Zero Cool, Page 7

  Ross smiled slightly. “Am I?”

  A knock on the door. The doctor arrived. Tex sat patiently on the bed and waited while the doctor examined Ross and pronounced him battered but fit. Ross was advised to stay in bed for a few days and to have someone around in case he lost consciousness. There was always the chance of a subdural hematoma. Ross nodded, knowing that he would never have a chance to stay in bed.

  When the doctor left, Tex said, “Probably you ought to take a shower and change.”

  Ross glanced at his watch. It was past eleven thirty. He had to register. “No time,” he said.

  “Sure there’s time,” Tex said.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  He shrugged. “Plane doesn’t leave for another hour.”

  “What plane?”

  “Better take your shower,” Tex said. “We can talk later.”

  “I’m not going on any plane.”

  “Sure you are,” Tex said.

  “Why?”

  “Cause I’m bigger than you,” Tex said, with an easy grin. “Now don’t make trouble. Just take a shower and change your clothes so you’ll look respectable.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “Paris,” Tex said. “Now git.”

  10. Paris

  THE PLANE LIFTED OFF THE runway with jets screaming and headed northwest over dry, mountainous terrain.

  “There’s going to be trouble,” Ross said. “I was supposed to register for the conference. When I don’t—”

  “No trouble,” Tex said. “You’ve canceled out.”

  “I have?”

  “Yesterday,” Tex said, “to be exact.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me. After all, I made the telephone call. Can’t really attend a conference when you’re laid up in your room with the trots, can you? Hell, any bunch of doctors understands that.”

  Ross frowned. “I should have said something to Angela before I left.”

  “Don’t fret. You’ll be back before she misses you.”

  “I will?”

  “Sure. This is just a little meeting. No problem. No problem at all. A peaceable little meeting.”

  Ross said, “She’s all right, isn’t she?”

  “The girl?”

  Ross nodded.

  “More than all right. She’s a fine hunk of girl. Best I’ve seen in many a moon.” Tex laughed. “How about a drink?”

  “Ugh,” Ross said. He felt suddenly queasy.

  “Sorry,” Tex said. “I forgot.”

  Tex stared out the window. “Love this country,” he said. “Reminds me of home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Texas, of course.”

  “Never been,” Ross said.

  “You ought to go, sometime,” Tex said. “Fine place.”

  Ross sighed. “I’ll go, first chance.”

  “Do that,” Tex said.

  Ross closed his eyes and discovered that he was very tired, with the dragging fatigue of a man confused. The gentle motion of the plane was soothing. He looked out the window at the soft patterns of the clouds, fluffed like pillows, and he drifted off to sleep.

  It was raining in Paris when they arrived, a light, warm, summer drizzle from low clouds which obscured the Eiffel Tower. Tex gave directions in surprisingly good French to the taxi-driver.

  “Sorry to drag you all this way,” Tex said to Ross. “You look really pooped.”

  “Nothing like a beating,” Ross said, “to poop you.”

  “God’s truth,” Tex said. “But I had to bring you, you know. I had to.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s very particular about meeting people face-to-face. It’s a thing with him. Got to meet them face-to-face. You wouldn’t think so, him being the way he is, but that’s how it is.”

  “Who?”

  “You.”

  “No. Who am I meeting?”

  “Whom,” Tex said absently. He sighed. “The professor.”

  “The professor,” Ross repeated, nodding dumbly. “And who is the professor?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The taxi drew up before a large mansion, heavy, imposing, solidly constructed. It was set back from the road and partially concealed by gardens which once were elegantly formal but now had grown thick and tangled from neglect. The mansion itself was also in disrepair; it needed paint for the shutters, which were flaking and falling from their hinges. Several windows had been broken but had not been replaced; they were patched with cardboard and newspaper.

  They got out of the taxi, walked through the gates and up the steps to the massive door. There was a knocker in the shape of a snarling dog’s head.

  “The professor lives here?” Ross said.

  “He does,” Tex said. He rapped loudly with the brass head.

  Immediately, it was opened by an irritable woman in a maid’s uniform. She led them up broad, creaking stairs to the second floor and into a small room. There was a desk, and twelve telephones arranged on shelves, and a short man with curly dark hair and large, brooding, feminine eyes.

  “Mr. Jackman,” Tex said. “The professor’s secretary.”

  Mr. Jackman stood and came scurrying forward, hand extended.

  “Dr. Ross, I presume. How absolutely marvelous to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  He shook Ross’s hand quickly and delicately, as if he were shaking out a match.

  “The professor will be most glad to see you,” Jackman said. He turned to Tex. “He’s been in such a state all day. Impossible. Absolutely impossible.”

  Jackman took Ross by the elbow and steered him toward the door. “But now that you’re here, things will be delightful. You’ll like the professor; he’s such a dear at bottom. You’ll enjoy talking to him.”

  He started to open the door for Ross, then stopped.

  “I assure you there will be no problem. Just relax—be yourself, you know… and be careful.”

  “Careful?”

