Distraction

“But you’ll be my personal guest,” he told her. “Because I’m inviting you now.”

That worked. Something clicked over in Dr. Pe

“Buna’s a city for flowers. After sitting through those committee meetings, I knew you must need a bouquet.” Red poppies, parsley, and mistletoe — he presumed she knew the flower code. Perhaps she was so hopelessly detached from mainstream society that she couldn’t even read a flower code. Well, if she didn’t, no great harm done. It had been a very witty message, but maybe it was just as well if it were lost on her.

“Why do you send me those mail notes with all those ques-tions?” Dr. Pe

Oscar put aside his peppered stub of jerky and spread his gloved hands. “I needed some answers. I’ve been studying you, during those long board meetings. I’ve really come to appreciate you. You’re the only member of that board who can stick to the point.”

She examined the dead grass at her feet. “They’re really incredi-bly boring meetings, aren’t they?”

“Well, yes, they are.” He smiled gamely. “Present company ex-cepted.”

“They’re bad meetings. They’re really bad. They’re awful. I hate administration. I hate everything about it.” She looked up, her odd face congealing with distaste. “I sit there listening to them drone, and I can feel my life just ticking away.”

“Mmmhmm!” Oscar deftly poured two cups from a battered cooler. “Here, let’s enjoy this sports-performance pseudo-lemon con-coction.” He dragged a folded tarp near to the fire barrel, careful not to scorch himself. He sat.

Dr. Pe

“Why did they put you into administration in the first place?”

“Oh,” she groaned, “a slot opened up on the board. The guy ru

“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me. I’ve noticed that the bookkeeping at the Collaboratory is not in standard federal formats. There seem to have been some irregularities in supply.”

“Oh, that’s not the half of it,” she said.

“No?”

“No.”

Oscar leaned forward slowly on his folded tarp. “What is the half of it?”

“I just can’t tell you,” she said, morosely hugging her shins. “Be-cause I don’t know why you want to know that. Or what you’d do about it, if you knew.”

“All right,” Oscar said, sitting back deliberately. “That answer makes sense. You’re being very cautious and proper. I’m sure I’d feel much the same about it, if I were in your position.” He stood up.

The plumbing pipes were made of a laminated polyvinyl the color of dried kelp. They had been computed and built in Boston to specifically fit this structure, and they were of a Chinese-jigsaw com-plexity that only a dedicated subroutine could fully understand.

“You have real talent with the mortar, but this plumbing is seri-ous work,” Oscar said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you gave up and left now.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. I don’t have to hit the lab until seven AM.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

“No, I just don’t sleep much. Maybe three hours a night.”

“How odd. I never sleep much, either.” He knelt at the side of the plumbing case. She alertly handed him a nearby pair of snips, slapping them into his gloved hand, handle first.

“Thank you.” He snapped through three black plastic packing bands. “I’m glad you came here tonight. I was rather wasting my time working alone on a group project like this. But it’s therapeutic for me. He pried up the lid of the case and threw it aside. “You see, I’ve always had a rather difficult professional life.”

“That’s not what your record shows.” She was hugging her jacketed arms. The wool hat had slipped down on her forehead.

“Oh, I suppose you’ve run some searches on me, then.”

“I’m very inquisitive.” She paused.

“That’s all right, everybody does that sort of thing nowadays. I’ve been a celebrity since I was a little kid. I’m well documented, I’m used to it.” He smiled sourly. “Though you can’t get the full flavor of my delightful personality from some casual scan of the net.”

“If I were casual about this, I wouldn’t be here now.”

Oscar looked up in surprise. She stared back boldly. She’d done all this on purpose. She had her own agenda. She’d plotted it all out on graph paper, beforehand.

“Do you know why I’m out here in the middle of the night tonight, Dr. Pe

She pondered this. Wheels spun in her head so quickly that he could almost hear them sizzle. “Really,” she said slowly. “That’s a shame.”

“She’s left our house in Boston, she’s walked out on me. She’s gone to Holland.”

Her brows rose under the rim of the woolly hat. “Your girlfriend has defected to the Dutch?”

“No, not defected! She left on assignment, she’s a political jour-nalist. But she’s gone anyway.” He gazed at the elaborate nest of convoluted plumbing. “It’s been a blow, it’s really upset me.”

The sight of all that joinery and tubing, complex and gleaming in its tatty plastic straw, filled Oscar with a sudden evil rush of authen-tic Sartrean nausea. He climbed to his feet. “You know something? It was all my fault. I can admit that. I neglected her. We had two sepa-rate careers… She was fine on that East Coast glitterati circuit; we made a good couple while we had some common interests…” He stopped and gauged her reaction. “Should I be burdening you with any of this?”

“Why not? I can understand that. Sometimes these things just don’t work out. Romance in the sciences… ‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd.’ ” She shook her head.

“I know that you’re not married. You’re not seeing anyone?”

“Nothing steady. I’m a workaholic.”

Oscar found this encouraging news. He felt instinctive camarade-rie for any ambitious obsessive. “Tell me something, Greta. Do I seem like a frightening person to you?” He touched his chest. “Am I scary? Be frank.”

“You really want me to be frank?”

“Yes.”

“People always tell me that I’m much too frank.”

“Go ahead, I can take it.”

She lifted her chin. “Yes, you’re very scary. People are extremely suspicious of you. No one knows what you really want from us, or what you’re doing in our lab. We all expect the very worst.”

He nodded sagely. “You see, that’s a perception problem. I do turn up for your board meetings, and I’ve brought a little entourage with me, so rumors start. But in reality, I shouldn’t be scary — because I’m just not very significant. I’m only a Senate staffer.”

“I’ve been to Senate hearings. And I’ve heard about others. Sen-ate hearings can be pretty rough.”

He edged closer to her. “All right — sure, there might be some hard questions asked in Washington someday. But it won’t be me ask-ing those questions. I just write briefing papers.”

She was entirely unconvinced. “What about that big Air Force scandal in Louisiana? Didn’t you have a lot to do with all that?”

“What, that? That’s just politics! People claim that I influence the Senator-elect — but the influence goes all the other way, really. Until I met Alcott Bambakias, I was just a city council activist. The Senator’s the man with the ideas and the message. I was just his cam-paign technician.”