* * *

  Jeff had asked the doctor who first saw Frank Lazenby's body a direct question: "How far could a man in that condition walk?"

  Obtaining a direct answer was not so easy. Dr. Kellogg had hemmed and hawed. "We are not sure of the cause of death --although the appearance of the body is certainly suggestive. Also, there are few medical records of such cases."

  "Doctor, I'm not asking you a question under oath in a court of law. I'm just asking for the best ballpark figure you can pull off the top of your head."

  "We-e-e-ll. My guess is that damage to and rapid deterioration of the body's balance centers would induce acute vestibulitis, and that would limit mobility. In other words, he'd fall over and after that be too disoriented even to crawl."

  "How far?"

  "Mm. Maybe three hundred meters? But it could well be only a hundred meters, or as much as a kilometer or more...."

  It was vague, but it was the best that Jeff was going to get. He towed the electric runabout behind one of the lab's jeeps until he was a kilometer south of where Lazenby's body had been discovered. If Kellogg were correct, and Lazenby had in fact staggered north as the body position suggested, then Jeff was still seven hundred meters away from ground zero, the place where something inexplicable and deadly had hit Frank Lazenby.

  Jeff unhitched the runabout. The first thing he did was check the reading of the radiation monitor. It showed a value thirty times as high as Wally Bronsteed had reported, early in the morning. Nowhere near dangerous, but enough to make Jeff feel uncomfortable.

  Lassandra had told him he might find rapid variations in recorded dose. "Most of the original sources of radioactivity register as point sources, meaning something specific happened, like an unauthorized drop-off of cooling liquids or spent fuel rods. Over the years, weather and wind and run-off diffuse the source over larger areas. But you can still expect hot spots."

  Maybe Jeff was close to one of those hot spots now. He headed the runabout north. The instrument that Lassandra Kane had placed in the space behind the driver's seat measured total radiation dose and GPS

  location every thirty seconds. It showed the value on a remote display fixed on the dashboard. It also made a complete digital record that could be analyzed within the framework of a Geographic Information System like the one that Lassandra Kane had shown Jeff.

  Jeff crept north, keeping the runabout to a slow walking speed. He examined the ground ahead, seeking any oddity or any sign of a manmade object. He saw neither, and there was so little vegetation that anything as big as a beer can would not be missed. The display of the radiation dose dropped steadily. After eight hundred meters it read a flat zero. Jeff halted the car to make sure that everything was still hooked up. It was. He kept driving. The measured dose gradually crept higher. When the car reached the place where Lazenby had been found, the value was exactly the same as that noted by Wally Bronsteed. Apparently the onboard device was working.

  Jeff halted the car and walked all around the body's location. As he made a slow spiral outward, heat came up at him from the ground in waves and he could feel sweat trickling down his forehead. There was nothing to be seen, nothing odd or even mildly interesting within forty meters of the marked point where the body had been discovered. Lazenby had died here, but the cause of his death was farther away --maybe as much as a kilometer away. Suppose that he had turned as he fell, and had actually been staggering not from the south, but from some other direction?

  Jeff climbed back into the runabout and drove a larger version of the pattern that he had already walked, a slow outward spiral. He saw nothing. He heard nothing but the whir of the car's electric motor and the regular click, every thirty seconds, that indicated a radiation measurement was being made and its position recorded.

  The temperature inside the runabout mounted. Jeff doggedly went on, driving and looking, until a different factor became important. He had gone round and round, until he was almost a kilometer from where the body had been found. In doing so he had covered close to twenty kilometers and the electric power was depleted to a point where the car was moving more slowly. He had to get back to the jeep, or be forced to abandon the runabout and go home without it.

  The power lasted --just. The final two hundred meters to the jeep were at a stately two miles an hour. As Jeff bent over to connect the tow, he felt dizzy from heat, fatigue, and hunger. All he had eaten since breakfast was junk food grabbed from vending machines. On the other hand, he had drunk three times his daily allowance of coffee. His heart was jumping and skipping like a lamb in the springtime. Just like the old days. Missing meals, or loading in empty calories.

