She was mad at me again, he thought, and this time I hadn’t even forgot any important days. His mental scan of the angry wife checklist had resulted in a score which was, for him, not even all that bad.

If only she had some understanding of his position. The department was breathing down his neck constantly looking for “progress” on his projects. As if they understood what he told them anyways. It took a quantum physicist to understand what he was doing.

Which was the core of both problems, he supposed. If his wife could understand his work then it would mean that he understood it well enough to explain it to her. Then the board would be off his back. And his wife would be part of the glorious discovery instead of an addendum on his Wikipedia page.

It took the man some time to notice that several of his graduate students had walked into his office and were nervously awaiting his attention. Miron and Tim stood a half step behind darting nervous glances at each other and the walls. As usual, it was the statuesque Chinese girl, Willow, who took the lead.

“Dr. Peraster, you haven’t been responding to our emails.” When she swept her hands back to include her companions a look of paralyzing fear passed over both faces, which she took the time, barely, to notice. If she was expecting a response from her advisor, she didn’t get one. “We have dedicated the past year of our lives to your research and mentorship. You have been kind enough to collaborate with us on several papers, for which we are grateful.” The two stooges flanking her let out grunts that approximated human appreciation.

“Our work for you over the past year more than merits inclusion in one of your higher-level projects. I’d restart college as a freshman if I could work on the cross-entanglement project with you. Tim’s undergrad thesis was on the conceptual underpinnings of the graviton gun.” Her voice entreated with a level of frustration that seemed to surprise her. She glanced at the man to her right for support, Tim- the bearded one- who smiled with more spirit than Questro had seen from either man yet.

She continued, “Let us help you, doctor. You have built the intellectual framework for a new industrial revolution, only now you don’t know what to do with it.” Fear flashed across Willow’s face for a moment. She had surprised herself, this time by her own temerity.

“Dr. Peraster. We are really lucky to have a chance to work with you.” Maybe he was expecting the voice to be tarnished from disuse, but Tim had a voice like one of the radio kings from the twenties. “If we have failed you in some way, please tell us so that we can make amends. The work that you have begun is too important to sit idle, even for a moment.”

“He’s right. Please let us help you.”

A persuasive and heartfelt appeal, one which deserved his consideration. “Tim, Willow, Miron. You haven’t failed me. In many ways you have been exemplary post-grads. Perhaps when you have experiments of your own you will understand my possessiveness.” He sighed and looked out his window. “When you look at those projects, maybe you see their future, what they could become. I see their past. All of the investment that I have given, the hours and the money and shame of begging yet another sponsor for a few hundred thousand dollars when his company makes billions annually.”

This wasn’t going anywhere. Those were probably more words not directly related to the science than they had ever heard from him. Even Willow looked subdued. Q mustered the energy acknowledge their complaints, “I cannot deny the truth of what you are saying. The projects have been left untended too long, but I do not know whether I am at a place where I can surrender my sovereignty over them.”

To the students’ credit, they did not interrupt the silence which fell after his pronouncement. He bent his head towards the desk and began the scientific process which provided him his living. He must have lost connection to the room as he reviewed another uninteresting paper. When he next looked up, the room was empty. The door had been left slightly open, so that the sound of it’s closing would not disturb him.

With a rush, the question that had him in such a bind resurfaced. What was he going to say to his wife to make it better?

****

Walking into his own house felt less like a homecoming than preparing for battle. The click of the shutting door felt like a warning somehow.

A thirtyish woman with three braids down her back appeared in the frame of the doorway just long enough to let him see her. It was an obvious pose, but one he couldn’t blame her for given how well she pulled it off. She really was a stunning example of humankind. He remembered the first time he had seen her at a lecture on the short-term effects of group isolation—the raw feeling of appreciation that the brilliant words coming from her perfect form should be hers, then the surprise when her eyes sought out his again and again.

The years had been more than kind to her; they had been wise. When she saw her husband walk through the door, she saw what she could no longer stop herself from seeing: a great man who was too tired to be present. If she squinted she could remember that athlete who had carried her, joking all the while, down two miles of switchback trails when she had broken her ankle during their honeymoon. She could remember the scientist whose undergraduate research underpinned a billion dollar company that he’d wanted no part of. When her imagination seized her she could even remember the man whose perspective had blazed new neural pathways across her mind.

But the eyes she saw now could hardly hold hers for more than an instant. They moved restlessly from one object to another, seemingly fixed on a path that led back to nothing.

