Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

Still, it didn’t change the fact that the natural laws-at least locally, in galactic terms-had become a whole ’nother ball game.

Melissa had been a physics major, specializing in quantum mechanics, but had soon found that her real skill was as a grease monkey. She’d always messed around with motors and engines. Her dad had been a first-rate mechanic-a weekend hobbyist mainly, but a good one-and he’d let her fool around with tools and equipment from before she was riding a bike minus the training wheels.

So when she joined the Atherton lab as a grad student import from UCLA’s Large Plasma Device facility, she’d just naturally fallen into being the pair of hands supervising the building of Jeff Arcott’s own radically original version of the plasma zapper, hand-tooling the steel housings and mounting the big water-cooled bus bars, pumping all the air out of the hundred-yard cylindrical chamber until you had a near-perfect vacuum at barely a billionth of an atmosphere, then introducing argon into the mix. Theo Siegel had taken the lion’s share of fine-tuning the lasers and doing the other minute calibrations. And Jeff Arcott was the designer on high, the lord of creation, the big brain in a globe the mutants carried around.

Nowadays, of course, the plasma zapper was just so much rusting junk; there were bigger fish to fry. Oh, she supposed they could summon up the raw energy to get it all sparking again. But the elusive Holy Grail quest for fusion power was Old Physics thinking now, when there was so much more of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if you started pursuing new lines of inquiry.

At least, that was Jeff’s point of view.

Sometimes-quite often, actually-Melissa felt like someone standing halfway up a mountain, unable to see anything over the top, while Jeff stood on the summit, gazing out onto immensity and rhapsodizing over what he saw.

She just had to trust that what Jeff reported was what was actually there.

And why should she doubt it? Why should she listen to the queasy, whispering little voices within her?

Not long ago, she and Theo had discussed this topic, for he shared her-all right, call it disquiet; she was alone and, in this moment at least, could be candid with herself.

What if Jeff was mistaken, what if he was drawing all of them into the darkness rather than the light? There was no evidence of that so far, given his triumphs here in town.

And yet, there were still those whispers….

In conversation with Theo, she’d betrayed none of these doubts, had instead hotly defended Jeff. “He’s doing something incredible,” she’d said, “and we can help make that happen. What’s this stupid life for anyway? You only have the people you care about, and if you’re not loyal to him”-she quickly amended it-“to them, then what do you have?”

Theo had said nothing in response, had only grown abashed, and retreated.

Which had been no mystery, for although by mutual unspoken consent they had never discussed it openly, had in fact barely alluded to it, Melissa was aware of how Theo felt about her, and equally aware of how nothing could come of it.

Melissa knew herself well, knew the recurring patterns of her life. Every man that had held center stage in her life, from her professorial father on down, had been a distant star retreating, as cold and unreachable as the ones in the firmament, the ones she could spy through the opening in the cupola above.

And Jeff, with his immense charm and charisma, that incredibly sexy air of assured genius (in her lighter moments, Melissa liked to fantasize about an infomercial for a videotape called Scientists Gone Wild ), was merely the latest and greatest, the most brilliant and rejecting of all.

And she cherished him more than the gems he had studded Atherton with, the treasures that had restored sanity to the town.

Even now after so much had happened, when Jeff entered a room, Melissa still felt weightless.

Which-as her father liked to say in his favorite colloquialism-was to laugh, because the only thing that made Jeff Arcott’s head turn, the only thing he had ever truly loved, was the quest for pure knowledge.

So she mooned over Jeff, while Theo mooned over her. At present, she suspected Jeff held much the same affection for her that she held for Theo; if that wasn’t her projecting emotions onto Jeff, filling in the blanks. She could hope at least, knowing that sometimes affection bloomed into more, a great deal more. She’d seen that happen on numerous occasions…and not all of them just in movies and TV.

Normally about this time of night, Theo would be seeking her out, asking if she might like some peach tea, or offering up a day-old Danish from the bakery the campus cooks still maintained despite all that had happened. He was as solicitous as a little brother, as kin, and she supposed in some odd way he was…given the nifty hand-tooled item just the two of them shared under the skin.

Through the open cupola, Melissa heard footsteps and voices echoing from the sidewalk outside. Two of the voices she didn’t recognize, but the third she knew as Theo’s, though laced with a tension she thought sounded like pain.

Theo cried out as he took a misstep, verifying her suspicion. Melissa looked away from the eyepiece and closed up the cupola.

She found Theo standing one-footed stork-like on the pavement outside, flanked by two strangers who introduced themselves as Cal Griffin and Dr. Viktor Lysenko.

Strangers, here in town. Incredible.

Jeff would certainly have a word or two about that. And more than a word. As she was sure Theo knew every bit as well as she did.

Melissa clucked her tongue in mock disapproval. “My goodness, Theo, what have you been up to?”

Theo shrugged and smiled haplessly. Shaking her head, Melissa couldn’t help but smile back, feeling a warmth surge up in her that was far from being in love.

Telling them nothing, she helped them get Theo to the Med Center.

Watching the MRI tech and the night nurse load Theo Siegel into the big magnetic resonance chamber, Doc Lysenko seemed moved almost to tears.

“I didn’t believe I would see equipment like this up and running for many years,” he told Cal, who stood alongside him in the waiting room just outside. “Truly, this town has accomplished the miraculous.”

Yes, Cal acknowledged silently to himself, but at what price? His hand rested on the hilt of his sword and he noticed that, despite his words, Doc kept a close grip on the rifle.

Miles to go before we sleep…

Cal glanced over to where the young woman who had introduced herself as Melissa Wade sat waiting nearby, idly flipping through an old magazine-what other kind were there now? The photo he’d seen in Theo’s wallet hadn’t done her justice. She was breathtaking, and not flashy about it. In fact, dressed casually in jeans and an oversized man’s work shirt, it was obvious she was trying to downplay it.

Still sitting, Melissa stretched, one hand sweeping the hair up off her graceful neck, craning her neck against the kinks.

Cal felt a chill- on the back of her neck was a bump seemingly identical to the one he’d felt on Theo when helping him out of the El Dorado.

When they were alone again, he would mention this to Doc. He felt certain Doc would be equally intrigued; perhaps the two of them might prevail on the medical staff to later run an additional MRI on Theo Siegel’s neck.

Just keep an eye out for what you really need, the grunter boy Inigo had told Cal. But were these mysterious bumps part of what Cal needed or merely yet another of an endless series of distractions, delays from getting what he needed, to get where he had to go?

Spying an intern passing by in the hallway, Doc exited quickly and collared the man. Through the door, Cal could hear Doc requesting access to a microscope.