An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  “I guess it’s up to you and me, Lia,” Ben said as the others dispersed to their offices.

  “Count me out,” I said immediately. “I’ve got a dress too.”

  “Don’t you have any creativity? Any sense of adventure? Any desire to celebrate this latest discovery?”

  I saw no way in which any of these qualities could be enhanced by a costume that, to hear Ben tell it, would consist mostly of green body paint and a couple of bobblehead antennae sets which we could probably pick up at Toy Joy. But Ben can be extremely persuasive, or do I mean persistent? Both, I guess. By the time Myers left (on, naturally, the stroke of five) he had worn me down to agreement with his plan, as long as he provided the costumes.

  “And my costume better consist of more than green paint,” I warned him.

  “No sense of adventure,” Ben said mournfully.

  “But a well-honed sense of survival,” I told him. “How do you think Lensky will react if you show up at the condo tomorrow evening and ask me to strip naked?” I’d never told Ben about Lensky’s occasional feelings of jealousy towards him, because they were too ridiculous to mention. But I was thinking about them now.

  “I wasn’t thinking exactly naked,” Ben protested. “A G-string, a couple of pasties…”

  “Whatever you come up with, it had better cover a whole lot more territory than that, or I’m wearing the black dress again.”

  “But just think about the possibilities, Lia. We can stage an alien abduction of Myers.”

  “I can do that without resorting to public indecency.” I didn’t tell him that I probably would be willing to strip if it would persuade real aliens to perform a real abduction. Too bad we didn’t know any. I was also willing to offer them a bargain deal: they didn’t have to give Myers back undamaged. Or at all, come to think of it.

  And yet it walks and breathes

  Chapter 21

  Ben called me that night. I was at the condo, waiting for Lensky’s return, so his call was not entirely welcome.

  Or entirely clear.

  “What do you mean, I can wear my black dress?” Not that I minded, but it seemed like a total reversal of his arguments earlier.

  “Just be sure you wear unobtrusive shoes. Silver slippers would be good. Not those sandals! I’ve got costumes we can just throw over our regular clothes. Oh, and masks. And… tools.”

  “Tools?”

  “This,” Ben said, “is going to be the best alien abduction ever. Jimmy just told me…”

  I heard a key in the lock.

  “Tell me later.”

  I hung up just as Lensky walked in, picked me up, and hugged me. I was still clutching the phone in my right hand.

  “Sorry to interrupt your conversation,” he said.

  “Oh, it was just Ben.”

  His body stiffened very slightly. “And what did he want?”

  “Oh, he just wanted to blather on about costumes for tomorrow night.”

  Lensky frowned and let me go. “Why tomorrow? Halloween isn’t until Tuesday. And aren’t you a little old to go Trick or Treating?”

  Well, somebody had to break it to him, and the laws of probability said it was almost certainly going to be me. “The Moore Foundation is having their Halloween party tomorrow night.”

  “And it’s a costume party.”

  I shrugged. “I expect costumes are optional. Ben – some of the people at the Center don’t want to waste the chance of spreading a little more chaos and turmoil than usual.”

  “Any more chaos than you guys spread last time,” Lensky said, “and the house will probably fall into the lake.”

  Actually, that was just about the only disaster I felt sure wasn’t going to happen. The previous head of the foundation had owned a very large, very modern house that opened right onto the lake, but that house was now up for sale to pay her legal bills. The new head’s house was reputed to be as lavish as that one, but it was up on Cat Mountain, nowhere near the water.

  “What are you going as?” he asked.

  “Me, to begin with. I can wear my black dress again.”

  His eyes lit up. “And those sandals? The shiny high-heeled ones with all the straps? I haven’t seen those since the May Fiesta.”

  “That’s because they kill my feet.” I was just as happy Ben had suggested flats this time.

  “You don’t have to go anywhere in them. I’d just like you to model them for me some time. Maybe with that black lace set…”

  Discussion of the black lace lingerie compared with what I was wearing now led us into the bedroom, and Lensky forgot all about asking me what “to begin with,” meant. To be fair, so did I. He had been gone for almost a week.

