Steamrolled by Pauline Baird Jones Page B

gratifying, but begged the question, why he sweated now?
    He should quit staring, but it was difficult. Her head had tilted to the mathematically correct angle for kissing—how did he know that? He’d never calculated that angle. It wasn’t a difficult calculation, even for someone kissing challenged, but he’d had no contact with kissable girls before he went crazy. He realized Wynken, Blynken and Nod had ringed him, as if he was the center of a stadium and they were the audience. He also sensed cheerleaders urging him to go for it. Where had they learned about cheerleaders? There were no cheerleaders in his memories.
    If she’d been looking at him as hard as he looked at her, he might have gone for it. But she wasn’t. All her attention was on the steam engine.
    “That’s…different.” Emily wagged a finger toward the machine.
    Robert felt obliged to look, though neither he nor his nanites wanted to. The engine looked much like the drawings and old photographs he’d seen of steam engines. To power his machine, Twitchet had chosen—possibly because of space considerations—a small cross-drum type of water-tube boiler, commonly used in ships of the period. He ran the specifications and came up short on energy required to move the machine across a room. No way this engine could displace the machine across space. And time. But it had. How? Why? What had provided the boost? Robert had to get his vision oriented to the adaptations Twitchet had made, before he could follow the machine’s lines down to the heat source required for steam generation.
    Instead of any variation of a furnace, for coal or other heat source, there was a glowing red ball about the size of his fist. She was right. It was different. It appeared to be floating in the space where the furnace should be. That was different as well. He thought about asking the nanites why they hadn’t mentioned it, when he found it in the data stream they’d sent him, but they answered him before the thought fully formed.
    Like you, we sometimes have trouble sorting at what is most relevant. And this machine is particularly anti-technology.
    “I’d blame J.J. Abrams but even he couldn’t make a red ball appear in the 1890’s,” Emily muttered. “Though he’d hate knowing he wasn’t the first. Of course he wins on size.” She grinned.
    He grinned back before he had time to think, finding the movement less clunky than last time. It didn’t matter that he didn’t get the joke when she looked at him like that.
    Can you go in and identify substance?
    We tried a drone and it was incinerated.
    Good thing they were non-sentient, though they also weren’t an unlimited supply. He frowned. So the red ball was incinerator hot, which made sense since it was the heat source, but he felt only a small level of heat emanating from two feet away. That was also different. Despite the various thoughts sifting through his mind, he was unable to halt the question he shouldn’t ask. It was another giveaway. “J.J. Abrams?”
    Question marks popped into her eyes again. What would it take to get her to ask a question?
    “A geek who hasn’t seen Star Trek . I do not know what to say.”
    He knew what he’d like to do. Her brows rose towards her hairline, as if she’d picked up on his longing, but before she could react, Ric interrupted them again.
    “Prof? How’s it going in here?”
    “Professor.” The low beam smile curved her lips and formed attractive lines around her eyes. “Maybe I should reconsider the benefits of a higher education.”
    His thought processes broke into pieces, reforming into new patterns. Was she…could she be…flirting with him? Would someone like her flirt with someone like him? He could be misreading her. Her smile deepened and his thoughts split again. Perhaps it was a combination of her smile and the look in her eyes. Or a dampening effect from the nanites. Or the years in crazy. Had he considered girls before? Pondered their smiles,