  “Yes. Don’t lie. The professor hates that.”

  Ross nodded.

  “Really. Bad for his heart. He gets positively apoplectic, I assure you. Do bear that in mind.”

  The door was opened.

  Ross was pushed through.

  The door was closed.

  Ross found himself in a long, low room carpeted in blue. It was filled with chest-high tables, slanted, like architects’ drawing boards. Along one wall was a shelf of books; otherwise, the room was empty, except for a solitary figure working over one table at the far end of the room. The man was fat and chalky pale; he wore a blue serge suit and a tie which, Ross noticed, had a naked woman painted on it.

  “Well, well,” said the man, looking up at Ross. “Well, well.”

  He looked down at his papers on the drawing board, sighed, and pushed them aside.

  “How nice of you to come,” he said. “I take it you’re Dr. Ross.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re younger than I expected. I anticipated that you would be thirty-four, five-feet eleven-inches tall, and weigh one hundred seventy-four pounds. You don’t.”

  “No,” Ross said.

  “Hmmm,” the professor said. He walked to another board and shuffled among the papers. “I have the figures here someplace. Know Gödel?”

  “Who?”

  “Kurt Gödel. Meddlesome fool. His theorem continues to plague me.”

  “What?”

  “Gödel’s Theorem,” the professor said, sternly. “That damned nuisance.”

  Ross shrugged.

  “It states that certain proofs cannot be proved. Meddlesome, meddlesome. Of course, he’s right. That’s the problem.”

  “I see.”

  He continued to search among the papers, then brought one up. “Ah, here we are. It was simple: regression and probability. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “My, my. And your height?”

  “Six feet.”

  “Weight?”
<
br />   “One eighty.”

  “My, my. Quite unexpected.” He picked up a slide rule, worked it in frowning silence, then wrote down some figures. “What do you know? The odds against your being that height, age, and weight are 14,724 to one.”

  “Sorry,” Ross said.

  The professor shrugged. “These things happen. It’s all accounted for in the equations. Confidence limits are quite broad. Frustrating. One likes to pinpoint things better, but it isn’t always possible. And then there’s the random factor.”

  “The random factor?”

  “Probability of indeterminate events. What we call single event prediction. At least, what I call single event prediction—I invented it. Very low state of understanding, right now, unless you go to tenth-order equations.”

  “I see.”

  “But that’s neither here nor there. We all have our little problems.”

  “Yes.”

  The professor fingered the knot of his tie, making the naked girl move. He sighed.

  “Come and sit down. I’ll tell you what this is all about.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “I’m sure. I’m sure.”

  They went to the back of the room, past the rows of tables. Ross looked at the tables briefly as he passed: the papers were scattered, disorganized, covered with numbers and symbols.

  At the end, there were two chairs and a table. On the table was a map of Spain.

  They sat down.

  “Now then,” the professor said, adjusting his bulk with a little shiver. “Let me tell you about our work. We are incorporated, you see. United Synthesis, Inc.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “We synthesize and predict. Mathematically, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “When the occasion demands it, we also free-lance. But in this particular instance, we have been retained by a client.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Tex, of course.”

  “Tex?” Ross said.

  “Yes,” the professor said. “Tex is a wealthy man, and he has a vested interest in the, uh, object of all this. He is our client: does that surprise you?”

  “Nothing surprises me,” Ross said.

  “Very wise of you,” the professor said. “You see, Tex came to us some weeks ago with an interesting problem which we solved, if I may say so, with characteristic brilliance. As usual, we synthesized—a combination of the topological methods used by Euler on the seven bridges of Königsberg and the three-body problem dealt with so brilliantly by Szebehely. It worked out quite nicely.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It gave us a generalized solution, of course. The specifics only began to fall into place much later.”

  Ross nodded.

  “I can see I’ve lost you,” the professor said. “Not surprised. Let me explain it simply: our problem is one of time and space. There are three elements involved, three groups. The situation is analogous—roughly speaking—to the so-called three-body problem of space navigation, where one must define a position in terms of, say, the earth, the moon, and a rocket. In our case, we are dealing with groups of individuals, and not inanimate objects, but the mathematics remains similar.”

  “Did you say three groups?”

  “Yes. There may be more. We discussed that very question earlier in the day. The possibility of as many as five groups cannot be discounted. But at present, it is unlikely. Occam’s razor.”

  “I see,” Ross said.

  “Well then, the next step in the problem is topological. Topology, as you doubtless know, is the mathematics of shapes. For example, topologists can show that a doughnut and a coffee cup are essentially the same. Both genus 1. You can bend a doughnut into the shape of a coffee cup, that sort of thing. But it can get more complicated”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Indeed. Möbius strips, and Klein bottles, solids with only one surface. That sort of thing. Very tricky.”

  “A solid with only one surface?”

  The professor shrugged. “Why not?”

  Ross nodded. Why not?

