The ELI Event B007R5LTNS

not to hear. Holt cleared his throat and tried again. “Major, this test was unquestionably successful, but was also unbelievably destructive, and apparently accomplished with only ten percent of the power available to the MDA. Yet according to your technicians, that’s twice the recommended safety limit. Do you even know what this thing could do if pushed further? The destructive potential is…” Holt couldn’t find the right word. He looked first at the screen, then at Pettis, who was still silent.
    Pettis finally turned his head toward Holt, slowly. His lips were stretched into that thin, flat line; his eyes were wide, wild, unfocused—filled with what could only be described as lust.
    Holt looked away, tried again. “Only ten percent,” he finally managed. He swallowed dryly, still searching for an adequate word. “It’s... it’s...”
    “Magnificent,” Pettis breathed.

Three
    The old man closed and locked the door of his store, tried the knob twice, just to make sure. He patted the pocket containing the small paper bag; satisfied, he retrieved his cane from its place on the window ledge beside the door and shuffled off down Davis toward Franklin Avenue.
    It was a warm, bright day in Colby—not too hot, not too cool. Northwest Kansas benefited from Colorado’s crisp mountain air, and the combination of warm sun and cool breeze made for a beautiful day. Just right, the old man reckoned, for a game of softball.
    As he turned the corner at Franklin, he saw he was wrong. Two blocks down, at Willow Street, he could just make out Mrs. Faraday’s boys gathering in the bare dirt playground behind the orphanage. Boys don’t play ball any more, the old man observed, they just huddle together and laugh and smoke and swear and make ridiculous hand gestures for no apparent reason. He approached the chain-link fence that surrounded the huge lot and looked for the one boy he knew would not be with the others. The small, thin fifteen-year-old boy with the dirty brown hair and the sad blue eyes. The boy he knew would be waiting, alone, for his friend the old man.
    Halfway down the block, he turned left and walked carefully down the graveled alley, next to the fence, toward the only tree on the lot, an old, sickly elm. The old man shambled along, knocked a soda can out of his path with the rubber tip of his cane. His mind drifted back, as it always did when he went to see the boy, to last year, the summer of 2014, when they first met.
    He was strolling through Fike Park, enjoying the beautiful day, and finally sat down to let the sparrows beg some sunflower seeds from him. To his surprise, the children from Faraday’s Home for Boys had been granted a trip to the park. He watched them play, running and shouting, swinging and teeter-tottering, until he noticed the other end of his bench was occupied by one of the youngsters, a small, fair-skinned boy. He tried to start a conversation, without success.
    The boy seemed more frightened than shy: not impolite, just lonely and withdrawn. The old man wished then, as he did a thousand times a day, for Lydia; she would know how to talk to him, how to get him to open up. He tried to talk about the weather, about sports, about anything that might spark the boy’s interest. But there was a wall, a screen, a self-imposed blockade around the boy that he couldn’t seem to penetrate.
    Finally, he gave up, told the boy that he had to get back to his shop; he had lots of TVs and DVD players to fix. Immediately the boy’s eyes lit up; somehow the remark struck a responsive chord. They spent the next hour and a half quite pleasantly, talking about electronics and the building and repairing of various types of equipment.
    Of course, it was the old man who did most of the talking. When the boy did speak, it was without a stammer, but carefully and laboriously, as though the mental selection of each phrase was easy, but the vocalization required substantial effort.
    It turned out that the boy had learned electronics from an old set of trade-school books at the orphanage. A poor student, he failed practically all his subjects except mathematics, which he applied to his electronics experiments. The old man took great pleasure in expanding the boy’s knowledge by bringing him books, manuals, and magazines, and sometimes used parts from his shop.
    Over the next few months he brought the boy a soldering iron and other tools, various circuit boards, an old electric typewriter keyboard, a