Spiral (8 page)

“Lunch.”

Joe opened up a little box marked
CRAWLER FOOD
, removed a handful of corn kernels, and placed them on the glass slide. First one Crawler, then another, descended on the kernels, scissoring their scalpel-sharp legs, slashing through the kernels’ fibrous skin to the soft flesh inside. Joe zoomed in on one Crawler as it stuffed bits of shredded corn into the small feeding portal on its front. “We’ve made ones that can feed on almost anything you want,” Jake said. “Corn. Grape juice. A packet of sugar can keep one going for days. Each one’s got a genetically modified fungus that lives in its belly and converts a sugar source into ethanol fuel, courtesy of Liam Connor.”

“The issue with microbots has always been power,” Jake said, stepping back to center stage. “Quite a few teams built little robots like these for the first Grand MicroChallenge, but they all had the same weakness. They were powered by onboard batteries—tiny cells that run out of juice after a couple of minutes. And you can’t load them with more batteries—they’d be too heavy to move. It was a showstopper. Everyone was stuck.

“Enter Liam Connor. He said to me, ‘No problem, my boy. You just have to teach the little fellows to eat.’ ”

Jake let that settle in before continuing.

“His idea was to create a fungus that could serve as a digester and convert food to energy. He started with something called
Ustilago maydis
—a fungus that lives on corn, and he added some genes from brewer’s yeast—the stuff that converts sugar to ethanol when you make beer or wine. The Crawler eats by shredding bits of food with its legs and stuffing them into a feeding portal. That portal—its mouth—leads to its stomach—a little chamber filled with the fungus. The fungus breaks down the food and voilà! Fuel. The fuel powers the Crawler, and the Crawler eats some more. It can keep going as long as the food holds out. We call them HungryCrawlers. And they are champions.”

“So what did you do with the DARPA prize money?” a student called out.

Jake laughed. “I still have my share, sitting in the bank. Joe?”

“I bought a house for my parents in China.”

“Dave?”

“I bought stock. Mostly Google and Intel. And a Segway.”

Jake said, “It’s a hazard. He rides it up and down the halls.”

A hand went up, a student down in front, wearing a red Windbreaker and matching high-tops, no more than eighteen years old. “What about intellectual property?” he asked.

“We’ve got seven patents filed,” Jake said. “Three have already been granted.” Jake was always amazed at how quickly the thoughts of today’s students went to the business side. Fifteen years ago, when he was an undergraduate, no one thought about IP, about patents. Now it was different. Kids saw dollar signs everywhere.

“Anyone license it yet?”

“Quite a few. A start-up in Boston wants every home in America to have MicroCrawler mini-Roombas running around. On countertops, walls, ceilings, cleaning away everything from crumbs to cobwebs. A medical technology company in North Carolina hopes to use them as remote surgeons that can work on a patient from the inside, excising tumors or clearing blockages without the need for incisions or the risk of infection. But our biggest suitors are a couple of military contractors. Micro-robotics is going to be the next big thing in warfare. That’s why DARPA ran the Grand MicroChallenge. Small spies, tiny assassins, things like—”

A cellphone went off. Jake was annoyed but not surprised. This happened at least once a class. Jake spotted the culprit fishing the phone out of his pocket. He did his best to shame him with his stare.

The student didn’t notice, fixated on the screen of his phone, an expression of shock on his face. What he did next surprised Jake. He whispered to his neighbors, got up, and headed for the door.

As he was working his way down the row of seats, another student pulled a phone out and started working it with his thumbs. He looked around, whispered to his friend, pointed to the door.

That’s when it really got going. Two more cellphones started ringing. Five times that number silently fished phones out from bookbags, pocketbooks, and knapsacks. More people began to leave. Jake had never seen anything like it.

He glanced at Dave and Joe. Both shook their heads, not knowing what was happening. Dave flipped open his own phone.

A couple of students near the back got up, talking louder now. “It’s Liam Connor,” one of them said, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“What? What about Liam Connor?” Jake asked.

“They just found a body in Fall Creek Gorge,” the student said.

“And?”

Dave closed his phone, face white. “Jake, this can’t be true. They’re saying that the body is Liam Connor’s.”

5

THE HILLS ON WHICH CORNELL UNIVERSITY STOOD WERE
the remnants of the glacial moraine left over from the last ice age. Streams cut through this loosely packed earth and shale until they reached older, solid rock, carving the dramatic gorges and waterfalls for which the campus was famous. Fall Creek Gorge was the deepest, a huge gash in the earth defining the north boundary of campus. It was spanned by a narrow suspension footbridge linking the central part of campus to the houses and dorms farther north. From its midpoint, it was a two-hundred-foot plunge to the rushing waters of Fall Creek below.