  When he climbed into the jeep for the trip back south, he glanced at the clock. Almost five-fifteen. On a normal day that was quitting time. He should be going home to a plain meal, his one-a-day permitted alcoholic drink, and a quiet evening watching television or a movie.

  Jeff started the engine. There must be something seriously wrong with him. In spite of the heat, in spite of the exhaustion, in spite of the tension and the knowledge that he had just wasted two hours driving round and round in order to discover nothing, he had enjoyed today so much more than a "normal day" that the difference couldn't be measured.

  * * *

  As Jeff parked the jeep outside the Waste Management Complex where Lassandra Kane should be waiting for him, he had a disturbing thought. His cell phone had not rung all day, while normally he had at least a dozen calls. That had to be as a result of instructions to others from Tom Markin. The head of security was deliberately isolating Jeff, making sure that he could point to a single point of responsibility -and blame --in the investigation of Frank Lazenby's death. Jeff unhooked the recording unit and hauled it inside. Lassandra Kane's estimate of its weight had been optimistic. It felt as if he was carrying an eighty-pound bag of concrete mix. There was no way he could have wandered the hills and valleys of the test site with that thing on his back. Not that its absence would have done any harm. It hadn't told him anything.

  He banged on the door of Lassandra Kane's office with his elbow, pushed through without waiting, and staggered on to drop the recorder on the nearest available surface, which happened to be a conference table.

  She was on the telephone, listening but not talking. She raised her eyebrows at him. He shook his head. "Nothing useful. Not a thing."

  She shrugged, pointed at a plate of cookies and a coffee pot, and waved him to a chair. More caffeine and more sugar. Well, why not? He was going to be fully alert until the very moment he dropped dead.

  Lassandra finally hung up the phone and came to stand next to Jeff. "Things are moving faster than I thought. That was word coming down that the Washington troop and the FBI roll in first thing in the morning, so we have to be ready for them. What happened with you?"

  "I roamed the range. I covered a lot of empty real estate. I sweated a lot. That's about it."

  "Did you receive information from anyone else in security? Maybe somebody else is making progress or having ideas."

  "If they are, nobody is telling me. I think I'm being kept in a box deliberately." Jeff mentioned his suspicions of Tom Markin's actions and motive. "Or am I being paranoid?"

  "I don't think so. I've heard bad things about Markin. He was here twenty-five years ago and in those days he was an open racist. Now he's just gone underground with his opinions." Lassandra went to the end of the conference table and stared down at the recorder that Jeff had dropped there. "This worked all right, did it?"

  "So far as I could tell. There was a point early on when the radiation reading dropped to zero. It came back up later. But to be honest with you, I wasn't taking too much notice of the values. I was too busy looking for visual evidence. Which I didn't find."

  "A _zero _radiation reading?" She had homed in on the one word.

  "That's what it said. I guess that's the opposite of a hot spot."

  "I think I'd better take a look." Lassandra lifted the recorder --easily; Jeff decided that she was much stronger than she looked --and carried it across to the computer on her desk. She went on, "One of the ridiculous things about environmental nuts is that they try to require nuclear waste clean-up to the point of zero radioactivity." She was making connections between the recorder and the computer. "But there's natural radioactivity _everywhere. _Zero radioactivity isn't natural; it's positively_ unnatural_."

  She touched a key, and a "Hot Synch" message appeared on the computer screen. "There. We're doing a file transfer, and then I'll use your GPS readings to put all today's radiation measurements into a geographic format. Takes a minute or two."

  She turned away from the computer. "By the way, are you still backing Glenn Schaefer as the person who killed Frank Lazenby?"

  "I've seen nothing to make me change my mind."

