Trouble in Elysium
A short story for Dr. Freeman's
SPAC 253, "Space Colonies"
"Strange that the home of the gods should look like a tin can
in space," Nathan Loomis mused from his acceleration couch as the
shuttle began its final matching acceleration with his destination.
"But it isn't the home of the gods, sir," replied the
stewardess as she crept down the aisle, her Velcro sandals and the slight
acceleration barely keeping her on the floor. "Olympus was the home
of the gods in ancient Greek mythology. Elysium was the area in the
afterlife where great heroes went to stay in peace and happiness for
eternity. Elysium Station is the same way: after great industrial tycoons
have made their fortunes and set up their companies, they can move here
and just let the profits roll in, just putting a hand in when they're
needed."
"Who built it? Surely it wasn't designed as a retirement
home?"
"Not a retirement home -- more like a year-round resort. In
the first flush of profits from organized asteroid mining made possible by
the Harrison fusion drive, Ad Astra, Inc. built a huge research and
development station, housing 100,000 people, both scientists and their
families. The company planned to use the mining profits to expand into
other fields in space manufacturing and development. But they
miscalculated their opposition and went bankrupt. A group of corporate
magnates took over the station, renamed it Elysium, remodelled the entire
residential system into villas instead of apartments, and made it their
home. From its site here in Earth geosynchronous orbit they can
communicate with their corporate offices on Earth but still live in
relative seclusion, closer to their actual interests in space."
The orbit-shuttle had turned off its fusion rockets, since
interplanetary law prohibited the pilot from firing those fountains of
radiation and hot plasma near any inhabited planet or space station.
Instead it was igniting its small chemical reaction rockets (which just
reacted the liquid hydrogen with oxygen instead of fusing it), lining up
the hatch in its nose with the corresponding opening on the near axis of
the station and spinning itself up to match Elysium's rotation rate of
five degrees per second. Loomis was in a small compartment, holding
couches for only about twenty people, with a hatch to the cargo holds
beneath him, a door to the side opening to the cockpit, and an airlock
iris valve at the bow above him. Loomis was the only passenger in the
cabin other than some elderly matron on the other side of the compartment,
slowly and meticulously filling out a crossword puzzle. Undoubtedly she
had done this hundreds of times before, Loomis thought. She was just
returning home, while Loomis was on his first trip outside near Earth
orbit. His elderly grandmother, widow of an interplanetary freight
magnate, had summoned him to Elysium after he graduated from law school so
that she could look him over and perhaps "help him find a place in
life."
He looked up at the viewscreen over their heads, its picture
computer-corrected to eliminate the growing rotation of the shuttle that
would have produced instant vertigo if the passengers had seen it
directly. The pilot himself probably had his eyes averted, looking only
at his instruments. The viewscreen was displaying a view from the bow
camera as they approached Elysium. In space one lost all sense of scale,
Nathan thought. In the screen one got no idea that the spinning cylinder
of treated, reinforced mooncrete and glass was two and a half kilometers
across and a little less than that long. As it spun he could see the huge
window sections rotate by. Swung out from each was a large aluminum and
mylar mirror that sent sunlight reflected from the large mirror on the
other side of the station right into the station, where mirrors mounted on
the central core would reflect it back to the living areas on the skin of
the cylinder. That central core was one of the unusual facets of Elysium.
The original designers had made the station a cylinder rather than a
torus, yet to keep from wasting space in the middle they had mounted on
the rotation axis a huge tube, running end to end in the station, housing
low-g manufacturing apparatus, maintenance machinery, and so on, mostly
run by industrial robots. The core also served as further radiation
shielding for what cosmic rays slipped in past the mirrors and thick glass
windows. Yet now it was unused, since costs prohibited removing it and
the heavy equipment it contained. It was indeed as useless as if it had
been air to the new owners.
He could see how the station was arranged from where the windows
were. About a fourth of the length, the portion they were approaching,
had no windows: that would be more unused industrial and laboratory
section, containing the parts that needed full gravity or, at least, more
than could be provided by the kilometer-across central core. Beyond that
was a section making up about half the length of the station, holding the
residential areas. Three full length windows made up about half its
surface area, letting light through for the inhabitants. At the other end
of the station, the windows were staggered from where they were in the
residential area: there what had been land was window, and vice versa.
