The Far Side (84 page)

A short while later, Kris sat down next to Erica in their room.  “Want to go on a little all-expenses-paid trip?”

Erica’s eyes lit up.  “Yes?  Yes!  Yes!”

“Then pack your bags.  For the first time out, pick the P90 as a personal weapon.  Anything that is good enough for Jack O’Neil has to be good enough for the likes of us!”

Pete Sharp was on the plane, and after they were off, he came and sat across from Kris.  “If you want to hit on me, there are easier ways.”

“I’m interested in giving you your heart’s desire, not in seeing to one of my own.  If it even exists.”

“Why?” he asked flat out.

“Because, in spite of my hair color, I’m the golden girl.  I can do no wrong.  I can do this, but for years and years I was stymied by rules and assumptions that limited me.  Now, not so much.

“I always told myself that I would someday look into someone’s eyes and see if I could fill the dreams I saw behind them.  Don’t fault me for trying -- fault me if I fail.”

“Well, I’ve seen something that few people alive these days have seen -- a nuclear detonation from just two miles away.  It does serve to concentrate my focus.”  He chuckled.  “Seattle, eh?”

“Yes, Seattle.”  Kris looked at Erica who was watching them with studied nonchalance.  “This is a police mission -- they want to arrest someone.  We won’t, unless he endangers us or the mission.  The book on this fellow is that he’s a rapist, a sociopath, and determined to have his revenge, whatever that is.”

“Sweet fellow,” Erica said blandly.  “A rapist, eh?  Maybe I’ll just cut his balls off first, and we can tell everyone that it’s an artifact of the Far Side device.”

Kris was patient.  “That’s not our mission, at least not now.  We are advising them so that the Seattle police can fetch him back safely.”  She looked at Kurt.  “I don’t know how I can see these things so clearly, but my intuition is that it can’t be done.”

“Surely we can repair the fusor?” Pete asked.

“Yes, and if nothing’s too badly out of adjustment, we can open the door behind him.  This fellow is a hater, Pete.  Sure, it’s possible he’s shacked up with some local girl and thinks that all his troubles are behind him, and that no one could possibly come after him.”

Kris
shook her head. “He has firearms and has been plotting his revenge since third grade against the two he left holding the bag.  Does that sound to you like someone who isn’t going to at least try to cover his bets?  How did they deactivate a Star Gate on SG-1?  They buried it.  I imagine he’s going to at least do that, although how long it will take is hard to say.”

“You are just such a breath of fresh air,” Kurt said sadly from a few feet away.  “Just so sunshiny and full of good cheer.  You mean that we could be taking fire from the moment the door opens?”

“That’s right.”

“Or he’s buried it, or worse, flooded it.”

“You’ve got it,” Kris said cheerfully.  “He took, from the emailed list of things they say went with him, a lot of what I’d call ‘cheap trade goods.’  Odds are, he’s shacked up with the daughter of someone important, and the local boss man isn’t going to be too happy that the light of his daughter’s life is being hassled by the evil bad nasties who chased him from home.

“If he’s enlisted the locals, we tell the nice people in Seattle that that’s it -- our job there is done.  The only way they’ll get him back is by killing a lot of people.”

* * *

“...so,” Kris concluded, “there is a risk that you won’t be able to get him back without killing a lot of people.”

The mayor of Seattle, Hoshi Koga, a rather pretty woman of Japanese extraction, grimaced.  “And what is it you’re trying to tell me?”

“We had reached the point in Chicago where I was willing to make one more attempt to remotely send a camera through, to see if there was anything we could see.  I asked the young mens’ fathers just how many lives they were willing to risk to get back people who were almost certainly dead.  They never did answer.

“You’re going to want to discuss this amongst yourselves -- just what it is that you’re willing to risk getting someone whose only crimes are alleged and while they include attempted murder, the attempt wasn’t very effective.

