Текст книги "The Cure"

Автор книги: Douglas E. Richards

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

17

ERIN GLANCED AROUND furtively, focusing especially on fit men who were older than the typical student. Fuller would have someone surveilling them, keeping track of them in the sprawling food court, following them when they left and making sure to alert others outside to their position when they did.

“I’m not sure I understand,” said Hansen. “Are you saying they waited to strike at Drake because they hoped you’d keep this meeting?”

“Exactly. So they could, um … reacquire me. They expected Drake to be meeting with me, so they could take us both out at the same time. Without any warnings being exchanged between us. When they discovered you had made the trip to Tucson instead of him, they must have decided to do this in stages.”

Erin realized as she said this that they had probably recovered her phone from the pickup truck into which she had launched it. In this case, Fuller would have known that Kyle Hansen was coming to meet her rather than Drake. But this wouldn’t have mattered. They just had to delay their strike on Drake until she and Hansen were in sight. If their attack was 100 percent effective, Drake wouldn’t be able to alert Hansen that anything was amiss. The two of them would be blissfully ignorant and easy pickings. But even if Drake did inform Hansen of the attack in Yuma, which he had, they would either fail to ferret out that the danger extended to their own location, or be unable to extricate themselves, even if they realized they were surrounded.

Hansen didn’t look entirely convinced. “Why would they ever believe you’d still keep this meeting after what happened? Or have the balls … courage,” he amended, “to try to get past them to keep your appointment? Even if you wanted to? Wouldn’t they think you were still hiding out in LA? Laying low?”

“From my conversation with Drake, they probably realized how important this meeting was to me. I might be wrong, but we have to assume I’m not. We have to assume they’re here. Right now. I can’t imagine they’ll make a move as long as we’re in this crowd. And they can afford to be patient.”

Hansen gazed at her with open admiration. She sensed that he was attracted to her, but not in the usual way. She was used to men falling for her physically. But he had never once given her the sense this was about physical attraction, even when he had complimented her looks.

“Drake told me that you were very impressive,” said Hansen. “For a human,” he added wryly. “But I think he undersold you. What you did to get to LA and then Tucson was remarkable. And you think like a master detective, or a master spy. Like you’ve been engaged in cloak-and-dagger your entire life. I’ve seen your background. I know you have some pretty impressive fighting skills, but nothing suggests you’ve had any kind of actual experience with this sort of thing.”

Erin frowned. “Yeah, well, don’t congratulate me just yet. I’ve just identified the woods. I haven’t come close to getting us out of them. My secret weapon is that I read a lot of thrillers. I know this sounds crazy, but I really think it’s helped.”

Erin knew her appearance was deceiving, so maybe his was as well. He was cute, but in a down-to-earth, friendly, not particularly hardened or athletic-looking sort of way, and she had the distinct impression he was not the hired muscle. He was too smart, and seemed too thoughtful—not that physical and intellectual skills were mutually incompatible.

“What about you?” she said. “Are you a bodyguard in Drake’s organization?”

Hansen looked amused at the thought. “No. I’m afraid not.”

“Any experience with these types of situations at all? Any fighting skills? I don’t suppose you’re ex–Special Forces?”

Hansen laughed. “No. But I’ll take that as a huge compliment. I’m afraid I wasn’t even a Boy Scout. Worse, I read nothing but science fiction, so you’re ahead of me there too. I don’t know how to operate a gun, don’t know how to use a knife, and I’m pretty sure a ninety-year-old woman in a wheelchair could take me in hand-to-hand combat.”

“Okay,” said Erin with a twinkle in her eye. “I admire your … pathetic … honesty.”

“So any ideas about what we do now?” asked Hansen.

Erin turned her head away from him, wanting to pause any conversation so she could have some quality time for thought. She reexamined her logic to this point, and still found it sound. Except for one point. Would they really go to all this trouble: attack Drake, send a team to surveil them here, and everything else, just because of a few words spoken over a phone? Maybe she was letting her imagination run away with her. Fuller wouldn’t commit these kinds of resources, and take this kind of risk—openly attacking a compound in Yuma, committing a military assault on U.S. soil—unless he was certain she hadn’t just hallucinated the cure.

