Smarter (an Ell Donsaii story #2) (15 page)

“I’ve resigned.”

“Oh!” He paused, then said somberly, “I’m so sorry to hear that. Well, come on up tomorrow or the next day. You can tell me about it and we’ll put your prototype through the mill here in the lab.”

“OK, I’ll make a reservation and let you know.”

Once she had plane reservations for the morning and had notified Smythe, Ell sat back, realizing that she felt immensely better and more relaxed, even though she was concerned about the cost of flying to Boston. Johnson’s constant harassment must have been stressing her more than she thought.  Allan said, “You have a call from Roger Emmerit.”

Ell felt a little glow at that, and took the call. “Roger, how you holding up without me to reorient your polarizer?”

He sounded depressed, “OK, I guess Ellen, but we all miss having you around. Are you OK?”

“Oh yeah! I feel great just getting away from Johnson. Sorry that you’re still under his thumb.”

“We’re wondering if we can buy you dinner, now that you have no visible means of support?”

“Sure! A girl’s gotta eat you know.”

“Meet us at That’s Amore?”

“When?”

“Now.”

When Ell walked into Amore she saw Roger, Emma and James sitting forlornly at a table in the corner. “Hey guys.”

“Hey.” They said together, sounding as if they were attending a funeral.

“You guys this depressed just because you miss my scintillating company?”

Emma said, “Ell, don’t make light of it. The guys told me about the row you had with Johnson. He’s a vindictive SOB and will destroy your career. I think you should talk to Dr. Sponchesi. He’s really nice.”

James put a hand on hers, “You really should consider putting your tail between your legs and apologizing to Johnson. He ruined another grad’s career a few years back after they got in a lot less of a fight than this one.”

Ell looked around at their long faces, “I’m gonna be OK, believe it or not. I really am.” Their waiter came to take an order then, defusing the moment and they managed to share a large pizza without any more dramatic conversation. They even got a few laughs in, Roger being particularly tickled about the look on Johnson’s face when Ellen called him a “tyrant and a bully.” He snorted, “Then you should have seen him rampaging through your stuff back in the lab. He took pictures of your setup from every angle, then cussed at it while disassembling and reassembling parts of it. When I left he was still in full storm mode. I hope you didn’t have any design files on the department computer system. I’m pretty sure he spent some time looking in your folders there too.”

“No, everything to do with that project has been stored solely on my AI ever since he told me I could only work on it nights and weekends.” Ell worried a little about the design files for her prototypes which would be stored on the department’s server. Even though she’d modified them to be nonfunctional without the solder bridges, she worried that they might give clues.

After a while they broke up, Ell agreeing to meet Emma for their run in the morning and to join James for pool sometime at West 87. Roger walked her home and shortly into their walk Ell was pleased to find that Roger had managed to slip her hand into his again. At her apartment complex he turned and gave her a hug. She again had mixed feelings of relief that he wasn’t trying to come up to her apartment and disappointment that he wasn’t… Roger held the hug for a bit, and then whispered in her ear, “If you ever need anything. Just let me know. I’d surely like to remain your friend.” He leaned his head back to look into her eyes.

Ell found she had a frog in her throat. She nodded, momentarily unable to speak, then managed to croak, “Always, my good friend. Always.” She cleared her throat, “We’ll see each other some more, don’t you worry.” She was touched to see his eyes shimmering a bit.

Roger leaned his head back beside hers, afraid she’d see his watery eyes and wondering if he dared try to kiss her. He started to pull his head back to give it a try. At the last moment he chickened out, gave her a squeeze and pecked her on the cheek, then turned quickly to head back down the street.

Ell watched Roger walk away, hands jammed in his pockets. She wondered if she was destined to remain un-kissed forever? She was eighteen for goodness sakes! Shouldn’t she have some kind of a love life? She trudged upstairs. As she arrived in her apartment, Allan said, “You have a call from your mother.”

“Put her on.” Then trying to put some pep in her voice she brightly said, “Hi, Mom.”

There was a moment of silence, then Ell realized her mother was sobbing. “Hi, Ell. I’m so sorry.” Ell heard her choke.

“Oh no. What’s happened? Is it Gram?” Her grandmother’s health wasn’t the greatest.

