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you,” he said, stepping through the door behind her.
    “Dr. Frankenstein didn’t have to worry about equipment bills,” she cautioned, eyeing his large frame. Bulls and china shops came to mind. “You will be careful, won’t you?”
    “You won’t even know I was—ow.”
    Melanie turned, cringing as she watched Chris rubbing his elbow. He’d bumped into one of the black connectivity boxes, half-hidden in the room’s dim shadows. “Watch out! That box is irreplaceable.”
    “And I suppose my elbow isn’t,” Chris replied, shaking out the quick pain. “I think I hit my funny bone.”
    Against her will, Melanie smiled. There was something endearing about the way he nursed that elbow, reduced momentarily from composed adult to vulnerable child. She imagined him as a little boy, presenting a scraped elbow or knee to his mother for mending. A little rascal. Her smile deepened, and she held out her hand. “Here. I’ll guide you through.”
    Almost instantly she regretted her offer. His warm, strong fingers curled around her own, sending an electric tingle up her arm. Enough of that, she thought, putting a scientific damper on the feeling. With studied discipline she counterfeited self-control and led him to the central table.
    The monitor and keyboard looked deceptively ordinary. Chris turned to her, his voice fighting to keep out the disappointment written on his brow. “Is this it?”
    Melanie couldn’t blame him for his doubt. Einstein’s looks were not his best feature. She’d built him out of secondhand parts gleaned from discount and bargain sales, trying to make her limited dollars stretch as far as possible. But what he lacked inlooks, he more than made up for in function. Smiling confidently, she waved Chris toward the monitor screen on the table. “Say something.”
    Chris continued his skeptical perusal of Einstein’s jumbled circuitry, but he stepped up to the keyboard all the same. He started to type, but Melanie stopped him.
    “No.
Say
something.” She pointed to the small antenna dish. “This audio pickup is linked to a digital modem. It decodes sound waves into discrete units, like a telephone does.”
    “He’s listening to us now?”
    “Every word.”
    Chris ran his hand lightly, almost reverently over the top of the monitor. Melanie shivered, feeling as if he were touching her. She recalled the feel of his hand on her arm, the burning sensation that lingered despite her repeated attempts to block it from her memory. Unconsciously she brushed her fingers across her arm, mirroring his movements. “Go ahead. Talk to him.”
    “What do I say?”
    She smiled. “Oh, nothing special. Just whatever you’d normally say to an intelligence who knows a hundred times as much as you and thinks a thousand times faster.”
    “Big help you are,” he said, flashing a grin that cut straight to her heart. “Well, here goes nothing. Er … hello, Einstein.”
    No second prompting was needed. The monitor screen blossomed to life, displaying a colorful backdrop overlaid by a line of crimson lettering.
Hey, dude
, it read.
What’s shaking?
    “Hey,” Chris said, laughing. “A jive computer.”
    Another series of words formed on the screen.
“Jive” went out with skin clothes and clubs
, read the screen.
Who’s the dinosaur?
    “Dinosaur—?” Chris began, but Melanie interrupted.
    “E, be nice. You know perfectly well who he is. You let Mr. Sheffield in. The least you can do is be civil to him.”
    You weren’t
, Einstein reasoned.
    Melanie ignored Chris’s muffled laughter. “That’s not the point. The fact remains, you let him in. Against my wishes, I might add.”
    If Einstein felt any remorse over his disobedience, he failed to show it.
Natch, babe. You heard his offer but reached illogical conclusion. Just correcting oversight.
    “It wasn’t an oversight,” she replied hotly. “It was my opinion. You should’ve respected it.”
    Did respect. Then corrected.
    This time Chris