She gave him a furious, disgusted look. “I want to be very clear with you about something,” she said in a warning tone. “There are many novels in which there is a handsome man and a beautiful woman and they argue all the time and are at odds and constantly clash and it is because secretly they want to make passionate love to each other. That is not the case here.”
At this, Tristan let out a huge guffaw, a rumbling, raucous belly laugh, head thrown back.
“I am serious,” she protested hotly.
“I’m so glad you clarified that,” he said, huffing with laughter. “Because I gotta tell you, with General Schneider breathing down my neck to learn what your magic is good for, with my spending every free waking moment trying to convince him and his bosses that this is useful even if you haven’t already materialized enriched uranium for them, I gotta tell you, when I am so totally preoccupied with your being seen as a valued commodity that the time it takes me to shave feels like a personal overindulgence, I love knowing that your number one priority is devaluing me even more than my bosses want to devalue you. That’s awesome. You’re the best. I’ll be so fucking devastated when they pull the plug on this and you end up in the street without even a nursing home to take care of you.” He stood up and stormed to the far side of the room, his hands at his temples. “Jesus.”
Then he turned back toward us and said, from a distance, “I apologize. That was totally uncalled for and I should have more control over myself. It’s been a tough week.”
“They want to pull the plug?” said Erszebet, scandalized.
“How long has that been true?” I asked, shocked.
He ran his hands through his short hair a few times roughly, and then returned to sit by us again. “Almost from the word go,” he confessed, pained. “General Schneider was excited for about thirty minutes and then he and Dr. Rudge wanted immediate gratification. They wanted her to start manifesting stealth bombers, or teleport invisibly to Syria, that sort of thing.”
This was the first time he had mentioned names. Until then, Tristan had maintained impeccable secrecy concerning his chain of command. Either he really was at the end of his rope, or else he thought he could gain Erszebet’s trust by personalizing the discussion.
If so, it wasn’t working. “And instead you had me turning sweaters inside out?” demanded Erszebet in disgust. “And you wonder why they do not value me? You are more of an idiot even than I thought.”
“Every task I gave you was a beta test for something else that would have obvious military use. They want you to turn a person inside out. Obviously I have to test that on a sweater and not a person, or even on a lab rat. And of course I’ll fulfill their agenda, but ideally I’d like to exceed it. I’ve got more scruples than they do, so I’d like to present you to them—brand you, so to speak—as being useful for something other than turning a person inside out.”
“Such as?”
“Turning lead into gold would be pretty awesome,” he said, sounding wistful.
She shook her head.
“Why don’t you suggest something, then,” he said to her. “Given that you can only work your magic inside the ODEC, you’re a little limited, you realize that?”
“She can turn rats into newts,” I reminded him.
“So can your average kids’-birthday-party magician.”
“Not for real. Anyhow, what about a person?” I said. “What if I let her turn me into a newt?”
“I would not turn a person inside out, probably,” Erszebet informed Tristan. “That would be tasteless. You Americans are so tasteless.”
“Turn me into a newt,” I insisted. “The bosses will like that.”
And that, as I recall, was the moment when Tristan’s phone began playing the “Liberty Bell March.”
He pulled it out of his pocket and double-taked, then used his finger to scroll down. “Snap inspection!” he announced, looking up to make eye contact with me and Erszebet. “Shine your shoes and polish your belt buckles!”
Diachronicle
DAY 304
In which General Schneider is impressed
NO MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES later we were joined by a broad-chested gentleman in uniform, trailed by a younger man, similarly attired, whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to open doors for, and to hold the hat of, the boss.
At the time, I knew nothing of uniforms, rank, or insignia. A few years later, having spent a lot of time around active-duty military, I’d have been able to recognize this man as a brigadier general (one star) and his aide as a lieutenant colonel. Both were wearing dress uniforms—the military-world equivalent of business suits. Conveniently, they were wearing name plates on their right breast pockets, and so I knew that their last names were Schneider and Ramirez even before Tristan made introductions, which he did with even more than his accustomed level of military crispness.
General Schneider moved about the room in an asymmetrical gait, shaking first my hand, then Erszebet’s. His manner was extraordinarily grim and formal. He paid only cursory attention to me. Then his gaze settled on Erszebet, taking her in head to foot, and for a fleeting moment he looked impressed. But then he frowned and turned his attention to Tristan.
“I assume that’s the Asset,” he said, pointing.
“Pointing is very rude,” said Erszebet.
Tristan hastily said, “General Schneider, yes. Miss Karpathy is the one I told you about.”
“This must be the one who wishes me to turn people inside out,” said Erszebet, looking away with wounded dignity. “Very tasteless.”
Schneider gave her a strange look, but then returned his attention to Tristan, who said quickly, “You came at a great time, sir. We were just in the middle of a very productive conversation.”
“You said a couple of weeks, Major Lyons. In my dictionary, ‘a couple’ means ‘two.’ It has been two.”
“General Schneider—”
“You’re not doing what we discussed, Major Lyons. You’re going off script. You’re giving us a science project.”
“Sir, I explained in my report—” Tristan began, but Erszebet talked over him:
“My powers are so little to a man who requires an assistant just to walk into a room?”
“She was just about to turn me into a newt,” I offered urgently.
General Schneider gave me a look and then turned condescendingly to her. “Yeah, I’ve been hearing about the newt thing all week. That might have been impressive a thousand years ago—”
“I was born in 1832, I was not alive a thousand years ago,” she retorted. “If you cannot grasp simple arithmetic, then you will never have any idea what Mr. Tristan Lyons is trying to accomplish here.”
Schneider continued speaking over her: “Those kinds of tricks are nothing in a world with drones, cruise missiles, and assault rifles. And according to Major Lyons’s reports, it takes you all day to pull it off. By the time you get that spell half out of your mouth, I can rack a round into my sidearm and put it between your eyes.”
“Do you need your minion to help you with that too?” she asked.
He looked back over his shoulder at Lieutenant Colonel Ramirez. “Have a look around the facility,” he said. Ramirez departed wordlessly.
“I liked the Maxes better,” Erszebet announced.
“Do you get my point?” General Schneider demanded. “If you want the taxpayers of the United States to go on subsidizing your beauty treatments, you had better impress me. Now. Today. Right now.”