On the south side of the NSF building it was the work of a moment to stand a plastic crate on its side and hop up to the lowest rung of the service ladder bolted to the concrete wall, and then quickly to pull himself up and ascend the twelve stories to the roof, using his leg muscles for all the propulsion. As he neared the top of the ladder it felt very high and exposed, and it occurred to him that if it were really true that an excess of reason was a form of madness, he seemed to be cured. Unless of course this truly was the most reasonable thing to doas he felt it was.
Over the coping, onto the roof, land in a shallow rain puddle against the coping. In the center of a flat roof, the atrium skylight.
It was a muggy night, the low clouds orange with the citys glow. He pulled out his tools. The big central skylight was a low four-sided pyramid of triangular glass windowpanes. He went to the one nearest the ladder and cleaned the plate of glass, then affixed a big sucker to it.
Using his old X-Acto knife he cut the sun-damaged polyurethane caulking on the windows three sides. He pulled it away and found the window screws, and zipped them out with his old Grinder screwdriver. When the window was unscrewed he grabbed the handle on the sucker and yanked to free the window, then pulled back gently; out it came, balanced in the bottom frame stripping. He pulled it back until the glass was almost upright, then tied the sling-rope from the handle of the sucker to the lowest rung of the ladder. The open gap near the top of the atrium was more than big enough for him to fit through. Cool air wafted up from some very slight internal pressure.
He laid a towel over the frame, stepped into his climbing harness, and buckled it around his waist. He tied his ropes off on the top rung of the service ladder; that would be bombproof. Now it was just a matter of slipping through the gap and rappelling down the rope to the point where he would begin his pendulum.
He sat carefully on the angled edge of the frame. He could feel the beer from Annas reception still sloshing in him, impeding his coordination very slightly, but this was climbing, he would be all right. He had done it in worse condition in his youth, fool that he had been. Although it was perhaps the wrong time to be critical of that version of himself.
Turning around and leaning back into the atrium, he tested the figure-eight device constricting the linegood frictionso he leaned farther back into the atrium, and immediately plummeted down into it. Desperately he twisted the rappelling device and felt the rope slow; it caught fast and he was bungeeing down on it when he crashed into somethinga horrible surprise because it didnt seem that he had had time to fall to the ground, so he was confused for a split secondthen he saw that he had struck the top piece of the mobile, and was now hanging over it, head downward, grasping it and the rope both with a desperate prehensile clinging.
And very happy to be there. The brief fall seemed to have affected him like a kind of electrocution. His skin burned everywhere. He tugged experimentally on his rope; it seemed fine, solidly tied to the roof ladder. Perhaps after putting the figure eight on the rope he had forgotten to take all the slack out of the system, he couldnt remember doing it. That would be forgetting a well-nigh instinctual action for any climber, but he couldnt honestly put it past himself on this night. His mind was full or perhaps overfull.
Carefully he reached into his waist bag. He got out two ascenders and carabinered their long loops to his harness, then connected them to the rope above him. Next he whipped the rope below him around his thigh, and had a look around. He would have to use the ascenders to pull himself back up to the proper pendulum point for Dianes window
The whole mobile was twisting slightly. Frank grabbed it and tried to torque it until it stilled, afraid some security person would walk through the atrium and notice the motion. Suddenly the big space seemed much too well lit for comfort, even though it was only a dim greenish glow created by a few night-lights in the offices around him.
The mobiles top piece was a bar bent into a big circle, hanging by a chain from a point on its circumference, with two shorter bars extending out from itone about thirty degrees off from the top, bending to make a staircase shape, the other across the circle and below, its two bends making a single stair riser down. The crescent bar hung about fifteen feet below the circle. In the dark they appeared to be different shades of gray, though Frank knew they were primary colors. For a second that made it all seem unreal.
Finally the whole contraption came still. Frank ran one ascender up his rope, put his weight on it. Every move had to be delicate, and for a time he was lost to everything else, deep in that climbers space of purely focused concentration.
He placed the other ascender even higher, and carefully shifted his weight to it, and off the first ascender. A very mechanical and straightforward process. He wanted to leave the mobile with no push on it at all.
