Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten

Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 26

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

He was not old. Don Andrews could still hold a laser in his hand. He lifted the sight to his eye. The target was a fleeting image. He fired and missed.

Smiling, he handed the weapon to Tarni, who was standing behind him. She stepped up to take his place. Another time she would have faced ahead, seriously assuming the calm stance he had taught her. But today was different.

She tried her shot and hit. Don Andrews nodded, but there was none of the usual young pride shining back in Tarni's face. She seemed removed, withdrawn into some other world. The last few days he had noticed her that way, at meals when Sand was absent. But when Sand was there, Don Andrews could not help but see how naturally she smiled, and how Sand smiled back.

"Why do we have to practice shooting?" Tarni asked. "Grandpa would never have allowed it."

Don Andrews stiffened. "He would never have understood the present situation," he replied shortly. Grandpa! Don Andrews had met Tarni when she was a little girl on Grandpa's farm. The old physicist had called it a farm out of sentimentality, and to get his students to volunteer helping dig and weed. It was really nothing more than a large garden. They were living in their own world, even then.

Don Andrews had traveled to the farm to meet the great Weissenbaum, determined to be different from the others of the flock. Don Andrews had something real to offer. He remembered walking around the back of the house to find the two of them, hand in hand, old and young, examining the vegetables. She could not have been more than five years old, holding a little model wingscoop that really flew. A spoiled little girl, but she was special, nonetheless. Two years later she had already flown a real wingscoop by herself.

He had never met Tarni's parents. They were already addicted by that time. So she lived with her grandfather, and when Don Andrews moved in Tarni adopted the quiet hawk faced man as her surrogate father.

Several years later, Weissenbaum took the first group of colonists through the loophole, telling Don Andrews to watch after Tarni. It was part of the trust left by an old man, along with the town of Backdoor, and the unanswered questions of the loophole.

Don Andrews tried his shot and hit.

That precious loophole was not an answer. It was an excuse. It did not explain the turbulence that had destroyed the Pinta. Weissenbaum had always maintained such an aura about him that no one else could question. But Don Andrews had seen him as no one else had, a senile old genius with a self centered and incomplete view of the world.

The night before the Pinta disaster, when Don Andrews had pulled Tarni from the crew, he had done so on an impulse. His heart had spoken to him. He had saved her to be part of his great plan.

Tarni missed her shot, and handed him the weapon. She was so pretty, dressed in a simple shirt and trousers. She would not meet his eyes and his temper rose.

"You know, there were many things your grandfather never understood. There were times he'd ramble on about something and be just plain wrong."

She looked up at him with surprise, for his words were so bitter. But she said nothing. Lately, he had been that way often, a constant critic with no hope for a cure. So she had become accustomed and immune, and would not remember later what he said. A different woman would have been upset, but Tarni was oblivious, somehow. It was one of her strongest traits, an instinct for survival.

The thing about a fire made of driftwood is that poking and prodding won't always keep it going. Sometimes, all it needs is an open hole for air, and time. As far as Tarni was concerned, this was a lesson Don Andrews never learned. And Sand, who was far too involved in his own art to notice, mastered it without trying.

Don Andrews, your ambitions were too great. You were meant to chase the alpha quanton, not to be entangled in the webs of fantasy that lovers weave. Trying to hold onto Tarni, you only grabbed at your own head. And trying to humiliate her, you left her no choice but to shut you out and find another.

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