  “However, we don’t deal with such abstruse matters. We are working with network theory, started by Euler almost two hundred years ago with the Königsberg bridges. There was a city with a river which divided the land into thirds. There was also an island in the river. The problem was whether you could cross all the bridges, and never recross any.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Euler proved, mathematically, that it was impossible.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “Yes. Particularly when such thinking is applied to this.” He tapped the map of Spain. “This is our problem—the road system of Spain. Quite a different order from seven little bridges. But we’ve managed.”

  “Perhaps you’d better begin from the beginning.”

  “Well,” the professor said, “the beginning was quite simple. Tex came to us. He’d heard about the discovery, and he wanted an analysis.”

  “The discovery?”

  “Yes. In Naples. They found it there, you know.”

  “Oh,” Ross said.

  “Tex told us who had it and asked us to determine what they would do with it. We worked on the problem, but had very little success, until we heard about Stephano Carrini’s death in Barcelona.”

  “Over the heroin.”

  “Heroin? Heavens no. They shot him so he could serve as transport.”

  “Oh.”

  “We keep very careful track of deaths here.” The professor waved to the shelves behind him. “We have a staff of five, upstairs, who read newspapers in every major language. They record all significant deaths, for our analysis. We discovered long ago that death means money. So to speak.”

  “Yes.”

  “So when we found out about Carrini’s death, we knew what was going on. Tex went down to the Costa Brava to keep track of the people—group 2, according to our calculations.”

  “Who is group 1?”

  “We are,” the professor said. “As representatives of Tex.”

  “And the third group?”

  “The count.”

  “Ah. The count.”

  The professor smiled happily. “It all fits together, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Ross said.

  “But now that you understand everything, I’m sure you see why we need your help. We must discover what happened to the body.” He pointed to the map. “We know that the body was taken by hearse from here, in Barcelona, to Lérida, here. That is on the main road to Madrid. At Madrid, the chances are roughly 9,470 to 1 that it would be flown out by plane. Of course, they could go north from Zaragoza to San Sebastián, but that is highly unlikely, as you can see by the odds.”

  He paused and smoothed his tie, caressing the nude. “Now then. From Lérida, the hearse traveled to Bujareloz, a little town halfway to Zaragoza. Through a mix-up, we obtained no confirmation that the hearse reached Zaragoza, but we think it did. In fact, we think it got all the way to Guadalajara, sixty miles from Madrid. We’re awaiting word on that.”

  “And what happened at Guadalajara?”

  “The hearse disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Not actually, of course. But for all practical purposes. We have made a few preliminary calculations and believe that it will be found abandoned here, in Sacedón, south of Guadalajara. The corpse will naturally be gone.”

  “Yes.”

  “It stands to reason. The probabilities work out to about 0.747. That’s only slide-rule accuracy, but it will do for the moment.”

  Ross nodded.

  “For the present, however, we need more information. The principal question involves a determination of which group did the hijacking.”

  “Is there any question?” Ross asked.

  “Certainly there is,” the professor said, with an impatient wave. “We can only rule out group 1, ourselves. Group 2 is possible.”

  “But they arranged
the hearse in the first place.”

  “Precisely. But they are a difficult group, dissident and argumentative. A falling out within the ranks is quite possible: one chance in seventeen.”

  “I see.”

  “Or alternatively, it could have been the work of group 3.”

  “The count.”

  “Precisely. The count. And then, as long shots, we must consider any other groups.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the undertakers who were hired for the transport job. They might have got wind of what was happening.”

  “Possible,” Ross said.

  “Yes, possible. But not likely. One chance in twenty-four thousand. Of course, wars have been won on less …” He sighed. “Mathematics is a cruel taskmaster. But I wander from the main point and the reason for bringing you here. Let me ask you frankly, Dr. Ross. What is your interest in this matter?”

  “My interest?” Ross laughed. “Staying alive, I think.”

  “You have no … vested interest?”

  “No,” Ross said. “As far as I’m concerned, I came to Spain for a vacation, and I got involved in a mess. I was forced to do an autopsy—”

  The professor looked at him sternly. “I trust,” he said, “that you did insert it into the body.”

  “Yes,” Ross said. “Whatever it was.”

  “You don’t know?” The professor cocked an eyebrow.

  “No,” Ross said. “Isn’t that obvious?”

  “You don’t know!”

  The professor leaped up and danced about the room. “You don’t know! You don’t know!”

  He ran down the room and threw open the door. “Jackman! Tex! He doesn’t know!”

  “I told you that,” Tex said.

  “Yes, I know, but … Oh, this is wonderful news!”

  He ran back to Ross and shook his hand warmly.

  “My dear sir, wonderful, wonderful. I can hardly believe my ears.”

  He sat down, his great bulk shaking with excitement. “You must tell me everything. Absolutely everything.”

  Ross looked at him steadily. The room fell into silence. Then Ross said, quite loudly and distinctly, “No.”

  11. The Probability of Death

  THE PROFESSOR ROCKED BACK: “No?”

  “No.”

  “But my dear Doctor, how can you say that?”

  “Very easily,” Ross said. “I open my mouth, move my tongue, and phonate in such a way as to—”