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Frik ducked deeper into the foliage as Paul Trujold stepped out the front door of Oilstar&039;s labs The chemist&039;s lab coat was draped over his ared He looked exhausted
About tilanced at his Rolex Four o&039;clock Thought he&039;d never leave What was he doing all this tirowth of hibiscus, he watched Paul lock the door and head for his car He felt ridiculous Here he was, the owner of this whole co from one of his employees so that he could steal a piece of property that already belonged to hiht Should have stuck out my hand and said, Give it to me, Paul It&039;s mine
Much as he&039;d wanted to, he hadn&039;t been able to force the words past his lips Had he done so, Paul would have known; he&039;d have looked down on hiround he occupied and seen into Frik&039;s heart He wouldn&039;t have uttered a word, but the look in his eyes would have said it all
I knohat you&039;re thinking, Frikkie I know your intentions You never want this artifact to see the light of day You want to sail out past the edge of the continental shelf and hurl it into the sea, let the Guyana Current carry it into the abyss
And he&039;d have been right, damn him
That was indeed what part of Frikwanted to do But he wouldn&039;t Couldn&039;t He&039;d never forgive hiical boon like that If need be, he&039;d hide it, keep it to hi time
He was not a &039;s spot price on a barrel of sweet crude that the artifact operated comfortably on principles not even suspected byat the thing that it wouldn&039;t give up all of its secrets until it was complete
When that happened, he would need people he could trust, people like Paul, to help hiy and break it down into patentable units to y He&039;d call the shots then
Paul&039;s car cruised out of the parking lot Frik didn&039;t ive theand decided to co these fragrant red blossoms A little more time in the bushes wouldn&039;t kill him
The sound of a familiar motor drifted up from the boat dock just down the hill from the lab Manny had arrived with some of Frik&039;s favorite supplies, the ones he didn&039;t want passing through the sticky fingers of the customs inspectors in Port of Spain He had left the Hu it there would assume he was on his boat When he went back down there to pick up his car, he could also pick up his loot
The thought encouraged hi, fat Cohiba Esplendido He could have a celebratory cigar noithout worrying about Paul seeing the sain about that scene in the lab this ined one of those gizine, to every furnace, to every freaking dynamo in every power plant across the world Frik could see his life&039;s work cru to smoke and ash if this device were reproduced and oil became as old-fashioned as vinyl records
Paul had seemed somehow oblivious of the full i the key to a future free of dependence on fossil fuels But that key, that odd little contraption he had assembled in there, could make Oilstar obsolete Noobsolete was a eupheet you asseht It&039;s not about in to find ways to spend theinterest ontiht back to when he had left South Africa His faemstones could have kept him in Cohibas and fine scotch for a lifeti under his father&039;s thuai with supplies and sailed alone across the Atlantic tocharter captain for a year to get together a few thousand bucks, he recalled Hocked le-handed Oilstar isn&039;t just a company, it&039;s not some soulless corporate entity It&039;siz asteroid aiht at the heart of Frik&039;s personal Cretaceous period
Think what you will of ht I&039; enough, Frik stepped out of the bushes As he strolled down the slope to the lab, he fished a set of keys fro, he&039;d returned to his office in San Fernando and put together a full set of keys for the lab building He just prayed that Paul hadn&039;t at soed the lock on his personal lab
He unlocked the front door and hurried down the central hallway The key fit into Paul&039;s doorturned He was in
He crossed to the workbench but stopped halfway there The artifact sat alone in the center of the black surface
Christ, Paul hadn&039;t even bothered to stick it in a drawer This was not so about, even in a locked room
He approached it slowly, cautiously, with the proper respect due a thing of such wonder He leaned close to the bench top and stared at it No question - there was so Reminded him of the science-fiction paperbacks he&039;d read when he was a teenager, the ones with the abstract covers by so shapes in the backgrounds of his paintings This thing would have been right at home on one of those covers
"Wheredid you come from?" Frik th forceps Paul had used earlier Turning on the bench larasped the artifact with the tips of the forceps and lifted He twisted it, turned it, rotated it this way and that, waiting for the loop of the figure-eight piece to fade away
Nothing happened