Dawson interrupted. “Pam?”
Kevin sighed. “I don’t know, Sam. I haven’t heard from her and there’s no way she can use the portal again. It’s closed. She could be anywhere though I suspect she’s in the Far East. Most likely Hong Kong. About the only thing I could do was try and take out the earth elemental here and that I managed to accomplish. I think there was another one involved as well, back on the other side of the portal, but I’m just guessing really. The only evidence I have is that the portal appears to have lasted long enough for Pam to have gotten through. I had killed the magician who had opened it by the time she made her move and it should have disappeared then. The only reason I can think of that would explain why it didn’t vanish immediately is if there had been a direct link between the scraithinth here and a magician on the other end or another scraithinth. Since they don’t play well with anybody, it makes more sense to me that the link was to another one.
“When I finally killed the first one, the portal did close and Pam had already gone through it.”
“You don’t know what happened to Pam?”
Kevin shook his head. His worry must have been easy to spot because Sam sighed and nodded as he sat down. Kevin continued. “The second break-in was necessary in any case, because they didn’t get a chance to strip your computers of information on the first break-in. I suspect they also figured that no one would be expecting a second break-in to occur so closely after the first. Wishful thinking on their part but not totally unreasonable.
“They also seem to have upgraded their defenses on the second one, by sending a higher level wizard to run things on this end. I also suspect they figured there was an outside chance of my being either here or nearby for the second break-in. That’s ostensibly why they included him, though he probably was there as a check on the scraithinth as well.”
“So where do things stand now?”
Kevin sat down opposite Dawson and sipped coffee before answering. “Do you have any samples of the doped silicon stashed anyplace else? If you do, my advice is to destroy them immediately. They’re more or less useless to you at this point and they represent a danger. They can be sensed by earth elementals, though I have no clue as to how strong a lure they might be. But the fact remains that there are a lot of earth elementals around and you run a risk no matter where you store the material. Besides, you don’t actually need it. You do need to have some sort of cooperative agreement with the earth elementals that might be attracted, to allow you to develop other materials. My suggestion is that you simply run each new material by one of them and if they appear to be interested unduly, drop it from further study. Eventually, you run into something that isn’t attractive and then you can go from there.”
Dawson looked thoughtful and didn’t reply for several moments. When he did, he sat back in the chair and spoke very carefully. “Can I get you to handle that?”
“That’s not my area of expertise. As I’ve said, I don’t have much contact with earth elementals and I’d have to build up a base of contacts and protocols before I could even start. I know some people here in the Boston area that can do that, though, and I’ll get you a list. They’re all good people, honest, and they’ll give you a fair deal. In fact, the couple at the top of my list are likely to do it for nothing. They’re academics, really, and this would be the sort of thing they’d love to investigate.”
“That wraps it up for now. I need to get home and start looking for Pam. If you have any other questions, drop me a note and I’ll answer them. But you’d better plan on me being out of contact for a couple of days. I’m probably going to have to go the Far East before I can pick up a lead to Pam — and that’s all I’m concerned with at this point.”
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