If her assumptions and logic were correct, they drove straight to a prediction. One that would be simple enough to test. And if it panned out, she could be nearly certain the attack on Drake wasn’t a hoax, there really were men watching them, and she wasn’t getting herself and Hansen worked up over bogeymen that didn’t actually exist.

Erin decided to continue to operate under the assumption that they did exist while she checked out her hypothesis.

She turned back to Kyle Hansen, who continued to gaze at her with a steady confidence, sure after her daring escape from San Diego she would find some way to pull a rabbit out of the hat. She found herself not wanting to disappoint him, and for reasons beyond just their personal safety.

“I need to make a phone call,” she said. “While I do, I need you to walk back to the bookstore. But take a circuitous route. Like you’re trying to decide if you should get something else to eat first. Try to spot whoever is watching us in here. My guess is he’ll be fit, won’t be a student, and will look totally occupied. As though he couldn’t possibly be watching us. Act natural and don’t be obvious.”

Hansen nodded. “I’ll try,” he said.

“My guess is that the watcher in here will alert the team outside when you leave, and they’ll be watching the entrance to the bookstore. So when you do cross between here and there, make sure you’re with a crowd so they don’t decide to try anything. When you’re inside the store get a U of A duffel bag and fill it with two large Wildcat T-shirts and two hats.”

The large shirts could be easily slipped over their current ones while adding bulk to both of them, enhancing the disguise.

“We want to be chameleons,” continued Erin. “Blend in with the students. Try not to let anyone see what you’re doing—especially not that you’re acquiring clothing.”

Hansen listened in rapt attention.

Erin paused to gather her thoughts. “The checkout is near the exit,” she continued, “so don’t check out. The watchers will see the items you’re getting if you do. Just shoplift the whole duffel and get back here as fast as you can.”

Hansen blew out a breath. “You know you’re not cut out to be Jason Bourne when the thought of shoplifting fifty dollars’ worth of clothing makes you want to vomit.”

Erin couldn’t help but smile, but she quickly became serious once again. “You know what?” she said. “Maybe don’t do the duffel bag thing. It would be too obvious a shoplift. Get a standard backpack and remove all the tags. Put the shirts and hats in there. Half the bookstore’s customers wear backpacks on a perpetual basis. And be sure to get the cheapest clothing you can find, so they don’t bother imbedding any of those shoplifting deterrent devices. You know, the super-clearance stuff they half hope someone will shoplift just so they can be rid of it. Try to wrinkle it up a bit too.”

“Are you sure you’ve never done this before?”

“Not even a candy bar. But don’t worry, Kyle. If we get out of this we can reimburse the poor university.”

Kyle Hansen pulled out his chair and rose. “If we get out of this,” he said, “I’ll throw the university a party.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll be back in five or ten minutes.”

As he was walking away, under his breath, he couldn’t help but add, “I hope.”

18

THE MOMENT HANSEN left, Erin dialed Alejandro’s personal cell phone number at the prison, using her prepaid phone. She was more relieved than she had expected to be when he answered.

“Alejandro,” she said excitedly. “It’s Erin Palmer. I’m so glad I caught you. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure. Glad I answered. For some reason my phone didn’t recognize you. How’s the vacation going? Having fun?”

Erin almost laughed out loud. Yeah, I’m having the time of my life, she thought sarcastically.

“I’m having a great time,” she said, trying to sound as sincere as possible. “I’m glad you convinced me to do this. Except I dropped my phone in a pool,” she added. “Not too smart. Anyway, I’ll tell you all about it later. I don’t have a lot of time right now. So here’s the reason for my call: were there any unusual visitors to the prison in the past few days?”

“If you mean the FBI, then I already know about it. You don’t have to fish around.”

The FBI? If her reasoning had been correct, she expected Fuller to have sent someone to visit the prison. But she wouldn’t have guessed this person would be able to impersonate the FBI.

“Great,” said Erin. “So, ah … what, exactly, do you know?” she said.

“The warden told me. The FBI is training someone to do what you do. So just to be sure he’s ready, they wanted him to conduct MRIs on the last five prisoners you saw the day you left. I brought them to him myself. Just this morning. He left about four hours ago.”

“Oh … good,” stammered Erin. “And did he have any problem doing the MRIs?”

“Not that I know of. I guess he’ll compare them with your results to make sure he’s doing it right, huh?”

“Exactly,” said Erin.

“You should feel proud, being the gold standard and all.”

