The Fold: A Novel Part 16

"Not really."

"Not even Casablanca? It's one of the greatest films of all time. It's won piles of awards. Made it onto hundreds of lists."

Olaf fit the key back onto a second ring with six others. "How high is your IQ? Supposedly?"

"Pretty high."

"Then this shouldn't be too hard to understand. I'll even say it slowly for you." He stared Mike in the eyes. "No."

"Sorry."

"Don't apologize. Just stop making all this wasted time even more irritating." He slapped the smaller key ring into Mike's hand. "These will open the room and all the relevant cabinets. Files can't leave campus. Log it if you take them out of this room." He pointed at the clipboard.

"Thanks."

"Don't lose those keys."

"I won't."

"You'd better not."

"It's really hard for me to lose things."

Olaf shook his head and muttered something under his breath. He gathered up the small bundle of files he'd walked in with and set his Kindle on top of it. "If you need help, don't hesitate to call someone else."

"Okay," said Mike. He pointed at the Kindle. "Reading anything interesting?"

"Physics in the Nineteenth Century," Olaf said. He stalked out of the room and back toward his office.

"Thanks again," called Mike.

He looked at the wall of file cabinets. The ants paced back and forth in his mind. After setting them loose the other night, it was tough to keep them under control. Even more so, since he knew he'd just be setting them free again.

Despite Olaf clutching them for twenty minutes, the keys were cold in his hand.

The individual drawer labels were clear in his mind. The first one he wanted was second from the end on the far left of the east wall. The west wall had blueprints, design specs, and other schematics. It was off limits to him.

Mike sighed and unlocked the first file cabinet. He pulled out a half dozen folders and set them down on the desk. The ants teemed and swarmed out as he swung open the mental doors.

The travel logs were standard to the point of boring. Eleven pages of raw facts and numbers. Another seven or eight pages of written reports from every department followed. The early ones were loaded with a glut of detail, describing everything that went wrong, went better than hoped, or went exactly as expected. There were veterinary reports for all the animals, and doctors' reports once human testing began.

Number 192 made him pause. He went over it three times before s.h.i.+fting focus to 193. Then he compared them. Several of the numbers he'd grown used to were zeroed out. There was no test animal or object listed. Both tests had taken place at midnight. The same with 194.

But 195 was a normal one. Two of the rats had gone through side by side at ten-twenty in the morning. Then there were four more reports at midnight with no numbers. Then normal reports resumed.

Arthur had been the first person through the Door. Report 425/1. Report 426/2 was Olaf. Jamie was next. Hers was just marked 3.

The elaborate chart in his mind grew as he developed new methods of arranging the data. Symbols, colored bars, new axes. He expanded it into a series of three-dimensional graphs that he could cycle through, and overlap at will.

After four hundred and fifty reports, Mike's stomach growled too loudly to ignore. He thought about going to get lunch, but the ants were making too much static. He settled for a walk down to the kitchenette. There was an apple and three cans of soda in the fridge. The pastry box was on the counter, emptied out except for the latest jelly donut. It sat alone in the crumb-filled box.

The ants urged him back to the files. There was still more for them to fight over. He sighed and grabbed the jelly donut with a paper towel. He took a tentative bite in the hallway and artificial raspberry syrup hit his tongue. He made himself take three more bites and felt the sugar buzzing between his teeth and gums. He shoved the last of it in his mouth, licked his fingers, and opened the next file.

As successful human jumps became the norm, the written reports became shorter and more casual. The recent ones were almost-blank pages with a few quick sentences. As far as Mike could tell, the last noteworthy thing had been a series of tests where the travelers carried different timepieces with them. That had been almost seven months ago.

Olaf had immaculate penmans.h.i.+p. Neil dotted his lowercase i's with a horizontal dash. Bob kept a tally of the total distance he'd jumped in the margins of every report he wrote. He wrote it in pencil and then erased it, but the impressions were still there.

Mike closed the last file. His stomach growled again. It had been growling for almost an hour this time. The hallway outside the room was dark. No one had activated the energy-saving lights in a while.

He gathered up the folders on the table, put them back in the drawer, and locked the cabinet. The file room door locked behind him with a thump of steel and magnets. He walked through the hall to the front of the building. The sun was low in the sky. Anne glanced up from the front desk. "All done?"

"I think so. Have you been waiting on me?"

She smiled and looked down at her desk.

"They don't trust me at all, do they?"

Anne smiled again. This one didn't feel as practiced. "If it makes you feel better," she said, "I've been here for almost two years and they barely trust me."

"Worlds better."

She lifted a purse that had been ready to go for at least an hour up onto the desk. "Is there anything else you need?"

He shook his head. "I think I've got everything for the night."

Anne tapped a few more keys. "Okay, then," she said.

"Did you at least get overtime for being stuck here?"

