by Jonathan T.F. Weisberg

 

The wind must have been howling outside. The crescent of ocean that Tanya could see was froth over a color as dark as shadow. The grasses that were drizzled over the dunes bent and twisted. The few trees she could see nearer the isolation unit whipped free from the pushing hand of the wind from time to time, only to be bent back. But Tanya heard nothing. The large window she was looking through was thick enough to stifle all sound.

She felt a tremor—almost fear—at the hint of isolation, but she quickly suppressed the feeling as inconsistent with her current duty.

She looked down at the detainee. He sat with his hands placed on the table in front of him. His posture was a little tight but not as hunched and scared as most others seemed at this point. His shirt was a thick, monochrome flannel, and she knew he had been taken while performing some sort of outdoor labor. His jacket was placed neatly over the back of the chair. He seemed intent on observing his own fingers, though from time to time he surveyed the tabletop and his hands twitched as if wanting to do something. He had glanced up when she entered the room, but he hadn’t been able to keep his eyes on her. Almost no one could. They’d all heard stories of the interrogations that occurred in places like this.

Tanya was all but certain he would turn out to be another dead end, another exciting hunch extinguished in incomprehension. She would again have to pore over the lists generated by Central Investigations, look into records of previous interrogations, and hope for some shred of promise. A generation of officers before her had dealt with everyone who had directly known Professor Hirthsin. Others had tracked down all his professional correspondents. Still others had dug through archives where his work appeared, deleting everything after 2032, the date of his Exalted Discovery. Still, the attacks continued, and so the investigation continued.

She stood rather than taking the chair across from him. “Start by telling me your name,” she said. Tanya knew, of course, but she wanted him to understand that he would have to explain, and even justify, himself from his very base.

“John Desoto,” he said. His voice was quieted by fear and uncertainty, though she sensed more of the latter. This was unusual. Most people were shaking at this point, naturally assuming they were suspected of being saboteurs.

She held a tablet computer and made a show of checking his answer. He should think she always knew whether he was telling the truth. When she looked back, his eyes were on her—incongruously sweet and content blue eyes. His glance didn’t start away as most people’s did. It disengaged deliberately after finding some bit of information it had sought.

“Where do you reside?”

“Bain Island.”

“And you’ve lived there all your life?”

“That’s what it says on your screen,” he replied. She let his retort fall without a response. The tone hadn’t been antagonistic—more a statement that he understood the game they were playing. And he understood it well enough to know he had no choice but to play along, so he continued, “I have lived there all my life.”

“Tell me about your childhood home.”

This surprised him. She saw the thought, “What could she be looking for?” in the quizzical concentration of his brows. She wanted him off balance. She wanted him searching his memory, pulling facts and anecdotes from the bin before he’d really looked them over. Too much conscious control might cause him to discard the one meaningful memory in a pile of junk.

She didn’t want him to sense, however, that in some ways she had no idea what she was looking for, either. All she knew was that someone out there had the secret, and she had to find it. But she didn’t know what the secret was—yet.

“I grew up on Bain Island, like we said. At 227 Point Harbor Road.” He was advancing slowly now, trying to figure what sort of information she was looking for. Being a practical person himself, he first thought of relaying concrete details. “It was a grey shingle house. Cape Cod style. Built in 1988 but in good repair.”

“Who raised you? What was the home environment like? That’s what I want to hear.”

“My mother. My father died when I was two. She- I guess you’re asking what she was like. Is that what you mean?”

“Sure. Tell me that.”

“She was stalwart.” John spoke slowly. Tanya found herself looking at his hands. Though they were largely still, only occasionally flexing or curling, they looked strong—or capable—in their repose. “That’s the word for her. She got up every day before the dawn. She worked all day. She provided everything I needed. I never thought she needed anything beyond what she had. That was very reassuring.”

This accorded with the facts Tanya had. She’d read the interrogation of mother Desoto, dating from 2048, and all of the background investigation. The mother had been immediately dismissed as a suspect. There’d been no question about her, but there was something in the old records that made Tanya want to talk to the son. A flash of intuition told her there might be something buried there. It was the mother’s reticence about her boy more than anything. It just seemed off. That was as good a lead as anyone could find in these late days, after the fields had been picked clean by thousands of other investigators. So, she’d sent a recovery team to pick up John. It marked the ninth time in her career she’d made it to a flesh interrogation.