“No, no. We’re all OK. It’s that SOB Jake. He’s tied up all of the little bit of money in my accounts and of course I have no access to our joint accounts. The divorce attorney is costing a fortune and, with your Gram living on a fixed income, I really hate to ask her. Now my car broke down and the attorney is demanding some cash up front because he’s not sure we’ll be able to get much out of Jake in the divorce settlement. It’s humiliating to ask my daughter but I thought I’d see what your current financial situation is? Would you be able to loan me several thousand dollars?”

Ell felt like her world was crashing in. So many problems at once. “Oh, Mom! That’s terrible. Right now I could loan you that much and then re-up with the Air Force. But, I’d be broke then and have no income. I just quit here at NCSU.”

“You did? Why?”

Ell gave her a brief synopsis.

“But you think this ‘invention’ will bring in some money?”

“Well, I hope so, but it will be a while. And I probably need to take out loans to apply for patents and I don’t know what else. I’ll get to work applying for some kind of loan immediately.”

Her mother came back, sounding like she’d gained some resolve. “No! Don’t do that yet. I’ll ask your Gram about the state of her savings. If she’s got any cushion at all, I know she’ll help me so that you can try to make a success out of your invention.”

They spoke a few more minutes about what a jerk Jake was. After they hung up, Ell pondered with some surprise how quickly her mother had trusted her about the ‘invention.’ She thought most parents would have serious doubts about the likelihood of their child inventing anything successful.

Ell, traveling as “Ellen” got out of the autotaxi in front of the Physics building at MIT and made her way into the lobby. Before she went upstairs Ell checked with FedEx to determine the location of her package and learned that it had arrived in Perth. She took a deep breath, if the transmission from one PGR to the other was at the speed of light there should be about a 43 millisecond difference between the readings due to the 8,000 or so miles between them that the signal had to travel. Obviously if the transmission was instantaneous like her theory predicted, the difference would be zero.

To her astonishment it showed a difference of 31 nanoseconds!
Far
less delay than the 43 millisecond delay you would expect with light speed transmission, but not instantaneous either. Her existing theory didn’t have room for an intermediate result. She sighed and wondered if there could be a problem with the clocks? They were supposed to be far more accurate than that! Could temperature changes or vibrations during the flight have affected them? She pondered a few minutes then decided that she couldn’t think of anyway to evaluate the discrepancy.

Oh well, she’d still transmitted through the diameter of the earth using only the 5 volt USB power supply from the clock, which was a pretty astonishing accomplishment by itself. It would just take more work to determine the actual speed of transmission.

Ell went upstairs to Dr. Smythe’s lab. When she peered in she saw a bearded young man leaning back with his feet up on a desk and head cradled back in his hands, staring up at the ceiling. She gently knocked on the jamb of the open door but there was no reaction. She knocked a little louder and he sighed, and turned his head to her without moving the rest of his body, “Yes?” His tone wasn’t exactly surly, but it was obvious that he wasn’t happy.

“Hi, I’m Ellen Symonds, Dr. Smythe is expecting me?”

He lifted an eyebrow, “Who?”

“Ellen Symonds.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure that I’m Ellen Symonds? Or that he’s expecting me?”

The young man just lifted an eyebrow again.

“Never mind. Allan, please let Dr. Smythe know I’m here at his lab.”

The young man dropped his feet to the floor and frowned at her. They stared at each other for a few minutes, then Dr. Smythe came around the corner and walked past Ell into the lab. He looked around a moment in the lab then turned back to, Ell. A big grin quirked up at the corner of his mouth. “Oops! You must be Ellen?”

“Yes sir.”

“I’ll be damned!” His grin got even bigger as he looked her disguise up and down. “Come in! Come in! I’ve set up some stuff over here.” Smythe moved quickly over to a cluttered table along a side wall. “I assume you’ve met Kevin here?”

“Not by name, but we spoke.” She glanced at the young man. His brows were up.

“Kevin Lamont, grad student. Don’t let his impenetrable affect fool you, he’s actually fairly intelligent.” Smythe threw another grin over his shoulder. “Let me see your prototypes.”

Ell pulled the pair she’d brought for this out of her pocket and handed them over. She heard Kevin get up and curiously move over to their side of the lab.

