Kinderman looked down at his tea and shook his head. “It’s no use. You’ll find nothing. It makes my mind cold. Something terrible is laughing at us, Atkins. You’ll find nothing.” He sipped at the tea and then murmured, “Succinylcholine chloride. Just enough.”
“What about the old woman, Lieutenant?”
No one had claimed her as yet. No traces of blood had been found on her clothing.
Kinderman looked at him, suddenly animated. “Do you know about the hunting wasp, Atkins?
No, you don’t. It isn’t known. It isn’t common.
But this wasp is incredible.
A mystery.
To begin with, its lifespan is only two months.
A short time. Never mind, though, as long as it’s healthy.
All right, it comes out of its egg. It’s a baby, it’s cute, a little wasp.
In a month it’s all grown and has eggs of its own.
And now all of a sudden the eggs need food, but a special kind and only one kind : a live insect, Atkins — let’s say a cicada; yes, cicadas would be good.
We’ll say cicadas.
Now the hunting wasp figures this out. Who knows how.
It’s a mystery.
Forget it. Never mind.
But the food must be alive; putrefaction would be fatal to the egg and to the grub, and a live and normal cicada would crush the egg or even eat it.
So the wasp can’t drop a net on a bunch of cicadas and then give them to the eggs and say, ‘Here, eat your dinner.’
You thought life was easy for hunting wasps, Atkins? Just flying and stinging all day, jaunty jolly?
No, it isn’t so easy. Not at all. They have problems.
But if the wasp can just paralyze the cicada, this problem is solved and there’s dinner on the table.
But to do this, it has to figure out exactly where to sting the cicada, which would take total knowledge of cicada anatomy, Atkins — they’re all covered with this armor, these scales — and it has to figure out exactly how much venom to inject, or else our friend the cicada flies away or is dead.
All this medical-surgical knowledge it needs. Don’t feel blue, Atkins.
Really. It’s all okay.
All the hunting wasps everywhere, even as we sit here, they’re all singing ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ and they’re paralyzing insects all over the country.
Isn’t that amazing? How can this be?”
“Well, it’s instinct,” said Atkins, knowing what Kinderman wanted to hear.
Kinderman glared. “Atkins, never say ‘instinct’ and I give you my word, I will never say ‘parameters.’ Can we find a way of living?”
“What about ‘instinctive’?”
“Also verboten. Instinct. What is instinct? Does a name explain? Someone tells you that the sun didn’t rise today in Cuba and you answer, ‘Never mind, today is Sun-Shall-Not-Rise-in-Cuba-Day’? That explains it? Give a label and it’s curtains now for miracles, correct? Let me tell you, I am also not impressed by words like ‘gravity.’
Okay, that’s a whole other tsimmis altogether. In the meantime, the hunting wasp, Atkins. It’s amazing. It’s a part of my theory.”
“Your theory on the case?” Atkins asked him. “I don’t know. It could be. Maybe not. I’m just talking. No, another case, Atkins. Something bigger.”
He gestured globally. “It’s all connected. As regards the old lady, in the meantime…”
His voice trailed away and a distant thunder rumbled faintly. He stared at a window where a light fall of rain was beginning to splatter in hesitant touches. Atkins shifted in his chair.
“The old lady,” breathed Kinderman, his eyes dreamy.
“She is leading us into her mystery, Atkins.
I hesitate to follow her. I do.”
He continued staring inwardly for a time. Then abruptly he crumpled his empty cup and tossed it away. It thudded in the wastebasket near the desk. He stood up.
“Go and visit with your sweetheart, Atkins. Chew bubble gum and drink lemonade. Make fudge.
As for me, I am leaving. Adieu.”
But for a moment he stood there, looking around for something.
“Lieutenant, you’re wearing it,” said Atkins.
Kinderman felt at the brim of his hat. “Yes, I am. This is True. Good point. Well taken.”
Kinderman continued to brood by the desk. “Never trust in the facts,” he wheezed.
“Facts hate us. They stink. They hate men and they hate the truth.”
Abruptly he turned and waddled away. In a moment he was back and ransacking pockets of his coat for books.
“One more thing,” he said to Atkins. The sergeant stood up. “Just a minute.”
Kinderman riffled through the books, and then he murmured, “Aha!” and from the pages of a work by Teilhard de Chardin, he extracted a note that was written on the inside of a Hershey Bar wrapper.
He held it to his chest. “Don’t look,” he said sternly.
“I’m not looking,” said Atkins.
“Well, don’t.”
Kinderman guardedly held the note and began to read: “ ‘Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with feelings, is the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.’ ”
Kinderman breasted the note and looked up. “Who wrote that, Atkins?”
“You.”
“The test for lieutenant is not till next year. Guess again.”
“I don’t know.”
“Charles Darwin,” said Kinderman. “In The Origin of Species.”