She wanted to get more sense of the detainee’s emotions, and so she pushed a little at the maternal bond. “So she took good care of you?”

“Of course.”

“Did she spend a lot of time with you? Caring, nurturing?”

“I don’t think I needed that,” John replied. “I had a lot of independence. I could go anywhere. I could try things. That’s what a boy needs.”

He was too guarded to show much emotion, but she thought she was getting a sense of the currents under the surface. He was self-reliant. He was also stubborn. If she confronted or pushed him, he’d push back. If she made him think he had his own reasons for doing what she wanted anyway, he’d apply his energy in the right direction.

“So, in the summers, after school, times like that, you’d be on your own. What did you like to do?”

“I studied fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, engineering, archaeology.” A slight smile curled his lip, and Tanya thought he knew he’d confused her for a second. “By which I mean I liked to play around the streams and the ocean. I liked to throw sticks in the water and watch them get pulled by the current. I wanted to understand that. I liked the old resort, Seavista, because they’d shut down their outlying bungalows about twenty years before and you could find all kinds of old stuff there. Or you could work your way through the boards on the windows and check out everything inside—the electrical system, the old furnace and boiler.”

Tanya knew from her investigation that John Desoto was currently the caretaker of the Seavista Resort Property. She’d assumed from the file that he’d just drifted into the position, it being so close to the place he grew up. But now she saw something else in him. The position at Seavista seemed more like a continuation of the inquisitive interest of his childhood.

“Let’s talk about when you were 11,” Tanya said. That meant 2041, the critical year. Professor Hirthsin had spent two months on Bain Island that summer. Later that year, he’d circulated a paper to a small group of colleagues proposing something that caused deep controversy in that circle—the leading physicists of the day. The attacks of the saboteurs started immediately after that.

“Professor Hirthsin?” John said. Tanya thought she’d somehow given away too much, and she worried she might botch the interview. But then she saw that he’d probably put the pieces together with his own track of reasoning. He was quick. His mind worked to create a plausible story out of the pieces he was given. “Is that what you want to know about? Why?” He was almost agitated now. He was smart enough to make the connection, but he couldn’t make sense out of it. After all, Hirthsin was still a hero to John. Everyone knew about the Exalted Discovery. Very, very few people knew that something darker had followed.

“Just tell me what you remember,” Tanya said, hearing an unplanned gentleness in her own voice.

She sat down at last. He straightened a little in response.

“It was Professor Hirthsin,” John said. For a moment she thought he wouldn’t say any more, as if that statement encapsulated everything that could be expressed or felt on the subject. “We all knew his picture, we’d all seen him on vids, and now here he was walking around the island. People were…” He waved his hand to indicate people were excited.

“And you? Were you more excited than the others?”

“Of course. D=C. This was him.”

D=C, Discovery=Creation, was the Exalted Discovery. The full theory was much more complex, but this was what had resonated with people. D=C became a popular bumper sticker. It still was.

People understood Hirthsin’s main point: discovery didn’t merely uncover reality, it created it to some extent. “Every discovery was a little Big Bang,” was a popular way of explaining the idea. This got at the energy Hirthsin had found in discovery. It got at the notion that the effect of the discovery went on shaping reality for a long time. It got at the power of human observation, and the sudden shift as people realized they were at least partly complicit in material circumstances that before would have been called works of god, or nature, or chance.

But it left out all the detail, all the complexities Hirthsin uncovered in the interplay of matter and imagination. Expectation shaped observation. Observation pushed against the edges of reality, reflected in measurement. Expectation was again shaped by past measurement. The idea wasn’t that anything was possible, but that each discovery fundamentally changed reality, even if minutely. Reality still stood, but it was a mountain of sand constituted of grains of innumerable past interactions.

The popular formulation also left out the series of brilliant experiments Hirthsin conducted in the insane pinball world of the smallest manipulable particles to prove and quantify his thesis. Few could really grasp the reams of calculations he had made, cutting bits of proof from across the history of science. He was surely the genius of his age.

“You knew about the theory?” Tanya asked.

John nodded.

“Did you understand the theory?”

“Somewhat.”

“You were eleven that year.”

