The Far Side (4 page)

“And that’s not fuckin’ chicken?”

“Mom fixed chicken for dinner last night, Andie.  I’m not going to be a chicken.”

Andie started giggling.  “Okay, you’re not a chicken!  But you gotta be there for me, girl!”

“You understand I’m not going to end up dino plop?”

“Sure, sure, whatever floats your boat.  You gonna be there for me or not?”  Andie paused and then her eyes glowed with unholy glee.  “Do a documentary, girl!  Outdo your old man!  Get an Oscar before you’re nineteen!”

Kris thought for a few seconds, and then took a deep breath.  “I wonder if my dead phone was a coincidence?  My watch works and the camera is fine.”

Andie took her cue from Kris’s mood.  “I’ll have to think about that.  I’m a little nervous about the lithium in the battery.  Thanks, I hadn’t thought about that.”

She held out her hand for Kris to shake
. 
“Partners?”

Kris shook her hand.  “Just so long as it’s not partners in crime, sure.”

Chapter 2
:: The Far Side

Kris met Andie after school, and while they were waiting for the air conditioning in Andie’s car to start working, Kris borrowed Andie’s phone to call her father.  “I’m going over to Andie’s after school,” she told him.

“Okay, I should be home around eight or so.  I gave your phone to Kit, our tech guru.  He says the battery is dead and that there’s nothing wrong with the phone.  He didn’t have a replacement battery, but it should be here by four.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“No problem.  Take care, I’ll see you later.”

“Dad, one other thing.”

“What, Kris?”

“Could I borrow one of the hand-held HD cameras for a couple of weeks?  I’m thinking about making a documentary.”

He laughed.  “The XL-2 would be better for that, Kris.  In most documentaries you’re honor bound to let subjects see the final cut.  We call the HD cameras ‘Warts and all.’”

“I know, but I’d like to get the extra detail.”

“Sure, it’s not a problem.  I’ll bring one home tonight.  You’ve used them before?”

“Yeah, a couple of times.  Arturo showed me.”  Arturo was her father’s number one cameraman.

“Just promise me that you’re not going to have Andie do the script.”

Kris made a rude sound, and then folded the phone and handed it back to Andie.  “Dad’s tech guy says my phone battery is dead but the phone is okay.”

Andie grimaced.  “I hope it was coincidence.  I got out an old phone last night and put it on its charger.  I’ll put it next to the machine when we start it up.”

“Yeah, and he says I can borrow one of the HD cameras.  You wouldn’t believe the detail you can get from one of them.”

“And that at the end?” Andie asked.

“He said he’d lend it to me if you weren’t doing dialog for the documentary.”

“Well, fuck him!”  Except she was laughing, and Kris grinned back.

They parked in the garage and went straight into the house.  Kris sat on Andie’s bed, while Andie sat at her desk.

“Okay, what I did was this -- I made a list of stuff we should take with us at first.”  Andie ran through the list with Kris.

“The way I figure it, this is about forty pounds total, not counting the rifle for me and a pistol for you.  Twenty pounds is a piece of cake.”

Kris agreed and added, “My dad has a gizmo in his office at home.  It’s a laser range finder he uses on a set at first, measuring everything.  It’s accurate to a small fraction of an inch over a mile.”

“How much does it weigh?  And why do we care?”

“About five pounds.  And we care because this is a cave, Andie.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get lost in a maze.  We can use it to map things.  It’s got a measuring ring you can use to measure angles.  We run a map as we go.”

“What, no string?” Andie asked, sarcastically.

“No string.  Maybe a couple of pieces of chalk to mark on the cave walls.”

They spent a half hour getting things ready, including a quick walk for Kris to go home, get the laser and return.

A few minutes before Andie started the machine up again, she put the battery from her old phone near the machine.  She popped her head through the blue door and pulled it back again after thirty seconds or so.

“There still is a happy face, still no sign of light.  Now there’s a perceptible breeze coming from the door, going into the cave, but it’s not much.  At a guess, the air pressure is different today either here or there or both.  More than yesterday.”

She shut it down and they walked into bedroom and Andie put the battery into her old phone.  “Deader than a doornail,” Andie said.  “Shit, shit, shit!”

“You don’t have any idea?” Kris asked.

