Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

McCarver tried to stare me down, but not this time. “Why don’t you take her and go someplace else?”

“I think we’ll stay here,” I said. “Maybe you should consider another line of work.”

Cathie was missing when I went back to mission control to say thanks. Again. I found her in the common room.

She didn’t smile. Didn’t shrug and say it was nothing. “You’re off the hook?” she asked.

“Looks like.”

“Good. I hope you were right.”

Our eyes met and I saw Trill.

“I am,” I said. Help is on the way.

Francis A. Gelper had been a biologist. He wasn’t especially well known outside Lockport. Won one or two minor awards, but nothing that raised any eyebrows. But everyone who knew him said he was brilliant. And they said it in a way that told me they meant it. They liked him, too. They all did. His colleagues shook their heads in disbelief that he was gone; several of his students openly cried when I tried to interview them. In his spare time, he was a Little League coach, and he even helped out down at the senior center. Wednesday evenings, he played competitive bridge.

He’d been on his way back to his apartment after a social gathering at the university—they’d been celebrating a prize given to one of the astrophysicists—when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel and drove his hybrid over an embankment. He was thirty-eight years old.

I’d never actually met him. I’d seen him from a distance on several occasions, and spotted him at the supermarket now and then. I’d always planned to do a feature story on him. Biologist With a Heart. Instead I got to do a postmortem appreciation.

He was from Twin Rivers, Alabama. At first I assumed the body would be shipped back for the funeral, but they conducted the service locally, at the McComber Funeral Home on Park Street. The place was packed with friends and students. The crowd spilled out into the street.

The service was one of those attempts to celebrate a life rather than recognize a death. They never work, if you ask me. But there were a lot of people who wanted to say something about him. And the speakers all had trouble with their voices.

When it was over, I stood outside with Harvey Pointer, the biology department chairman, watching the crowd dissipate. Harvey and I had gone to school together, been in Scouts together. He was a little guy with an outsize mustache and the same mischievous smile that always made him the prime suspect when something happened. “Did he have a girl friend?” I asked. “Any marital prospects?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think he was the marrying type.” His gaze clouded momentarily, then cleared, and he seemed to be waiting for me to show I understood.

I nodded.

“You know, Ron,” he said, “Frank got caught up in the genesis problem and he devoted his life to it. He could have gotten a grant in any one of several research areas, but he wanted to settle that one issue. It was the driving force in his career.”

It was one of those hard, cold, bright days when you have to stand facing away from the sun. “What’s the genesis problem?” I asked.

Harvey thought about it. “How life got started. Where the first cell came from.”

“I thought that got settled years ago,” I said. “In a laboratory somewhere. Didn’t they mix some chemicals and add heat and water? Or was it electricity?”

“No.” Harvey stopped to talk to a couple people from the department. Yeah, they were going to miss him. Damn shame. Then they were gone. “There’ve always been claims,” he said, continuing where he’d left off, “but nothing’s ever stood up.” He jammed his hands down into his topcoat pockets. “Pity. Solve that one and you get to take a Nobel home.”

He was working on genesis. It would make a nice bit to add to the story I’d already half-written.

As far as we could tell, none of Gelper’s family had shown up. His mother and father were still living, and he had a brother and sister. When I broached the subject to Harvey he said he didn’t know any details. Gelper hadn’t talked much about his family. “I don’t think he liked them much,” he added.

I’d seen odder things over the years, like Arnold Brown’s religious conversion at his mother’s funeral, and Morey Thomas’s insistence when they buried his father that it was no use because the old man wouldn’t stay dead. But usually death has a way of bringing families together. Especially when the loss is unexpected.

I wrote the story and went back to covering the routine social calendar for Lockport, doing weddings and visiting authors at the library and writing features on anybody who did anything out of the ordinary. If you discovered you could play a banjo standing on your head, you could make the front page of the Register .

So I’d forgotten about Gelper and his missing family when, about a month after the funeral, Harvey called me. “Got something you might be interested in,” he said.

“What is it, Harv?”

“Can you come over?”

You’d expect a department chairman to be set up in a reasonably elaborate office. In fact, he was worse off than I was. They had him jammed into a space the size of a large closet. He sat behind a desk piled high with folders, journals, disks, legal pads, you name it. Behind him, a bulletin board had all but disappeared behind a legion of post-its, schedules, and articles cut from magazines.

He got up when I appeared at the door, waved me in, shook my hand, and indicated a chair. “Good to see you, Ron,” he said, leaning back against his desk and folding his arms.

We did a couple minutes of small talk before he came to the point. “You remember I told you what Frank was working on when he died?”

“Sure,” I said. “How life got started.”

“You knew he left his papers to the university?”

“No, I didn’t. In fact, I hadn’t thought of it at all.”

“I’ve been looking through them.”

“And—?”

He walked around behind the desk, took his seat, pushed back and forth a few times, and put his hands together. Announcement coming. “I could have called CNN. And the A.P., Ron. Instead I called you .”

“I appreciate that, Harvey.”

He had sharp brown eyes that could look through you. At the moment they had become dull, as if he’d gone away somewhere. “Frank found the solution.”

“To what?”

“Genesis.” I stared at him. The eyes came back from wherever they’d been. “He worked out the process by which the first living cells appeared.”

The words just hung there. “Are you serious, Harvey?”

He nodded. “You think I’d make jokes about something like that? It’s true. At least, as far as we can tell. We haven’t run all the tests yet, but the numbers seem to be right.”

“Well, you’re an honest man, Harvey. You could have taken that for yourself. Claimed credit for a major discovery. Who would have known?”

“What makes you think I won’t?”

“How much cash is involved?”

He rubbed his index finger across his mustache. “Truth is, I thought about it, Ron. But I couldn’t have gotten away with it.”

“Why not?”

“I could never have done the equations. And everybody in the department knows it.” He chuckled. “No, this needed somebody brighter than I am.” He glanced out through the single window at Culbertson Hall, directly across from us. It was the home of the student center.

Bells went off in the building. I listened to doors opening, the sudden rush of voices in the corridors. “What a pity,” I said.