Spiral

He glanced at Dave and Joe. Both shook their heads, not knowing what was happening. Dave flipped open his own phone.

A couple of students near the back got up, talking louder now. “It’s Liam Connor,” one of them said, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“What? What about Liam Connor?” Jake asked.

“They just found a body in Fall Creek Gorge,” the student said.

“And?”

Dave closed his phone, face white. “Jake, this can’t be true. They’re saying that the body is Liam Connor’s.”

5

THE HILLS ON WHICH CORNELL UNIVERSITY STOOD WERE the remnants of the glacial moraine left over from the last ice age. Streams cut through this loosely packed earth and shale until they reached older, solid rock, carving the dramatic gorges and waterfalls for which the campus was famous. Fall Creek Gorge was the deepest, a huge gash in the earth defining the north boundary of campus. It was spanned by a narrow suspension footbridge linking the central part of campus to the houses and dorms farther north. From its midpoint, it was a two-hundred-foot plunge to the rushing waters of Fall Creek below.

Jake always brought the students here later in the semester when he taught “Physics for Presidents.” They stood on the bridge and stared at the water below while Jake gave them a rundown on the geology, describing the advances and retreats of the glaciers that carved out the gorges. Then Jake would give them a little demo. He would take a watermelon and drop it off the bridge. They’d all time it with their watches, the seconds ticking by until it burst on the stones below. Three-point-two seconds was the average answer. They’d compare it to what Newton predicted.

But the real lesson wasn’t Newton’s laws, the acceleration due to gravity, v² = 2gh. That was a cover. Jake had worked up this field trip after he had lost a student to suicide. Jake knew the statistics. Over the past twenty-eight years, sixteen students had jumped from this bridge. It was a painful fact about a pressure-cooker school like Cornell, but it had hit Jake hard. He still couldn’t forget the parents at the funeral. No parent should ever have to go through that. No kid should ever put their parents through that.

The real lesson of the watermelon was about the violence of falling. The melon splattered, bits of red flesh streaking out like the sun from the point of impact. Potential energy turned into kinetic, velocity growing with every second of the fall. He brought the class here every semester to see what would happen when you went over. Cut through the romanticism and get down to the reality. You jump, you fall, you hit.

Three-point-two seconds. Blam.

MORE PEOPLE WERE ARRIVING BY THE SECOND, MORE STUDENTS, more faculty, more police. They were coming from all across campus. Jake had joined the rush, running over from the Schwartz Auditorium lecture hall. If it truly was Liam Connor, Jake didn’t think it would stop until the entire campus was clustered up against the gorge.

Liam Connor was an icon. He’d been at Cornell for sixty years, was known to every student, faculty member, and alumnus. He was in many ways the face of Cornell, the last of the pivotal scientists-people like Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, and Barbara McClintock-who had turned a sleepy central New York town into one of the most important centers of science in the world.

Jake kept flashing to the last time he’d seen Liam-yesterday, lunch at Banfi’s. They were both in a hurry. They’d chatted about a recent experiment; a guy at Caltech had come up with a way to make a strand of DNA assemble itself into a smiley face only fifty nanometers across. Not just one but billions and billions, all floating around in a single little test tube. “The most concentrated solution of happiness ever made,” Liam had joked. Liam was beaming. His own discovery, someone else’s, Liam barely seemed to notice the difference. He loved every new development, every step up the scientific ladder.

There was no way that Liam Connor had jumped from that bridge.

DOZENS OF PEOPLE PUSHED AGAINST HIM, CROWDING FROM all sides. Jake’s stomach churned. He hated death, despised it. Not in the way most people did, ones who mostly feared it. Jake hated it as an enemy. Hated what it took, what it left behind. Jake was in the Army for four years, a time that included the First Gulf War. No soldier spends time in a war zone without getting to know death’s sight and smell. But familiarity had bred contempt. Jake found death to be a colossal waste. Someone’s alive, and then not. It was sudden. Stark. Irreversible.

An unmarked helicopter swept in from the west, dipping down over the dorms of West Campus and pulling up directly over the gorge, hovering dead still. The door was open, and Jake saw a cameraman hanging out on the skids, lens pointed straight down. The local station must have hired the pilot to bring them over.

“Check this out,” said a student to his right. He had his phone out, showing it to a friend. “It’s on CNN.”