This was the agricultural area, closed off to allow a carefully controlled
atmosphere and temperature which would be uncomfortable for humans, but
was marvellous for plants. Its windows were staggered so that it could
use a separate set of window mirrors: light could be supplied to the
plants at times when the main windows were closed to provide
"night" for those living on the station. Beyond that was only
the immense mirror that turned to follow the Sun in the colony's orbit
with the Earth. At its edges were large black solar panels to collect
power, further in were the mirrors that reflected sunlight into the
station, and in the center was a microwave antenna that sent power to the
receiver at the end of the core shaft. There was Elysium -- a strange
enough prospect at first. But what would await him when he arrived
inside?
With the aid of guidance lasers mounted on the edges of the dock
and timed pulses on the radio, the guidance computer on the shuttle,
specially programmed to take account of the strange Coriolis accelerations
that acted on moving, rotating bodies, managed to guide the shuttle to a
smooth, painless juncture with the station's receiving dock. The iris
valve above them dilated open, revealing two small airlock chambers and
the empty receiving area beyond that. No ladder? thought Nathan to
himself, but then saw the old woman across the compartment release her
couch's acceleration harness and just kick herself up through the air
toward the corridor leading to the station's axis. Blushing at his
ignorance of the theory of rotationally simulated gravity, Nathan followed
suit. Entering the foyer at the end of the passage, he saw a middle-aged
gentleman waiting for him, dressed in an archaic butler's costume, his
coat-tails ludicrously floating behind him in the zero-gravity of the
central core.
"Mr. Loomis, I presume?" he asked, "I am Phelps,
your grandmother's butler, sent here to meet you. Would you follow me
please?" Pushing off from the wall, he took a radial corridor from
the reception area to a pair of elevator doors. The well-kept, lighted
lift took the two along the core cylinder and through the unused
industrial segment, where they entered a second elevator that took them
from the axis along the wall between the section of the station to the
residential area. Within the living area of Elysium was an unusual sight.
As with most stations, the ground curved up toward the horizon, but unlike
the typical torus, with its blank, chevron-shielding ceiling above leading
in sunlight, the ceiling here mirrored the empty space outside, with the
sun floating in the sharp, clear, starry night sky outside Earth's
atmosphere. Since each mirrored section of the core shaft reflected light
to two ground segments, however, the observer could see two suns in the
sky. Across the chamber and above and behind the observer the walls of
the residential area were painted black with white spots of stars to match
the reflected view. Far to the left and right high stone walls blocked
off access to the large windows that made up three sixths of the chamber's
surface area, and also stopped any stray radiation that slipped through
the windows slantwise. Between the walls, however, lay the villas of the
rich and powerful. An access road carried small electric cars along the
walls of the area, while the rest of the area consisted of large,
well-landscaped villas separated from each other by large, ivy-covered
walls of sculpted lunar rock. Each land-owner could alter his area as he
saw fit, as long as the patch-work landscape was still pleasing to those
farther along the cylinder who could see it before the core shaft
artificially cut off their horizon. Cheap lunar soil could be shaped in
whatever patterns the owner desired -- hills, plains, plateaus, terrain
like an insane golf-course -- whatever the person had money and mind to
do.
Phelps took Nathan to a little electric car parked by the elevator
and drove it along the accessway until a gate, activated by a tiny
transponder under the car's hood, opened for them. The butler drove in
along a long driveway, and finally parked the car before what seemed to be
a large, English mansion. The building's pillared portico and high
windows were surrounded by ivy, and it had obviously been designed so that
the sunlight, always falling at the same angle from the reflective
mirrors, would strike the house at the best angle to show it off. Phelps
led Nathan into the house, through a richly furnished foyer, full of plush
furniture and expensive, carved wood, up carpeted stairs to a second-floor
bedroom, where Nathan's bags had already arrived by the pneumatic tubes
used for parcel sending on Elysium. "This will be your room,
sir," he said, "until your grandmother can find time from her
numerous business dealings to see you. In the meantime, I will be taking
you on tours of various portions of Elys ium. I hope you enjoy your
stay."
