Death Qualified (47 page)

    Frank laughed.

    "One of his clients stole it."

    Nell withdrew her hand from Clive and held her cup.

    "I'm glad we have something else to do," she said.

    "I

    can't sew or knit."

    "Neither can I," Barbara said.

    "Okay, Mike, that's your cue. Where are the tapes now, by the way?"

    He had put them in his safe-deposit box that morning, he said. He took out his note pad and laid it on the table before him, and then didn't touch it again.

    "He made most of the tapes during a couple of weeks," he started.

    "Whenever he remembered something, he added it, and that makes the chronology out of synch, but I think I've got it more or less in order. The other difficulty is that Lucas never really knew what they were up to, not the theoretical end of the work. He had a gift of seeing, and they needed that, but he didn't have the training to let him comprehend the significance of the project." He looked at Nell apologetically; she nodded agreement. She knew; she had always known that.

    "Frobisher was into chaos theory before it had a name," Mike said.

    "And he had his own theory that he never stopped pursuing, apparently. He believed in consensual reality, and he believed that we are trained from infancy to see the same world that our parents see, that almost everyone around us sees. He thought that wasn't the only way the world could be perceived."

    Clive made an impatient sound and Mike said to him, "Did you know that babies make every known human sound in their babbling? The impossible French vowels, seventeen different clicks, the multi-tones of the Chinese, you name it. Babies produce them all, and they drop any that don't get reinforced. Extinction, it's called. They re peat the sounds they hear and lose the others, including some that can't be learned as an adult. Frobisher believed vision is exactly like that. And he believed he could retrain good subjects to see the world the way it really is, as a mathematical network that is altogether different, more complex and yet in some ways simpler than the one we see. That was his goal. Lucas was his means of achieving it."

    "Jesus!" Clive said.

    "He was a nut case."

    Mike grinned and spread his hands.

    "Maybe. From the beginning of history, as well as what we can decipher from the clues from prehistory, there have been those who claim that the universe is a mathematical formulation, that if we can invent the right tools we can solve the problem. Mystics have described such a world; artists have painted it. It appears in poetry from the beginning of time." He shrugged.

    "Could be they're all nuts, as far as that goes."

    dive's expression changed subtly; he had looked angry and disgusted. Now he looked disbelieving.

    "You buy that, don't you?"

    Mike's eyes seemed to un focus a curious, dreamy look crossed his face, and he said almost gently, "The world I'm talking about wouldn't be a lesser one, you know.

    There is great beauty in the perfect solution, elegance in an irrefutable proof, grandeur in a demonstrated truth. It would not be a lesser world, just different." He blinked, as if the inner vision had failed; his expression of wistful yearning became a faint grin of self-mockery.

    "The ultimate golden carrot: Utopia. Anyway, Frobisher had the arrogance of almost knowing, and that's the worst kind."

    Barbara found herself nodding at the phrase. The arrogance of almost knowing. It described those who harbored a doubt that had to be buried and reburied endlessly; they had to prove how right they were again and again. Those with real knowledge lost the arrogance and the need to prove anything.

    Before Mike could go on, there was a knock on the door; the court clerk opened it and beckoned to Barbara.

    The clerk was a handsome, middle-aged woman with kind brown eyes and crinkly laugh lines.

    "Chambers," she said.

    Judge Lundgren and Tony were waiting for her in the judge's chambers. Court would not reconvene, Lundgren said. They were free to go to lunch, and they should leave numbers where they could be reached after two. If no verdict had come in yet, court would reconvene at five-thirty. They were not to be more than fifteen minutes away from the courthouse until that time.

    He looked tired; his manner was cold and distant, very formal, very proper. Today there was no offer of coffee in fine china cups, no pseudo-hospitality. He thanked them and dismissed them as soon as he had delivered his message.

    "Well," Barbara said, outside his door.

    "That's it, just well."

    "Right," Tony said with a grin.

    "His wife took off for Maui over the weekend and he got stuck here in the snow and freezing rain. I'd say the old boy's pissed."

    "And blames us," Barbara said glumly.

    "Oh, no doubt. I was willing to get on with it, you know."

    "To hell with it," she said darkly.

    "Let him slosh through the slush like the rest of us." She strode away with her head high. But she could hear Tony's chuckle all the way to the large double doors that opened to the public areas of the courthouse.

    They walked the few blocks to The Electric Station, a restaurant with refitted railroad cars used as dining rooms.

    No one else was in the section where their table was reserved;

    the waiter saw them seated, then vanished, to return very quickly with a pot of coffee and menus, which he left at Frank's elbow. Then he was gone again. Smooth, Barbara thought, nodding her gratitude to her father. Prank poured coffee, handed out the cups, and said to Mike, "You were saying?"

    "I was," Mike said.

    "So there was Frobisher and his assistant doing his research, publishing a paper now and then, and Schumaker read one of the papers and got interested.

    That's when they took off for Colorado. According to Lucas, Schumaker had enough clout to see to it that Probisher got a hefty raise, and that he was relieved of teaching duties in order to do his research. Later, he did the same thing for Brandywine, to get her to join them.

    Could be. Schumaker's a real draw for the school, endowment money, gifts, backing by the elite of the West, stuff like that. So they were set up, and for the next few years they continued the work, but now Schumaker was a coauthor of papers, and Herbert Margolis was brought in to do the computer end of the work. But things were going sour, or maybe the end of the road just kept receding. Whatever it was, Schumaker was getting bored with the whole project, and Frobisher was running scared that his funds would vanish. That's when Lucas took off and came home. None of the promises were being kept. He was no closer to a degree than he ever had been, and he was pretty disillusioned. He goes into some detail about the suggestions he made to get the work on the right track again, and apparently they decided to try one of them to use younger people. They had gone to freshmen, and even a few high school students, but it seems they kept running into the same dead end, no matter what they did."

