“Of course, I can’t put the stair climber on the wheelchair myself,” Capie said, still blathering away seemingly uncontrollably. “I usually call Dad on my cell phone and he comes out to take care of it. So thank you for doing it this time. I’m sure Dad will appreciate it.”
The observatory in front of them was a two-story building built of stone, with one large dome on the west end of the building and two smaller domes on the east. A large portico with stone steps provided entrance to the building’s center. At the foot of the steps, Paul energized Capie’s climber and guided it and the wheelchair up to the building’s set of wooden double doors. He held open both of them for Capie and wheeled her into the gray marble-floored lobby.
A security guard, white-haired and in his mid-sixties, sat at a small desk just inside the main doorway. He looked up as they entered and smiled.
“Why, Miss Capie, it’s nice to see you,” he said, practically purring in delight.
“Hello, John,” Capie replied, laughing softly. “It’s nice to see you again too. John, this is a friend of mine, Henry Kaufman. We’ve come to see Dad.”
John looked at Paul as if he were contagious with a deadly infection. The guard’s expression caught Paul off balance, and he blinked in surprise.
“Okay,” the security officer muttered in Paul’s direction before he turned back to Capie, regaining his smile. “Your dad is in his office catching up on some paperwork.”
“Thanks, John,” she replied as Paul pushed her past the security station, wheeling her through the lobby toward an open archway that led deeper into the building.
John glared at Paul in naked disgust as he went past.
They traveled down a large hallway with a white ceramic tile floor and a high ornate ceiling, where one wall sported large, tall windows, the other with sets of darkly finished wooden doors. Capie pointed at a door halfway down the hall, and Paul maneuvered the wheelchair over to it and pushed the door open.
“Hi, Dad!” Capie called out.
A tall man with average features and salt-and-pepper hair was in the inner office, sitting behind a large wooden desk. Dressed in a white shirt, a narrow black tie, and black pants, he was every inch the dignified scientist.
The professor smiled and dodged around the desk, then leaned forward to hug his daughter.
“Capie, how nice of you to make the drive up this weekend!” he happily resonated in greeting. “I’m glad you did. It looks like the work on next year’s budget will keep me tied up here all next week and I won’t get the chance to drive down to Chicago like we planned. I’m sorry about that.”
His blue eyes shifted direction and focused on Paul.
“Hello, you must be Henry Kaufman, whom I have heard so much about,” he said as he offered his hand.
Paul shook it, feeling the firm grip. “Yes, I am. It’s nice to meet you.”
“I’m sure.” Chris Kingsley released the hand quickly and turned back to his daughter. “Are you planning to stay the night?”
“Yes, please,” she replied with a smile. “By the time we finish the tour here, it will be too late to return to Chicago. So, if it is okay with you, we would like to stay with you tonight. I’ll take the couch, and Henry can use the spare bedroom.”
Paul jerked around toward her. “Whoa, wait a minute...!” he protested.
She raised a hand. “You are the guest. There will be no discussion! Besides, I like the couch better. The couch is more comfortable than the bed in the spare bedroom.”
That part Paul doubted very much. He glanced over anxiously at her father for support, but the professor merely stared back at him with no expression.
But Paul couldn’t bring himself to surrender without an objection. He looked back at Capie. “I protest under the strongest possible terms.”
She smiled sweetly at him. “Be a dear and don’t worry about it. I’ve slept on that couch before.”
Paul wanted to protest further but could see how foolish he would look arguing with her. So he clenched his teeth and said nothing.
She seemed to understand his feelings. “We can argue about this later, if you like. But there are things to do right now. There’s a 102-cm telescope waiting for us.”
Paul frowned but gave in to her suggestion. “All right, let’s not keep it waiting anymore.”
“Dad? Ready for that tour?” Capie asked her father.
Chris gave a dignified nod. “Let’s go.”
• • • •
Dr. Kingsley did an excellent job of showing Paul around the observatory and providing a first-rate hands-on training session with the 102-cm telescope.
