The Far Side (16 page)

“We need to know about it in advance.”

“Well, you know now, don’t you?”

Kris watched the man who was visibly sweating.

“Agent Dunphy, far be it from me to direct you, but I would suggest that you have been dragged out here based on misinformation.”

“What is your interest, Mr. Schaeffer?”

“I told you, I’m the young woman’s lawyer.  She’s making a movie, with millions of dollars at stake.  As part of her due diligence, I’ve been employed to protect that investment.  And please, Agent Dunphy, don’t be so droll as to ask who employees me.”

They left after still more palaver.  Kris couldn’t exactly characterize it as “slinking away” but they surely didn’t leave like they were happy about it.

When they were gone, Mr. Schaeffer turned to Andie.  “Far be it from me to make light of this... but I hope this is a lesson to you.  Do you know what you need to do to make this legal?”

Andie shook her head.

“You go down to a DWP office, or go to their website.  There’s a form you fill out.  Fill it out and that’s it.  They did this a lot, making trouble for people who put power back into the grid, in the first days of solar and wind power.  We applied a fair amount of pressure back then and they are much better about such things now.”  He laughed.

“That’s it?”

“Yes.  They do ask how you’re generating the power.”

“It’s similar to solar,” Andie said with a straight face.

Chapter 6 :: Real Progress

Kris explained the earlier events to her father over dinner; her mother was reading a medical journal and once again seemed uninterested.

Sunday afternoon, Kris spent running errands, mostly on her own, always coming back to the studio.  Abe Wallace, the head gaffer, was a man of about forty-five who was pleasant and energetic.  Not only did he have the first enclosure built, but when told in the morning that they wanted similar enclosures in the other two sound stages, he’d asked if he could use a larger crew, Kris had told him to go ahead.

By six o’clock the enclosures were complete and wired the way Andie had specified.  Andie showed up and professed satisfaction, and then the two women drove back in their individual vehicles.  Kris wasn’t unhappy that Ezra had spent the day hovering around Andie.  She was obviously the focal point of DWP’s interest and Andie didn’t want any of that.

Ezra left and the two girls sat in Andie’s bedroom, the closet door closed.  Andie was working on equipment checklists and construction directions while Kris was going over the list of stuff that Linda Walsh had asked for.

Linda had written up the list and put a short explanation by each item.  It was when Kris got to the oscilloscope request that she blinked.  There were a half dozen uses, plus the blurb, “I want to run it through the door when it’s running and see what happens.”

Kris giggled and Andie wanted to know why.  Andie wasn’t amused when Kris laughed again.  “What’s so funny?”

“It will most likely smoke.  It surely won’t work.”

“Why wouldn’t it work?” Andie asked.  “We know current flows through wires just fine.”

“Coils and inductors won’t work,” Kris reminded her.  “Anything that works with a magnetic field is going to fail as it goes through.”

Andie blushed.

“What?” Kris asked.

“My cell phone keeps breaking.  I’ve been careful to keep it as far from the machine as I can, but every time I go through the door, it breaks.  I am so stupid!  I need to leave it behind.”

“It’s hard to think of everything,” Kris told her.

“Yeah, I suppose.  Still, I’d rather be perfect.”

Kris stuck her tongue out and Andie laughed for a second and then stopped.  “I hired them all, including that asshole Art.  He’s an asshole, if you get my drift, but he’s not a stupid asshole.”

“You could have fooled me,” Kris told her.

“Yeah.  Linda is going to work here, Art at Poppa One, Lin Xi at Poppa Two, and Shorty at Fox Two.”

“You’re going to have to spend a lot of time supervising,” Kris observed.

“Yeah, I know.  But you’re going to do some of it, too.   You’ve been keeping up on your homework assignments?”

“Sure.”

“Good!”

Andie had been sending Kris diagrams and descriptions of how the fusor had been put together.  “I’m getting us both small laptops,” she told Kris.  “They’ll have phone cards, headsets and all that crap.  Wireless access, the whole nine yards.”

“Not a Blackberry or PDA?”

“Those are fuckin’ cripples.  I want something that can do Office, including Access.  Yeah, I want to be able to read my email or call someone, but I’m not going to spend as much money for something that does that as I could use to buy a laptop.”

Kris laughed.  “No iPhone?”

“No iPhone, no Blackberry.”

“No problem,” Kris agreed.