In the next few days, Phelps took Nathan around the wheel of the
residential area, showing him its general layout. They drove by the
closed-off and carefully guarded water and sewage treatment areas, manned
entirely by robots to prevent any possibility of harm to the wealthy
inhabitants of Elysium. Another day they passed by the equally
well-protected control areas for performing such routine but dangerous and
important tasks as remotely maneuvering the mirror outside to always
reflect sunlight towards the station or distributing the power caught by
the microwave antenna. Then, a few days after Nathan's arrival, Phelps
informed the hopeful young law-school graduate that in the afternoon they
would be visiting the home of Mr. Duncan "Donuts" Hart, owner of
a large toroidal space station construction firm which, incidentally, had
a large legal department. The villa grounds were done like Scottish
moors, with low flat, fog-filled areas filled with heather and bracken.
The house looked like a long, low castle, complete with portcullis and
battlements. A robot servant, more common in this day and age than human
servitors like Phelps, opened the door and remarked in almost
human-sounding speech from the voder behind its simulated armored visor,
"Good evening, sirrahs. Mr. Hart is awaiting you in his chambers.
Follow me, please." The knight-like robot clanked away down the
stone, torch-lit passage and up a set of cirular stairs to where a large,
carved oaken door opened into the hall. Stopping in front of the door, he
knocked and then said "You may go in now."
Nathan opened the door. The first thing he noticed was that Mr.
Hart was not sitting at his desk, but rather was in the middle of the
floor, sprawled on the floor in a pool of his own blood. Red stains
spread out across his chest from a large, angry, ragged bullet hole, just
as a crazy network of cracks emanated from a jagged hole in the middle of
the window across the room. The robot and Phelps both stood still in
shock, but Nathan strode across the room to look out the window. Nothing
but the normal view of walls and villas beneath a sunny, starry sky
presented itself.
"I don't see where the killer could have fired from!"
Nathan complained bitterly, looking far and wide over the landscape.
"Ah, Mr. Loomis," Phelps hoarsely whispered, trying hard
not to look at the corpse, "you have obviously not paid any attention
to life on space stations. Moving objects in a rotating station do not
seem to move in straight lines, or even normal gravitational trajectories.
Coriolis accelerations affect them, and they move in strange, complex
curves, dependent on their speed and the station's rotation. We probably
have no chance of seeing where the, ah, assassin was standing." He
glanced again at the dead body and turned his head away, wincing.
"Well then, we can tell the bullet's speed from its caliber
and mass. We know the station's rotation speed. And we can tell its
general direction from these two holes," Nathan exclaimed, counting
off each point on his fingers. "Why can't we still plot its
trajectory back to the firing point?"
Excitedly, the two sent the robot to fetch them polar graph paper
for scratchwork and sat down at Hart's desk computer to work out a
solution. Phelps constantly looked on the point of being sick, but after
a few minutes they had arrived at a solution and pulled out a map of
Elysium to find the murderer's location. Because of the large size of the
villas on the station, only one was under suspicion, and because of their
exclusivity, someone from that villa must have done the deed rather than a
stranger who just wandered in. "You'd need sophisticated measuring
and sighting devices to get this done," Nathan pointed out, "so
this is obviously a case of premeditated murder. Who represents the
police here?"
"We don't really have any," Phelps explained, "the
Orbit Guard takes care of major affairs, and minor events are generally
handled within the households. But by the time we got word to the Guard
headquarters and it went through their bureaucracy, tomorrow afternoon's
shuttle might have left with the murderer on board. It looks like you may
need to make a citizen's arrest."
"All right, we'll just have to see who we're up against.
Robot, tell us about Mrs. Rosamond Varley, 112 Segment Three."
The dry voice, almost human but not quite, emanated patiently from
behind the mechanism's closed visor as it linked with the household's main
computer and searched for references. "Rosamond Elaine Varley....
Widow of Hans Roderic Varley, former regional head of Hart
Astro-Engineering, fired for unknown reasons and then worked for the
competing firm of Varley and Jacobs.... Her husband committed suicide five
years, three months, and twenty-six days ago.... Ever since she has lived
in seclusion in her home on Elysium, visited seldom even by her son, who
lives in the next villa.... End of references."
"Well, sounds like a possible motive there," Nathan said,
smiling, "Can we call up a picture from the computer?" He
searched through a few databases and, finally a digitized picture built up
on the screen of Hart, his dead wife, Varley, and his wife standing and
smiling at the camera. He recognized Mrs. Varley as the person who had
been the only other passenger in his shuttle. "She just doesn't seem
the murdering type..." he said.
