There Must Be a Mistake Ch. 02

I wondered if I was wrong, but I said to hell with it, and pulled her to me. "Delicious, I have never felt as strong a connection to any woman, not even your mother, as I do to you. I will never hurt you, but more important than that, I will never let anyone hurt you. Whether you choose to stay here with me, or travel the world without me, I will make sure you have someone by your side protecting you. You are much too precious to this world to lose."

"Thank you, Uncle Even I feel the same way about you. Don't you ever think about putting your little girls into a boarding school. I will haunt you in your dreams worse than I will Rod's."

"What a horrible thought that is. I had better make sure I have boys. My woman and I will do the DNA selection. We will fertilize her eggs with my sperm ex-vitro, implant them in-vitro, and not take any chances on having girls."

Delicious punched me hard. "Doesn't that sound like a romantic way to start a family, Uncle Even? Your wife is in stirrups in a sterile room, while you are sitting in a room the size of a small closet jerking off into a petri dish. The doctors are in a laboratory separating your wife's eggs and your sperm into viable little boys, and killing off all the little girls, as they do in China. Doesn't that get your hormones racing, and your heart fluttering with joy? Doesn't that sound like the way God intended a man and woman to go forth and multiply? Isn't love supposed to be part of the process of having a child?"

I tried to lighten up this conversation, but I released the Kraken instead. "It's less messy."

Delicious cried out in frustration, "Uncle Even..." She reached out to grab me, but I was gone. It was my turn to run for my life, because she was angry with me for being so glib on the process of having children. She was angry, but not with me. She was angry at the way Julius implanted her inside her mothers' womb, because he did it with a lie. She was angry with her mother, because she believed Julius, in a moment of weakness, while she was still a virgin. She was angry, because of the way she always had to protect herself from the men and boys she came in contact with. She was angry because she was a beautiful young woman, and her mother taught her, every day, the one hard lesson in life she failed to learn herself. Delicious was just ANGRY, and I was going to be on the receiving end of her displeasure. I allowed her to catch me in the living room, because it was carpeted. I did not want my head to be smashed against a hardwood floor.

She tackled me from behind, like any good linebacker, or safety would. She drove her shoulder into my back; my knees collapsed, and my body folded into three parts, and I descended to the floor. I now knew how she knocked the football coach on his ass.

I half expected her to do a victory dance around my battered body, but I was not that lucky. She climbed on my back and began pounding on it with her fists, while explaining to me that having a child was not supposed to be a medical procedure. It was supposed to be a decision between a man and a woman, before and during an act of love. She did this while pounding the shit out of me. When I had enough ammunition to throw back at her, I twisted and put her on the floor beneath me, making sure the lower part of my body was not in contact with hers.

I stared at her and asked, "What is your problem, Delicious? You have made up your mind not to become involved with any man, because you do not want to get hurt. You cannot get pregnant if you don't get involved with a man unless you wish to use the procedure I just laid out before you. Love is a very messy thing, and sometimes you get hurt very badly. Either you get up off the floor and try again or you become someone like me. Someone who stays on the sidelines of life watching everyone else live their lives to the fullest. Don't get me wrong, I love what I do. There are a billion people on this planet who would give up everything to have for what I have. They would give up everything they have and love it. However, at this moment those people have a circle of friends and families that enrich their lives, but they don't have two pennies to rub together. It just doesn't seem fair does it?

Until you came along, I had one friend, and no family. Sure, I talked to your mother, but I could never see her. I couldn't do what I wanted to do for her. So that brought a great deal of pain into my life, instead of pleasure. In order to bring you into my life, everyone else in my family had to die. Is it a fair trade-off, for me it is. However, four people died to give me a little happiness."

If my father stayed at home, as I would have, and waited to get the reports from the hospital on Julius, I could have gotten your mother and you, without all the pain you are going through now. I would have won the Mega lottery. What I had wished for all my life would have come true.

