Free Fires of Midnight by Jon Land

several minutes to print. Mulgrew read it off the screen as it slid by.
    “Isn’t this terrible,” he muttered barely above the printer’s whir. “He’s one of our regular-term students, as well, enrolled in the doctoral sciences program after completing his masters in a mere—”
    Mulgrew stopped suddenly, got up and went to the printer. He lifted the stack up off the tray and inspected the top page.
    “I thought I saw it wrong on the screen. I thought, I was hoping …”
    “What is it?” Susan asked him.
    Mulgrew’s eyes had glazed over with shock. “Joshua Wolfe is only fifteen years old.”
     
    “I ’ll need to see his room,” Susan said.
    “Of course. I understand. I’ll have security let you in.”
    Minutes later Mulgrew accompanied Susan and a uniformed security guard the brief distance across Harvard Yard to Weld 21, a room in a freshman dormitory used for summer-session students.
    “If there’s anything else I can do,” Mulgrew offered, “I’ll be in my office.”
    “Thank you,” said Susan, and she closed the door behind her.
    Weld 21 was actually a pair of rooms and would probably have been occupied by two or three students during the school year. But for the
summer, clearly, only one had resided within it. The bedroom section contained a bed, a chair, a television and nothing else. There were no posters on the walls, no stereo with monster speakers, nothing that indicated occupancy by a teenager. The only things even remotely suggesting the presence of a youth were half-open dresser drawers and a collection of clothes that lay strewn about over the floor and bed, as if Joshua Wolfe had packed and left in a hurry. A glance into the closet revealed no suitcase. A number of wire hangers had dropped to the dull tile floor.
    The second room was something else entirely.
    It was dominated by computers. One of them she recognized as the Power Macintosh Series II 8100/80, the fastest, most powerful computer of its kind available. Two smaller computers were set against another wall, each boasting external hard-drive boosters. Bookshelves rested against every available wall, all of them packed solid.
    Susan moved about the room slowly, taking it all in. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, and she picked up and discarded several items from desk or shelf until she spotted a thick, neatly bound report. She opened it and studied the title page:

    IRREVERSIBLE EFFECTS OF POLLUTANTS ON
THE ENVIRONMENT AND POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS
A Doctoral Thesis By
Joshua Wolfe
First Draft

    The same shelf was stacked with notebooks. She lifted one up and skimmed its contents. Then another. And another.
    All this boy’s research notes and theoretical ponderings were centered around air pollution. One whole notebook was dedicated to global warming, another to the greenhouse effect.
    The next three off the shelves had Susan retreating to a stiff-backed desk chair. They concerned the need for drastic and dramatic solutions to the pollution problem and detailed the devastating effects to mankind if that problem was not addressed in full very soon. Geniuses, she knew, were prone to be obsessive, and Joshua Wolfe’s personal obsession was laid out in notebook after notebook.
    Susan moved to the desk holding the Power Macintosh, dragging the single chair with her. She switched it on and accessed its menu list. Not surprisingly, all the hard drive’s files had been erased. Disappointed, Susan started working her way through the desk’s drawers in the hope of finding at least some semblance of a clue.
    The second drawer down yielded much more than that in the form of a plastic storage case containing unlabeled floppy backup disks. Excited now, Susan popped the first one in and opened the single file it contained.
A poem appeared on the screen, the first in a long collection that made up the file. The poems were laid out in the chronological order in which they had been written. Susan hit HOME, returning to the first