Of course, it was still daylight outside, so they didn’t actually see anything through the telescope. Dr. Kingsley offered to let the two of them come back later that night, as long as they didn’t interfere with the graduate students that would also be using the telescope. Paul graciously declined.
As a consolation prize, Dr. Kingsley logged them onto the observatory’s computer system and showed them some of the hundreds of thousands of photos that had been taken through the telescope. Paul saw some of the most beautiful pictures of stars and stellar nebula that he had ever seen.
They were in the second hour of the tour when Capie suddenly excused herself to “go powder her nose.” Paul froze, fearing the worst.
Uh-oh.
With trepidation, he watched her roll her wheelchair from the room, finding himself alone with Professor Kingsley. His spidey-sense was tingling up and down his spine, and the little guy in the back of his brain was diving into a foxhole.
“Mr. Kaufman, you’ve seen something about what we do here at the Observatory. I am curious about what you do for a living,” Capie’s father said, then stared at Paul, waiting patiently for a reply.
Yep, Paul should have gone to powder his nose too. He could suddenly taste bitter bile in the back of his throat, and he steeled himself as best as he could, mentally tip-toeing through a minefield in search of the appropriate words to use.
“Ah, Dr. Kingsley, I...ah...do freelance scientific work. I am, uh, currently working on a study that a couple of...organizations will probably find interesting.”
Capie’s father pursed his lips. “May I ask the subject of the study?”
Fretfully, Paul took a breath. “Nuclear transmutations. Or more specifically, fusion reactions.”
Chris grunted and looked skeptically at Paul for a moment. “Fusion reactions?”
“To date, all the efforts to develop a fusion reactor have focused on hydrogen,” Paul pointed out a bit nervously. “But there are a host of other possibilities that could work, and they might be easier to use than hydrogen.”
“Such as?” the astronomer asked.
Paul couldn’t afford for the man to pursue this line of questioning too deeply, lest he should trap Paul in a web of lies of his own making. So instead, Paul shook his head. “I’m sorry, Professor. I’ve already explained more than I should have. A certain amount of...discretion, is required about a topic this sensitive.”
Clearly, the professor didn’t like this evasion of his question. But it was the best Paul could do on a moment’s notice in order to discourage even more in-depth questions.
“Mr. Kaufman, I must confess that I did a little checking,” Capie’s father told him with no hint of apology in his voice. “No one in the physics department of the University of Chicago has ever heard of you. And I could find no mention of you on the Internet.”
For a second, Paul felt a surge of panic deep in the pit of his stomach. Maybe he could cast a quick spell to trigger the building’s fire alarm? No? Perhaps a tornado warning instead?
“Uh, Dr. Kingsley, I am an electrical engineer, not a physicist. It does not surprise me that the physicists at the university haven’t heard of me.”
“I see.” Chris’s frown deepened further before he turned his gaze to the wall. “Mr. Kaufman, I loved Myra, Capie’s mother, very deeply. When she died...I lost the love of my life.
It’s hard to explain what that does to a person, to lose the one individual in the entire world that they love the most, their soul-mate. Capie is also very special to me. She is all the family that I have left now. When that drunk driver ran into her and I found out that she would be paralyzed for the rest of her life—well, I went out in search of that drunk driver, and I had to be physically restrained from beating the living daylights out of that low-life creep.”
Paul leaned back uncomfortably in his seat. “Capie did not tell me about that.”
The professor leaned forward, a glint of ugliness in his eye. “I would do anything to protect Capie from harm. Anything. If I thought someone—anyone at all—intended to hurt her, I would do my best to hammer that person into the ground.” He paused for a moment. “Is my meaning clear?”
“Crystal clear,” Paul replied, the mental image of the professor whaling away at him with bare-knuckled fists more than a bit unsettling. “I have grown to appreciate how special of a person she is too. And if someone did try to harm her...I would hold that person down for you while you hammered on them.”