“I do, thanks. I just wasn’t sure the FBI was going to tell you why they were there. I didn’t want you to think they were checking up on me.”

Alejandro laughed. “On you? I’d never think that.”

His absolute confidence in her integrity made Erin feel even more guilty about what she had done.

“Did you get a look at this guy’s credentials?” she asked. “I mean, was he really with the FBI? Or was he more of a consultant?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t show me any credentials. But he must have satisfied the warden. He was scheduled on very short notice.”

“Okay then. Well, thanks a lot, Alejandro. You have a great week.”

She returned the phone to her pocket and a sick feeling penetrated the deepest recesses of her gut. This call had really brought it home. Before, trying to elude shadowy, hypothesized surveillance seemed like nothing more than a challenging intellectual exercise. But it had suddenly become very real. Now the likelihood of the attack on Drake being a hoax was vanishingly small. Her logic had been correct. Fuller hadn’t made his final move until he had confirmed that the cure was real, that she wasn’t delusional. Whoever he had pressed into service as an FBI imposter knew his way around an MRI scanner enough to verify that the brains of the last few inmates she had seen suddenly read normal.

Kyle Hansen returned less than a minute later carrying a black canvas backpack, with a blue-and-red A stenciled on it proudly, his face flush from adrenaline. He took the chair he had occupied before and faced Erin. “Mission accomplished,” he said happily.

She congratulated him and then quickly filled him in on her conversation with the prison guard.

“Brilliant deducing,” he said. “This really cements it. You’ve connected the last dot from this Steve Fuller to us.” He paused. “And I think I found the guy watching us on this level.”

“How sure are you?”

“Not positive, but as confident as I can be. He’s one of the few people here who aren’t nineteen or fat old professors. Imagine a Navy SEAL trying hard not to look like a Navy SEAL.”

Erin paused in thought. “Did you drive here from Yuma?” she asked.

“No. I took a puddle jumper and then cabbed it from Tucson International.”

Erin thought about this. It didn’t matter, she realized, because even if he had driven, they would be watching his car.

“How much cash do you have?” she asked.

It took Hansen a second to adjust to this change of subject. “A few hundred, I think.”

“Well, sure,” she said playfully. “With all the shoplifting you do it’s no wonder you’re loaded.”

Hansen laughed.

“Two hundred is good,” she continued. “That’s plenty for cab fare. Or to bribe a student to become a cabbie for you.”

She quickly told him her plan. He tried to hide his anxiety, but he couldn’t quite do it.

“You sure you’re okay with this?” she asked.

Hansen nodded. “Look, Erin, too much is at stake for me not to be. I won’t let us down.”

Erin waited ten minutes until the precise time the classes currently in session around campus had ended and the students were released back into the wild. The next round of classes would begin soon. For a square mile around them, undergraduates, graduates, and faculty poured from buildings—as though these buildings were anthills kicked by a giant—and began swarming in every direction. Like a change of shift at a crowded factory, in just a few minutes throngs of young men and young women would be flooding in and out of the student union and the food court area.

Erin forced herself to wait three minutes and then said, “Let’s go.”

Without another word they rapidly approached the man Hansen had identified as the professional watching them. He had his nose in a textbook and barely gave them a glance as they approached, but Erin was confident Hansen had been right: this guy belonged in this particular food court about as much as a grade-schooler belonged rappelling down from a military helicopter. The man continued to ignore them until they both pulled up a chair on either side of him.

“We’re willing to come with you,” said Erin without preamble. “But I want your word that if we cooperate, we won’t be hurt.”

“I’m sorry, Miss, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’re really going to let this chance go by, just to avoid breaking cover?” said Erin disdainfully. “Really?”

The man stared intently at Erin for several seconds. “Okay,” he said. “It’s a deal. No one will touch you.”

With the last word of this confirmation that he was, indeed, the man they were seeking, Hansen pressed the Taser he had concealed in his hand—the one Erin had slipped to him before they had crossed the food court—against the man’s leg, and held it there until the man slid off the chair to the smooth floor, convulsing. Erin knew her martial arts reputation would have preceded her and that she’d be the focus of attention, so Hansen would have to wield the Taser.

She followed the man rapidly to the floor, hastily locating and removing his wallet and weapon, an H&K .45, and slipped them both into an open pocket in the black canvas backpack, just seconds after he completed his fall.