“Hello Questro.”

“Hello Annagail.”

Tonight was not going to be the battle that he had thought. There was nothing of confrontation in her voice. That scared him. Primarily, her voice was calm. He was again reminded of the first time, the conference. Her voice was like that—educated and so assured of its own value.

“We need to talk.” Uttered at the same time, the words caused both to crack a smile. “Who gets to go first?” he asked. There was something in his voice that she had been seeking for a long time, but it was tremulous. A thread that had been tugged from a tangled mess of a mind could unravel the whole thing or pull the knot tighter. His eyes flicked over to hers and stayed there. She had to tread carefully, she had his attention.

“The proposal that I submitted to interview the ISS astronauts just back from the station was accepted. I’ll be in Florida for two weeks determining, hopefully, any alteration in sleep cycles resulting from their extended moratorium on gravity. Assuming that the initial data taken by NASA wasn’t the usual useless trash.” She was losing him. She had learned to recognize the glaze that said his mind was not on what his eyes were. Those still locked on to hers.

“But that isn’t what I want to discuss. I’ve been talking to the secretaries in your building. They say that you spend all day sitting in your office. When you are at home, you seem distracted and focused on all the wrong parts of our life.” There it was. There was fire in his eyes. He would think that he had been wronged, and maybe from it would come some of the firepower that she knew he possessed.

“While you were out today, Dr. Mitchell called and told me that if you are done with research, the company still has a vice presidency with your name on it.” Now it was a conflagration of emotions raging. She had done it. She had woken his passion, and she wished that she was a little less afraid. She looked at him and waited for the explosion.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Maybe he really wasn’t the man she remembered, for he looked down and when he looked back up it was at a spot just over her head. “My poat-grads approached me today. The best of them at least. They asked me to open my research to them. ‘Dr. Mitch’s’ timing couldn’t be better I suppose. Fucking honorary doctorate. It was just in time to remind me of what happens when you let the fruit of your mind be harvested by others.”

He started to turn away and she knew that the worst was yet to come. “Q. Mitch isn’t just offering you that job because he owes you. It’s also because he knows how well you can do for them.” she implored. He turned back towards her. This time his eyes met hers and his full force was back in them, a beam that could cut deeper than any laser. It seemed stronger than she remembered.

Bitterly he said, “You know I don’t want to do anything for them.”

Something happened to you Q, she thought. But, the man love who is here at last with me is drowning in there somewhere. “I don’t know what changed for you in the last year. But you need to figure yourself out before I get back.” Was it her imagination or did the unspoken “or else” hang off of that sentence a little too freely.

Questro heard it too. He went very still while looking at his wife. “You know how I feel about threats.” She must have felt some of his energy because she started to pull away and then came in closer. “I remember.” She whispered. What was that glint in her eye? Did my own wife want me to feel threatened? What is this? All at once he felt immensely tired. He kissed her cheek and turned away.

“Good luck with the astronauts, dear. One look at you will bring them out of post-astral depression for sure.”

Annagail sat back. It was begun. She had seen him, all of him. For an instant he knew who he was and how powerful he was. She had done all she could. Now she just had to hope.

****

That hadn’t gone as well as he had hoped.

My wife is gone. Why did I get angry? Anger was not what he wanted to show her. How did I let this happen? It filled him with a tense obsession that did not pass with the night, or the next night. He felt indignation twisting inside him like a parasite. It squirmed in him like an animal in a towel. Every time that he investigated the source of his rage it bit at him it was bear the towel was drying.

****

In the past he had run to heal his hurts. Now when he ran, it made him burn hotter. The secretaries in his office had started drawing straws for who had to deliver his messages, not because he would snap at them, but because he didn’t say anything. He pretended not to notice.

He sat in his office and thought of all his work that could would stay locked in storage if nothing changed. He thought of the shame he would feel transferring to management and the scorn and envy of his current colleagues. I am a scientist, goddammit. I looked at the world and saw truths that no one else did. He had lived on the front-lines of research. It was his passion, his way of life for as long as he could remember. It was time to go back to those roots. It was his identity.

So he poured over his research. Every word was as familiar to him as the day that he wrote it. It just kept going. He read page after page that was full of words that said nothing meaningful to him. He knew all the words so well that nothing stuck out in his mind. From one paper to the next he could make no new connections, and there were so many to review. The processes that had made his friends billions of dollars seemed to have stalled. He had stalled. Maybe I’m not the man my wife married. Maybe I’m not the man she remembers.