Smythe looked at the prototypes, “Ah, nice! USB 5.0 I assume, powered from the port?”

“Yes sir.”

“Very good, very good.” He plugged one of the PGRs into a jack on his AI and the other into a small stereo player device. He tilted his head a moment, looking mildly surprised.

Kevin reached out and touched the power switch on the stereo and the sound of Dolby’s, “She Blinded Me with Science” emanated from it. Kevin said, “Professor, you listen to the damndest stuff!”

Smythe washed his hands together excitedly. Kevin said, “What is it, some kind of micro transmitter for USB signals? There are quite a few commercial models available…”

Smythe picked up a Faraday cage and dropped it over the stereo. The sound continued. “Can they transmit through a Faraday cage?”

Kevin looked puzzled, “Maybe? If the signal is strong enough or uses a frequency that can bounce up through the bottom of the cage?”

Smythe grinned, “Metal table, my man, metal table.”

“Hard to believe it has enough power off USB to force a signal through. Is it using a really short wavelength?”

Smythe winked at Ell, “See, told you he wasn’t as dumb as he looks.”

Ell grinned back and shrugged, but didn’t say anything.

Smythe turned to Kevin, “Well man, let’s have some foil to wrap it in and see if we can block those short, short wavelengths.”

In a few minutes they had wrapped the Faraday cage in layers of foil but could still hear the muffled stereo playing.

Kevin said, “What the hell?”

Smythe clapped his hands together, “What the hell indeed! Let’s unwrap it.”

Shortly they had done their best to detect any electromagnetic radiation emanating from the PGR without success, Smythe exclaiming in delight after each test. Kevin suggested a few other tests which they carried out, as well as some that Smythe had prepared ahead of time. “Well Kevin, got any other ideas?”

“Take it apart?”

“Nope, not allowed. But you sit here and see if you can figure it out. You’re always telling the undergrads how smart you are. Let’s see you prove it.

“Elll-en,” Smythe said stumbling over her new name, “come with me to my office and let’s talk.”

In Smythe’s office he beamed at her. “Amazing!
Just
as awesome as you said. Have you tried to determine the speed of transmission yet?”

“Um, it has normal fiberoptic data transmission rates at present. It may be able to be pushed up, but I haven’t made any attempts as yet.”

“Well that’s fantastic, but I was asking, is it light speed?”

“I… I think it should be instantaneous, but I’ve got conflicting results.”

“Really? How?”

“Well I checked out a pair of picosecond accurate clocks and FedEx’ed one to Australia with a PGR attached to its output.”

“PGR?”

“That’s what I’m calling them, for photon-gluon resonance.”

“Oh, great idea! You’re not telling me that you transmitted a signal from Australia to here with a device powered on a five volt USB port are you?”

“Uh, yeah. Distance shouldn’t matter according to my equations and apparently it doesn’t, at least across the earth.”

“Fantastic! So what is the difference in the readings between the clocks?”

Ell reached into her bag and pulled out the PGR-clock. “At light speed there should be forty plus milliseconds difference. My theory would predict instantaneous transmission, but…” She set the PGR-clock in front of him, “You can see it’s reading 31 nanoseconds. Faster than light, but not instantaneous. I’m hoping that there’s something wrong with the clocks. I’ll have to wait until it comes back to know for sure.”

Smythe looked at the display, “Hmmm, Bert?” he said to his AI, “Show me Hafele and Keating’s experiment from back in the 1970s. He looked up at the screens of his AI. “Hah, just when I thought you were too smart by half, you miss something like this!”

“Like what?” Ell grinned crookedly at him. “Teach me, Yoda.”

“Yoda!” He cackled, “It is merely
relativity
, my dear Watson. The speed of the flight around the earth in a plane should have resulted in a small amount of time dilation partially offset by lower gravity up where the plane was flying.”

Ell smacked her palm on her forehead. “Of course! I bow to your wisdom sensei. I’ll try to calculate how much dilation should have occurred.”

“Hah, no need grasshopper. Hafele and Keating sent an atomic clock eastward all the way around the world all the way back in 1971 and it resulted in a 59 nanosecond loss, close enough to double the 31 nanoseconds you got from sending your clock half way around the world! Transmission must be instantaneous or damn close to it! Hah! Amazing!”