“Someone help!” shouted Erin, now playing the concerned citizen.

Dozens of pairs of eyes turned to witness her and Hansen kneeling by a muscular man lying on the floor. Hansen hit him with another long dose of electricity, using the backpack to shield the activity from onlookers, and the man convulsed yet again.

Dozens of onlookers gravitated toward the scene in a rough circle, like fish swimming to spilled food. “He’s having epileptic seizures!” shouted Erin. “Someone call nine-one-one.”

As phones began dialing, Kyle Hansen hit the man on the floor with several more jolts, once again under cover of the canvas pack.

“I’m gonna find a doctor,” announced Erin, lifting the backpack and quietly slipping away from the paralyzed man and into the crowd, with Hansen close behind. The second they were through the first wall of spectators, Erin handed Hansen a stolen shirt and hat from the backpack and they broke in opposite directions, slipping the shirts over their own clothing as they walked.

Erin slid her arms through the straps of the backpack, took a random exit far from where they had entered, and glommed onto a group of four girls who all sported backpacks of their own. She melted into the group as though she’d been part of it for years. “Do any of you know that guy in there?” she asked so they would continue walking and not question her presence in their midst.

“What guy?” said the girl closest to her.

“The guy having the seizures. Poor guy. None of you saw that?”

“No, we were just cutting through on the way to the dorm.”

Erin heard a faint siren off in the distance. “That must be the ambulance now,” she said for the benefit of her new walking companions.

Erin continued moving with the group and chatting about anything she could come up with, not once glancing around to see if she was being followed.

Ten minutes later she arrived at Apache, one of several nearby dorms, with the group of four freshmen. And none to soon. She suspected they had been very close to ignoring their manners and asking her to leave them alone.

As soon as they were through the doors she approached a different group of students at the far end of the lobby, telling them that she was late for an important meeting, and that if any of them had ready access to a car, she’d be willing to pay fifty bucks to anyone willing to drive her six miles—so she wouldn’t have to wait for a cab.

Within five minutes she was in the passenger seat of a car, on her way back to the Saguaro Inn. She checked the mirrors the entire drive but saw no sign of followers.

About halfway to the motel, she realized she was still carrying the dime-sized GPS tracking device she had planned to plant on Drake in her pocket. She shook her head, realizing that this plan had been made obsolete three realities ago, and tossed the tiny device out of the window.

As they pulled into the motel, Erin closed her eyes for just a few seconds, letting relief wash over her for the first time, and prayed that Kyle Hansen would have similar success and would be joining her shortly.

19

ERIN PALMER SAT cross-legged on the bed, on top of a faded yellow-and-orange floral bedspread, while Kyle Hansen was parked on a small wooden chair that was in front of a cheap, laminated, particle-board desk.

“Well, no risk of anyone thinking of looking for us here,” said Hansen, making a show of looking around the room in mock horror. A slow smile came over his face. “Big risk of the entire motel being condemned or falling down around us.”

Erin couldn’t help but return his warm smile. He seemed more genuine than most people she had met, and charming in an unpolished way. Which was a good thing. After years of working with psychopaths, too much polish hit her the wrong way.

As she gazed into his eyes, a momentary image came into her mind of a naked Kyle Hansen holding her equally naked body in his arms and kissing her passionately, and she could almost feel the smoothness of his body against hers.

Where did that come from? she thought.

Lisa Renner had been so right. Two years without sex—with little human contact of any kind—started to wear on the psyche. Which is why she had been intent on seducing her collaborator, Hugh Raborn, who turned out—maybe—to be an alien named Drake. It was a good thing she hadn’t met with him in San Diego, she decided, because even though she didn’t think of herself as overly choosy, she still insisted that the body parts of her sexual partners be 100 percent human. You just didn’t compromise on certain things.

Was she really so desperate, though, that she could switch gears from Drake to Kyle Hansen so quickly? In her heart, she knew the answer to this wasn’t desperation. In only a few hours she already found Kyle to be more appealing than any man she’d met in the past two or three years, including Drake. And working together to escape a dragnet and holing up together in a motel seemed to accelerate the bonding process, as did sharing any number of world-shattering, mind-blowing secrets.

