The Infiltrators (29 page)

“I don’t believe we ever met socially, Mrs. Ellershaw,” he said, “and I’m afraid we last saw each other, in the courtroom, under rather unfortunate circumstances. I suppose it’s too much to hope that you bear me no ill feelings for my testimony.”

Madeleine hesitated, and shrugged. “You told only the truth, didn’t you?”

“Yes. The exhibit I’d been asked to identify… I could say nothing else.”

“Then I’ve no grounds for resentment, Dr. Grunewalt, although it was… another nail in my coffin. But they had me pretty well boxed in already, even without your evidence.” She gave him a reluctant little smile. “Anyway, it was a long time ago.”

Grunewalt studied her a moment longer, in a regretful way, and turned to shake hands with me.

“Mr. Helm. I understand you work for the government—as do we all, of course. How can I be of service?”

I glanced towards the man still seated behind the desk and said, speaking to both of them: “You should be aware that we’re not at all satisfied, in Washington, that Mrs. Ellershaw’s civil rights were given proper consideration before and during her trial. There’s reason to believe that she could be—I’ll put it no more strongly than that at the moment—that she could be the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice. We’re therefore reopening the investigation originally carried out by another agency, and trying to determine just what happened here at the time of her husband’s disappearance and her arrest, and in the weeks immediately preceding. Since you two gentlemen were reasonably well acquainted with Dr. Ellershaw—at the time, you were working on the same project with him, I understand—I’m starting with you. Please understand, this isn’t a formal inquiry. If I should come up with sufficient evidence of error, my findings will be turned over to our Legal Department for appropriate action, at which time you’ll be asked to make your statements in the proper form. In other words, right now we’re just exploring the possibilities, informally.”

I was aware that Madeleine’s lips were firmly compressed, not with disapproval, but to conceal her amusement at this verbose legalistic double-talk; but fortunately she had the only legal training in the group. The other two obviously didn’t know any more about law or legal procedures than I did.

Johanson said uneasily, “But… but after eight years…!”

Grunewalt laughed. “Mrs. Ellershaw has good reason to be even more clearly aware of the length of time that has passed than you have, Oscar. For my part, if a mistake was made, a terrible mistake, I’ll be very happy to help correct it as far as possible.”

“Yes.” The big man behind the desk spoke hastily. “Yes, of course, we’re all happy to cooperate.”

“But I would prefer to cooperate sitting down,” said the smaller man. When we were all seated, he said, “Where would you like to begin, Mr. Helm?”

“Well, let’s start at the end, just to get the record straight. This laser shield, I believe it was called, that you were all working on, the LS-system that was so important to the nation’s defense that the Russians were falling all over themselves to steal or buy it… I don’t want to trespass on any realms of desperate security, but perhaps you can answer the question: Is it in operation now?”

I looked at Johansen, but he made no response. I turned to Grunewalt, who shook his head. “No.”

“No you can’t answer, or no it isn’t, Dr. Grunewalt?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Can you tell me why, if it was such a great defensive invention? There’s been plenty of time to install it or whatever you do to a gadget like that—distribute it, deploy it—hasn’t there?”

Johansen cleared his throat warningly. “Kurt, I’d like to remind you that, regardless of what Mr. Helm’s investigations turn up eventually, at the moment Mrs. Ellershaw has no security clearance whatever; quite the contrary.”

“Clearance, schmearance!” Grunewalt made an impatient gesture. “Who in our field, in this country or out of it, doesn’t know that, with Roy gone, Project LS was a disastrous failure? The problem was always the outlandish energy requirements of the system, Mr. Helm. I could find no way of solving it—or shall we say that none of the solutions I dreamed up proved practical? And your contributions were no more useful, Oscar. But Roy, our button-pushing enfant terrible, set up a model of the system in his beloved computer, don’t ask me how. Although I can use it for ordinary calculations, even fairly intricate ones, when it comes to such complex theory I still find myself completely intimidated and inhibited by a machine that can think. I leave the true electronic magic to the younger generation; I’m still an old-fashioned pencil-and-paper man at heart. But Roy could think nowhere else but at his console; he played it like a musical instrument. And he was making progress.”

