by Geof Johnson
Jamie introduced his biology professor and Evelyn said, “How do you like it so far, Dr. Tindall?”
“Oh, call me Nancy, and I’m impressed. I had absolutely no idea this young man was doing anything like this.” She gave a little jittery laugh. “Or that he was a sorcerer, or that there was another world populated by humans. No idea at all.”
“Good. We don’t want people knowing that. Have you seen the clinic yet?” Dr. Tindall shook her head and Evelyn said, “I’ll take you over there in a minute.” Then she turned and glanced over her shoulder at the front of the school. “I keep expecting your grandfather to show up, Jamie. He called a while ago.”
“How can he call here if it’s another world?” Dr. Tindall said.
“We have a phone in the office,” Jamie said. “I made a mini-portal, about the size of a nickel, and ran a wire to my aunt’s condo in Hendersonville.”
“Interesting.” Dr. Tindall gazed across the field at the kids playing dodge ball. “That girl with the pale red hair? She looks just like my sister did when she was young.”
“That’s Leora Hale,” Evelyn said. “She’s been coming here since the summer.”
“That’s the girl who caught the flu from Sammi,” Jamie added.
“Hale,” Dr. Tindall said. “That was my maiden name. What a coincidence.”
“It’s probably not,” Jamie said.
“What do you mean?”
“We don’t have many coincidences around here. That girl might be a cousin of yours.”
“You’re joking.”
“Do you have any Irish in your family history?”
“I believe so.”
“Well, then it’s probably not a coincidence.” He told her about Shira Coy, the local red-haired girl who looked like she could be Fred’s younger twin, and how Fred’s father had gotten together with Shira’s family and determined that they were distantly related.
“That’s incredible. Fred is the redhead who came with you and the other girl to my office?”
Jamie nodded. “She’s my girlfriend.”
“Nancy, would you like to meet Leora?” Evelyn asked. “She’s a sweetheart.”
“Uh, some other time I guess.” She glanced at Leora again before saying, “Does anyone else from your family work here?”
“Most everybody does,” Evelyn said, “in some fashion. Even Pete’s wife once in a while, though she won’t do anything that might break a fingernail. How about you, Nancy? Do you have any family?”
“I’m divorced, and I have a grown son. He’s working on his master’s in business management at UCLA.”
“Will he come home for Thanksgiving?”
“He’s going skiing in Colorado with his girlfriend, so I’ll be on my own.”
“What are you going to do about Thanksgiving dinner?”
“One of my grad students has asked me to join her family, but I think it’s more out of sense of duty than anything else.”
“Then why don’t you eat with us? We’ll have plenty.”
“I’ll be fine by myself. I’ve done it before.”
“Nonsense. You can come to Hendersonville and eat with our family, though we’ll have a mob.”
“It’ll be great, Dr. Tindall,” Jamie said. “We’d be honored to have you, and there’s always too much food. This year Mrs. Tully is going to fix something, too, and she’s a great cook. She lives here in Rivershire.”
“It’s too long of a drive to Hendersonville to come for the day.”
“You won’t have to drive. I’ll make a doorway to your house and you’ll walk right into our family room. It’ll take about five seconds.”
“Your table will be too crowded, won’t it?”
“I might make a doorway to my stone house here in Rivershire and use that table, too. Mrs. Tully will be cooking in that kitchen anyway, since it’s more modern than the one in her house. You really should come. When will you ever get another chance to have dinner with someone from another world?”
“Um…we’ll see.”
“Think about, Nancy,” Evelyn said. “We’d love to have you, and everybody there already knows about the magic and everything. You would probably hear a lot of really interesting stories.”
They all turned when they heard someone whistling. Pete appeared around the corner of the building, wearing dark blue slacks and a pressed white dress shirt, and he carried his briefcase in one hand. He smiled when he saw them and joined them at the table.
Jamie made the introductions and Pete said, “Are you here to apply for the job, Dr. Tindall? I hear we need another teacher.”
