The Far Side (14 page)

“And that’s it?” Otto asked.

“No giant toilet flush,” Andie agreed.

“Cool.  What’s on the other side?  Can I see?”

Andie handed him a flashlight.  “It’s dark and there’s not much to see.”

He took the flashlight and walked up to the blue rectangle, and poked the flashlight through.  Sensing nothing out of the ordinary, he leaned forward, no doubt, Kris thought, seeing the happy face.

Kris was a little shocked when he vanished through it.  Her mother gave a little startled sound, but remained quiet.  Time dragged and Kris grew a little nervous.  Finally Otto was back.

“A little underwhelming.  Where the fuck was I?”

“I have no idea,” Andie told him.  “Around the corner, down the block -- Carlsbad, someplace on another planet half way across the galaxy -- maybe even halfway across the universe.  There’s no way to tell yet.”

He laughed, shutting off the flashlight.  “I know you think I’m hopelessly stupid and, compared to you, I probably am.  That doesn’t mean the possibility that I was walking on the surface of another planet didn’t give me a hard on.”

Andie blushed and Kris coughed.

Otto Schulz turned to Helen Boyle.  “My daughter is going to be richer than that fuckin’ piker Bill Gates!”

Andie started shutting it down and the blue rectangle vanished.

“I’m not sure I’m following all of this,” Helen said.  “What did you see?”

“A cave or tunnel,” Otto told her.  “Not very long, but there’s a bigger room beyond.  Bigger than I wanted to explore just now, so I came back.”

“And why would I disapprove of my daughter exploring a cave?  A little dangerous, I suppose, but with the right equipment it wouldn’t be that dangerous.”

Otto Schulz laughed and turned to Kris.  “And I thought I was fuckin’ stupid!  Your old lady is really fuckin’ stupid!  Dumber than a stump!  Jeez!  Dumber than me!”

“Excuse me!” Helen said, drawing herself up.  “I’m sorry if I’m not a rocket scientist!”

“Mom, do you see the blue rectangle?” Kris asked.

“No, Andie turned it off.”

“That’s right.  Guess what you’d see if you were on the other side right now?”

“Nothing, why?”

Andie snickered and Otto was shaking his head in mock sorrow.

“Mom, how would you get back if it was off?”

Finally it dawned on her what they were talking about.  She shrugged and said primly, “You wouldn’t do that to me.”

“Nope,” Andie said with some of her earlier good cheer.  “Not on purpose.”

Kris could see her mother didn’t fully understand, and when she saw Andie was about to make things abundantly clear, Kris shook her head.  Andie promptly subsided.

“Speaking of stupid,” Helen said, not really understanding what was going on, “Otto has the abbreviation
‘AMA’ stamped in big red letters on his records.  That’s ‘Against Medical Advice.’”

“When I was diagnosed the doctors said I had a one percent chance to be alive after six or eight months with treatment and no chance after four or five months without treatment.  I couldn’t see the difference,” Otto said without his usual verisimilitude.

He turned to Andie.  “You and me, we kinda don’t get along that well.  Promise me, you won’t hang around when things go bad.  They say it really sucks.”  He turned his eyes on Helen.  “They said it would suck all six months if they treated it, win or lose.”

That request caught Andie flatfooted.  “Whatever.”  She ostentatiously closed her closet door.  “I’m feeling tired.  If you all will excuse me...?”

Kris went with a little reluctance, her mother with none at all.  Her mother didn’t say anything all the way home, which suited Kris.  Kris went into her room, stripped out of clothes and crashed across her bed.  How was it people could be so different?  It had never made any sense to her.

Kris woke up at seven the next morning.  Her mother was already gone, and her father was nearly ready to leave himself.  “Are you doing okay, Kris?”

“Yes.  The machine is working again and leads back to the same place.”

“I’m sorry to hear about Otto.”

“Yeah.  Andie is handling it better than she did her mother’s death -- but not by much.”

“The meeting with the Caltech people is still on?”

“Yes.”