“Yes.” He understood her implication that he had been too young then. “I’d read the paper. It was one of those things… Kids decide they want to do something.” He shrugged. “I loved something about it. I couldn’t have calculated the parameters of a cone of plausibility, but I had some notion of…”

“Like a phase?” Tanya asked and he nodded. “How long did it last?”

“I don’t know that it ended. I’ve tried to study the theory. I’ve done all the calculations. I’ve applied some of the concepts to the theory of entropy.”

“Do you still love it?” Many people did. Every government, corporation, and university in the world poured resources into managing research according to Hirthsin’s principles. They, and most people, believed that the course of scientific progress could be steered toward objectives more aligned with human well-being now that we seemed to control discovery. Viruses could be crippled if we found flaws in their molecular armature. Energy could be produced at 5, 10, 1,000 times its current ratios if hidden bonds could be found and exploited. And it had worked for a while.

“It’s just part of me.” John said. “I don’t know.”

He was again inert as earth, but she’d seen a spark when he talked about Hirthsin. Tanya’s pulse became faster and stronger. She held the tablet tight enough that the edges cut into her hands. There could be a real connection between John and Hirthsin, and if that was the case, she could find what she’d been looking for for so long. She tried to keep her concentration firm on the next step—to think it through, to be sure she didn’t lose the thread—as excitement swirled around her.

She wanted to know so badly.

“You must have seen him,” Tanya said, as if the comment were part of a simple conversation.

“He stayed at Seavista. I saw him. He walked a lot. He passed by my house. He passed by the places where I played.”

The old professor with his black beard that never showed a hint of gray walking by this boy with wonder in his eyes. Tanya could picture it. She had seen a thousand photographs and vids of the professor, but now she felt closer than ever, hearing from someone who had actually seen him in person. She felt strong all of a sudden. She wanted to tear the secret out of John, like pulling a heavy weight up on a line.

The physical reaction was powerful, because a very old and very deep feeling awakened in her. It was the horror—the horror that had been birthed when she’d heard that her brother had been killed. Somehow the shock of that moment could still hit her with huge force.

Her brother had been frolicking in a new club that had been built cantilevered over the ocean. It was typical of him: Always so much fun. Always connected to the pulse of life. Always so far ahead of the curve of style that only he seemed to know where it was heading. But an attack by the saboteurs killed him and 114 others that night.

When her mother first told her the news, they’d both been steely, or almost deadened. Neither cried over the phone. But Tanya had immediately wanted to destroy the people who had killed her brother. It was a physical reaction, a pull, as much as anything else.

She’d been young, only in her first year of college, and so she’d steered her life to that end: studying criminology, joining the department, working and working. She’d allowed no real life outside that purpose—no meaningful lovers, no long-term home, no society outside others as devoted to the department as she was. And as a reward, she’d been told that what she thought had killed her brother—what she’d spent years pursuing—had been a lie.

When they made her an investigator, they told her: There were no saboteurs. Their strange ideology of technophobia and anti-hedonism was a fabrication. No one believed it. Their manifestos had been written by salaried propagandists. Something more insidious was behind the failure of new constructions. All of the buildings that collapsed, the bridges that fell, the engines that blew apart—it all happened without the intervention of a human hand.

At first, they had no idea what the cause could be. It was thought that people would panic if they knew of this blank gulf of ignorance—so, the saboteurs were invented, a convenient scapegoat for the unknown. Soon enough the investigation turned to the theory that a new discovery had been loosed on the world and was now wreaking havoc. What could it be? Something that unsettled the advance of science. Something that unknitted what was previously known. Something that made certainty unattainable.

The discovery could be tracked even if it wasn’t understood. The quants combined some of the calculations of magnitude, space, and time in Professor Hirthsin’s original paper with models from epidemiology to try to trace the idea back to its origin. The work took a few years, and then the result, strangely, pointed back at Professor Hirthsin. But he had died in the interim and couldn’t be questioned.

But the investigators had quickly focused on the year 2041 and found the professor’s controversial unpublished paper. The people at the highest level of the investigation decided to pursue a tactic of eradication—as had been done in epidemiology—and to wipe out everything Professor Hirthsin had done since the Exalted Discovery. This, it was thought, would wipe out the contagion. They destroyed copies of the paper, even going to the lengths of incinerating libraries and banks of data servers. They sequestered the people who knew of it, including, eventually, themselves.