“Well, I suppose it could be neutrons.  But if it is, we’re in big trouble, because anything that would kill a battery is going to kill us too.  Except I have three different neutron detectors in the closet and not one of them is letting out a peep.  In theory this method shouldn’t produce any.”

“I thought fusion produced neutrons?”

“Helium fusion does.  This is fusing a boron-12 atom with a simple hydrogen atom, which fuse together to make an excited carbon-12 atom -- then you get three alphas when the excited carbon-12 breaks down.  All the alphas are stopped inside the reaction chamber and converted almost directly to electricity.  There are a few losses along the way, mostly it’s excitation of any remaining gas in the reactor -- it makes it glow blue.”

Right then the front door bell went off.

Andie looked at Kris.  “Sorry, I just about always have something on order.  I gotta take this.”

Kris followed her out and stood behind Andie when she opened the door.

Andie spoke almost instantly.  “Gimme the fuckin’ package.  I’m busy.”

The young man, about twenty-five, blinked.

Kris laughed.  “Andie, meet Kit, Christopher Richards.  Kit, this is my friend, Andie.  Andie, Kit works for my dad.”  Kris recognized the camera case in the young man’s hands.

“My dad said he was going to bring a camera home I could borrow.”

Kit nodded.  “Yes, Miss Boyle.  Mr. Boyle found out I was going up to the Valley and he asked me if I would drop off your phone and the camera.  He gave me this address.”

“Who the fuck is ‘Miss Boyle?’” Andie barked.

Kris laughed.  “Kit, Andie has a favorite word.  You get three guesses what it is, but you’re only going to need one.”

The young man laughed and lofted the case.  “You want this, it’s yours.  You don’t even have to sign for it.”

“Are there spare batteries?”

“Sure, three and three chargers.  They’re only good for about two hours apiece.”  He reached into his shirt pocket and produced Kris’ cell phone.  “The battery on this was dead.  It happens.”

“What, you some fuckin’ expert on phone batteries?” Andie asked, sounding angry.

Kit laughed.  “We use them in phones, cameras, computers and half the tools used on the set.  Sure, I know a few things about them.”

“Why would two batteries go dead in the same place within a few hours of each other?”

“The most common reason is that they are exposed to a great deal of heat in storage.  But even then, they take a while to degrade.  Two would most likely be a coincidence.”

“Andie, Kit is my father’s technical guy.  He fixes the electronics on the set.  They even let him work on the camera electronics.”

Most civilians wouldn’t know just how rare that was.

“So, a fuckin’ hotshot genius, right?”

“Well, I don’t go around having intimate relations with the smart people I know... for that matter, not even the dumb bunnies I know.  But I’m not stupid,” Kit said evenly.

“Well, come here, hotshot, let’s see what kind of stones you got.”

Kris was stunned when Andie headed for her room.  Kris brought up the rear again, just that it was a much longer parade.

Andie stood in her door.  “Okay, hotshot.  Two guesses this time.”

“Jeez!  You built a fusor in your closet?”  He laughed.  “Excuse me, you built a fucking fusor in your fucking closet?”

Kris had never seen the look that filled Andie’s eyes.  She had no idea what emotion was going through her friend’s mind, none at all.

“Yeah, I built a fucking Bussard EXL fusor in my fucking closet.”

“Good grief!”  He walked closer and looked at it.  “Wow!  Does it work?”

“Yeah, it works.  It works damn good.  You fuckin’ better be able to keep your fuckin’ mouth shut or I’ll fuckin’ cap ya!”

Kit laughed and looked at Kris.  “You’ve told her what happens to someone on a movie who gets talking?”  He glanced at Andie for a second, and then back to Kris.

“Let me guess, this a high school science fair project.”

“Fuck off!  Of fuckin’ course!  I started Friday, got stuck and pissed off.  I fuckin’ got back on course.  This is what I got today.  Now I’ve got a fuckin’ problem.”

He laughed. “Let me guess, you’re Andy90 on the bulletin board and you haven’t been back since 9 AM Saturday morning.”

“I got too fuckin’ much on my plate.  I thought it was a fuckin’ scam.”

“Thirty people replied to your description of your problems.  You had the vacuum pump hooked up backwards.”

Andie reddened, causing Kris to laugh.  “You hooked it up backwards?”