“I’m just taking the tour, thanks. Jamie said he brought me here for something else, but he hasn’t said what it is, yet.”
“I think Jamie’s going to get to that soon,” Evelyn said. “Pete, what little scheme do you have cooking today?”
“Oh, this and that.” He reached over and patted Jamie on the elbow. “I’m glad you’re here today, because I have something I want to run by you.” He gave a quick nod and said, “A friend of mine from Hendersonville, who’s one of our former tourists, wants to open a café here in town. He likes it here, and he’s working up a partnership with one of the Rivershire councilmen. I wanted to see what you think about it.”
“A café? Why?”
“Several reasons. There’s not one here, for starters.”
“Hold on.” Evelyn waved one hand. “If you guys are going to talk business, I’ll give Nancy a tour of the clinic.”
Evelyn walked with Dr. Tindall across the grounds to the two-story building that served as the medical facility for the school and the town.
“Evelyn, is Pete a wheeler-dealer?”
“Very much so. He’s got a knack for business and money management, and none of the rest of us do, so he’s taken to the chore of handling the school’s finances. He gets a little carried away, sometimes.”
They reached the front door and Evelyn held it open. “Here we are.”
They passed through the small waiting area to the main part of the clinic, where they found Dr. Burke, Evelyn’s gray-haired friend, with another, younger woman, helping a patient who was lying on the examination table on the far wall. Dr. Burke came over to say hello. After the introductions, Evelyn said, “Where’s Dr. Shelby?”
“She’s back in Hendersonville for the day. She was up all night with a tough delivery. The midwife was having a hard time with that baby, so they brought the mother-to-be here. But we managed all right, after a while. The baby and the mother are both fine, resting together in the back room.” She exhaled heavily with an exaggerated slump of her shoulders and turned to Dr. Tindall. “So, Nancy, are you as wowed by this place as I was when I first came here?”
“I don’t know, but it’s all pretty darn amazing. Who is the young lady with you?”
“She’s our healer, a witch, and talk about amazing! You haven’t seen anything ’till you’ve seen what she can do.”
The young woman was tall and slender, with long black hair and brown eyes, and her expression was serious as she examined her patient.
“Her name is Keeva,” Dr. Burke said. “She’s only twenty, but she knows a lot about magic-kind of things. Really fascinating. She trained with an older healer in Paulsbury, which is about fifteen miles north of here. There are at least two other healers in that town, so there’s not enough room for another one. When she heard about our clinic, she came to see what we were doing. After we told her a little bit about how we practice medicine, she asked if she could stay on and learn from us. Now she works with us, and I loaned her a few of my textbooks from med school. She studies those very hard.”
“We put her up in the boarding house,” Evelyn added, “and we pay her a small salary. Not as much as she’d make as a full-fledged healer, but it’s enough, I think.”
“I hear a good healer can make a lot of money,” Dr. Burke said, “if she’s in the right town. Keeva figures with the extra things she’s learning from us, she�
��ll be a first-rate doctor, though that’s not what they call us around here. As far as the locals are concerned, we’re all healers.”
“How does her magic work?” Dr. Tindall said.
“She can lay her hands on a patient and diagnosis their ailment, like whether a bone is broken or not, which is useful, since we don’t have an X-ray machine. And she can make some potions that work really, really well. You would not believe it. Just…fantastic. I’m learning a lot from her. It’s not a one-way relationship.”
“Can she do anything about arthritis?” Dr. Tindall shook her right hand and grimaced. “Mine’s gotten so bad I can hardly sign my name on a cold morning.”
“We have something for that.” Dr. Burke turned and opened a cabinet on the nearby wall. “I know that Jamie’s girlfriend can make this, too.” She pulled out a travel-sized plastic container of petroleum jelly. “In fact, Fred gave us the idea for mixing the healing powder in this stuff.” She gave it to Dr. Tindall. “Rub a little of that on it and see if that doesn’t make it better.”
