Programmed for Peril

he, Lois?”
    Trish’s glance hardened. Nicholas’s skills and personality formed the cornerstone of her suspicions. Foster had told him of the curious relationship between Lois and her gangling, brilliant brother. She had met the man once when keeping a mall luncheon date with Foster. Nicholas had happened by before she arrived. She found her fiancé buttonholed by a tall, completely bald man in his late thirties. His dome gleamed in sunlight leaking down through the atrium glass. He wore an expensive but ill-fitting three-piece suit. From his jacket pocket protruded a folded chessboard. High-tech earphones clasped his neck. Their wire snaked down under a tie that clashed like a cymbal with the charcoal vest. A blind man could have made a better fashion choice.
    Odd as he looked, when he turned toward her to be introduced she was nonetheless startled by his eyes. Lying under a high, naked sweep of forehead, their depth and blue brilliance seemed unearthly. She thought of off-world aliens from movies and the pages of the Enquirer. Her glimpse was brief because those eyes slid swiftly over her face and didn’t return. He looked only at Foster. Mr. Shyboots, she thought.
    Later Foster told her that Nicholas Smith-Patton was a genuine hybrid, erratic, eccentric, and emotionally immature. He had attended MIT, where he studied electronics but was never graduated. Study bored him, and he intuitively grasped much of the curriculum. Buoyed by the life preserver of a modest inheritance, he bobbed around on the ocean of life, trying one career after another. He was most successful as an electronic design consultant, solving thorny problems that had choked corporations’ best engineers and collecting fancy fees. But he was too much of a gadabout to turn talent into an organization. He operated solo with little more overhead than business cards and letterhead. He had no passion for career. The greater part of his energies were devoted to what for most were mere hobbies: chess and jazz.
    Lois served as his gateway into normal society. She advised him about the minimum interactive requirements expected for him to be actively considered a member of the family. Like a comet he soared for long periods geographically and emotionally away from the Smith-Patton clan’s solar system. He returned regularly, summoned by the sun of a wiser sister’s command. “If anyone controls Nicholas, it’s Lois,” Foster told Trish.
    Knowing all this had armed Trish for this confrontation. She made her detailed accusations: Lois had conspired against PC-Pros and had enlisted Nicholas’s considerable skills in her scheme. Her goal was to force Trish to break her engagement or have her business destroyed.
    Through Trish’s exposition Lois held her purse straps in both hands. She squeezed them with increasing strength. Foster had told Trish about Lois’s hot temper, now put to the boil by her charges.
    “That is the most absurd mess of nonsense I have ever heard, Patricia Morley! If Foster needs more evidence of your mental instability, you’ve just given it to him. And he is going to hear about this—lunacy. I guarantee you that!” The heads of other shoppers turned their way. Trish ignored them, concentrating entirely on facing down her adversary. “You can rave all you want, Lois. It’s just a smoke screen I see through quite clearly.” She rose. “Consider yourself and Nicholas warned. Any more ‘incidents’ and I’m going to the police with your names.”
    Lois leaned over and spoke venom to Trish. “I can’t believe how stupid you’re being, Patricia. You had Foster in your hands—for life. Now your craziness is bungling him away. And when he’s loose I’ll get him back again!” She spun and strode away, drawing half the shoppers’ eyes. The rest remained on Trish.
    She stood still. She felt her previously controlled face reddening. Confronting Lois had seemed precisely the right thing to do. What better way to stamp out her dangerous mischief? Now... doubts loomed. In an attempt to end the growing psychological pressure, she had perhaps both overreacted and jumped to conclusions. Oh, Lord, had she? If so, she had put trump cards in the hand of a moribund rival in a game she had already won, then asked that play be resumed.
    Could she have been that stupid?
    Later that evening Foster phoned. Would she join him tomorrow on his drive upstate to deliver two mastiffs to new owners? Normally Doris, the kennel manager,