“The pallet of MREs is here, in LA, and will be delivered early tomorrow.  I had a discussion with the old man.  He’s putting the Maserati up for sale.  The doctors are having shit fits about him driving anywhere.  He’s hired a chauffeur and rented a Lexus.  So he’s going to let me put the MREs in the garage until I can get them through the door.”

“Maybe we should think of a sexier name?” Kris suggested.

Andie laughed.  “I thought about it.  First, we need to know if we’re actually going someplace.  If it happens it’s another planet, then I already told Linda -- I’m going to call it the ‘Star Gate.’  You, me, Linda and Ezra will be Team One.”

“They’ll sue your ass,” Kris said laughing.

“They stopped making the show.  I’m just restarting it,” Andie told her.  “I sent Schaeffer an email earlier asking what it would take to buy the rights to make additional episodes.  He said it would likely be expensive.  I didn’t mention that this time they’ll be documentaries.”

Kris laughed harder.  “Cool!  It’ll never happen, but it’s a cool idea!”

“Yeah.  I looked over the machine earlier.  I can’t see anything wrong.  I’ve got a note to myself tomorrow to go over with Linda various things we can measure on this side with the machine.  I was watching every second you were gone, Kris, I swear -- there was no flutter.

“There was on our side.”

“Yeah, that’s got to be a sign of something, although I have no idea what.  And I have no idea what we can measure on the other side.  I’m going to get a video camera and tripod and put it on the other side.  We’ll start it running as soon as we can after we get there.”

“It might be worthwhile,” Kris suggested, “to go there, set up the camera, start recording, shut down and then start right back up and compare it to what happens on this end.  Try shutting down for longer than a few minutes as well.”

“Yeah!” Andie said and started typing another note on her computer.

She finished and looked at Kris.

“I’m going to miss the old man.”

“Yeah.”

“I hate the fat fucker’s guts, though.  I hate the fact he never seems to care.  But I’ll miss him.”

“Maybe he’s just been hiding how much he cares.”

“Why?  What would the purpose be?  Practice?  Fuck him!”

Kris could only shrug.

“Today is Sunday,” she told Kris.  “Monday is the first day for Linda and Shorty; Art and the Chinese guy start on Tuesday.  I decided to pay them forty K each -- they were all making less than fifteen K.”

“That’s not much.”

“Me or what they were making before?” Andie said with a laugh.

“Yeah!” They both laughed at that.

“I’m going to close my eyes, harden my heart, and not turn this on again until tomorrow.  We will then have an all-hands drill.  I was thinking of a line of people passing cases of water and food through, but that’s just too risky.  No, we’ll bring everything to my bedroom first and then move it to the other side, coming and going both.”

Kris coughed and Andie looked at her.  “What?”

“What happens if person A is coming at the same time person B is going?”

Andie turned green.  “Shit!  The Star Gates in the series were one way!  That sucks!  I don’t know what would happen, and that’s an experiment I’d want to be careful doing, even if we’re waving brooms at each other through the door!”

Kris could only nod
as Andie continued, “Okay, I’ll think of something!  Later tomorrow morning, you and I are going to go over plans and documentation and getting ready for when the various nerds will start work on their machines.  You’ll get Shorty going Tuesday morning, while Linda will work here with me on the instrumentation plans.  Wednesday morning you and I will work with Art and Lin on getting started with their machines.  Wednesday afternoon, we’ll review progress to date.

“Thursday morning. I’ll be back here with Linda, getting the instrumentation hooked up, while you and Kit will be doing some exploration.  Thursday afternoon, we’ll review progress on the various machines.  You’ll take notes and I’ll ask the questions and ask for suggestions.  The whole nine yards.”

“Sure, Andie.”

“The schedule for Friday morning is also open, to do whatever it is we think is important.  Friday afternoon, Saturday, and Sunday is preparation and recovery from graduation.”

Of course, things never work out like you expect and it took Andie longer to get the drawings and plans for the fusors together -- she kept making changes every few minutes as she thought of something new.  So, instead of moving material on Monday, everyone was on hold while Andie finished her homework.

Tuesday, Kris showed Shorty onto the sound stage with Abe hovering close by.  Shorty had, he’d told her, read the instructions and decided he only needed one set of hands, which would be Abe.

The two men worked steadily and at two in the afternoon, they broke for lunch.  Kris had made a few dozen notes, but not as many as she had expected.  Shorty had few questions and she’d been able to answer them without bothering Andie.