Hansen had managed a clean escape from the student union in a similar fashion to her own, but his arrival at the motel had been thirty minutes behind hers. It was one of the longest thirty minutes of her life, and the suffocating, mind-numbing fear she had felt during this entire period was not due to what his capture or death would mean for her own prospects of survival, or any lofty cause, but was felt for him alone. This wait had exposed her emerging feelings more surely than a rational self-examination of her emotions ever would, as much as she refused to fully acknowledge it.

She wondered what he was thinking. Was he picturing her naked as well? She suspected that wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, even among men who didn’t know her. Only when she used makeup and disguise to purposely make herself look unappealing was she free from the male libido. Had she been more of a free spirit, had a psychopath never ripped her life away from the path it was on, she wondered what her life might be like. She wondered if she would enjoy the interest from men instead of wishing it would go away. She certainly wouldn’t be in the field she was in, doing the work she was doing. A veterinarian perhaps, working with the animals she loved rather than with human monsters she loathed. And she certainly wouldn’t be collaborating unlawfully with someone of uncertain … species.

“Any more messages from Drake?” she asked.

Hansen shook his head. “I ditched my phone. It was the one thing you forgot to tell me to do.”

“Oh. Right. Good thinking.” Erin raised her eyebrows. “Maybe you’ve read some thrillers, after all.”

“I’m not that lame,” protested Hansen. “Doesn’t everyone know that cell phones can be used to track people nowadays?”

“I guess so.”

“And Drake ditched his as well. And so did you. So it was an obvious thing to do.”

“So how are we going to connect with Drake?”

“We go to the designated location and he’ll contact us.”

Erin reflected on Drake’s text message. “So SF wasn’t San Francisco. But CO did mean Colorado, right?”

“Right. We need to get there. But let me explain more about that part of the message later. Right now, I’d love to finish our conversation.”

“Me too,” said Erin.

Hansen left the chair and slid down onto the worn beige carpet, sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall, facing Erin on the bed five feet away.

Erin decided the chair he had abandoned did look uncomfortable, although she was still sure the ones in Dean Borland’s office were more so, despite their far more welcoming appearance. The two of them both sitting cross-legged in a bedroom reminded her of slumber parties she had had as a little girl, only she doubted the air would soon be filled with delighted giggling, nor that the conversation would turn to who was the cutest boy in class.

“Where were we?” said Hansen, breaking Erin from her reverie.

“I believe we left off when I was saying that Drake had miscalculated. That his cure wasn’t the panacea he thought it would be.” Erin shook her head, almost imperceptibly. Had she really just used the word panacea? Maybe she had been in academia too long. “And you told me I didn’t have the full picture,” she continued. “Yet again.”

A thoughtful look came over Hansen’s face as he considered the best way to move the conversation forward from this point. “Everything you said before we were interrupted is absolutely true,” he began. “As far as it goes. Just having a cure isn’t enough. And approval could take a decade, even if a corporate sponsor stepped up right away based on an anonymous tip, and the FDA allowed it to happen. This is time we, as a species, probably don’t have. And you’re also right that the very people we need to cure are the ones who would refuse to take it.”

Hansen paused for several long seconds, as though not eager to continue.

“So tell me where I’ve gone wrong,” prompted Erin. “Come on, Kyle, don’t keep me in suspense.”

Hansen sighed. “Drake wasn’t planning to give them a choice.”

Erin rolled her eyes. “Okay, shoving it down the throats of millions of psychopaths won’t work either. Not that they’d identify themselves. And even if they did, and you could force them in some other way, it’s ridiculous. Unless you really do believe that Santa can visit every kid on earth in a single night.”

“There is a way,” Hansen assured her. “One whose delivery doesn’t involve chimneys. Drake has engineered a cold virus to carry the cure. A hypercontagious cold virus. Within a year, probably less, it will infect every man, woman, and child on earth. It’s designed to be very mild, so ninety-nine percent of the population will get nothing more from it than a runny nose and maybe sneeze for a few days. One percent of the population, however, a few weeks after being infected, will no longer be psychopathic.”

The enormity of this vision was mind-numbing. Erin’s mouth fell open and stayed there for an extended period as she wrestled with the sheer audacity and scope of the concept. “You can’t do that,” she whispered.

“Maybe we can’t,” he acknowledged. “But Drake and his computer, after coming up to speed on our genetic code, can. The Wraps have developed genetic engineering to a level we can’t yet begin to approach.”

