Diablo Mesa(41)

“I know. But when you get excited about something…” Nora was already sorry she’d brought it up, but she soldiered on anyway. “You forget about that protective shroud. It drops away.”

“I don’t follow,” Tappan said.

“Like after you’d spent all that time in Quonset One with Greg. You started explaining superheavy elements and the island of stability with almost as much familiarity as if you were a physicist yourself.” She paused. “What I mean is, you seem to know a lot more about physics than you let on.”

Tappan digested this. “I do?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” He took a sip of his martini. “Busted.”

Nora waited until, finally, it was Tappan’s turn to sigh. “It’s true—I’m a physics geek. Astrophysics, actually.”

“I figured you didn’t become a billionaire inventor out of ignorance. But why the act?”

“It’s not an act,” Tappan replied quickly, and for a moment Nora thought she’d gone too far. But he simply drained his martini and chuckled. “There are two reasons, really. The first is I’ve learned from experience to hire the best people, give them a nudge or reorient them from time to time, but let them do the talking…and the heavy thinking. If I strut my own knowledge, it just hinders them, intimidates them.”

Nora nodded. This made sense. “And the second?”

“That’s more complicated.” Tappan looked at her glass, hesitated, then rose and made himself another martini—one more, she recalled, than he usually allowed himself. When he sat down again, his face had grown introspective. “You know the old story of the poor working-class parent who toils night and day so their kid can become a doctor or a lawyer…but all the kid wants to do is paint or write sonnets?”

“Of course. Sounds like the life story of most Victorian novelists.”

“Well, that’s my story, too…except in reverse. My father taught English at a community college in South Dakota. He lived and breathed literature and had dreams of being a writer. He’d struggled all his adolescent life to escape the family farm so he could write and teach. His leaving the farm enraged his father, but he did it anyway. But here’s the tragedy: writing eluded him.” Tappan paused, expression still introspective. “He always wanted to write that perfect, jewel-like novel. Like the fellow in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: a book full of ‘sensitive, intensely felt’ prose. But he just didn’t have it in him. So the mantle of famous family novelist fell upon me, his firstborn. The problem was, I was much happier fixing a tractor, or lying in the barnyard at night watching for shooting stars or learning the constellations or figuring out how a windmill worked. I had little interest in books.”

He chuckled again, but this time rather mirthlessly. “My dad—when he wasn’t busy teaching class or tearing up drafts of his novel—did everything he could to make me fall in love with literature. He tossed me books by Robert Louis Stevenson and H. G. Wells. Even offered me candy bars to finish them.” He shifted on the couch. “It was around that time my mom left home, moved in with her in-laws on what was left of the farm.”

Nora thought it best not to overtly sympathize. “So, did you? Finish the books, I mean?”

“Sure. I read them. But after a while, the page-to-candy-bar ratio began to feel onerous. The irony was that I did like books: books with numbers in them, such as my algebra and geometry texts. I liked Jules Verne, too, but only for the science and imagination. I tried building a submarine out of two ancient canoes lashed thwart to thwart. Almost incinerated myself improvising a two-stage rocket. I built a radio dish and tried to pick up radio waves from distant star systems. My dad was aware of the irony, of course. Instead of writing short stories, I was tinkering with mechanical stuff. So he just kept writing and rewriting that novel, and he started drinking while doing it. In time, his own failed dreams became…well, my fault. That’s when his frustrations started getting physical.”

“Jesus,” Nora murmured.

Tappan shrugged this away. “So I followed my mom back to my grandparents’ farm. With me there to help, the farm started to come back. And my juvenile studies went from algebra to electrodynamics, and mechanical engineering to radio telescopes, black holes, and cosmology. But I never lost my curiosity about the farm’s windmill. Over time, I was able to make it generate more than five kilowatts of power. This was in the early nineties, after the government passed the PTC measure.”

“The what?”

“A corporate tax credit for renewable electrical sources. It made wind turbines interesting. But they were big, and they were loud. All my tinkering with our old windmill, combined with what I’d learned about mechanical engineering, had given me ideas for a new kind of direct-drive generator. It could shrink a gearbox, allow for slower rotational speeds—and make the whole mechanism quieter. It was my grandfather who suggested I apply for a patent.”

And he picked up his martini.

“And?” Nora asked.

“That little idea was the start of everything. At first it just provided seed money. Now sixty percent of the wind turbines out there use my patent, much improved, of course. And my childhood interest in rockets resulted in building an equally efficient vehicle for satellite launches.” He took a sip. “But deep in my limbic brain, I feel guilty for not being a poet. My dad beat that much into me, at least. So keeping my scientific knowledge to myself became habitual.”