Read Online Not Quite an Angel by Bobby Hutchinson - Free Book Online

Delilah all about myself and my purpose when the time is right.”
    â€œYeah, sure you will,” he jeered. “The fact is, there’s nothing about you that anybody should trust. You see, Sameh—” he injected the faintest hint of threat into his tone “—nothing about you adds up. Your ID is as phony as all those so-called references you supplied to Elite Personnel. There are no records anywhere —” he underlined the word “—of Sameh Smith before April of this year.” He waited a long moment and added in a deceptively soft tone, “So now, since you suggested it, I’m asking, lady. Who are you, where do you come from and exactly what are you doing working for Delilah McDonell?”
    He was pretty sure he’d get some kind of phony run-around, but at least it might get her off the offensive for a while, and even provide a few clues he and Bernie could follow up on. He hoped.
    She seemed to relax and settle deeper into the leather seat. “My name is Sameh Smith, at least until I earn my new one—we get to choose when we qualify as Adepts. I was born in the year 2470. I have three dec…I’m thirty years old.” Her deep, calm voice, with its rich undertones of sensuousness, rhymed it all off casually enough. “My tutors sent me back here to do a research paper on Delilah McDonell because she’s an important historical figure in our era.”
    Adam laughed, a harsh bark of sound. “And I’m Luke Skywalker. Welcome to the twilight zone.”
    She ignored him. “I grew up on an agrofarm in the Western parameter. My father was an analog scientist, and my mother ran the baby nursery. There was—” her voice faltered for an instant “—there was an accident when I was sixteen. My parents left the earth plane, and I went to live with my great-grandmother.”
    Adam decided to humor her. If she wanted to play science fiction, what the hell. He’d seen a few sci-fi movies himself. “Why a great-grandmother? Why not just one of your ordinary garden variety first generation grandmas?”
    â€œBecause we’re matriarchal. And my mother’s mother chose to emigrate to Balille, back when we were colonizing the asteroids. She invited me to come to her there, but I didn’t want to leave Earth, and anyway, Great-Grandmother Kendra had always taken a special interest in me.”
    Adam struggled to quell a sinking feeling in his gut. Sameh was so earnest about this bullshit. Maybe a dose of cold, hard reality would help snap her out of it. “She must have been pretty old and feeble by that time, this Kendra. To take on a sixteen-year-old kid when she was already a great-grandmother herself. Let’s see, on the average that would make her about—” he calculated quickly “—seventy, at the very least.”
    Sameh smiled and nodded. “She was over ten decades, actually, but that’s very little. She’s an Adept. In theory she could have as many decades as she wanted. She’s only now in her prime at one hundred twenty years. See, our lifespans are much longer than yours are now, and of course the Adepts live even longer than average because of their emphasis on meditation and diet. We learned to arrest the aging process just after the millennium, and of course we don’t have most of the problems with disease you still have here in the nineties. We have illness, but we manage it differently.”
    â€œThat’s real handy.” All of a sudden he was fed up with all of it. He felt sick inside, because it had dawned on him during the past few minutes that he might be dealing with a real, honest-to-God loony here. She was seriously deranged, no doubt about it. Probably spent those missing years sitting in some library reading H. G. Wells.
    And why did she have to be so damned gorgeous? Why did just listening to that smoky voice rhyming off all this wacky crap make