7.1. Jill Talcott

She probably should have stopped at 75 percent power. But Jill Talcott had too much at stake to play it safe. And since no one except Nate knew what she was doing, there was no one to advise her otherwise.

She did try to get advice. The thought of Dr. Ansel had been more and more on her mind. She wanted very much to talk to him about her discovery and what it might mean. He was practically the only person she could speak to. But there was the business of the bad parting holding her back.

When she finally gathered her courage to call, a secretary answered and she was transferred to Tom Cheever, the head of the department.

“Jill Talcott? You were Dr. Ansel’s graduate student? I guess that was before my time. I’ve been here five years.”

“Yes,” Jill agreed, feeling guiltily relieved. Cheever didn’t know her, which was good. Not that Ansel had made a big deal out of her transferring to another professor. It probably hadn’t been a big deal to anyone but her, but—

“What is it that you’re working on now?” Cheever asked.

“Work? Um… wave mechanics. I’m at the University of Washington.”

“Wave mechanics,” Cheever repeated faintly.

“I don’t understand. I called to speak to Dr. Ansel. Is he on sabbatical, or—”

“I’m sorry you hadn’t heard. Henry… Dr. Ansel passed away last month.”

Jill was floored. He’d been in his late fifties when she worked with him and far from decrepit. She felt a grief that was genuine, if self-interested. “Jesus. What happened?”

“He… took some pills.”

He took some pills? Ansel had committed suicide. A terrible coldness sluiced through her. How far down he must have sunk into the cesspool of shame and dishonor to do such a thing. How hopeless he must have felt. It was awful, terrible. She felt bad for Ansel, but the worst part was that she could practically taste that fate as her own. The horror she felt was as much for herself as for him.

It took a moment for logic to override emotion. That wasn’t going to happen to her. That would never happen to her. Because she had proven her theories. And when she finally spoke out she would have so much evidence that no one would be able to refute her.

“Dr. Talcott?”

“I’m here. Thank you for—”

“We were friends. I know many people here didn’t believe in Henry’s work, but I did. I knew quite a bit about his work. Things other people didn’t know.”

Jill was starting to feel uneasy. Something wasn’t adding up. Ansel had been a nice man, a very nice man, but he’d also been pretty stubborn. It was hard enough to imagine that he’d gotten so battered down that he’d committed suicide. But if he’d had the support of his department head…?

Things other people didn’t know.

Cheever’s voice lowered. “If you’re working on anything close to what Henry was working on, then I really think we should—”

“God, I’m sorry; look at the time. I have to go.”

Jill hung up. She stared at the phone for a minute, her mouth dry. She would give anything—yes, she wished very, very much that she hadn’t made that phone call.

Her mind raced through the possibilities. Ansel hadn’t had access to a quantum computer. Therefore, even if he had turned to wave mechanics after she’d left, even if he’d come up with her exact equation, he would never have been able to test it. Therefore, it was unlikely he even suspected the existence of the one-minus-one. And even if he did, he couldn’t have had more than a vague idea about it. She went over it several more times, but she was certain her logic was correct.

She put her head in her hands and sighed deeply. Her work was safe. And even if Ansel had been close to some of her theories, as long as she didn’t know the details no one could accuse her of plagiarism. Part of her knew that she was being paranoid. Cheever had just wanted to talk; he’d sounded perfectly nice.

But she wasn’t going to let him steal her work.

August 15. The morning was warm and sunny. The newspapers proclaimed it had been one of the driest, hottest summers on record in Seattle. Jill, to whom the sun was merely an eye-blinding annoyance on her forays from class to basement lab to her house, wished for rain. She was finishing up some journal entries regarding her students’ grades. She had begun to notice some weeks back that the papers and tests were quite a bit better than normal, so she had dug out files from last summer and compared them. The scores were much higher this year, sending the bell curve lofting in the middle like a cat’s arching spine. But since they were different students, there was no verifiable correlation…

She heard the door open with that sucking sound the rubberized curtain gave off, and Nate entered the lab. A black leather motorcycle jacket was slung over one tanned arm. The rest of him was clad in blue jeans and a black T-shirt. She found it annoying that he was looking less like a frumpy science student and more and more like his funky co-residents on Capitol Hill. He’d purchased a motorcycle this summer with some financial windfall or other and the black leather gear had triggered a chain reaction. First his hair had been cropped to a thick nubby cut; then he’d colored it with a fluorescent blond on top that made the olive in his skin shine like gold. He’d had a hoop punched into one earlobe where it glittered against his dark neck, and he’d lost a good fifteen pounds. He looked amazing, even younger now than his twenty-eight years. It made Jill feel pathetically old and unhip by comparison.

“I thought you’d be late today. The 520 bridge is closed, isn’t it?” Perhaps, Jill thought, he hadn’t gone over to Linda’s last night, hadn’t had to take the bridge back this morning. He’d made such a point of telling her about his staying with his girlfriend in Bellevue, so she’d know why he was late in the mornings, he said, though she suspected a bit of face rubbing was involved. Her face had stung afterward, at any rate.

Nate tossed his jacket and helmet on the coatrack and put on a protective apron. “They finished up two days early. God bless the highway department.”

“Hmmm.”

“It was beautiful driving over the lake this morning. The water was like glass and it had this deep greenish-blue color. The sky was flawless.”

“Huh.” Jill moved over to the objects on the table. Here’s a topic of conversation, she thought, the experiment. “The growth rate is still slowing down on the virus, and the mice aren’t as hyper.”

He came over and squatted down beside the mice, his face focused in that utterly dedicated way of his. “They look healthy, just not as active as they were.”

“Should we risk putting the males and females back together?”

“ ‘Kay.”

They were up to six cages of mice now, so quickly had the reproduction proceeded before they’d separated the sexes. The homosexual “humping” activity in the male cage had not been noticed for about a week. Perhaps the mice had been shamed to abstinence by some homophobic moralist in their midst. Then again, perhaps they’d lost the drive. Nathan took three male mice out of cage A and three female mice out of cage D and switched them.

Jill and Nate knelt opposite cage A and watched. There was a flurry of mutual sniffing as the mice reacquainted themselves; then the three girl mice settled down near the food, unmolested.

“Being back together might set them off again,” Nate suggested.

“Hmmm. Keep logging sexual activity. Every day.”

“Mine or theirs?”

If looks could kill, the one she shot him would have been the equivalent of a coronary thrombosis.