Instead, he rushed headlong into the path of an oncoming train, to see the monster that defiled his daughter for 16 years. If he was the only one in the car, I could check it off as stupidity. I don't understand why my mother and Divine were in that car with him. I will never understand why she got into that car with him. Divine hated Julius with every fiber of her being, yet she was rushing to the hospital to be by his side. I can't comprehend that at all.

During all these years, the only woman I talk to on an ongoing basis is Roz. I see her very rarely, maybe three or four times a year. Other than that, the only time I speak to a woman is when I am on my way to a conference, or a business meeting. If I put together all the words you and I said to each other, since we met Thursday, I would bet it would equal or surpass every word I said to every female I have interacted with in the last 8 if years."

"Uncle Even, I have to get you a date."

"Delicious, how would you like to see your head on a plate?"

"Would that be on a China, or paper plate, Uncle Even?"

"China naturally; blood would saturate paper plates and ruin my furniture."

"What are you afraid of uncle? You speak with me very easily, and I'm a girl."

"You are also my niece, and if you weren't my niece you would not be here. As you said to Roz, you remind me of my sister, so you get a pass. Roz is married to my best friend, so she gets a pass. No one else, no one else gets a pass; no one."

"Uncle would you like to say 'no one' again, just in case the people driving on I-70 didn't hear you?"

I was about to answer that smartass question, when my cell phone rang.

After being queried, I answered, "Mushrooms and green olives."

Delicious looked at me and asked, "You ordered a pizza?"

I smiled. "Not unless these folks brought it with them."

"Oooohhhhhh!"

I went to the basement, turned on the telephone system. I opened the exterior gate, and walked upstairs. The car was at the interior barrier, where it turned off its lights, and I opened the interior gate and let them in. I looked at Delicious and said, "Remember, these are ordinary people; they just have extraordinary jobs."

There were no secret knocks at the door, or anything you see in the movies. I watch them approach on the video monitor and when they were close enough; I opened the door and let them in. They were all carrying briefcases, and sat down at the dining room table, without being asked. As was protocol, they were introduced by the lead agent.

"Good evening, for tonight's meeting, I agent Grape, next to me is agent Pear, agent Apple, and agent Peach. Even, you got us up here in a hurry. What the hell is up?"

"Delicious would you join us please."

"Even you know better than this."

"Grape, you want to know what's up; she is it. Do you remember the Freolyte experiment we did seven, or eight years ago, and it came up empty. Well, this young lady just blew it up in my face."

"Even, we ran that through four labs after you finished with it. All of them came up negative. It just can't be done."

"Gentleman and lady let me introduce you to my niece. This is Delicious Mark. Her parents died last week and she is now living with me for at least the next two years until she becomes of age. She took three years of my work and in a little more than three hours came up with a formula that took Freolyte and made it into a bomb that could take down Manhattan from 34th St., South to Battery Park. Does that interest you?"

"Even, you are full of shit."

"Okay guys this meeting over. You can leave. I have nothing more for you, I'm sorry I wasted your time. I am going to put her paper up for the Westinghouse prize and make it public. We will see what happens then."

"Uncle Even that is wonderful. I already picked out my dress, and was disappointed when you said I might not be able to wear it to the ceremony. Maybe we should tell them about the other thing bending, that's not supposed to bend as a consolation prize?"

"Delicious, we are not supposed to tell tales out of school."

Apple asked, "Can I see the paperwork on this?"

Delicious replied, "If I show it to you, I can't wear my dress."

"I know all about you Miss Mark. You are an underachiever in school, with an out of this world IQ. We do our homework also. What do you have that we may be interested in?"

"You can look at all the paperwork; it's downstairs in the lab. However, to summarize it, Freolyte works differently than most other explosive compounds. With dynamite, TNT, or nitroglycerin, the more you use, packed closely together, the bigger the bang. With Freolyte nothing happens, because the chemical formulation is neutral, and will not react to a positive electrical charge. Once I realized that the fix was easy. It's like gasoline. You could take a lighted match and stick it into a gallon of gasoline and nothing would happen. However, take that same gallon of gasoline, the same match, and induce gasoline vapors into the mix, and you get an explosion.

