Read Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods Online
Authors: Paul Melko
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Collections & Anthologies
“I hope not,” I said, smiling as well as I could. I wanted to yell at her that I was suffocating in the sterile environment of the University. I was dying and would be as dead as Rocque if I stayed. I wanted out, and I wanted out now. I added, “Thank you again for the offer. I plan to get into the private sector perhaps.”
“Yes, of course. They offer far more money than we ever can.”
And far more air.
Dr. Mohammed Khomeli smiled nervously at me. “I am quite ruffled today, Aristotle. The police have been here already, and this matter of death in the building. Quite bothersome. And my productivity will be quite low today.”
“The police questioned you already?”
“Yes. They checked the computer records and found everyone who was logged in at the time of the death. I was here on Sunday, but no one saw me but you.” I had met with Khomeli briefly on Sunday to clarify a point in the thesis. That was before I had gone to see Rocque about the signature.
“I wanted to ask you about that pistol on your desk . . .”
“Do not make jokes, Aristotle! How atrocious a sense of humor you have.” But I saw his lips quiver slightly. He came around his desk and shook hands warmly with me. “Good luck. Please contact me if there is anything I can do for you. Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”
*
Sergeant Clarke was standing in the student lounge when I entered. She was interviewing a student, but stopped immediately when I walked in.
“Let’s take a walk, Aristotle.”
“Sure.” I dropped the box on a chair and was about to follow her out the door, when she turned and picked up the original copy of my thesis.
The campus was quiet, like always a week after finals. A slight wind rustled the leaves of the trees lining the road. We walked for about a hundred feet down the curb before she spoke. Claudia said, “How did you know that you had your doctorate Sunday night? You told a number of people in the Man Hole that you were done.”
“I assumed it was done. All but the signatures.”
“That was a big assumption. Faculty members have mentioned that Rocque was holding back. Hard enough to keep you here.”
“Not that hard.”
“Was this sitting on Rocque’s desk?” She waved the thesis at me.
“No.”
“You went to Thelma and picked it up. Slightly irregular.”
“I wanted to make a few extra copies.”
“You have an alibi.”
“I was at the Man Hole.”
“You have another alibi.”
“Hmmm.”
“Dr. Khomeli is quite certain you talked with him from just before four until 4:45pm. Two alibis, Stot, are better than one, even if one is a lie. So I know you didn’t do it.” Damn. I’d forgotten about Khomeli. Fernando had done me the favor of lying; but I hadn’t needed it. I hadn’t known that Rocque had been killed during the hour I’d spent with Khomeli.
“I’m glad you know that.”
“You felt the need for an alibi, Stot. Why?”
“Fernando was obviously confused. Feebleminded.”
“Was your thesis sitting on his desk?”
I stopped. “I answered that question already. More than anything else in the entire Universe, I want to get the fuck out of this hole. I want out! I didn’t kill him and we both know that. And I don’t know anything more than you do, so just let me go, okay?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“I’m leaving tonight, Claudia.”
She paused, then said, “You are so fucking smug. Did you hate him so much?” She handed the thesis to me.
“No, just this place.”
She smirked. “Welcome to the real world.”
*
I was packed, my apartment empty except for cobwebs and dust bunnies. It had taken two trips to Goodwill, but I’d managed to get everything I owned in my car. Everything but the thesis sitting on the floor next to the telephone jack.
There was nothing holding me there, and I knew I should just get in my car and drive like I had meant to. But I kept looking back at my thesis.
It was the only witness to the death of my advisor. It was too bad that a book didn’t reveal in its text what it saw.
I paused. What page had the book been opened to? I tried to recall. Chapter 4? No, Chapter 5, the chapter on alternative materials for aromatic collection. Dr. Olivia-Yordan had mentioned the plaster idea, but there were others, including a sample of filamented paper substance that worked rather well.
The sample. The thesis had been open to the sample collector. Rocque had known the murderer might take the eggs, but the murderer wouldn’t have known about the filament. Perhaps Rocque had opened it, casually, desperately hoping that I would notice. Bastard. He was drawing me in again, just when I was almost away.
I flipped open the thesis, then shut it. I would have to hurry. It had been twenty-four hours already, and the paper had a definite time limit before the uncertainty was too great.