“Good.  I told you I wasn’t going to interfere and I won’t.  But one thing you personally will want to pay attention to: people who lose loved ones don’t necessarily make wise decisions right afterwards.  Someone about to become an orphan may or may not be prone to mess up.  I’m not saying Andie is going to lose it -- instead, I’m saying that you should pay attention and ask questions where you think it’s appropriate.”

“Yes, sir,” Kris told him, wishing he’d shut up.

Kris called Andie at eleven and found her friend was awake and alert.  “I’ve ordered a shit pot of stuff, headed to Crenshaw, attention me, in care of ‘Project Otto.’  That’s the name I want.”

“No problem, Andie,” Kris replied.

“For right now, I want everything to go into building two.  That’s the one in the middle.”

“We’ll just explain the designations to David Solomon and he’ll see to it,” Kris explained.

“Fine.  Now I’m going to order a pallet of MREs.  I’ve got a pallet load of two and half gallon water jugs coming.  It’s a good idea, but I hope we’re not still humping all this shit into the cave when the machine fails again.”

“Me too,” Kris agreed.

“Fine.  Give me an hour and then get your ass over here.  I want to be ready for the Caltech nerds.”

* * *

Kit stood in Andie’s living room, with four people roughly his age standing behind him.  “Taking it from the right,” Kit told them, “first we have Linda Walsh.  She’s a mathematician, specializing in multi-dimensional geometries.  Next is Shorty Carver, the tall fellow.  He’s a condensed matter physicist, due to go to CERN in a year or so to work on ITER.  Lin Xi is a Chinaman from Honolulu, as were his parents, grandparents, and great grandparents.  It’s like eight generations they go back.  He’s a super-conducting magnet expert.  Last, Art Foster of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s Advanced Study Group, working at JPL.  A dog’s body, jack-of-all trades.

“Lady and gentlemen, your hostess, Andrea, Andie, Schulz and her faithful sidekick, Kris Boyle.  For those of you who haunt the fusor bulletin boards, Andie is Andy90.”

“The bit who got the vacuum pump backwards?” Art laughed.

“Fuck you twice,” Andie said.  “If you’re not interested, don’t let the door hit you in the ass when you leave.  Do it now.  Otherwise shut the fuck up,” Andie told him coldly.

Kris could see the young man reacted badly.  Andie didn’t care and pressed on.

“Yeah, I’m seventeen.  I don’t want to hear crap from you about my age, my gender, and I sure as fuck don’t want to hear about ‘ad hoc,’ ‘empiric,’ ‘serendipitous’ or ‘lucky guess work.’

“I built this and had it working in a day and a half.  If you want to think it was an accident, you go right ahead.  It wasn’t an accident and I actually knew, mostly, what I was doing.  I’m here to tell you right now that my largest oversight would have surprised you, and would, as it has done to myself and Kit here, confounded you as well.

“Now, a show of your fuckin’ hands: who here has a curiosity larger than their fuckin’ ego?”

Four hands went up.

“Good.  Now, hold your questions and comments until there is the very slightest chance you might have one worth making.”

She led the way into her bedroom and opened her closet door.  “A design I call the ‘Otto Schulz’ fusor, based on original work by Bussard and others,” she told them.

“You hit break even yet?” Art said, contempt dripping from his voice.

Andie glared at him.  “You’re either a fucking moron or a fucking idiot.  Do you think you’re here because I couldn’t get the fucking vacuum pump to work?”

She didn’t wait for him to speak.  “I have a question for you, asshole.  You ever work on a fusor?”

“Yeah, a buddy and I built one.  We never got close to break even.”

“Yeah, you stupid fuck, I’m sure you didn’t.  Tell me, dipshit, how long did you work at it?”

“Couple of months,” Art replied.  He looked like he was realizing maybe he’d screwed up, Kris thought.

“Yeah, well I hit break even in thirty-six hours.  Two and a half of those hours I spent up the transformer pole in front of my house rewiring it and yeah, an hour figuring how to make the vacuum pump work.  Rewiring that pole has been the biggest waste of my time to date.”  She turned to Kris.  “I saw a DWP truck down the block, it’s been sitting there with three guys in it.  Where’s Ezra?”

“Outside.  He saw them too.”

“Good, I don’t want any fuckin’ bean counters interrupting my demonstration.”

