Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

The women broke ranks. Some ran in place during the break. Some chatted in groups. Ms. Dibbs was one of the runners. Lawrence, in subjective-camera, trudged out to the hallway again, there was a flash of reflection of him at the water fountain, sweatshirt now living up to its name, totally soaked through, face so dark that it looked like he was going to bust a blood vessel, and then the camera turned away from the drinking fountain and the exercise room, down the mirrored corridor, through a door marked MEN…

Syd started laughing.

“OK,” yelled Lawrence from the dining room. “You can turn it off, Trude. They get the idea.”

Trudy put it into fast-forward again. The camera seemed to rush at one of the urinals, looked down while gym shorts were tugged out of the way, then the view shifted to the tiles above the urinal, then down, then up again, then down, the final flips and tucking away, over to the sink, Lawrence’s reflection in the mirror, still wearing the Jack Nicholson shades, the time-readout still flicking away in ghostly digital numbers, then back to the exercise room for the last few minutes of exercise. He followed Ms. Dibbs out to the parking lot. The claimant seemed invigorated by the workout and almost skipped to her Honda. The camera seemed to be lurching dangerously, once pausing by a fencepost where Lawrence’s hand came into view, hanging on for support.

Syd was still laughing. “Nothing…nothing personal,” she managed to say, raising her voice so Lawrence could hear in the kitchen, where he had retreated beyond the dining room.

“You see the problem,” said Trudy.

Syd was rubbing her cheeks. “You can’t edit video shown in a courtroom,” she said, her voice shaking in its attempt to stay steady. “It’s all or nothing.”

“I goddamn forgot, ” yelled Lawrence from the kitchen.

“You can do it over,” said Dar.

“We think Ms. Dibbs has made Larry,” said Trudy.

“Lawrence,” came the voice from the kitchen. “And you can damn well do it over, Trudy.”

Trudy shook her head. “I was the one who took Ms. Dibbs’s statements. It looks like this is it.”

“Well…” began Syd.

“I’d use it,” said Dar. “Counting the van surveillance tape, it’s almost an hour before we get to the…X-rated part. I don’t think the jury or the claimant’s attorneys will let you show that much. They’ll want to shut it off as soon as possible.”

“Yeah,” agreed Syd. “Just put it in the record that there’s another forty minutes of tape or whatever. I think you’re safe.”

“Easy for you guys to say,” came Lawrence’s voice from the kitchen.

Syd caught Dar’s eye. “If we’re going to get all the way up to Julian and your cabin by nightfall, we should get going.”

Dar nodded. On his way out, passing through the kitchen, he patted Lawrence on the back. “Nothing to be ashamed of, amigo.”

“What do you mean?” growled the big man.

“You washed your hands after,” said Dar. “Just like our mommas taught us. The jury will be proud of you.”

Lawrence said nothing but was staring daggers at Trudy now.

Dar and Syd climbed into the Land Cruiser and headed for the hills.

Dar and Syd took Highway 78 from Escondido into the wooded mountains, stopping in the little town of Julian for dinner before going on to the cabin. Julian had once been a small mining town and now it was an even smaller tourist town, but the restaurant Dar chose served better than decent food in ample amounts for a decent price and had no large bar, so even on a Friday evening it was not filled with boisterous locals. The owner knew Dar and showed them to a table in a bay window of what had been the main parlor of an old Victorian home. The place served good wine. Syd knew the pros and cons of the vintages, she chose a bottle, and they shared an excellent merlot over conversation.

The conversation itself surprised Dar. Over the years he had become a master at subtly turning the focus on the other person; it was amazing, really, how easily people could be steered into talking about themselves for hours on end. But Chief Investigator Sydney Olson was different. She responded to his questions with a brief summary of her years with the FBI and an even briefer description of her failed marriage—“Kevin was also a special agent, but he hated fieldwork and that was all I wanted to do.” Then she hit the ball back in his court.

“Why did the NASA review board fire you when you told them that some of the Challenger astronauts had survived the initial explosion?” she asked, holding her wineglass in both hands. Her nails, Dar noticed, were short and unpolished.

He gave her what Trudy had once called his “Clint Eastwood smile.” “They didn’t fire me,” he said. “They just replaced me quickly before I could put anything in writing. At any rate, I was just a junior member of the support staff for the real review board.”

“All right, then,” said Syd, “tell me how you knew that some of them had survived the explosion only to die after the fall.”

Dar sighed. He saw no way out of some exposition. “Are you sure you want to talk about this over dinner?”

“Well,” said Syd, “I suppose we could discuss poor Mr. Phong getting rebarred right out of the cab of his Isuzu van, but I’d rather hear about the Challenger investigation.”

Dar did not comment on her use of “rebar” as a verb. He explained briefly about his doctoral work in physics.

“Shaped plasma events?” said Syd. “As in explosions?”

“Precisely as in explosions,” agreed Dar. “They didn’t really understand much about the dynamics of plasma wave fronts in those days because the analytical use of chaos mathematics—what they call ‘complexity theory’ today—was in its infancy.”

“So you became an expert on chaos at the wave end of explosions?” said Syd.

“And other extremely high temperature events, yes,” said Dar.

“Is there much demand for that sort of expertise in the job market?”

Dar sighed and set his wineglass down. “More than you can imagine. Shaped charges was the ‘in’ thing in armaments at the time. Ask the Iraqis in their Russian tanks after the American sabot round penetrated eight inches of armor and detonated in a shaped explosion.”

“I don’t suppose they’re around to ask,” said Syd.

“No.”

“So you joined the National Transportation Safety Board,” she said. “With your Ph.D. it sounds like you were overqualified.”

“Unfortunately,” said Dar, “there are more plasma events in commercial aviation than we like to think about. And it takes some training to work backward in deductive steps because the dynamics of the explosion itself have to be completely understood.”

“Lockerbie,” said Syd. “Or TWA Flight 800.”

“Exactly,” said Dar.

The waiter came by and cleared their plates. When their cups of coffee arrived, Syd said, “So that got you to the higher echelons of the NTSB and that put you on the staff of the Challenger Commission. So how did you know that they survived the explosion?”

“I didn’t know, ” said Dar. “At first. It’s just that I was more aware of how resilient the human body is in explosions. Most explosions are like leaps from tall buildings—it’s not the fall that kills you…”

“It’s the sudden stop at the end,” supplied Syd.

Dar nodded. “The actual blast is not necessarily damaging to a human body that is restrained as tightly as the astronauts were in their couches. They’re strapped in tighter than a NASCAR driver, and you see the horrific wrecks those guys walk away from.”