“I am not a teacher,” Beasley said, concentrating on his work. “I am an expert. There’s a difference.”
They waited until Beasley sat back. As methodically as a machine, he wiped the strange pen on a sponge that hissed from the contact, placed the pen on a stand, and covered it with a welding mask. Spinning on the stool to face them, Beasley removed his goggles and donned thick black glasses. He resembled an annoyed bird, narrow and beakish, with the glasses perched low on his nose, as if they were about to fall off. “What failure have you brought me this time?”
“This is Fish,” Simmons said, “the smart fellow from upstairs I told you about.”
“Has he soldered before?”
“Total novice. I mentioned that earlier.”
Beasley grimaced. “I was hoping you’d been joking.”
Simmons laughed. “Always the dreamer.” He checked his watch. “I have a call.”
“You do know I am being asked to produce more down here, not less, right?”
Charlie was astonished at Beasley’s blatant disrespect for the department chair, but he marveled more that his uncle allowed it. In fact his trademark smile was undiminished. Maybe it was about more than warmth, maybe there was resolve too.
“I’m counting on you to teach him so he increases production from this lab.”
Beasley pursed his lips. “I am not a teacher.” He pouted on his stool, then touched his glasses upward, though they continued to hang every bit as precariously on the end of his nose. Charlie thought they were somewhere between aristocratic and comical. “Look, I’ll give him the basics, all right? Safety rules, some circuits. But you can’t expect me to do my job if I’m spending half my time babysitting.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Charlie spoke up at last.
“It talks?” Beasley snorted. “You are so uninformed, swaddling infant, you don’t even know what you need.”
“Try, Charlie.” Simmons gave his elbow a friendly squeeze. “Try not to punch him in the jaw.”
And he hurried off to take his call.
As the door closed, Beasley stood—though to Charlie it seemed more as if the man were unfolding himself, long limbs straightening until he stood six and a half feet tall. His wrists were long and knuckles large, and he had a giant Adam’s apple. Charlie thought of a bird with an extended bill, perhaps a crane of some kind. More than anything, though, he felt an impulse to reach forward, to push those glasses up the bird’s beak before they fell off.
“Wait,” Beasley said, switching off the light that Simmons had left on. He crooked a finger in Charlie’s direction. “Follow.” He moved with a strange, large-jointed walk, and Charlie thought: not crane, stork.
“This is your station.” He pointed at a desk that was cluttered with wires and electronic components. “Notice that it is at the opposite extreme of the room from mine. Notice that you work with your back to me. This is deliberate, to minimize chatter and interruptions.”
Charlie picked up one of the components, a strip of stiff wire with a yellow lump of ceramic material in the middle. “What will I be doing here?”
“You’re unacquainted with this project? What kind of imbecile are you?”
“You know, I am about at the end of taking insults from you. A guy two minutes into a new assignment can reasonably expect—”
“Oh no, you’re not.” Beasley wagged a finger. “Your days of being insulted by me are only beginning. You are more likely to fail here than anywhere else in this building.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know one thing about me.”
“Oh?” Beasley snatched the component from Charlie and pointed its wire at him. “Charles Fish. Brought straight from Harvard, where you were majoring in math and on track to graduate at eighteen—a fact you keep so quiet, not even your dorm buddies know. You also sang in the university choir, which makes you as pathetic a creature as I can imagine.”
“How in the world did you—”
“Finally, you are the nephew of John Simmons, metallurgy boss, and owner of the phoniest smile this side of Lake Michigan.” He tossed the yellow component back on the desk. “Right so far?”
“You have one hell of a nerve.”
“Fish, your uncle’s influence ends at that doorway. In a dungeon, the guard serves the prisoner’s sentence right along with him. In a dungeon, the guard is king. And I am not here to win a war, I’m here to avoid having to kill anyone.”
“Really?” Charlie stepped back. “On that, actually, we agree.”
“I’ll throw the confetti later. Tell me, how do you know when water is very cold? Quick, now.”
“Well, it’s ice, I suppose.”
“You suppose? Pathetic.”
Charlie crossed his arms. “What’s pathetic about that?”
“How can you tell when water is very hot?”
“It boils.”
“Progress,” Beasley said. “But I won’t get my hopes up. Now.” He lifted off a rack one of those strange pens. “How do you know when metal is cold or hot? Does it freeze or boil? How can you tell?”
Charlie puzzled that over for a second. “I don’t know.”
“HOT,” Beasley yelled, pressing the pen’s tip against Charlie’s arm.
“Yow,” Charlie jumped back, rubbing where he’d been touched.
Beasley shook his head slowly, a picture of disappointment. “It wasn’t hot.”
Charlie reddened with anger. “No.”
“But you couldn’t tell by sight. There is no way, looking at a piece of metal, to know if it is hot or cold or”—he thumbed the metal pen’s tip—“Room temperature.” He put the device back in its stand. “These soldering irons can reach seven hundred and fifteen degrees. If you ever touch something in my work area, I figure the third-degree burn you’ll get will serve as education and reprimand all at once. But if I come over to your station for any reason—to borrow a tool or check your work or blow my nose—and you have left a hot iron uncovered, I will find the first possible opportunity to stick it in your eye. Got me?”
“You were telling the truth,” Charlie marveled. “You really aren’t a teacher.”
“Lesson one is ended.” He pointed at a stool. “Sit.”
“Would it be entirely too much to ask for a bit of context?” Charlie hooked his foot on the stool and rolled it closer. “What is this department, and what are we doing?”
Beasley crossed his arms. “I’m permitted to tell you that we receive electronic designs from somewhere outside this building, and my job is to build them. Every part is top secret, every assembly is urgent. That’s what I’m doing. What you are doing, other than slowing my work? I have no idea. But I will placate my director, and with luck the war will end before either of us murders the other.”
Charlie sat on the stool with a sigh. “Are you always this disagreeable?”
“Are you kidding?” Beasley sniffed. “Today I’m in a good mood.”
Later the stork announced that he was going to lunch, and that “Harvard boy” should organize his station. Alone, the first thing Charlie did was switch the overhead lights back on. He returned to his desk, scooping up a handful of the components. They were all pieces of colored ceramic, roughly the size of a dime, with stiff wires sticking out of both ends. He found goggles, a welding mask.