Free The Medusa Encounter by Paul Preuss Page A

slight air of distraction with which his mother navigated life, she spoke from the heart. Love between parents and children is more complicated than it should be, he thought, and more subtle than anyone he’d read had ever been able to express adequately, but despite all the emotional harmonics and bass rumbles that accompanied the love between him and his mom and dad, love was solidly there among them.
He emerged from his old room wearing a respectable suit and tie, dressed the way he knew his father would want to see him.
    “So you lost all those books you’d spent a small fortune on.” Redfield pere was taller than his son, with a square patrician face mounted upon a squarer, even more patrician jaw. His gingery hair and eyebrows and the sprinkle of freckles across his fine nose hinted at his Boston Irish origins, suggesting that the money in the family was perhaps only two centuries old, instead of the three or four centuries claimed by those with names such as Rockefeller and Vanderbilt.
“Yes.”
     
Edward glared at his son in ill-disguised triumph. “I hope you learned a lesson.”
     
“More than a lesson, Dad. I lost everything. I won’t be collecting anything of so perishable a nature again.”
    The dining room was in the southeast corner of the penthouse, overlooking old New York harbor. In the weak sunlight of autumn, the algae farms that covered the wide waters from the Jersey shore to Brooklyn were a dull matte green, like pea soup; stainless steel harvesters grazed languorously on the stuff, converting it to food supplements for the masses.
The Redfields were not of the masses. Edward sliced through the medium-rare magret de canard and put a left-handed forkful into his mouth, European-fashion. “The insurance wasn’t adequate?” he mumbled.
    “Oh, the financial loss is covered. Not allowing for appreciation. But I realized how ephemeral those old books and paintings are.” Can I really get away with this? Blake wondered—but people are desperate to believe what they want. “Perhaps I’ve finally grown up.”
    Edward kept chewing and mumbled again. “I’ve been thinking I might look around a bit and see if I can apply myself to public service,” Blake added. His father having written him off as a dilettante, nothing could be sweeter to Edward than to hear his son come around to his point of view.
“What a fine idea, dear,” his mother said brightly. “I know our friends will be more than happy to help you find something suitable.”
     
“Why government, Blake? Why not something with more potential?” By which Edward meant buying and selling.
    “I’m not really a statistics kind of guy, Dad. The market never made sense to me.” False, but it fit Edward’s prejudices. “If I’d followed your advice I’d have gone to law school,” Blake added, truistically, “but it’s too late for that.”
    “Well, what are you good at?” A whiff of the old rancor. After all, sending Blake to SPARTA had not been an inexpensive proposition; sure, that enhanced-education project had had foundation support, but parents like Edward who could pay had paid plenty to get their kids enrolled.
    “I’m a good investigator—anybody who’s serious about scholarship has to be. I know my way around old libraries as well as I know my way through electronic files. I can be inconspicuous when necessary.” All this was true, and not the half of it; his father would not have believed even the half of it. “I read and write a dozen languages, I’m fluent in almost that many, and I can pick up more when I need them.” Blake added something musical in Mandarin for the benefit of his mother, meaning roughly, I owe it all to you .
    His father, who didn’t speak Mandarin, although he was fluent in German and Japanese and the other old languages of diplomacy, emitted another skeptical mumble. When he finally swallowed his mouthful of duck he asked, “What sort of job do you think all this qualifies you