Capie’s father blinked in surprise. “You would? That would be most considerate of you. But what if you were the person that was trying to hurt her?”
Paul stared into space behind the other man, not really seeing anything at all. This conversation was every bit as disturbing as he feared it might be. “I swear to you, sir, I would never do anything to harm her and would fight anyone who tried.”
“I see,” Chris said, though Paul could easily tell from the tone of the other man’s voice that he greatly doubted that assertion.
Capie chose that moment to reappear.
“Hello, boys,” she said cheerfully as she propelled her wheelchair back across the room. “Sorry to take so long. Have you been talking about me?”
Professor Kingsley smiled generously at his daughter. “Hardly, dear. Mr. Kaufman was just getting ready to tell me why he enjoys Chicago’s weather so much. Weren’t you, Mr. Kaufman?”
• • • •
Paul’s time that evening at the professor’s home in Williams Bay was equally uncomfortable. Chris doted on his daughter but was barely civil toward Paul. After a restless night in the guest room, Paul joined Capie the next morning for a continental breakfast in the kitchen nook. By 9 a.m., he was champing at the bit to climb into Capie’s van and escape.
On the long drive back, the two of them were quiet. It wasn’t until they were on the Tri-State Tollway bypass that Capie finally sighed and looked sadly over at him.
“I apologize for my father,” she began. “I had no idea he was going to be so....”
“Protective?” Paul suggested diplomatically.
“That’s the right word,” she gloomily admitted. “I don’t know what he said to you, but he gave me quite the earful.”
Paul sighed in sympathetic agreement. He had strongly suspected what Chris’s reaction to him was going to be. He should have done more to avert the whole situation. But he was loath to admit that to Capie.
Instead, he quietly said, “You are the only family that he has left, so it is quite natural that he feels very protective of you. I would feel the same in his position.”
“Look, don’t take it personally,” she stated with a touch of grimness in her voice. “I’ll talk to him and explain things to him. As soon as he gets to know you better, I’m sure he’ll come around.”
“Capie, I....” Paul closed his mouth. He almost told her that they should stop seeing each other, for her own good. A deep bottomless pit yawed wide open before him, making him nauseous at the very idea of saying those words. He just couldn’t force himself to do so.
“I know he’ll come around in good time,” she repeated even more firmly, then turned to smile enchantingly at Paul. “You’re a good man, Henry Kaufman. I can tell. He’ll eventually learn to like you. You will see.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Naperville, Illinois
East Bauer Road
Two-bedroom rental house
May
Wednesday, 10:29 a.m. CST
It hadn’t taken long for Paul to complete his move from South Lawndale to Naperville. For one thing, he didn’t own all that much in the way of furniture. And for another, his magical powers made lifting and toting a virtual breeze. He had spent far more time arranging for the switch of his utilities to his new rental home than he had hauling all his stuff there.
And of course, the new residence was much closer to Capie’s house, currently a mere three miles away. Paul was now able to use a constant healing spell on her, by way of a microportal, with very little energy involved and very little chance of detection. To make the holding of the constant spells easier on himself, at Merlin’s suggestion, Paul whipped up a holographic assistant, a hunched backed mute wearing an old lab coat, which he named Igor.
• • • •
There were still a great many things left to do. Just two days before, he had finally finished the tantalum conversion process to isotope 180m. Successfully, too. The block of tantalum was just as potent as he had hoped it would be.
And the last few times he had worked on the conversion of the tantalum, he had simultaneously started on the chemical alteration of the bertrandite (which he had purchased) into one large emerald. Bertrandite’s chemical formula was Be4SiO7(OH)2, while emeralds had a very similar chemical formula of Be3Al2(SiO3)6. Therefore, with a little bit of magical power and a roll of aluminum foil purchased at the grocery store, Paul had already begun the synthesis process. Thus far, he had a small 2-carat emerald to show for his troubles. However, his end goal was a bit more ambitious—eventually turning the small emerald into a 10,000-carat stone, to weigh 4⅓ pounds. It would take a little time to accomplish that, of course, and Paul fully understood the task he had set for himself.
