Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [63]
“Oh.” Shel sat back. “Well, why don’t we plan on spending an afternoon at the Library and take some pictures?”
“It would be criminal not to.”
“Okay. Then it’s settled.”
“When do we leave?”
“Let’s give it a couple of weeks. I need time for my crash course.”
“We might have a problem, though.”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t want to tell anybody about the converters.”
“Yeah. I’ve thought about that. If we can recover some of this stuff, how do we explain where we got it?”
“Bingo.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there, Dave. Look, we can send whatever we get anonymously to, I don’t know, Penn. Or LaSalle. Or maybe Temple. Maybe spread it around. Give everybody some of it. It’ll drive them crazy trying to figure out where they’re coming from.”
“They’ll think they’re forgeries.”
“Sure they will. But I bet my foot that when the experts have a chance to look, they’ll figure out they’re legitimate.” He poured another round of drinks. “What do you think?”
“I say we try it. And I know exactly the person we should send the stuff to.”
“Who’s that?”
“Her name’s Aspasia. I knew her in graduate school.”
“A Greek?”
“Seems right to me.”
THEY met for dinner the following evening. Helen accompanied Shel. Dave took Madeleine Carascu, a member of the Penn English Department. Like Dave, she had red hair and green eyes. She was also armed with a dazzling smile, a quick wit, and a ton of energy. The kind of woman who has so much going for her that she scares most men off. But she didn’t scare Dave, who spent most of the evening hoping that Helen would get jealous.
They went to the Chart House on Delaware Avenue, a place with its own interior waterfall, and got a table overlooking the river. And the women didn’t need long to figure out that he and Dave were celebrating something. “What’s going on?” asked Helen.
“Breakthrough in transdimensional warp theory,” Shel said.
“What’s that?”
Madeleine looked at Dave. “Are you following this?”
“He talks like that a lot.”
Helen plunged straight ahead. “Why are we so happy?”
Shel grinned. “Dave and I are having dinner with the two most beautiful women in Center City, and you wonder why we’re enjoying ourselves?”
Her steady gaze shifted to Dave. “What can I tell you?” he said. “When the guy’s right, he’s right.”
Shel turned the conversation in a new direction. They talked about Morgan, that season’s hot new antiterrorist TV drama. And wondered whether the new Josh Baxter film, Nightlight, could really be as good as the critics were claiming. Madeleine asked Shel whether he thought the effort to establish solar collectors in orbit and beam the power down to groundside stations would ever get off the ground. “Pardon the pun.”
“Eventually,” he said. “The problem is funding. There’s no money for the research.” They finished and went over to Larry’s for a nightcap. Then they were breaking up and going home. Madeleine lived in an apartment at 22nd and Spruce.
She was quiet on the way, and Dave knew she wasn’t satisfied with the evening. She hadn’t said anything, but there was a coolness in her manner that was hard to miss. It had been their first date, and he knew there would not be a second. He suspected she’d picked up his interest in Helen. Or maybe she saw him as a poor second to Shel. So he took her to her door, said good night when she opened up, and kissed her lightly.
“I enjoyed the evening, Dave,” she said. “Thank you.” Lights went on. She smiled at him and slipped inside. And he thought that this was an evening he would one day come to regret.
DAVE celebrated Christmas with his family in Scranton, much better than the Christmas he’d spent alone in the cabin a couple of weeks ago, subjective time. A week later he took Katie to a New Year’s Eve party, where she asked how the hunt for Helen was progressing.
“I think she’s in love with Shel,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“How’s it going with Harry?” Harry Begley was her current target.
“I’ve written him off,” she said.
“Oh. I didn’t know.”
“You must have noticed it’s New Year’s Eve. And I’m not out with him.