid, out to infinity. If that happened, she followed the line of thought, she would not be able to finish something she had started, something important--not only for Nell, but for her, also.