The demonstration I proposed for my uncle was to make the Freolyte into one-inch diameter Ping-Pong balls shapes, which leaves space between each ball. Using a negatively charged base of used battery cases lined in the bottom of a tandem truck. Using rough figures I came up with approximately 24 million balls. I used four positively charged timers per truck, for redundancy. When the positively charged timers hit zero, one, or all of them, acting in concert, along with the negatively charged bases create positively charged ions which produces enough of an electrical charge to spread across the entire base to start the initial small explosion. This explosion excites the remaining Freolyte, bringing it to critical mass and BOOM.

It is a double pulse, just like a nuclear weapon. First you get the blink, and then the blast. You don't want to be around when the blast occurs."

"Even have you checked her work?"

"I checked it, the computer has checked it, I have re-checked it, and I ran it through the computer again. Unfortunately, she blew three years of my work up in my face. I should take her over my knee and spank her, but that would be child-abuse."

Pear said, "Young lady, you're going for a field trip."

Delicious looked at me with frightened eyes.

I said, "Mister Pear, this young lady is going nowhere. She is under age and she is under my legal guardianship. She will never be out of my sight, ever. Miss Apple said you did your homework. In that case you should know she lost both her parents and grandparents last week. Her mother's body should be arriving any day to be buried. I am Delicious' last living relative, and we will not be separated.

You and I have a long-standing relationship, and it would be terrible to end it on a sour note. However, my niece has suffered enough. She is not going to be taken away from me, for any reason."

Orange said, "Even you were never a pain in the ass before. What happened to you?"

I took Delicious by the hand, looked into her smiling face, and asked, "Should I have him call Rod and ask him that question?"

"Uncle, he wouldn't need the telephone to hear his answer."

"Mister Orange, we can come to an accord on this issue. However my original dictum stands. She will never be out of my sight. If that is agreeable, tell me what you have planned for her."

"We want to test her Even. If she blew three years of your research out of the water in three hours, we want to know what else she can do. She may be able to help us with some of our foreign problems, or write codes that are unbreakable, or break some of those we are having a problem with. We won't know until we test her."

True to form Delicious said, "Uncle Even does that mean I won't be able to graduate high school this week?"

"Yes dear, it looks like you going to be left behind for another year; unless of course, these nice people can help you."

"How long will this testing take Agent Grape?"

"Miss Mark, that all depends on you. Normally it takes three weeks of 12-hour days. If you can't keep up that pace, it will take longer."

"Uncle Even, if I do what they ask, I think I should get at least two or three years of college credit, don't you?"

I laughed at her. "Delicious, I was only joking when I said you would be starting graduate school in a year."

"In that case, I'd like to start high school over again. I'd like to bring up my GPA so I could get a scholarship to a good college, and not be a burden to your checkbook. How about my drivers' license? My new car is due here by the beginning of next week. I won't be able to use my car without it."

"Delicious, I said you should be the negotiator for the Teamsters union."

"I guess that's a good thing Uncle Even?"

"Yes, it is a very good thing."

Agent Apple said, "Miss Mark, I want to see your paperwork now, please."

"Uncle Even, should I bring it up here, or take agent Apple downstairs?"

"Take agent Apple downstairs and show her your work. If she wants to see what the computer said, call me and I will bring up the results."

"Uncle, you are no fun. I know how to work the computer, almost. What could possibly happen if I try?"

"Delicious if you touch my computer without my being there, I will cut off your fingers at the elbows."

"How will I be able to take my birth control pills?"

"I will get you a service dog, and have it feed them to you."

"Isn't that a little like the sex talk we had last night; a little bit messy?"

"Just keep thinking about it that way, and you will keep your hands off my computer."

"Remember, the second thing Rod is doing tomorrow is putting my name on the deed to this property. That makes half of that computer mine."

Grape asked, "Do you two do this all the time?"

"I'm sorry to say we don't do this all the time. We only do it when we are not working together downstairs. Rosalynn said that my niece is the best thing that has ever happened to me. Delicious and I have only been together for four days, and I could not agree with her more."

