Bloodless

50

Coldmoon awoke from a nightmare involving large trees, toboggans, and lumberjacks in plaid work shirts chasing him with axes. A hand was gently shaking his shoulder. He came partially awake — Christ, he was tired — but was pleased to find it had been only a dream. The figure silhouetted in golden light, gently prodding him with soft fingers, was extremely attractive. Perhaps he could dive from one kind of dream into a very different one.

But the silhouette wouldn’t let him alone, and with a groan and a mumbled curse, Coldmoon became fully conscious. In the gloom, he could see that the sylphlike figure waking him was Constance Greene.

“Yes?” he croaked.

“Pendergast needs you,” came the contralto voice. “Both of us.”

Coldmoon checked his watch. “Now? I just finished two cross-country flights for the guy.”

“Get dressed, please, and come down to the hotel’s library.”

Coldmoon sat up, then flopped back down again with another groan.

“If you’re there in five minutes,” Constance said, “and sufficiently presentable, I’ll get you some pejúta sápa.”

“The way I like it prepared?”

“For God’s sake, no.” She turned with a rustle of expensive silk and left his room.

It was ten minutes later that Coldmoon — now dressed and fully awake — stepped into the library of the Chandler House: a narrow room overlooking Taylor Street. The room held wall-to-wall bookcases, with a few tables and several comfortable reading chairs. In one corner sat Pendergast and Constance. They had pulled a sofa and two armchairs away from the other furniture in a kind of defensive posture. Coldmoon walked over and sat down. As promised, there was a large pitcher of coffee and some cups with saucers. Without speaking, Coldmoon poured himself a cup and sipped suspiciously. He put the cup down on the table between them and sat back.

Pendergast, so drawn and pale he might have been a candidate for Moller’s monster-diagnosing equipment, sat across from him. “I’m going to tell you both a story,” he said.

“Oh, goody,” Coldmoon replied sarcastically. He had looked up D. B. Cooper on Wikipedia and been as entertained as Pendergast promised, yet he’d been unable to figure out how that celebrated cold case could be linked to the current killings — although he could see a number of possible links to their trip west.

“Both of you know different pieces of the story,” Pendergast went on. “Neither of you knows it all. Our trip west answered half of it. The other half belongs to Constance. I tasked her with a most difficult undertaking... and she has followed through.”

“What was that?” Coldmoon asked.

“Asking the proprietress of the Chandler House four questions.”

Four questions? Coldmoon glanced at Constance. She was sitting on the sofa between Pendergast and Coldmoon, utterly still and — apparently — emotionless. Coldmoon knew from personal experience this might be a bad sign, and he discreetly edged his chair away from the couch.

“I’ll tell the story, as reconstructed with the help of Constance, as efficiently as possible. Time is of the essence.” Pendergast drew in a breath. “A little over fifty years ago, a young woman named Alicia Rime was employed as an airframe designer at the Boeing aerospace complex in Portland, Oregon. She was a brilliant young engineer, and she had been moved from the company’s headquarters in Chicago to the advanced operations facility. This was a secret location, not unlike Lockheed’s ‘Skunk Works,’ where employees worked to develop new technologies. Beginning in 1970, important steps were being taken toward fly-by-wire systems, as well as novel approaches for improving safety. At that time, Rime was the only female engineer at Boeing.

“Soon, Rime began to learn that the more senior engineers in her department were poaching her work and taking credit for it themselves. Given her lack of seniority, and — alas — the fact that she was a woman, management circled the wagons and turned a blind eye to what was happening. And it wasn’t long before Rime’s excitement turned to disenchantment, then bitterness.

“At this point, she gravitated toward an older engineer working in advanced operations. He had been a rising star in earlier years, but — as his ideas became perceived as more and more impracticable, even bizarre — his work was disparaged or, worse, dismissed. By the time Rime met him, such treatment had driven him to work alone, not sharing with the others. He was a widower, with no family to speak of. He’d been laughed at one too many times, and now he kept his projects secret, locked in a safe when he went home for the night.

“Not surprisingly, the old man and Alicia Rime, the two outcasts of the department, forged a friendship. Eventually the older man began to share the secret of his work with her.

“His idea had been to develop hardware and software that could model human behavior. He took a dazzlingly unconventional approach, using a computer language of his own invention, far more advanced than LISP. His goal was to predict pilot behavior using AI. If a computer could predict, even a minute in advance, what a pilot might do given a set of circumstances, it would be an extremely powerful tool in avoiding pilot error.

“Alas, his efforts to create predictive AI ended in failure. The world is ruled by chaos, and human behavior is too complex.”

Pendergast allowed this observation to settle over the small group before he continued.

“But this scientist was a true genius, and he was not yet ready to admit defeat. After abandoning AI as a tool, he hit upon another idea — an insight based on the Schrödinger’s cat effect and the many-worlds theory of the physicist Hugh Everett, proposed in 1957.”