"Maybe that's why we've found her so easily," Phelps
quickly rejoindered. "This is a clever crime at first, but we solved
it easily enough."
"I still don't know. Let's pay Mrs. Varley a visit."
After carefully instructing the robot to call the Orbit Guard and arrange
for the preservation of the body until burial, the two new investigators
leapt into their car. They raced along the access road, crossed a bridge
over a window segment, and found themselves on Segment Three, where most
of the smaller and less elaborate villas were to be found. They stopped
at the gate marked 112 and rang for admittance. "Varley residence.
Who's there?" asked a computerized voice.
"Nathan Loomis and Phillip Phelps, here to pay a call on Mrs.
Varley," Phelps interjected, "We'd like to see her about an
urgent matter."
"You are registered as occupants of Elysium.... Mrs. Varley is
unoccupied at the moment.... You may be admitted." The gate swung
open with a click. The two drove their car up a driveway somewhat shorter
than the others they had seen to a New England style house, looking as
though it had been transplanted right out of suburban Massachusetts on
Earth (for a richer client, it might very easily have been). A somewhat
unkempt, unadorned robot met them at the front door. "This way,
please," it said, with something of an uncorrected rasp in its voice.
The mechanical servitor, gleaming dully in the sunlight, led the two in
the front door and over to a small study where old Mrs. Varley was waiting
for them.
"I don't believe I've ever met you two," Mrs. Varley
began.
"Did you murder Duncan Hart?" Nathan asked.
A look of shock spread across Mrs. Varley's face. "No,
no!" she said. "He's dead? How? I wouldn't have killed
him!" She seemed to visibly slump in her chair, not with the weight
of guilt, but with that of grief and surprise.
"Where were you today?" Nathan asked further.
"Here -- here in my house," the old woman stammered.
Did anyone see you here? Any servants? Anyone?"
"No, no, my household is all robots and I stay by myself. I
haven't been anywhere today."
"Why did Hart fire your husband from his company?"
"I don't know. He didn't say, though I asked him, but it did
hurt him terribly, and he always went downhill after that until he died.
But I wouldn't kill Hart for that, I swear I wouldn't!"
"Can anyone vouch for you? A neighbor, a relative?":
"Y-yes, my son James lives next door. He doesn't come over,
but I talk to him on the phone all the time."
"Tell us about him."
"He's a nice boy, makes his living on stocks. He stays rather
quiet and by himself too. Runs in the family, I suppose...." Her
voice trailed off. "I didn't kill him. Really I didn't! Please
believe me!" Her hands were visibly shaking.
"All right, Mrs. Varley. You just stay around the house here
for the next few days, and we'll be back soon to clear things up. Do you
mind if we look around the house before we leave, though?"
"Go ahead, go ahead, I have nothing to hide," she
pleaded.
As the ill-repaired robot showed them out after their tour of the
elegant yet slowly declining home, Phelps spoke for the first time.
"Why did you let her off like that? She has the motive and the
opportunity."
"Yes, but I don't believe she did it! She just doesn't seem
right for a killer! And you saw the grounds: the kind of brackets you
would need for the rifle and the sighting equipment should have left some
trace, but none of the weeds or plants had been disturbed. And do you
think in a disrepaired household like this she would have a high-precision
rifle?"
"All I can say is that trajectories don't lie. Newton wasn't
wrong, so I say I'm not. She's just putting up a good front to disguise
her revenge of her husband."
"Can we check her baggage from the shuttle? See if she
brought any weaponry or had any delivered? She certainly didn't have any
in that house or on the grounds. How about looking into her garbage? How
about questioning her robots?"
"Robots' memories can easily be changed merely by ordering
them to forget things. Both baggage and mail for Elysium residents are
inviolable. Garbage is all disposed of by being incinerated in the
supplemental fusion reactor, since orbital littering is a capital crime.
The only piece of evidence we have or are likely to get is that bullet and
its plotted trajectory, and that leads right back to Mrs. Varley."
"Well, I still think she's innocent. Let's wait for a while
-- take me on that tour of the agricultural area you had promised. I want
to think for a while."
"All right, but I don't think you'll meet with any success."