“Obviously the rapes are a more serious matter -- but I understood just now that so far you haven’t found one of the women willing to admit to one of the rapes.”

The mayor looked at the chief of police who just shrugged.  “I have a lot of men who want blood.  The deaths of three cops in Chicago was bad; this kid was trying to run up the score.”

“And the rapes?”

Paul Higgins huffed a sigh.  “Honestly, I’m not sure.  They are incredibly detailed accounts, you understand, including intimate details of the women involved.  Neither of two of the more dramatic identifying characteristics or marks were confirmed on the named victim.  In fact, we haven’t at this time, confirmed that any of the victims he named in his diary have ever seen the young man.

“Our profiler tells us that it is entirely possible that these are fantasies.  Another possibility is that he has changed the names of the victims to someone else’s, and it’s a code.  If there is a list of who those fake names equate to, we haven’t found it yet.  We’ve only gone through about half of what we found on his hard drive.  He had all sorts of things on it, including thousands of internet porn stories about girls being raped.  It’s clear he has an obsession about it.

“All in all, we’re not afraid to spend money to catch him.  Spending people?  Like you, I’m not comfortable with the thought.”

Kris smiled.  “As Major Sandusky will tell you, I’m very good at ‘negative thinking.’  I do really well at figuring worst case scenarios.  Look at this from another point of view.

“This fellow is sociopath.  It is likely he’s inserted himself into the local culture, and it is likely he has attached himself to a family of importance over there.  He doesn’t respect women; he enjoys having power over them -- that’s what rape is all about.

“What are the odds he’s going to be faithful for very long?  What are the important daddy and mommy going to think when he starts sleeping around?  What are they going to think when he starts manhandling women?  If their society is more primitive than ours, at some point there is a good chance that he’s going to find himself running away from a mob of angry relatives -- quite possibly from two or more families.  He’s not the sort of person who is going to be content with patting barmaids on the bottom.

“He didn’t do well in our society, and who knows how he’d fare in a more advanced society?  Odds are the punishment he’s going to face there in a year or two at most will be more severe than anything that you could give him.

“And, for that matter, he’s bound to be considered filthy rich by local standards if they are actually like the primitive people he described.  How many people in history have been murdered for their wealth?  He’s going to be walking a tightrope.”

“But he could come out smelling like a rose,” the chief of police said.

“I understand that, like the young men in Chicago, the parents here are people of influence.  I’ll repeat -- you have a case to build against him.  You have writings on a computer; and you say you haven’t had any luck getting any of the women he’s alleged to have raped identified?”

“None,” the police chief admitted.

The mayor looked at the city prosecutor.  “You’ve been silent.”

The city prosecutor smiled wanly.  “I told you before that I thought that this was a bad idea.  Now you’ve hired some expensive consultants who tell you that it’s a bad idea.  Hopefully they can make you listen.”

Kurt smiled.  “It’s called ‘the consultant effect.’  People in an organization can propose changes and management ignores them, preferring to get high priced consultants -- who in many cases tell them exactly the same thing.  Management thinks the consultant’s ideas are the greatest thing since sliced bread, tout the consultants -- and half their own people start looking for a job where the managers aren’t idiots.”

The mayor looked at Kris.  “Normally we think of teenagers as brash, rash, eager to run, look and see.  I’m not sure what to make of one who counsels caution.  Tell me, Miss Boyle, just what would you do, if you were in my shoes?”

“I’d hire the expensive consultants to seal the house; it’ll be ugly and you’ll probably need jackhammers to take it apart later, but it’ll meet the government’s security requirements.  We’ll repair the fusor and install remote sensing equipment.  Then we open the Far Side door and see what we see -- from a safe distance.

“After that, the possibilities are like those ten moves into a chess game -- there are too many to accurately estimate what we’ll want to do, and a good part of that is, as I said, how much you want to risk... and ma’am, your high-priced consultants aren’t going to help you with that decision.  We can offer options, we can offer planning -- but decisions will be yours.”