That night he went home and stared at the television without grasping anything that happened in it. Then he started pacing. There was something that he was missing. Something simple and central that if he could only access it the wheels would stop spinning and their traction would fire him into the future. The frustration was becoming more than he could handle.

That thought brought pause to his rancid ruminations. He tried to list all of the research that he had left unexploited. When he got to six, he knew that there were a few trees he was forgetting and a forest that he’d lost sight of long ago. Maybe it was that simple. Maybe I really have found my limits.

Well, He was nothing if not a pragmatist. If he was at his limit, that didn’t mean it was over, just that he had to make a change. It was time to dust off the Potthast Private Valuestream.

****

His three collaborators were surrounded by susurrating seas of paper. Occasionally a paper from the floor would rustle and exchange positions with those in their hands. It had started as a simple rotation, but that whirlpool had quickly dissolved into something more resembling the chaotic motion of leaves during a late autumn storm.

Questro had been standing in the room for most of the time his students had been going through his “locked” project papers. Once he had woken up in a chair to the sound of the bathroom door closing. After signing what felt like a dozen non-disclosure agreements, their persistence working through his papers was nothing short of astonishing. Out of respect for them he had maintained the silence that had fallen. For himself, he wanted to shout obscenities. It had seemed like such a good idea, sharing his work. Yet now that it was shared he wanted nothing more than to go back to the solitary speculation that had established his position. These kids are killing me with their stupid, silent contemplation.

Finally Willow sighed, dropped the paper she was reading and penciled a small mark where she had stopped. That had been his collaboration with Hoover about vacuum propulsion and one that he had always wanted to return to. “If I read another word my brain is going to drip directly out of my retina.”

On cue her men dropped their articles. Miron put his forehead in a vice grip and Tom satisfied himself with closing his eyes for a moment before intoning gently, “It would be your retina falling out through your pupil. But I’m fried too.”

“Smartass.” Willow snarked.

“Tired smartass.” Tom agreed.

Chairs creaked as the graduate students joined Questro on their feet. “What happens now?” asked Tom.

“It’s simple, we brainstorm. The computer has the research from each of these articles and will record our brainstorming session. You will have proportional control and receive proportional profits based on the percentage of verifiable research that you generate.” He had opted to revert to his oldest copy of the Valuestream, the world’s premier crowd-sourced productivity platform, encrypted by his own hand. The newer versions left something to be desired from the simplicity of those early days.

Miron broke the silence, “We are going to be so rich.” Questro felt like he was missing something. The three faces across the room were splitting smiles like pumpkins on Halloween. Willow’s eyes were shining with something more than their usual luster.

Feeling like clarification was necessary, Questro said, “I’m not sure that you understand. Later we will put the research into one of five categories based on its function in the research-to-sale stream. If you want to maintain total control over the project you’ll have to provide research for as many of the categories as is necessary to define the project.”

They were still grinning and looking at him like it was Christmas morning and he was a brand new video game console they were holding in their hands that their dad just told them all the updates had been installed and it was ready to go. “We all signed the collaboration agreement before you showed us this…” Tom trailed off for a moment, “I don’t even have the words to describe the monument that we are going to erect from this work. The giant’s shoulders that we are standing on…” This time his beautiful voice cracked before he returned to what Questro concluded was awed silence.

“Usually scientists have to claw tooth and nail to get up to that shoulder-y precipice, but you built us a ladder and shared it to with for nothing more than a percentage.” The smile on Miron’s face transformed into wonderment.

Something in Questro snaps. “What the hell are y’all talking about?”

Willow’s eyes snap back into focus. She looks at the professor’s and something clicks for her. “Dr. Peraster… how many projects do you expect to result from this session?”

“I hadn’t really thought about. Don’t get your hopes too high, but we could probably work through a project for each of you. Why are you laughing?”

Willow again, looking sharply, “Tom how many projects could you work through on that paper on cross-entanglement pairings of subatomic molecules?”

“Five without thinking about it.”

“Miron, what about that paper on plasma surface adhesion reactions?”

“Half a dozen or so.”

“If I read ten papers and so did each of you, and each paper yields three, let’s call it three, projects. That is 90 new research projects without your assistance at all.” Willow concluded.

Something in Questro’s mind was reorienting, a fundamental assumption about how the creative process could function. “We are going to need to get you all some assistants.”