He tried to set it down on the workbench, next to the wooden box, but it refused to stay in place. Instead, the glass/plastic/metal object floated a full three inches above the bench in a perfectly vertical position. Startled, Paul gently pushed it down into contact with the wood, but it snapped back up into a hover as soon as he pulled his hand away.
He studied it, again pushing his eyeglasses up his nose. “Some sort of magnetic field, perhaps? But the table is made of wood! Interesting. There doesn’t seem to be a way to open it,” he muttered to himself.
“It doesn’t open,” announced a confident baritone voice behind him.
Paul froze in surprise and fear for several seconds, his eyes opened wide. Gradually, he forced himself to turn and face the genie, which stood tall, perhaps eight feet, not counting the white turban with the large red ruby in the center. He was a much smaller figure here in the garage than he had been in the church.
But it was the same image, dressed in the same clothes. The sight of him was still enough to make Paul’s chin drop and his eyes bug out. The genie chuckled at the expression on Paul’s face.
Mentally, for several seconds, Paul flailed wildly for control, wedged between indecision and incomprehension, while the giant in front of him waited patiently, even cheerfully, for him to recover his wits.
He eventually did, at least partly.
“How do I know you’re really a genie?” he whispered, a part of him still thinking that this was some sort of trick. How could it possibly be real?
The genie laughed, his voice booming in the room. “But of course, Paul! What else would I be, wearing clothes such as these and having an appearance like this? Perhaps you were expecting someone or something else? Hmm?”
The image of the genie morphed, stretching in some directions, contracting in others, and now appeared as a brawny man dressed in a tight tunic, baggy pants, and leather boots, with a conical felt hat on his head. A short sword was sheathed at his waist, a crescent shield in one hand and a long spear in the other.
“Perhaps Xerxes the Great is who you wanted?”
The image transformed a second time. The new figure was incredibly stout, with bulging muscles on top of muscles. Bare-chested, he wore a short skirt-like garment. Long black hair and a heavy black beard framed a manly face that was sporting a wide grin.
“Or Hercules himself?” the figure asked. “Or do your tastes run more to mythical beings?”
Yet another transmutation. In front of Paul was now a large...creature of some kind. It possessed the body of a lion, red in color, and a head that appeared almost human, but with large, dagger-like teeth. And was that a dragon’s tail?
The sight of the strange beast unnerved Paul. He edged away from it slowly.
“How about a manticore?” the monster said, showing far more of the razor-sharp teeth than Paul cared to see.
“Or,” and there was a fourth morphing of the genie’s appearance, “a peri, perhaps?”
In front of Paul now stood...a very voluptuous feminine figure in a provocative pose. A dark-haired beauty, wearing a thin facial veil and a skimpy, lacy garment of silk that barely covered the essentials.
Paul felt his face heat up in embarrassment, and he turned away.
“Ah, no!” he barked. “I believe you! You’re a genie!”
There was another metamorphosis, and the image of the original genie was restored. “And what do you wish for? Wine, women, and song? Riches without end? To live forever? Power? Fame?” He leaned forward a little. “Maybe a full head of hair and some decent clothes to wear instead of those rags? Whatever you want. Wish for it and it is yours!”
Various synapses began to fire again in Paul’s brain, like old spark plugs with the carbon blown out.
“Theoretically speaking, you shouldn’t be here,” Paul observed lamely, backing up even farther, smack up against the workbench.
The giant figure smirked. “Obviously, this ‘Theoretically’ person knows naught of which he speaks.”
Feeling overwhelmed by the genie’s presence and even a bit faint, a quote finally popped into Paul’s head. “‘I’ve always found that sticking your fingers in your ears and humming loudly solves a whole slew of problems.’ Jack O’Neill, Stargate SG-1. I am sorely tempted to try it this one time.”
The genie grinned widely. “I’ve always valued a master with a sense of humor.”
