The Warlock's Curse (21 page)

Jenny sensed his hesitation. “Goddamn it, William! We have got to get out of here—I mean it!”

The panicked urgency in Jenny’s voice was like a bucket of ice over his head. His heart raced. Picking her up, he threw her over his shoulder and began to run.

“
Jenny
!” Mr. Hansen’s voice was a breathy roar. “Jenny, Will,
please
... stop!”

Will shouldn’t have been able to outrun a turtle—much less a still-powerful father-in-law—with Jenny weighing him down, but he too made a break for Market Street, just as Mr. Hansen had, darting in among the crowd of marchers. Cries of pointed disapproval rang from all sides, but their bodies made an effective screen.

Just off Market Street, Will glimpsed a small alleyway between two of the buildings. Hoping Jenny’s father hadn’t seen them turn down it, he slid Jenny off his shoulder, and they stood listening as Mr. Hansen called for them. They listened as he continued past them, and kept listening until his calls grew softer.

When they could no longer hear him, they hurried back to the Baker. As the two men in the Emporium had predicted, the march had proceeded with admirable efficiency. The streets had already cleared, and Argus was nowhere to be seen.

Will refrained from saying anything until they were in motion. Then he exploded.

“What the hell, Scuff?” he yelled. “You said he’d understand!”

“I meant
someday
,” Jenny yelled back with equal heat. “If he caught us now, before he had a chance to cool off and accept the situation, there’d be hell to pay!” She kept glancing back, as if expecting her father to appear at any moment.

Will jammed the controller forward into the next higher speed. After they had put several blocks behind them, Will looked over at Jenny. She was frowning unhappily, and she looked tiny beneath her huge winged hat.

“They all must have come back to the city early.” Her face was closed and dark, and her earlier happiness over her success was gone without a trace. She knew that she had hurt her father, and Will could see that it stung.

“Well, of
course
Argus came back early,” muttered Will. “If he got wind that someone was going to hang him in effigy, he wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

“Dad will see,” said Jenny softly, striking a tightly closed fist against her leg. “I’m going to show him and then he’ll understand. He’ll understand everything.”

Then she didn’t say anything else for a long time.

They drove down to the Ferry Terminal Building, where they could catch the ferry that would take them to Oakland, where the Berkeley campus was. Given that Mr. Grigoriyev had said that the Dimensional Subway would take them straight to Detroit, it wasn’t worth making arrangements for transporting the Baker. They both agreed (Will more reluctantly than Jenny) that it was time for them to part ways with the crummy old machine.

Using tools from his leather bag, Will carefully removed the Otherwhere Flume and tucked the cigar box safely inside his vest. It was bulky and the corners poked him, but it was safer there than rattling around in his bag of tools. Jenny withdrew her little calfskin grip from under the seat. In their escape, Will had neglected to retrieve her packages from the automat, but he supposed she didn’t dare comment on that.

Even though the Baker was a beat-up old wreck, Will felt a twinge of regret. He and that car had had some fine times. He gave it a last fond pat. Jenny sniffed.

“Honestly,” she said. “It’s a rotten heap and the one good thing about it you just took out. Which, strictly speaking, I own, since I bought the car.”

“Don’t push your luck,” Will growled, lifting the toolbag and settling it over his shoulder. Leaving the Baker behind made him keenly aware of how little he truly had. His Otherwhere Flume, his toolbag, his cap, the clothes on his back—and an angry father-in-law hot on his heels.

A quick ferry ride to Oakland, followed by a quick streetcar ride, and they were on Berkeley’s leafy campus. Will knew the campus layout by heart—before he’d been accepted into the Tesla Industries apprenticeship program, Berkeley had been one of his top choices of colleges. He’d often scrutinized the campus map, noting with special interest the South Hall, which housed one of the very first physics laboratories in the United States.

And even though he was going to Tesla Industries, Will felt no less excited as they entered the ivy-covered building and climbed the polished wooden stairs to the second floor.

Entering the physics lab, Will was reminded of the similar lab he’d worked in at the Polytechnic. Bunsen burners sat atop soapstone work surfaces; cabinets and shelves were crowded with apparatuses, tools, etched reagent bottles. He breathed in the wonderful smell of science—tangy and bitter and profoundly
rational
.

In a far corner of the room a heavyset young man stood hunched over some kind of experimental setup that was emitting random, infrequent clicks. Curious, Will crossed the room to get a closer look. The sound of his steps was swallowed by the soft asphalt floor tiles.

The clicks, Will discovered, were coincident with the flash of a phosphorescent tube and the galvanic jerk of a pen on a scrolling piece of paper. The paper was also being marked at regular intervals by a chronometer. Nearby was a barometer; as the chronometer ticked off a marking, the heavyset young man indicated the barometric pressure reading near to it.

Will was so fascinated that he didn’t even look at the young experimenter taking the measurements. The clicking device seemed familiar.

“A Geiger counter!” he blurted, when the recognition finally hit him.

It was only then that the two young men actually looked at each other, and when they did their surprise was compounded.

“William Edwards!” the young experimenter cried.

“Tom!” said Will. There was a round of hearty handshaking and backslapping. “Are you the one everyone calls ‘Massy’?”

“Yeah, the fellows gave it to me as a goof.” Massy sheepishly patted his belly, which had indeed gained in mass since Will had last seen him. “Too much time in the lab, not enough with the kettle bells.”

“Jenny, this is Thomas Masterson,” Will said. “He was a senior at the Polytechnic when I was just a raw frosh. He showed me around.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Jenny, extending her hand. “I’m Will’s wife.”

