Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (19 page)

“That depends on how you define forever.” Kirk had taken it upon himself to outfit the roof of Witmer for survival. He was intent on the staple gun attaching wire mesh to the plywood supported by a Unistrut frame, the green metal beams we used for experiments like an erector set.

“What are you building?”

“Chicken coop. We'll have eggs,” Kirk answered.

“Raising chickens here? What about salmonella?”

Kirk ignored me and squeezed another staple into the wood with a thunk.

“More important, where are we getting the chicks?” I asked.

“Biology department.”

I was glad to have a break from the pistons and cylinders and scribbling down rows of measurements on an engineering pad and clipboard. We had tried different liquids, alcohol, acetone, etc., and even tried igniting the gunpowder from the handgun shells in the piston. Nothing except fizzle.

After lunch, I followed him to the basement and through a metal floor grate into the steam tunnels. We crossed under the campus in candlelight, following insulated pipes in musty concrete passages. It was strange, maybe a bit liberating, when we broke into the basement of the biology building. We snuck to the second floor and found the incubators in a dark lab. I smashed down the locked door. Most of the chicks were dead. I felt sorry for the damp little fluffs of feathers, abandoned like this, but Kirk rescued the surviving ones. I carried the bags of birdfeed back through the tunnels.

*   *   *

M
ARCH
28
W
ITMER
B
ANDIT
L
AIR AND
C
AMPUS

Our criminal looting spree couldn't be stopped after that. We roamed through the tunnels, Kirk with his sword and me hefting the “universal key,” bolt cutters liberated from the machine shop in mechanical engineering. We grabbed drugs and antiseptics from the medical building. The diseased organs and fetuses in formaldehyde on display were creepy in the half darkness. The stench of something decomposing filled the basement and we left quickly. We hit Leonard Hall and scavenged the precious metals and gemstones from the geology displays. I don't know why that seemed like a good idea at the time, living out a role-playing fantasy, or maybe planning ahead. Kirk seemed fascinated with a gritty, twisted rock like a branching piece of sandy gingerroot. He said it was fulgurite, as if I should know, but I couldn't find it on the list of semiprecious gems in the DM guide.

When we broke into the Student Union, we ran into trouble. The first hint was that the potato chip rack outside the Subway had been ransacked. The roll-down metal gates had already been jimmied open. The second was the trio of young cops picking through the bookstore. None had stripes on their sleeves. The shortest one—I recognized his clipped voice from our previous encounter—threw aside a crumpled Doritos packet and shouted, “There! The one with the sword!”

The cops turned as a unit and hefted nightsticks with the funny handle on the side. They rushed toward us, yelling “Drop it!” and “Halt!”

Kirk and I ran without exchanging a word. We instinctively knew we were in the wrong, although the cops had been doing the exact same thing we had planned. A thrown nightstick, meant to trip one of us, clattered to the tiles behind me. We crashed into a dim stairwell as the heavy boot steps from our pursuit echoed in the deserted corridors. As we descended, I kicked open an emergency-exit-only door that led to the street. We continued into the service basement as doors slammed in the stairwell above.

“Just like high school!” Kirk laughed as we dropped into the pitch-black steam tunnel.

He had obviously gone through a different kind of school system. We hurried to our bandit lair by feel. Once inside Witmer, we tipped a heavy desk onto the steam tunnel cover in the basement. I stayed to reinforce our barricades while Kirk went upstairs to check on another of his pressure experiments. This time we rigged a gradual increase in compressive force using a massive hourglass fabricated from a water cooler jug that trickled sand onto the piston.

Still hopped up on adrenaline, I went to the main entrance, passing through the astronomy and Einstein displays in the sterile foyer. Previously, I had arranged desks into interlocking mounds like a Roman shield wall and bolted lengths of two inch Unistrut to reinforce the structures. Under cover of night, we had hauled in sandbags left over from the flood and then filled metal bookcases with them against the glass doors. I had been working on bracing everything in place by chipping into the cement floor and wedging the Unistrut to entirely overengineer the barricade.