Tanya knew this history. She knew this dangerous idea was out there. But she still didn’t know what it was, and wouldn’t until she found it.

Tanya couldn’t hate a faceless idea the way she’d once hated the supposed saboteurs, but she found that the hunt kept the passion alive. She never lost her determination, she never lost the thrill when she thought she’d found a clue, and she never lost the horror that was at the base of it all.

“You were excited that he was there,” Tanya said. “You must have tried to say something to him, to let him know.”

“No. I couldn’t.”

“So, he saw you. He befriended you. Or he knew your mother…”

John shook his head. “He never said a word to me. He never seemed to see any of us.”

Tanya knew she’d lost the thread when she saw the confusion in John’s eyes, confusion at her horrid fallibility. She saw him closing off.

She felt the hovering wave of failure, balanced and ready to break. She’d been so sure the professor had said something to John, and that the contagion was there, that she’d leapt ahead clumsily. Now the thought that she’d lose it when she might be so close… but, no, the secret would not be easy to find. She needed to keep trying.

Others had done it. She knew many of the compartments around her in the detention center were occupied by people who knew the secret, but they couldn’t tell her anything precisely because they knew. They’d been isolated to keep it from spreading.

The “attacks” continued. The idea lived. Someone out in the world knew.

If it was John, she’d have to understand him better before she got to it. She could also cover her flub with some indirect questions.

“You scored extremely well on your college entrance exams, but you never matriculated,” she said, drawing on more of the facts she’d gathered in her background research. “What happened?”

“My mother got sick.”

“She died when you were 20. You could have gone then.”

He looked at her like he’d been wounded and just shook his head. Tanya realized there was something unprotected, unguarded about him. His pain was as evident as if he’d never been able to talk about it before—or heal from it. She felt reluctant to be too harsh—harsh as she’d been with others when she thought she had a good reason.

She was quiet for a time. He tapped his fingers on the table and looked down at what he was doing, as if it were a novelty.

The light in the room shifted. Outside, the sun pushed through a rent in the clouds, turning the atmosphere golden, the sea blue-gray, and the sand nearly auburn. Their little room brightened and gained hints of chromatic variation. Tanya watched it all happen. John turned around in his chair to look out the window and see. They both stayed like that for a time, taking it in.

“Is Bain Island like this?” Tanya asked.

“No. Mostly a rocky shore. The trees are taller, conifers dominate, and they grow down to the shore. It never feels so open.” He waved an arm toward the horizon. “The sea’s a little clearer, too. You see more in it. Different current. How far are we? 500 miles?”

“A little more,” Tanya said. It was a good guess. He’d been hooded for the flight and would have been disoriented. He probably knew a lot of botany.

“As far as I’ve been.” John looked away from the window to smile at her. He probably assumed that she’d traveled around the world—as she had—and that his provincialism would seem contemptible to her. But she actually found it intriguing.

“Why did you never leave?”

She had tried to avoid the line of questioning that involved his mother, but he returned to the subject. “My mother would have liked me to go to college. I would have done it for her. But then she was gone. Seavista started closing over the winter, and they needed a caretaker.” He shrugged as if that explained everything.

That was the life of a normal man, dictated by circumstances.

But she knew there was another layer to him. She saw it in his attentiveness. She saw it in the care he took before speaking. She saw it in the calm he maintained when he should have been scared to death.

And she saw it in the reaction he’d had to Hirthsin—how much he’d known about the Exalted Discovery (he seemed to understand the concept of the cone of plausibility, for one thing) as well as his emotional response to the name.

“You weren’t interested in learning more?” she asked.

“I had enough to think about, and a lot of quiet hours.”

“You weren’t lonely?” Tanya worried she’d lost track of whether she was advancing the interrogation or just asking because she wanted to know.

“Like I said, I had a lot to think about.”

That didn’t mean he wasn’t lonely, but that something else was more important to him. He had a purpose. In that sense, the two of them resonated at the same frequency.

“You taught yourself enough math to do the calculations,” she said. He nodded slightly but perceptibly. “That must have been a tremendous amount of work.”

“A few years,” he said.

“Then you really worked through all the calculations in Hirthsin’s ‘Discovery and the Nature of Matter’ on your own.” She paused while she thought about this. “There are mathematicians who couldn’t do that. Why would you work so hard?”

