Ell gave him her best stern look
“Just keep it nearby buddy.”
***
Despite her joking with Shan, Ell worried that the FBI would show up that night and slept poorly during her usual three hours. Thinking that, if they were to burst into the house looking for her, they would do it between one and three AM when most people are most deeply asleep she was careful to stay awake until 3:30 instead of three when she usually went to sleep. She had Allan continue to watch for movement outside the house.
When she woke at 6:30 Allan reported that no one had approached the house, not even to go on by.
After pondering a while, Ell started having Allan run some calculations for her. She stared at the results for a while; then, shook her head. She’d need Emma’s help.
As soon as Shan left for work, Ell apprehensively climbed down into the tunnels. Nothing down there looked like it had been disturbed. She walked to Amy’s house where Steve also waited.
Sitting down on the couch with them Ell said, “Thanks for meeting with me.” After some pleasantries, Ell turned to Steve, “You’ve rechecked with the team about whether they really want to keep working for me even though I’m a “persona non grata?”
He nodded and grinned, “The six that are left all say they’ll take their chances.”
“They understand that if the FBI figures out they’ve kept working for me after Stockton declared me a ‘menace,’ they could be in real trouble?”
Steve shrugged, “The FBI interviewed all of us when they figured out we had been on your payroll. We all stuck to the same line, the truth. We told them that we indeed had worked for you in the past and that now that you were gone, we were only held “on retainer” until you returned. Some of the guys have bolstered that story by taking security jobs here and there and of course, four of them did take jobs elsewhere. Our line is that we aren’t working for you; we’re waiting for you to get out of hock with the government. Meanwhile, we’re maintaining our skills until that day. Amazingly, the Feebs never thought to ask if you used any aliases, but if they had, our plan was to claim employer security and refuse to give them up.”
Ell looked back and forth from one to the other with concern in her eyes. “I don’t pretend to be an expert in the law but I’m pretty sure that if you guys help me you’re guilty of ‘aiding and abetting,’ or ‘harboring a fugitive.’”
Steve shook his head, “Aiding and abetting means assisting in the commission of a crime. As I see it, we’re protecting you. We aren’t assisting you in committing any crimes and we aren’t ‘harboring’ you.”
Ell twisted her lips, “By that reasoning you can’t assist me in escaping the police.”
Steve shrugged, “Yeah, that would be true.” He grimaced, “We’d have to consider that on a case by case basis.”
Ell turned to Amy, “I think you should let me help you get a job at D5R. It’s crazy for the single mother of young teenagers to stick her neck out.”
Amy said, “Ell, you need an assistant!”
Ell sighed, “Yeah, I do, but not badly enough to put you and your kids at risk. You put your application in out at D5R and get yourself an honest job. I’ve already greased the skids.”
“OK, but if you need help, you’ll still be able to call on me.”
“Maybe, as some kind of last resort.” Ell turned, “And, Steve, as far as the team is concerned, I want you to be just like you’re on retainer for me. You won’t actively follow me from place to place anymore. You’ll hold yourself available to help with bad guys if I need the help, but certainly not come between me and the police in any of their attempts to capture me.”
Steve wiped at an eye. “Everyone on this planet owes your our lives,” he said hoarsely. “We should all be willing to go the extra mile.”
Ell, tears pouring down her cheeks, hugged each of them.
It was nearly eleven when, done up as Raquel, Ell got into her car and headed back out to D5R for the first time in months.
Emma looked up and her eyes widened as she saw “Raquel” walking her way. “Hey Raquel,” she said, “long time no see.” Realizing that she should act like she didn’t know where Ell/Raquel had been, she said, “Where have you been lately?”
Speaking loudly enough for curious passersby to hear Ell said, “Here and there, some time up at the habitat and some out at the island. And a few other places around the world.” She gave a half wink, “Good to be back.” She sat down next to Emma, “So, what’s been happening girlfriend?”
More quietly Emma said, “Well, we’re working with the FDA to get approval for more than just our limited ‘testing’ of the neurotrodes. Then we’ll be able to start licensing places to provide prostheses to some of the thousands of people who’ve been begging for them.”
Ell waved a negligent hand, “Pish, who cares about that stuff. I want the nitty gritty on how you and Roger are doing.”
