I wasn’t any good at puzzles.
Then, the footsteps I’d been waiting to hear sounded, the slap of loafers on linoleum.
“Yes?” a voice said. It was Flemming.
I put on my happiest radio voice. “Hi! Is this where we sign up for tours of the lab?”
The lock clicked and the door opened a crack. Flemming stared back at me with a startled, wide-eyed expression. “You shouldn’t be here.”
He turned away,
leaving the door open. I considered it an invitation and stepped inside.
The place was a mess. I wanted to say like a tornado had struck, but that wasn’t right. The chaos had a settled look to it, as if it had accumulated over time, like sediment through the eons. Flemming must have been the kind of person who organized by piling. Papers, file folders, books, trade journals, clipboards—that was just what I saw on a cursory glance. The stacks crowded the floor around the pair of desks, lurked in corners, and blocked the bookshelves that lined the walls. Three computers, older models, hunched on the desks. If I had expected the gleaming inhumanity of a high-tech, secret government laboratory, I was disappointed. This was more like a faculty office at a poorly funded university department. A second door in the back led to who-knew-where. Probably a collection of coats and umbrellas. It had a frosted window inset into it, but the other side was dark.
The waist-high, high-volume paper shredder lurked against the back wall. Flemming returned to it, and the stack of paper on the table next to it.
“Is everything okay, Doctor?”
“I’m just cleaning up.”
“In case you have to move out, is that what you’re thinking?”
“Maybe.”
“So, no tours of the lab today?” He’d started shredding again, and I had to speak louder to be heard over the noise.
“Ms. Norville, this isn’t a good time.”
“Can I come back tomorrow?”
“No.”
“You don’t have any hapless interns who could show me around?”
“No. There’s only me.”
The scene made me think Flemming wasn’t just afraid of losing his funding; he was already at the end of it.
The computers were on, but the screen savers were running. I wondered if I could casually bump the desk, and get an image to flash on-screen, maybe a word-processing file with a title across the top saying, “Here’s What’s Really Going on in Flemming’s Lab.”
I took slow steps, craning my neck to read the papers on the tops of various stacks. There were graphs, charts, statistics, and articles with titles containing long, Latinate words. Without sitting down and plowing through the documents, I wasn’t going to get anything out of the mess.
I really wanted to take a look at what he was shredding.
He was keeping an eye on me, watching me over his shoulder while continuing to feed pages into the shredder.
“So, um, do you think the committee would want to take a look at what you’re destroying there?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your concern.”
“Then I guess if I asked you straight up what the real purpose of your research is, you wouldn’t be inclined to tell me?”
“Do you treat everyone like they’re on your show?”
I hadn’t really thought of it like that, but he had a point. I shrugged noncommittally.
“I’ve told you a dozen times, and I’ve told the committee: I’m doing pure science here, information-gathering research, nothing more.”