But the second ascender slipped when he put his weight on it, and instinctively he grabbed the rope with his hand and burned his palm before the other ascender caught him. A totally unnecessary burn.
Now he really began to sweat. A bad ascender was bad news. This one was slipping very slightly and then catching. Looking at it, he thought that maybe it had been smacked in the fall onto the top of the mobile, breaking its housing. Ascender housings were often cast, and sometimes bubbles left in the casting caused weaknesses that broke when struck. It had happened to him before, and it was major adrenaline time. No one could climb a rope unaided for long.
But this one kept holding after its little slips, and fiddling with his fingertips he could see that shoving the cam back into place in the housing after he released it helped it to catch sooner. So with a kind of teeth-clenching patience, a holding-the-breath antigravitational effort, he could use the other one for the big pulls of the ascent, and then set the bad one by hand, to hold him (hopefully) while he moved the good one up above it again.
Eventually he got back up to the height he had wanted to descend to in the first place, and was finally ready to go. He was drenched in sweat and his right hand was burning. He tried to estimate how much time he had wasted, but could not. Somewhere between ten minutes and half an hour, he supposed. Ridiculous.
Swinging side to side was easy, and soon he was swaying back and forth, until he could reach out and place a medium sucker against Lavetas office window. He depressed it slightly as he swung in close, and it stuck first try.
Held thus against her window, he could pull a T-bar from his waist bag and reach over, just barely, and fit it into the window washers channel next to the window. After that he was set, and could reach up and place a dashboard into the slot over the window, and rig a short rope he had brought to tie the sucker handle up to the dashboard, holding open Lavetas window.
All set. Deploy the X-Acto, unscrew the frame, haul up the window toward the dashboard, almost to horizontal, keeping its top edge in the framing. Tie it off. Gap biggest at the bottom corner; slip under there and pull into the office, twisting as agilely as the gibbons at the National Zoo, then kneeling on the carpeted floor, huffing and puffing as quietly as possible.
Clip the line to a chair leg, just to be sure it didnt swing back out into the atrium and leave him stuck. Tiptoe across Lavetas office, over to Dianes in-box, where he had left his letter.
Not there.
A quick search of the desktop turned up nothing there either.
He couldnt think of any other high-probability places to look for it. The halls had surveillance cameras, and besides, where would he look? It was supposed to be here, Diane had been gone when he had left it in her in-box. Laveta had nodded, acknowledging receipt of same. Laveta?
Helplessly he searched the other surfaces and drawers in the office, but the letter was not there. There was nothing else he could do. He went back to the window, unclipped his line. He clipped his ascenders back onto it, making sure the good one was high, and that he had taken all the slack out before putting his weight on it. Faced with the tilted window and the open air, he banished all further consideration of the mystery of the absent letter, with a final thought of Laveta and the look he sometimes thought he saw in her eye; perhaps it was a purloined letter. On the other hand, Diane could have come back. But enough of that for now; it was time to focus. He needed to focus. The dreamlike quality of the descent had vanished, and now it was only a sweaty and poorly illuminated job, awkward, difficult, somewhat dangerous. Getting out, letting down the window, rescrewing the frame, leaving the cut seal to surprise some future window washer Luckily, despite feeling stunned by the setback, the automatic pilot from hundreds of work hours came through. In the end it was an old expertise, a kid skill, something he could do no matter what.
Which was a good thing, because he wasnt actually focusing very well. On various levels his mind was racing. What could have happened? Who had his letter? Would he be able to find the woman from the elevator?
Thus only the next morning, when he came into the building in the ordinary way, did he look up self-consciously and notice that the mobile now hung at a ninety-degree angle to the position it had always held before. But no one seemed to notice.
CHAPTER 9
TRIGGER EVENT
Department of Homeland Security CONFIDENTIAL
Transcript NSF 3957396584
Phones 645d/922a
922a: Frank are you ready for this?
645d: I dont know Kenzo, you tell me.
922a: Casper the Friendly Ghost spent last week swimming over the sill between Iceland and Scotland, and she never got a salinity figure over 34.
