A Wrongful Death by Kate Wilhelm Page B

have a meeting, and Dad agreed and flew up to Portland. Next thing, he was working with Diedricks on a prosthetic knee or something. For the next five years they worked together. My mother moved to Portland to be with him, and Rita and I stayed behind to finish school. She was still in high school and I was going after my Ph.D. I sort of took charge of her and we both accepted that. Then, thirteen years ago Diedricks crashed his plane and it was touch and go for him for a couple of years. It left him blind and partially paralyzed."
    He turned to gaze out the window. "I don't know what they were thinking of during those years they worked together. No contract, no written agreement, nothing except two driven men doing the work they both loved. After the crash Dad tried to see Diedricks and couldn't. Intensive care, no visitors allowed. Dad wasn't allowed in the house where they had done a lot of their work, and at the plant, where the main R&D is still done, his workspace had been cleared out over one weekend. He had nothing to show for the previous five years. He finally saw an attorney, and that started two years of hell for him."
    He looked directly at her and said slowly, "They robbed him, Ms. Holloway, and he couldn't prove a thing. He could replicate some of the work they had done together, but the attorneys said so could anyone else familiar with the field. It wasn't enough. He made some sketches of ongoing work, and they were called pie-in-the-sky fantasies, science fiction stuff. They ridiculed him at the hearings, said he should go back to playing with his robots, try to get work in the movies making science fiction horror films. And so on. Then a new patent was granted and it had Joe Kurtz's name as well as Diedricks's name, and that probably was the tipping point for Dad. He always said Joe Kurtz was not a scientist, he was a hack, a second-rate thinker, laughed at behind his back by the real developers and researchers. They all revered Diedricks and understood that Kurtz was vice president of R&D only because he had married the boss's daughter. They pretty much ignored him. Anyway, Dad lost the first trial and wanted to start an appeals process. His attorneys tried to talk him out of it and told him how much it was likely to cost and he fired them and started over with a new bunch. Six months later he was broke, and he had a nervous breakdown."
    "After Diedricks began to recover, didn't he intervene, make a statement or anything?"
    "Nothing. For a couple of years I guess he couldn't, and later— I don't know why not. He and Dad formed an instant friend-ship, a bond. They understood each other perfectly from the first meeting, and Dad always said that was a first for them both, to find someone else that compatible with the same work. I don't know why Diedricks didn't take a stand in the matter. That was one of the things I wanted to talk to Elizabeth Kurtz about."
    He looked out the window again. "It's turning into snow."
    Big oversized flakes were falling, and staying where they fell. "Time to get on the road," Barbara said.
    "One more thing," Knowlton said. "Something Elizabeth Kurtz said, that someone might be watching you. Someone followed Rita and me when we left the restaurant that day. She spotted him first and I thought she was just being paranoid, more conspiracy theory stuff, which she's pretty much into. But I looked and after I dropped her off and headed for my house, I saw that same car again. It was pretty foggy and he was staying in close. There's no other way to explain why another car would have gone to her apartment on Tenth near Jackson, then turn to head out to the Santa Clara area where I live. She was right. We were followed when we left you last week."
    Chapter 11
    Barbara sat in traffic at a red light near the corner of Sixth and High and watched, holding her breath, as a car started to turn onto Sixth, began a tortuously slow sideways slide and pulled out of it less that a foot from the car