Virtual Destruction

CHAPTER 26

While Paige continued making phone calls to track down the computer records of CAIN booth use, Craig unfolded a Livermore site map tucked into the back of a battered LLNL telephone book. He had to get away from this madhouse of T Program scientists to think. With his fingernail, he traced his way over to the mothballed Laser Implosion Fusion Facility, which Hal Michaelson had spent so many years developing.

Outside, Craig shoved his sunglasses firmly against his nose. He dropped his heavy leather briefcase into the battered basket of a clunky Lab bicycle and swung onto the worn black seat. The rusty springs squeaked, and the kickstand drooped back toward the pavement as he began pedaling. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle since his teenage years — luckily for him, rumor claimed it was impossible to forget how to ride a bike.

Craig had his doubts, though, as he wobbled along, steering the fat tires onto the bicycle path and picking up speed. In his dark suit and flapping tie he must have presented a bizarre picture as he pedaled over to the towering research center, but none of the Lab employees paid attention. It wasn’t so much his riding the bicycle that made him stand out — it was the formal attire. He hadn’t seen more than one other suit during his entire time inside the chain-link fence.

The abandoned Laser Implosion Fusion Facility stood four stories tall, unmistakable in the middle of its own cleared parking area. In its heyday it had been a bustling complex, but now it was an eyesore: a concrete cube 100 feet wide, braced by support pillars and blue-painted steel girders. According to the reports Craig had read, the structural supports extended another four stories beneath the ground to provide stability in the event of an earthquake.

The LIFF’s huge bay door looked like a football field of segmented metal strips rolled partway up. He supposed that was the simplest way to allow air circulation inside the airplane-hangar-sized building. Inside, orangish lights had little success against the shadows in contrast to the brilliant California sunshine.

Craig parked his bike against one of the carefully tended sumac trees that gave the Livermore Lab a campus-like appearance. He stood with hands on his hips, catching his breath on the asphalt apron in front of the partially open hangar door. Trailers and permanent office buildings were distributed around the LIFF building, leftovers from the height of the fusion power project, no longer necessary and now serving as temporary quarters for other programs.

He craned his neck and looked up at the mammoth-sized, useless building, and a phrase tickled through his mind. Your tax dollars at work. The Laser Implosion Fusion Facility had been one of the largest boondoggles in the history of the Lawrence Livermore Lab. Teams of top researchers had spent ten years of their lives developing the project, bringing it to the final phase — only to have it cancelled at the last possible moment. LIFF was an embarrassment on the political level, a tragedy on the scientific level.

Craig pondered the correspondence files of Michaelson’s old memos relating to José Aragon, describing the long-standing feud between the two men. The memos gave just an inkling of the force of Michaelson’s personality. His words slashed like razor blades across the page, eviscerating Aragon, questioning his competence, his scientific understanding — even his parentage. Even recent memos from Michaelson, such as the one curtly posting Gary Lesserec’s position, held the same biting edge.

Craig wondered if Lesserec had even known that Michaelson was preparing to fire him. Did that mean that Lesserec himself might be a suspect as well?

Craig had scanned a photocopy of the old fax Michaelson had sent from his on-site inspection tour in Eastern Europe upon learning that LIFF funding had been cut. Michaelson had pleaded and cajoled and intimidated an entire list of congressmen and senators, wielding endorsements and support from other scientists. He had hopped a flight back to the United States weeks before his Moscow assignment ended, leaving the inspection team in the hands of his deputy, Diana Unteling.

Craig kept staring at the behemoth building, and the empty facility seemed to yawn in front of him. It had all been for nothing. After ten years and a billion dollars, the LIFF had been shut down before it could even be turned on. The debacle had cost the Lab Director his job and several congressmen their careers.

Such a failure would have destroyed most people utterly, Craig thought, but Michaelson, with his pit-bull persistence and refusal to accept the inevitable, had risen like a phoenix from the ashes with T Program, his wild and unorthodox proposal to use virtual reality sensors for remote but on-site inspections anywhere in the world, anytime.

Meanwhile the LIFF sat like an enormous mausoleum too immense to be ignored.

Craig ducked his head and stepped inside the gigantic echoing space. He snapped off his sunglasses and tucked them in his suit pocket while waiting for his eyes to adjust.

The place smelled like old oil and cool musty air. He heard the rattling hum of generators and a sound of someone driving a forklift at the other side of the bay, moving pallets of supplies. Here, though, he seemed to be alone.

Catwalks laced the ceiling four stories overhead, but a spherical stainless-steel vacuum vessel — large enough to hold a house — occupied the bulk of the interior. He had seen schematics of the test chamber, so he recognized the hundreds of coolant conduits, the long tubes of laser amplifiers, diagnostic ports tapped at random places inside the welded metal plates that formed the walls.

Once the initial sight of the awesome high-tech apparatus wore off, Craig noticed other things that seemed out of place. The concrete floor of the giant facility was not clean and uncluttered for scientists to walk around and take measurements. Instead, much of the empty space was stacked high with crates of decommissioned machinery; identifying labels had been stenciled on the sides of the wooden slats, and shipping tags dangled from staples on the planks. Pallets filled with cases of photocopier paper stood taller than Craig’s head. Under the weak yellow-orange light, most of the LIFF apparatus appeared smudged and covered with dust.

As he stared at the enormous, somehow disturbing, machinery, Craig thought about how José Aragon had supposedly brought the entire project to ruin and how a vengeful Hal Michaelson had attempted to get even with him. Yet somehow, through a labyrinth of reasoning that only government officials could fathom, Michaelson and everyone else associated with the LIFF had been severely chastised — while Aragon blithely found himself promoted.

He shook his head. The dispute over the LIFF, as described in Michaelson’s sequence of inflammatory memos, had not managed to convey the sense of majesty and high stakes Craig felt upon standing inside the actual facility. The place reeked of high hopes and lost dreams.

Inside the echoing LIFF hangar, Craig wondered if this could be sufficient cause for a murder.