The lab was dark, and I fired up the mass spectrometer and the neutron activation system. While they warmed up, I cast a few micro-tubes from the sample. The eggs were filled with a micro-tubule structure that stored molecules from the air, larger than a certain size, in a temporal sequence. By excavating backwards, a researcher could determine the sequence of events around the egg. There were huge databases of odors maintained by the domestic and international agencies. Whenever a criminal was booked, fingerprinting was less common than an odor sample.
My paper sample worked the same way. The only difference was that the micro-structure was not ceramic, and so it required a more elaborate casting method. But, hey that’s what Ph.D. dissertations are for: they take a simple idea and expound on it in more and more complicated ways until the original idea is buried beneath piles and piles of unrelated intellectual refuse.
The murder was easy to pinpoint. Blood has a unique signature. At that point, I needed only to identify the possible odor traces right before and right after the murder. It took me several castings to get a good enough sample of that time period. Luckily, there were several million samples in the paper collector.
Once I had my sample of molecules from the murder time, fifteen minutes on either side, I eliminated Rocque’s signatures, then mine, then Thelma’s, whose signature was all over the office. I was still left with a number of possibilities, since each person acts as a molecule collector. Whoever Rocque, Thelma, the murderer, and I were around on Sunday probably were in the sample in some small part. So I eliminated Rocque’s wife, Thelma’s poodle, and Khomeli. Then I opened my personal database, including samples from all my old lovers and all my aftershaves. It was amazing how a lover’s odor can cling to you. I’d seen egg technicians fooled into thinking a husband had been there, when in fact it was the wife. There was a sort of melding of odor between lovers. I probably still smelled a little like Adrian.
I eliminated all that and I was left with nothing. I had eliminated Rocque’s murderer. All that was left was inorganic or trace chemicals.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Maybe I did do it and I don’t remember.”
Then I realized that it had to have been Thelma. Khomeli had an alibi, I had an alibi, and Rocque’s wife probably had one or she’d have been arrested by now. “Thelma, you old dog. Twenty years of silence was too much for you, huh? Beware a lover scorned.”
To be certain, I took another group of samples and eliminated Thelma’s signature, then set about eliminating what was left completely. I got up to Rocque, his wife and me, then I was left with a couple trace odors, and one major one that my personal database had gotten rid of before. I figured the major one was Adrian — it had only been a week since we were living together — and the minor signatures were Khomeli and who knew who else.
To be certain, I queried my personal database, expecting Adrian’s cologne to appear. I was surprised to see it was Russell’s.
*
I let myself into Russell’s apartment when he didn’t answer my knock. All right, so I still had a key. I hated burning bridges. He was in the shower.
I rummaged around in the kitchen, then the living room. I had about given up when I noticed the line of seven eggs sitting on his mantel. Only Russel would store evidence of murder on his mantel.
Behind me, the shower turned off, and I heard Russell climb out of the shower. “Oh, hi, Aristotle. I was wondering if you were going to say good-bye before you left.” He didn’t bother to put on a towel before sitting across from me.
“Those eggs will put you away for a long time, Russell.”
“Oh, those old things. I doubt it. I even have the gun around here somewhere.” He looked under the magazines on the coffee table, then pulled out a small pistol. He put it squarely in my palm.
“You’ve just handed me your murder weapon. I could go to the police right now.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Do you think I won’t through some devotion to what we had? Do you think you still mean that much to me? Adrian doesn’t mean that much to me.”
“Oh, no, no. I have something stronger than Adrian does. You can’t go to the police because I know the thesis wasn’t signed.”
A rush of blood filled my cheeks.
Russell added, “We are bound by more than lust or love, Aristotle. I had hoped to simply frame you for the murder. But then I realized that taking away your freedom would be so much better. You’re not going anywhere, so you might as well have a seat.”
“Russell . . .”
He stood and I stood too. “We’re accomplices now. Maybe you should move in here with me. I know you really want to stay here with me.”
“What have you done, Russell?” My stomach was churning. My mind was spinning. Had I forced him to this? The gun in my hand was heavy as I brought it to point at his chest.
Russell made a motion with his hand. “Shoot me, Aristotle? That will only incriminate you more. Face it, you’re stuck here in this little piece of heaven. I’ve always thought you were a fool to want to leave.”
I looked at the row of eggs. Each one would show that Russell had entered the Rocque’s office, killed him, then left with the eggs. And when Russell was arrested, he would tell the police that the line for Rocque’s signature had been empty. He would tell. Unless he was dead.
