“Yes. I’ll find her.”
“Anna says Nutka will be here soon and she can give you a regular massage.”
“They keep saying that” He raised his hand. “What are you doing?”
“I miss my cat.”
“Panzy, right?”
“Yeah. I am worried about her. I was going to find Sam to ask him something.”
“About cats?”
“Not exactly. I need to get into some e-mail. I’ll be right back, okay?”
“Sure. The Nannites aren’t going anywhere. Neither am I. The little bastards.”
Jason desperately needed Nutka. But Anna could give him oil and that would cure the Nannite nerves. He also needed the board that they were now putting together so he could work equations, and he needed his computer. Grady was his only consolation. He had never wanted to get near her for fear the Nannites would commence their plague. But now she was here and it wasn’t his doing and he wanted to know her.
He walked over to the computer and squinted at the screen. AOL. An in-box of sorts. Someplace called the Critter Sitter had sent an urgent e-mail regarding Panzy. No wonder Grady had been distraught. Clicking the mouse, he opened it.
Need immediate treatment authorization for Panzy. We have detected a large sarcoma tumor in her abdomen. Surgery may save Panzy if performed immediately. Please respond by e-mail so that we have a record of your authorization.
If it were his pet, Pasha, he knew what he would do. He wrote:
Take all necessary steps to save Panzy. You have my full authorization for any and all treatments.
He sent it and felt better immediately. Then he got an idea. Perhaps he could call Grace Technologies and access his own e-mail. It would be fun to send Chellis a message. He clicked out of AOL and thought how he might access the satellite. Then he considered all of the weird goings-on and how Sam and Anna had traveled and seemed to be hiding. Better to wait and discuss it with Anna.
“Grady, listen carefully. No way do you access your e-mail. You are going into AOL over an eight hundred line?” Sam asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you open anything or send anything?”
“No, I would never do that without asking.”
“If it is a trap, if they’ve figured out about your cat, the second you open that e-mail they’ll know you’ve called the account and that could be the beginning of the end for us. Responding with your own e-mail would without question give away our location unless we did a whole lot of programming that hasn’t been done here.”
“They can find that out?”
“A corporation like Grace would make up some bullshit story and they would be able to easily discover the local carrier that put that eight hundred call through. AOL has to keep track of all eight hundred calls for billing purposes. The local carrier will know the physical address of the phone that placed the call. Or in this case the modem. We use these techniques all the time.”
“God, Big Brother.”
“I’ll send someone to check on your cat. Don’t worry about it.”
“There is no way I can read that e-mail?”
“Too risky even to do that. Let’s not take chances.”
Grady returned to her room and found her computer displaying the desktop icons and her AOL screen gone from the monitor. Certainly her father knew about computers, so he probably went off on the Internet or something. It was just as well. She wouldn’t have to look at that e-mail again. She shut down the computer and looked at the clock. She would read the book that Anna had given her. Oddly she seemed to find herself the subject of every chapter. It was called Where Did He Go? Where Did She Go?
Thirty-seven
Anna found Sam bent over a desk strewn with maps of the house and grounds.
His room was large to accommodate three walls full of oil paintings, a king-size bed with a massive oak headboard, and a big-screen television mounted in a mahogany entertainment center. Although the room had several lights, Sam worked by a single desk lamp, and so the cream and faux gold walls were softened and enriched by the man-made twilight.
“Secluded homes often don’t make good safe houses. Bad guys can hide in the woods.”
She nodded, looking at the maps.
“But this place is perfect. We are in the middle of a two-acre lawn manicured with flower beds and low-lying shrubbery. There is a fence all the way round, three dogs, and good electronic security. It’s the summer retreat for a contractor who builds nuclear plants and he likes his peace and doesn’t want to be disturbed by environmental activists.”
“You really had me going with the yacht story.”
Sam smiled and turned around in his seat. “You and my mother have been talking incessantly.”
“She told me a story.”
“Yeah?”
“An Indian girl grew apart from her husband and?? about a single man to take as a lover. Many nights she sneaked across the stream. To make it easy she planted large stones and learned to dance across and keep her moccasins dry even in the dark. Then her lover took a wife and left her alone. Every day she looked at the stones and was reminded of him. One night she danced across the stones and found her husband waiting. After that meeting, so the legend goes, they prospered and had many children and every night her husband waited for her at the other side of the river. Over time the story of the stones got around the village and dancing across them in the dark became a game amongst the young women, and soon they placed more stones and made more elaborate crossings.
“Have you heard this story?” she asked Sam.
“Yes,” he said. “But keep going. Sometimes my mother’s stories have a fork in the road-which fork depends on the traveler.”
“Then you know that as time passed, crossing the river on the stones became a wedding ritual for brides, who would find their husbands waiting on the other side to take them off to a secret place.
“Then one day a Talth went to the people and said this ritual was not right because the stones were a memorial to treachery and should not be part of a wedding celebration. Wanting to keep the tradition, the people went to the chief and inquired about the message of the Talth.
“The chief said that time for love must be stolen from the cares of life or it will fade. So the ritual was good because it taught an important lesson.”
Sam smiled as if he understood the point. “And what did you get out of the story?”
“There is something about escaping cares and commitments and just stealing time for love that perpetuates it. For a lot of people, it’s sort of in the blueprint for marriage that duties are more important than love.”
“But?”
“Love seems dangerous. If you don’t want to feel it you can escape it, but you then become emotionally unavailable.”
“She really is getting to you.”
“Are you feeeee… ling something, Sam?” she asked teasingly. “You won’t get this overnight. How did your mother tell the story to you?”
