Superposition by David Walton Page A

carts used for VIP tours or maintenance runs. The whole thirty-mile track had to be checked regularly for cracking concrete, for rats or other animals that might chew on the cables, for signs of shifts in the bedrock that might cause problems, or any other potential problems with the machinery. We took one of the golf carts and headed out.
    CATHIE was the Controlled Acceleration and Temperature Heavy Ion Experiment, a brainchild of Brian’s and mine when I was still working at the NJSC, but one that had never been fully funded. We had pushed it far enough that an underground bunker along the path of the collider ring had been dug to house it, but the project had been scuttled in favor of an experiment controlled by another colleague who was poor at experimentation but gifted at playing the game of politics. It had been the beginning of the end for me, to see our financing and most of our equipment taken away. The bunker had remained a concrete shell, emptied of its scientific apparatus, but Brian’s letter suggested there was something there he had wanted me to see.
    Fifteen minutes later, we reached it and parked the golf cart. The door into the bunker was closed and had a warning sign indicating it was not in use, but I tried the handle and the door opened. There was a bad smell, but it wasn’t strong, and the implications didn’t dawn on me at first. Inside, we saw half a dozen card tables stacked with scientific equipment and strewn with paper cups and food wrappers. Black and blue cables snaked across the floor and tangled around the table legs. Instead of overhead fluorescents, the room was lit by a half-dozen yard-sale lamps. Was this an approved project? It didn’t look like it. There were thousands of dollars’ worth of instruments here, though; I had no idea how Brian could have purchased or stolen this much. He must have used the maintenance elevator access from the pine forest above to get it all down here secretly.
    This was not the CATHIE experiment. As collider experiments go, CATHIE was a small one, but it would still have involved dozens of collaborating scientists and months of installation of a set of barrel-shaped detectors around a section of the ring. In fact, none of the instruments here was connected to the accelerator at all that I could see, except that Brian had tapped into the ring’s power lines. He had been using this underground bunker, not for its proximity to the accelerator, but because of its secrecy. What he was studying was something else entirely.
    It wasn’t until I walked around one of the card tables that I saw him. He was lying on the concrete floor in a dark puddle, one leg crumpled under him at an odd angle, his chest a bloody ruin. It was Brian Vanderhall.

CHAPTER 8
    DOWN-SPIN
    Judge Roswell called a short recess, after which Haviland continued his questioning of Officer Brittany Lin. Lin gazed straight at him with a confident expression as she answered, only occasionally looking to the jury when clarifying a word or technical term. She was a well-rehearsed and experienced witness.
    â€œIn the course of your investigation of the underground bunker, did you check for fingerprints?” Haviland asked.
    â€œYes, I did.”
    â€œCan you share with us your findings?”
    â€œYes. Aside from those fingerprints that matched the victim, there were fingerprints found on a pair of microscopes and on a length of steel pipe. One of the microscopes had been badly damaged, possibly by being struck with the pipe.”
    â€œAnd were these fingerprints matched to a person?”
    â€œYes. They were Jacob Kelley’s.”
    â€œCould the fingerprints have been left from some previous visit that Mr. Kelley made to the bunker, sometime before the murder?”
    â€œYes, theoretically they could have, but given their clarity, it is unlikely they were there for many days. Also, the fingerprint evidence is consistent with other indicators we have