Hypatia shuddered in the drawing room, overcome by the note. Fear, Anger, Anxiety, Lust; a dozen emotions swept through her. She felt faint, sinking quietly onto the chaise lounge, reading for the tenth time the stinging words it displayed.
Dearest Hypatia - A lie, in the salutation, no less!
It is with great sorrow that I break off our engagement. I have been a bounder and a cad, constantly endangering your reputation with society - As if I minded! I was in love!
My behavior has been quite inexcusable - finally, some truth!
...but I must confess I have compounded my errors with the love of another - what was wrong with mine?
For my own, I must confess to having led a double life - a double-cross, you mean!
While society may have approved of Ms. Bowdler as our constant chaperone, - constant betrayer!
Our relationship has become something more than chaperone and charge, and has blossomed into all the delights society has denied the both of us - You mean she let you have your way with her!
In the course of events, our activities have been blessed with issue, and the lady - Lady!? Whore! Bitch!... she restrained herself before she gave voice to the foulest oaths heard at the dockyards... is with child. The rules of a gentleman -Hypatia snorted in derision require that I bring forth a legitimate product of our issue, and unless we move to the arid wastes of Utah - another snort, Jonathan couldn't find High street if he was tied onto the police box there.
...I am restrained to but a single wife. You are a good woman, Hypatia, and I am sure that one more constant than I shall relieve your suffering. I have always admired your qualities of restraint and good judgment, which will endear you to a far better man than I - I doubt I could find a worse one, after this, she gritted her teeth.
Ever yours - Ever hers, you mean!
Jonathan - rot in hell, you right bastard...
She carefully folded the note, and slipped it into the secret compartment of the secretary, unsure what to do. The hidden door on the polished wood took its secret, and closed with a barely audible 'click'.
She checked her outfit; a perfectly workable dress, finally free of the bustles her mother had suffered with, a smart jacket filled with small instruments, and her fedora, a single concession to the last century. Her 'impossible' bosom heaved with anger, as she straightened it. Lately it had known the attentions of Jonathan, and she quivered as she remembered the heavenly feelings his fingers made as he used them, his mouth and tongue ...stop it!
While her heart and mind swung into fierce opposition, her body remembered those hands, the wonderful feelings they made as they explored her flesh, causing the most excruciating emptiness between her legs. She would miss his hands the most...
No, Hypatia, she cautioned herself, it is not his hands that you miss the most. Her own hands moved as if of their own accord, when they could be alone. She would regard his member with a combination of scientific and erotic fascination, using her hand to slowly stroke him, until his very essence shot in the air like fireworks, and rained down hotly to cover her hand.
Just the last fortnight, she'd allowed him to touch her in her most secret place, and relished the overpowering flare of aroused passion. He'd stumbled over her clitoris, and had applied himself to it vigorously, causing her to gasp in rigid bliss as if her body had been attached to an electrical wire. She lay back, breathing heavily, his body close to hers, and drew her legs together, milking the newly-discovered bliss. Her emptiness tortured her more than usual, and she swore the next time, she would let him have his way, as it was her way, or would be soon.
Jonathan, you stupid idiot! I was prepared to surrender to you this very night! You could have deflowered me; it could be me who carried your child. She fought not to cry, a single tear only creasing her makeup.
Slowly she contained her emotions. A new day was dawning, and she was needed, at the Research Corporation. Repairing her face and appearance, the young scientist went outside, to catch a passing taxi, looking down with distaste as the aetheropter climbed into traffic, and towards the laboratories. I will lose myself in my work; at least that they cannot take from me.
Far below her, the towers and smokestacks of London painted the morning fog with a sulfur-tinged yellow, as hundreds of vehicles floated and darted about. An occasional ray of sunlight would illuminate the crenellated mansions and row houses, horses still plodding the cobblestones of 21st-Century's greatest Empire.
Thanking the driver, and paying her fare, she climbed off the levitating vehicle onto the fourth-floor labs. A guard tipped his hat to her, recognizing her at once. She smiled back in turn, wondering if he was single...and stopped herself. What on Earth was she thinking? Could she ever trust another man, after the ultimate in rude behavior? A real man would have said those things to her face, not sent a note and card. She'd have a chance to change his mind, to seduce him, to run her fingers over his...she stopped in the hallway, almost colliding with another scientist. Really, we can't be distracted, especially with the kind of forces we're dealing with, she admonished herself.
She opened the heavy doors to the high-potential energy lab, seeing Dr. Rabelais hunched over a winding of a man-sized transformer. Looking up, he smirked as he saw his assistant enter the room. Hypatia knew Rabelais well; the kind of a man a woman should have hatpin ready for, and besides, he was a foreigner anyway.