Madeleine, who’d been listening in silence, gave a sudden ugly little laugh. “Progress! Just
progress
?” She stared at Grunewalt incredulously. “Do you mean to say that I was punished, ruined, for supposedly having in my possession some pieces of paper describing a lousy national-defense system that didn’t even
work
? That might never have worked even if Roy had stayed available to work on it? Goddamn it, at the trial they made it sound as if I were a female Benedict Arnold opening the gates of the lousy fort to the British—except that in my case it was supposed to be the whole damned country I’d exposed to the dirty Red Russians! But what you’re saying is that the priceless secret stuff they claimed to’ve found in that bank box of mine wasn’t really good for anything but toilet paper!”

Grunewalt cleared his throat. “Actually, my dear lady, it wasn’t even suitable for that. Computer printouts make very poor bathroom tissue.”

“And for
that
I was shamed and vilified and had my life totally destroyed!”

Johansen said stiffly, “Regardless of the material involved, there had obviously been a major breach of security.”

“Security! Oh, my God! Do you know what kind of a stinking kennel they locked me up in for your dirty security? For eight whole years! I… Oh, Jesus, Helm, lend me your hanky, I can’t seem to get a Kleenex out of these lousy tight pockets.”

We waited for her to blow her nose and wipe her eyes; then I went on to ask the kind of questions I’d be expected to ask. I learned that the scientific threesome composed of Grunewalt, Ellershaw, and Johansen had divided the work of Project LS among them according to their aptitudes. Inspiration, calculation, and organization, was the way Grunewalt described it. He, Grunewalt, was the misty-eyed middle-aged dreamer who came up with the wild ideas; Ellershaw was the hardheaded young computer whiz who put those ideas into language the machine could understand and tested and refined and elaborated them electronically; while Johansen… well, Grunewalt was diplomatic, but I got a distinct impression that he and Ellershaw could have got along quite well without the big blond man and used him mainly for scientific housekeeping, the routine work of the project.

I learned a little about the layout of Laboratory Beta, and the security procedures employed. I learned that both Johansen and Grunewalt were married and had homes nearby, in a development in the bedroom community of White Rock, just down the hill from Los Alamos. I learned that Grunewalt had actually not been at the laboratory during the critical few weeks preceding Roy Ellershaw’s disappearance; he’d been sent to the East Coast to work with a certain Dr. James Finn at
CADRE TWO
, where a special nuclear research program was in progress at the time. Purpose of visit: to determine if Finn’s work with nuclear energy might possibly be applicable to Project LS.

“Was it?” I asked.

Grunewalt shook his head. “You know how they are. Any energy problem that arises, they think they can solve it by either fission or fusion. Finn was actually developing a miniaturized long-term power source for… well, I suppose that’s still classified. He was dealing in milliwatts, where we needed megawatts and plenty of them. His work was quite fascinating, and caused us to revise some long-held ideas about critical mass; but I was happy to be ordered back here… that is, of course, until I learned what I’d been called back for. The place was a shambles; that stuffed shirt Bennett, of the Office of Federal Security, had men crawling everywhere and was asking insulting questions of everyone; Roy was missing; and I was asked to identify certain computer printouts, hard copies, that had been found where they shouldn’t have been—well, to confirm Oscar’s identification of them.”

“Which you did then, and later in court.”

“There was no possibility that I could be mistaken, Mr. Helm.”

I said, “You’d better explain it to me in simple terms; I don’t know too much about computers. But a printout is a printout, isn’t it? Infinitely reproducible? And I don’t suppose we’re talking about a little personal computer with a memory all its own. For all the separation of facilities you boast about here, for reasons of security, there’s one place it all comes together, isn’t it? In the single giant memory of the big master computer that, I’ve been given to understand, serves not only this whole installation but also
CADRES TWO
and
THREE
at the far sides of the continent.”

Johansen had a tolerantly amused look on his face. “Yes, yes, Mr. Helm, you’re quite correct in what you’re thinking. It would have been theoretically possible for someone who could decipher the access code to break in from another terminal and, to put it melodramatically, steal Ellershaw’s program and print it out, but… Tell him, Kurt.”