The gun wavered in my hand. “I can’t let you do that,” I said. I’d forged a signature, built an alibi, and lied to the police. It was the slippery slope to murder, just one more felony to be rid of this place forever.
“I can’t let you do this,” I said, but now I was unsure what I meant.
I put the gun on the table. No more. He looked at me with unconcerned eyes.
I turned and left.
“I’ll tell them, Aristotle,” Russell yelled after me. “You’ll have wasted six years.”
What was six years in a lifetime? I thought as I pulled open the car door. Fishing in my pocket, I found Claudia’s card.
I looked at it for a few moments, then I started my car.
WALLS OF THE UNIVERSE
T
he screen door slammed behind John Rayburn, rattling in its frame. He and his dad had been meaning to fix the hinges and paint it before winter, but just then he wanted to rip it off and fling it into the fields.
“Johnny?” his mother called after him, but by then he was in the dark shadow of the barn. He slipped around the far end and any more of his mother’s calls were lost among the sliding of cricket legs. His breath blew from his mouth in clouds.
John came to the edge of the pumpkin patch, stood for a moment, then plunged into it. Through the pumpkin patch was east, toward Case Institute of Technology where he hoped to start as a freshman the next year. Not that it was likely. There was always the University of Toledo, his father had said. One or two years of work could pay for a year of tuition there.
He kicked a half-rotten pumpkin. Seeds and wispy strings of pumpkin guts spiraled through the air. The smell of dark earth and rotten pumpkin reminded him it was a week before Halloween and they hadn’t had time to harvest the pumpkins: a waste and a thousand dollars lost to earthworms. He ignored how many credits that money would have bought.
The pumpkin field ended at the tree line, the eastern edge of the farm. The trees — old maples and elms — abutted Townline Road, beyond which was the abandoned quarry. He stood in the trees, just breathing, letting the anger seep away.
It wasn’t his parents’ fault. If anyone was to blame, it was he. He hadn’t had to beat the crap out of Ted Carson. He hadn’t had to tell Ted Carson’s mom off. That had entirely been him. Though the look on Mrs. Carson’s face had almost been worth it when he told her her son was an asshole. What a mess.
He spun at the sound of a stick cracking.
For a moment he thought that Ted Carson had chased him out of the farmhouse, that he and his mother were there in the woods. But the figure who stood there was just a boy, holding a broken branch in his hand.
“Johnny?” the boy said. The branch flagged in his grip, touching the ground.
John peered into the dark. He wasn’t a boy; he was a teenager. John stepped closer. The teen was dressed in jeans and plaid shirt. Over the shirt he wore a sleeveless red coat that looked oddly out of date.
His eyes lingered on the stranger’s face. No, not a stranger. The teen had
his
face.
“Hey, Johnny. It’s me, Johnny.”
The figure in the woods was him.
*
John looked at this other John, this John Subprime, and decided he would be the one. He was clearly a Johnny Farmboy, not one of the Johnny Rebels, not one of the Broken Johns, so he would be wide-eyed and gullible. He’d believe John’s story, and then John could get on with his life.
“Who . . . who are you?” Johnny Farmboy asked. He was dressed in jeans and a shirt, no coat.
John forced his most honest smile. “I’m you, John.”
“What?”
Johnny Farmboy could be so dense.
“Who do I look like?”
“You look like . . .”
“I look just like you, John. Because I am you.” Johnny Farmboy took a step back, and John continued. “I know what you’re thinking. Some trick. Someone is playing a trick on the farmboy. No. Let’s get past that. Next you’re going to think that you were twins and one of them was put up for adoption. Nope. It’s much more interesting than that.”
Johnny Farmboy crossed his arms. “Explain it, then.”
“Listen, I’m really hungry; I could use some food and a place to sit down. I saw Dad go in the house. Maybe we can sit in the barn, and I can explain everything.”
John waited for the wheels to turn.
“I don’t think so,” Johnny Farmboy finally said.
“Fine. I’ll turn around and walk away. Then you’ll never get to hear the story.”
John watched the emotion play across Farmboy’s face. Nominally skeptical, he was debating how full of crap this wraith in the night was, while desperately wanting to the know the answer to the riddle. Farmboy loved puzzles.
Finally his face relaxed. “Let’s go to the barn,” he said.
*
The man walked at his side, and John eased away from him. As they walked through the pumpkin patch, John noted that their strides matched. John pulled open the back door of the barn, and the young man entered ahead of him, tapping the light switch by the door.
