Ghost of a Chance

“If you wanted to get hold of me, you should have just called my office.”

Barton scowled, the ends of his mustache turning down.

“I did,” he said. “Your secretary said you’d gone home.”

He made a point of looking up at a massive clock hanging over the bookcases, it read four-forty-five.

“Those are some banker’s hours you keep,” Barton went on. “Is that your idea of a work ethic?”

Alex bristled at that. Most days he was on the job till late and some days he didn’t get any sleep at all. Still, it was never a good idea to bait a sorcerer, so he just froze his smile in place.

“I had to pick up some things for a client,” he said, holding up the wooden crate of glassware as evidence. “I was on my way to deliver this when your men located me.”

“Gary,” he said to Bickman. “Call a courier up here for Mr. Lockerby’s delivery.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Alex said, setting the crate down on the richly carpeted floor. “It’s something I need to handle myself. Now, what can I do for you, Mr. Barton?”

The sorcerer cast a critical eye over Alex for a long moment. He lingered on Alex’s snowy white hair before moving on. Finally he nodded to himself, obviously making up his mind.

“Gary here tells me you’re a damn good private eye,” he said, nodding at Bickman. “Seems to think you can help me.”

“I guess that depends on your problem, Mr. Barton,” Alex replied.

Barton laughed at that.

“You aren’t willing to commit to anything until you know the score,” he said, nodding. “Smart. Irritating, but smart. I like that.”

He picked up a silver cigarette case with a green, tortoise-shell inlay on it. He flipped it open with his finger and offered one to Alex.

“I like a man who knows his business,” Barton said as Alex took a cigarette. He flipped the case closed and set it back on the desk as Alex reached into his pocket for his matchbook. Before he could complete the gesture, Barton pointed his index finger at Alex and a spark of blue energy snapped between the outstretched finger and the end of the cigarette.

“My business is electricity, Mr. Lockerby,” he said, picking up one of the mechanical models from his desk. It was roughly rectangular and seemed to have a lot of delicate parts. “This is a scale model of my new Etherium Capacitor, the Mark V. When it’s built, it’ll be about the size of a delivery van.”

Barton paused as if he were waiting for Alex to ask him a question, but Alex just nodded attentively. He’d learned a long time ago to keep his mouth shut when he had no idea where a conversation was going.

“The Mark II generator is what powers Manhattan,” Barton went on. “It takes up five full floors of the tower, and there are twelve of them.”

Alex whistled. He was starting to see why the newer, smaller capacitor was a big deal.

Barton put the model back on his desk and turned to look out the window at the city beyond.

“This entire building is a prototype, Mr. Lockerby,” he said. “I plan to make cheap, radiant power available to the whole city in the next five years.”

He turned back and picked up another model, this time of a crawler.

“Right now, I’m working with Rockefeller to extend the crawler network all over the city.”

“How?” Alex asked, forgetting to keep his mouth shut. Crawlers were faster than cars and rode better; their only problem was that they lost power if they left the radiant field of Empire Tower. As a result, they mostly served the Core and the Inner and Middle-Rings, leaving a huge chunk of the population outside their operating area.

Barton smiled at Alex’s interest.

“We thought about putting an electric rail along the ground, but it was too hard to shield it. Anyone could just walk up and electrocute themselves. So we’re going to raise the rail up above the street and add a second one. Rockefeller’s marketing a new crawler that will run along the rails, right over the top of the traffic. It’ll be even faster, and we’ll tie the rails directly to the tower here, so there won’t be any power problems.”

As he spoke, Barton’s words got faster and faster, like a kid explaining his favorite show at the pictures.

“Sounds great,” Alex said. “What’s the problem?”

Barton’s exuberance faded and he sighed.

“Nothing with that,” he said. “We’ll have the new line to Brooklyn running by New Years. My problem is that I’m dreaming much bigger than that, Mr. Lockerby. I’m not just going to send crawlers out into the city, I’m going to power it all. Everything.”

He picked up the model of his Mark V generator.

“These generators aren’t cheap to build,” he said. “This is my company, but I still have a board and investors to answer to. People who were with me in the beginning.”

“And they don’t want you providing cheap power?” Alex asked.

“It’s not that,” Barton said. “I can put sixty-four of these capacitors in the space of one Mark II. That means I can power the entire state, maybe multiple states, right from here.”

He set the model back on his desk.