He didn’t consider himself a typical islander, however, and while he couldn’t help Frik with his divers, he wanted very badly to take a closer look at these trinkets.
3
Where the hell is he? Paul wondered as he paced back and forth in front of Oilstar’s labs.
Frik was late, but what else was new? The man got a charge out of keeping people on hold. He was probably having another cup of coffee and taking his own sweet time getting here just to be annoying. Even if he’d stopped in at his San Fernando corporate office building on the way from his house, he should have been here by now.
If he was certain of nothing else, Paul was sure of one thing: once he had shown his discovery to Frik, the man would wish he hadn’t played games this particular morning.
Not that a few minutes, even a few hours, could make a difference. It was just that Paul couldn’t wait to share his conclusions. Those “trinkets” Frik’s drillers had raised from beneath the ocean bed just might change the whole damn world.
He gazed at the morning sky, a flawless pale blue, promising another perfect day. His lab was a squat one-story white stucco square which lay near the town of La Brea—a short way south of San Fernando on Trinidad’s west coast, with a good view of the Gulf of Paria. The sun had yet to crest the lush hills behind him, but it had reached the drilling platforms that studded the still water like ticks on a dog’s belly.
Trinidad…Paul loved the big, bold island. It anchored the Lesser Antilles to the continental shelf of South America. Nestled into a large depression on the northeastern coast, it played footsie with Venezuela with the extended toe of its southern tip, Punta del Arenal. He was born here and, except for college and postgrad years when he was earning his Ph.D. from Harvard, had spent his life here, lost a wife and raised his daughter, Selene, here. He planned to die here—but not for some time yet, thank you.
He inhaled the morning air. When the wind was wrong, you could smell Pitch Lake, but not today. This morning the air filtered from the northwest, clean, with a briny tang from its journey across the Gulf of Paria. Early morning was his favorite time of the day.
Early? He rubbed his burning eyes. Early for Frik, maybe, he thought, but late for me.
He’d been up all night, feverishly testing and retesting. The key to a true breakthrough in science was reproducibility of results. He had that now. Oh, Lord, he had that indeed. And he was dying to showsomeone .
But not just anyone. He had to keep this under wraps until Frik saw it—then they could tell the world.
To that end, Paul had given the staff the day off—with pay. Frik would squawk at that. If he wasn’t already a billionaire, he was knocking on the ten-figure door with champagne and flowers in hand. Yet how he pissed and moaned about the slightest overrun.
Well, once he saw what Paul had, he wouldn’t bitch about an extra paid vacation day for the small, bright crew of Trinis who staffed the lab. He’d forget all about it, the way he’d forgotten about the cost of the mainframe and electronic testing equipment Paul had asked for after it became clear that the apparatus had increased the efficiency of Oilstar’s refineries more than a hundred percent.
There…the rumble of a big engine down the slope. Seconds later, Frik’s Humvee hove into view. The roads around here could barely handle a couple of passing Nissans, and he imports a Hummer. Typical.
Paul waved as Frik skidded to a halt and hopped out. His boss didn’t wave back.
“This’d better be good, Paul,” he said. “I’ve got a sweet young dancer visiting from Mumbai sleeping it off in my bed. She knows tricks neither of us has ever dreamed of, and I’m looking forward to another demonstration when she wakes up.”
“This’ll make you forget all about the angle of your dangle,” Paul said, turning and leading the way to the lab entrance.
“I seriously doubt that.”
Paul smiled. He was tempted to trap Frik into a big bet, but decided that wouldn’t be fair. His boss was short-tempered, high-handed, and vain, and brilliant, funny, and loyal as well. Paul alternately loved and loathed him. Right now, he loved him.
Paul led Frik through what he thought of as his lab, though of course it wasn’t really his. The Oilstar insignia graced the glass entry doors, the stationery, and just about everything else. Since Frikwas Oilstar, he owned the lab. But Paul ran it, and he felt that made it his, too, in a way. The lab was a small cog in the giant Oilstar wheel, but an indispensable one. This was where the crude from Oilstar’s wells was analyzed before and after its journey through the refinery.
“My patience is wearing thin, Trujold. Let’s get this over with.”
“Your wish is my command.” Paul led his boss into a storeroom he’d converted for his personal experiments—the odds of his creating a new petroleum-based polymer with industrial applications were slim, but he could dream, couldn’t he?
“What’s that smell?”
Paul sniffed and turned on the lights. Damn, he thought. He knew the odor: ether. He’d been testing that and some other solvents on the trinkets. He spotted the open jar on his workbench. The all-nighter had made him careless.
“I’ll get rid of it.”
He recapped the jar and started the exhaust fan in the ceiling. As the fumes were pulled away, he turned on the two bench lamps and ignited both Bunsen burners. Then he pointed to the object sitting in the center of the cleared area on his workbench.
“Thar she blows.”
Frik stared at it. “What the hell is it?”
“It’s those trinkets your men found in that core sample.”
“I gave you four objects,” Frik said, staring at the assembly.
When Paul had started analyzing the objects, the first thing he’d discovered was that they weren’t made of turquoise or mother-of-pearl or anything else he had ever seen. The second was that they were all part of a whole. “And there they are, all four of them,” he said. “They click together like pieces of a three-dimensional jigsaw. I’m talkingperfect fit.”
Frik bent and stared at the unified object from different angles. “They look even weirder together than they did apart.”
Paul couldn’t argue with that. The assembly looked like something from an abstract painting. That was what he found most disturbing: how could objects that fit together with such fine tolerances appear so lacking in functionality?
“Looksweird?” Paul said, repressing a grin. “You don’t know weird until you see what itdoes . Watch this.”
He took a long pair of plastic forceps and grasped the object at what he’d by now determined was its center of gravity. He lifted it and began tilting it this way and that, rotating it back and forth.
Now we fricassee Frikkie’s mind.
“Paul,” Frik said when nothing happened. “Have you lost it?”
“Just be patient. It never seems to work the same way twice.”
Paul kept his eyes on the main piece—at least he called it the main piece. It was the largest and had a vaguely figure-eight or Möebius strip configuration. Telltale piece was probably a better name. He watched its outer edge, waiting…waiting….
He felt the now-familiar chill run over his skin. A heartbeat later the motor of the overhead exhaust fan rose in pitch and the room brightened.
Got it!
He moved the assembly again, and everything returned to normal.
“What just happened?” Frik asked.
“Watch that gooseneck lamp right in front of you.”
Paul rotated the assembly back, felt the chill again, and then the bulb flared, sixty watts climbing to one hundred. All the lamps in the room seemed to have doubled their wattage. The overhead fan whined and jittered, sounding as if it were about to take off. He’d had to move his computer terminal out of the room because he was afraid the power surge would damage it.