"My uncle is trying desperately to keep my mind off what happened last week. I know what he's doing, and he knows what he's doing. He is being wonderful to me, because we are the only family remaining. He is worried about what is going to happen to me when my mother gets here, and I have to put her in the ground. So am I. I couldn't leave mom with them. Her parents and her husband ruined my mothers' life. I didn't want her to have to spend eternity lying beside them. I wanted her here by her brother, who loved her, and I, who she protected all her life. After we lay her to rest, I am going to need some time to get myself back together. When my uncle and I agree I'm ready, I will take all the tests you want me to take, wherever you want me to take them; as long as he is there with me."

Agent Grape told Apple to take Delicious down to the lab and check her work. I had a feeling it was more to get my niece out of the room than anything else.

I was right again.

"Even have you tested her language skills?"

"Stan, I mean Grape, Delicious and I have only been with her for four days. She has been through a trauma very few people have experienced. She is an amazing young woman, and I will not push her beyond what I think she can handle. I was amazed at what she did today. Actually, amazed is too subtle a word. Stupefied would be better. I gave her my four tapes on Freolyte, and watched her as she transcribed the first one. I didn't ask her to memorize it; I didn't ask her to analyze it. I asked her to type it out. Her mind did the rest. She knew something was up in the middle of that first tape, because her fingers slowed to a crawl as she typed. I believe she is totally photographic. She can repeat conversations verbatim hours after the words were spoken. She told me my sister homeschooled her. I am positive it is true. You can't do what she did today, while goofing off in classes that are designed for idiots. She took metal shop, not physics, but what she did today proves she can do higher math with the best of us."

"Even let's test your theory on her being photographic. I'll put off testing her for six weeks to two months, depending how long you think she needs. I'm going to send you a learning system for Mandarin Chinese. Tell her she will receive a phone call once every week, and be tested on her progress. It will be very interesting to see how she does."

"Give her an incentive and she will do just fine."

"Her high school diploma and drivers' license will be here by Wednesday. What college does she want to attend?"

"If she is as good as I believe she is going to be, you are going to want to keep an eye on her 24/7. You may want to have her skip college, and go straight to MIT, Michigan, or Stanford, and get her into the big stuff immediately."

"Do you think she is really that good Even?"

"No, I think she's better than that, and she doesn't realize it because all her young life her mother had to protect her from her father raping her, and every other young man who was determined to get between her thighs. That is the one problem area you will run into with her. If someone makes an unwanted advance, she will turn into another person. The person you saw today will get locked up inside, and I don't know when my niece will reemerge."

"Should we add some self-defense classes to her training Even?"

"Not some Stan, throw the whole package at her. Build up her confidence, because it died the day her mother did."

"Okay, we will shorten her class time, extend her training period, and add the physical training package. I think we will use the University of Texas at Austin as the training site. I'll keep you posted."

Apple exited the basement and addressed her three colleagues. "I haven't run the numbers completely, but if you increase the size of the Ping-Pong balls from 1" to 1 1/4 " using the same component weight of the Freolyte, it appears that the blast potential increases by 18 percent. She did that in 14 minutes."

Delicious looked at me with a pouty face.

I asked, "Baby, what's wrong?"

"Uncle Even, I won't be allowed to wear my dress." Then she smiled, and winked.

I said to her, "Young lady, you are grounded...until breakfast. Go to bed." It was almost 11:30, well past her bedtime, and she still had to take her shower.

She said good night to everyone, kissed me on the head, and began to run upstairs. She stopped halfway up, and came back down.

"Uncle Even, can I speak to you for a moment?"

I joined her and asked what was up.

"I have a babysitting job first thing in the morning."

"Who are you babysitting for it that hour?"

"Rosalynn; she wants to go with Rod to the doctor for his examination. It's not that she doesn't trust him, it's just that... I guess she doesn't trust him. She wants to get all the information from the doctor herself. He does not know she is going with him. He is sleeping downstairs again tonight, because he was a bad boy today."