The same arguments for skipping the rest of his classes existed in his head, only now they were buttressed by a concrete reason far beyond merely exhaustion and far greater than simply not wanting to go. There were ideas rushing through his mind beyond those of his usual daydreams, ideas that demanded immediate attention.
How large an object will it work on?
Does material make the difference?
Can more than one be made at a time?
There were hypotheses to test, data to collect. His scientific brain quickly dissected the miracle that he had beheld the night before and translated it into quantifiable predictions and was already running experiments.
Sitting alone on the bench, eating the soggy sandwich he had dared to buy for lunch he suppressed a smile.
Jonah McAllister Has an Epiphany
He tapped his pen on the edge of his desk as he looked around at the remaining grad students, two in all, as they bustled around the benches, throwing this solution or that on top of slides or pipetting markers into agarose assays. He bit his tongue impatiently, waiting for them to leave. The one time he wanted them gone...
The anticipation was becoming almost too much to bear as his tapping of the pen and his chewing of his tongue continued apace.
They began whispering between the two of them and he had a brief flash that they knew what he was going to do once they were gone. A pang of worry lasted long enough for him to seriously consider walking out the main door and rushing back to his cramped apartment with its full complement of pens. But there were things he needed to do that could only be done in the lab.
He needed to figure out exactly what had happened to the plants on that first day.
Over the past day he had grown more and more confident with his control over the sounds that had made all of the pens, or at least the outer shells of a pen, in his apartment. He was beginning to suspect the reason he was unable to make the inkwells to go along with them, but he wanted to run some tests on the plants in the greenhouse first. The ability to make plastic knickknacks out of thin air was impressive, but a plant was a living thing and he needed to know how they were being affected before he continued on. There was no telling what could be happening to him every time he did this. He had not grown any taller yet, but who knew what was going on?
The two grad students, Sara Something and the one who called him Josh, were arguing heatedly over the centrifuge, about procedures or something. Jonah tapped his pen harder against the notebook and then stood up, gripped by a sudden urge for a drink from the soda machine down the hall.
“Josh!” the call grated on his nerves. The older student, his face disturbingly close shaven, ran the last couple of steps to catch up before the door closed between them. “Hey, man, thanks for the slides. They look good.”
“Good.” Jonah continued walking.
“So, I said I owe you one. I'm not supposed to mention this to you, but the other grad students are having like—this Christmas thing. I figured you've got the student part down, right?”
Jonah frowned, his impatience barely held in check. “Uh, no thanks.”
The grad student looked him uncomfortably square in the eye. “You know that brunette from the lab down the hall is going to be there,” he whispered.
His pulse quickened momentarily and then slowed once again.
“Come on, man, every single undergrad that comes through here has a thing for her. Look, normally I don't get involved, but you seem like a nice guy. Bit high strung maybe, but... You'll stain a friend's slides in an emergency, right?”
Jonah mused for a moment, thoughts of getting into the greenhouse drifted away. If there had been no reaction to the invitation there was now a growing curiosity. He managed a brief exhale.
Sensing submission the grad student pushed him by the shoulder, nearly sending him back into the seamless windows that lined the hall. “All right, man. It's about two weeks from now at the Fort hotel. All you need is fifty bucks to chip in for booze.”
Jonah's heart sank. “Fifty bucks?”
“Yeah. I'll look into getting you an invite.” He threw open the door and dashed back down the hall into a world that Jonah had no possible way to reach.
“Fifty bucks...” the last part of the sentence drifted off into a string of mutterings.
The grad students had left for the evening and he had collected his samples in secret, though they had receded into the back of his mind for the moment. There was nothing wrong with them, they had just grown a little faster than the rest was all. He had pointed the sounds at them and they had tried to replicate like the pens and toothbrush, but like the bristles and the inkwells there were too many parts of the plants, too much complexity to make a complete copy, or even to make them grow more than a few millimeters at a time. Maybe he had managed to increase the sugar stores in the plant cells.
That was his interpretation anyway.
“So, we can make simple things out of thin air...” he trailed off dreamily. “What did you do today, Jonah? Nothing much. Just put China out of business.”
He tapped his pen on the paper. As excited as he should have been, he was still in a dire mood. No matter how he