“Unless the government decides to preempt again,” the mayor said bitterly.

“We have asked them to send Mr. Jon Bullman from LA to supervise.  I trust him more than most of those people.  So far, we haven’t heard if they’ll let him come.  I’ll tell you true, you should talk to your senators and congressmen -- you need a representative of the government involved and who will be privy to such a decision as was made in regards to Chicago.

“We had ten blessed minutes warning in Chicago.  If there hadn’t been a pissing contest between the mayor and the governor, it’s very possible that the cordon would have been at a mile, and hundreds of people would have been killed or injured.”

The mayor nodded.  “That’s good advice.”  She turned to an aide. “See to it, Mark.”

“Yes, Mayor.”

“And, by the authority vested in me as mayor of the city of Seattle, I ask that you proceed with securing the premises, repairing the equipment, and the initial survey,” she told them, “as per the terms you earlier stipulated.”

Kurt nodded, lifted a walkie-talkie and spoke into it.  Then he turned to the diminutive mayor.  “One last word of caution.  Shortly we’ll get the contract signed and all of that.  Because we believe that the matter is urgent, we aren’t requiring legal review of the terms.  I am not saying you’d ever think of such a thing, but our only redress if we’re stiffed is that we would never undertake this sort of an operation, without formal review and signings by all parties -- and then cash in the bank.  Like as not, I’m told, it would take at least three business days, and if there are complications, a week.”

The mayor made a face.  “No, things are just as I said.  This is on my word of honor, and my word will be honored.  For that matter, you could do the same to us.”

“Except we stand or fall on our reputation,” Kris interjected, before Kurt could speak.  “And shorting you would be a catastrophe.  And, if we did it, we’d be cutting off our nose to spite our face, losing a great deal of money to what would certainly end in litigation.  The odds are you’d win and we’d lose.  No, I regret that Kurt brought this up, although I admit the necessity.”

* * *

The rest of the afternoon and evening was hurry up and wait.  The technique that Norwich had developed consisted of placing a heavy plastic “tent” over the building, then conforming the inner layer to the outside of the house.  A steel airlock arrangement was put in place in the space provided, and then specially treated foam was pumped into the space “inside” the tent.

The tent inflated steadily and by two pm, it was ready to be cured.  That was done with a device that “ignited” the mixture of powdered aluminum and iron oxide that had been spread through the volume.  Over a period of ten minutes, the reaction raised the temperature of the foam to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit, which set the plastic foam in a matter of minutes.

The airlock was opened and Kris and a young MIT graduate, Richard Shelton, went in and started working on the fusor apparatus.  By six, the vacuum pump was busy and by eight, the last of the electronics had been replaced.

The police were left on guard and everyone went back to their hotel for the rest of the evening.

Kris ate a late dinner with Erica, Pete Sharp, and Richard Shelton.  Erica had a million questions, while Pete was mostly silent.  Richard was more interested in listening to stories about life on Arvala, and so Kris stuck mostly with that.

Kris was up early the next day, and Erica, excited, woke when she did.  The two young women rushed through their morning routines, and by six were in the hotel restaurant having breakfast.

When they were setting up the last of the probes and things, Erica touched Kris on the arm.  “You need an RV for this, so that you don’t have to reestablish a site everywhere you go.”

Kris laughed.  “And how would we get an RV on a business jet?”

The mayor of Seattle appeared and beckoned to Kurt and Kris, drawing them a ways away.

“We just got a bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security.  A few minutes ago there was a nuclear explosion in southern France; the thought is that it’s fusor related.  It occurred at the site of a French government research lab.  The initial report was that the detonation was on the small side, in the range of kilotons, not megatons.”

Erica overheard and sighed.  “The French are the world’s greatest hypocrites, talking about this and that fine and noble idea.  When it comes time, though, their agents kill with impunity.”