“Hector, don’t let him! Hector, help me!”
Everything went black.
Hector snapped his eyes open. He was sitting in the booth beside Geri, his arms around her protectively. She was shuddering.
“How did….”
“It was my fault,” she gasped. “I thought about Odal… .”
The door to the booth was yanked open. Leoh stood there, his face a mixture of surprise and puzzlement.
“What are you two doing? All the lights and power in the building are off!”
“I’m sorry …” Hector began.
“It’s my fault,” Geri said. She explained what happened.
Leoh still looked puzzled. “But why areyou both in the same booth?”
Hector started to answer, then it hit him. “I … I was in the other booth!”
“It’s empty,” Leoh said. “I looked in there first, when the power went off. The door was closed.”
Hector looked at Geri, then back at the Professor. “I must’ve jumped out of the booth and ran over here … but, I mean … I don’t remember doing it.”
The chief meditech came striding into the room, his steps clicking angrily against the hard flooring. “What’s going on here? Who blew out the power?”
Turning, Leoh said, “It’s all right, just a little experiment that didn’t work out.”
The chief meditech looked over the control console in the fading sunlight of the afternoon as Geri and Hector got out of the booth. He muttered and glared at them.
“No permanent damage, I’m sure,” Leoh said as soothingly as he could.
The lights on the control panels sprang back to life, as did the room’s main illumination lights. “Hmp,” grunted the chief meditech. “I guess it’s all right. The power’s on again.”