Erin shook her head. “I don’t mean you can’t do that because of the technology hurdle. I mean even if you could do that—you can’t do that. My actions have breached ethics, I know that. But this would be a breach of ethics on one of the grandest scales in history.”

Hansen nodded. “Which is why Drake didn’t tell you about it. He knew you’d feel this way. Which is surprising given what you’ve been through at the hands of one of these monsters.”

Erin’s eyes widened and she visibly shrank back on the bed. The expression on Hansen’s face made it clear he regretted saying these words the instant they had come out of his mouth.

“What do you know about that?” she demanded. “Those records are sealed.”

Hansen lowered his eyes. “Nothing is sealed when it comes to Drake and his advanced computer,” he said softly. “And I am truly sorry. I’m sorry that we abused your privacy in this way. And I’m sorry that this happened to you. I can’t even imagine. But the way you picked yourself up and recovered from this is unbelievable. Inspiring. How you could trust anyone ever again, especially a man, I’ll never know. I couldn’t in your shoes.”

Erin wasn’t sure she could in her shoes either, which probably explained her lack of any kind of meaningful, long-term relationship. She blamed it on her dedication to her work, and that was part of it—but there was far more to it than that …

She looked away. She felt more violated than she had in years—possibly since the incident had occurred. But she needed to shake it off. It wasn’t Kyle’s fault for reading a profile that Drake had thrust in front of him.

Or was she already going out of her way to find reasons to forgive Kyle Hansen? To minimize his part in this? Was that why Drake had sent him? Did he and his computer predict she would be attracted to Kyle’s warmth and obvious sincerity? Was Drake even more adept at manipulation than a human?

“Is that why Drake chose me to be his partner in crime?” said Erin. “Because he figured I’d have a grudge to bear? That I’d be easier to convince to ditch my principles for a cure?”

Hansen opened his mouth to answer and then closed it again. A few seconds later he said, “That’s something you’ll have to ask him. I wasn’t involved in this decision. Drake likes to keep things compartmentalized, and until recently, I had no need to know just who it was that was testing psychopaths.”

In a rush Erin realized that while it seemed in some ways that she had known Kyle Hansen forever—her libido certainly thought so—she had just met him. She had gained a strong sense of his personality, his sense of humor, and his intelligence, but she knew absolutely nothing more about him. There was so much going on she hadn’t bothered to ask him a single question about himself.

“Time out,” she said. “Before we go any further, let’s do something I should have done a while ago. You know everything about me. But who are you? And how did you get involved in this?”

Hansen smiled. “You know, it never occurred to me I hadn’t told you already. Sorry. Let me give you the short version. I’m a physicist. Thirty years old. Single. Currently unattached,” he added, and as soon as he did a look of disbelief came over his face. “I’m not sure how my relationship status made it into a CliffsNotes summary of my entire life,” he said in embarrassment. “Must just be a Facebook-generation thing.”

Erin’s heart had picked up speed at this indication of interest on his part, so unsubtle even he was surprised it had come out of his mouth. “Right,” she said with an amused twinkle in her eye.

“I grew up in the Midwest. Indianapolis, Indiana, to be exact. My father was a mathematician and my mother a nurse, and I have two older brothers. Grew up loving science and science fiction. Completed my undergraduate at Purdue, and then went on to do graduate work in computer science and physics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Working on making advances in quantum computing.”

“That’s an interesting coincidence given what you’ve told me about Drake’s magic computer.”

“Not a coincidence. That’s how I found him. I had a theory about how to isolate quantum events. If I was right, my theory predicted a certain type of quantum pattern when I searched a particular…” He stopped himself in midsentence. “Unless you’ve spent years studying physics this isn’t going to mean much to you. So let’s just use the word spectrum for simplicity’s sake, even though this isn’t technically correct. I had a theory for how to identify certain quantum spectra and what this might mean. My thesis advisor, who was British, thought my ideas were rubbish.”

“They have such a beautiful way with words over there, don’t they?”

Hansen laughed. “He had some other choice words as well—this was just the nicest. Anyway, I went on to find what my theory predicted I would find—but more organized, and while still at vanishingly small levels, a far clearer signal than I had expected. When I plugged these results into my theory, it suggested a quantum computer was operating. Not the fledgling attempts we were currently making, but a far more sophisticated version.”