“What the hell does a cat have to do with anything?” Coldmoon interrupted.

“Never mind the cat. The many-worlds theory is a phenomenon of quantum mechanics, which says that all possible worlds are physically realized in countless universes parallel to our own.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’m not surprised. The important thing is that our elderly engineer succeeded in building a device that employed quantum effects to predict the future.”

Coldmoon shook his head. “I’m going back to bed,” he announced.

“Don’t be so hasty; I think you’ll find the rest of the story worth your time. That engineer’s machine used quantum mechanics in a very original, very practical way. Most physicists spend their time speculating and theorizing; he actually built something.”

“That can see into the future,” Coldmoon said. “Of course he did.”

“Modicae fidei!” Constance said, annoyed. “Be quiet, and maybe you’ll learn something.”

A short, awkward silence ensued. Chastened, Coldmoon poured himself another cup of coffee and, as requested, kept his thoughts to himself.

Pendergast tented his fingers. “The many-worlds interpretation states that we live within a multiverse: a place in which all possible outcomes of any action are occurring simultaneously. Schrödinger’s cat is alive in one world and dead in another.”

“There’s that cat again,” said Coldmoon.

“Or to be more prosaic: In our own universe, we are here speaking calmly among ourselves. In a different but parallel universe, you got up and did indeed go back to bed. In yet another, the ceiling is rotten and has just fallen down on our heads. And so on, ad infinitum.”

He stopped, as if expecting another protest from Coldmoon. When none came, he glanced at Constance. Then he continued.

“Events in universes parallel to ours don’t always change that dramatically. Physicists believe the universes most like ours are those which run closest to us in the quantum stream of time. According to brane theory, these universes are layered next to each other, like membranes, in higher dimensional space. So close that they sometimes touch, and thus open a window or portal between the two.

“Our elderly engineer managed, using the principles I’ve just described, to create a machine that could open that window and peer through it into another universe, very close to ours, except running at a slightly different timeline. The machine doesn’t see into our future. It’s looking into a universe almost identical to ours, one minute ahead.”

“This is crazy,” said Coldmoon.

“I assure you this is well-established physics that many, if not most, physicists believe in.”

“So what good is it to look one minute in the future?” Coldmoon asked.

“It makes all the difference, as you shall see.”

Coldmoon fell silent, and Pendergast went on. “So: Our elderly scientist built a prototype machine. That extra minute of predictive time would be enough to warn a pilot of catastrophic events. Lightning, extreme turbulence, engine failure. However, the engineer was tired of being laughed at by his colleagues. He needed to make a dramatic demonstration of its power, one that anyone could appreciate. That would be stock trading on Wall Street. It would display where a stock price would be, one minute ahead. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the value of such a device.

“The old man confided in Alicia Rime. He told her he was going to bring his device — which was small enough to fit into a briefcase — to the Seattle headquarters, where he could demonstrate it to the CEO and board of Boeing at a retreat the weekend after Thanksgiving.

“Rime thought it was a crime for Boeing to get a device like that, especially after the way she, and the engineer, had been treated by them. She tried to convince the engineer to keep the machine for himself and not give it to Boeing. She suggested the two of them could quit their jobs and use the machine to make money. But he was adamant: it belonged to Boeing, he had developed it on their time, and so forth. They had a bitter falling-out. She’d come to hate Boeing and — though she had no rights to it — saw the machine as her ticket out. But her elderly acquaintance never gave her the opportunity to examine the device or even get a look at the plans, and by now they were estranged. And he kept the device, and plans, in his safe at all times, or on his person.

“She knew he was planning to take a flight from Portland to Seattle: Northwest Orient 305, carrying the briefcase with the device. She also knew the type of jet that flew that route was a Boeing 727–100. This is a critical pivot in our story, because she had an intimate knowledge of that aircraft as well. For example, its three engines were mounted unusually high on the rear fuselage. It was able to fly at a lower altitude and lower speed without stalling than any other commercial jet. But particularly important, and virtually unique to the 727–100, was the airplane’s aft airstair, and the ability of this stair to be lowered during flight — from a control in the rear that nobody in the cockpit could override. This ability was so secret that it was even kept from many of the crews that flew commercial flights. However, it was not a secret to the engineers at Boeing.

“The board retreat in Seattle was scheduled for November twenty-seventh, 1971—the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The previous Tuesday, Rime contrived to have an altercation with her manager over credit he’d taken for some of her blueprints. As a result, she was told to clear out her desk by the end of the day, which she did, and left. Nobody ever saw her again as Alicia Rime... except the farmer-cum-doctor we met in the backwoods of Washington.”

“How in the world have you figured all this out?” Coldmoon asked.

“The four questions, as you shall see.” Pendergast shifted in his chair, leaning on his elbows and looking at Coldmoon. “Still thinking of going back to bed now, partner?”