His destination was the Grove Park Inn, an exclusive hotel that had housed an endless roster of luminaries: presidents, monarchs, magnates, musicians, artists. Tricky Dick Nixon had visited just last year. Various members of the Society, including Helen Keller and Harry Houdini, had also conducted business at the inn.
But that night, the only guest of importance to Dr. Corwin was a young psychologist from Boston by the name of Waylan Taylor, recently returned from a sabbatical in South America.
Wispy entrails of fog curled around the long driveway as Dr. Corwin approached the inn, a red-roofed granite monolith surrounded by ancient firs and spruces, sitting proudly on a western-facing slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a breathtaking sight, a Bavarian château supersized by American industry, though not in a gauche manner.
He parked the car and stepped out, inhaling the fresh air, stretching the long legs that had earned him the nickname of Stork as a boy. The cool, damp slopes in the distance reminded him of the verdant landscapes of his Jamaican youth.
Inside the main lounge, the ceilings soared high overhead, supported by stacked stone pillars as thick as castle walls. Oversize leather chairs and sofas swallowed their occupants, and the stone hearth was wide enough to park his Austin-Healey inside. He strode through the lounge and saw that it opened onto a tiered outdoor terrace with stunning views of the mountains.
After securing a room that overlooked the golf course, Dr. Corwin took a hot shower, ordered a warm Grand Marnier from room service, and relaxed in an armchair while he debated how to find Waylan Taylor. Though possessed of one of the finest intellects of his day, Dr. Corwin had another gift that was all too rare among the academic elite: common sense.
Yes, he might be able to sweet-talk the cute receptionist with the pixie cut into giving out Waylan’s room number. Yes, he could probably contrive a way to peruse the spa register or examine the tee times, in case the psychologist had anything scheduled the next day.
But why complicate matters?
Waylan Taylor was a single male staying in a glamorous hotel away from home. Unless he was ill or there were extraordinary circumstances in play, Dr. Corwin was betting he knew exactly where to find him.
Later that night, after a scrumptious meal of pecan-crusted trout and roasted potatoes on the candlelit terrace, Dr. Corwin carried his Macallan single malt to a leather sofa in the lounge. Lanterns suspended from the ceiling on iron chains cast a spell of rustic sophistication on the room.
The clientele was a mixture of stuffy southern aristocrats and long-haired young professionals dressed in polyester trousers and waist-hugging pantsuits. Dr. Corwin had opted for white pants that flared at the ankles, a lime-green cotton dress shirt with a wide collar, his trademark blue trilby, and the same model of Omega Speedmaster that had adorned the wrist of Buzz Aldrin when he stepped foot on the moon.
Though not poor by any stretch, Dr. Corwin was a college professor with no family money to fall back on, and very little savings. After paying the rent on his Manhattan apartment each month, he believed in spending his remaining income on the finer things in life, and in living fully in the present. A mindful capitalist he was. The Society had allotted him a per diem for the assignment, which he planned to use in full.
Just a bachelor enjoying his nightly tipple, he kept his eyes alert, scanning every patron who entered the lounge for a resemblance to the photos of Waylan Taylor in the file.
A man glanced at Dr. Corwin from the bar. By itself, this was nothing out of the ordinary. Almost everyone in the lounge had given him a surreptitious, or sometimes direct, look at some point: he was the only black person in the room, excluding the staff. An unfortunate reality, since it made his face easy to recall, but a reality nonetheless. He did not like to dwell on such matters. It was not that he was unsympathetic to the racial issues plaguing America; he was simply preoccupied with other things.
In his view, true change would remain elusive until a radical dissemination of knowledge and technological advancement equalized the wealth and opportunity gaps and engendered mutual empathy among all people. In short, the sort of global step forward that the Leap Year Society espoused.
And that was very much his concern.
Yet the look from the handsome man at the bar with blond hair and a sharp Teutonic nose had been different from the rest of the rather ovine glances. Brief. Direct. Purposeful. A moment of attention from someone such as a policeman, a dictator, or even a successful entrepreneur—someone who lived apart from or above societal norms.
The man seemed familiar, which bothered Dr. Corwin. He rarely forgot a face. Maybe it was nothing, a resemblance to a colleague he had met at some conference abroad.
The blond man returned to his drink, so Dr. Corwin continued to watch and wait, letting his mind drift. He was still processing the Ettore Majorana file. To a layperson, much of it would have read like speculative fiction, even the part that was established science. To a professor of theoretical physics, such wild conjecture on the nature of the cosmos was a matter of daily routine. What was the quantum realm if not another layer of reality? Less than a century ago, the composition of an atom was an undiscovered kingdom, a fantastical tale that would have elicited disbelieving chuckles in science labs and universities around the world.
Dr. Corwin was not hopeful that science would soon uncover more hidden realms and dimensions—he was convinced of it. Only a fool thought the present age of discovery was the last.
Still, what was this place called the Fold? He had been told nothing beyond what the file contained. Who else in the Society knew of it? Did they take it seriously?
Could Ettore’s theorems truly make inroads into the so-called theory
