“Done,” said Paul.
Heather lifted one of the boxes. It must have weighed over twenty kilos.
“You’ll need help getting that back to your office,” said Paul.
She certainly would have appreciated a hand, but she’d imposed enough. Or, she thought more honestly, she’d incurred all the obligation she wanted to. She’d enjoyed Paul’s company yesterday, but it had felt wrong afterward—and now it was almost dinnertime; she knew things would not end with him simply helping her across campus.
“No, I’ll be fine,” she said.
Heather thought Paul looked disappointed, but he was no doubt able to read the signs; you didn’t survive in a university environment if you couldn’t, that guy in Anthropology—Bentley, Bailey, whatever his name was—notwithstanding.
But then Heather turned back to the two boxes; she’d kill herself trying to get them over to Sid Smith in this heat. Really, she could use some assistance.
“On the other hand…” she said.
Paul brightened.
“Sure,” said Heather. “Sure, I’d be very grateful for some help.”
Paul held up a single finger, indicating he’d be back in one minute. He left the lab and returned shortly, pushing two hand trucks in front of him, one with each hand. It was a bit awkward; they seemed to want to go in separate directions. Heather came over to him. Their hands touched briefly as she took the handles of one of the units.
“Thanks,” she said.
Paul smiled. “My pleasure.” He wheeled his hand truck in front of him, pushed its lip under one of the boxes, then tilted the whole unit back so that the box rested against the red metal frame. Heather duplicated the procedure with her hand truck and the second box.
Paul held his finger up again. “You’ll need a supply of clamps and clips if you want to make the squares into cubes.” He got a third box—he’d already had it prepared, it seemed—and set it on top of the one on his hand truck.
“There are also a couple of glass handles in there.” He opened the box and removed one. It was a suction-cup affair with a black handle on it. “You seen these before? They’re used for handling panes of glass, but you might find them useful for maneuvering your big sheets once you assemble them.”
“Thanks,” Heather said again.
“Of course you know that a real tesseract has only twenty-four faces.”
“What?” said Heather. She couldn’t have screwed up in such a fundamental way. “But Kyle said—”
“Oh, when it’s unfolded, it appears to have forty-eight faces, but when it folds up, each of the faces touches another face, leaving only twenty-four. The one on the bottom folds over to touch the one on the top, the side cubes fold in, and so on. Not that there’s any way to really fold it, of course.” He paused. “Shall we get going?”
Heather nodded, and they set off, rolling the hand trucks in front of them.
Of course, once they got back to her office, she could just thank him and let him go, but—
But twenty-eight hundred tiles! It would take forever to assemble them on her own.
Paul might be willing to help, and—
No. No. She couldn’t ask, couldn’t spend more time with him. Things had to be resolved first with Kyle.
But—
But how could they ever be? How could she ever know for sure? And if she didn’t know, would she forever tense up every time Kyle’s hand touched her body?
She looked over at Paul as they made their way up St. George.
His hands were wrapped around the rubber-coated handles. Nice hands, strong hands. Long fingers.
“You know,” said Heather, tentatively, “if you’ve got nothing to do, I could sure use a hand snapping all those tiles together.”
He looked over at her and smiled—and a really nice smile it was, too.
“Sure,” he said. “I’d love to.”
Paul and Heather eventually got the boxes across campus, after stopping to rest at a couple of park benches along the way. They came up the wheelchair ramp to the entrance to Sidney Smith Hall. There was a husky student right in front of them wearing a Varsity Blues leather jacket with the name “Kolmex” on the back. Heather thought the guy’s status as a football player must have been very important to his self-image for him to be wearing a leather jacket in the middle of August. She hoped he’d at least hold the door for them, but he let it slam shut, with a clatter of glass, behind him. Paul raised his eyebrows, sharing an expression with Heather, one teacher to another—the caliber of the kids today. He then jockeyed his hand truck so that he could free up one hand long enough to open the door.
Finally, they both made it down to her office.
“Ah,” said Paul, looking around as they entered. “You share an office.”
Heather nodded; even universities had their pecking order. “I’m only an associate prof,” she said. “I took several years off to raise my daughters—I guess I’ve got some catching-up to do. My office mate, Omar Amir, he’s off for the summer.”
Heather used her foot to push the box off her hand truck’s platform, then collapsed in a chair to catch her breath. She shook her head slightly and looked around the room. They’d have to move Omar’s desk—oh, joy—but if they pushed it against that bookcase, there would be enough room on the low-pile carpeted floor to start assembling the alien jigsaw puzzle.
Paul was resting, too, using Omar’s chair. After a couple of minutes, though, they both got up and moved the desk. Then she got a hardcopy of the CAD program’s plan for the first panel, opened the first box of tiles, and sat down on the floor, her legs tucked one under the other. Paul sat down a meter away from her. She could smell his sweat a bit; it had been a long time since she’d smelled a man’s sweat.
They started clicking the tiles together. It was gratifying to see the way the seemingly random patterns on each one connected across tile boundaries.
As she worked, she kept thinking idly of the kind of joint Paul had said he was employing on the tiles’ edges: tongue and groove. Several really good jokes about it occurred to her, but she kept them all to herself.
Around 8:30, Paul and Heather ordered in pizza and Cokes; to Heather’s delight, they were able to agree on pizza toppings in a matter of moments; it was always a major negotiating game with Kyle.
Paul offered his SmartCash card when the delivery boy showed up, but Heather insisted that he was the one doing her the favor, and so she paid. She was pleased that Paul acquiesced with grace.
It was 10:00 P.M. before they had all forty-eight large squares assembled. Each measured about seventy centimeters on a side. They had leaned each one against the edge of Omar’s desk after its completion.
Now it was time to build the damn thing. Using the clips and clamps Paul had brought along, they connected the sides. Eventually they had all eight cubes assembled.
Overall, the paint markings—which glistened slightly, like mica—still didn’t make up a recognizable pattern, but they did flow over the surface of the boxes in an intricate grid-work, reminiscent of printed circuits.
Using the CAD diagram as a guide, they continued on, assembling the cubes into a greater whole. They couldn’t stand the thing up—the ceiling wasn’t high enough—so they made it horizontally, with the shaft of four cubes running parallel to the floor:
The structure rested on one cube; they supported the end of the shaft that stuck out the farthest with a pile of textbooks. The finished construct rose up most of the way to the ceiling.
When it was done, Heather and Paul sat back and stared at it. Was it art? An altar? Or something else? It was certainly provocative that it made up a kind of crucifix shape—even now, with it lying on its side, the image was unavoidable—but how could aliens share that particular bit of symbolism? Even if one granted that a putative God might have had putative mortal children on other worlds, surely no one else would have come up with the cross as an execution device—it was geared toward human anatomy, after all. No, no, the resemblance had to be coincidental.