The Measures Between Us by Ethan Hauser Page B

to tamper with the instruments.
    â€œWhy would he have that stuff in the middle of the woods?” Jack asked Cynthia once they knew what they had stumbled across.
    â€œMy mom says he’s studying artificial intelligence,” Cynthia said.
    â€œIn the forest? I thought that stuff was all done with computers. I thought it was like the opposite of nature.”
    â€œI’m not sure of the details. She says the ones here are just a fraction of them, actually.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œHe has them all over the world—the rain forest, the Arctic, some desert in Chile.”
    It was late at night, and they were on the phone. They frequently spoke after their parents had gone to bed, marathon conversations that could stretch to two hours and more. Slowly their town was falling asleep around them. The lights in the houses were going dark, murmuring good night.
    â€œShe says the point is to get data on as many animals as possible, especially ones we don’t usually see,” Cynthia said. “Then he feeds it into computers and at some point it’ll add up to something.”
    â€œHow does she know all that?” Jack said.
    â€œShe reads all the articles about him. He’s been here a while, you know. He was here when we were kids—we just didn’t hear about him.”
    â€œI know,” said Jack, recalling some of the rumors about him. “I just thought he was a secretive old hermit.”
    â€œHe is,” Cynthia said, “but things seep out. You can’t hide forever. Not with all that money and all those ideas.”
    â€œHe must have so much information about things,” Jack said.

Chapter Five
    Jack heard the noise before anything was visible, a faint sound that built steadily. Cynthia always located the source before he did, as if she were an animal with ultrasensitive hearing. Soon the helicopter appeared, and initially it was no bigger than a bird, one more distant speck against cloud and sun. In the space of a few minutes it grew larger as it approached the landing pad. Its arrival flushed birds from the trees, their branches bending and twisting with the wind it swirled up. Finally, just before the copter landed, the grass bowed down.
    Frank Kingman lived on a 250-acre estate just outside of town. Two decades earlier he had been working in Boston, at MIT, and had invented a way of storing huge amounts of information on microchips, technology that he sold to a computer company for a fortune. With his windfall, he had bought the acreage and built a house on it, rumored to have twenty-five rooms. No one knew much about him or his property; thick stands of trees hid it from view, and every foot of the perimeter was fenced. He refused to give interviews to reporters, and in the vacuum of knowledge, the stories about what he did in his compound multiplied. Some people thought there was a robotics lab in a bunker underground. Others theorized that he was doing cutting-edgemedical research, self-funded so he wouldn’t have to abide by the FDA and other agencies. When he was once spotted at a local store with a cartful of light bulbs, the hypothesis was that he was working on alternative forms of electricity.
    One corner of his property was anchored by a heliport, and Jack and Cynthia liked to go there and watch him fly in. The helicopter looked like a giant bug, all bubble eye and long tail, the body far more delicate than its viciously turning blades. The first few times they went, they never made it close enough to see the chopper land. Security guards in shiny black pickups sprang from hidden roads in the woods and forced Jack to stop the car. “Private property,” they barked. “You’re trespassing.” Jack didn’t quite believe Kingman’s property line extended out to where they halted him, but the guards were big and imposing, and it seemed unwise to argue with them.
    After a few weeks of getting caught, Cynthia figured out