Grunewalt spoke in a kindly way: “The possibility was, of course, thoroughly explored at the time. However, Roy was, as I’ve said, a real computer genius; I doubt very much that any protective code he devised could be broken.”

“But it could be compromised, couldn’t it? By somebody who talked too much at the wrong time?”

Grunewalt laughed. “Oscar or myself, you mean, since we were the only others who knew it? But you are barking up the wrong tree. The fact is that it was not the contents of the hard copies that led me to identify them with such certainty; even though, as a matter of fact, experts established that they had actually been run off at our terminal and no other. Apparently those printers produce material that is unique to them, as do typewriters. But the printouts in question also carried numerous penciled notations in Roy’s handwriting indicating possible ways in which the program could be modified and rewritten to explore… No, Mr. Helm. Those printouts definitely came from the terminal in Laboratory Beta, by way of our security safe. As a matter of fact there were some notes in my handwriting, too; we’d worked on them together before I left for the East. There was no doubt whatever of their origin.”

After which, of course, as a conscientious investigator, I had to ask questions about the safe and who had access to it. That pretty well completed the interview. I glanced at my watch as if preparing to leave, but settled back and asked, as a casual afterthought: “Just to make sure I have it all straight, in Dr. Ellershaw’s time there were three separate scientific laboratories here, each operating independently on different projects, except for the computer linkage. Is that correct? And now, since Dr. Johansen tells me two more have been built, you can house five separate research programs.”

Johansen said quickly, “No, you are mistaken. We have only sufficient facilities to carry out four independent projects at any given time.”

I said innocently, “It’s been a long time since I had any contact with the Greek alphabet, but you mentioned a Lab Epsilon. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon. Five, unless you skipped a letter somewhere.”

There was an amused laugh from Grunewalt. “Oh, you’re referring to the Monkey House.”

“The what?”

“We’ve had a bunch of mad social scientists grafted onto us since the earliest days of the Center. Social engineering. Community interaction. Political interrelations. Whatever the currently fashionable jargon may be. Apparently they’re trying to quantify human behavior and study it computerwise, if I’ve got the verbiage straight. They were originally in Lab Alpha, but they outgrew that little building, so it was turned back to us and Delta was built especially for them—we got Epsilon at the same time, as a consolation prize of sorts. Obviously somebody has some real political influence in that research group; but I wish they’d stop calling themselves scientists and giving science a bad name. Institute for Advanced Human Managerial Studies, indeed!”

“I see,” I said. “Well, I guess that takes care of it. I certainly thank you both for your cooperation…”

Wohlbrecht was waiting in his jeep when we crossed the parking lot with our security escort. He drove us to the Mazda and bid us goodbye very politely, but I had no idea whether I’d gained his respect by calling him down, or made a lifelong enemy who was merely smart enough to hide it until he got a chance to strike back. Not that it should matter, since it seemed unlikely that we’d meet again, but I don’t like leaving human booby traps behind me.

Then we were driving away along the steaming, murky creek that had probably been a nice little trout stream once.

I guess we both had a sense of escaping from a trap as we drove away from all those weird scientific structures stuffed into that gaping erosion wound in the side of the mountain. However, the narrow, dark exit canyon with its poisonous little stream—at least I wouldn’t have wanted to try drinking the stuff—wasn’t exactly reassuring either, so it wasn’t until we turned onto the open main road again, heading back towards Los Alamos in the low afternoon sunshine, that normal human relations were resumed.

“Well, I think we got somewhere,” Madeleine said. “Back there. We learned a few things. That Johansen, creep is really a creep, isn’t he?
And
he was one of the three people who had access to that safe where the printouts were stored.”

I nodded. “And let’s note that not too long after your trial, just long enough not to attract unfavorable attention, Dr. Johansen found himself happily transferred from a scientific job he wasn’t very good at to an administrative position of considerable prestige and power that was right down his alley. Does anything come to mind? Like Mr. Bennett, the minor security official who wound up as head of one of the nation’s top law-enforcement agencies only a discreet interval after your husband disappeared?”