Timeline - Michael Crichton [8]
He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “No,” he said. “You did the right thing. We saved the old guy’s life.”
His wife smiled.
He drove out of the parking lot, and headed for the highway.
In the hospital, the old man slept, his face partly covered by an oxygen mask. He was calm now; she’d given him a light sedative, and he was relaxed, his breathing easy. Beverly Tsosie stood at the foot of the bed, reviewing the case with Joe Nieto, a Mescalero Apache who was a skilled internist, and a very good diagnostician. “White male, ballpark seventy years old. Comes in confused, obtunded, disoriented times three. Mild congestive heart failure, slightly elevated liver enzymes, otherwise nothing.”
“And they didn’t hit him with the car?”
“Apparently not. But it’s funny. They say they found him wandering around north of Corazón Canyon. There’s nothing there for ten miles in any direction.”
“So?”
“This guy’s got no signs of exposure, Joe. No dehydration, no ketosis. He isn’t even sunburned.”
“You think somebody dumped him? Got tired of grandpa grabbing the remote?”
“Yeah. That’s my guess.”
“And what about his fingers?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He has some kind of circulatory problem. His fingertips are cold, turning purple, they could even go gangrenous. Whatever it is, it’s gotten worse since he’s been in the hospital.”
“He diabetic?”
“No.”
“Raynaud’s?”
“No.”
Nieto went over to the bedside, looked at the fingers. “Only the tips are involved. All the damage is distal.”
“Right,” she said. “If he wasn’t found in the desert, I’d call that frostbite.”
“You check him for heavy metals, Bev? Because this could be toxic exposure to heavy metals. Cadmium, or arsenic. That would explain the fingers, and also his dementia.”
“I drew the samples. But heavy metals go to UNH in Albuquerque. I won’t have the report back for seventy-two hours.”
“You have any ID, medical history, anything?”
“Nothing. We put a missing persons out on him, and we transmitted his fingerprints to Washington for a database check, but that could take a week.”
Nieto nodded. “And when he was agitated, babbling? What’d he say?”
“It was all rhymes, the same things over. Something about Gordon and Stanley. And then he would say, ‘Quondam phone makes me roam.’”
“Quondam? Isn’t that Latin?”
She shrugged. “It’s a long time since I was in church.”
“I think quondam is a word in Latin,” Nieto said.
And then they heard a voice say, “Excuse me?” It was the bespectacled kid in the bed across the hall, sitting with his mother.
“We’re still waiting for the surgeon to come in, Kevin,” Beverly said to him. “Then we can set your arm.”
“He wasn’t saying ‘quondam phone,’” the kid said. “He was saying ‘quantum foam.’”
“What?”
“Quantum foam. He was saying ‘quantum foam.’”
They went over to him. Nieto seemed amused. “And what, exactly, is quantum foam?”
The kid looked at them earnestly, blinking behind his glasses. “At very small, subatomic dimensions, the structure of space-time is irregular. It’s not smooth, it’s sort of bubbly and foamy. And because it’s way down at the quantum level, it’s called quantum foam.”
“How old are you?” Nieto said.
“Eleven.”
His mother said, “He reads a lot. His father’s at Los Alamos.”
Nieto nodded. “And what’s the point of this quantum foam, Kevin?”
“There isn’t any point,” the kid said. “It’s just how the universe is, at the subatomic level.”
“Why would this old guy be talking about it?”
“Because he’s a well-known physicist,” Wauneka said, coming toward them. He glanced at a sheet of paper in his hand. “It just came in on the M.P.D. Joseph A. Traub, seventy-one years old, materials physicist. Specialist in superconducting metals. Reported missing by his employer, ITC Research in Black Rock, around noon today.”
“Black Rock? That’s way over near Sandia.” It was several hours away, in central New Mexico. “How the hell did this guy get to Corazón Canyon in Arizona?”
“I don’t know,” Beverly said. “But he’s—”
The alarms began to sound.
:
It happened with a swiftness that stunned Jimmy Wauneka.