Free Oceanic by Greg Egan Page B

window closed. I emailed an encrypted transcript to Alison, then slumped across my desk. My head was throbbing, but the encounter really hadn’t gone too badly. Of course Sam and his colleagues would have preferred to know everything; of course they were going to be disappointed and reproachful. That didn’t mean they were going to abandon the benign policies of the last decade. The important thing was that my assurance would prove to be reliable: the incursion would not be repeated.
    I had work to do, the kind that paid bills. Somehow I summoned up the discipline to push the whole subject aside and get on with a report on stochastic methods for resolving distributed programming bottlenecks that I was supposed to be writing for a company in Singapore.
    Four hours later, when the doorbell rang, I’d left my desk to raid the kitchen. I didn’t bother checking the doorstep camera; I just walked down the hall and opened the door.
    Campbell said, “How are you, Bruno?”
    “I’m fine. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming to Sydney?”
    “Aren’t you going to ask me how I found your house?”
    “How?”
    He held up his phone. There was a text message from me, or at least from my phone; it had SMS’d its GPS coordinates to him.
    “Not bad,” I conceded.
    “I believe they recently added ‘corrupting communications devices’ to the list of terrorism-related offenses in Australia. You could probably get me thrown into solitary confinement in a maximum security prison.”
    “Only if you know at least ten words of Arabic.”
    “Actually I spent a month in Egypt once, so anything’s possible. But I don’t think you really want to go to the police.”
    I said, “Why don’t you come in?”
    As I showed him to the living room my mind was racing. Maybe he’d found the relay behind the bookshelf, but surely not before I’d left his house. Had he managed to get a virus into my phone remotely? I’d thought my security was better than that.
    Campbell said, “I’d like you to explain why you bugged my computer.”
    “I’m growing increasingly unsure of that myself. The correct answer might be that you wanted me to.”
    He snorted. “That’s rich! I admit that I deliberately allowed a rumor to start about my work, because I was curious as to why you and Alison Tierney called off your search. I wanted to see if you’d come sniffing around. As you did. But that was hardly an invitation to steal all my work.”
    “What was the point of the whole exercise for you, then, if not a way of stealing something from Alison and me?”
    “You can hardly compare the two. I just wanted to confirm my suspicion that you actually found something.”
    “And you believe that you’ve confirmed that?”
    He shook his head, but it was with amusement not denial. I said, “Why are you here? Do you think I’m going to publish your crackpot theory as my own? I’m too old to get the Fields Medal, but maybe you think it’s Nobel material.”
    “Oh, I don’t think you’re interested in fame. As I said, I think you beat me to the prize a long time ago.”
    I rose to my feet abruptly; I could feel myself scowling, my fists tightening. “So what’s the bottom line? You want to press charges against me for the laptop? Go ahead. We can each get a fine in absentia .”
    Campbell said, “I want to know exactly what was so important to you that you crossed the Tasman, lied your way into my house, abused my hospitality, and stole my files. I don’t think it was simply curiosity, or jealousy. I think you found something ten years ago, and now you’re afraid my work is going to put it at risk.”
    I sat down again. The rush of adrenaline I’d experienced at being cornered had dissipated. I could almost hear Alison whispering in my ear, “Either you kill him, Bruno, or you recruit him.” I had no intention of killing anyone, but I wasn’t yet certain that these were the only two choices.
    I said, “And if I tell you to mind your own