The Fourth Bear полностью

“You removed evidence from the evidence store? How the hell did you manage that?”

“I have a good friend who steals things for me. This is what we’ll do: Mary, you’ll be with me and we’ll take this broken cookie to Parks. Ashley, I want you to go into the office and pretend everything is as normal. If Briggs or anyone else asks what’s going on, you’re to tell them that Mary is looking into a minor domestic bear incident down at the Bob Southey.”

“You mean lie to a ranking officer?”

“Yes,” said Jack, “and do it well. But remember: no elephants, no pirates.”

Ashley was halfway out the door before Jack called him back.

“What?”

“You’d better get dressed if you’re going to work.”

“Of course,” said Ashley, and he dashed off into the hull of the flying boat.

It was midmorning when they found Dr. Parks at Reading University’s Charles Fort Center for Cosmic Weirdness. He was giving a lively lecture to a packed auditorium. Pseudoscience had become a popular degree subject in recent years, and Reading University, always eager to provide popular coursework and with its finger pressed hard on the pulse of the zeitgeist, had added the three-year master’s to their roster of unconventional B.A.’s, along with cryptozoology, crop circles and the study of extraterrestial life, which went down quite well with Rambosians, who knew most of the answers anyway—except what all those previous UFO things were, as it certainly hadn’t been them, nor anyone they knew.

Jack and Mary stood near the door and let the talk go over their heads. It was mostly about the feasibility of using the solar wind as a power source for telekinetics, the theoretic possibilities of the existence of a chronosynclastic infundibulum and the likelihood of capturing ball lightning in large glass jars to use as an indefinite light source. Jack and Mary applauded with the others when the talk ended, and they approached Parks as the students filed out.

“Inspector!” said Parks with a friendly smile. “I was meaning to call you.” He shook them both by the hand and started to pack up his notes and the carousel of slides that had accompanied his talk.

“You were?”

“Yes, I found some information about the blast on the Nullarbor Plain. In October 1992 a seismic survey on a routine oil exploration reported an explosion of some sort to the National Parks Authorities. They sent out a survey team, expecting to find a meteorite strike. Instead they found glass.”

“Glass?”

“Glass. Fused sand, to be precise. Circular in shape, about the size of a soccer field; the glass was four inches thick in the center and thinned out toward the edge. A few hundred thousand degrees for a very short time.”

“What do you think it was?”

Parks took the small piece of fired earth from the padded envelope. “I think it was the same type of blast we saw at Obscurity. Intense heat, very little radiation. Some form of advanced thermal weapon, tested clandestinely in the Nullarbor. If you wanted to sterilize an area of land quickly and easily, a heat bomb of the description I’ve given you would be just the way to do it. And if you didn’t want your competitors to figure out what was going on, you’d make damn sure you removed the evidence.”

“QuangTech,” murmured Jack. “Perhaps they didn’t disband their Advanced Weapons Division after all.”

“That would be good news for the conspiracy industry if true,” said Parks excitedly, adding after a moment’s thought, “or even if not true. Did you want to see me about something?”

“Yes,” replied Jack. “Do you have a scanning electron microscope?”

“Not officially, but the SEM operator here is heavily into the whole yeti/bigfoot/sasquatch noncontroversy and so could probably be swung.”

Jack showed him the gingerbread thumb, still in the evidence bag.