Laurie Carter sat assembled in Larry Duncan's office with the three other team leaders of the Daedalus project including Kyle Martin. Larry had been distracted with something most of the day, visitors to the island and meetings with Carl Jacobs. Besides that he'd holed up in his office, which was unusual for Larry, ordinarily a hands-on working manager. Kyle had also seemed focused on some project of his own, although he'd been pinging Laurie for data dumps of their test results and config data throughout the day. He, too, had spent the day in his office. For her part, Laurie had been ruminating in the control room, hoping for a distraction to come along to rescue her from her thoughts, like a request to run another experiment or make an adjustment to the parameters on Daedalus. She was mystified about the missing hard disk drive. How did that plan not work? Or did it? How could they know? She wasn't used to considering these ideas, the simplest of which were brazenly illogical and an affront to any scientist's belief in reason. She wondered how Kyle and Larry kept it together.
“Team,” Larry Duncan began. “We have a minor distraction that's going to require some special treatment. It seems a teenage boy has gone missing, possibly near Isla Roca. I had a visit from the FBI earlier today, and Carl and Aaron are presently escorting detectives and the family on a search of El Pliegue.”
“El Pliegue? You mean that sinkhole? The kid went missing there?”
“Well, that's a theory, and not a particularly bad theory. The kid was on a diving tour out there, Carl says they have them out there daily where tourists go diving over the sinkhole. The kid never made it back from the tour. They figure maybe he drowned.”
“That's terrible,” said Laurie.
“Yeah, it's heartbreaking,” Larry said, only slightly sarcastically. “But the fact is that the FBI and maybe even reporters and local cops are probably going to be showing up here, poking around, asking questions. We are hoping that by sending Carl and Aaron out with some Zodiacs to help them search, we could either turn up the body quickly or establish that the kid isn't here, but we are going to err on the side of caution. We need to shut down all work on Daedalus until further notice. Power it all down, close up and lock the lab, lights off, you name it. Everyone will remain in the dorms and don't talk to any visitors. If you are approached for questioning by the FBI, police, or a reporter, then send them to me.”
“That's kind of extreme, don't you think?” Kyle said.
“Yeah, but it's not my call. Carson Lee made the call. But it's still probably a good idea. We don't even know what's going on with our own project right now, not absolutely, and we don't need it advertised on national TV. Plus, you know these Puerto Ricans are not all that friendly with the DoD, and I'm sure that includes us. We need to keep this project under the radar. Best way to do that right now is to shut it down. This will blow over in a day or two and we'll be back in business. Just take a couple of days off. But we have to stay here on the island.”
“Larry, this couldn't be a worse time to shut this down. I'm—” Kyle began before Duncan cut him off.
“I know, I know. You're just about to solve our riddle. But we don't have a choice.”
“I have been running the math again all day. Making sure there wasn't something we overlooked. I think there's something we didn't account for. I'm pretty sure we did create a time loop, and I think I might know why. But we need to do more tests to be sure, and collect some data where we weren't looking before.”
“We'll get back on that in a couple of days. Right now, we're shutting it down. Got it?” Larry commanded. Kyle thought about arguing for a half a second before he bit his tongue. It wasn't going to do any good. Larry had orders from on high. He might be a scientist, but he still had a job to do.