John Sandford: Saturn Run

That was the plan, anyway.

He was running late.

Severely late, though he didn’t much care. The warm, soupy aroma of marijuana hung about his shoulder-length blond Jesus hair. The van found an approved space, parked itself, and he climbed out, grabbed his pack, threw it over one shoulder, and ambled toward Astro, taking his time.

He was a large young man, barefoot, wearing damp burnt-orange board shorts and an olive drab T-shirt. When he came out of the ramp, he flinched: movement on the roof of a building down and to his right. A microsecond after the flinch, he recognized it as a Pasadena parrot, rather than a sniper. That was good. He moved on, detouring around the traditional Caltech drying-lumps-of-dogshit in the middle of the sidewalk outside Astro, sighed, and went through the door.

He no longer had implants and so wore a wrist-wrap, which cleared him through Astro’s security gate. Inside the lobby, he took the fire stairs instead of the elevator.

At the fifth floor, he peeked through the window on the fire door, to make sure that Fletcher wasn’t standing in the hallway. He’d been through a lot of trauma in his short life, and trauma, he thought, he could handle. And he’d thought he could handle Fletcher’s pomposity, but he was no longer sure of that. Sometimes, he thought, bullshit was worse than bullets.

Fletcher was not in sight, and he went on through the door and trotted down the hall toward his cubbyhole at the far end of the building, also known as the ass end, where the lowest-status people worked.

The main thing that everybody knew about Sanders Heacock Darlington—besides the fact that he had three last names, no first names, and showed remarkably little ambition—was that in two years, when he turned thirty, he would inherit money. Lots of money. More money than anyone in the Caltech Astrophysics Working Group had any chance of making in a lifetime.

And he was hot. His eyes were the same deep blue as the Hope Diamond, he had big white teeth, and a dimple in his chin, all original. He had that Jesus hair, a terrific surfer’s physique, and an easy way with women.

In the Astro context, that made him extraordinarily annoying.

But he had, said the women who got to know him—there were a steadily increasing number of them in Astro—an absolutely black side that never showed at work.

Where that came from, they didn’t know. Drugs, they said, may have been involved. There were hints of violence, that whole untoward incident at the Santa Monica Pier, and some odd scars on his otherwise flawless chest, back, and buttocks. When they probed, they were politely put down. But there was something dark and werewolf-ish behind those perfect teeth….

Best not to pry, they agreed.

As he turned the last corner, he nearly ran over Sarah McGill.

Sandy hadn’t tried to hustle McGill, though she’d been more pleasant than most of the people in the working group. She wasn’t a beauty—he tended to favor beauties—but she was prodigiously smart, and she didn’t treat him entirely like dog excrement. He’d lately noticed a certain languor about her, and the languor was sending signals to his hormones.

McGill dodged him, said, with a thin rime of sarcasm, “Right on time,” and was about to continue on her way, and he called, “Hey, you got a minute?”

“About ten seconds, Sandy,” she said. She had a full set of implants and he saw her eyes narrow as she checked the time. “Group meeting in nineteen.” She had a turned-up nose with freckles, and kinky dishwater-blond hair, cut short. She’d bagged Samsung as a sponsor and had a dime-sized Samsung logo on her collarbone, along with smaller and slightly less prestigious tags from ATL and Google, as fractional sponsors.

Sandy nodded. “I was wondering… you wanna get a steak and salad some night? Catch a show?”

“Stop there.”

“Hey, I’m just being human,” he said.

“Right. Thanks, Sandy, but I’ve got—”

“Listen, you’ve been nicer than most of these assholes. I kinda owe you. I’ve got tickets to Kid Little at the Beckman.”

Kid Little. She was tempted, he could see it in her eyes.

“Sandy…”

“I just want to go out and shake it a little,” he lied.

“Let me think about it,” she said. “I gotta go.”

“Yeah, the group meeting. Say hello for me.”

She twiddled her fingers at him and disappeared down the hall. Sandy was satisfied. One small step, he thought, as he continued on to his cubbyhole.

A janitor was coming down the hall with a push broom and they slapped hands as they passed, and the janitor said, “Tomorrow at dawn.”

“If I can,” Sandy said.

The janitor was a semipro surfer. Semipro surfing paid mostly in free burgers and beer.

Sandy was popular enough with janitors and maintenance men. His problem was with the academics. His status hadn’t been helped by the fact that his father had purchased the job for him. The senior Darlington had hinted to Caltech’s president that he would be extremely grateful if one of the working group professors would take his son under his wing. His son, he said delicately, was troubled: but not in some fractious, embarrassing way. He simply… didn’t do much.

Dr. Edward Fletcher, respected and thoroughly tenured astrophysicist, had been happy to fall on that sword. Darlington Senior had already given Caltech not one, but two research buildings, and was a major financial backer of Chuck, the congressman who got the money for Chuck’s Eye.

Fletcher could use a new building. Hungered for one. Preferably one called Fletcher Hall.

And it wasn’t as though Sandy was an idiot. He had a perfectly good degree, his father pointed out. In American Arts, from Harvard. He’d even taken the non-required science elective, called Calculus and Physics for Poets, by those who took it, and had gotten a B. That didn’t score any points among the astrophysicists.

“American Arts” was also known informally as the “College of Dilettantery,” and those who left with degrees could reliably identify both a Masaccio and a Picasso, manually expose a photograph, make a short film, discuss both Italian and Scandinavian furniture, dance, make him/herself understood in French, Italian, and Spanish, and play the guitar and piano. Orbital calculations, not so much.

As one of the Real Scientists put it, “He couldn’t change a fuckin’ tire,” which, in Caltech terms, didn’t literally mean he couldn’t change a tire, it simply meant he couldn’t reliably explain the difference between a Schwarzschild radius and Schrödinger’s cat.

There had been a stir of interest when the Astro group realized how much money was about to arrive in the shape of an intern, but a few minutes of research on the Internet revealed that Sandy had been through a number of career changes since leaving Harvard, and none of the jobs would have interested anyone in Astro.

He’d worked for Federal Mail for a while, but had apparently been unable to deliver, and had been fired. He’d been a vid-reporter with a marginally respectable independent news-and-porn blog, but that had ended badly, when Sandy threw an unclothed producer off the Santa Monica Pier, at low tide.

Lately, he’d been a surf bum and rhythm guitarist with a mostly girl-group called the LA Dicks. When asked by a leading Young Astro Star what he was going to do when he grew up, Sandy told him after he got Grandpa’s money, he planned to become a philanthropist, or a philatelist, or a philanderer, or perhaps a flautist?

“It’s one of those things,” he said, with a toothy grin. “I’ve never been, you know, a big vocabulary head.” The Young Star left with the feeling that Sandy had been pulling his weenie, which wasn’t supposed to happen to Stars; he’d had to look up “philatelist.”