And with that, he stuffed the note into his pocket and left.
And again came back.
“Something Else,” he told Atkins.
He stood with his nose an inch away from the sergeant’s, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his coat.
“What does Lucifer mean?”
“Light Bearer.”
“And what is the stuff of the universe?”
“Energy.”
“What is energy’s commonest form?”
“Light.”
“I know.”
And with that, the detective walked away, listing slowly through the squad room and down the stairs. He didn’t come back.
*****
Kinderman absently stirred his cold coffee and shifted his glance around the room as if watching for some eavesdropping secret agent. He leaned his head forward conspiratorially.
“My approach to The World,” he said guardedly, “is as if it were the scene of a crime. You understand?
I am putting together the clues.
In the meantime, I have several ‘Wanted’ posters. You’d be good enough to hang them on the campus? They’re free. Your vow of poverty hangs heavy on your mind; I’m very sensitive to that. There’s no charge.”
“You’re not telling me your theory?”
“I will give you a hint,” said Kinderman. “Clotting.”
Dyer’s eyebrows knit together. “Clotting?”
“When you cut yourself, your blood cannot clot without fourteen separate little operations going on inside your body, and in just a certain order; little platelets and these cute little corpuscles, whatever, going here, going there, doing this, doing that, and in just this certain way, or you wind up looking foolish with your blood pouring out on the pastrami.”
“That’s the hint?”
“Here’s another: the autonomic system. Also, vines can find water from miles away.”
“I’m lost.”
“Stay put, we have picked up your signal.”
Kinderman leaned his face closer to Dyer’s. “Things that supposedly have no consciousness are behaving as if they do.”
“Thank you, Professor Irwin Corey.” Kinderman abruptly sat back and glowered.
“You are the living proof of my thesis. You saw that horror movie called Alien?”
“Yes.”
“Your life story. In the meantime, never mind, I have learned my lesson. Never send Sherpa guides to lead a rock; it will only fall on top of them and give them a headache.”
“But that’s all you’re going to tell me about your theory?” protested Dyer.
He picked up his coffee cup.
“That is all. My final word.”
*****
“What happened?”
“I’m not ready to discuss it at this time. However, I want your opinion on something. This is all academic. Understand?
Just assume these hypothetical facts.
A learned psychiatrist, someone like the Chief of Psychiatry at the hospital, makes a clumsy effort to make me think that he is covering up for a colleague; let’s say a neurologist who is working on the problem of pain.
This happens, in this hypothetical case, when I ask this imaginary psychiatrist if anyone on his staff has a certain eccentricity about his handwriting.
This make-believe psychiatrist looks me in the eye for two or three hours, then he looks away and says ‘no’ very loud.
Also, like a fox, I find there’s friction between them. Maybe not. But I think so.
What do you induce from this nonsense, Atkins?”
“The psychiatrist wants to finger the neurologist, but he doesn’t want to do it openly.”
“Why not?” the detective asked.
“Remember, this man is obstructing justice.”
“He’s guilty of something. He’s involved. But if he’s seemingly covering for someone else, you would never suspect him.”
“He should live so long. But I agree with your opinion.
In the meantime, I have something more important to tell you.
In Beltsville, Maryland, years ago they had this hospital for patients who were dying of cancer. So they gave them big doses of LSD.
Couldn’t Hurt. Am I right?
And it helps The Pain.
Then something funny happens to all of them.
They all have the same experience, no matter what their background or their religion.
They imagine they are going straight down through The Earth and through every kind of Sewage and Filth and Trash.
While they’re doing it, they are these things; they’re The Same.
Then they start to go up and up and up, and suddenly everything is beautiful and they are standing in front of God, who then says to them, ‘Come up here with Me, this isn’t Newark.’
Every one of them had this experience, Atkins.
Well, okay, maybe ninety percent. That’s enough.
But the main thing is one other thing that they said. They said they felt the whole universe was them. They were all one thing, they said; one person.
Isn’t it amazing that all of them would say that?
Also, consider Bell’s Theorem, Atkins : in any two-particle system, say the physicists, changing the spin of one of the particles simultaneously changes the spin of the other, no matter what the distance is between them, no matter if it’s galaxies or light years!”
“Lieutenant?”
“Please be silent when you’re speaking to me! I have something else to tell you.”
The Detective leaned forward with glittering eyes.
“Think about the autonomic system. It does all of these seemingly intelligent things to keep your body functioning and alive. But it hasn’t got intelligence of its own. Your conscious mind is not directing it.
‘So what directs it?’ you ask me. Your unconscious.
Now think of the universe as your body, and of evolution and the hunting wasps as the autonomic system.
What is directing it, Atkins?
Think about that.
And remember the collective unconscious. In the meantime, I cannot sit and chit-chat forever.”
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