He pushed away from the doorframe, as if he was about to leave. She couldn't stand to see him walk off with that lost expression, so Claire asked, "How did you meet her?"
That brought him, and the smile, back. It seemed less wistful this time. "I heard of her first. She was brilliant, you know. Brilliant and charming and well before her time. She understood the concept of computing machines from the very beginning, but not only that--she was a student of a great many things, including people. That was how we met. She spotted me in a crowd one night in London, and the next thing I knew she was demanding to know what I was. She could tell, you see. It fascinated her. No surprise, because her father and his friends were the original Gothic crowd, you know." Claire must have looked blank, because he sighed. "Really, child. Lord Byron? Percy Shelley? Mary Shelley? John Polidori?"
"Um . . . Frankenstein?"
"That would be Mary's work, yes. Dr. Polidori became famous for a similarly dark work of fiction . . . about a vampire. So Ada was much more perceptive than one would have thought. And terribly persistent. Before long, we were . . ." He stopped himself, looked sharply at her, and said, "Close friends."
"I'm not five."
"Very well, then; call it what you like. We became intimate, and we'll leave this discussion there, I think." He cleared his throat, looked away, and said, "Thank you."
She was gathering up her grease-stained doughnut bag, and stopped to stare at him. "What for?"
"For making me think of that," he said softly. "I do miss her. I really do." He seemed a little surprised about it, then shook out of it with visible effort. "Enough. Let me show you what I've accomplished while you were out getting yourself in so much trouble."
"I didn't--"
"Claire." He gave her a long, reproachful look, and put his finger to his lips. "Silence while I am speaking. We don't have time for you to quibble."
He did have a point, sort of. She nodded, and he led her over to the nearest lab table, which held undefined lumps of things under a gray canvas. Myrnin whipped the canvas off like a magician unveiling a trick, complete with, "Ta-da!"
It looked worse than it had when she'd last been here. It looked like a completely insane, random collection of parts, cobbled together without any sense of reason. Wires went everywhere, looping into snarls, and he'd used so many colors of wire that the whole thing had a strange rainbow look to it that made even less sense. There really wasn't much to say, except, "What is it?"
"Oh, Claire, it's my latest attempt to bring up the barriers around the town; what do you think it is? Look, I added vacuum pumps here, and here, and a new gear assembly, and--"
"Myrnin, stop. Just . . . stop." She closed her eyes for a second, thinking, I'm going to die, and finally forced herself to look at him again. "Let's start from the beginning. Where's the input?"
"You mean the point at which energy enters the system?"
"Yes."
"Here." He touched something in the middle of the device, which made even less sense. It looked like a funnel made of bright, shiny brass. In fact, it looked almost like a horn.
"And then where does the . . . ah, energy go?"
"Isn't it obvious? No? I weep for the state of public schools." He traced two wires, one that split off into a tangle of tubes, and one that went into what looked like a clock, only there were no numbers on the dial. "It draws power during the daytime hours, but it's at its most powerful at night, under the influence of the moon, which is why I've made certain parts of it from elements that resonate with the lunar cycle. I tried to balance the effects of the different elements, day and night, to achieve a perfect oscillation. It's obvious."
If you were insane.
Claire sighed. "We need to start over," she said. "Just start from scratch and build it again. One thing at a time, and you explain to me what it does, okay?"
"There's no need to start over. I've been perfectly--"
"Myrnin," Claire interrupted. "No time to quibble, remember? It's going to take all day to tear this thing apart, but I need to understand what you're doing. Really."
He considered it, looking at her for the longest time, and then grudgingly nodded. "Very well," he said. "Let's begin."
Autopsying Myrnin's mad-scientist machine was weirder than anything Claire had ever done in Morganville, and that was definitely a new record. Some of the parts were slippery, and felt almost . . . alive. Some were ice-cold. Some were hot--so hot she burned her fingers on them. Asking why didn't seem to do any good; Myrnin didn't have explanations that she could follow, since they drifted out of science and off into alchemy. But she methodically broke down the machine, labeled each part with a number, and made a diagram as she did of where each thing fit.
For a device that was supposed to establish a kind of detection field around the town limits, and then a second stage that would physically disable vehicles that weren't already cleared for exit, and then a third stage that selectively wiped memories, it was . . .
Incomprehensible, really. She could see pieces of what Myrnin was doing; the detection-field part was simple enough. She could even follow the purely mechanical part of how the machine broadcast a shutoff of a vehicle's electrical system--which led into the more complicated problem of how to rewire people's brains. But it was all just so . . . weird.
It took hours, but all of a sudden as she was drawing the plug-in for a vacuum pump that felt as if it was radiating cold, although she didn't know how, Claire saw . . . something. It was like a flash of intuition, one of those moments that came to her sometimes when she thought about higher-order physics problems. Not calculation, exactly, not logic. Instinct.