Free The Orphan of Awkward Falls by Keith Graves Page B

pushed up his spectacles thoughtfully. After a moment, he set the book back down and opened it to the page he had been working from. “I suppose it will be all right if you only look. But you must be careful!”
    Josephine tried to make sense of the hieroglyphic-style symbols and equations scribbled across the page. Carefully drawn diagramswere crammed into the margins and on top of the text, with little care for legibility.
    “A daunting puzzle, as you can see,” said Thaddeus.
    “Yeah,” she nodded. “The diagrams look sort of like the stuff in my dad’s books, but in some weird language. Like this one here.” She pointed to one of the larger drawings. “It reminds me of a genetic sequencing diagram, except it’s written in Martian or something.”
    “I have heard of the genome work being done of late, but I unfortunately lack the resources to delve into it. I wonder what creature was being sequenced?”
    “Is this the only notebook your grandfather left?” she asked, noticing the number twelve written on the upper corner of the cover.
    He shrugged. “It’s the only one I’ve found. There must be others, probably volumes of them. Perhaps they will turn up someday.”
    “Did anyone else know about your grandfather’s work? Friends or other scientists, maybe?”
    “His early work was widely published, of course, due to his winning of the Nobel Prize. He was an international celebrity. Then he abruptly retreated from the public eye after writing an article for a scientific magazine about a theory concerning the aging of cells. I’ve read and reread the article many times, but I can’t understand the details. Apparently, neither could anyone else. He was roundly criticized by his colleagues, and afterward became something of a laughingstock. He never wrote another article from that point on, as far as I can tell, and mention of his work in science journals became rare.Grandfather became extremely secretive from that point on. No one knows anything about his work after that.”
    “But what about Stenchley?” she asked. “He would have been with him the whole time, right?”
    Thaddeus chuckled. “He would have seen things, of course. But by all accounts, Stenchley was a simpleton, too feebleminded to make any sense of them.”
    “Hmm, right. Do you think Norman would remember anything?”
    The boy shook his head. “I’ve questioned him repeatedly, but his memory circuits are corroded beyond repair. He’s as dotty as a loon.”
    The boy stopped talking then, turning his full attention to a delicate bit of stitching.
    Having extracted all the info she was likely to get from him for the moment, Josephine flopped down in a chair and pondered the situation, chewing her pinkie nail intently.

    When the weasel’s new organs had all been attached and the repairs completed, Thaddeus snapped off his rubber gloves and clapped his hands together. “Now for the best part of the operation. Prepare the beast for reanimation, Norman!”
    The robot didn’t need to be told. He was already in the process of inserting various colored pins into the weasel’s body. When this was done, Norman carefully laid the lifeless carcass inside the chamber ofa huge microwave oven that looked more like a front-loading washing machine. He closed the hatch and sealed it using a large wrench. Thaddeus twiddled knobs on a control panel until the indicator needle rose to the correct voltage. He gave the thumbs-up to Norman, who pushed a red button. The machine began to emit a high-pitched buzz, and through the glass door Josephine could see the weasel’s fur suddenly stand on end. The colored pins began to sparkle and smoke, and the weasel’s muscles began to twitch. Thaddeus watched what looked like a radar screen as points of light blipped on and off, getting brighter with each blip. After a couple of minutes, he signaled for Norman to turn the machine off. Smoke and the stink of scorched fur wafted out of the machine as the robot