Cosmologist’s Causality Murder

I popped the cap and swallowed a physics pill. Dr. Mitchum shot me a disapproving look, but I shrugged her off. I'd need the substitute pharmaceutical teaching to get me through this mystery. I'd first heard about the homicide as I lay beachside in San Diego in the form of two men making their way across the sand toward me. Only trouble wears a tie to the beach

Sixteen hours later, I found myself on the runway of McMurdo Antarctic Station, smelling like sun-tan lotion, yet dressed in a parka and shivering from climate shock. I could spend the next three pages describing the cold to you: the crystal-embittered chill of that white continent, along with the inadequacy of the human body to cope, but I won't get into all that. Suffice it to say, I was cold, miserable, and ready to see a corpse.

The stiff in question was Dr. Sanja Patel, a national of India in his very late 50's. Harvard professor of cosmology, or ex-professor of cosmology, as it would appear—not just due to his passing, but because he was fired a year before when he claimed he had cracked the code to The Grand Unified Theory. From the prescription for advanced physics provided to me by Harvard, it appears poor Dr. Patel was a nut job. One of those sad saps who couldn't handle the enviable brick wall of knowledge limitations first proposed by his rival, Dr. Thomas Cooper, back in 2026. Cooper's first law (that knowledge is limited to the amount of chemical interactions that can be processed by the brain's chemistry) led to a scientific revolution toward the enviable cul de sac of human understanding.

The now-known fact that the human brain is only capable of understanding so much about the world around them may at first have seemed limiting, but it was actually freeing! No longer were we doomed to plumb the unfathomable depths of reality. Scientists could now focus their energy on that which was knowable and comprehensible to human understanding. The advancements wrought by this new trajectory of science were undoubted. Through the rejection of the speculative while focusing on the objective, humankind had cracked the code of genetics, mapped the observable universe, and unlocked the secrets of consciousness.

Many scientists rallied against this new pattern of research, but their voices were drowned out. For better or worse, science had been shifted by the followers of Dr. Cooper and paid for by his second great achievement, the invention of the learning pill.

I had a carry-on bag full of them: forensic gel caps, and police academy booster tablets, I even had a basic law degree prescribed by Temple University. Everyone in the world had become a junkie to easy knowledge. A pharmaceutical solution to learning where a single pill can install hours' worth of math lessons into our brains like a program to a processor. Currently, I was buzzing on physics. It was a nice high filled with everything from Newton's laws of motion to Susskind's work on String Theory. My sigh caught in the chill air as the drugs opened my thoughts to the latest equations in advanced cosmology.

"Is that really necessary, detective?" Dr. Mitchum was still giving me that disapproving stare from above her scarf as she escorted me across the tarmac to the sno-cat idling in the sharp arctic sun.

"Don't judge me, Doctor. I was told Dr. Patel was a leading cosmologist in his field. I think I could use a theoretical brush-up."

"No, not the drug, I mean your pistol," she said.

I looked down at the ugly Glock hanging from my belt. "I know all about the Antarctic Treaty’s weapons ban, but I’ve got special dispensation considering this is the first murder investigation in Antarctica. Besides, a gun was used in the killing. Someone else out here’s armed and dangerous; this may save a life."

Doctor Mitchum drove the tractor across the camp, passing rusting petroleum tanks, arched hangars, and insulated Quonset huts. The entire station looked like a child’s sandbox with randomly dropped toy blocks left abandoned to rust during a harsh winter. "I’ll take you to your bunk so you can get acclimated."

"No, take me to the crime scene. I want to get in and get working as soon as possible before the forensics team arrives from Christchurch. I like seeing a scene fresh."

With a shrug, Doctor Mitchum did an abrupt U-turn and headed back around the airport to a few isolated shacks that I at first thought were tool sheds. She pulled up to one such structure, basically a cargo container dug into the permafrost. Stapled across the insulated entrance was a piece of duct tape with the words "Crime Scene Do Not Cross" written in black Sharpie.