"Of course," she said. "One minute for the alarm."

She waved him to the entrance. They stepped outside, and she locked the door behind them. "I'll see you in the morning," said Anne.

"Two years, and they don't trust you, either?"

"I said they barely trust me," she said. "I've got a general idea what's going on here."

"Really?"

She considered him for a moment as they walked down the steps. "There are some advantages to being the pretty woman," she said. "Sasha and Bob come up with reasons to talk to me all the time."

"Ahhhhh," he said.

She smiled again. Another less-practiced one. "They haven't told me anything important," she a.s.sured him. "Or if they did, I didn't realize it."

They strolled across the small parking lot, and Mike realized he was walking her to her car. "So how'd you end up here?" he asked. "Did you know somebody or...?"

Anne shook her head. "Temp agency placed me," she said. "I'd just moved down here from LA, and I'd done a lot of work for them up there. Data entry at a magazine, another receptionist gig, that sort of thing. So the local agency gave me this. I was here for about three months, and Dr. Cross hired me full time."

"Los Angeles?"

"Yeah."

"Why'd you move?"

She unlocked her car door and considered him again. Her dark eyes studied his face. "He said we should be careful if you start asking too many questions."

"Sorry," said Mike. "Was he worried I'd find out why you moved?"

She laughed. It was a perfect laugh. Quick, honest, full of life. It was easy to see why Sasha and Bob came up with reasons to talk to her. "I suppose not," she said. She tossed her purse onto the pa.s.senger seat. "I lost my brother."

"Oh," he said. A dozen teacher-student protocols flooded his head. "I'm sorry."

Anne saw it in his eyes. "We weren't that close," she said. "Hadn't talked in years, to be honest, even though we lived in the same city. He called me that night, wanted me to join him for a family thing, and I kind of brushed him off. And then he was gone."

There was more to it that that, he could tell, but he knew better than to push. "I'm sorry, again," said Mike.

Her head went up and down once. The practiced nod of someone who'd told a story a few times. "I left LA about a week later. Didn't want any reminders. It was kind of freeing, actually, just dumping half my stuff and moving to a new city."

"I'll have to try it some time."

She glanced down the path toward the trailers and gifted him with one last smile. "Didn't you?"

"I guess I did."

"Good night, Mike."

"G'night, Anne."

She drove off with a wave, and he wandered down the path to the trailers.

He reviewed the logs again in his mind while he microwaved a Lean Cuisine sandwich. He summoned up his ant-constructed model of the Albuquerque Door and added seventy-six new labels. The microwave beeped at him.

He ate his chicken club panini as the trailer got dark. He didn't bother turning the light on. He knew where everything was in the room. And it made it easier to concentrate.

He broke the data down into categories. Every sc.r.a.p, no matter how mundane it seemed. He organized it in spreadsheets and graphs and columns.

There was a hole in the middle of his data with a spike in it. Three empty reports, one normal, four empty.

Jamie had signed off on all of the empty ones.

The gray phone was still on the floor in the far corner. A plastic menu slid out from beneath it with a list of extensions and names. He shoved the list back, picked up the receiver, and pressed three digits.

The line rang thrice. "Yeah?"

"Hi, Jamie, it's Mike."

"What do you want?"

"I'm fine, thanks. I was going over the logs and I noticed a discrepancy."

"Where?"

"On one ninety-two through one ninety-nine. The numbers seem a bit...off."

"Off how?" He could hear her frown.

"Well, they're all blank. There are no numbers."

"What the h.e.l.l are...Where are you?"

"I'm over in my trailer. Are you-"

Jamie hung up. A moment later he heard the m.u.f.fled crunch of gravel and a fist pounded on his door. He almost reached the door before she barged in. She was dressed in crimson sweatpants, despite the warm night, and wore a hooded MIT sweats.h.i.+rt with the sleeves pulled down. "Why are your lights off?" She reached past him and flipped the switch. "I was thinking."

"Think with the lights on, like a normal person. What do you mean, they're wrong?"

"I didn't say wrong. I said off. Aren't you kind of warm in that?"

She ignored the question. "What reports are you talking about?"

"In the one-nineties. I saw them earlier. I was just charting all the data for the trials, and it stood out again, so I thought I'd-"

She glanced around the spa.r.s.ely furnished trailer and focused on the tablet computer. "Where are those? Let me see it."

"Those..."

"Your charts. Spreadsheets. Whatever you did. I need some context."

"Oh," said Mike. "Well, I just did it all in my head."

Jamie's brows relaxed, but her eyelids sank down. "In your head?"

"Yeah."

"Are you f.u.c.king with me?"

"No."

"You made charts for six hundred runs in your head?"

He shrugged.

She reached up and covered her eyes for a moment. "Wait." Her hands dropped. "Three blank and then four blank? One in the middle?"

"Yeah."

"That's the timer experiments."