Read Critical Mass for Free Online Page A

programmed in.”
    Peering closely, I saw a small speaker and two tiny camera eyes mounted into the door frame. Martin must be a clever boy indeed to disguise their mounting so carefully.
    When I walked into the room, I thought if Kitty had built this space, she was pretty clever herself. Soffits were set into the low ceiling, with three sets of recessed lights. One illuminated the built-in workstation, which held two computer monitors, a second an alcove where Japanese-style screens were open to show a carefully made bed. The third set of lights covered a separate little living area where Martin and his friends met—if he had any friends, poor guy.
    The floor was tiled in a soft-colored stone. I opened a door and saw a bathroom, tiled in the same pale stone. An old tube of toothpaste and a dried-out bar of soap sat on the sink, but a trailing vine, its leaves still thick and green, covered part of the wall next to the shower.
    I wondered if Kitty came in to water it, then saw that a little hose hung over it, attached to an electronic timer. “Was this your invention or Martin’s?” I asked.
    She gave a half-smile. “That was one of the tricks we learned from my dad. Martin made the electronics for it, though. The last thing we ever did together.”
    Back in the bedroom, I poked my head into a walk-in closet, where a lone sports jacket hung. Most of the closet was a storeroom for Martin’s overflow of electronics, old computers that he was hanging on to, a bassoon, some stereo speakers. His whole little apartment wasseverely bare, as great a contrast as possible to the musty rooms above with their collection of junk.
    Two rockets about a yard long, made with a painstaking attention to detail, stood on a shelf above the computers. In between them was a framed snapshot of Martin as a young teen, holding up a plaque that read “First Prize.” His grandfather stood next to him, beaming with pride.
    The rockets and photo, with a poster-sized copy of a book jacket over the bed, were the room’s only decoration. The poster showed the laughing face of the author, Richard Feynman, positioned so that his eyes seemed to be looking at the pillows.
    “He was Martin’s hero,” Kitty said, noticing me staring at it. “Martin read everything he wrote, which gave him the idea he ought to go to some fancy science school, like the one in California where Feynman taught. We fought about that.”
    Feynman’s name was familiar. “A scientist, right?” I guessed.
    “A physicist.” Kitty bit off the word, as if it were something despicable—a symptom of degeneracy, like her daughter’s drug abuse. “He won the Nobel Prize, so I guess he was smart, but what good does that do you? He’s dead like all the rest of them, but Martin doesn’t see it like that. Martin always says Feynman’s work made him immortal.”
    Her jaw worked; she kept staring at the photograph. “Of course, Feynman died before Martin was born, but he started reading about him when he was still in junior high, and then he collected everything he could, books and so on. Martin’s first science project, when he was twelve, was trying to show how Feynman figured out what made the space shuttle blow up.
    “Martin made six rockets, three with faulty O-rings and three without. He tested them; he wanted the faulty one to crash at the science fair, but he couldn’t make it happen because the atmosphere this nearthe ground isn’t cold enough, as any fool would have known. So then he tried doing the experiment in dry ice, which Len thought was such a wonderful idea he went out and filled the garage with it. Toby Susskind, one of the neighborhood boys who came around to stare at the rockets, he passed out from the dry ice, and his father acted like I’d murdered him.”
    She waved a hand at the models above his workstation. “Those are the last two. Martin kept them after he saw he had to give up the idea. He was that upset, as if it was the end of the world. Len