They ate sandwiches that Abe cadged from another set, looking at the machine.  “This is...” Shorty sighed.  “Mind-boggling.  Stupendous!  It’s astounding that no one has discovered this before!”

Kris glanced at Abe who appeared to be studiously ignoring them, munching chips and a ham sandwich.

“You’re about two-thirds done?” Kris asked.

“Yeah.  I mean, jeez... sure there are things that aren’t clear in the plans, but nothing earth shaking.”

Kris nodded.  She’d expected to have to call Andie a few times, but instead, between the two of them, they’d figured things out whenever it wasn’t clear how to proceed.

“Do you have any suggestions?” Kris asked neutrally.

“Well, clearly, there is too much shit to do by hand, here and there.  We need a control panel where you can do it all.  The clutch for the Van de Graaff is -- mundane.”

The clutch for the Van de Graaff was a lever that tightened the belt tension by hand.  It was brain-dead simple, and Kris noted Shorty’s comments about “control feed back loops” for Andie to pay attention to.

About six, Shorty looked at Abe.  “You’re union, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Abe, it’s Shorty, okay?  My old man was a union truck driver.  I have nothing against unions.  We don’t need you that often and I’m thinking you could leave if you want.”

Abe laughed.  “And forgo overtime?  They’d drum me out of the union!”

Shorty turned to Kris.  “Andie didn’t say squat about a budget.”

Kris laughed.  “And do you know how much this machine costs, the parts?”

“Not much,” Shorty told her.

“Well, just a few thousand dollars.  The salaries here are a great deal more.  Don’t worry about it.  You’re going to be managing this device.  Yeah, you should set a budget with Andie, but I think you’re going to find that anything now is automatically approved.”

“You want some overtime, Abe?” Shorty asked the older man.

“Sure.”  The gaffer smiled.  “You never heard of me, no one ever hears about guys like me except in the business and the trades.

“But, once upon a time, a long time ago, I was a little younger and I might add, a Canadian, living near Vancouver.  I got a job doing carpentry on the Star Gate series sets.”

“You really, really don’t want to talk about this with your buddies,” Kris said levelly.

“I’d never!  Never!  I’ve got a grown son who does income taxes!  He’s been an underachiever all his life... now, I’m going to do something that will make his jaw drop.  Something he could do if he wanted!  If anything can stir him, this will!”

“You can’t tell him,” Kris repeated.

He laughed.  “I won’t tell anyone, I swear.  But unlike Star Gate, this is the real world.  You have about as much chance of keeping this secret for very long as flying up to the ceiling.”

“Oh, mighty veteran in the field, do you have any suggestions?” Kris asked.

“Me?”

“Sure, you!  Look at me!  I’m an eighteen-year-old high school student -- I don’t graduate until this weekend.  Shorty is ever so much older.  You’re what, twenty-five?”

“Yes and a full-fledged nerd in good standing.  This sort of thing -- you dream about and it’s like dreaming of spending the night with some famous hot Hollywood starlet -- you know it’s a dream.  Now... not so much!”

Abe laughed.  “Come to a few wrap parties.  Yeah, there are some good girls -- and some very naughty ones.”  He waved at the apparatus.  “You want some advice?”

“Sure,” Kris said, not wanting to hear about naughty starlets.

“Star Gate had a simple premise... wormholes between Star Gates.  I don’t get the impression that’s what you’re doing.”

Kris sighed. “All we know is that we produce a means to go from here to there -- wherever there is.  We have no idea.  No one has a clue yet how it works.”

“I saw something the other day on the Discovery Channel.  Ninety-nine percent of the matter in the universe is plasma.”

Kris frowned, trying to figure out how that could be.  Shorty saw her puzzlement and supplied the answer.  “The stuff of stars, Kris -- and most everything in between them.  Stars are dense concentrations of plasma -- interstellar space isn’t -- but it still consists of a lot of plasma.”

Kris paled.  Stars?  The vacuum of space?  That didn’t sound very appetizing!

Abe nodded.  “Yeah, and bad as that is, I’m a lot older than you guys.  My father is older still.  He loves science fiction.  When I was a kid, I read a science fiction story in one of his old magazines about someone who opened a wormhole or some such -- into the depths of space.  Pure vacuum.”  He made a vulgar sucking sound.