Sighing, Paul clenched his teeth and tried to pull his thoughts together. “Michaels said that you only grant three wishes.”
The genie’s grin was daunting. “Glenn Michaels is correct. But three wishes should be enough for any man, don’t you think? What shall they be?”
More synapses fired. “And there are strings attached.”
The huge genie swung his arms out wide and laughed again loudly. “So he told you that, did he? Yes, it is said that for every action, there are consequences, good as well as bad.”
Paul’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “He also said that you answer questions, but that your answers don’t often make much sense.”
For the third time, there was a booming laugh. “Knowledge is like catching a wild butterfly.”
At first, the genie’s answer seemed to make no sense. Then Paul realized his implication: Wild butterflies were elusive and difficult to catch. And when caught, they often lost their luster.
Paul gulped and nodded thoughtfully. “He also said that questions don’t count as wishes.”
The genie shrugged, those massive arms resuming their position across his chest. “Conversation is cheap. Ask what you will, wish what you want. I will answer to both.”
“I see,” Paul replied. Then he remembered something else from Michaels’s note. “I thought you were only supposed to come out when I use a certain magical phrase.”
The genie gave a smug smile. “Yes, to be sure, you are correct. However, the words don’t have to be said out loud. You were thinking them.”
“Ah, I see. I’ll have to be more careful about my thoughts,” Paul noted sarcastically. “By the way, did you enjoy scaring all the people in my church?”
Again, the smug smile and the shrug. “I did as you bid. Like you said, it is wise to be careful. And now, are you ready to make your first wish?”
“I...ah...that is...ah, no,” Paul stammered.
“No?” the genie replied in surprise, his smile fading slowly.
Paul crossed his arms and slid along the workbench, further from the genie. He realized that he still wasn’t ready to confront the reality of his situation and that he badly needed time to come to terms with the idea of a genie granting him three wishes, let alone of making decisions about what, if anything, he wanted to wish for. No, Paul needed time to analyze the notion of genies, magic, and wishes and to explore all the potential implications and ramifications thereof. There was research to do, web searches to make! This whole situation screamed for an impact study, a fault-tree examination, boundary assessments—maybe even a fishbone diagram! He was an engineer, blast it, not an impulsive gambler!
Slowly and deliberately, Paul said, “If I only get three wishes and those will all have some negative side effects, then I want...that is to say, I intend to give it considerable thought before making any wishes.”
Most of the genie’s smile returned. “Ah, so you really are a wise and careful man after all. Very well, Paul. Whenever you want a wish granted or if you simply want to talk, you know how to summon me.”
Paul nodded in appreciation. “I understand....” But then he discovered that he didn’t really have anything further that he wanted to say and that mostly, he was anxious to terminate this disturbing interview—if that was the right word for it—as rapidly as possible.
“Ati Kispu Du,” he said quickly. The genie faded out of sight, and Paul was faced with an empty garage again.
For several moments, he leaned against the workbench for support, his knees weak, as he frowned, mentally trying to deal with his encounter with the genie. He grimaced
at the sight of all his tools, still neatly arrayed for his use. None of them would really help him with this type of problem.
He still found himself wondering if he had really even seen the genie, if what instead he had experienced was yet another delusion, a mental aberration of some kind, brought on by fatigue and stress. What was reality anyway? How much of what was seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled was real, and how much was contrived within his mind? Until that day, Paul would have sworn that genies had no place in cold, hard reality. Yet he had just talked to one. Was it his concept of reality that was flawed, his perception of it, or had delusions seized control of his mind?
Paul shook his head in confusion. What choice did he really have? According to what he thought he had just seen and heard, he now had three wishes to think about. Maybe he was deluded. Maybe not. The best he could do was play the cards he had been dealt.
His knees wobbling, Paul gingerly took the brightly colored object and carefully put it back in the box, snapping closed the lid.
