by Paul Dueweke
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Susie
Elliott and Martha sat in their breakfast room, one reading, and the other just staring into the newspaper.
“Susie called yesterday while you were out,” Martha said without raising her eyes. Elliott looked up at her media-focused face. “She wanted to know if you’d be home this morning.” Elliott continued to stare at Martha. She turned the page and began reading a new article. “I told her I never knew what kind of trouble you were out getting into, but I’d at least tell you about it.”
“Is she going to call back this morning?” Elliott said.
“She has some business at the University today. Said she’d stop by this morning. Her flight gets in at ten.” Elliott’s eyes wandered back to his unread front page. Martha turned another page and scanned the headlines. “She’s going to rent a car and come over.” Her eyes stopped. “Isn’t that interesting? Junkie Gordon is suing NBC for a rematch. I wonder why? Lizzie won the debate fair-and-square.”
“It’s good for prime time advertisers,” Elliott said.
Martha looked up at Elliott and then back down at her paper. “I suppose you’ll be pulling one of your disappearing acts this morning.”
Two hours later, Elliott stood in the late morning sun of their rear deck picking faded geranium leaves from a flowerbox. The sound of a door behind him caused him to turn. A slender woman stepped out onto the deck. Elliott faced Dr. Susan Alvarez.
“Good morning, Dad,” she said as she stepped toward him. After a brief hug, Elliott stepped back and looked into his daughter’s eyes. She maintained a hold on one of his hands, but he seemed not to need this restraint as his eyes rummaged through her hair and her lips and then back to her eyes.
“I never appreciated before … just how beautiful you are, Susan. Why do you suppose that is?”
“I don’t know.” She swallowed hard, biting her upper lip. She stroked the back of his hand with her thumb.
He looked down at her hands and was startled at how similar they looked to Guinda’s. His beautiful daughter was a few years older than his exquisite lover. “Martha is watching TV. She’ll be so glad you’re here.”
“Please don’t tell her just yet. I’ve got some things I wanted to talk to you about first.”
They sat down on a pair of chairs beside a glass table.
“You’re probably wondering what all this is about. I don’t really have an appointment at the University this afternoon like I told Mom. There are a couple things I had to tell you in person … and one of them just can’t wait.”
Elliott took a deep breath and sat back, running his fingers over his forehead.
“We haven’t had a very good relationship for a long time,” she began. “I blamed you for turning away from me a long time ago, but over the last few years, I’ve realized that I’m the one who turned away from you.”
“No, no, Susie. It wasn’t your fault. I—”
“Wait a minute, Dad. Let’s not play this game of each of us blaming ourselves until after you’ve heard me out. I’ve thought a lot about this over the years, and I convinced myself I’d forgiven you for abandoning Luke and me. Then I thought, who abandoned who? I knew you were tortured by that day at the science fair, and I could have helped you—but I didn’t.
“You see, I knew what really happened that day. You thought I was just a kid and those skis and your big scene were so important to me. But I was a smart kid, and I saw what happened. You saw your little girl being stepped on and insulted, and in a way that would leave some indelible imprint. So you attacked that bitch, Dobbs, in my behalf.”
Susie reached for Elliott’s hand and held it. “You might have been a little more delicate about it.” Elliott fought back a grin, but Susie encouraged it with her own. “But you sure as hell let everybody know what you thought of her, and they better not pull any more crap like that with you around.”
Father and daughter held hands and laughed to each other. Then Elliott’s smile faded and he said, “But then I ran away. Your hero abandoned you.”
“Yeah. And that’s what I held against you for so long.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I finally realized that I was the one who kicked you out of my life.”
“But you were just a kid and very upset.”
“I knew you’d come home and apologize to me. I had a couple hours to think about it. I was a very smart kid. I knew exactly what I was going to say to you before you ever walked into my room. I’m not sure to this day why I had to hurt you. Maybe it was really Dobbs I was trying to get.”
“Maybe you weren’t as smart as you thought.”
Susie nodded her head. “There is that possibility.”
“So why was it so important for you to come here today and tell me this?”
“Okay. Now I’ll tell you what precipitated this trip. I heard through the grapevine that you’ve been stirring up trouble again.”
“What do you mean?”
“COPE trouble—with a guy named Sherwood.”
Elliott squinted his eyes. “Did Martha tell you? But wait, I never told her Sherwood’s name.”
“Mom had nothing to do with this. You see, I’m somewhat of an insider at COPE. I’ve been doing some consulting work there, and I’ll tell you one thing, Dad. Don’t cross swords with COPE. Or Sherwood.”
Susie sat back in her chair and began her tale of computer development in the grand style of COPE and Dr. Planck. “Then a while after Planck’s supposed suicide, I got a call from a woman right in the guts of COPE named Jenner, just Jenner, a real nerd. She wanted me to help her sort some things out with the COPE main frame, but the funny part was that she didn’t want me to visit her or even call her. She came up to see me a couple of times, and the kind of stuff she was asking told me she was right in that computer’s brain and plucking strings that should never be plucked, at least if you have any regard for self preservation.
“Day before yesterday, she came to see me with this wild scheme for sending the computer back to the Stone Age, and I helped her refine it. But mostly, I was the Planck history. Planck never documented what he was doing.”
“So you and Jenner are the only ones who know what’s going on at COPE?” Elliott said.
“Don’t worry about me, Dad. Jenner took very careful precautions to keep me clean. There’s no way to tie me to her scheme. But here’s the interesting part. On this last visit, she was just talking over lunch about this really weird guy named Sherwood. Apparently, she and Sherwood collaborated on some super-secret program at COPE that had something to do with enforcement robotics. That’s all she’d tell me, but you can probably guess what it means.
“Anyway, she was telling me about this Sherwood guy who is apparently a cross between an Einstein and a Dracula. He wears some different hats at COPE, but his latest job is a Field Liaison Officer right here in this district. And his first case is some physicist who just retired from the Hyper Collider and is an anarchist. It didn’t take me too long to figure that one out, so I thought I’d better get over here and give you some sound advice—get off your white horse, Dad. Whatever you’re doing, stop. It isn’t worth the risk.
“Don’t try dueling with this Sherwood creep. He plays with some very dangerous toys. And it’s no game.”
PART FOUR
Spiders
—the present—
“It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”
— Voltaire