Alarm shot through her. Maybe it was fear that the crown would like the new boss too much, or maybe fry his brain. Or maybe she just felt proprietary toward it. Either way, she wasnt comfortable with the idea of him using it. She answered quickly, Most people who put it on experience a blinding headache for several days thereafter. The crown seems to have an affinity for certain brains.
Have you determined what it is about those brains that it likes?
Everyone it has not bothered has been strongly psychic. She added with a certain satisfaction, And everyone it has liked so far is female.
Graftons gaze narrowed. Are you jacking me around, or are you serious?
She allowed herself a small smile. Oh, Im serious, all right. The crown likes women.
He grinned. Cant say as I blame the thing. I like em, too.
A shiver rippled down her spine, leaving her body tingling withsomething. Oh, good grief. She didnt go for all that ridiculous boy-girl foolishness. Shed sworn off dating by the time she graduated from college, throwing herself into her research almost to the exclusion of all else. And as a result, her life was calm. Peaceful. Serene. Just the way she liked it. Severely lacking in annoying, overconfident males who oozed testosterone and sex appeal. At least until now.
He asked casually, When will you be ready to try sending something somewhere? It looked to me like youve got all the equipment set upthe quartz booth to contain whatever you send, the computers, the amplifiers.
She resisted an urge to wince. Shed known it would come to this eventually. Just not yet. She answered reluctantly, We still have to figure out where were going wrong in the programming.
He said briskly, I think we should go for it. The numbers I looked at seemed more like minor tweaks than actual errors.
Its your career on the line.
He laughed, sharply and without humor. Like I still have a career. Ive been shunted off to a kooky research project in the middle of nowhere with zilch for funding and run by some crazy civilian chick who claims she can time travel. Id say my career has effectively tanked, wouldnt you?
Damn. Shed been hoping the guy at least had a sense of self-preservation she could use to rein him in. Curious, she asked, What did you do to get stuck with this assignment?
He threw her a withering look. Office politics gone bad. I tried to do the right thing, and took the moral high ground. I came out on the losing end.
Nothing like being a small, replaceable cogwith a conscience, no lessin a very big machine, eh? Thats why I could never have joined the military. I wouldve gone crazy or gotten court-martialed, or both.
He made no reply to that.
She said quietly, As tempting as it is to rush to the end result on this project, I think caution is the best course. Were close. Lets not blow it now.
He bit out. Ill take your opinion under advisement, Dr. Carswell.
She actually felt her teeth gnashing.
Introduce me to the rest of the staff, the colonel ordered briskly.
She was half tempted to argue further, but instead, behaved herself. Lets go. And call me Athena. Everyone else does.
The staff was small: two graduate students coming out of the fields of physics and math to analyze brain waves and crunch numbers, two student programmers to translate the equations into computer code, and two hardware technicians to keep the computers up and running. At one time, the best scientific minds in America had worked on the crown in secret, along with the other artifacts recovered from the Roswell crash. And now they were down to this.
A handful of geeks in a basement lab, a crazy psychic chick and one outcast colonel.