Phelps drove the car to one of the walls of the residential area,
where they parked the car and walked to an air-lock door in the wall. The
immense black partition stretched above them, white spots flecking its
surface to resemble stars. Phelps opened the door and they entered a
small air-lock chamber. Then the butler gave Nathan a small air tank with
an attached mask which covered the wearer's nose and mouth. "What's
this for?" asked Nathan.
"The agricultural area is kept at a high partial pressure of
CO2 and a carefully controlled temperature to encourage plant growth. We
have an air lock to maintain those special conditions, and air-masks to
let people function at their normal level instead of being inhibited by
the excess carbon dioxide. Under controlled conditions we can get about
225 kilograms of food per hectare per day."
Together the two cycled the air lock and passed through. Nathan
felt heavy, hot, humid air enfold him like a blanket. The two investigators
had emerged from the airlock on a walkway near a window, so directly in
front of them was another of the stone walls that blocked out slanting
cosmic radiation. "Why do windows in the residential section
correspond to land in the agricultural section, and vice versa?"
Nathan asked.
"So that the reflecting panels for the residential section
won't block sunlight from reaching the agricultural section's
mirrors," Phelps responded. "Instead the windows are staggered
so that both can receive sunlight at the same time." As they emerged
from the shelter of the wall, Nathan could see around him a chamber
resembling the residential area, but only about half as deep and covered
with plants and enclosures rather than villas. Phelps pointed out the
areas where food-crops were grown and where luxury crops, originally not
planned for in the station but now possible because of the reduced
population, were cultivated. Here and there they saw pressurized shelters
containing normal atmosphere and temperature for cattle and other
livestock which provide meat to the population. Explained Phelps,
"The plastic windows of the enclosures contain chemicals that become
opaque when we run an electric current through them so we can provide a
night period for the livestock."
"Why not just close the windows like you do for the
residential section?" asked Nathan.
"The plants grow faster and better in continuous, twenty-four
hour sunlight, so the windows are fixed in an open position."
"So why not put all the livestock on one land segment and
just close the windows reflecting sunlight to them?"
"You can't just close some of the windows: it has to be
all or none, or you'll give the station an off-center rotation."
"Wait, hold on!" Nathan stopped short in the middle of
the walkway. "Get me to a computer, quickly!"
The two raced back down the walkway and through the airlock, leaped
in the car and swiftly drove back to Nathan's grandmother's house. Nathan
worked furiously over the desk computer terminal in his room, and
eventually emerged triumphantly. "Take me to 111 Segment
Three!" he shouted to Phelps. The butler looked puzzled but obeyed
the command, and within a few minutes the two were outside the gate to the
villa adjoining Mrs. Varley's. Nathan rang the bell, and a cool
mechanical voice said "Varley residence. Who is calling
please?"
"Nathan Loomis and Phillip Phelps calling on an urgent
matter," Nathan answered while Phelps looked on in puzzlement.
"You are refused admittance," the voice responded,
"please call back some other time." But Nathan was already
walking along the base of the stone wall, looking closely at it. He
stopped and jumped upwards, catching hold of a small crack midway up, and
began struggling upwards. Phelps ran up and gave him a boost, and from
the top of the wall Nathan pulled his companion up beside him. The young
lawyer leapt down from the wall into the inside of the villa enclosure and
began making his way through the shrubbery towards the house, Phelps
following at his heels. Nathan circled around as they approached the
residence itself, and as they came up on the porch a surprising sight met
their eyes. A young man was on the porch, disassembling a tripod on which
was mounted a sleek-looking rifle, connected by a cable to a computer and
a complicated-looking sighting device.
"Stop, police!" Nathan cried, perhaps taking on more
responsiblity than his job as lawyer granted him. The young man jumped
up, seized the rifle, and fired a shot into the shrubbery. Then he turned
and ran into the building, with the two companions in close pursuit. The
building was furnished in rather low class as far as Elysium was
concerned, but this would have been rather posh anywhere else. However,
the pursuers had little time to critique the furniture as they chased the
culprit to the garage, where he leapt into a small electric car and went
roaring down the driveway. "This way!" Nathan shouted, and ran
towards the wall. The two climbed a tree and vaulted over to their own
car, soon speeding along in pursuit of their quarry.
In the chase, their prey had no chance to dip behind the horizon or
disappear behind a hill, because a space-station has neither. But Nathan
and Phelps had no chance to gain on the murderer either, since all cars on
Elysium had roughly equal performance. They pursued him all along the
access road and over a few bridges joining segments, until finally he
stopped some distance ahead. By the time they caught up, the two saw that
he had torn open a hatch in the wall leading into some dark space beyond.
