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Authors: L. Neil Smith

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BOOK: The Probability Broach
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—ANAHEIM (FNS) In a surprise 12 to 1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ruling of a lower court ordering seizure of Disneyland and Florida’s Disney World due to the corporation’s inability to pay newly passed retroactive taxes on profits from the 1960s and 1970s. Also cited was its “blatantly unjustified waste of America’s irreplaceable energy resources.”
Spokespersons for the Federal Bankruptcy Administration refused comment on rumors that the theme parks may continue operating for the benefit of 25 million government employees, but did say, off the record, that the “social conscience and public service of millions of selfless, patriotic Americans deserve some conspicuous acknowledgement.”
—The Denver
News-Post
July 8, 1987
 
It was good to push my Plymouth out of that eternal curtain of brown smoke. Millions of bike-induced coronaries won’t put a dent in pollution, when the State House exempts its own “Public Service” gunk factories. With a cautious eye on the rearview mirror, I settled back and let the miles peel off—ice-blue Rockies on my left, Kansas somewhere off to the right—and tried forgetting corpses, Burgess, maybe even poor old Mac awhile. I couldn’t forget the body armor, though even with the drop in temperature outside the inversion-bowl that makes Denver the second-stupidest place in America to build a city.
Once out of dispatcher range, I switched to the commercial band. There was a Jim Kweskin revival underway—beat hell out of what they’d been playing last year. Too soon, though, the real world horned in—what passed for news from New Guinea, Japan breaking relations, more ration reduction. I flipped over to CB for some amateur entertainment.
There was plenty: farmers swapping yarns along their lonely furrows; truckers seditiously exchanging tips. Suddenly the band exploded with obscenity: President Jackson is a——, four or five unpopular federal agencies are——. The diatribe began to repeat itself. I slowed, listened—yes, there it was again: a CB “bomb,” a cheap, battery-operated tape player with a seven-minute loop, and an equally expendable transmitter, buried by the roadside and simmering up through a ten-foot copper wire, waiting for FCC gunships to triangulate and blast it to pieces. Remote-control radicalism. The People’s Committee for Free Papua entertained me almost all the way to Fort Collins, then quacked suddenly and went off the air.
Spread across ten miles between I-25 and the foothills, to the south Fort Collins is a virtual ghost town of abandoned tract homes. The older section is a pleasant Edwardian-vintage hamlet with broad, tree-lined avenues. I’d been there before, and I liked it. Unfortunately, it takes federal permission to change a cop’s location, and seniority—meaning pensions—isn’t transferable. I stopped briefly for a Jaycee city map, then navigated my way to Colorado State University.
 
