The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [51]
She swallowed the intended reference to driven snow, cursing at the necessity of censoring her private thoughts.
The elevator had arrived at the door of the outer office by the time Goldfarb had ushered them out of his little empire. Goldfarb didn’t actually push them into it, but the little man’s hands were fluttering with ill-restrained impatience. “I do hope you find Professor Miller before any harm comes to him,” he said anxiously. “A terrible thing—and Edgar Burdillon hurt! Terrible! A man held in the greatest respect throughout our organization, I can assure you.”
“Did Miller mention Burdillon when he came to see you?” Smith asked, pausing on the threshold of the elevator.
“No,” said Goldfarb. “At least, I don’t think—”
The bespectacled man was still in mid-sentence when the door slid shut and the elevator slid sideways toward its shaft.
A universal transformer might be as useful to researchers in the longevity field as any other, Lisa thought as they descended. Was it possible that Morgan had been talking about the main line of his research, albeit from a slightly odd angle? The transformer he never found might have been even more useful to people determined to give humankind a hefty shove up the evolutionary ladder. If Morgan had been talking to Goldfarb about his own Holy Grail, and someone misunderstood…. Maybe he’d recently seen some results obtained by one of the researchers sponsored by Ahasuerus that connected in a nonobvious way with what he’d been doing for the last forty years—something that made him see some of his former results in a new light. Maybe his old hopefulness had been stirred up again.
She abandoned the train of thought when she noticed that Peter Grimmett Smith was frowning. His mind was still on Chan Kwai Keung, and Chan’s insistence on speaking to Lisa. All the suspicions Smith had generously set aside in order to make use of her expertise had obviously been reawakened. He looked like a man who was wondering whether he might have made a serious mistake. Given his age, he must be in the same position relative to compulsory retirement that Lisa was, and he probably had an equally thin margin for error,
Lisa wished that she’d had more sleep and that she didn’t feel so ragged. Despite the smartish dressing, her right arm had begun to ache all the way from the elbow to the palm of her hand.
Fortunately, Smith still remembered the code when the elevator reached its destination on the ground floor. The teenage receptionist hardly glanced at them as they crossed the lobby to the other elevator; she was busy with her computer, making a great show of concern, although the dullness of her blue eyes gave the lie to her performance.
“Do you think he was lying?” Lisa asked Smith, hoping to distract his attention from more embarrassing possibilities. “Goldfarb, I mean.”
“Difficult to say,” Smith replied, catching his lower lip with his teeth as he put on a show of bringing the question into focus. “The trouble with organizations like Ahasuerus is that they’re a law unto themselves. They think they’re above petty national concerns. If Miller had given them something they considered valuable, I’m not at all sure that they’d tell us what it was just because the poor devil has been kidnapped. They’d be more likely to hire some fancy mercenary group to go after the kidnappers for them—but we’ve had no indication yet of any such move, and even if Ahasuerus’s private enclave of the net is as secure as Goldfarb thinks it is, there isn’t a mercenary outfit in these parts whose communications are any more solid than a sieve.”
“And if he isn’t telling the truth,” Lisa said, “why make up such a peculiar story? Why take the trouble to tell us that whatever Morgan wanted to give him, it’s forty years out of date? And why throw in all those impressions? It’s not the kind of smoke screen I’d have—”
She broke off as the elevator