The faint sound of smashing glass came from the second floor. I lifted the six-foot length of Unistrut that I had been fitting and dropped the hacksaw.

“Kirk?”

I knew better. He would be all the way upstairs tending the chicks or his experiment. I rushed up the single stairwell we—meaning me—had not heaped with obstacle furniture and bookcases. On the second floor landing I heard them in the department office. They must have come in from the south side of the building above the big lecture bowl, hidden from view. I eased past the secretary's station and peered into the short hallway lined with closed doors. We had left the faculty offices alone, mostly, half from respect and half from habit, but no professors had returned to campus from the fateful spring break.

The three cops from the Union stumbled out of Dr. Lykken's office, heaps of papers avalanched from overloaded shelves and desks. They wore black Kevlar helmets and struggled with clear riot shields in the tight quarters. They also reeked of alcohol. I had wondered what the police did with the booze confiscated from underage students.

“Kirk!” I shouted.

“He is big,” one officer said and lifted a long baton. They pushed forward. “Goddamn squatter.”

I lowered the strut and thrust it like a spear. The sharp edge I had just cut gouged into a shield and the impact rocked the cop backward. The other shields tried to bat my metal strut aside. I dipped the end under a swinging shield and thrust again at an exposed chest. The blunt end thumped into the soft torso of a cop. He collapsed, gasping. A baton struck downward on the strut and made a dull ringing. The bone-tingling vibration nearly made me drop my only weapon. The other cop lunged forward as I maneuvered out of the cramped office area. I caught a glancing blow on the side of my head and the hard plastic bouncing off my skull hurt like hell.

They covered their fallen comrade as he struggled to his feet. I repeatedly slammed the strut into the raised shields like a battering ram. The metal strut transferred a lot of momentum. They grunted in pain with each shock. The barrage of strikes kept them on defense and me outside the reach of their batons as I shuffle-stepped backward. One drew a machete. I was pretty sure that cops weren't allowed machetes.

“Kirk!” I yelled again.

I swiped the strut across the useless florescent light fixture overhead, knocking the plastic cover away. Two white tubes fell free and shattered over the cops in a faint dust of phosphors and glass shards. While they hesitated, I retreated to the department entrance and stood my ground. They'd be squeezed into a single doorway, while I now had room to swing.

One cop came through the door as I finished a wide swing with all my weight and muscle behind it. He lifted his riot shield, but I kneeled at the last instant. The whistling metal strut whacked him on his unguarded leg. The meaty pop of his dislocating joint made my own knee twinge in sympathy. He toppled and cried out. The other two, including the one with the machete, moved around him, muttering curses at me with murder in their eyes.

Kirk seemed to leap out of nowhere. He was beside me in the hallway with his katana tucked into his belt and shoulder tilted forward.

The machete cop lifted his blade with a yell. Before he could slice down, Kirk's sword was free of the scabbard with a hiss and in a single graceful sweep, sliced across the cop's forearm. Before the machete hit the floor, the last cop charged. I lifted the tip of the strut to catch the bottom of his riot shield, prying it up, and Kirk's blade slipped beneath. The police body armor couldn't stop the chisel tip of the katana and the blade parted Kevlar and sank four inches into his belly.

Blood welled out as Kirk withdrew the katana in a flourish. The cop made a retching sound as he doubled over and covered his stomach with his hand, hiding behind the clear shield. The cop with the busted knee had crawled into the office, shield and baton forgotten.

“Witmer is our territory. Don't mess with us and we won't mess with you.” Kirk glared through narrowed eyes and bared his teeth like a snarling cat.
“Comprende?”

“There's nothing here we'd want,” said the cop with the slashed arm.

His hand was curled against his side as he clamped on to his wound. He looked for a quick escape despite his bravado. “Just trash.”

Kirk whipped the sword up to his throat. The steel tip rested on the soft skin below his jaw leaving a smear of red. “See yourselves out the way you came.”

We followed as they dripped blood onto the carpet and hobbled into Lykken's demolished office. They crawled out the busted window.

“Asshole cops always pick on Mexicans,” Kirk said.