  The next night started as well as could be expected. Lensky had reservations at Chez Nous, where we’d eaten before going to the May Fiesta. And although the menu had changed slightly, they still had that multi-layer, multi-chocolate dessert. I sighed happily when we got to that part of the meal.

  “Is this going to become a tradition?”

  “It already is,” Lensky informed me.

  “Good. It does a lot to counterbalance the tradition of showing up at Moore Foundation parties to listen to a lot of stuffed shirts.”

  “Judging from the events of the last party,” Lensky said, “you and your colleagues are remarkably good at – ah – unstuffing those shirts.”

  I couldn’t dispute that. But at least I could shift the blame a little. “It’s mostly Ingrid’s doing,” I claimed. “Between Wagner on the sound system and Ingrid in that horned helmet – and almost falling out of that silver dress – no man with a pulse could remain completely stuffed.”

  “Right. It had nothing to do with your encouraging regents and trustees to pick you up, twirl you around and fling you from one man to another.”

  That was a biased and totally inaccurate account of a minor incident at the May party.

  “Not to mention,” Lensky added, “the episode of the champagne and the sandals.”

  “No fair! You weren’t even at the Solstice Shindig last year, so you’re just repeating gossip. I didn’t even know you then.” Hard to believe that less than a year ago, I hadn’t even known of Lensky’s existence. And now he was so important in my life that I couldn’t even imagine it without him. Which was terrifying, so I refused to think about it much.

  “Is your new director coming to the party?”

  I grinned. “I certainly hope so. I think Ben has a special entertainment planned for him.” We hadn’t yet talked about the changes at the Center; I filled him in as we shared a generous slice of Chocolate Death. The three kinds of chocolate helped to keep me from giving in to despair.

  Lensky’s scowl deepened as I added detail after detail. Rather frightening, that. The man had only been Director for two days and not only did everybody who’d been there hate him, his depredations were sufficient to make Lensky hate him at second hand. “I wasn’t going to go in costume,” he said when I finished, “but now I think maybe I’ll go as an FBI agent and arrest this guy.”

  “Ah – exactly how would you be different as an FBI agent?”

  “Easy. I just add an element of bumbling incompetence and glory hogging to my normal personality.”

  The people in Lensky’s agency really didn’t like the FBI.

  This time we weren’t as late as we’d been to the May party. For Lensky, this had something to do with his piously expressed hope that we could make an appearance and get out of there before half the guests were drunk out of their minds; for me, it was the interest of seeing what my colleagues had done about costuming.

  Ingrid and Jimmy were the first to show up after we got there, and Ingrid had outdone herself. So, in a way, had Jimmy. Ingrid was sporting the horned helmet, long flowing golden hair, and extremely low-cut silver dress in which she’d appeared in May. But without Dr. Verrick to censure her, she’d added a sword and shield to the outfit. The shield looked like foamcore sprayed with silver; the sword was the one tha
t usually hung on her bedroom wall, and it was all too real.

  As for Jimmy, he’d been seriously inspired by his role as a mortally wounded Viking being carried off to Valhalla. At least the top half of him looked inspired. He was wearing imitation chain mail (it looked like a cable knit sweater that had been sprayed with the same silver paint that decorated Ingrid’s shield) and masses of red-stained bandages around one shoulder, part of his chest, and the side of his head. I have to admit that from the waist down he was wearing jeans, which probably hadn’t been a big fashion item among the Vikings. A bloody and repulsive wound like the one on his top half, on the other hand, was practically de rigueur for anybody who wanted to make it to Valhalla.

  While Lensky was fighting his way to the bar and Ingrid was persuading the DJ to put on her Wagner CD, Jimmy edged over to me and murmured, “Did Ben tell you?”

  I shook my head. The phone conversation on the preceding night had been totally uninformative, and I hadn’t spoken with Ben since.

  “I’ve been doing, um, ‘research.’ Found out a bit about our new director.”

