A completely random excerpt from Research & Development
(c) 2004 Jeremy Rosenberg
Having nothing at all better to do he sat down across from Dr. Davenport, who was eating her lunch and reading the latest issue of Nature. He had received the same issue at his apartment and it was now lying on his nightstand. He smiled at her but she only glanced up and said, “Hello, Dr. Raymond,” flatly, as if she was reading it off a card.
He had had little contact with Dr. Davenport before their meeting in Dr. Carlton’s office. He knew her enough to say hello in the mornings and good night in the evenings, and often saw her eating her lunch at this very table; but beyond that he rarely ran into her as she rarely left her office during the day and certainly never seemed to wander around the office like he did. He didn’t think that she had any work to do either, but she was always tapping away at her computer when he peeked into her office, or scribbling on one of her numerous notepads; he had no idea what work she was doing, but guessed that she had, perhaps, completely invented her own paperwork and assigned it to herself.
Dr. Davenport did not wear glasses, or wear her hair in a bun, but was otherwise resembled and acted like a stereotypical librarian. She had a wide, kind of flat mouth, shaped so that she almost always appeared to be frowning, or at least grimacing with impatience, but she never – not even now, after giving Dean such a dull-sounding greeting – appeared to be upset or annoyed by anything; she merely acted like a detached, curious observer, unwilling to provoke or alter anything around her but content to watch and wait. Once in a while she remembered to apply lipstick to that wide mouth, but only two or three times a week, and when she did she often put on far too much, so that throughout the day she was quietly spitting out small chunks of lipstick that had found their way into her mouth. She seemed to be only faintly aware of her long curly dark brown hair, which settled in reasonably neat order down to her shoulders with an apparently minimum amount of effort, and in fact she seemed to occasionally twitch a little, as if she felt it scraping the back of her neck but had no idea what it was. She also had eyes that Dean found mesmerizing and even a little troubling; two neatly spaced ellipses, rimmed with what appeared be some kind of dark eye shadow, which glared deeply into whatever they were pointed at, but were not without emotion or humor.
Her constant efficient demeanor suggested that she had little time for anything other than business, but this was somehow hard to believe; there were a number of quirky details about her that were difficult to notice at first but even harder to ignore once you did. Having little else to do for two months, Dean had compiled a mental list of these details, a few of which he even noticed right now: the blue and black striped shirt she was wearing underneath her lab coat – it looked like the kind of t-shirt a teenager would wear. In addition to her turkey on rye with mayonnaise and lettuce (no tomato), the only thing he had ever seen her eat, she was drinking a small plastic container of chocolate milk.
“So. Dr. Davenport,” Dean said, suddenly. He had hoped he would have something new to say after completing this greeting, but found to his immense irritation that he could think of nothing whatsoever. “The experiment tomorrow,” he tried, knowing that this was neither a question nor a particularly useful statement.
“Yes,” said Dr. Davenport, to his surprise, closing the magazine and placing it next to her, and pulling a small yellow pad from her lab coat pocket. “I’ve given our task a lot of thought, as I’m sure you have, and I’ve come up with a battery of tests that should help us generate some raw data; from this we should be able to determine the feasibility of the vehicle, as dictated by the client, and by that I feel that we should be concentrating on both fuel efficiency – comparing the vehicle’s fuel use versus other vehicles currently being used by the public, and I’ve gathered some data from the Internet and the library to help determine this – as well as the ease of the transition from land to water. Personally, judging solely from the photograph Mr. van den Berghe showed us, I have my doubts about that, but that’s purely a cursory, superficial observation on my part.”
Dean blinked. “Yes. Sure. Sounds good.”
“But we’re partners in this project, and I have no interest in taking total control over it. I mean, I’ll show you the schedule I drew up, and we can discuss this later and put your own tests in, or perhaps they even overlap.”
“Um. Well, I’m sure whatever you’ve got is fine.” Her eyes were boring into him and he squirmed in his seat, finding that he was somewhat unable to stop staring back. “Er, well, I’ll stop by your office later and you can show me what you’ve got, and, um, I’ll let you know what I think.”
“Of course,” Dr. Davenport replied, taking a swig from her chocolate milk. She seized her sandwich and clutched it near her mouth, staring at him over it. “What sort of things did you have in mind?”
“Uh . . .” Dean squirmed some more and watched her chew. He realized with a chill of terror that she was actually, really interested in the brilliant idea he was about to reveal to her. He nodded. “What you said.” He had no idea what this meant.
“Hmm?” she asked with a hum through her chewing.
“I mean . . . well, I think we should start right away with, uh, getting this thing into the water.” She started nodding, and then the eyebrows above those dark eyes fluttered a bit in interest. Dean realized that he was actually about to pull this off, and it somehow made him even more terrified. “I mean that’s the make or break thing here, right? If that doesn’t work, there’s no point in testing anything else.”
She finished chewing and dabbed at her mouth with a napkin, nodding vigorously as she did so. “I’m glad you think that. I felt the same way. I thought that maybe we could start with some stress tests on the chassis, doors and hood, you know, standard crash tests, that kind of thing, but it’s my understanding that Mr. Bellamy only has one of these things so far, so I imagine we’re expected to protect it.”
“Ah,” Dean said, slowly realizing that this bit of information sounded rather important.
“According to the report from Mr. Bellamy, it cost him over $50,000 just to build the prototype. Most of that was grants from ShuntCorp.”
Dean dimly recalled the document in question, which was sitting in a file folder on his desk. He had considered leafing through it the morning of the tests, but could no longer remember why this had seemed like a good idea to him.
“Good,” he said, somewhat desperately. “We’ll go drive it into the water tomorrow morning, then.”
She nodded again. “We have access to a small slip on the river, so I’ll ask Mr. van den Berghe to have it driven over there. I looked into the river depth, which should be about adequate for our needs, as well as tomorrow’s weather and visibility conditions, which should be just about perfect.”
Dean smiled. “Well. Good. Glad we could work all that out.”
She smiled back. It was a nice smile, making her eyes more narrowed and somehow darker. “Just doing my part for the team,” she replied.