Dr. Tindall took off the cap and eyed the pale goo inside. Then she scooped some out with her finger and spread it across the back of her hand. “Now what do I do?”
“Wait a few seconds. See how it feels.”
Dr. Tindall flexed her fingers, tentatively at first, then she made a tight fist and opened it, and her lips parted. “Oh! It’s better.” She looked at Dr. Burke and smiled.
“Give it a minute and the improvement should be more noticeable.”
She flexed her hand again and drew a sharp breath. “It feels normal. No pain at all.” Her smile broadened.
“Amazing stuff, that healing potion,” Dr. Burke said. “Keep that little jar because we have plenty. You can put it on all kinds of injuries, like small cuts and burns and bruises. Heals them right before your eyes.”
Dr. Tindall put the cap back on it and slipped the container into her coat pocket. “Did this healer make that inoculation potion that Jamie made me drink today?”
“If it tasted like battery acid, she did. It’s nasty, but really effective. Dr. Shelby helped Keeva come up with that. Dr. Shelby used to work for the CDC as an epidemiologist, and she knows more about infectious diseases than just about anybody. I think we need to work on it a little to improve the taste, though.”
“Have you developed any other new treatments using both magic and modern medicine?”
“We’re working on some things, but we really need a lab. Not a big one, just some basic equipment will do. Right now, Keeva has to make her potions in my little apartment upstairs, and sometimes they stink up the place so badly that I have to sleep down here, if it’s my turn to cover the overnight shift. I should talk to Pete and Jamie and see if we have the money to build a little addition on our clinic. I heard we’ll have the funds if they sign that mining deal.”
“Is that the deal that Jamie hasn’t told me about yet?” Dr. Tindall asked. “He’s been very evasive about that so far.”
Dr. Burke looked at Evelyn and bit the corner of her lip. “Should I not have said that?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not going to say anything about it. I’ll leave that up to Jamie.”
Dr. Tindall stared at them for a moment, then she said, “So, um, Dr. Burke, do you and Dr. Shelby take turns staying here overnight?”
“One of us goes home and the other stays, unless it’s a big emergency. We use the magic doorway in Pete’s headquarters across the street, and I leave my car in the parking lot of his warehouse in Hendersonville.”
“So, that’s your commute? You drive to the warehouse, go through a magic doorway to the building across the road here, then walk across the field to the clinic? How far is that? Thousands of light years? Millions?”
“Nobody knows. Jamie thinks we might even be in another universe right now.”
Dr. Tindall exhaled through tightened lips and her eyes flared. “I’m still getting used to that concept.”
“You will soon,” Evelyn said. “Now, let’s finish the tour before you have to go.”
Jamie waited at the picnic table while his grandmother and his science teacher strolled toward him from the clinic, engrossed in conversation. When they joined him, Dr. Tindall said, “Jamie, I’ve got to get back to my office pretty soon. Are you ever going to tell me why you brought me here?”
“Um….” Jamie took a deep breath and tried to get his thoughts together quickly. He glanced at Evelyn, sitting next to him on the bench, before continuing. “Okay, you know that I can make doorways to many, many worlds, more than I can even count. Some of them are lush and green, like this one, and others are somewhat barren, but they have substantial ore deposits, including valuable industrial metals, like copper and nickel. I know this because Eddan used to go to a couple of them to get raw ore for the metal that he used when he made some of his contraptions.”
“So what does that have to do with me?” Dr. Tindall said.
“Well, a few weeks ago, my grandfather talked me into letting a mining company have access to one of these worlds to survey it.” He extended one finger and shook it. “Just to survey, though, to see what the production potential of it is, and only in one isolated location. We haven’t granted extraction rights yet.”
“In other words, if they want access to the ore, they need you to make a doorway for them.”
“Exactly. But that’s about all I have to do, so it’s easy money for us if we agree.”
