A minute later he was looking at the one-minus-one.

10

Although not all suffering in human life is wholly evil, a great deal of it is, and the ultimate source of all evil is the biological capacity for suffering. The biological capacity for suffering, in turn, exists because it has evolved. It has evolved because it often served an adaptive function… It was adaptive because it contributed to the reproductive success of its possessors. Because it contributed to the reproductive success of its possessors, it was favored by natural selection.

All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons.

10.1. Calder Farris

The parking garage was vast. The light, at 7:00 P.M., was flat, ugly, and artificial. Chuck Grover had parked on floor C. Most of the cars in faculty parking were gone, leaving a space next to his BMW convertible for a large sedan to slip in and wait.

Grover was just getting into his car when a hand fell on his shoulder. He jumped.

“Dr. Grover?” Calder removed his sunglasses. “Lieutenant Calder Farris, United States Marines. We’d like to talk to you.”

Grover seemed reluctant to look away from Calder’s eyes, the way a man might fear turning his back on a hooded and hissing cobra. But he did tear them away, took in Calder’s military uniform and that of Ed Hinkle, hulking behind him. For a moment Grover looked confused; then a self-congratulatory smugness crept over his face. “This about Quey, right?”

Calder held up a zip disk. On the label was written “wavesim.exe.”

“No, Dr. Grover, it’s not.”

It took twenty minutes to shake Grover down. Unlike a lot of geeks, he had a healthy and realistic fear of authority (a drug bust way back when, Calder guessed). But even so, the bastard was cagey. He tried to probe to see how interested the government was and what was in it for him. Calder got tired of it, sensed a snow job a mile high, and began to turn the screws. Grover crumbled like blue cheese.

To be honest, and he was leveling now, he knew absolutely nothing about the simulator. He’d been hoping Serin could tell him. He told a story about a Dr. Jill Talcott and how she’d promised him she’d share her work with him if he (a bunch of shit Calder didn’t care about), but then she reneged and kept it all under wraps. She was a loner, a hermit. Nobody liked her. Nobody had the first clue what she was doing. Nobody.

Calder might not have believed him, might have made sure with what Hinkle referred to as some “serious work,” if he hadn’t already expected Grover to be clueless from that enigmatic phone call to Alaska. So, like a fisherman being careful to remove his hook before throwing back a fish too small to eat, Calder spun a brief cover story involving HAARP confidentiality and a missing-documents investigation.

But the whole thing, the whole pointless, shitty thing, took thirty minutes. Thirty minutes were lost, all because some marijuana-smoking, self-serving geek would not give Dr. Talcott’s name over the phone. It was thirty minutes Calder would deeply regret.

The sedan nudged out a car trying to park in a space on Forty-fifth Street, across from the campus. Calder smiled tightly as Grover tried to make his excuses and slip away. He gripped the physicist’s elbow.

“No, I’d like you to escort me to Dr. Talcott’s lab.”

“It’s in the basement of Smith Hall. If you go—”

“I appreciate your help, Dr. Grover.”

They crossed the street. The rain had finally let up, but it was colder than a witch’s tit, and the cement walkways were turning icy. They passed bundled students. Might as well be in Alaska, thought Calder. It wasn’t supposed to be like this in Seattle, was it? But he forgot the cold as he walked at Grover’s side because he was close now. He could smell it. Close to the Big One, close to congratulations and recognition and a promotion or three or four. Close to being Maj. Calder Farris or, hell, even general, a man personally responsible for his country’s continued superiority and invulnerability to the chaotic hordes, maybe for the next several hundred years. Close, after all this time.

They rounded a corner at the library and faced a quad lined with buildings. After a few faltering steps, Grover stopped and stared, perplexed. Calder followed his gaze. At first he took it for a plume of steam from a heating duct. Then he saw it was smoke. It was coming from the basement windows of a Gothic brick-and-cement building. A few students passing in front of it looked at it curiously, but no one seemed unduly alarmed.

Then the ground thudded beneath his feet. There was a cacophony in his ears and a force slammed against his chest. It was like hitting a concrete wall in a car, only he hadn’t been moving—the wall had come to him. All three of them went down, Grover flying backward into Ed Hinkle and Calder slamming onto slick pavement. He must have blacked out momentarily. The next thing he was conscious of was a ringing in his ears and then, coming muffled through that, distant sirens.

He lifted his head, wobbling, and saw the brick building in front of them blackened from the ground up, flames rising to the upper levels. The basement had just exploded.

Calder’s reactions were a tiny bit slow. It took him a moment to grasp the significant point here. Then he grabbed the lapels of Grover’s coat, noting dully that his hands were scratched and bleeding. He shook the physicist until his yellow teeth rattled. He shouted, and his voice came from very, very far away.

“Where’s Talcott’s lab?”

Grover pointed—to the conflagration.

10.2. Aharon Handalman

Aharon Handalman did not watch television. He did not even allow it in the house. Yet it just so happened that lately he had varied his route to work. Instead of seeking out the most ancient pathways, he had, once or twice, cut straight from the Jaffa gate to the temple wall, down Hashhalshelet, where the modern world was no stranger.

And if he stopped, on his way to and from work, at a little corner store that had television sets in the window? If he watched the news for a few minutes at a time? Was that such a crime?

He didn’t know what he was looking for. They say, “He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he’ll know it when he sees it,” and this was the case. When he walked up to the store this morning, it was there on the screens, all twenty of them. CNN international news, Hebrew edition. A newswoman’s voice was being piped from inside the store. To her right was an imposed video of a burning building. The heading said: “Seattle, Washington.” The video was replaced by a photograph of a slight, intelligent-looking woman. Underneath the photograph was a name: Dr. Jill Talcott.

Aharon stared at the name for a moment, feeling he had seen it somewhere.

“…so far missing. The fire is believed to have started in the physicist’s lab, where Dr. Talcott was conducting experiments of an unspecified nature. Police…”

Aharon turned and began running toward home.

When he arrived, Hannah was just getting up. She stood in the hallway in her robe as he opened the door.

“Aharon?”

He hesitated, the enormity of what he was doing striking him for the first time. He gulped a breath. “Hannah… if I had to go to America… We have some savings. Half of that is yours, Hannah.”