“It was the greatest discovery of the century. It’s the basis of everything that’s come after. Anyone could tell you that.”

“But not everyone reads it, let alone studies it.”

“It just— It seemed to explain so much for me. I don’t know how to explain…”

“What does it explain?” Tanya asked. “That’s important. Most people, I think, just think of D=C as a sort of tool, something to improve the efficacy of human labor. A part of our advance—”

“No, no,” John said. He leaned forward and with his finger he drew a circle on the tabletop. She had the sense that he’d been filled with some sort of conviction, and she was sure she was seeing some of the depths she’d suspected were in him. “It’s beautiful in its own right. It’s about the laws underneath everything. That’s why it’s beautiful. Hirthsin dug deeper than anyone else. He’s near the most basic truth. You can see it in the math. He’s so near.”

“And that truth is beautiful?”

“I think so,” John said. “It has to be. What else is there?” His voice strained under these words. He was looking into her eyes with live eyes, and she realized the tension between them had become something as thick and active as passion, as if they were both on the verge of something they desperately wanted. “The truth has to be simple, but immense. Shocking, but unmistakable. Simple, unbreakable, irrefutable, immutable.”

“And D=C is the closest we’ve ever gotten to this nirvana?”

“Hirthsin got closest,” John replied.

His answer opened space for her to conjecture that he knew something more about Hirthsin. If John knew of a deeper level, it could be exactly what Tanya was searching for. But she hesitated before asking another question. She felt she would hurt him if she kept pushing. But she had to do it.

He was now opening to her deliberately—stubbornly and cautiously, but deliberately. He wanted her to know more about him, probably because he was beginning to desire her. It was not uncommon. She knew the effect her looks had.

What was uncommon was that she sort of wanted to reach out to touch his hand on the table.

“Are you aware…” Tanya began. But the words felt wrong—too much the straight interrogation. “I understand this means a lot to you. I guess it’s like poetry to a poet or an artist’s life work. I think it means that much to you. You’ve found something else. Something more than D=C. I want to hear it. I probably shouldn’t tell you that. I know I shouldn’t tell you that, but I want to hear your story. Forget about everything else here. Just tell me.”

“I’ve never told this to anyone,” John said, and then laughed, his voice high-pitched with the excess energy people have at desperate times. “This has to be the worst time to tell it. You can lock me up for good by pressing a button there.” He pointed at her tablet. She resisted trying to coax him again, and eventually he went on. “I stole something. I’ve never told anyone.” He shook his head. “My mother cleaned the bungalow where he was staying. Hirthsin. She knew I was interested in him. She saw me reading the paper. She saw that I watched for him to walk by. So, one day she brought me to work with her, so that I could see his rooms.

“While she made the bed, I found a piece of paper on the floor. It was near the desk, as if he’d just written on it and dropped it. It could have been just an hour or two before that that he wrote on it. I picked it up and saw something about particles, atoms, and universal laws. But my mother came back in, so I stuck it under my shirt.”

Tanya almost wanted to laugh at how seriously John took this childhood misdeed, but she knew better than to interrupt a confession.

“She would have been so upset. I can’t imagine what she would have made me do if she’d found out. Marching up to him and returning the paper would have been the beginning. For a while I thought of throwing it away so I could stop accusing myself of holding stolen loot. But when I took it out, I wanted so badly to read it through. I thought this man was like a god, or had read the mind of God. What kind of secret might…”

Instead of announcing what he’d read, John was quiet, as if guilty to share his ill-gotten gains.

Tanya prodded a little, trying to move him indirectly. “This paper changed your life, don’t you think?”

“It did.”

She saw the wonder in his eyes that he was saying this now—what he’d long thought but never admitted. She was almost grateful. She leaned closer and sought out his gaze. “You read it?”

He nodded his head.

“This is the truth that you love,” she said.

“I didn’t understand it at first,” he said. “Hirthsin never published this idea. I don’t know why.”

Tanya knew why: It had scared the hell out of his colleagues and correspondents. They’d rejected it as madness. They’d kept him from publishing it. They’d spread rumors about his sanity. They’d turned against him. After that, he didn’t seem to care. He lived the rest of his life in recondite silence, walling his ideas in his own consciousness. Pushing on in his experiments and conjectures without leaving any written trace.

