roofed catwalk forty yards long. Inside a fortified archway at the far end, they confronted a narrow passage guarded by a security officer and lined with sensitive metal detectors, electronic bomb-sniffers, and fluoroscope machines. Authorized entry required photo ID, a fingerprint scan, and a mandatory search of all bags.
A sentry buzzed open the archway door, and I walked up to the security desk, my face revealing none of the anxiety I felt.
"Morning, Doc," said a middle-aged guard named Henry.
I sometimes thought Henry had been hired through central casting. The other security personnel were all in their late twenties, lean young men and women with smooth faces, avian eyes, and zero body fat. Only Henry, the gate man, ever said a word of greeting.
"Good morning, Henry," I said.
"There's a meeting in the conference room at nine."
"Thanks."
"You got four minutes."
I looked at my watch and nodded.
"Still can't get over Professor Fielding," Henry said. "They say he was dead before the ambulance got here."
I took a careful breath. This exchange was being recorded by hidden cameras. "That's the way it goes sometimes with strokes."
"Not a bad way to go out. Quick, I mean."
I forced a smile, then laid the pad of my right forefinger on a small scanner. After the unit beeped for a match, I passed through the gauntlet of threat-detection equipment and took the stairs to the fifth floor, which housed the administrative offices and conference room.
Yellow police tape stretched across the closed door to Fielding's office. Who had put it there? Surely the NSA hadn't allowed local or state police to enter this facility. Glancing up and down the empty corridor, I quickly tried the knob. Locked. And not with some lightweight mechanism from a hardware store. If Fielding's pocket watch was inside his office, I couldn't get it.
I walked a few doors down to my own office, closed the door, and sat down at my primary computer. Part of a closed network that served only the Trinity scientists, it had no connection to the outside world. To access the Internet, I had to use a second computer that had no ports or drives through which files could be exported from the building.
My primary screen showed one interoffice e-mail: a reminder of the meeting scheduled to begin in the conference room in two minutes. With a macabre chill I realized that I'd half-expected a humorous e-mail from Fielding. He often sent me little jokes or ironic quotes from dead scientists or philosophers: Scientists over 60 do more harm than good! — T. H. Huxley —like that. But today there was no message. And there would never be another. I looked blankly around my office. Fielding was gone, and I was profoundly disoriented. Together, we had stopped Project Trinity for six tense weeks, angering our colleagues while we tried in vain to discover the cause of the MRI side effects experienced by the six Trinity principals. Today that issue remained unresolved.
I hadn't volunteered to be scanned by the Super-MRI unit out of stupidity. The theory was simple: since Homo sapiens had evolved in the earth's magnetic field, an MRI's magnetic energy did not pose a health risk. This had been proved countless times by conventional MRI machines, which generated fields thirty thousand times more powerful than that of the earth. But the Super-MRI developed at Trinity—using superconductivity and colossal magnets—generated fields up to eight hundred thousand times greater than that of the earth. Gross side effects such as tissue-heating had been solved in animal tests, but within days after undergoing our "super-scans," all of us had begun experiencing disturbing neurological symptoms.
Jutta Klein, the designer of the Super-MRI, suffered short-term memory loss. Ravi Nara endured extreme sexual compulsions (he had several times been caught masturbating in his office and in the rest room). John Skow developed hand tremors, and Godin himself had suffered epileptic seizures.
A sentry buzzed open the archway door, and I walked up to the security desk, my face revealing none of the anxiety I felt.
"Morning, Doc," said a middle-aged guard named Henry.
I sometimes thought Henry had been hired through central casting. The other security personnel were all in their late twenties, lean young men and women with smooth faces, avian eyes, and zero body fat. Only Henry, the gate man, ever said a word of greeting.
"Good morning, Henry," I said.
"There's a meeting in the conference room at nine."
"Thanks."
"You got four minutes."
I looked at my watch and nodded.
"Still can't get over Professor Fielding," Henry said. "They say he was dead before the ambulance got here."
I took a careful breath. This exchange was being recorded by hidden cameras. "That's the way it goes sometimes with strokes."
"Not a bad way to go out. Quick, I mean."
I forced a smile, then laid the pad of my right forefinger on a small scanner. After the unit beeped for a match, I passed through the gauntlet of threat-detection equipment and took the stairs to the fifth floor, which housed the administrative offices and conference room.
Yellow police tape stretched across the closed door to Fielding's office. Who had put it there? Surely the NSA hadn't allowed local or state police to enter this facility. Glancing up and down the empty corridor, I quickly tried the knob. Locked. And not with some lightweight mechanism from a hardware store. If Fielding's pocket watch was inside his office, I couldn't get it.
I walked a few doors down to my own office, closed the door, and sat down at my primary computer. Part of a closed network that served only the Trinity scientists, it had no connection to the outside world. To access the Internet, I had to use a second computer that had no ports or drives through which files could be exported from the building.
My primary screen showed one interoffice e-mail: a reminder of the meeting scheduled to begin in the conference room in two minutes. With a macabre chill I realized that I'd half-expected a humorous e-mail from Fielding. He often sent me little jokes or ironic quotes from dead scientists or philosophers: Scientists over 60 do more harm than good! — T. H. Huxley —like that. But today there was no message. And there would never be another. I looked blankly around my office. Fielding was gone, and I was profoundly disoriented. Together, we had stopped Project Trinity for six tense weeks, angering our colleagues while we tried in vain to discover the cause of the MRI side effects experienced by the six Trinity principals. Today that issue remained unresolved.
I hadn't volunteered to be scanned by the Super-MRI unit out of stupidity. The theory was simple: since Homo sapiens had evolved in the earth's magnetic field, an MRI's magnetic energy did not pose a health risk. This had been proved countless times by conventional MRI machines, which generated fields thirty thousand times more powerful than that of the earth. But the Super-MRI developed at Trinity—using superconductivity and colossal magnets—generated fields up to eight hundred thousand times greater than that of the earth. Gross side effects such as tissue-heating had been solved in animal tests, but within days after undergoing our "super-scans," all of us had begun experiencing disturbing neurological symptoms.
Jutta Klein, the designer of the Super-MRI, suffered short-term memory loss. Ravi Nara endured extreme sexual compulsions (he had several times been caught masturbating in his office and in the rest room). John Skow developed hand tremors, and Godin himself had suffered epileptic seizures.
Similar Books
