He muttered a long series of words, now in Greek, and the scene slowly shifted, moving away from the workbench view he’d selected to scan the entire lab. Nothing. He next marched the view down the short hallway to the basement corridor and looked all three ways. Nothing visible. A thought occurred to him and he shifted the view downward to about six inches off the floor and scanned again.

Yep, there was light on two doors down from the electronics lab.

He zoomed in closer, nodded to himself and then moved through the closed door into the second lab proper, reassumed a normal viewing height and looked around. Oscilloscope. A couple of test boards. Ah, light in the back corridor.

He zoomed to view the corridor and stopped immediately when he rounded the corner. Carnage. Muck. Junk all over the place. What the hell had happened?

He frowned. There was quite a lot of blood, too. He traced where the blood seemed to head, marked the outside door and nodded to himself. Kevin appeared to be damaged but still under his own power.

But what the hell had happened? He looked around, slowly sweeping the corridor and could see no sign of any explosive device whatsoever. So, what had exploded?

A person? Too much mass, he thought, for a normal human being. Marcus? Well, Marcus wasn’t a normal human being so that at least fitted. He nodded to himself. He rather hoped Marcus had exploded. A most unpleasant lad. But how?

His eyes finally rested on the machine that sat in the side corridor, waiting to be fixed. Puzzled, he examined it closely and at length gave up. He had no idea what it was, what it did, or if it was in working order. The power light was on, but that was about all he could determine. It hadn’t been there the last time he’d been in the corridor which was late Tuesday night. What the devil was it? He rather doubted it had caused any explosion.

Sighing, he sat back and let the orb deactivate. Well, Kevin had at least survived. That was phase one. Phase two would see if he could put two and two together and come up with a sensible figure, which in actual fact was 4i. This time.

He rather hoped Kevin wasn’t too angry. He’d hate to have to protect himself and possibly kill Kevin. He’d hate it even more if Kevin killed him.

He rather liked the idea of seeing his five hundredth birthday.

They let him into the student emergency room in the clinic immediately. Perhaps they were bored. They couldn’t really have told much from the monitor, couldn’t have seen just how much bleeding there was. At least, that’s what Kevin told himself.

“What the hell—Vi, get the doctor up, now!” The nurse at the desk was up like a flash, spitting orders the moment she saw Kevin’s shirt. “Harvey!”

Harvey proved to be an orderly about six foot tall with large shoulders and huge hands that managed to grab a gurney in his rapid passage down the corridor to answer the nurse’s call. They had Kev on it before Kevin even knew what the hell was going on. He also ripped the shirt open and caught a towel thrown his way without looking. The nurse took the other side and together they started, calmly, for all their speed, examining the slash that still bled freely.

A doctor showed up next and Kevin lost track of things, concentrating as he was on breathing, swallowing and keeping out of the way of the hands that were darting here and there. That was harder than it looked.