The Project by Brian Falkner

pushed his glasses back into place and started to walk on.
    “You’re an Aussie!” Luke said, recognizing the accent.
    He stopped again and looked at Luke sideways. “Kiwi?”
    “G’day, I’m Luke,” Luke said. “My dad works over in the agricultural college.”
    “I’m Heath, g’day,” the man said with a quick grin. “I don’t hear that around here very much. Who were you looking for?”
    Luke explained about the diagram, without telling him where he had seen it.
    “So do you have a copy?” Heath asked.
    Luke tapped his head. “In here.”
    “You memorized the entire diagram?”
    Luke just nodded.
    Heath shrugged. “I’ll find you some paper. Draw it for me and I’ll show it to a few of the profs. See if anyone recognizes it. Come with me.”
    He led the way into his office, which was a tiny room tucked at the end of a long corridor, beside the men’s bathroom. He unlocked the door with a swipe card and indicated that Luke should sit.
    Heath’s desk was covered with notes, thick sheaves of paper, and three-dimensional models of strange things with boxes and balls all interconnecting by small tubes. A sign identified him as HEATH THOMPSON, LABORATORY TECHNICIAN .
    Heath fished a few sheets of paper out of a box marked RECYCLING and made enough space on the desk for Luke to draw.
    Luke sketched the first page of Mueller’s diagram as quickly as he could, the numbers and the long German words flowing easily from the cavernous storeroom of his memory. He put that page down and started on the second, while Heath rustled around in a filing cabinet, then made a phone call, his feet up on his desk.
    Luke was just starting on the third page when Heath finished the call and idly picked up the first page of thedrawings. His feet slid off the desk with a crash, knocking over a wastepaper basket, which spilled paper and lunch wrappings across the floor. He didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed at the second sheet and studied it.
    “Is this a joke?” he demanded, looking around the room as if searching for hidden cameras.
    “No, sir,” Luke said in a voice that was not as steady as before.
    “Who put you up to this?” Heath asked, snatching away the third page.
    “Nobody, sir,” Luke mumbled, wondering what the hell was going on. “You said you might show this to—”
    “Where did you get this diagram? Where did you see it?”
    Luke thought about that for a second or two. He couldn’t exactly tell him that he had broken into a hotel room and opened a locked briefcase. He sat back upright in his chair, looking Heath directly in the eye. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, “because it would get a friend of mine in trouble.”
    “Your friend is already in much bigger trouble than he wants to be in,” Heath said a little more calmly. “I’m going to have to report this.”
    “That’s fine,” Luke said, unsure who he was going to report it to. “What is the diagram of?”
    “You know perfectly well,” Heath said. “Don’t you?”
    It seemed he still half suspected that Luke was setting him up for some kind of elaborate practical joke.
    “No, sir, I don’t,” Luke said. “What is it?”
    Heath looked at Luke keenly, his eyes magnified so large behind his Coke-bottle glasses that his pupils looked likemarbles. “These are the plans for a rudimentary fission device.”
    Luke shook his head. “Sorry, sir. A rudimentary
what
device?” Luke’s memory was freakish but fickle. Some things he could remember easily; some things he couldn’t remember at all. But what Heath said next he would remember—in full color, in minute detail—for the rest of his life.
    Luke rang Tommy as soon as he got clear of the building, which was only after Heath took his name, address, and phone number and rang Luke’s father over at the agricultural college to verify who he was.
    Tommy answered immediately. “Dude!” he said. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you. You’re never going to believe what