Dark Matter. Greg Iles

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СКАЧАТЬ struggled to bring the revolutionary Cray 2 into being, Godin and a tiny team built an elegant and reliable four-processor machine that outperformed the Cray 1 by a speed factor of six. It wasn’t a revolutionary advance, but it was one government weapons labs were willing to pay for. At $8 million per machine, Godin quickly paid off his debts and began designing his dream supercomputer.

      Competing against national governments and Seymour Cray himself, Peter Godin had gained a foothold in the supercomputing market, and he never looked back. When the end of the Cold War virtually wiped out the supercomputing business, Godin switched to parallel-processing technology, and by the midnineties his computers had augmented or supplanted the Cray machines at NORAD, the NSA, the Pentagon, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and in missile silos across the country. In his day, Peter Godin had been both pioneer and follower, but he was first and foremost a survivor.

      Everyone looked up as the old man entered the conference room, but I nearly got to my feet. When I joined the team two years ago, Godin had looked scarcely older than Andrew Fielding, who was sixty-one at the time. But two years leading the Trinity team had aged Godin at a shocking rate. His face sometimes had the swollen look of a cancer patient on steroids. At other times, it was thinned to skeletal hollowness, and his hair almost disappeared. Today he looked as though he might collapse before reaching the table. He’d told me that during times of creative stress, his body always underwent physical changes. Godin often worked without sleep for fifty or sixty consecutive hours, and though he knew this was taking years off his life, he felt that was a fair price to pay for what he had achieved during his years on earth.

      His light blue eyes scanned the room, resting longer on me than on the others. Then he gave a general nod and settled into the empty chair beside Skow.

      “Now that we’re all here,” Skow said with an air of ceremony, “I would be remiss if I didn’t begin this meeting with a few words about the terrible loss that we—and this project—suffered yesterday. After a complete autopsy, the pathologist has confirmed that Dr. Fielding died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He—”

      “Pathologist?” I cut in. “The state medical examiner?”

      Skow gave me a look of forbearance. “David, you know we’re not in a conventional security situation. We can’t involve local authorities. Dr. Fielding’s cause of death was certified by an NSA pathologist at Fort Meade.”

      “The NSA has a pathologist?” I understood why the agency might need psychiatrists. Code-breaking was a high-stress profession. But a pathologist?

      “The agency has access to a full complement of medical specialists,” Skow said in the voice of a government tour guide. “Some directly on the payroll, others fully vetted consultants.” He glanced at Godin, whose eyes were closed. “Do you have some doubt about what killed Andrew, David?”

      There it was. The gauntlet on the table.

      “After all,” Skow said in a condescending tone, “you are an experienced internist. Perhaps you saw something inconsistent with a stroke?”

      I felt the tension in the air. Everyone was waiting for me to speak, especially Ravi Nara, who had diagnosed the stroke as Fielding died.

      “No,” I said at length. “Ravi said he observed paralysis, speech impairment, and a blown pupil just prior to death. That’s consistent with stroke. It’s just … it usually takes a while to die from a bleed. The suddenness took me by surprise.”

      It was as though the air had been let out of a balloon. Shoulders sagged with relief, buttocks shifted position, fingers began drumming on the table.

      “Well, of course,” Skow said generously. “It took us all by surprise. And Andrew was, quite simply, irreplaceable.”

      I wanted to strangle Skow. He had wanted to replace Fielding for the past six months, but there was no one remotely as qualified as the Englishman available for the job.

      “And to show how serious I am about that,” Skow said, “we will not try to replace him.”

      Only Jutta Klein looked as shocked as I. Fielding had known more about Project Trinity than anyone but Godin. He’d got us through a dozen major bottlenecks. Problems that had stumped software and materials engineers for weeks were but puzzles to the eccentric Englishman, something to be solved in a quarter of an hour. In this sense, Fielding truly was irreplaceable. But the quantum aspects of Project Trinity could not be ignored. Quantum physics was akin to alchemy in my mind—alchemy that worked—and to push ahead without someone qualified to handle problems like quantum entanglement and unwanted tunneling would be madness.

      “But what do you plan to do about the MRI side effects we’ve been studying?” I asked. “As you know, Fielding believed they were the result of quantum disturbances in the brain.”

      “Ridiculous,” barked Nara. “There’s no proof there are any quantum processes in the human brain. There never has been, and there never will be!”

      “Dr. Nara,” Skow said.

      I gave the neurologist a look of disdain. “You didn’t sound half so sure when you were in the room with Fielding.”

      Nara shot silent daggers at me.

      Skow gave me his patient smile. “David, both Peter and I feel that you and Ravi are quite capable of continuing to explore the medical anomalies. Bringing in a new physicist at this time would be a needless security risk.”

      I wasn’t going to argue this. I would save my efforts for the president. “Will Fielding’s body and personal effects be turned over to his widow?”

      Skow cleared his throat. “We can’t seem to contact Mrs. Fielding. Therefore, Andrew’s remains will be cremated as per his written wishes.”

      Along with any evidence of murder. I struggled to keep my face impassive. So Lu Li had made her escape. On the other hand … would they say anything different if they’d caught or killed her?

      Godin touched Skow’s wrist.

      “Would you like to add something, Peter?” Skow asked.

      Godin rubbed his nearly bald pate under the indirect lights. He sat with a Buddha-like centeredness, only the blue eyes in detectable motion. He spoke rarely, but when he did, the world listened.

      “This is no time to talk about trivialities,” he said. “We lost a giant yesterday. Andrew Fielding and I disagreed about a lot of things, but I respected him more than any man I’ve ever worked with.”

      I couldn’t hide my surprise. Everyone at the table leaned forward, so as not to miss a word. The hypnotic blue eyes made a quick circuit of the room. Then Godin continued, his voice soft but still deep and powerful.

      “From the dawn of history, the driving force of science has been war. If he were here today, Fielding would argue with me. He would say it is mankind’s innate curiosity that has driven the upward surge of science. But that’s wishful thinking. It is human conflict that has marked the great forward leaps in technology. A regrettable reality, but one that every rational person must recognize. We live in a world of fact, not philosophy. Philosophers question the reality of the universe, then look surprised when you hit them with a shoe and ask if they felt that reality.”

      Ravi Nara snickered, but Godin gave him a withering glare.

      “Andy СКАЧАТЬ