THREE
Home
Mojave, CA
December
Thursday, 10:00 p.m. PST
Try as he might, Paul could not get the genie out of his mind. For four days, he wandered through life like a man in a dream, wrestling with a thousand variations of wishes he might make. Nothing he could come up with seemed to be satisfactory. The more he thought about it, the less sure he was that he had actually seen a genie at all. And although he used every spare moment to research genies and magic on the Internet, Paul was also totally uncertain about what he wanted and how to wish for it. As a result, he became utterly distracted and frustrated.
It didn’t help the situation, either, to be followed around by that blasted wooden box! It seemed to be everywhere! At home, at work, in his car, at the stores where he went shopping—everywhere that he went! And the fact that everyone else noticed it and asked pointed questions about it that Paul found difficult to answer only compounded the issue, making him feel like a liar.
His co-workers and neighbors all became very much aware of his distracted condition as well. Some were concerned but the majority was irritated, and in a couple of cases were genuinely exasperated with Paul. Only a couple of people tried to give him some space to work out his problems. Everyone else pestered Paul with questions or chastised him for being so dysfunctional and unresponsive to their demands on his time. His stress levels rose dramatically. He felt despondent and even more isolated and alone.
Thursday night, Paul ended up sleeping on the couch. He tossed restlessly, unable to fall asleep until well after the mantel clock chimed 1 a.m.
And then, in his sleep, he dreamed that he was the genie, trapped in a bottle by an evil master, who only let him out when he wanted some greedy, twisted wish granted. Paul dreamed that he was the one confined in a bottle—a horribly small, dank, and dark prison—while the evil, repulsive master, who totally controlled him, laughed hideously, pointing at Paul with a gnarled, misshapen finger. It was a ghastly nightmare which woke Paul up with a start. He came to sitting fully upright on the couch, gasping for breath, his heart racing, his forehead drenched in a cold sweat, the dream still vividly and terribly real in his mind. Gradually, he got control of his breathing, calming himself by degrees, telling himself over and over again that it was only a bad dream. A glance at the coffee table confirmed the presence of the wooden box, the faint light in the room reflecting off the scrollwork patterns in the wood. Feeling miserable and down in the dumps, Paul glanced at the clock on the mantel. 5 a.m. Though every muscle and joint in his body ached, the idea of going back to sleep distressed him. Instead, he got up and prepared to go to work.
Dragging through the morning was pure torture. Paul’s eyes were gritty, the lids like lead weights. His head throbbed and his body ached with fatigue.
This was the day of the big test, the day that his whole company had been working toward for nearly three months. The test program involved a new fuel mixture for the C-5M cargo plane. The Air Force was attempting a new fuel combination that would supposedly increase the plane’s range while at the same time leaving less in the way of pollutants in the atmosphere. In lab and wind-tunnel tests, the results had been promising. The task at Edwards AFB was to fly an instrumented test aircraft, complete with a data acquisition system in the plane and one also on the ground, to monitor the environmental conditions and the usage of fuel.
Operations were scheduled to start at 9 a.m. with the takeoff of the C-5M aircraft test bed. As far as the testing team could tell, they were as ready as they could be, though the new data system, which Paul was partly responsible for, was still somewhat of an unknown quantity.
The nightmares of the previous evening continued to plague Paul’s thoughts. He could not seem to concentrate. When he arrived at work, a co-worker, Ken Rivera, an African-American engineering graduate of Caltech, seemed to immediately recognize that Paul was in trouble, and he stepped in to help whenever and wherever he could.
For the ten thousandth time in four days, Paul was tempted to call upon the genie and wish for the data system to work properly during the test. But there were two problems with making that wish. First, it would waste a wish on something that was real important to Paul, but trivial on a nationwide or global scale, and he was loath to waste any wishes in such a manner. Second, and even more important, Michaels had made it abundantly clear that there were strings attached to every wish. If Paul asked for the data system to work correctly, then something else might go terribly wrong, such as the C-5M aircraft crashing into the Tehachapi Mountains or a major earthquake striking the San Andreas Fault nearby. Or any one of a thousand other potential disasters. No, it was best not to tempt fate in that manner.