Jake always brought the students here later in the semester when he taught “Physics for Presidents.” They stood on the bridge and stared at the water below while Jake gave them a rundown on the geology, describing the advances and retreats of the glaciers that carved out the gorges. Then Jake would give them a little demo. He would take a watermelon and drop it off the bridge. They’d all time it with their watches, the seconds ticking by until it burst on the stones below. Three-point-two seconds was the average answer. They’d compare it to what Newton predicted.

But the real lesson wasn’t Newton’s laws, the acceleration due to gravity,
v
²
= 2gh
. That was a cover. Jake had worked up this field trip after he had lost a student to suicide. Jake knew the statistics. Over the past twenty-eight years, sixteen students had jumped from this bridge. It was a painful fact about a pressure-cooker school like Cornell, but it had hit Jake hard. He still couldn’t forget the parents at the funeral. No parent should ever have to go through that. No kid should ever put their parents through that.

The real lesson of the watermelon was about the violence of falling. The melon splattered, bits of red flesh streaking out like the sun from the point of impact. Potential energy turned into kinetic, velocity growing with every second of the fall. He brought the class here every semester to see what would happen when you went over. Cut through the romanticism and get down to the reality. You jump, you fall, you hit.

Three-point-two seconds.
Blam
.

MORE PEOPLE WERE ARRIVING BY THE SECOND, MORE STUDENTS
, more faculty, more police. They were coming from all across campus. Jake had joined the rush, running over from the Schwartz Auditorium lecture hall. If it truly was Liam Connor, Jake didn’t think it would stop until the entire campus was clustered up against the gorge.

Liam Connor was an icon. He’d been at Cornell for sixty years, was known to every student, faculty member, and alumnus. He was in many ways the face of Cornell, the last of the pivotal scientists—people like Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, and Barbara McClintock—who had turned a sleepy central New York town into one of the most important centers of science in the world.

Jake kept flashing to the last time he’d seen Liam—yesterday, lunch at Banfi’s. They were both in a hurry. They’d chatted about a recent experiment; a guy at Caltech had come up with a way to make a strand of DNA assemble itself into a smiley face only fifty nanometers across. Not just one but billions and billions, all floating around in a single little test tube. “The most concentrated solution of happiness ever made,” Liam had joked. Liam was beaming. His own discovery, someone else’s, Liam barely seemed to notice the difference. He loved every new development, every step up the scientific ladder.

There was no way that Liam Connor had jumped from that bridge.

DOZENS OF PEOPLE PUSHED AGAINST HIM, CROWDING FROM
all sides. Jake’s stomach churned. He hated death, despised it. Not in the way most people did, ones who mostly feared it. Jake hated it as an enemy. Hated what it took, what it left behind. Jake was in the Army for four years, a time that included the First Gulf War. No soldier spends time in a war zone without getting to know death’s sight and smell. But familiarity had bred contempt. Jake found death to be a colossal waste. Someone’s alive, and then not. It was sudden. Stark. Irreversible.

An unmarked helicopter swept in from the west, dipping down over the dorms of West Campus and pulling up directly over the gorge, hovering dead still. The door was open, and Jake saw a cameraman hanging out on the skids, lens pointed straight down. The local station must have hired the pilot to bring them over.

“Check this out,” said a student to his right. He had his phone out, showing it to a friend. “It’s on CNN.”

Jake took out his iPhone, carved himself out a little space up against a parked car. He pulled up the CNN website, found the footage rolling. The view was from directly overhead, the suspension footbridge maybe a hundred yards below, a thin ribbon of blue metal hanging over empty space. The bridge was empty except for a lone policeman. Crowds on either side were held back by yellow police tape and a phalanx of officers.

The camera view zoomed into the gorge. Jake counted seven people: an officer taking pictures, two more watching, two EMTs, and two more in plain clothes that Jake guessed were also police. Their movements were choreographed, professionals going about their jobs.

The view from the camera pulled back, then panned over to the waterfall upstream from the rescuers, the remnants of an old hydroelectric station clinging to the walls of the cliff. The water was running hard, plunging over the waterfall, cascading downward.