“A little warmer,” he said. He rubbed his hands together and turned to John.
The light hit his face squarely, and John was startled to see the uncanny match between them. The sandy hair was styled differently and was longer. The clothes were odd; John had never worn a coat like that. The young man was just a bit thinner as well. He wore a blue backpack, so fully stuffed that the zipper wouldn’t close all the way. There was a cut above his eye. A bit of brown blood was crusted over his left brow, clotted but recent.
He could have passed as John’s twin.
“So, who are you?”
“What about a bite of something to eat?”
John went to the horse stall and pulled an apple from a bag. He tossed it to the young man. He caught it and smiled at John.
“Tell the story, and I might get some dinner from the house.”
“Did Dad teach you to be so mean to strangers? I bet if he found me in the woods, he’d invite me in to dinner.”
“Tell,” John said.
“Fine.” The young man flung himself on a hay bale and munched the apple. “It’s simple, really. I’m you. Or rather I’m you genetically, but I grew up on this same farm in another universe. And now I’ve come to visit myself.”
“Bullshit. Who put you up to this?”
“Okay, okay. I didn’t believe me either.” A frown passed over his face. “But I can prove it. Hold on a second.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Here we go: That horse is named Stan or Dan. You bought him from the McGregor’s on Butte Road when you were ten. He’s stubborn and willful and he hates being saddled. But he’ll canter like a show horse if he knows you have an apple in your pocket.” He turned to the stalls on his left. “That pig is called Rosey. That cow is Wilma. The chickens are called Ladies A through F. How am I doing so far?” He smiled an arrogant smile.
“You stole some of your uncle’s cigarettes when you were twelve and smoked them all. You killed a big bullfrog with your bb gun when you were eight. You were so sickened by it you threw up and haven’t used a gun since. Your first kiss was with Amy Walder when you were fourteen. She wanted to show you her underwear too, but you ran home to Mommy. I don’t blame you. She’s got cooties everywhere I go.
“Everyone calls you Johnny, but you prefer John. You have a stash of
Playboys
in the barn loft. And you burned a hole in the rug in your room once. No one knows because you rearranged your room so that the night stand is on top of it.” He spread his arms like a gymnast who’d just stuck a landing.
“Well? How close did I come?” He smiled and tossed the apple core into Stan’s stall.
“I never kissed Amy Walder.” Amy had gotten pregnant when she was fifteen by Tyrone Biggens. She’d moved to Montana with her aunt and hadn’t come back. John didn’t mention that everything else he’d said was true.
“Well, was I right?”
John nodded. “Mostly.”
“Mostly? I nailed it on the head with a hammer, because it all happened to me. Only it happened in another universe.”
How did this guy know so much about him? Who had he talked to? His parents? “Okay. Answer this. What was my first cat’s name?”
“Snowball.”
“What is my favorite class?”
“Physics.”
“What schools did I apply to?”
The man paused, frowned. “I don’t know.”
“Why not? You know everything else.”
“I’ve been traveling, you know, for a while. I haven’t applied to college yet, so I don’t know. As soon as I used the device, I became someone different. Up till then, we were the same.” He looked tired. “Listen. I’m you, but if I can’t convince you, that’s fine. Let me sleep in the loft tonight and then I’ll leave.”
John watched him grab the ladder, and he felt a twinge of guilt at treating him so shabbily. “Yeah, you can sleep in the loft. Let me get you some dinner. Stay here. Don’t leave the barn, and hide if someone comes. You’d give my parents a heart attack.”
“Thanks, John.”
*
John watched Farmboy disappear through the door into the night, shuddering and then exhaling. He hadn’t even come to the hard part yet.
It would have been so easy to kill Farmboy, a blow to the back of the head, and it was his. But John wouldn’t do that. He hoped, not yet. He was desperate, but not willing to commit homicide. Or would it be suicide?
He chuckled grimly to himself. Dan the Man nickered in response.
John took an apple from the basket and reached out to the horse. Suddenly his eyes were filled with tears.
“Hold yourself together, man,” he whispered as he let Dan gingerly chomp the apple from his hand. His own horse was dead, at his own hand.
He’d taken Dan riding and had tried for the fence beyond the back field. They had flown. But Dan’s hind left hadn’t cleared it. The bone had broken, and John ran sobbing to his farm.
His father met him halfway, a rifle in his hand, his face grim. He’d seen the whole thing.
“Dan’s down!” John cried.
