The Far Side Read online

  “Yes, Kristine?”

  “What does it take to win a Nobel Prize?”

  “Patience. A lot of people do the research and don’t get recognized for decades. Or, like Einstein, they snub his real breakthrough and they give it to him for something entirely different years later.”

  “Has anyone ever won twice?”

  Her mother chuckled. “Dear, you’ll need to develop a technical avocation you’ve shown no aptitude for up to now.”

  “Andie.”

  Her mother’s chuckle turned to an outright laugh. “Sure, she could do it, particularly if she adds ‘Bush’ right after her favorite word and ‘Bush is a’ before her second favorite.”

  “Helen,” Kris’s dad said with a grin, “you’ve told me a thousand times you don’t want to talk politics after you get home from the lab.”

  “I’ve said that, haven’t I? Well, okay. Yes, Andie might just do it. She’s a bright girl, even if she has a little too much color in her language.”

  Kris nodded and a while later went to bed.

  The next morning Andie picked her up on the way to school. “I’ve been a good girl, since last night,” she told Kris.

  “You’re always good,” Kris said with a laugh.

  “No, I’m not!” They both shared the laugh.

  “I did think about it a lot. I’ll talk about it with you at lunch, because if I don’t concentrate on these fuckin’ assholes out here on the road we won’t make it to lunch!”

  It was a twenty minute drive and Andie really did focus on driving. Kris didn’t like to admit it, but driving made her a little nervous, particularly in heavy traffic. But like most things, Andie took it stride and did really well at it.

  At school they went their separate ways for the first period. Andie had a computer lab that she mostly spent playing first person shooter games on the Internet, while Kris was in HP English. They were together in second period for HP physics and third period HP Math, which was integral calculus this term. Fourth period they again went their separate ways, Andie to another HP English section, while Kris was Mr. Beck’s, the chemistry teacher, student assistant.

  It always amused Kris that her mother disparaged her for not wanting a technical career, even though Kris had never gotten anything other than an A in a science class in her life, and most of the time, could at least figure out what Andie was talking about, even if she couldn’t get to those places on her own.

  Lunch they usually spent in the library reading, but this day Andie wanted to go outside and talk away from everyone else.

  “Okay,” Andie told her. “I’m paranoid, okay? Let’s just get that whole line of thinking out in the bright light of day.”

  “Paranoid about what?” Kris asked, curious.

  “Well, there’s a lot of fuckin’ bas-turds in the world. If I’m not careful, they’re gonna fuckin’ rip me off. No big fat fuckin’ asshole is gonna want a seventeen-year-old midget to win a Nobel, much less two of them.”

  “You’re not a midget, Andie, you’re just short.”

  “Yeah, you fuckin’ know it and I fuckin’ know it, but what do those fat fuckers know, eh?”

  “Then there’s the fuckin’ power. Jeez! I never gave it a thought! Those fuckers are going to want to step on the whole fuckin’ idea!”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I was doing the numbers last night after you left. I was good, okay? I was looking at the data I’d already gathered, okay?”

  “Sure, Andie. You’d never cheat,” Kris said sarcastically. Andie gave her a finger.

  “I’ve got a tank of hydrogen gas for welding and some finely powered borax for fuel. As near as I can tell, I fused maybe two grams of shit yesterday. Maybe. The numbers said a hundredth of that, but I don’t fuckin’ believe them.

  “Still, I mean Kris... a couple of pounds of fuel is going to be enough to light LA. The gizmo would cost a couple ten million dollars. I looked it up on the Internet last night. LA Water and Power rates are set from their equipment investment, fuel and overhead costs, plus money for overhead and then 7% or thereabouts, for ‘profit.’” Andie made air quotes around the last word.

  “Right now they’ve got billions and billions of dollars sunk in power plants and distribution systems. With a couple of these, they could do without a lot of that. Most of that. Fuck! A big company would probably build their own fusor, instead of getting their power from the grid! DWP would go broke! The fuckers would kill the idea if they have the chance!”

  Kris contemplated that and slowly nodded. “You can get the TV and radio stations involved,” she told her friend. “We can make it so that you’ll get credit no matter what.”

  “You know what? There were all those fuckin’ high school kids on the net who are doing this sort of research! They fuckin’ well should be heroes; even if they’re fucking asshole dorks! They’ve been on TV and all that shit! But famous? Ha! Not! They’re treated like junior assistant geeks and marginalized.

  “Not me! No one is going to marginalize me! I’ve got a plan!”

  “A plan?”

  “You fuckin’ bet! You!”

  “Me?” Kris was startled.

  “You! You know what you are with a fuckin’ camera? A fuckin’ genius is what!”

  “Well... I’m good but...”

  “But what? You’re good!

  “So, I got a plan!”

  Kris sighed. “What’s the plan?”

  “You and your camera, Kris! That’s the key! The Internet!” Andie started cackling. After a second Kris realized her friend hadn’t actually gone insane, she was just pulling Kris’s chain.

  “And how is my camera going to help?”

  “We’re going to fuckin’ explore the far side of that fuckin’ door! I am, and so are you. You’re going to carry your camera and I’m going to carry my father’s big fucking elephant gun! You’re going to take pictures on the far side!”

  “And what, pray tell, are you going to do if we find that cave is like Carlsbad or something? Maybe those rocks are in Central Park?”

  “Well, there’s gotta be some fuckin’ justice in the universe. Karma, my karma, couldn’t possibly fuck me over like that. I’m hoping for fuckin’ dinosaurs!”

  Kris laughed. “Well, dinosaurs are big enough to eat us, no matter how big your elephant gun is. I don’t recall elephant guns helping those guys in Jurassic Park. I’ll pass, thanks.”

  “You will not! You’re my friend! We can do this! We’ll be careful, and you’ll take pictures! I was thinking maybe we’d put them up on YouTube or something, and maybe have our own website for the best shit.”

  Kris thought for a second. “You think it might be another planet?”

  “Who the fuck knows? We haven’t looked! We fuckin’ need to go look! And you’re chicken!”

  “I’m not chicken, Andie. It’s just that the first time I see a dinosaur I’m going home.”

  “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.