I snapped the brittle tape aside while Doctor Mitchum and I tugged at the outer door. Stuck with frost, it took a good hard pull to get it open. Stepping into the narrow space, I opened the inner insulator door while Doctor Mitchum shut the outer door with a dull thud. As my eyes attempted to adjust from the bright winter white of outside to this unlit interior, I caught the first smell of blood.

Blood is always the first thing I notice when I start an investigation. I hate blood. It's the smell. That penny copper smell makes me lightheaded. I put a gloved hand over my mouth suppressing a gag as I waited for Doctor Mitchum to find the light switch.

Overheads blinked on, adding a hard fluorescent edge to a frost-covered scene of violence. "Was anything touched?" I asked.

"No, detective," she said as she tugged her scarf from her face and opened her parka to reveal a body that I really didn’t need to be distracted by. "We left him as we found him."

"Frozen?"

"We turned off the heating elements after the UN told us not to touch anything or move the body, so we let the cold preserve him."

"Any witnesses?" I always ask that question even though I knew the answer.

"No."

"Except the killer. When was the last time anyone saw Dr. Patal alive?"

"He came into the commissary for coffee just before the storm hit."

"Perhaps he put a little Irish in his coffee to warm it up? I know you snow bunnies like your alcohol."

"I never knew him to drink." I saw a tell cross her face with a frown. "I, I was the last to see him alive, I suppose. I drove him back to the lab myself, just as the Condition 4 storm hit."

I’d seen videos on the net about Condition 4 arctic weather. Whiteout is a kind word to describe it. It’s more like the entire arctic landscape awakens and decides to act like air with impenetrable, unforgiving, solid wind blowing horizontal ice and death. She’d abandoned him here when she knew that was coming?"

"I shelved the thought and turned away from her to examine the room. It was a cold mess. There had been some kind of struggle here. Papers and old electronic equipment were scattered on the floor, a tipped-over office chair, and spilled coffee frozen in place.

I stepped over the body, making sure not to disturb anything, while leaning in to inspect the wound. “Looks like a single shot to the head. Burn marks show the shot was taken point-blank. You didn’t find a gun, correct?”

“We left it as you see it.

"No gun, no shell casing,” I followed the blood spatter to the far wall, and among the frozen skull and brain fragments, I also located a point of impact. The hole was empty. The slug dug out after exiting the doctor’s skull, “and no bullet. The ballistic guys are going to love that.”

Stepping away from the wall, I looked down and it dawned on me just how obsolete the surrounding equipment was. The place was filled with the vivisected junk of yesterday’s pop techno trash. Casings stripped from iPhones, television sets, and CD players. Wires, vacuum tubes, and solid-state exposed like electronic entrails. “Is that an Atari gaming system?”

“What’s left of it. The Doctor kept ordering this stuff, having it shipped down here piecemeal. One week it was a black and white TV, the next a digital Casio wristwatch. We never knew what would be on the next plane.”

I tried to fit the image of this space into the pharmaceutical lessons coursing through my system. “Maybe I got a bad pill, but this looks more like a junk shop than a physics lab.”

Dr. Mitchum nodded, tucking a long brown strand of wayward hair back into her fur-lined hood, “Unless you were at CERN 10 years ago with the LHC, there isn’t much lab work you can do in the field of advanced cosmology anymore.”

LHC? I felt a surge of drug-induced lessons pour into my thoughts. Large Hadron Collider, an old atom smasher up in Europe where cosmologists used to push the envelope of theoretical physics. Now a poorly funded museum dedicated to its once powerful magnetic loop that helped discover some of the proofs that led to our current understanding of the Grand Unified Theory, or as Doctor Cooper would later say, “Our understanding that we’ll never understand the Grand Unified Theory if there ever was one.”

“Then what was he doing down here?” I asked as I surveyed the solid state.