The sound of the broadcast was inaudible in all the noise around him. Where the hell was the volume? It was a new phone; he hadn’t had it more than two weeks. He found the volume, turned it up. Nothing. The mute? Where’s the mute? The itchy dread in Jake’s stomach was building, his initial disbelief eaten away by the acid of information coming in. If this was on CNN, then—

The camera swung back, zoomed in on the accident scene. In close on the victim.

There
.

The image was grainy, but there was no doubt. The old brown coat. The shock of white hair.

Jake felt as though he’d been punched in the chest. He lowered his phone, hardly believing it. He looked up to the helicopter suspended in the sky.

Around him, people were yelling, struggling to be heard over the noise of the helicopter. Everyone was packed in tight, jostling him, elbows in his sides. The crowd surged, knocking Jake against an empty police cruiser. He barely noticed. All he could see was Liam and Dylan a week before, laughing their heads off, running Crawler races in the gardens of decay.

6

AT THE POLICE STATION, MAGGIE WAS FURIOUS. THEY KEPT
saying her grandfather killed himself, but she was certain they were wrong. “It’s impossible,” she said for the tenth time, pacing the room.

“I know this is a terrible shock. I’m very sorry. But please try to calm down, Ms. Connor,” the police chief said. His name was Larry Stacker. He was neatly dressed, short brown hair, a blue tie over a white shirt. Maggie thought he looked like a banker.

“No way,” she said, shaking her head. “He had no reason. He was healthy. He was—” She looked away, trying to regain control. The office was modest, the painted concrete walls bare, save for a couple of diplomas and a picture of the Cornell campus from above. She expected the head of the Cornell police to have fancier digs. She wanted him to have a palatial office. She wanted to believe that he had every resource in the world at his disposal.

“When did you last see him?” Stacker asked.

“Last night. Around nine p.m. Outside the Physical Sciences Complex. He was fine. Making jokes. He and Dylan were going letterboxing this afternoon.”

“Dylan? Who is Dylan?”

“My son. His great-grandson. Please listen to me. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Liam. He loved Dylan. He loved me. He loved his work, his friends—everything. He was the most goddamned content person I’ve ever known. He had a big talk coming up next month at the AAAS meeting. He was getting ready for it. Why do all that if he was about to kill himself?”

Stacker was silent. He was waiting her out, Maggie thought, wearing what must be the face he used for the bereaved, projecting equal parts steadiness and sympathy.

“There’s no suicide note, right?”

“That’s correct. But most suicides don’t leave a note.”

She shook her head. “I don’t care. I’m telling you, he
did not
jump from that bridge.”

“Ms. Connor. I know this is very difficult to accept. But there’s no question. Your grandfather jumped.”

“How could you possibly say that? How could you know? Were you there? Did you see it?”

“In a manner of speaking. We have a security camera on that bridge.”

Maggie was stunned. “Oh my God. You’re serious.”

“I’m so sorry, Ms. Connor. There were witnesses as well. They saw a woman on the bridge with your grandfather. We’re looking for her now.” He opened a manila file, removed a printout, and passed it over. “Do you recognize her?”

Maggie studied the image. It was grainy, a pixilated image of the woman from the waist up, clearly a blowup of a longer shot. It caught the woman in profile, dark hair pulled back, long forehead, thin cheeks. Asian. She looked to be in her mid-twenties. She wore a black coat and gloves.

Maggie shook her head. She was fighting back tears. “I’ve never seen her before. You don’t know who she is?”

“Not yet. But your grandfather had said a woman that matches her description was following him. He’d reported it a week ago.”

“
Following
him? Why?”

“We don’t know.”

“Could she—”

“She wasn’t close to him when it happened. Professor Connor seemed to run ahead of her.”

“Did she try to stop him?”

“It’s hard to say for sure.”

“Let me see the video.”

“I don’t see what good that will do, Ms. Connor.”

“I don’t care. Show it to me.”

After five minutes of fighting, Stacker reluctantly opened his laptop.

Maggie watched, her heart pounding. The scene was grainy. The bridge was empty, swaying ever so slightly in the wind. A time stamp at the bottom said nine-thirty-two a.m.

“Oh, God. There he is.” The tears ran down her cheeks. She fought the urge to cry out loud.

Liam was slowly shuffling along, the unknown woman beside him. He had on his old brown overcoat, the one with the big wooden buttons. She could barely make out his face. “Oh, Pop-pop.” She put a hand to her mouth.

He continued to progress along the bridge, the woman beside him. She couldn’t tell if they were talking.

They approached the middle of the span.

It happened so fast. One minute he was shuffling along. The next minute he was running. Fast. Then he was up and over.

Gone.