“Not really.” He shrugged. “I was a little short, and he wasn’t returning my calls. So I stopped by. Anyway, he left me cooling my heels while he talked on the phone, so I wandered around and noticed he’d left a couple of lamps burning here and there around the house. It being noon and all, and me being a good, ecologically minded son”—he grinned here, but Alicia wouldn’t respond and Jack only stared at him—”I, uh, went to turn them off. But as I did, I noticed these little wires sticking up from the bases of their bulb sockets. I looked closer and realized that the damn lamps weren’t plugged in. What was powering the bulbs? Had Dad developed some sort of battery-powered lamp? Out of curiosity, I began to tinker with one. By the time he finished his conference call, I’d figured it out.”

“I’ll bet he was thrilled,” Alicia said.

“Hardly the word for it. Royally pissed was more like it. He started kicking me out, but then changed his mind. That mystified me then, but I understood why later. Dad wouldn’t tell me anything about the technology itself, but he did explain why he didn’t want word to get out about it just yet. You see, his invention isn’t completely his. It utilizes a number of discoveries he made and technologies he developed while working for various universities and corporations over the years. Those organizations hold the patents on those technologies. They’d claim the lion’s share—or possibly all—of the profits from his invention. So what he was doing was searching for a way to maintain ownership once he revealed it. He leant me the money I needed on the condition I kept mum.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the other way around, Alicia thought. You promising to keep mum in exchange for cash.

“But I thought Dad’s thinking was backward. If patent disputes were going to get in the way, he should come up with a way to make all those patents irrelevant. If going public with it meant losing all your profits, then find a way to profit from not bringing it to market. So I started asking myself: who stands to lose the most from broadcast power? And that gave me my answer: Sell the technology to OPEC.”

His head swiveled back and forth, looking for approval. Alicia wasn’t going to give him any, and Jack’s face might as well have been cast in bronze.