“They’re looking for it.”
Like when he was sledding and would halt the dogs to determine if a stretch of ice might be thinner than it looked, a familiar ball of wariness formed in his stomach. “Who is ‘they’, professor?”
He plopped his sheets of calculations onto the tabletop. “As you may know, I’ve experienced something of a vagabond life since, well, since my troubles.”
Henson had been the one to deliver Ellsmere to the sanitarium after the return to New York on the whale ship the Hope, bearing the largest of the Cape York meteorites, the thirty-four ton Tent, Saviksoah. The “Great Iron” as the Eskimos had nicknamed it. Eleven feet long and seven feet high. It took many hours, several hydraulic jacks and other engineering adaptations to load it onto the ship Previously, two other ancient meteorites had been brought back from the north shore of Melville Bay, the Mother, Ahnahnna, and the Dog, Kim-milk, both of which were much smaller than the Tent.
Henson lowered his voice. “You didn’t tell anyone anything, did you?”
“Of course not. All this time, even at my most…” he gestured, “untethered, I have not given that confidence away. But I must admit, through all my travails, unlocking the secrets of the Daughter has been the one beacon focusing my mind. Helping to keep me on task, I suppose one might say.”
Henson nodded, staring into the depths of his coffee.
Their food came, and both remained silent until the waitress departed again. Ellsmere spoke, “In my wanderings after my incident, in my travels, I might take a research job or lab work, what with teaching posts not available to me given, well you know…”
Henson started in on his breakfast. “No rush, prof, but about the Daughter…”
“Yes,” Ellsmere said over a mouthful of food. He swallowed, looking down at his meal, grinning. “I see why you frequent this place.”
Henson smiled, “Beats roasted seal, don’t it?”
“Oh, we got used to a lot of things out there, didn’t we? Anyway, as I was saying, I’ve been living in an itinerant manner. Even went out to Los Angeles for a time, a place called Pasadena actually. The one time I almost got a post again.” He forked in more of his breakfast, looking off, then refocused. “Anyway, making my way east again, I was approached by an interesting woman, herself part Inuit I’m pretty certain, with an interesting proposition. This was oh, four or so months ago.”
“And what was the job?”
“That’s just it, her finding me was a dream. I was paid handsomely, provided rooms and pertinent books, and all I had to do was further pursue avenues previously abandoned. Every two weeks or so she’d drop by and ask about my progress.”
Henson took a few steps onto that ice. “But she was a ringer?”
“As the colloquialism goes,” Ellsmere said in German, knowing that Henson would understand. He switched back to English. “About three weeks ago she asked me pointedly about my time at Princeton.”
“Why did that raise your hackles?”
“The light bulb finally went off in my head, Mathew. So hungry was I for being appreciated. But I suddenly understood, given her follow-up attempts at deflection, that the previous scientific inquiry for the sake of inquiry was just to butter me up you see. To draw me in and have me lower my guard. Her real interests, and that of her backers, I surmised, was what we are calling quantum physics that Dr. Einstein has gotten so much attention advancing.”
Henson detected the envy in his voice. “What does that mean, quantum physics?
“In 1919, astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble advanced the theory that our universe is constantly expanding, my friend. That it is not fixed, since the science of astronomy was established. This changed everything.”
Henson chewed and recalled that more than once he’d been in an Arctic storm at night and the only way to find his way back was sighting specific star formations. Still, he didn’t have a PhD, let alone two of them. “How does that relate to what happened to you?”
“I could go into what all that means via Hubble’s and Bohr’s theories. But to be succinct, it’s about the energy that is all around us, my rugged fellow. Untapped and unseen. But there nonetheless. It’s about unlocking the potential of the atom.”
Now the ice began to crack beneath his feet. “Or objects from space.”
Ellsmere stopped eating and sipped his coffee, eyeing his companion over the rim of the cup.
“Did she mention the Daughter?”
Ellsmere was chewing again. He paused and put his fork down. “Not directly, but I sensed that’s where she was going. As I said, she soon took the conversation elsewhere, but two days later, wound back around to my thoughts on this branch of physics.”
“I don’t know, that seems natural as it relates to you. There’s a lot you have your finger in.”
“Believe me, Matthew, I am not imagining this. I’m not hearing voices or seeing little green men. I didn’t even during my breakdown. My memory has always been quite intact. Which reminds me, when was the last time you’ve seen your son?”
“Longer than it should be,” he admitted.
Ellsmere started at him. “Take it from a man with no family, Matthew. Don’t let it go too much longer.”
“You’re right.”
Ellsmere held a piece of bacon near his mouth. “To continue, my rooms, if you will, were part of a larger mansion in Poughkeepsie. Mind you, I had relatively free run of the place until that evening when she broached that particular subject matter.”
“You know where this mansion is?”
“Not exactly. It was near a park though,