"Ah, Miss Fullerene, there you are. I've had an idea; I really think that it may provide the breakthrough."
"As in scientific experiment?" she asked.
"As in a way to actually travel to these alternate worlds. See that Charles brings us a few more canisters of film, and some spare Deforest valves." The lab 'go-fer' was a minor partner in the research, still trying to get the graduate degree. He worshiped Hypatia, which made her feel both gratified and annoyed.
"Indeed, Doctor. Any particular kind?"
"6L6's, and a few '34's, " he responded, making a final connection on the wire-covered pillar of iron. He pointed over to the vast ring, mounted on gimbals. It was capable of rotating in two dimensions, as each of the seven electrical connections was made. The result was a splash of water like energy that stabilized into an almost mirror-like pool of radiance, which they'd unsuccessfully tried to pierce with telescopes, periscopes, and even a camera dangled on a string. Thing went in, but didn't come out again. Charles was still smarting from a missing fingertip he'd lost touching the effect.
"I've looked at this in a geometric fashion, only taking into account the first three dimensions. What if there were more?"
Hypatia grinned to herself. He would have made a perfect kinetoscope villain, entirely unable to avoid describing in painstaking detail his plans and stratagems. She listened with half an ear as he rambled on about orbits, magnetic offsets, and the idea of mental processes affecting the outcome. The last was hardly scientific, and she called him on it.
"Doctor, perhaps you confuse the physical with the mental. I'd have a hard time believing that wishing would affect the results, else every scientist be counted a genius."
He sighed, recognizing she was trying to get his goat. "Alas, as a nation of shopkeepers, you have to be so hard-headed and logical about science. I consider science my love, and my mistress."
"Really, Doctor! You forget yourself!"
"Really, Miss Fullerene, if there is no love of science, of mystery, of solving the essential questions of the universe, then why bother?"
"Perhaps you could have phrased it a bit more delicately," she lectured, "you are in mixed company. Unless you forget I am a woman." A frustrated woman, she thought to herself.
"As you wish. Young people today..." he shook his head. He walked to the control circuits, Charles finally arriving with the necessary supplies.
"Ready circuit one," he intoned, as Charles threw the first knife-switch. A low hum started, as the ring began to rotate. Hypatia busied herself with the kinetoscope, filming the results of today's experiment.
Ready circuit two," Rabelais said, and the switches were thrown, one after the other, until the last slid home, and the effect began to pulsate, a hot, liquid star wobbling within the containment ring. The humming now shook the room, a throbbing shake to the air, almost physical. Hypatia, watching through the viewfinder, found the sensation...distracting. It was almost like the anti-hysteria devices the doctors used, before the home models could discretely be delivered to relieve the suffering of women everywhere.
Don't think about that snake now! She remonstrated with herself. The throbbing seemed to center on her sex, giving her a feeling of lethargy and excitement she'd felt whenever he...not another thought! She concentrated on the process at hand, making notes on the typewriter as she expounded on the impressions she saw before her. She watched the control settings recorder print out the columns of numbers the settings and effects generated second by second.
She looked over momentarily at Charles, quickly popping in a new valve to replace a blown circuit. In his haste, he saw him grab the wrong tube. It would not have the same control as the necessary one, and in fact, would convert the whole apparatus into an amplifier. Rabelais was watching from a few feet away, not seeing what their assistant was doing. She raised a hand to get his attention, but it was too late.
The pins struck home in the mounting, and the experiment increased in fury, the throbbing increasing. She felt...she felt...she felt good. Her hips were warring against her, the emptiness was back, and she wanted...she knew what she wanted, if only Jonathan...
An explosion of blue light flared through the room, filling the windows with a radiance that flashed through the windows high above, causing heads to turn around the complex of brick buildings. A tremor quaked the earth nearby, as worried guards and scientists rushed towards the lab, fearing what might be found in what was obviously an experiment gone wrong.
Reaching the metal door to the lab, they cursed as they found it welded shut to the frame. A quick line of concerned people wound down through the supply room, to come in the back way. What they found was desolation, magnificent, and terrible. Dr. Rabelais was sprawled a good twenty feet behind the main controls, while Charles was nowhere to be seen. A man-sized hole in the wall was the most likely place to look, but there was only a charred confusion of bricks and clothing.
One of the men, his mutton-chopped whiskers fluttering against the afterglow, looked around. "There was a third scientist here, a Mistress of Science. Fullerton, Fuller..."