“He received a research grant, something about the stability of gravity adjacent to planetary magnetic fields? Conditions in Antarctica were supposedly perfect for his tests,” Dr. Mitchum shrugged. “I tried reading his proposal once. I have a prescription for mathematics from MIT, yet still, it read like gibberish. What the science board saw in his request, I’ll never understand, not even with all the pills in Princeton.”

I looked back down at Dr. Patal’s body reposed in frozen shirt sleeves. I noted that his parka was hung neatly from a peg on the opposite wall. “Looks like he had time to get out of his cold weather gear. This space is cramped. Can’t see a place a person could have hidden to ambush him. You said he came into the commissary for coffee, you drove him back here, then what?”

“I went back to the dorm.”

"How long did that take?" An innocent question asked innocently enough, but she was smart. She knew what I was asking, and I saw the look on her face, the flash of shock - that micro-burst expression that said it all. She didn't do it, and she can't believe that I would suspect her. Damn.

"Detective, you're not saying..."

"No, no, please. I just had to ask the questions, that's my job. Please continue."

"It... it took." She was flustered, honestly flustered. "It usually takes about five minutes to get to the garage from here, plus two or three to spread the heaters on the engine to keep the oil from freezing. Then about a minute to walk up to the dorm."

"But it took longer for you that night?"

"I honestly didn't think I'd make it. Like I said, the storm hit and dumped a load of white everywhere. By the time I'd parked the Sno-Cat and prepped her for the storm? Hell, it took me five minutes just to follow the guide ropes to the dorm. So, I don't know, twenty minutes later? But honestly, I had nothing to do with..."

"No, I don't suppose you did. Elimination is the first part of detecting. Was everyone accounted for?"

"After the storm passed, people filtered in, soon the dorm was full. I can't remember anyone missing but Doctor Patal."

"No one thought that was strange?

"No one missed him at first. The guy didn't, he wasn't, what did you call us? Snow-bunnies? Listen, it takes a special type of person to work down here. Some fit in like they're born to it, and others? It isn't an easy life, and he didn't make any friends. Not that anyone had problems with him, he was just isolated."

"So when did you find him?"

"About a day after the storm. No one had seen him at meals. A few of us came out to his lab. Found it socked in. It took an hour to dig him out, even with the Sno-Cat's plow, and there he was, dead."

"No footprints?"

"The place looked deserted when we got here. No one had come in or out after the storm. We thought maybe he wasn't even in here, that he had tried to make it back to the dorm, but we'd already searched the rest of McMurdo, and we all doubted anyone would have ventured out into that mess."

Standing, I blew into my gloves to warm my cheeks, then scratched at my growing beard, realizing I still had vacation stubble. "A locked room murder mystery? I hate this kind of case." I stamped in place, feeling the cold reach my feet.

Dr. Mitchum noticed my discomfort. "Coffee to warm you up?" she asked while zipping her parka.

"Thanks, yes."

A fresh chill entered the room as she opened the lab's outer door. "I'll be back." She smiled while shutting it after her with the solid thump of insulation.

Alone now with the dead doctor, I popped another advanced physics pill while I poked around his workspace looking for any clue as to what he was working on - notes, a diary, napkin doodle, anything that would set this place apart from an average junk seller, but even with my chemically induced lessons droning in my head, I couldn't find a thing that made sense among the wreckage.

Bending once more over the body, I noticed his outstretched arm as if he were reaching for something. I followed its direction and saw an Atari joystick that had been kicked under a card table. Leaning in I picked up the iconic game controller, its little red button begging to be pushed.

So, I pushed it.

"I fell to my knees as the air was sucked out of my lungs. I shut my eyes while the room jumped and spun about me, and then a howling wail resounded around me like a freight train passing without the rhythmic clatter of tracks.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” The heavily accented Indian voice hollered over the roar.

I opened my eyes and immediately regretted it. My head began to spin. I stumbled when I put my weight on the back of an office swivel chair, tipping it over and sending me against the work table. I balanced myself on a desk only to knock over a cup of hot coffee.

