Night Train полностью

Then you park the car and walk toward a low array of wood-clad buildings, expecting to be met by a forest ranger or a Boy Scout or a chipmunk. Here comes Chip. Here comes Dale. Here comes Woody Woodpecker, wearing a reversed baseball cap. The Department of Terrestrial Magnetism has the follow­ing words scrolled into the wall of its entrance corri­dor: ET GRITIS SICVT DEI SCIENTES BONVM ET MALVM. I got a translation from a kid who was passing: And you will be like gods, knowing good and evil. That’s Genesis, isn’t it? And isn’t it what the Serpent says? Whenever I’ve been out to CSU—for a criminology lecture, an o.d., a student suicide around exam time—I’ve always had the same feeling. I think: It’s a drag, not being young, but at least I don’t have to take a test tomorrow morn­ing. Another thing I notice, at the Institute of Physical Problems, is that someone has changed all the rules of attraction. Sexual allure is a physical problem that the students are no longer addressing. In my day, at the Academy, the women were all tits and ass and the men were all dick and bicep. Now the student body has no body. Now it’s strictly sloppy-joe.

I am identified and greeted in the corridor by Jen­nifer’s department head. His name is Bax Denziger and he’s big in his discipline. He’s big all right: Not a joint-splitter like my Tobe, but your regular bearish, bearded, flame-eyed, slobber-mouthed type with (you can bet) an inch-thick pelt all over his back. Yeah, one of those guys who’s basically all bush. The little gap around the nose is the only clearing in the rain forest. He takes me into his office, where I feel I am sur­rounded by enormous quantities of information, all of it available, summonable, fingertip. He gives me cof­fee. I imagine asking permission to smoke, and imag­ine the way he’d say no: Totally relaxed about it. I repeat that I’m conducting an informal inquiry into Jennifer’s death, prompted by Colonel and Mrs. Rock­well. Off the record—but is it okay if I use a tape recorder? Yes. He waves a hand in the air.

Bax Denziger, incidentally, is famous: TV-famous. I know stuff about him. He has a twin-prop airplane and a second home in Aspen. He is a skier and a mountaineer. He used to lift weights for the state. And I don’t mean in prison. Three or four years ago he fronted a series on Channel 13 called “The Evolution of the Uni­verse.” And they have him on the news-magazine shows whenever something gives in his field. Bax here is a skilled “communicator” who talks in paragraphs as if to camera. And that’s pretty much how I’m going to present it. The technical language should be right because I had Tobe run it by his computer.

I kicked off by asking him what Jennifer did all day. Would he please describe her work?

Certainly. In a department like ours you have three kinds of people. People in white coats who man the labs and the computers. People like Jennifer—postdocs, maybe assis­tant professors—who order the people in white coats around. And then people like yours truly. I order everyone around. Each day we have a ton of data coming in which has to be checked and processed. Which has to be reduced. That was Jennifer’s job. She was also working on some leads herself. As of last fall she was working on the Milky Way’s Virgo-infall velocity.

I asked him: Could you be more specific?

I am being specific. Perhaps I should be more general. Like everyone else here she was working on questions having to do with the age of the universe. A highly controversial and competitive field. A cutthroat field. We’re looking at the rate of expansion of the universe, the rate of the deceleration of that expansion, and the total mass-density para­meter. Respectively, in shorthand: Hubbies constant, q-nought, and dark matter. We’re asking if the universe is open or closed... I look at you, Detective, and I see a resident of the naked-eye universe. I’m sure you don’t bother too much with this stuff.

I said, well, no, I seem to make do okay without it. But please.

What we see out there, the stars, the galaxies, the galaxy clusters and superclus-ters, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. That’s just the snowcap on the mountain. At least 90 percent of the universe consists of dark matter, and we don’t know what that dark matter is. Nor what it adds up to. If the total mass density is below a certain critical point, the universe will expand forever. The heavens will just go on getting emptier. If the total mass density is above a certain critical point, then gravity will eventually overcome expansion, and the universe will start to con­tract. From big bang to big crunch. Then— who knows?—big bang. And so on. What has been called the eighty-billion-year heartbeat.

I’m trying to give you an idea of the kinds of things Jennifer thought about.

I asked him if Jennifer actually went up in the telescope much. He smiled indulgently.