Doc Thorne was a gray-haired, barrel-chested man of fifty-five. Except for his wire-frame glasses, he looked as if he might be a retired prizefighter. It was hard for Kelly to imagine Thorne as a University professor; he was immensely strong, and in continuous movement. “Damn it, Henry! Henry! Henry, are you listening to me?”
Thorne swore again, and shook his fist in the air. He turned to the kids. “These guys,” he said. “They’re supposed to be helping me.” From the Explorer, there was a white-hot crack like lightning. The two men leaning into the hood jumped away, as a cloud of acrid smoke rose above the car. “What’d I tell you?” Thorne shouted. “Ground it! Ground it before you do anything! We’ve got serious voltages here, guys! You’re going to get fried if you’re not careful!”
He looked back at the kids and shook his head. “They just don’t get it,” he said. “That IUD is serious defense.”
“IUD?”
“Internal Ursine Deterrent-that’s what Levine calls it. It’s his idea of a joke,” Thorne said. “Actually, I developed this system a few years back for park rangers in Yellowstone, where bears break into trailers. Flip a switch, and you run ten thousand volts across the outer skin of the trailer. Wham-o! Takes the fight out of the biggest bear. But that kind of voltage’ll blow these guys right off the trailer. And then what? I get a workmen’s-compensation suit. For their stupidity.” He shook his head. “So? Where’s Levine?”
“We don’t know,” Arby said.
“What do you mean? Didn’t he teach your class today?”
“No, he didn’t come.”
Thorne swore again. “Well, I need him today, to go over the final revisions, before we do our field testing. He was supposed to be back today.”
“Back from where?” Kelly said.
“Oh, he went on one of his field trips,” Thorne said. “Very excited about it, before he went. I outfitted him myself – loaned him my latest field pack. Everything he could ever want in just forty-seven pounds. He liked it. Left last Monday, four days ago.”
“For where?”
“How should I know?” Thorne said. “He wouldn’t tell me. And I gave up asking. You know they’re all the same, now. Every scientist I deal with is secretive. But you can’t blame them. They’re all afraid of being ripped off, or sued. The modern world. Last year I built equipment for an expedition to the Amazon, we waterproofed it – which you’d want in the Amazon rain forest – soaking-wet electronics just don’t work – and the principal scientist was charged with misappropriating funds. For waterproofing! Some university bureaucrat said it was an unnecessary expense. I’m telling you, it’s insane. Just insane. Henry – did you hear anything I said to you? Put it crosswise!”
Thorne strode across the room, waving his arms. The kids followed behind him.
“But now, look at this,” Thorne said. “For months we’ve been mod]fying his field vehicles, and finally we’re ready. He wants them light, I build them light. He wants them strong, I build them strong-light and strong both, why not, it’s just impossible, what he’s asking for, but with enough titanium and honeycarbon composite, we’re doing it anyway. He wants it off petroleum base, and off the grid, and we do that, too. So finally he’s got what he wanted, an immensely strong portable laboratory to go where there’s no gasoline and no electricity. And now that it’s finished … I can’t believe it. He really didn’t show up for your class?”
“No,” Kelly said.
“So he’s disappeared,” Thorne said. “Wonderful. Perfect. What about our field test? We were going to take these vehicles out for a week, and put them through their paces.”
“I know,” Kelly said. “We got Permission from our parents and everything, so we could go, too.”
“And now he’s not here,” Thorne fumed. “I suppose I should have expected it. These rich kids, they do whatever they want. A guy like Levine gives spoiled a bad name.”
From the ceiling, a large metal cage came crashing down, landing next to them on the floor. Thorne jumped aside. “Eddie! Damn! Will you watch it?”
“Sorry, Doc,” said Eddie Carr, high up in the rafters. “But specs are it can’t deform at twelve thousand psi. We had to test it.”