    Nell was watching him as if entranced; her eyes were wide and unblinking, she was unmoving. Now she said, "That's when they called him, they told him they were bringing in the psychiatrist, Brandywine. They needed him to demonstrate what they were doing. They still needed him."

    Mike drained his coffee cup and set it down, then moved it around and around in his saucer. He watched it when he spoke again.

    "They promised him the degree if he'd just write a paper, anything at all to show the committee, and agree to demonstrate what they were doing for the new team member, Brandywine. That's when he started to make the tapes; he knew it was a lie this time, and he planned to leave, but he agreed to do the one demonstration first, and she got him. After that one time he never mentioned leaving again. And some days, he says on the tapes, he had no memory from the time he entered the lab until he was back in his apartment that night. No memories of anything that happened. But they were excited, and now they were rushing into the idea of using young teenagers thirteen, fourteen at the oldest."

    He was turning the cup around and around. Barbara reached out and moved it; at the same moment, Frank touched Nell on the arm, then shook her arm slightly. She jumped as if awakened from a dream.

    "Let's order some food," Frank said briskly. He handed out the menus. He waved the waiter over and began asking about the various seafood entrees and making suggestions to the rest of them, things he knew were excellent. For the moment they were just like any other group of people who had leisure time, who could stretch out the lunch hour to any length they chose.

    The waiter came back with hot rolls and butter, another pot of coffee, and now the talk was only about food. The waiter had become supremely efficient; he served them swiftly, gave the table a professional glance, then left them alone. For a time they were all silent as they ate their lunches, all but Nell, who only played with the salad be fore her.

    Barbara said, "You might as well go on with it." She put her fork down and rested her chin in her hands. Nell nodded and put her fork down also, and made no further pretense at eating.

    Mike buttered another roll first and took a bite.

    "Okay.

    I'll fast forward a bit. This is still September, remember.

    Things were moving along at a pretty good clip, apparently, but then there was some trouble. Two of the kids they had tested, and kept testing, went joyriding in a stolen car and ran off a mountain road. One dead, one paralyzed from the neck down. Called a simple accident, but it panicked our crew. It gets a bit hazy here, but I think another kid went insane, and that's when the whole project was killed, the first week of October."

    Nell picked up her water; her hand was shaking so hard the ice rattled in the glass. She stared at it and made a deliberate effort to hold it steady enough to drink, and then set it down too hard. She was ghostly pale. Clive put his arm over the back of her chair and rested his hand on her shoulder.

    "Go on," she whispered.

    "Yes. Well, Frobisher wouldn't give it up. They had fights and he said he'd finish alone, get his own subjects, and handle everything by himself. Schumaker said not at the school, their reputations were at risk, so Frobisher decided to continue at his house. He began to round up kids from the streets, nameless boys who could use five or ten dollars. Lucas couldn't do it, whatever it was, any longer; Brandywine had left a suggestion apparently that he would not allow himself to be tested again. But he helped Frobisher set things up, run the computer program, do whatever was required as an assistant."

    His voice was very low, and he spoke more slowly as he went now.

    "They were into late October. Lucas could see what was going on in Frobisher's house, and he was convinced that modifications they had made were working, but he couldn't seem to focus on them. Also, he was having wild dreams that scared him. Then, in November, Fro bisher found a new kid, a Chicano whose name Lucas didn't know, but he called him the laughing boy. And whatever was going on was working with this boy. Fro bisher was wild with excitement because the boy wasn't being hypnotized, and it was still working. He had found the way around the dead end that had stopped him for years."

    The waiter came back then and asked with near anguish if anything was wrong with the food. Would they like to order something else? Frank reassured him that it wasn't the food.

    "They're all dieting," he said.

    "Just more coffee. " They remained silent until he had cleared the table and departed.

    Mike looked at his watch; it was one-thirty.

    "Okay," he said, and went on briskly.

    "That last day Frobisher called Lucas; he sounded desperate and said come right now. Lucas got in his car and headed out for his house, but he says that he was hallucinating all the way. He kept hearing the laughing boy, laughing, talking to him. The boy said Probisher was crazy, trying to kill him. He hid some disks and said he had to try to calm Probisher down. When Lucas went into the house, Frobisher had the gun, the boy was dead, and they were both cut up and bloody. Frobisher shot at him, and then Margolis arrived and Frobisher killed himself. Brandywine was there by then.

    Margolis and Brandywine set the stage to make it look like the boy had shot Frobisher, and they hustled Lucas out of there and hid him, and from then until he woke up last June he had no memories of himself as Lucas Kendricks."

    Nell made a muffled sound and ducked her head quickly and kept it lowered.

    Clive looked bewildered.

    "Why would they do that?"

    he demanded.

    "It doesn't make any sense to me."

    "To hide the fact that there was research going on, or had been, that led to insanity, or even murder, maybe," Barbara said sharply.

    "I'm just surprised that the police bought it."

    Frank nodded thoughtfully.

    "Not so surprising. It could have been a combination of things, the big one being Schumaker. If he said Frobisher had a yen for boys, and there would be a terrible scandal at the school if anything of that sort came out, that would have been distracting, I suspect. Small, expensive private school like that probably brought in lots of big bucks that you wouldn't want to scare off. And since they were both dead, Frobisher and the boy, it probably didn't make much difference to the cops who pulled the trigger. Two gays out of the picture;