Sigma One (32 page)

Burt unfolded his arms and quickly put his hands up to his mouth and blew warm air into them as the wind found an opening in the neck of his sweater and plunged its icy finger down the front of his chest. He then looked up at Amanda who was smiling at his antics.

"You're absolutely right, Amanda," Burt said, reading her face as she stood there laughing at him, "first thing tomorrow, I'm going to have to get a heavier coat. Sorry I kept you waiting, really!"

“Okay. Let's just go inside where it's warm, but give Jeremiah a tip before we do."

Burt reached into his pocket and produced a five dollar bill which he held up to the window for the chauffeur to see. That same smile that Jeremiah had when they first met him at the airport enveloped his face again as he rolled the window down and accepted the money. Burt returned his smile and then stepped away from the curb as Jeremiah drove off. Then he climbed the stairs and joined Amanda, now already inside.

As soon as the glass door closed after Burt, the guard on duty looked up from the paperback and greeted them both.

"Hello, Ms. Yates." Mr. Simmons said. "Long time no see. Where have you been this past week? We missed you around here."

"California," Amanda replied as she took off her coat. ""That's where Mr. Grayson here is from."

Simmons nodded a greeting to Burt who, in turn, nodded back.

Mr. Simmons was an elderly, seventyish, security guard and had been with the NSF since its founding some ten years earlier. At that time, he had had to come out of retirement to help pay his wife's medical bills, but after her death some three years later, he stayed on out of habit more than anything else. His insurance had been kind and with social security, he really didn't need the money, but he did need the company even though now he only worked graveyards and weekends, the shifts none of the other younger guards wanted. But that was okay by him. It gave him plenty of time to read. Likewise, the NSF employees were his only family now and he especially liked the younger girls who worked there. The feeling amongst most of them , too, was mutual. To them, Mr. Simmons was their adopted grandfather, and like grandfathers all over the world, Simmons kept tabs on his favorites, of which Amanda was on the top of that list.

Simmons scratched his bald head which shone like a cue-ball under the fluorescent lights of the lobby and put his new Stephen King novel, The Dark Half, down. He then stood up and stretched.

"California? Why you travelin' all the way out there?" he asked while he moved forward to look at Amanda's ID which she had pulled from her purse and laid on the counter for him to see. Simmons took one look at it, and then looked up to her face, smiled at her and then scowled into the video camera which was over his right shoulder making sure he did his job right by checking everyone's badge even though he knew them by sight.

Amanda watched him and then laughed. "Mr. Simmons, you know I can't tell you that." She then pointed up to the video camera and whispered, "Big Brother wouldn't like it."

Simmons immediately raised an eyebrow and then responded, "I know what you mean!"

"Well you can tell me who your friend is, can't you?" he added as they both stood there 1Paring into the camera.

Amanda nodded and then introduced Burt to Simmons. Both men were smiling broadly; Simmons, because he suspected Burt might be a new-found boyfriend who had come out to spend the holidays; Grayson, because he could see by the way the old codger was sizing him up and down that Simmons was treating Amanda like a granddaughter. This latter thought made him feel more comfortable than he had felt all day and caused him to lose any feelings of trepidation he had been carrying with him on the ride out from Dulles.

During that time in the car as he had watched the dreary landscape whizz by, he had let his mind wander and in that wandering, he began to doubt whether or not he would be accepted by the NSF, and even if he was, how long it would be until he saw Debbie again. Seeing Mr. Simmon's warm smile changed all that, and his fears left as quickly as his previous schizophrenic spells had arrived.

"You can sign in here, Mr. Grayson," Simmons said pointing to the visitor's logbook which he pushed forward on the counter.

Burt stared at the open page and read. "Last name, first name, middle initial." No problem here, he thought as he signed.

The logbook, which was about a half an inch thick and bound in black simulated leather, looked very official. The next line asked for "Person/point of Contact." and on reaching this, he looked up to Amanda for help. She glanced at the blank and then back at him and quickly spelled Mr. Patrick Huxley, aloud for him to enter.Burt then came to the line labeled "Classified, Unclassified," and again looked up to her, unsure of what to put. Although he had grown up in California and had visited the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena on a school trip before and had signed a similar log then, he thought it strange an organization like the NSF, which he thought did only medical research, or so Amanda had alluded when he asked her what the NSF did, would have any classified programs. He was under the impression that a question such as the one on the page was reserved only for military research labs.

Amanda saw his hesitation and lifted the pen from his hand and quickly, lest she raise any further questions, scrawled a "U" in the appropriate space and then closed the book and slid it toward Simmons.

Simmons then gave him his white laminated, magnetically encoded visitor's badge and punched the buzzer to unlock the entryway vault door. As soon as he did, the thick steel door unlatched with a dull, metallic clunk, a sound which icily pierced Burt's nerves and sent a shiver down his back--one that was even more pronounced than the one the wind produced when it knifed through his sweater earlier.

Amanda stepped forward through the door and summoned Burt to follow, which, after a brief hesitation, he did. Once inside, she punched the button on the wall and the door clanked shut. The sound made Burt feel like he was entering a bank vault and wonder what was so important at the NSF that it had to be guarded by such extreme measures. He turned to ask Amanda, but she had already started walking down the long vacant corridor. On both sides, Burt saw similar vault doors which seemed to go on forever. He got the feeling he was in a bad dream running down a hallway and with each step he took, the hallway stretched further out. The friendly atmosphere and good feelings he had recently experienced in the lobby seemed miles away and with each step forward and each dull, lonely echo of his and her footfalls, he began to feel increasingly lonely and strange inside again. When they were halfway down the hall, large beads of sweat started to form on his brow and to trickle down into his eyes. The salt stung and he quickly and self-consciously wiped his face with the back of his hand as he followed her.