645d: Wow. How deep did she go?
922a: Surface water, central water, the top of the deep water. And never over 34. 33.8 on the surface once she got into the Norwegian Sea.
645d: Wow. What about temperatures?
922a: 0.9 on the surface, 0.75 at three hundred meters. Warmer to the east, but not by much.
645d: Oh my God. So its not going to sink.
922a: Thats right.
645d: Whats going to happen?
922a: I dont know. It could be the stall.
645d: Someones got to do something about this.
922a: Good luck my friend! I personally think were in for some fun. A thousand years of fun.
Anna was working with her door open, and once again she heard Franks end of a phone conversation. Having eavesdropped once, it seemed to have become easier; and as before, there was a strain in Franks voice that caught her attention. Not to mention louder sentences like:
What? Why would they do that?
Then silence, except for a squeak of his chair and a brief drumming of fingers.
Uh-huh, yeah. Well, what can I say. Its too bad. It sucks, sure Yeah. But, you know. Youll be fine either way. Its your workforce that will be in trouble No no, I understand. You did your best. Nothing you can do after you sell. It wasnt your call, Derek Yeah I know. Theyll find work somewhere else. Its not like there arent other biotechs out there, its the biotech capital of the world, right? Yeah, sure. Let me know when you know Okay, I do too. Bye.
He hung up hard, cursed under his breath.
Anna looked out her door. Something wrong?
Yeah.
She got up and went to her doorway. He was looking down at the floor, shaking his head disgustedly.
He raised his head and met her gaze. Small Delivery Systems closed down Torrey Pines Generique and let almost everyone go.
Really! Didnt they just buy them?
Yes. But they didnt want the people. He grimaced. It was for something Torrey Pines had, like a patent. Or one of the people they kept. There were a few they invited to join the Small Delivery lab in Atlanta. Like that mathematician I told you about. The one who sent us a proposal, did I tell you about him?
One of the jackets that got turned down?
Thats right.
Your panel wasnt that impressed, as I recall.
Yeah, thats right. But Im not so sureI dont think they were right. He grimaced, shrugged. It was a mistake. Anyway, theyll get him to sign a contract that gives them the rights to his work, and then theyll have it to patent, or keep as a trade secret, or even bury if it interferes with some other product of theirs. Whatever their legal department thinks will make the most.
Anna watched him brood. Finally she said, Oh well.
He gave her a look. A guy like him belongs at NSF.
Anna lifted an eyebrow. She was well aware of Franks ambivalent or even negative attitude toward NSF, which he had let slip often enough.
Frank understood her look and said, The thing is, if you had him here then you could, you know, sic him on things. Sic him like a dog.
I dont think we have a program that does that.
Well you should, thats what Im saying.
You can add that to your talk to the Board this afternoon, Anna said. She considered it herself. A kind of human search engine, hunting math-based solutions
Frank did not look amused. Ill already be out there far enough as it is, he muttered. I wish I knew why Diane asked me to give this talk anyway.
To get your parting wisdom, right?
Yeah right. He looked at a pad of yellow legal-sized paper, scribbled over with notes.
Anna surveyed him, feeling again the slightly irritated fondness for him she had felt on the night of the party for the Khembalis. She would miss him when he was gone. Want to go down and get a coffee?
Sure. He got up slowly, lost in thought, and reached out to close the program on his computer.
Wow, what did you do to your hand?
Oh. Burned it in a little climbing fall. Grabbed the rope.
My God Frank.
I was belayed at the time, it was just a reflex thing.
It looks painful.
It is when I flex it. They left the offices and went to the elevators. How is Charlie getting along with his poison ivy?
Still moaning and groaning. Most of the blisters are healing, but some of them keep breaking open. I think the worst part now is that it keeps waking him up at night. He hasnt slept much since it happened. Between that and Joe hes kind of going crazy.
In the Starbucks she said, So are you ready for this talk to the Board?
No. Or, as much as I can be. Like I said, I dont really know why Diane wants me to do it.
It must be because youre leaving. She wants to get your parting wisdom. She does that with some of the visiting people. Its a sign shes interested in your take on things.