Veronica glanced up over the arm of the living room couch as Cy closed the door and speared his coat on one of the hooks attached to the wall, laptop lowered onto the hall table. "Make progress on the code?" she asked, shushing the beagle and muting Justin Larrabee's TV reality show.
"Some," he said, "code" being code for the elephant in the room, never spoken aloud. "Haven't cracked it yet."
"Hungry?" She'd made him a sandwich, "it's in the fridge."
He shook his head, yawning. "I need to sleep it off; start fresh in the morning."
"Then you've read the draft of Harry Bostridge's thesis?" The conference, she remembered Tate saying, was scheduled for 7:30 A.M. "A little late to postpone, isn't it?"
Wasn't it ever. "So much for REM time, even." Eyes rolled, briefcase opened, he crossed to the dinette table. "That kid"—Bostridge, not Brick—"weren't throwing away the chance to be the next Niels Bohr or Stephen Hawking I'd say screw it."
Except "screw it" in two words was the heart of the problem. A once in a generation prodigy in theoretical physics, multiverse mathematics, and quantum chromodynamics et al, Harry would take minutes to dash off the work it took lesser students days to complete, freeing him to spend the rest of his waking hours bedding as many women as possible. Unlike most of his ungainly peers at Pupin Hall, Bostridge did not have to pursue them; his wheat-blond good looks, great build, and masculine confidence drew the moths to the flame, thick eyeglasses notwithstanding. That provocative half-smile would flash out from under the ever-present Yankees cap and they'd flock, pheromones flying.
And for all that, he was the most brilliant mind in Cy's advanced class, a creative genius capable of taking the kind of intellectual leaps most Nobel laureates would sell their souls for, and it was likely that the material in this paper would be just as staggering. That Tate had let something this important slip was nothing less than a measure of how hot the fire that nearly consumed him had been, and how long it had taken to burn out.
Spreading the pages, adjusting his glasses, he began to read, annotating as he went. By the time he fell into bed at nearly 2:00 A.M. his spouse was asleep and the laptop on the hall table was out of sight, out of mind.
YOU ARE READING
Dragonfire: A Gulliver Swift Adventure
Science FictionGulliver Swift is-was-an archeologist-adventurer who traveled the world in search of lost tombs, temples, and treasure. But his last expedition was attacked by a tribe of feathered fire-breathing monsters out of the Cretaceous. His financial back...