“Isn't Vandermeer Dutch?” I asked as we pulled up their ladder.

“Mom's side.” Kirk rubbed his moustache as he watched the rogue cops slowly cross the spotted brown lawn. “We probably should have killed them.”

That was the last time Kirk willingly left the building.

*   *   *

A
PRIL
5
W
ITMER
F
ORTRESS

I fitted bars over the windows with the last disassembled Unistrut, scrounged pipe fittings, and broken apart furniture. I made do with hand-powered drills and screws and clamps until my wrists and forearms ached. My sweat and labor had transformed Witmer into a fortress.

Kirk had found a gold leaf electroscope in an old box in one of the professors' offices. The electroscope was an old demonstration apparatus where two strips of very thin gold foil dangled inside a glass bottle attached to a protruding plate electrode. Rub a plastic rod with fabric and touch the electrode. Static charge would transfer to the gold foils and they'd repel each other. Honestly, not a very exciting demonstration, but when Kirk discovered the static charge still caused the gold foils to dance apart, he stole it away.

When I went to the pantry to find lunch, Kirk called me over to his desk. He was hunched over the electroscope and a small circuit board attached to a nine-volt battery. He consulted a Mouser Electronics catalog.

“The chicken room is getting rank,” I said. “When do we move the hens to the roof?”

“Do you mind clearing it out?” he asked, distracted. “Oh, you need to see this.”

I sighed. Kirk had sworn he would take care of the chickens, but that duty had fallen to me as he got obsessive about his discoveries.

“What? Batteries don't work, right?”

“Apparently batteries do work.”

“Okay . . . ?” I combed my fingers through my beard. It had come in orange-red and finally stopped itching.

Kirk had removed the plate electrode from the glass bottle, so the enclosed foils weren't connected to anything. He stacked three heavy lead bricks from the X-ray lab between the electroscope and the circuit. Then he connected the battery and stood back.

“So what is supposed to happen?” I asked.

“The light should glow.”

Kirk pointed at the circuit board where a small bulb poked out. It didn't glow. Then he pointed at the two foils on the other side of the bricks. They spread apart like golden butterfly wings.

“Whoa!”

“The electrons in the current tunneled out of the circuit. Then reappeared someplace else. Here.”

Kirk discharged the electroscope, the foils flopped limp, and then they slowly spread apart again. He disconnected the battery, discharged, and the foils remained inert.

I bent to peer at the experiment from a tabletop level.

“How could they go through the lead?”

“Because they didn't. Maxwell's demon picks out the fast moving electrons, dephases them, steals their energy, and dumps them back nearby.”

“Steals their energy?”

“The momentum is gone, the battery drains without doing observable work, and that energy is going someplace else to do something else.”

“Like feed Maxwell's demon?” I asked.

“Mmm.” Kirk rubbed his carefully trimmed moustache. “Preliminary results, but your guess about mass not being conserved may be right. Although nonlinear interparticle forces require energy too.”

*   *   *

J
UNE
17
W
ITMER
F
ORTRESS

“I need to send a letter to NDSU with details. Have them reproduce my”—Kirk corrected himself—“our results.”

Kirk had mapped the diffusion region for hot electrons escaping circuits. He said that it matched the radial expansion for suddenly freed electrons in vacuum, down to his measurement uncertainty. We revisited the piston experiments and detected reappearing alcohol and the faint sulfurous taint of gunpowder with our noses. But the heated molecules weren't subject to the same space charge expansion as electrons, so they remained localized, rephasing back into the test chamber, mostly, according to Kirk's theory.

“There aren't many folks left here,” I said. I had watched the exodus of people moving through town from the roof with the telescope. “I'd bet everyone else has migrated into the farmland or to the lakes in Minnesota.”

“We'll take that chance. Find someone to go south.”

“Like a postman?” I asked, but he ignored me.

We recovered the ancient mimeograph from the department office and cranked out copies of Kirk's handwritten and illustrated letter, “Evidence of Maxwell's demon after the Change.” Now it was up to me to find an honest courier headed elsewhere.