Disclaimer etc, see Chapter 1
NET KNOTS
Chapter 4
Dean digested this reply for several seconds, then a few seconds more. He was aware of a burgeoning stress headache tightening across his forehead. Dean knew he was probably one of the few people in the world who saw more reality than absurdity in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland; there were many occasions in his life, and right now was definitely one, when it would not have surprised Dean in the slightest to have a giant white rabbit suddenly bound across the scene bearing a giant pocket watch, wearing a constipated expression of anxiety and declaring agitatedly, "I'm late! I'm late, for a very important date!"
"Of course," this time the sarcasm in his voice would have sliced diamonds in half.
Sam sighed again, "I'm serious, Dean."
"And I'm seriously struggling not to beat you to a bloody pulp with the nearest heavy object." Dean ground out. "So cut the cryptic and talk me out of it, fast."
"Fine," Sam snapped. "It goes like this. The Chinese invented the printing press two millennia ago. Western civilisation had to wait 15 hundred years until William Caxton came up with the idea. Irish, Welsh and Scandinavian seafarers founded colonies in America 15 hundred years before Chris Columbus got the notion. Leonardo da Vinci invented heavier than air flying machines five centuries before the Wright Brothers. An Englishman named Lord Henry Cavendish was one of the most brilliant scientists of his day, but suffered extreme agoraphobia. When he died forty years later it was found that he had independently discovered or anticipated dozens of scientific advances others got the credit for…With me so far?"
"I'm about to go and get the tyre iron from the Impala, Sam." Dean warned in that quiet, careful voice that warned he really, really was not fooling around. "If you have any point to make, I suggest –"
"That is my point, Dean." Sam leaned forward earnestly. "Don't you see? Sometimes it took years, sometimes centuries, sometimes millennia, but eventually, someone always followed those that went before."
The words seemed to hang in the air in front of Dean's face. His ire lessened a tiny notch as deep in his brain he began to see a faint glimmer.
Sam let the pause hang, allowing the words to rearrange themselves in his brother's cerebellum. Dean was smarter than anyone Sam knew – his IQ probably even outstripped Sam's own. Dean had never gone to college or taken his SATs and GED, not through inability, but lack of time and interest. Sam's intelligence was an academic intelligence, one that absorbed the printed page, but Dean's was a practical intelligence – not dumber, just different. Sam knew Dean – give him Philosophy's 100 Essential Thinkers and his eyes would glaze over. Give him twenty minutes to come up with a practical way of preventing the asteroid obliterating all life on Earth and he'd do it in ten. Sam was good with abstract concepts; Dean was good at turning those structures of light and fancy in solidly tangible and cool stuff that seriously kicked ass.
He paused long enough to let Dean's prodigious intellect sink its teeth deep into the idea he had just tossed to it like a juicy steak, and went on, "The plane demon was the most dangerous thing we've ever faced because it used its initiative. A demon wants death and destruction for its own sake, but that particular demon managed to think outside the box. You said it yourself, Dean –"
"A demon that's moved with the times and found a way to ratchet up the body count," Dean reiterated his own words softly.
"Yeah, and where one has gone, others will eventually follow." Sam emphasised. "It might take years, it might take centuries, but eventually another supernatural son of a bitch will do what that one did and have another Original Thought."
Continued in Chapter 5…
© 2006, Catherine D. Stewart