I wasn’t GOING to like Dr. Otis Bealls or his little Errol Flynn mustache. A nicotine-stained yellow-gray, it was the only hair he had—except for a scraggly fringe around the back of his head—and appeared to be growing from his nostrils. Affecting baggy tweeds, cheap velveteen waistcoat, and rimless plastic spectacles he fiddled with continuously, he failed to convey the academic impression he aspired to. The whole ensemble reminded me of the proverbial dirty old man who “carved another notch in his gold-handled cane.”
The bastard wouldn’t see me for an hour and a half. My idea of hell is a waiting room, plastic and tubular steel, a busy-busy secretary pointedly oblivious as you riffle through six-year-old copies of
Today’s Health
and
Wee Wisdom.
Only in this case it was journals filled with squiggles I wasn’t even sure were numbers. The street map was more entertaining. All that time, the fancy telephone blinked on and off like a horror-movie computer, burning up the lines.
When he finally condescended, it was like being sent to the principal. He lounged behind an aircraft carrier of a desk, playing with his glasses and shuffling papers. Finally, glancing at his watch, he asked without looking up, “Well, what can the CSU Physics Department do for the Denver Police?”
“Then you haven’t heard about Dr. Meiss?”
“Heard? What kind of trouble is he in now?”
“The worst. He was killed yesterday. I understand he worked—”
“Officer, please! Ph.D.’s do not
work
here! Janitors, stenographers, other menials
work
here. If I may optimistically exaggerate, undergraduates
work
here.
Professors
pass the Torch of Civilization, deliberate our Vast Body of Knowledge. They Labor in the Vineyards of Science, pushing back the Barriers of the Un—”
“Dr. Bealls,” I interrupted. “One of your Laborers won’t be hanging around the Vineyards anymore. He’s lying on a sheet-steel table at the Denver City Morgue, so full of machine gun bullets, he’s gonna need a forklift for a—”
“Bullets? My dear fellow, certainly no one in
this
department—” He keyed the intercom, which was stupid—the office door was open, secretary sitting eight feet away. “Shirley, ascertain whether Dr. Meiss is in his office or in class. Have him come immediately if he’s free.”
She swiveled and looked right in the door. “Vaughn didn’t meet his eight-o’clock, sir, and he hasn’t called in. I mentioned it when you came in at eleven.” Score three points for Shirley.
“Thank you, Mrs. Binh.” He purpled. “That
will
be all.” Rising abruptly and skirting the desk, he closed the door and hustled back. “I’m sure there’s a more reasonable explanation for this. He’s punctual, at least that can be said.”
I made curiosity grimaces. “You feel he had some failings?”
“My good man, you simply don’t
know!”
He leaned back, polishing his glasses with an edge of his jacket. “In a field already overcrowded with nitwits, mystics, and Bohemians, he is—where can I possibly begin?”
“How about—”
“—His disgraceful activities! My deepest frustration, as head of this department, is to be obstructed from assuring the, um,
gratitude
of its employees. Variant opinions, particularly in these times of economic reappraisal, betray a certain
inhumility.
Nor have we room for contumacious individualism. Socially Responsible Science cannot proceed in such a manner.”
And Mac had asked where
I
had been! “What form did his particular contumaciousness take?”
“He writes
letters—
wild, irresponsible things, absolutist,
subversive!
Do you know, he claims this institution would be more efficient run for profit? As if
efficiency
were a valid criterion in education!” He peered confidentially over the tops of his glasses. “Let me tell you—not even the department’s Trotskyites and Birchers willingly associate with him.”
I grinned. “He was a Propertarian. A book I’m reading said they think the whole right-left political spectrum is eyewash. That might rankle your garden-variety radicals a little.”
“As may be. He was dangerous, antisocial … some sort of Bolshevist!”
“Bolshevist?” I hadn’t missed the sudden change of tenses. “I wonder how Mary Ross-Byrd would like that?”
“Who? Oh, I see—just like all the others. Well, I warn you, I’m an old hand. Not a man on this faculty isn’t anxious to pull me down. Daily I withstand ridicule, plot and counterplot. I’ll cooperate fully with responsible authority—my happy duty as a grateful citizen—but I will
not
suffer abuse from a public servant, do you understand?”
“Sure, Doc, I understand—that’s a mighty fine pair you’ve got.”
“Pair? Pair of what?”
“Noids—skip it. What else was unconventional about Meiss?”
“Ahem … Well, he used to—
tends
to—confuse his proper role on the faculty. He’s completely aloof from his colleagues.”
“You mean the Trotskyites and Birchers who wouldn’t associate with him?”
“I mean they frequently complain he goes out of his way to make his professional undertakings vague and esoteric. They—”
“Couldn’t understand what he was doing.”
“I would find other words. He has no right to set himself above his peers.” He fumbled nervously through a desk drawer, glanced up at me, and thought better of it, regretfully shoved the drawer closed.
I laughed. “Go ahead. I’m a nicotine fiend, myself.”
He colored. “
We
were speaking
of Dr.
Meiss!”
I considered lighting up, myself, decided not to push things. “So we were.”
“Yes. He seems to be more candid with his students than his colleagues, mixing in a vulgar and undisciplined fashion—they call him by his first name! I’ve even heard it said he sees them socially, drinks with them in utter disregard for decency and the law.”
“Prohibition’s tough on everybody. Think any of these colleagues’ d like him a bit less candid—via several dozen nasty little bullet holes?”
He sat up, really shocked, I think. “Officer,
please!”
“Lieutenant, Dr. Bealls, homicide lieutenant. I wouldn’t want abuse from a public servant, either. What about Meiss’s extracurricular activities?”
He assumed his frostiest expression. I gave it a B-minus. “I assure you,
Lieutenant,
I do not meddle in the personal lives of my subordinates.”
This was getting me nowhere. “Listen, Bealls, I’m just doing my job, and it isn’t very easy. Everybody I work for is dead, and it depresses me. What do you say we call a truce?”
He sat a moment, color returning to normal. Then he nodded microscopically. So I rushed him: “Okay, tell me what sort of physics Meiss was up to lately.”
He surprised me: “May I see your identification again? I assure you, I’ve good reason.” I handed my badge case over. He looked at the shield, weighing it in his hand—amazingly heavy, wouldn’t feel like authority, otherwise—then flipped over the felt liner and spent more time on the plastic ID. “I don’t suppose you’d mind if I called your department to confirm this?”
I recognize a National Security reflex when I see one. I sat tight, practicing my poker face. If they told him no, Lieutenant Bear’s in Manitou Springs, it’d take weeks to talk my way out. “Not at all. 226-2421—better get it from the operator, just in case. Ask for Lieutenant James J. James. The J stands for—”
“I don’t think that will be necessary.” He sneaked a peek at his watch. “You see, Dr. Meiss once pursued investigations of a …
sensitive
nature. He no longer does that sort of thing—of course, if he’s really dead, I suppose that’s the case anyway, ha ha.
Ethics
, he maintained, but you can see how they were just as happy. They were disturbed by the turn in his views.”
“So I’ve been told. About when did all this happen?”
“Not all at once. I gather he made it final two, two and a half years ago.
I remembered the date on his Party card. “So why the panic now? That’s a long time, as government secrets go.”
Bealls went into his spectacle-scrubbing bit again. “Understand, sir, he was—considering his mediocre talent—quite far ahead in the field. The price of catering to reckless independence. I’m afraid no one else has been able—and if that weren’t enough, walking around with all that information in his brain—”
I couldn’t help it. “Was he supposed to turn it in? His brain, I mean. The usual practice is to do that
before
you start working for the—”
“—abandoned everything, charging off on some trivial commercial track, leaving nothing behind but—”
“What do you mean?”
“A series of lucrative grants from private industrial sources. Not general endowments, mind you, but personal
carte blanche.
Anything his whim desired! He was
bought,
simple as that, out of his proper field and service to his country. I dare say he had more resources available than the rest of this—”
He fumbled with his glasses, putting them on upside down. “Well, I can tell you, serious consideration was being given certain measures. There were those who could see he was denied tenure,” Bealls added brightly. “They would have thanked me for that. It is not beyond consideration.” He blinked and rearranged his spectacles.
Before he could open his mouth again, I said, “Would it be possible to examine his office, you know, for clues and things?” I expected resistance, but was prepared to argue.
An examinatory stare and thoughtful pause. Bealls probably intimidated a lot of undergrads. “It’s quite irregular, Lieutenant. I ought to insist on a warrant or something, ha ha. But we don’t want it said we failed to cooperate, do we?” He looked at his watch again.
BOOK: The Probability Broach
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