Beside the hatch the rifle lay twisted, obviously misused as a crowbar on
the recalcitrant entrance. "Quick, what's through here?" Nathan
asked urgently.
"Nothing but the full-g industrial section," Phelps
answered, "nothing but unused labs, offices, and machinery. It's
been vacant for years. No-one ever goes there."
"That's exactly why he's gone there. You stay here in case he
comes back," Nathan ordered, and plunged into the blackness with a
flashlight from the tool kit in the back of the car. As he entered, dust
sprang up before his feet and his steps re-echoed from the walls up and
down the corridor. Yet his flashlight picked up the only other
disturbances in the dust of years of disuse: the footprints of his
adversary. The air is rather stale in here too, Nathan thought: they must
have had the ventilation shut off for years along with the power. As his
breath rasped in his throat he followed the tracks, tramping up and down
through vacant offices, conference rooms, and laboratories of dusty and
broken equipment, tombs and mausoleums of science slaughtered for
pleasure's sake. Suddenly the walls opened up around him into an immense
shaft, some sort of air-circulation space with corroded bulletin boards
mounted in the middle and staircases circling the walls. Suddenly, with a
fierce, hoarse shout, a dark shape launched itself from high on the
stairwell directly towards Nathan. Stunned, the young man could do l
ittle but stand, frozen, as his enemy descended towards him in the dark.
Yet even as he watched, the murderer's trajectory seemed to go slightly
awry, and the killer crashed to the ground some five feet from his
intended landing-place -- Nathan. As the crumpled body gave a moan,
Nathan gave it one sharp rap on the head for safety and set himself to
dragging it back to the open air of the residential section.
The Orbit Guard tended to respond swiftly when given a murderer to
seize rather than a mystery to solve, so by the next day James Varley had
been arrested and incarcerated, and Nathan and Phelps were relaxing
together in Nathan's grandmother's house to hash out the last details of
the case. "But how did you figure out it was James who was the
killer?" Phelps asked, hoping, now that peace was restored, to at
last get an answer.
"When you were showing me the agricultural station, your
comment on off-center spins suddenly reminded me that the extendable
mirrors can change the spin rate. The residential section is longer than
the agricultural section, so its reflecting panels extend out farther when
they're open. When the mirrors are extended in the day, the station's
radius effectively increases, increasing its rotational inertia, so its
spin rate slows down. But the radius and spin rate given in the
references is for the station with all the windows closed. We used the
wrong spin rate in our calculations and ended up with the wrong suspect.
I went back and refigured the calculations and found the change in
trajectory was just enough to put the assassin in James Varley's villa. I
did some research and found he owned major stock in the two companies his
father had worked for, and stood to acquire a great deal more as an
inheritance when his mother died. He counted on our miscalculation, and
reasoned that if Hart died and his mother were executed for murder, he
would acquire large amounts of stock in both companies and be able to buy
up even more of Hart's company's stock at a reduced price in the shock of
his death. He had always blamed Hart for firing his father and his mother
for driving him to death with guilt, so here was his chance to gain
revenge on both counts and make a great deal of money at the same time,
all with seemingly little risk to himself. When we went to his villa and
found the murder weapon itself, our case was complete, except for the
formal necessities like the ballistics tests the Orbit Guard just
finished. All we had to do was hunt him down and chase him."
"Yes," interjected Phelps, "you were certainly lucky
there. Though Varley had an intellectual feel for Coriolis acceleration
and used it to cover up his crime, he didn't have an emotional,
instinctive feel for it. I don't think any human ever can. When he
jumped off that stairwell to crush you, he didn't think that the station
and you would rotate beneath him enough that he'd miss the human cushion
he'd planned on. The medics say he's all right except for a few strained
ligaments and bad bruises -- certainly fit enough to stand trial."
"It certainly was an interesting first case," Nathan
answered. "I think I'll always remember my experiences here on
Elysium, and certainly the refresher in physics I've had. Varley used
Coriolis acceleration to accomplish a crime, yet it also proved his
downfall. I guess I could say that, no matter how strange my future cases
may be, this first one certainly had a lot of unexpected twists to
it."