“Conceptual error,” Andie muttered.  “I figured that out and I figured out the other problem and started messing around.  That’s when I realized that those descriptions about how it was never going to break even were the straight shit.  I’d already read about Bussard’s work, so I spent the rest of the weekend changing this and that.”

Kit looked at her.  “You started when?”

“Friday after school.  Three day weekend and the old man spent the entire fucking weekend at the bar.”

“That’s... incredible.  Most people take months.  And then more months fiddling around with it.  You’ve got fusion?”

“Sure, I got neutrons Saturday by noon.  But so fuckin’ what?  If I’d made enough neutrons to be useful, I’d be fuckin’ glowing in the dark.  So I switched to boron and hydrogen.”

He whistled and repeated his question, “And you’re getting fusion?”

“Yeah.  I tweaked this and that.  None of that pissant 13KV shit.  I built a little Van de Graaff that puts out 750 KV.”

Kris could see the gleam of interest in Kit’s eyes.  She wanted to laugh.  To see two people of Andie’s caliber meeting was an experience to behold.

“What kind of current you getting out?”

Andie closed down.  “A lot.”

“What’s a lot?”

“A great deal.”

“Volts and amps, girl!  What did you get?”

“I made some changes, okay?  I twisted this and that.”

“What?” he demanded.

“I ran it for an hour Saturday evening.  240 volts at 200 amps.”

Kris did the math.  That’s what Andie had said, 48 kilowatt hours.

“You’re kidding; you’re so full of shit!” Kit said contemptuously.

“No, the fucking power people were out here Sunday morning wondering who the fuck rewired the power pole just off the property.”  Andie grinned wickedly.  “For whatever reason, I wasn’t a suspect.”

“This is... I mean...”

Andie stepped close to him.  “Let me explain this clearly, fuckwad!  This is my research, my ideas!  You got that?  Mine!  And if you even hint I’m bullshitting you again I’ll turn the fucker on.  I went out and checked the fucking breakers in the garage.  Two hundred fuckin’ amps!  I can put it all in and they’ll never know!”

Kit held up his hands.  “No mas!  I swear!  Jeez!  I’ve been following this for a couple of years now!  Jeez!  You made it work!  Way to go!”

“Is ‘Jeez’ the best you can do?” Andie asked, sounding contemptuous.

Kit grinned.  “Fuckin’ A!”

All three of them laughed.

“Well hotshot,” Andie said, turning serious.  “Explain this -- yesterday Kris was close to the machine when it was running.  Her cell phone battery is shot.  I charged up another battery today and put it near the machine and tried it just now.  Less than a minute and it appears at least discharged.  It’s not neutrons.  How about very strong rotating magnetic fields?”

Kit gestured at Andie’s machine.  “These don’t use that kind of magnetic field.  They use current potential to do the work.”

“Fine, wonderful, but I never said the fuckin’ fusor was where the magnetic fields came from!  I had to do something about creating a load on the fuckin’ output!  So I created a fuckin’ rotating magnetic field.  It’s fuckin’ virtual, right?  No fuckin’ moving parts.  So I thought maybe I could go for the trifecta and see if I could get some fuckin’ frame dragging.  I ran the magnetic field up to the gigahertz range.  That’s where the magnetic field comes from.”

“I bet you’re messing up one or both of the electrodes,” Kit told her.  “Lithium ion, ‘Li-on,’ batteries are very sensitive to the condition of the electrodes.  Mess them up, the battery would look dead, even fully charged.”

“I thought they were carbon and lithium,” Andie told him.

”Yeah, but they’re usually plated on a stainless steel base.”

“Would it mess up a person?”

“Not unless you had stainless steel in your body.  Some people do.  They can’t get in those MRI machines -- it would kill them in seconds.”

Kris saw his eyes suddenly focus on the Andie’s bed, and the gear they’d been accumulating.

He sniffed.  Andie saw where he was looking and reacted badly.

“You really are a hotshot, aren’t you?” there was none of Andie’s earlier humor this time.

“Look, we all have our own things, right?  When I was going to Caltech, a half dozen people had these and were testing them.  None of them worked worth a shit.  Bussard is just a genius.  Pardon me, a fucking genius.  He was the one going out there, doing new things.  Now he’s dead and no one is doing anything with his work.