vending-machine fare that was standard at most places.
“Did you look at the paper I gave you yet?” Rebecca asked.
For a moment Ian looked at her blankly, then remembered the project paper she’d so excitedly presented him the other day. She’d done that before, come up with some idea she thought they should pursue, and this time he’d made the mistake of telling her to write it up, simply to get her out of his hair for a while.
“I did glance at it, yes,” he said.
“And?” Rebecca asked, hope brightening her angular face.
He tried for tact, feeling as if he needed to apologize in some way for being suspicious of her.
“It’s clever,” he began.
She beamed.
“And the process is very thorough. At first look, I’d have to say it appears solid.”
“Great!”
She looked so thrilled he almost hated to go on. But teaching was part of having a student assistant. He sighed inwardly; he’d told Josh he was no teacher.
“What’s your goal?” he asked.
A crease appeared between her brows. “Goal? Just as it says, to create a new polymer.”
“To what end?”
The crease became a frown, and she gave him a look that hinted that she was thinking him deliberately obtuse. “To do it, of course.”
Irritation spiked through him, but he fought it down. As gently as he could, he asked the crucial question.
“Why?”
Rebecca blinked. Twice. “Why?”
“For what purpose? How will this polymer be better for that purpose than anything that already exists? What about it will make it worth going through this lengthy and expensive process? Will it make something stronger, lighter, more durable?”
She took a step back, staring at him. “Is that all you care about, whether it will make money somehow?”
Idealism, Ian thought with a sigh. It was the most wearing thing about children.
“What I care about,” he said, “are things that will make lives easier, better, safer, and even give hope where there is none. Spending months to design a polymer we have no use for is a waste of effort, intelligence and, yes, money. But most of all it’s a waste of the most valuable, finite resource you have, and that’s time.”
Her expression turned troubled. “Haven’t you ever wanted to invent something just to see if you could?”
He was glad now he’d been gentle about it. “Yes. And I have. But eventually you come to realize the truth of the old saying about the scientists who got so wrapped up in the fact that they could, they forgot to question whether they should.”
“Yeah. Right.”
She turned and walked away, and he wondered if he’d inadvertently accomplished his goal of keeping her out of his way. Even if she wasn’t the leak, it was best to find out now. If the simple rejection of an idea could stop her, she wasn’t cut out for this.
Still, he hadn’t liked smashing her hopes. And it was still bothering him when he got into Samantha’s car that evening.
“Rough day?” she asked, discerning his mood so quickly it startled him.
“Sort of. I had to rein in my assistant today, and she wasn’t happy.”
“Rein her in? Was she messing something up?”
He settled into the seat and fastened the seat belt—something he didn’t always do when he drove by himself but that Samantha demanded before she would even turn the key—before he answered her.
“No, she just wanted to take off on a project that was a bit…misguided.”
“Misguided?”
“With no real purpose. And somewhat self-indulgent. But she’s young, so I tried to cut her some slack.”
Samantha smiled at that. “You say that like you’re ancient.”
“Sometimes I feel that way,” he admitted. “Her methodology is good, she’s got the ‘how’ down pat. I hated to see one simple question take all the wind out of her sails.”
She studied him for a moment. “You asked her…why?”
He was startled anew, but realized a perceptive woman like Samantha could have figured it out from his own words.
“Yes.” His mouth quirked. “I told her not to feel too badly. A very wise real professor once said, ‘Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question How?, but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question Why?”’
“And how many eons ago was that?”
“Recently. Erwin Chargaff of Columbia, 1969.”
Samantha chuckled, but it somehow didn’t sting. He knew he tended to older trivia, and she was too perceptive not to have noticed. Her next words proved it.
“Only you, Ian, could consider that recent. Do you have any quotes from this quarter century?” she asked as she started the car.
“Sure.” He thought a moment as she negotiated the parking lot. She glanced at him as they waited for cross traffic, and he grinned and said “‘It’s hard to be religious when certain people haven’t been struck by lightning.’ Calvin and Hobbes.”
She burst out laughing this time, and it pleased him more than he wanted to admit.
“If you’d told her that instead, it probably would have gotten through,” she said. “How angry was she?”
“Not angry, really,” he said, thinking back to Rebecca’s reaction. “More…unhappy, I think.”
She seemed to consider her next words carefully before saying, “How unhappy?”
It hit him in that moment—what hadn’t before but should have. He must have been too preoccupied with how to let her down easy. But he should have thought of it. Should have wondered if Rebecca was—and perhaps had been for a while—unhappy enough to do something foolish.
If she felt unappreciated enough to sell out Redstone.
“How’s it going?”
Sam finished her last bite of salad, then raised her gaze to the man who looked enough like her to be her brother. The first time she and her partner, Rand, had come face-to-face, it had been an eerie sort of shock for them both. Later they laughed when they discovered they had both started checking the family history to make sure there were no unclaimed siblings floating about. Since her parents were dead, she couldn’t be absolutely positive, but Rand’s parents were alive and well and had been somewhat insulted by his questions. That is, until