  "Maybe this will. After you left, he came to see me in my office. He told me that Frank's death had disturbed him profoundly, and confirmed the feeling he has had for a long time that he ought to be in a different kind of work. He is considering resigning from the lab, and going off to teach high-school physics. What do you make of that?"

  "When murder is involved, you can run but you can't hide. But if you mean, is it evidence, then it isn't. It would make more sense as a motive if Schaefer _stayed, _because then you could argue that he was after Lazenby's job."

  "They were equals, employed to do the same kind of work. Frank Lazenby was a lot more talented than Glenn Schaefer, but neither one worked for the other."

  "So cross that idea off the list. As I said, even if Schaefer worked for Lazenby his decision to leave argues the wrong way so far as motive is concerned."

  On the computer screen, isolated points of color were popping into view. Associated with each, just below it and to its right, was a number. Lassandra, watching the display, suddenly grunted and moved closer.

  "You're quite right. There's a point with an actual zero recording for radiation dose. And there's another." Jeff stood up to join her. He could discern on the screen the track of his own progress on the ground, a wobbly outward spiral of dose readings. He hadn't realized there had been so many; two and a half hours of driving produced close to three hundred data points.

  At his side, Lassandra breathed, "Well, isn't that the damnedest." He stared at the values, and saw nothing significant.

  "What?"

  "Just a minute, and you'll see." Lassandra was over at the computer. "I've got a routine here, takes a two-dimensional array of values, performs interpolations, and plots isograms --in this case, the program plots curves where the measured radiation dose is a particular value. Take a look at this." The scattered points of the readings Jeff had made during his excursion on the electric runabout were still there, but overlaid on them he now saw a number of closed curves. They nowhere intersected, and they formed an almost perfect set of concentric circles.

  "Here's where Frank Lazenby's body was found." Lassandra used the mouse and a cursor moved to midway between the center and the top of the screen. "If he walked north, as you think, and as far as Dr. Kellogg thinks, then whatever happened to him would have happened just about _here_." The cursor moved, until it was close to the center of the set of concentric circles.

  "Now look at the measured radiation values. Zero at the center, zero everywhere until about here --the scale bar says that represents about two hundred meters on the ground. And then the numbers gradually increase. By the time we're a kilometer out --as far as you went --the values are typical of what I would expect in that region of the test site. And Frank Lazenby died of a massive radiation overdose, but his body showed no residual secondary radiation."

  Jeff could follow the pattern on the screen. That was clear enough. But nothing else was clear. He said, "I see the lines. But what do they mean?"

  "I think they mean --I think they mean I have to think."

  Lassandra sat down, placed her elbows on the conference table, and covered her eyes with her hands. Jeff knew when to keep quiet. He waited, until at last she sighed, laid her hands on the table, and said, "I think I understand what killed Frank Lazenby. But I don't know why."

  "You're ahead of me, Dr. Kane. Let's start with how."

  "He was killed with his own invention. Remember how I told you that the problem with radioactive waste materials would be solved, if you could make every decay in the chain happen in seconds or minutes instead of some of them taking thousands of years? Frank solved the problem. The trick is to _stimulate _the decays to take place, using a nuclear laser. You force the nucleus to descend to a lower energy level, in just the same way as an ordinary laser makes electrons drop all at once to lower energies. The process has been understood since 1917, when Einstein published the basic paper on stimulated emission. Of course, the machine you need will be very complicated and have many different operating energies, because there are many different steps in the nuclear decay ladder." Jeff thought that he understood. He said, very slowly, "So he had a way of solving the nuclear waste problem. But he didn't want to talk about it until he had proved it worked. I can understand that. I still don't see why he died. Wouldn't what he built_ get rid_ of radioactivity, not make it worse?"

  "What it would do --what it did --is make the stored particles and radiation that would normally be released naturally over a period of thousands of years come out _all at once,_ in one huge flood. Anyone close by would be hit with enough radiative energy and particles to be killed almost instantly. But after that happened, if the machine was still operating it would then get rid of all the _induced _radioactivity in the body. As it did in Frank Lazenby's case. And of course, there would be no radioactivity at all in the ground nearby --as you found."