  “Spill!”

  “For starters, he has this little hobby of flipping houses, and it’s not going well for him. He’s got two places that have been empty so long they’ll cost a lot to fix up to code, and one of them has been tagged for ‘demolition by neglect’ by the Historical Landmark Commission.”

  “Demolition by neglect? I thought that was what he was doing to the Center.”

  “No, it means the building is a historic landmark and they think he has intentionally allowed it to deteriorate. Now he has to either get the city to approve a plan to rehabilitate it up to their standards, or tear it down completely. He can’t afford to take the loss that completely destroying it would mean, and he also doesn’t have the money to rehabilitate it properly.”

  “And you know this how? Jimmy, have you been rummaging around in Myers’s bank records?”

  “If I had,” he said, “I certainly wouldn’t shout it out at the top of my lungs in the middle of this party. Oh, and I found out something about how he got appointed Director.”

  “How?” I’d been wondering how somebody so flagrantly unqualified inherited Dr. Verrick’s position, but I don’t understand faculty politics.

  “Decision of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.”

  “Not the chairman of the math department?”

  “The dean overruled him. Having been advised by a man called,” Jimmy paused significantly, “Jay Corbin.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you know anything about etymology, Lia?”

  “Nope. How do you?”

  “Started out as a linguistics major. Switched to computer science after I decided I’d like to be able to earn a living after graduation. Look: ‘Jay’ comes from an Old English word for crow, and ‘Corbin’ means ‘Raven’.”

  “Crow Raven,” I said slowly. “Raven Crowson. The Master of Ravens again.” He’d been instrumental in our problems of last spring, ending by holding me hostage at gunpoint. In front of Lensky. Which had been a very, very bad idea, but he got away that time. “He must want to destroy the Center in revenge for the way we messed him over in May, and Myers is his instrument.”

  Jimmy nodded. “We really do have to get rid of Myers.”

  The party had been getting significantly noisier as we talked. Most of the people around us were holding drinks. Alcohol probably lessened the pain in their eardrums, and speaking of alcohol, what was taking Lensky so long?

  “Any idea how to do that?”

  “Another thing I found out, an old scandal. If we can remind enough people of it, he just might be embarrassed enough to resign.”

  “What did he do, rape a nun?”

  “No, nothing like that. He – “

  The strains of “Ride of the Valkyries” blasted into the room. I could see Jimmy’s mouth moving, but couldn’t hear what he was saying. Ingrid sailed up with a couple of glasses, one for her and one for Jimmy, and added a few soprano calls of “Hojotoho!” and “Heijaha!” to the noise.

  “Ask Ben, he knows all about it!” Jimmy shouted as Ingrid towed him off by a length of bandage. I wondered how many other people would be sporting blood-stained bandages if she waded into the crowd with that sword in her hands. At the moment the sword was sheathed and hanging from a belt like a chain. She seemed to have her hands full with Jimmy and a drink.

  Lensky made his way back to me as Colton and Annelise came in. Colton was dressed like a sheriff from the Wild West: a star pinned to his chest, tooled leather boots, gunbelt – oh no, were those guns in the holsters? Granted, Texas is an open carry state, but wasn’t this pushing it? No, on a closer look, they were toy guns. I thought. Annelise had probably spent ten times more for her costume; there wasn’t a lot of fabric above the waist, but she made up for it with yards of skirts and petticoats, hiked up to display a shapely leg wearing a black garter.

  “What’s she doing dressed like a floozy?” a disgruntled but familiar voice said behind me.

  “Oh, come on, Ben. She’s wearing enough fabric to make three modern dresses.” There wasn’t much point in saying that she’d dressed as a dance hall girl to complement Colton Edwards’ “costume.” He could see that. Probably every warm-blooded male in Travis County could see it, if they weren’t focused on that black lace garter to the exclusion of all else.

  The Wagner stopped, thank goodness, and the DJ put on something that sounded like dance music. Most of the people between my vantage point and the bar were doing some swaying and gyrating that looked sort of like dancing. I was perfectly happy to sip my drink and look on.

