Free Dead Letter by Jonathan Valin Page A

with deer and one hirsute buffalo
roaming through the snow-draped pines.
    I turned off the highway onto a paved access road
that led to the main building. There was a guardhouse about the size
of a tollbooth a hundred yards down the road. I gave the guard my
name and he waved me toward the visitor’s lot. It was a short walk
from there to the main concourse, down an avenue planted with
leafless ginkos. The lobby, an enormous arena, was planted with
ginkos, too, and with a dozen other varieties of ornamental plants
and flowering shrubs. They’d regulated the temperature and humidity
inside the building so that most of the trees were still in bloom. I
half expected to find the receptionist camped on a picnic blanket.
Instead she was sitting in a round metal booth at the end of one of
the garden trails that wove through the little forest. She had a
dreamy, contented look on her face; and she smiled  happily at
me as I approached her.
    "Welcome to Sloane," she said with good
cheer.
    "You’re Mr. Stoner, aren’t you? Mr. Bidwell
will be down in a moment."
    I sat down on a sofa, set like a park bench in a
square of earth, and listened to the soft music that was being piped
in from somewhere above the arbor. There was something a little
scarey about this artificial paradise. Maybe it was the thinness of
the deception—as if all the trees and grass, the courtesy to
nature, could disguise the daily work of atom-smashing and nuclear
experiment. Or, maybe, it was the dreamy look on that receptionist’s
face and the thought that, if you stared long enough and in the right
light, those trees and shrubs might actually come to seem like a real
forest, the great A-shaped building like a towering herbarium, the
four-mile accelerator like a mere pen for the bison and the deer. To
me, the place had the shallow charm of a wax museum, only it was
nature here preserved on exhibit—as posed and caricatured as a
tableau out of history.
    Within five minutes, a thin, dapper man of about
forty half-walked, half-marched up one of the trails to my bench.
    "Louis Bidwell, sir," he said, extending a
hand. There was nothing rustic about Louis Bidwell’s looks. His
blond hair was cropped in military fashion, short at the back and
sides; and he sported an immaculately trimmed mustache that gave his
stern Southerner’s face a bit of dash. He looked like a young,
hard-driving Atlanta business executive, one who had served six years
in the Army and was now attached to the Reserves. Good company, a
lady’s man, a bit of a drinker, and hard as nails. You could see
that toughness clearly in his eyes, which were the cold, distant blue
of a winter sky.
    "We’re having a bit of a problem around heah
today, Mr. Stoner," he said in that smooth Southern voice.
"Apparently some muskrats got into the ventilatin’ system of
the accelerator."
    "Muskrats?"
    "Yes, sir. They’ve colonized a section of the
park near the lake."
    "There’s a lake out there, too?" I said.
    "Yes, sir!" he said and almost clicked his
heels. "We’ve gone to a good deal of trouble to preserve the
natural beauty of this area."
    "I think you’ve improved on it."
    "Well, we wanted our personnel to feel as if
they were working next to nature and to discourage the notion, which,
I’m sorry to say, is all too prevalent about atomic research, that
we are somehow tamperin’ with nature. The men out heah are no
different than you and I, and they’re doing important work."
    "I’d like to talk to you about one of your
personnel," I
said. "Daryl
Lovingwell."
    "A sad thing," Bidwell said sternly. "I’ve
known the Professor intimately for ten years and, in all that time,
our relationship was nothing but cordial and sincere. Make no
mistake, that kind old man is going to be missed."
    "You called Lovingwell on Tuesday morning, about
eleven-thirty. Can you tell me what you and he discussed?"
    Bidwell gave me a soft, reproachful look. "I
don’t want you to take what I’m going to say as an