  "Dr. Kane, Lazenby must have known that what he had could be dangerous. He wouldn't have tested his machine when he was standing next right to it."

  "He didn't intend to. My guess is that he set the machine to operate with a timer. He planned to go out onto the test range at night, when no one was around, with the timer set so that he could observe what happened from a safe distance. Afterward, when he knew it was safe, he would come back and collect his machine and make his measurements. He thought he was doing all his work in secret; but somebody else had been following his progress."

  "Glenn Schaefer."

  "Maybe. Whoever it was tampered with the timer in the lab, so that the machine operated when Frank was standing right by it. The other person probably followed Frank out to the testing place in an electric runabout --they are very silent. He watched to make sure that Frank would die, then loaded the runabout onto the van that Frank had been driving and came back with that and Frank's invention."

  "What would he do with it?"

  Lassandra shrugged. "Hide it. Study it. Then, once he was sure he knew how to build another, he would dismantle it. He would want to leave no evidence of what Frank Lazenby had been doing. But _why _would he have killed? Glenn Schaefer didn't have any reason to hate Frank Lazenby."

  "He didn't hate him." Jeff was back on his own ground. "But he had a hell of a good reason to want him dead. Suppose you have a machine that can be driven across an area and get rid of excess radioactivity as it goes. How much would it be worth?"

  "Priceless. The cost of nuclear remediation for all the sites in this country alone is estimated to be in the trillions of dollars."

  "Of which Frank Lazenby would have received nothing. He would have given the secret away, gladly. In any case, you told me that the patent rights for work done here all belong to the government. But if somebody _didn't _work for the government --say, somebody was teaching high school --then after a period of time he would be free to patent the invention in his own name. He'd become a billionaire. We knew from the beginning that Glenn Schaefer had the _opportunity _to be the killer. Then you told me the _means, _the way that he was able to kill. Now we have the _motive_ --and a damned good one." Jeff had spent most of the day feeling like a half-wit. It was a treat to see Lassandra Kane's jaw hang and her eyes open wide. She said, "My Lord. So it _was _greed, the way you said. But are you sure?" Jeff nodded, for a reason that went beyond rational argument. Since midday he had been running on adrenaline. Now he could sense the level dropping inside him, as it always did when the gut feel was right and a case was wrapped up as far as he could take it. He realized that he was tired, sleepy, and starving. Lassandra was staring at him. "What do we do next?"

  "Write up everything we know or think. I give it to Tom Markin. We'll have the people here from Washington tomorrow, and it will be out of our hands. Finding proof of what we say, or breaking Schaefer, will be up to them."

  She was nodding, but also frowning as though she did not agree. She said abruptly, "Are you hungry?"

  "I could eat a horse."

  "I don't think it's on the menu, but you could ask. I want to take you off base to the Toledo Steak House, and buy you dinner and a drink." And, when Jeff simply stared, "I want to try to talk you into something." She was already moving toward the door, taking his acceptance of the dinner invitation for granted. Jeff followed her, feeling slow, lumbering, and physically and mentally depleted. They were outside, and Jeff was blinking at the big red sun, low in the sky, before he asked, "Talk me into what?" They climbed into her little blue car --at least the seat was cool now --and she drove toward the test site's southern exit. "Talk you into doing things a little differently. I know proper procedure. You're supposed to write up your daily report. It will go to Tom Markin. What do you suppose will happen then?"

  "It will be his report. He'll shunt me to one side, and he'll deal with the Washington people himself."

  "That's consistent with everything I've heard about the man. Suppose the report that you hand in for today says you got nowhere. What then?"

  "I'm not sure. There's a good chance he'll trot me out in front of the Washington group, so he can point me out as the man in charge of the investigation who didn't do a damn thing."

 

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