The C-5M took off on time, lifting majestically into the bright, sunny California sky. On the ground, Paul and his team were positioned to one side of the control room, monitoring the telemetry data streams from the aircraft. All data channels seemed to be operating normally, the squiggly lines on the computer monitors showing parameter data from each on-board sensor.
An hour went by, the test crew running their procedures, preparing for the most important part of the test sequence. And just as the aircraft switched the on-board fuel sources to the “environmentally-correct” fuel, all the telemetry channels suddenly dropped out, all of them reading a perfect 0.0. All the pressures, the temperatures, fuel flows, and everything else. Absolute flat liners.
“Oh, no!” groaned Ken. Paul too could not believe his eyes, his jaw dropping open.
The test conductor, Darcy Wilson, standing at her station a few feet away, spotted the issue on her monitors at virtually the same moment. “What’s this? Data Ops, what’s going on? Where’s my data?”
Paul bit his lip and rapidly flipped through the displays at his workstation. Nothing was making any sense. How could all the data stop at the same time? He tried to think it through, but the mental and physical fatigue was hampering him badly.
“Couldn’t be an antenna problem,” muttered Ken as he too examined the displays. “We still have IRIG timing synch.”
A quote came to Paul, from the movie The Andromeda Strain. “‘It’s just registering double-zero, double-zero.’”
“Huh? What’s that mean?” Ken asked.
“What’s the problem here?” asked their boss, Adrian Cantrell, who was standing behind them.
Paul looked up with a start. He had not heard Cantrell’s approach. With a supreme effort, Paul kept himself from groaning out loud or otherwise reacting in a bad way. Cantrell was the worst micromanager that Paul had ever worked for, bar none. The last thing that they needed was to have Cantrell looking over their shoulders while they worked to resolve the problem with the data system.
And it was urgent that they solve it. If they didn’t do so in the next few minutes, then it would seriously impact the performance goals of the test, perhaps even cause the test to be cancelled. That would be bad, Paul knew. It would reflect poorl
y on the company and cost the Air Force a hefty chunk of money. It might even delay the program past the end of the year.
Ken screwed a hesitant smile onto his face. “It’s just a glitch in the data system, boss.” He turned to Paul. “I think we should reboot the telemetry computer. That will probably take care of the problem.”
To Paul’s mind, it seemed like a reasonable suggestion, so he started to nod in agreement.
And then, in a flash, he understood what the true cause of the problem was.
“No,” he said slowly. “It’s the telemetry demultiplexer. It’s lost module lock mode.”
Ken stared at him. “That’s never happened before.”
Paul nodded. “The sales rep told me about it once, right after they sold us the system. I almost forgot about it. He said if it happened, it would have these symptoms.”
Cantrell coughed. “How long does it take to fix the demultiplexer?”
Ken blinked. “We would have to reload a calibration and setup file. It would take ten, maybe fifteen minutes to run and get back into acquisition mode.”
Cantrell’s eyes narrowed dangerously, and he gave Paul a measured look. “And to reboot the telemetry computer?”
“Two, maybe three minutes, tops,” Paul replied with a sinking feeling in his heart. Knowing Cantrell, he knew what was coming next.
“Do the PC reboot instead. Now,” he ordered Ken.
For a brief moment, Paul considered voicing his objections. His boss’s decision had been based solely on the time element involved and not with any technical considerations. Paul knew that the reboot would not solve the problem and that they would eventually be forced to take the demultiplexer off-line and reset it anyway.
It was a perfect case of being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. If he tried to explain to Cantrell that it was the wrong decision, then his boss would yell at him. If he let Ken waste time rebooting the PC, his boss would later be furious at him for not saying anything. Either choice was bad.
Genie and Engineer 1: The Engineer Wizard Page 4
