Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“How was NASA taking extra risks?”

Dar shrugged. “The Commission documented it pretty well. They knew about the O-ring problem—even the Crit-One severity of it—but didn’t fix it. They knew that cold weather made the O-ring problem much worse, but launched anyway. They violated at least twenty of their own no-go guidelines because that teacher was on board, and they were feeling political pressure to get her launched into orbit so President Reagan could mention it in his State of the Union Address that evening. The odds caught up to them.”

“You believe in odds, then?” said Syd. “Do you believe in anything else?”

Dar looked at her quizzically. “Are you asking me a philosophical question, Chief Investigator?”

“I’m just curious,” said Syd, swallowing the last of her whiskey. “You see so many accidents, so much carnage. I wonder what philosophical framework you apply to it.”

Dar thought a moment. “The Stoics, I guess,” he said.

“Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius and his ilk.” He chuckled. “The one time I ever felt political enough to drive to Washington and throw a brick at the White House was when Bill Clinton was asked what the most important book was that he’d read recently—and he said Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations .” He chuckled again. “That love-handled mass of appetites…quoting Marcus Aurelius.”

“But what do you believe?” pressed Syd. “Other than a Stoic point of view.” She paused a moment and recited quietly, “‘To the rational creature, only the irrational is unbearable; the rational he can always bear. Blows are not by nature intolerable.’”

Dar stared at her. “You can quote Epictetus.”

“So would you say that’s your philosophy?” repeated Syd.

Dar set his empty glass down and steepled his fingers, tapping his lower lip. The dying fire crumbled again and the embers glowed in their final brightness. “Larry’s older brother, a writer who lived in Montana until his marriage broke up, came to visit several years ago; I got to know him a bit. Later I saw him interviewed on TV and he was asked about his philosophy; his novel was about the Catholic Church, and the interviewer kept pressing him on his own beliefs.”

Syd waited.

“Larry’s brother—Dale’s his name—was going through a rough patch then. In response to the question, he quoted John Updike. The quote went something like—‘I am neither musical nor religious; each time I set my fingers down it is without confidence of hearing a chord.’”

“That’s sad,” said Syd at last.

Dar smiled. “It was Larry’s brother quoting another writer—I didn’t say it’s what I believe. I subscribe to Occam’s Razor.”

“William of Occam,” said Syd. “What…fifteenth century?”

“Fourteenth,” said Dar.

“Maxim,” continued Syd. “The assumptions introduced to explain a thing must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

“Or,” said Dar, “all other things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the right one.”

“Rules out alien abduction,” laughed Syd.

“Area Fifty-one, kaput,” said Dar.

“Kennedy conspiracy shit…adios,” said Syd, her smile very wide.

“Oliver Stone, bye-bye,” agreed Dar.

Syd paused. “Did you know you’re famous for Darwin’s Blade?”

“For what?” said Dar, blinking in surprise.

“Some statement you made a few years ago—I think it was at the meeting of the National Association of Insurance Investigators.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Dar, putting his hand over his eyes.

“You had a corollary to Occam’s Razor,” persisted Syd. “I think it went—‘All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity.’”

“Which is stupidly obvious,” muttered Dar.

Syd nodded slowly. “No, I know what you were saying. It’s like those guys in the pickup trying to crash that rock concert…”

Dar suddenly looked over at the box of files and stacks of Zip drives and floppy disks that still awaited them. “Maybe we’ve been looking for the wrong thing in our files,” he said.

Syd cocked her head.

“Maybe it’s not my investigation of stupid accidents—even fatal ones—that drew someone’s attention to me,” he said. “Maybe it’s murder.”

“Have you solved a murder recently?” said Syd. “Other than the Phong swoop-and-squat, I mean.”

Dar nodded.

“And are you going to share it?” said Syd.

Dar glanced at his watch. “Yeah. Tomorrow.”

“You bastard,” said Chief Investigator Olson, but she said it with a smile. “Thanks for the Scotch.”

Dar walked her to the door.

Syd paused. Dar had the sudden, wild thought that she was going to kiss him.

“Sleeping up in my wonderful sheep wagon,” she said, “how will I know if the bad guys have come and you’re in deep shit?”

Dar reached under a heavy coat on a wall hook and pulled down a bright orange whistle on a string. “It’s for hiking, in case you get lost in the woods. You can hear this damned whistle two miles away.”

“Like a rape whistle,” said Syd.

“Yeah.”

“Well, if the murderers show up tonight, just whistle.” She paused and Dar could see a glint of mischief in her blue eyes. “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?”

Dar grinned. The nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall had said the line to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not . He loved that movie.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just put my lips together and blow.”

Syd nodded and went up the path with her flashlight, blowing out each lantern as she passed.

Dar watched until she was out of sight.

Syd came knocking early on Saturday morning, but Dar was already up, showered, shaved, and with coffee and breakfast ready. Syd ate bacon and eggs happily and refilled her coffee cup twice.

Before starting work, Dar took her on a long walking tour of the property: the ravine to the east with its abandoned gold mine, the stream that fed into the canyon, the small waterfall up the hill bridged by a fallen tree that looked too slick and mossy to cross, the rock slabs and boulders along the high ridge to the north, the stands of birch trees and acres of thick pine on the hillside just above the cabin, and the endless fields of grass in the valley below. All during the walk, Dar felt the same pleasure that had shocked him so much the night before—the strange awareness of Syd’s physical self, the warmth of her smile, the glow that her tone of voice and laughter gave him.

Cut it out, Darwin, he warned himself.

“I know this is a forbidden question between men and women anymore,” said Syd, stopping and looking straight at him, “but what are you thinking about, Dar? I can hear the gears meshing from two feet away.”

She was only two feet away. When Dar stopped, he almost surrendered to the urge to put his arms around her, draw her closer, set his face against the curve of her neck just beneath her ear, just where her hair curled onto her neck, just to breathe in her fragrance.

“Billy Jim Langley,” he said at last, taking half a step back.

Syd cocked her head.

Dar pointed to the south. “An accident I worked a year or so ago way back in the national forest there. Want to hear it? Want to solve it?”

“Sure.”

Dar cleared his throat. “OK—I was called out to the scene of a suspected homicide about five miles back in the woods there—”

“This isn’t the murder you promised me last night, is it?”

Dar shook his head. “Anyway, a Mr. Billy James Langley, one of Larry and Trudy’s CalState insureds, was reported missing a day after he should have returned from a fishing trip. The sheriff drove back toward Billy Jim’s favorite fishing hole and found his pickup—a seventy-eight Ford 250—upside down in a creek. Billy Jim was inside. Drowned. It looked as if he had run off a little bridge in the darkness the night before and not been able to get out of the cab of the pickup in time. The coroner confirmed the time.”