The conversion of the bertrandite was just one of a number of tasks on his list to accomplish. Once the emerald was made, he would also have to convert its beryllium from 9Be to 10Be, the 28Si to 29Si, and the 16O to 17O. According to his calculations, this would raise the magical quotient of the emerald almost 340%. The downside of these operations was that they too would take a great deal of time to perform, more than twice as long as the conversion of the tantalum.
After that, he still needed to find suitable specimens of pallasite and komatiite and tackle their conversion as well. That would be followed by the actual ceremony for the assembly of the components into a talisman. In addition, there were other projects that he had in mind. And on top of all of that, there were his efforts to heal Capie’s injury.
All those tasks were sandwiched between the time he was spending with her on dates and little outings. Indeed, he was seeing her nearly two or three hours a day. The constant efforts and demands on his time were beginning to wear on him.
He sat in the living room in the metal folding chair at a card table, deep in thought. There were times when he just didn’t see how all of this was going to come together.
“Uncle Sam?” Paul broodingly asked.
The image of the distinguished gentleman appeared, pulled up his typical imaginary chair, and dropped his hat on the floor.
“How may I help?” he asked Paul civilly.
“I’m feeling overwhelmed,” Paul morosely admitted to him. “It’s going to take months to finish getting the materials ready for the talisman ceremony.”
Uncle Sam grunted but did not comment.
Paul hung his head low, putting both of his palms to his forehead. “And to top everything off, I’ve got to do something about Capie now. One way or the other.”
“I see. Why is that?” Uncle Sam asked.
With a heavy sigh, Paul gloomily said, “Because yesterday, Capie told me about a dream she had. She dreamed that feeling was returning to her legs.”
Uncle Sam cocked his head to one side, looking a bit puzzled. “And is this not what you wanted? To cure her paralysis?”
“Yes, of course, it is,” Paul admit
ted dolefully. “But how will she react when she realizes that she is on the mend? I mean, she has been told by a score of doctors that she will never walk again. And then, suddenly, she will start regaining sensation in the lower half of her body, followed by an ability to move her legs and feet again. How will that be explained?”
The strategist perceptibly raised both of his eyebrows. “There is something you are not saying here.”
Paul nodded, dejected. “I am in love with her.”
“I see,” the man replied. “That’s normally a cause for celebration, yet you look as sad as an old goat with no boot to chew on. Please, continue.”
Paul glanced around the room without actually seeing it, his gaze focused inward instead. “I kept telling myself to walk away from her. I knew what was going to happen. I’ve been down this road before. And yet, I wanted to help her, to cure her. That was part of the reason I told myself to keep seeing her.” Paul picked up the emerald and casually studied it before laying it back on the table. “But I didn’t find a cure in time. Now, it is too late. I love her, and I can’t walk away.”
“You are afraid of how this will impact the Master Plan. Am I correct?” the hologram guessed.
Paul was more than a bit peeved by the question. Uncle Sam was supposedly the super intelligence here! He should already know all of this. “Yes, of course, it impacts The Plan. Don’t you see? I don’t know where to go from here! I don’t want to abandon The Plan, especially if it might actually work! But the risk is just too high to involve Capie! If I fail, it will mean her death too if she is too close to me. I can’t really abandon The Plan, not even if I wanted to. Because they are still out there looking for me. I don’t want to live my life on the run, especially if Capie is with me!”
“Penalized either way,” Uncle Sam observed. “To go on with The Plan or not, that is your question?”
Finally! It appeared that the man had it now. “Yes, that’s right. You are the strategist. What should I do?”
“You are making an assumption here that may not be valid,” Uncle Sam replied. “You are assuming that Capie loves you in return. Do you know that for a fact?”
Genie and Engineer 1: The Engineer Wizard Page 30
