Genie and Engineer 1: The Engineer Wizard (29 page)

And it really would be the smart thing to do, to just walk
away at this point in time. She didn’t need to be anchored to a Don Quixote, a
man who really did have a short life expectancy. Paul couldn’t ask any woman to
stand beside him under those conditions, let alone a woman he was coming to
admire and care for.

If only he could cure her of her paralysis first, then he would
have no qualms about walking away. At least that way, he would leave her in a
better situation than where he had found her. But after learning the specifics
of spinal cord injuries, that choice was apparently denied to him.

So, what would it be? Help this one woman and let the rest
of the world remain in slavery? Let World War III happen, including the death
of 500 million people? Or do the smart thing and stop seeing her in order to
continue with his mission to save mankind?

Grimly, Paul realized that his situation was similar to what
Kirk faced with Edith Keeler in the
Star Trek
episode “The City on the
Edge of Forever.” But of course, that was just a TV show. This was for real.

Why did he find it so hard to make this choice?

Northbound, U.S. Highway 12

Two miles north of Genoa City, Wisconsin

May

Saturday, 10:51 a.m. CST

“
Y
ou
are really going to enjoy Yerkes Observatory,” Capie was babbling to Paul. “I have
been there many times, of course, but each time, I learn something new or see
something through one of the telescopes that I’ve never seen before. It’s
always a lot of fun, don’t you know....”

Paul tuned her out. Capie was practically blathering as she
drove up U.S. Highway 12, heading for Lake Griffin and eventually Yerkes
Observatory.

He was still not quite sure how she had talked him into going
on this trip. He had taken her to dinner in a nice restaurant in Chicago two
weeks after seeing
Foundation
. He had just given her a present, too,
specifically, the five books of the
Deverry
series, in hardcover,
written by Katherine Kerr. Capie had confessed on their earlier “date” that she
was looking for the series and was having difficulty finding it in hardcover
format. So, since his magical powers made it childishly easy to find such for
her, Paul had surprised her with the five-book set right there in the
restaurant.

And somehow, a minute or two after that, they were planning
a trip to the Observatory.

Ostensibly, the two of them were making this trip so that Paul
could tour the facilities and actually lay hands on a 102-cm refracting
telescope, the largest of its kind in the world. But he suspected that the ulterior
motive up Capie’s sleeve was to introduce him to her father. Or stated in more
pertinent terms, maybe it was the other way around. Maybe she wanted her
father
to meet
him
.

Paul turned to study her profile. She was still prattling
away at warp speed, still very excited about this little trek of theirs. They
had taken her vehicle because neither one of her wheelchairs—not the manual or
electric version—would fit in his Camry. It made sense to take the van, and as
such, it was equipped only to let her drive.

Her father, Professor Chris Kingsley, was on the staff of Yerkes
Observatory (part of the University of Chicago) as one of the astronomers.
According to Capie, he was working on theories about interstellar dark matter,
using the telescopes to acquire the relevant data to work with.

Paul was
not
looking forward to meeting him.

If this had been some sort of pleasure trip and he was
merely Joe Public touring the observatory and meeting a real-life astronomer—well,
that would have been wonderful and great, and Paul would have loved to meet an
accomplished scientist under those conditions. But this would be profoundly
different. Professor Kingsley was the father of the daughter that he had been
spending a great deal of time with lately. Now, Paul had never had a child of
his own (Douglas was a stepson and as such didn’t count), but he thought he
could predict how Professor Kingsley was going to react to him.

There would be questions. The professor would be sizing Paul
up as a potential suitor for his daughter’s attentions. And Paul flat didn’t
think of himself in those terms. True, for reasons he hadn’t fully dealt with, he
had not yet been able to just walk away from her. And yes, he was working on
that, to develop the courage to perform that very act. But meeting the father
in order to subject himself to the man’s evaluation—it made Paul feel
uncomfortable, sort of like a wolf in sheep’s clothing must feel when sneaking
behind the head sheepherder, the one carrying a fully loaded double-barreled
shotgun.

And the question he dreaded the most—just what were his intentions
toward Capie?—was the question that would likely be uppermost in the
professor’s mind. If he asked it, Paul didn’t have an answer for him. How could
he when he didn’t really know it himself?

Maybe it was something that Paul didn’t need to worry about.
Perhaps if he stuck close to Capie, the good professor would never have the
chance to ask him that question.

Paul glanced at Capie again, feeling uneasy about the whole
situation. How did she feel about him? Oh, sure, she liked him well enough. But
was she falling for him? Certainly, he could use a spell to give him the answer
to that question, but it felt too much like prying, and to be honest, he wasn’t
anxious to know the answer. To know about her feelings might force him to do
something about his own, and he really didn’t want to know. He wasn’t ready to
confront his feelings yet.

So he squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. He just needed a
little more time to sort it all out.

• • • •

There was no real parking lot in front of Yerkes
Observatory. It was as if the building’s planners knew nothing about cars when
the place was designed and constructed. And maybe they didn’t. According to the
travelogue that Capie was spouting, the building dated all the way back to 1897.

Capie parked the van along the edge of the circular driveway
and then activated the electric loading ramp. Paul got out and watched as the
ramp lowered her and the wheelchair to the ground. Then, at Capie’s direction,
he removed a special mechanism from the van and attached it to her wheelchair.
Known as a stair-climbing wheelchair, the electrically powered machine allowed
Capie to go up and down stairs, an essential mechanism for entering and leaving
the Yerkes Observatory building. When the van was secured again, the two of
them headed off to the observatory’s front entrance, with Paul pushing.

“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.”