“Do have you have to make their entire company do the magic oath?”
“Just a small division, less than a dozen people, and we’ve already taken care of that. They paid us two hundred thousand dollars just for the right to survey.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Two hundred thousand?”
“Apparently, that’s not a lot to a mining company. But I made it easy for them by blasting a couple of tunnels where I’m sure there’s plenty of good ore. Copper, mostly. They’re doing some drilling around the site and taking samples to analyze. If they’re happy with the results, we can sign a mining deal for big bucks, according to Granddaddy.”
“How big is big?”
He paused before he answered, holding his breath. “Millions. Tens of millions if Granddaddy can get a decent percentage of the value of the raw ore they extract. He’s talking about a renewable lease and options and those kinds of things, but I don’t worry about that stuff. I leave that up to him.”
Dr. Tindall stared at him for several seconds. “I’m in the wrong profession.”
“You didn’t become a scientist for the money,” Evelyn said, “did you?”
She shook her head once. “So why do you need me, Jamie?”
“Because I’m afraid we rushed into this without thinking about the impact on the world they want to mine. It looks like a wasteland, but what if it’s not? What if we’re screwing up the environment and destroying an important ecosystem? I’m afraid we got greedy and jumped into this without careful consideration. Just because we can take natural resources from another world doesn’t mean that we should.”
Dr. Tindall rubbed her chin thoughtfully with the side of one finger. “Let me play the Devil’s advocate for a minute. Some people would say that it’s just another world among millions, and that it’s our right as human beings to take what we want. How would you answer that?”
“I would say…who am I to make that choice? I’m just an eighteen-year-old kid who’s trying to do the right thing. Maybe it’s too late for the world with the copper ore, but what about the others?”
She gazed back at him, her eyes narrowed studiously, then she said, “I’m glad to hear you say that. A lot of people wouldn’t care. They’d just take the money and run.”
“If this works out, Granddaddy wants to make another deal, same mining company, different planet. I don’t want to do it until we investigate it first to make sure we’re not destroying something important. I need your help making that assessment.”
“Why me? There are other
scientists who are qualified to do that.”
“Because I have a gut feeling that you’re the one, and Uncle Charlie told me to trust my instincts.”
“Uncle Charlie, the Cherokee man? You’re making the decision about who to trust based on his advice?”
“Spend thirty minutes with him and you’ll understand why.”
Dr. Tindall looked at Evelyn, who nodded and said, “He’s a special fellow. I don’t know why, but he is. He’s been to this school twice to give talks and tell stories about his people. The kids are fascinated by him.”
“Does he have magical powers, too?” Dr. Tindall asked.
“Not that I know of,” Jamie said.
Dr. Tindall’s eyes were unreadable while she regarded Jamie. “It sounds as if you could make a fortune off of this. What could you possibly do with that much money?”
“I can think of a lot of things. I want to build an all-purpose facility for the school, and that won’t be cheap. And just about every person within five miles of this school has been by to look at the electric lights and ceiling fans, and almost all of them want them now. But most of them can’t afford it, because of the cost of the solar panels. I’d love to help them get some, but it would be expensive.”
“That wouldn’t cost tens of millions of dollars, would it?” Dr. Tindall said.
“Jamie and his grandfather have bigger plans than that,” Evelyn said.
“If the school ends up being as successful as I think it’s going to be,” Jamie said, “I’d like to replicate our model and build more in some of the other nearby towns. Maybe even build a college, eventually.”
“My, you are ambitious, aren’t you,” Dr. Tindall said.
“I can’t help it.”
“No, I respect that. I really do.”
“Does that mean you’ll help us?”
Dr. Tindall continued to study him, her expression neutral. “I don’t know. I may not have time, though I’d like to help you, because I think what you are doing is admirable. But if my grant comes through, I’ll be too busy. This sounds incredibly tempting, but I’m already committed, and others are counting on me.”