Mercy 6

Covey had a sign-up pad pinned to the door’s bulletin board.

The cork surface appeared quaint, filled with postcards from various collecting posts. A bumper sticker in the lower left corner: “Matter Sizes.”

Mendenhall signed in, startled to find that the pen and pad were digital, her signature and time no doubt forwarded to Covey— wherever he was. She wandered back toward the elevator, that student she once was, frustrated because professors never kept their office hours, always had something else more important to do, to ponder.

A student in a hoodie slipped out of the elevator, headed away from Mendenhall. She couldn’t tell if the figure, flinty inside loose clothes, was a man or woman, the hood pulled down by hands jammed into the kangaroo pocket. Earbud wires, one green, one red, looped and flopped atop each shoulder.

“Excuse me,” Mendenhall called. She was going to ask about Covey, how maybe to find him. The figure continued walking straight away, not hearing or not caring. In the ER she would have released the hounds. Here she was just that student again, insecure, lost, second-guessing every decision in her life, certainly whatever set of them had brought her to this hall.

She realized one thing, then the other, one in the focal point, the other peripheral. The person ahead of her moved in a familiar manner, a reminding tilt in the walk and carriage. And the woman in the tailored lab coat was Covey. She moved, as usual, to the peripheral.

Jude Covey.

Mendenhall returned to the doorway. The woman with the pencil ignored her, tap-counted three more gels. Mendenhall leaned against the jamb.

“You’re Jude Covey. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Covey paused and considered her. “You figure it out. Or you don’t.”

“I knew someone who always said that.”

“Knew or still know? It’s a big thing to stop knowing somebody.”

“Know. Still know. My mentor.”

“Did he — or she — show you how to dress?” Covey looked her over again. “Your soulmate is two floors up, by the way.”

“We met.”

“Schrader. How long before he hit on you?”

“I escaped the elevator just in time.”

Covey squinted, drew the eraser along Mendenhall’s striped sleeve. “You two might hit it off.”

Mendenhall removed the ball cap, shook her hair. “I’m Dr.

Mendenhall. I’m from the ER at Mercy General.” She let this register.

“You figure it out. Or you don’t.”

Covey’s other lab was in a basement. Part storage room, it held dozens of mechanical microscopes, aligned neatly enough to make them appear alive, stabled. A cement lab table fitted with unconnected plumbing and capped Bunsen burners was covered with five bowls, as big as birdbaths. On closer inspection Mendenhall saw that they were glass-lined — empty collecting pools for Covey’s research. Each pool was labeled with its point of origin: Oslo, Reykjavik, Melbourne, Las Vegas, Jakarta. Three had at least one pit mark; two had several. The pit marks ran in a straight line, or close to it.

The desk area Covey had fashioned in the center of the room had nothing quaint about it. The table was titanium with built-in power supplies. The PC had two large side-by-side screens, with one laptop on either side. A green exercise ball made for a movable seat.

Covey eased herself onto it, bounced a little, straightened her back. The pleated tails of her lab coat draped over the back of the ball. Mendenhall thought of the black cocktail dress hanging in her locker back at Mercy, the one she kept for overlooked fund-raisers and retirement parties.

“Have you scanned those pit marks?”

Covey answered by filling the two main screens with side and overview resonance images, or whatever was the astrochemist equivalent. They were not pit marks. Instead they were drop formations, tiny fountains in freeze-frame, liquid heaved up, a single ripple.

“Why are they like that?”

“The glass is very soft — the softest we can make. Almost water.”

“Do all the particles do this?”

“Only one in two hundred seventy-five million. The others remain suspended in the water.”

“Where are those particles?” Mendenhall nodded to the images.

“The ones that do that.”

Covey shrugged. The ball bounced. “Somewhere in the mantle.”

“The Earth’s mantle?”

“Yes. That huge green mass of perodite.”

“They make it that far in?”

“They’re heading somewhere else. We’re just an acceleration, a vector that helps form a crush line.”

Mendenhall felt her own earlobes, forgetting. “What is a crush line?”

Covey answered this by putting up a stop-action version of a line of objects hitting Jupiter as it spun. “This is the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy impact. The comet was crushed by the sun and Jupiter’s gravity; then the resultant smaller masses were pulled into a line. Twenty-one visible objects. Probably millions of microparticles. All in a line, under a sewing machine.”

Mendenhall bit her lip, almost cringed.

“I gave up that fight long ago,” Covey said. “Regular people find metaphors smart. Smart people find them amusing, sexy, even. It’s a skill with a big payoff.”