  At least, until I took the first sip.

  “How did they mix this margarita,” I grumbled to Lensky, “carry it past a bottle of tequila?”

  “It took me a while to explain to the bartender that you wanted a virgin margarita.”

  “Then you lied to the bartender.” Lensky has this idea that because I’m only five foot three, I will become drunk and incapable if exposed to more than a teaspoon of hard liquor. Given that I grew up in a Greek family that brought out the ouzo for every life event from graduating eighth grade to christening a baby, this attitude was more than slightly unrealistic. I can handle booze just fine. I just strongly prefer that it not taste like licorice. All that ouzo did leave its mark.

  I decided to fetch my own drink next time.

  But that might have to be a while, because Ben grabbed my arm just then. “Come on, he’s here.”

  “Who’s here, and where are you taking my girl?” Lensky demanded.

  “No time – explain later!” And the crowd closed around him, while Ben led me around the edge of the room, down an empty hall, and into an unoccupied bathroom.

  He locked the door and shoved a bundle of stuff at me. “Put it on!”

  There was something like a choir robe with sleeves, made of a shimmering holographic polyester knit. To go with it there was a full-face silver mask, rather disturbingly blank with no features except two holes for eyes and one for a mouth, and a pair of silver-colored gloves. And then there was a tube of some kind of sparkly gel. I stared at this dubiously. The costume didn’t leave any exposed skin to cover, did it?

  “For your hair,” Ben said impatiently, and rubbed a handful of it over his own head. I followed suit and all right, I was rather taken with the effect. I wasn’t nearly through looking in the mirror and experimenting with making silver spikes when Ben pulled my mask up and yanked me out of the bathroom.

  “Follow my lead,” was the total extent of instructions he gave me.

  Okay; I followed him back down the hall and into the partying crowd, who gave way before us.

  “Now that is a costume,” a graying man said appreciatively.

  His companion, a redhead who had probably been in high school with his daughter, squeaked and wriggled portions of her anatomy. “Ooh, Jake, it’s too weird, I don’t like it!”

  We descended upon
Scott Myers like avenging harpies, or something. “Does this look like a good candidate for our studies, Unit 2?” I’d never guessed Ben could make his voice high and squeaky like that. It carried well, too.

  Ok, I could do this. “It appears to be a healthy male, Unit 1,” I squeaked.

  “Let us make the necessary tests.” A shining silver object appeared in Ben’s gloved hand. He ran it over Myers’s body. At certain points the thing made an appalling squawking noise. People started to laugh.

  Didn’t Myers try to get away from us? Of course he did, but Ben’s other hand had a firm grasp of the director’s forearm, and on my side I was holding on to him with both hands. Yes, it did just occur to me that we could both get fired if Myers identified us. On the other hand, the masks were a pretty good fit. And on the third hand – hey, I was being a space alien, I could have three hands if I wanted – did I really want to stay at a research center run by this man?

  A loud, prolonged squawk from the silver thing – now pointing at Myers’s head - terminated Ben’s “examination.”

  “Unit 2, this sample appears to be defective,” Ben said. “Tests show no activity at all in the cerebral cortex.”

  “And yet, it walks and breathes, Unit 1,” I squeaked back.

  There was a nervous quality to the laughter. “Who are those masked aliens?” someone quipped.

  “Let’s find out!”

  A hand seized my elbow. Seconds later, loud popping noises burst out to my left. The partygoers surged to the right in reaction, and Myers took advantage of Ben’s surprise to twist free of us and dive to the floor, arms covering his head.

  It was Colton, a cap gun in each hand. “This is the Sheriff!” Colton shouted. “Hands up, you alien varmints, before ah brouwer you!”

  God bless the boy.

  “Brouwer!” I repeated, grabbing for Ben’s hand, and we found ourselves back in the bathroom. It was the work of a minute to lock the door, discard our silver choir robes, and roll up the costumes and accoutrements into a small bundle.