Andie waved at the apparatus.  “I’ve got three separate neutron counters; all of them work different ways.  None of them has chirped.  I use boron and hydrogen for fuel.  I do a couple of other things, proprietary things, to speed up the fusion reaction.  Right now, all things being equal, I produce 240 volts with 200 amps of current.  That’s 48 kilowatts.  I’ve checked the inputs and it is about 2.5 kilowatts to operate the machine.  Sounds like break even to me.”

“Subject to verification,” Art interjected.

“I’d be happy to run that current through you to ground,” Andie said sarcastically.  “Everyone else would get the message, even if you wouldn’t.”

“Art,” Kit said, speaking for the first time, “shut the fuck up or use the door.  This is the one and only warning you’ll get from me.”

“Oh, I’ll be a good boy, because I’m going to take a great deal of pleasure ripping the little bitch to shreds.”

Andie started the fusor running without another word.  Art saw the Van de Graaff generator start up and laughed.  “Oh my God!  A B-science fiction movie!”

“I’d short that fucker to ground with you,” Andie said with a laugh, “except all it would do would be making your hair stand on end.  I’m going to settle for making you eat your own shit.”

Kris saw her setting the controls to create the door.  The blue shape appeared, fluttering in the breeze.

“Any comments, eh, asshole?”

“Excited nitrogen molecules.”

“And what, in your experience creates a delimited sheet of excited nitrogen molecules in the free atmosphere?”

“I’d need to do some research.”

“Yeah, right!” Andie said sarcastically.  The rectangle stabilized.  She grabbed a flashlight and handed it to Art.  “Here, come look.”  She walked forward and leaned through the door and held the position.  After ten or fifteen seconds, she pulled back.  “Cat got your tongue?  Chicken got your guts?”

Kit spoke up.  “I’ve walked through it, Art.  If you don’t have the balls for this, turn around and go now.”

Art walked forward, turned on the flashlight and put his head into the blue sheet.  A second later he’d pulled it back and he looked around, before putting his head back through again.

Linda Walsh spoke.  “What’s there, Art?”

“He can’t hear you,” Andie told her.  “You can physically move from here to there, but vibrations stop.  An extension cord works there, but radio waves don’t go through.  Sound doesn’t go through.”

Art pulled back.  “What did you see, Art?” Linda Walsh asked again.

“A dark tunnel, pitch black.  There’s a happy face scrawled on the wall across from the viewpoint.  I have no idea where it is.”

“Hey,” Andie said brightly, “we agree on something!  I don’t know where it is either.  You think we needed rocket scientists to hold our hands over there?”

Linda Walsh walked up to Art, took the flashlight and poked her head through.  After a second she went all the way just as Otto had the night before.  Andie nodded and Kris went after her.  Linda was flashing her light at the tunnel that led into the larger room.  Kris went up to her as the other was about to start through the narrow passage.

“Before you do that,” Kris told her.  “Turn around and look behind us.”

Linda laughed.  “I see the gate.”

“Now imagine it with the machine off.”

Linda Walsh wasn’t at all dense.  “Ouch!”

“Thursday night the machine failed.  It tore itself up when the belt on the Van de Graaff separated.  Andie and Kit got out with maybe a minute to spare.”

Linda smiled at her.  “Well, when you put it like that, I can see I’m on the wrong side of the door to anywhere.”

“We call it ‘The Far Side,’” Kris volunteered.

“As good of a name as any.  And I’m being offered a position working on this?”

“Yes.”

“Lead on!  I want to sign on the dotted line!  You want my soul?  No problem!  Cheap at the price!”

“We don’t ask that -- just that you don’t tell anyone about it.”

“You’re on!”  Linda stepped back through and Kris followed her.

“What is it?” Shorty asked.  He was odd, Kris thought, because he was tall, but didn’t seem to be.

“Like Art said, a pitch blank tunnel.  There’s a happy face on the wall opposite of the entrance.  It’s cool, dusty and there’s no indication of where it’s at.  The rock contains coquina -- massive quantities of fossil mollusks, and there’s a small crawlway that leads further along.  I think there’s a larger room beyond there, but I couldn’t see for sure,” Linda explained.