Eric sat finishing his breakfast, listening to two men in the next booth arguing politics. The bearded man in the green sweater had decided that socialism was morally degenerate. The belief structure came first, determining what was acceptable as fact. Whatever accorded with it became a self-evident truth; anything in conflict was rejected as propaganda or typical of uninformed media. Finally, the white-haired man with him said, “I can’t talk to you. You won’t entertain any possibility that you might be mistaken. If it’s not even conceivable, then there isn’t anything to discuss.”
After a few seconds of silence the other conceded grudgingly, “Well, theoretically I could be, I guess. . . .” Then rallied quickly. “But that still doesn’t alter the fact that . . .”
But the one who’d asked the question had created a chink. Now he could start probing it with wedges.
He faced the same problem, Eric thought to himself. It was a lonely business, waiting for one of Kuhn’s paradigms to shift. The collective of the physics orthodoxy were literally incapable of seeing a fact that went against what in their minds had taken on the quality of self-evident truth. Hence, the very notion of questioning it was unthinkable. Eric had been through the routine many times, heard all the objections. Here, however, was an approach that he hadn’t tried before.
“Is it possible that you might be wrong?” So disarmingly simple. Perhaps this time he would preface his talk with an appeal along those lines. Who could refuse to grant a modicum of open-mindedness in response to something like that?
He finished his meal, paid the check, and left, mentally composing various opening lines as he walked back to where he had parked the Jaguar.
They had found an index under Heber’s name that contained references to various files and records. This looked more like it. Michelle studied the entries on the latest page that Kevin had routed through to her screen. “Now I need to check something back in the index,” she told him. Just then, the display lost synchronism and broke up into streaky bands scrolling vertically. “Wait a minute, I’ve lost the picture here,” she said. “What do I do now?”
“Hang on. I’ll be there in a moment.”
A few seconds later, the mec that Corfe had left on the console with Michelle moved a couple of inches and looked up at the controls beneath the screen. “Third knob from the left,” Kevin’s voice said in her headset. Michelle turned it. The scrolling slowed, then reversed. She turned the knob back a fraction, and the screen stabilized. There was still some residual judder. “Now try turning one next to it to the right a little,” Kevin said.
A clack sounded from the rear door as the catch was released from the outside. Michelle turned her head as the door opened, expecting to see Corfe. But the man standing there in the dark raincoat was somebody she had never seen before: lean and muscular, dark hair slicked back above a sallow, unsmiling face. Two others were with him, one of them pocketing what looked like a phone. The one at the door jerked his head curtly. “Okay, it’s over. Get out.”
Michelle summoned as much semblance of outrage as she was capable of, given her surprise and the sudden shock. “What the hell? . . . Who are you? What do you think you’re doing? Get out of here!”
The man sighed and produced a gun. Michelle stared at it disbelievingly. It took her several seconds to accept that this was really happening. “No, I don’t think you understand,” he said. “Either you come out the sensible way, or get pulled out with a hole in your leg. It’s your choice. Don’t touch anything in there.” The tone and look on his face said that he meant it.
Michelle experienced a confused numbness. She got up and climbed shakily out of the van. The two men who had been standing back moved in on either side and seized her arms. A black Lincoln was blocking the back of the van. Another two men, she saw, had been positioned outside the doors at the front. Before anyone could say any more, a beige Cadillac came into the parking lot and pulled up behind the Lincoln. A short man with a mustache, wearing a camel-hair overcoat and black Tyrolean hat, climbed out and came forward.