His father nodded and handed the rifle to him.
John took it blankly, then tried to hand it back to his father.
“No!”
“If the leg’s broken, you must.”
“Maybe . . .” But he stopped. Dan was whinnying shrilly; he could hear it from where they stood. The leg had been horribly twisted. There was no doubt.
“Couldn’t Dr. Kimble look at him?”
“How will you pay for that?”
“Will you?”
His father snorted and walked away.
John watched him trod back to the house until Dan’s cries became too much for him. He turned then, tears raining down his cheeks.
Dan’s eyes were wide. He shook his head heavily at John, then he settled when John placed the barrel against his skull. Perhaps he knew. John fished an apple from his pocket and slipped it between Dan’s teeth.
The horse held it there, not biting, waiting. He seemed to nod at John. Then John had pulled the trigger.
The horse had shuddered and fallen still. John sank to the ground and cried for Dan for an hour.
But here he was. Alive. He rubbed Dan’s muzzle.
“Hello, Dan. Back from the dead,” John said. “Just like me.”
*
His mother and father stopped talking when the door slammed, so he knew they’d been talking about him.
“I’m gonna eat in the barn,” he said. “I’m working on an electronics experiment.”
He took a plate from the cabinet and began to dish out the lasagna. He filled the plate with enough to feed two of him.
His father caught his eye, then said, “Son, this business with the Carson boy . . .”
John slipped a second fork into his pocket. “Yeah?”
“I’m sure you did the right thing and all.” John nodded at his father, saw his mother look away.
“He hates us because we’re farmers and we dig in the dirt,” John said. His mother lifted her apron strap over her neck, hung the apron on a chair, and slipped out of the kitchen.
“I know that, Johnny . . . John. But sometimes you gotta keep the peace.”
John nodded. “Sometimes I have to throw a punch, Dad.” He turned to go.
“John, you can eat in here with us.”
“Not tonight, Dad.”
Grabbing a quart of milk, he walked through the laundry room and left out the back door.
*
“Stan never lets anyone do that but me.”
John turned from rubbing Dan’s ears. “Just so,” he said. He took the proffered paper towel full of lasagna, dug into it with the extra fork Farmboy had fetched.
“I always loved this lasagna. Thanks.”
Farmboy frowned, and John recognized the stubbornness; he did the same thing when presented with the impossible. He decided to stay silent and stop goading him with the evidence. This John needed a softer touch.
John ate in silence while Farmboy watched, until finally he said, “Let’s assume for a moment that you are me from another universe. How can you do it? And why you?”
Through a mouth of pasta, he said, “With my device, and I don’t know.”
“Elaborate,” John said, angry.
“I was given a device that lets me pass from one universe to the next. It’s right here under my shirt. I don’t know why it was me. Or rather I don’t know why it was us.”
“Stop prancing around my questions!” Farmboy shouted. “Who gave you the device?”
“I did!” John grinned.
“One of us from another universe gave you the device.”
“Yeah. Another John. Nice looking fellow.” So far all he had said was the truth.
Farmboy was silent for a while, his lasagna half-eaten. Finally he said, “I need to feed the sheep.” He poured a bag of corn into the trough. John lifted the end of it with him. “Thanks.” They fed the cows and the horse afterwards, then finished their own dinner.
Farmboy said, “So if you are me, what do I call you?”
“Well, John won’t work, will it? Well, it will if there’s just the two of us, but as soon as you start adding the infinite number of Johns out there . . . How about John Prime?”
“Then who gave you the device?”
“John Superprime,” John Prime said with a smile. “So do you believe me yet?”
Farmboy was still dubious. “Maybe.”
“All right. Here’s the last piece of evidence. No use denying this.” He pulled up his pant leg to reveal a long white scar, devoid of hair. “Let’s see yours,” John said, pushing down his panic. The last time he’d tried this, it hadn’t been there.
Farmboy looked at the scar, and then pulled his jeans up to the knee. The cold air of the barn drew goose bumps on his calf everywhere except the puckered flesh of his own identical scar.
When John Prime had been twelve, he and Bobby Walder had climbed the barbed wire fence of Old Mrs. Jones to swim in her pond. Mrs. Jones had set the dogs on them, and they’d had to run naked across the field, diving over the barbed wire fence. John hadn’t quite cleared it.
Bobby had run off, and John had limped home. The cut on his leg had required three dozen stitches and a tetanus shot.