"Oh," Remo said.
"By the way," said the girl standing next to Dr. Quake, "who are you?"
"Name's Remo. Remo Blomberg." He tried to force his eyes to her face, tried to meet her eyes, tried desperately to look at something beside her breasts.
He was not successful. If he had been, he would have seen surprise. Instead, he saw only bosom. The girl next to Remo moved even closer to him, then put her hand on the back of his chair. She was only a bite away, throbbing and pulsating with each heart beat and breath.
"What are your names?" Remo said.
"I'm sorry," Doctor Quake said. "These are my two daughters. They assist me. This is Jacki and that's Jill."
Remo looked up at the girl next to him and caught her eyes past the edge of her bosom.
"Jacki and Jill," he said. "That's cutesy poo."
The girl leaned down close to his ear. "Would it be cutesy-poo if I grabbed you and squeezed?" she whispered.
"No," Remo said. "That would be a no-no. Or, maybe a no-no no-no," he said, recalculating his arithmetic.
"They're identical twins," Doctor Quake said, belatedly and unnecessarily.
Remo nodded, then to the girl at his side, he said softly: "You're not really identical."
"No?"
"No. I make you out to be a 42-D. I figure she's only a 41%."
"Mother always liked me best," Jill said, then added, "I didn't think you'd notice."
"Yeah. And if you put me in the Sistine Chapel, I wouldn't look at the ceiling."
"A lot of men don't. In California, anyway. You know how they are. I thought maybe you."
"Don't let the sailor suit fool you," Remo said. Then louder, "What is it you do here?"
Remo had addressed the question to Quake, but the scientist's head was turned, looking over toward the corner from which the steady thumping sound came.
Remo repeated the question, this time to the girls. "What is it you do here?"
"If you can stand up without embarrassing yourself," said 41DD at Doctor Quake's shoulder, "we'll show you."
Inhale. Heavy on the oxygen. Drain blood out of the groin. Flood the lungs, the brain. Think of fields of daises . . . daisies. It took Remo a split second and he was able to stand almost straight up.
"The power of negative thinking," he pronounced. Then Jill, standing next to him, put her hand on the small of his back.
Remo sat down again. "On second thought, why don't you tell me about it while I sit here? I'm rather comfortable."
He crossed his legs awkwardly.
"Don't be embarrassed," Jill said, whispering hotly in his ear. "We do that to people sometimes." Her hot breath didn't help. Neither did her left breast laying heavily on his shoulder.
"You're like a pornographer's daydream," Remo said. "Go ahead. I'll give you a head start."
Jill walked away from Remo to the far corner of the room where the machine thumped away. Carefully and with great effort, Remo arose and followed her. Jacki's eyes played with Remo as he passed her, and then she followed him. Doctor Quake brought up the rear.
"This is daddy's invention. The way we're going to make the world earthquake proof," Jill said, pointing to the machine on the table. It was the size and shape of a five-gallon gas can and was painted bright blue.
"What is it?" Remo asked.
"Well, you could call it a water laser."
"A water laser?" Remo's mind shuffled through the one percent of the geology book that he still remembered.
Then, "I never heard of such a thing."
"Of course not. It's still experimental." Jacki's voice came from over Remo's shoulder.
"What does it do?"
Jill answered. "You've seen light lasers, which intensify the power of light by amplifying their waves. You know. Lasers can cut stone and metal. Even diamonds. Well, the professor has done the same thing with water. Water flows in a wave pattern, crests and troughs. Doctor Quake has smoothed out the waves, so that the force is steady-no pulsations and no vibration. This machine will be able to focus a flow of water into a stream of tremendous power."
"What has that got to do with earthquakes?" Remo asked, forgetting Jill's boobs for the moment.
Dr. Quake spoke up, in that funereal, words-of-God voice. "The San Andreas fault is six hundred miles long, Mr. Blomberg. Every mile along the fault, we have drilled and dropped shafts. These shafts are loaded with sensors-to measure heat, pressure and other things, too-and their readings are recorded back on the computer in the other room.
"With constant monitoring, we can tell when the pressure on one side of the fault is building higher than the pressure on the other side. That's the pressure that creates an earthquake as nature tries to equalize the pressure."
He stopped as if he had answered Remo's question.
"Yes," Remo said. "But what does this machine have to do with earthquakes?"
"Oh, yes. The water-laser. Well, by hooking this device up to those shafts before the pressure reaches a critical point, we could pour water pressure down into the fault. The tremendous power of the water surge will literally force the rock apart, with only a modest tremor. But it relieves the pressure instantly and can prevent a major earthquake."
"If it works," Remo said, "That's a great invention."
"Oh, it works," said Jacki, standing alongside Dr. Quake.
"Can you convince your idiotic government that they should assist us with our research? No," she hissed. "They'd rather be building bombs and spending billions to mess up people's lives in Asia. And the Professor has had to struggle along without funds."
"Without funds?" Remo said. "Somebody built the building. Somebody pays your salaries."
Jill interrupted. "Friends," she said. "Donations from people and foundations that understand the importance of our work. Without them, we never would have gotten this far."
"How far?"
"Far enough to test the device," Jill said. "And it works. At least, theoretically. What we have to do now is to improve our water-laser. Its power and its endurance." She thumped her hand on the side of the blue metal pump. As she hit it, her breasts jiggled under her thin tee shirt.