Taking a deep breath, I finally felt well enough to look up, and I was shocked to see a very much alive Dr Patal. His face was vivid with shock and something else. He had that strung-out look of a man deprived too long of teaching pills. “Who are you? How did you find me? How did you get in here? How did you get through the storm?”

What storm? It was a beautiful day out. That’s what the howling was! I tried to grasp the impossible. My mind was bending to understand what couldn’t be when I felt the sudden rush of pharmaceutical knowledge kick in.

The Grand Unified Theory? Of course! The elusive link between Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity! The unknowable! The impossible to understand! The equations seemed to open up to me like a ten-dimensional flower. The answer was so simple, so clear. Our mind can cope, and we can know. We can have true understanding! And he had done it, the bastard did it!

“Time Travel, you’ve put a time machine into an Atari joystick?”

Dr. Patal looked down at the controller I had clenched in my gloves. Then, like a fevered madman, he fell to one knee and shouted, “It works! It bloody works!”

The look of triumph beaming from his frantic face was short-lived, however, as an accusing finger was thrust in my direction. “How did you get it? How did you find me?” His voice cracked in paranoia. “You’ve come to take it away from me? I thought that here, here in this godforsaken place, I was safe, to think freely and to learn and understand without constraint! But you, you, people, you roadblocks!

He lunged at me, and we collided against a worktable, knocking the joystick out of my hand and sending it, along with the table’s electronics, crashing to the floor.

“This is just the start!” his caffeinated breath screaming into my face. His fingers gripped my throat, pressing into my scarf, crushing my larynx. “Open minds! Open to new thoughts! New understanding! We will know God’s mind, and we’ll be able to ask him THE question!” I felt my windpipe close, and my vision begin to tunnel as I tried to pry this man from my throat.

Looking back now, I’m not sure how I was able to do it. Was it the heat of the moment, the stupendously strange shock of being flung through time, the adrenaline surge of having this murder victim’s hands at my throat, or was it just a case of muscle memory and training? All I know is that as my vision darkened and my knees buckled, the gun that had been hanging and forgotten on my belt was now in my hand. I put it to the side of Dr. Patal’s head. I flicked off the safety, and I pulled the trigger.

The roar of the pistol's report was muffled in the howl of the storm but deafening in the confines of the lab. Dr. Patal fell to occupy the same position in death that he had only just vacated, while I collapsed, gripping my neck and gasping the sweat metallic air full of blood.

My hands shook as I gripped the pistol in both hands, holding it as far from me as possible. It had saved my life, but now? Now who would believe me? What do I do? How do I answer the evidence?

I had traveled back in time, I killed this man. It was me.

I sat like that for an hour, listening to the howl of the storm, and I came to a realization of what my only course of action could be.

I went to work. Stepping over the body, I picked up the bullet's casing. Then I followed the bullet's trajectory to a wall where I dug out the offending lead from the insulation and placed it, along with its casing, into my parka pocket.

Retracing my steps and actions, I was satisfied that I hadn't left a clue for my future self to find. I hate locked room murder cases, and it looks like I just caused one. I reached back under the table to retrieve the joystick but stopped myself short.

Instead of taking it, I made sure to leave it in place so I would find it once more waiting for me in the future. The pharmaceutical lessons in my head warned me about paradox. I mustn't create a paradox.

The controller was so simple, mirroring the simplicity of time travel. How had we not stumbled across it sooner? I almost laughed at the absurdity of it. I lightly pressed the little red button.

By the time I'd recovered from the time spin, Dr. Mitchum was returning with two steaming coffees in her hands.

"Find anything new?" she asked.

I shook my head. "If you don't mind, let's take the coffee back to the commissary. The smell of blood makes me ill."

We turned to leave the locked room murder mystery, the joystick time machine now safely hidden in my coat along with a spent bullet and its casing.

"This might be one murder that will never be solved," I said in dismay as I shut the lab's door behind me. "Some things were never meant to be discovered."