“Wife!” Massy’s eyes widened, and he stared at Will. “But you just graduated, didn’t you? You move fast!”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Will said. “I’m on my way to Tesla Industries. I’ve been accepted into their apprenticeship program.”

“You’re going to Fort Tesla? With a
wife
?” Massy shook his head, as if he didn’t know which fact was more astonishing. “Boy, they must really want you!”

“You know, I’m standing right here,” said Jenny, rather sourly. Massy gave her a courtly bow.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Edwards,” he grinned. His eyes traveled over the gear they both carried—Will’s toolbag, Jenny’s little grip—then back up to them. “So, using my exceptional powers of deduction, I reach the following conclusion. Given that Tesla Industries thinks you’re so swell, they’ve decided to impress you by offering you the use of the Dimensional Subway to get to Detroit. Am I right?”

“On the nose.”

“Fine and dandy,” Massy said. “Happy to oblige. But you’ll have to wait until I take my next reading. I’ve been taking them every fifteen minutes for the past month—it’s been one hell of a job, even with someone relieving me at night.”

“What are you recording?” Will asked, peering at the pens on the paper.

“Studying the correlation between cosmic rays and barometric pressure,” Massy said. “You know how some researchers think that the Connection Drop Problem is associated with barometric pressure, right? Well, it’s my theory that it’s not the barometric pressure, but the fact that more cosmic rays get through when the pressure is high.
In other words, I’m starting to get the idea that it’s the cosmic rays that cause the random connection loss.”

“You don’t say.” Will shoved his hands in his pockets, doing his best to remain casual. He glanced at Jenny, but she was pointedly ignoring the conversation, instead looking out a window onto the smooth green lawn outside the South Hall.

“I certainly do! I’ve been taking readings for a month now, and the preliminary results are very interesting. I’ve already decided to do my master’s thesis on it.”

Will cleared his throat. He looked at his shoes for what seemed quite a long time before an inspiration struck him.

“So how are you accounting for the terrestrial radiation?” he asked.

Massy shrugged. “I’ll just factor it out using the Princeton averages.”

Will sucked in air through his teeth.

“What?” said Massy, immediately on guard.

“Hell, Tom, I don’t like to mention it if you’ve already been taking readings for a month—”

“
What
?” Massy roared.

“This building has a granite foundation,” said Will. “Noticed it when I came in.”

“So?” Annoyance laced the graduate student’s voice.

“Haven’t you heard about the comparative analysis of granite they did down at Stanford?” Will asked. “They found extremely high radiation in some California granites. Who can say how much radioactivity the granite foundation in this building is giving off?”

“God damn it!” Massy blurted. “Granite? You’re saying my whole set of readings might be screwy because of
granite
?”

“It’s not so bad.” Will strove to sound soothing. “You just have to figure out the exact level of terrestrial radiation you’re dealing with. Do some comparative studies of different granites, that kind of thing.”

“That’ll add months!”

“Oh well, it’s not like you know of anyone else who is working on this,” Will said. Then he added, somewhat pointedly: “Do you?”

“No, no one,” said Massy. “But still—”

“Then what are you worried about? Take all the time you need. Get your numbers right. It’ll make defending your thesis that much easier, right?”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Massy. He didn’t sound happy about it, but he sounded convinced, and Will exhaled a silent sigh of relief.

After taking his reading, Massy led them out of the laboratory and down the hall. He walked ahead of them both, muttering curses under his breath as he did. Jenny leaned close to Will.

“Good work,” she said, elbowing him in the ribs. “You’re sneakier than I thought.”

“I am
not
sneaky,” Will whispered back, hotly. “California granite
is
radioactive.”

“Well, thank goodness, because otherwise your Nobel Prize is going to have Thomas Masterson’s name on it. Now, I don’t like to say I told you so—”

“Then don’t.”

“Fine. But I will say this. The sooner we get your Flume patented the better!”

Will said nothing, but suddenly felt a strong agreement with her. The thought of anyone else getting credit for the discovery he had made—even Massy, who he liked—was flat out infuriating.

Massy came to a stop at a very simple door, certainly simpler than one would expect for what lay behind it. It actually appeared to be a broom closet that had been retrofitted for its special purpose. On the door some wag had tacked up a sign printed by New York City’s Transit Commission, warning travelers against swearing and spitting. On a hook screwed into the wooden doorframe hung a clipboard; it held a sheet to record the Subway’s use. Using a stub of pencil tied to the board by a piece of dirty string, Massy quickly wrote down their names. Then, pulling out a key he wore around his neck, he unlocked the large wooden cupboard on the wall.

Within the cupboard was a tangle of wires. Will could see glass fuses as well as a board of numbered wheel dials and a very large knife switch. A list of locations was thumbtacked to the inside of the cupboard door. Massy peered at this list, running his finger down it until he found the numerical code for Detroit. He carefully set the dials, then threw up the knife switch. There was a low hum, and the door ...
smudged
. It didn’t shimmer, or glow, it just seemed to lose focus. Will blinked to make sure it wasn’t his eyes, but it wasn’t.

Fascinated, Will rubbernecked over Massy’s shoulder into the open cupboard. Even a glimpse of the arrangement of the wiring board might help him understand how it all worked. It was a piece of Tesla Industries technology that was still extremely experimental, and they had never published any information about how it actually worked. But Massy quickly closed the cupboard and locked it.

“Now, it’s really quite easy,” he said. “You just walk through this door, and you’ll be in the Otherwhere. In front of you, you’ll see another door. The distance to the second door is proportionate to the actual physical distance between here and the place you’re going, so I’d say that makes it ... oh, about fifty feet. So you walk that fifty feet to the second door, you open it, and you’ll be in Detroit.”