He prayed he wasn't going to have another attack and ruin his chances for the research position and tried to concentrate and slow his breathing as they continued down the hall. While he was doing this, he tried to keep his eyes focused on the back of Amanda's head rather than look at the cold, steel doors which they passed and which hid god knows what abominations behind them and were the cause for his sudden anxiety attack. He was using the same deep breathing technique that is taught in La Mas classes to help women during early stages of labor--a sort of self-hypnosis which he unconsciously picked up from his mother who used to drag him to the classes during her pregnancy with his brother, Daniel.

The closer they got to the end of the corridor and the slower he breathed, the more he found his anxiety level diminish. By the time they reached Pat's office which stood at the end of the hallway and Amanda finished punching in the cypher code, Burt felt thankfully normal again. Breathing a sigh of relief, he stepped inside.

Pat was deep in concentration when they stepped into his office. Be had been reading the latest medical report Dr. Jerome had finally produced for him after innumerable proddings by him. He found the report fascinating and worth the wait, and hardly wanted to put it down. But put it down he did, quickly closing the cover lest Mr. Grayson be able to inadvertently read it as it lay upside down on his desk. As he did, he looked up guiltily from the report and his eyes met Burt who was staring directly at him. As Burt neared the desk, in one quick, smooth furtive gesture, that all but said "you don't really want to see this Mr. Grayson," Pat slid the report into the center drawer of the desk and then locked it. As the latch clicked into place, he let out an audible sigh of relief and then, and only then, did he get up to meet his guests. The entire episode took perhaps three seconds.

Pat came around to the front where Amanda and Burt were standing. He was all smiles, fakes smiles, like the kind the dentist gets on his face right before he slips you a needle so long he could go through both cheeks and gums from one side, have it come out the other and still have plenty of needle left. "You must be the amazing Mr. Grayson Amanda's told me so much about," Pat syruply said to Burt as he gestured for him to take one of the two chairs which stood in front of the desk.

"Do sit down, you must be exhausted from your trip," he continued smiling at Burt, but completely ignoring Amanda and speaking very rapidly as do most people when caught in the act; in this case, caught reading a report describing seemingly positive evidence of the medical risks associated with the level of deep concentration required for "linking," a report he could ill-afford to show the young man to whom he was now speaking, lest he frighten SIGMA ONE's only chance for survival away.

Pat continued, but slowed his speech slightly having realized he really was acting as if he were trying to cover something up. "How was your flight?" he asked as he reached for his pipe and tamped it full of tobacco as a diversion.

"Okay," Burt replied, his eyes locked in place staring at the middle of the desk where the report had been. It was obvious Amanda's boss was trying to keep him from seeing whatever he had put in the drawer and to Burt, things were getting "curioser and curioser."

First there was the security guard at the front desk. Second, there was the question on the form regarding whether or not his visit was classified. Third, there were the numerous vault doors they passed on the way to Mr. Huxley's office. Certainly these weren't needed for medical research. He could tell they weren't hermetically sealed, and everyone knows when you're working on things like germ warfare, which is one thought that crossed Burt's mind as to the nature of the business going on at the NSF, you need hermetically sealed doors to keep things like the Andromeda Strain from getting out and melting people's faces. And finally, there was Mr. Huxley trying to hide some sort of document from him. Too many coincidences had occurred in too short a span of time. That's what it was, just too many unexplained things for his liking.

Burt started looking critically around the room for some sort of clue which might answer some of the questions he had regarding the nature of the work which was being carried on at the NSF, but as he looked at the office walls, he found them clinically blank save for two items: a photograph of a much younger Pat Huxley standing at the steps of the same building they were now in, obviously cutting the ribbon for the site dedication, and his diploma from the U.S Naval Academy; neither of which offered any new evidence whatsoever. The pictures did prove two things, though. From the fading on the picture of the building dedication, Burt surmised that Mr. Huxley was the founder of the NSF; from the diploma, that he was once in the Navy like his father had been which was something he could relate to. But aside from these two things, he knew nothing else.

Burt got up from his chair and moved toward the diploma to see just when Huxley graduated and from that to make a guess as to how old he was. He did this thinking that if he knew how old he was, perhaps he could establish some common ground with his soon-to-be employer, or so he hoped. Burt figured if Huxley was near his dad's age, that perhaps the two might have run across each other, the Navy being the small community that it is.

The year was written in script, but easily determinable at being 1969, in the year of our Lord anno domino etcetera, etcetera. "That would make him say forty-three, give or take a year or two and assuming he graduated when he was twenty-three," Burt thought to himself. That would, indeed make him a contemporary of Dad."

He had to ask. He had to find some way of establishing some commonality so he could get some answers. He turned away from the wall and spoke, "Academy grad, huh, Mr. Huxley?"

"Uh, huh," Pat replied curtly not knowing what to make from his interest in his former military career, but deciding to play it out.

"My dad was in the Navy. Ship fitter first class, on the Texas. Ever run into him?"