John went on, pushed by the excitement of his ideas, “I thought about it for some time. At first I thought it was madness. Then I thought that was just an excuse for not understanding. Why should I be able to understand him so easily? It should take work. Then I began to think there was a connection between D=C and this. So I studied ‘Discovery and the Nature of Matter’ more closely. I did all the calculations again and again. Eventually, I found the link. But you don’t understand.” She had been nodding encouragingly, but he was right; she didn’t understand. “You haven’t seen…”

“How well do you remember the words that you read on that paper?” Tanya asked. If this was the secret, she needed to reconstruct what Hirthsin had originally thought. Discovery=Creation. Something he had discovered had changed the world. This creation had begotten monsters.

Instead of answering, John reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a weathered brown wallet. It was on the inventory of belongings from when he was detained, which Tanya had of course reviewed before the interrogation began. But he’d been allowed to hold on to it, as it seemed harmless. He tucked finger and thumb into the billfold and drew out a folded rectangle of dirty paper. He put it on the table between them, offering it to her.

It wouldn’t lie flat, but curled from its middle against gravity. She could just see an indication of handwriting on the hidden side.

Tanya knew she would read. All of her ambition, all of her training pushed her to it. And yet she didn’t know she wanted to. She didn’t recognize it as volition because, in large part, it wasn’t; she’d made the choice long ago. She picked it up, flattened it, unfolded it effortlessly, and read:

The atom is a very old idea… the fundamental particle… hence its power.

Thousands of years of discoveries shaped by this idea… Still we pursue it in our bosons and quarks. Why do they become so absurd?

Now all my experiments point in another direction.

There is no smallest particle. No fundamental particle. Everything is divisible. Only our ability to measure and observe ever makes us think otherwise.

Thus…

Underneath it all is a what? / a nothing? / a mystery? / certainly nothing that can be known. Under the known is the unknowable?

Everything is built on a nothing.//rather no stability, no final certainty… why not shift under you???// Our foundation is poured on sand. Sand is too generous a metaphor. It is just nothing. The foundation hovers over endless nothing. I can not explain why anything exists or functions on such a base. Unless our own minds hold us up somehow. Our own minds build/contain/lay the sand on which we walk to keep from plunging into the abyss.

We haven’t had to imagine a world like this before. I don’t know what it will do to us.

She had no doubt. This idea picked away at the very basis of physical science. It could rewrite its first rules. It was easy enough to her to see the path that led from this notion to the phenomenon she’d been fighting against. Why should steel remain rigid any more than water? Why shouldn’t newly constructed structures—be they bridges, buildings (nightclubs), or vehicles—collapse? Who would be able to predict what would stand and what wouldn’t?

This slip of paper in her fingers, with its scrawled handwriting and sketchy ideas, was the secret she had sought. All the menace and murder of the saboteurs. All the death and destruction. The horror that had overturned her life. They were all inscribed on this almost weightless sheet.

John saw that she was finished reading and resumed his explanation. “You see, the other side of this unreliability he seems to worry about is malleability—the concept that D=C introduced to science is really just the corollary to this, the other way of looking at it, if you will…”

Tanya had trouble listening to him. Nothing he said could matter in the immediate term. But she watched his face and found his innocent enthusiasm endearing, though she saw it from a kind of distance because of what she now knew.

She had a clear duty. She’d found the secret, and it had to be isolated. But she was now contaminated herself.

She went to the door, but she looked back before she hit the code she knew she would have to enter. She saw John, looking at her surprised but expectant. Her heart contorted in a way it never had before. Was it sympathy for him? The death spasm of her hatred? The final conviction of success? A kind of love? Even as she was about to terminate so many possibilities, she felt the emergence of a new one. Would it be enough? She saw the horizon behind John, an undulating red thread between sea and evening sky. This view would progress through its infinite variations day after day, and yet all she would see of the world would be within the window’s frame. They would both spend the rest of their lives here.

They would be comfortable. She knew that the isolation unit had an automated system to provide full nutritive, health care, and recreational support, without allowing any communications to pass to the outside world. Beyond this interrogation room was a small apartment that would be theirs. They would each have a companion, but they would not speak with anyone else, lest they pass on the idea.

She looked down at the numeric keypad to enter the code. She’d always pitied the souls she knew were locked in apartments like this. They were all around her.

She wondered if she and John would be the last, or if there was one more person out there somewhere who knew.