“We’re doing fine. He and Dr. Trumble at UNC have been pushing hard to get their heart booster pump approved. He’s also been working with Dr. Mullis to get their port driven ‘artificial pancreas’ accepted by the diabetes research community. It’s just two tiny ports mounted back to back, one goes to the glucose sensor and the other delivers the insulin from a dispenser. It’s small enough to be inserted through a big needle. In animal trials they’ve been able to maintain blood glucose levels with tighter control than the pig’s natural pancreas, so diabetes researchers are pretty pumped. They’re really just starting on their attempt to build an artificial kidney but…”
Ell, grinning, had reached out and put a finger on Emma’s lips. “You know what I want is the skinny on how you and Roger are getting along.”
Emma lifted her left hand out of her lap and put it up on the table.
Ell glanced down, her eyes widening as she saw the sparkling ring on Emma’s finger. She leaned forward to put her arms around her friend. Tears spilling down her cheeks she said, “Oh Emma! I’m so happy for you guys! When did you get engaged?”
“Last Saturday. He was just as sweet and awkward and wonderful as you might expect Roger to be.” A tear trickled down Emma’s cheek as well, “I’m so happy.”
“Let’s go out to lunch and celebrate!”
When they returned from a nice lunch, Ell said, “Hey, I do have favor to ask.”
Emma grinned, “I knew there’d have to be some kind of payback for your services as maid of honor.”
Ell gave her a mock serious look. “Of course.” Then she grinned, “Let’s use the screens in one of the little conference rooms; I need your help designing an odd circuit with a rapidly varying bias…”
As they worked, Allan managed all the data for the design, answering questions so rapidly that Emma had no temptation to use her own AI for any of the design questions that were posed. Once the circuit design had been completed, with Emma’s as usual brilliant suggestions that reduced its size and complexity yet boosted its reliability, Ell took her leave.
As she walked away, Ell spoke quietly to Allan. He removed all traces of their design activity from the memory imbedded in the screens of the conference room. Then she had him modify the circuit design in three ways. The first simple modifications changed the circuit so it would generate the actual currents she needed, rather than the dummy currents she had told Emma she wanted. The second set of modifications left the circuit with a couple of defects that rendered it inoperable without some solder bridges. The third set of modifications produced a section of the circuit that would rapidly overheat under certain demands. She had Allan erase all evidence of the previous versions from his memory. Finally, she had Allan send a request to the circuit fabricator Ell had hidden away in the tunnel in West Virginia for four copies of the circuit to be built, each constructed on a magnesium frame that would immolate the entire circuit if Ell overheated the circuit with the demands specified by the third set of modifications.
The fab waited patiently for the magnesium frame and a number of circu
it components it had ordered from Amazon.
Ell considered dropping by her office for a moment but then shook her head. There was nothing in her office that didn’t also exist elsewhere and if the FBI had dropped off some kind of bug in there that reported the presence of someone besides the cleaners, it could produce a huge problem.
***
Gary looked up from his discussion of graphend construction with his team. Somehow, he’d felt eyes on him and sure enough he saw Ell, dressed as Raquel standing on the other side of the big room with a large plastic bag. Turning back to his team, he said, “So, what I want you to work on is constructing large ‘cabinets’ within which we can establish these conditions and rapidly vary the conditions from the construction of one allotrope, to the construction of another. Right now we’re limited by the small volumes of our chambers. Also, the length of time it takes to change from one condition to the other means that it takes a long time to cycle enough layers to make a useful product.” He looked around the table at them, “We have money to spare. I want you to brainstorm different designs. I’ll be back in a bit.” He got up and headed towards Ell. “Hey Raquel, what are you doing slumming around our new facility?”
“Slumming? These are some pretty nice digs you’ve moved into here!” She frowned, “Hey, you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. It’s conceivable you could wind up answering some difficult questions from the government if they were to find out that you talked to me. I can just take off?”
Gary snorted, “I owe you plenty. Like everyone on the planet, I owe you my life, but I also owe you for the start you’ve given my business.” He waved a dismissive hand, “I’ll talk to you about whatever you want, the government be damned.”
“Thanks Gary,” Ell said quietly. “From what I overheard of your conversation, it sounds like you’re getting ready to scale up your graphend coating production?”
“Yeah, the plan is to fill all this space,” he waved vaguely around the insides of the huge building, “with cabinets of various sizes for coating all sorts of objects. My first priority is to make a commercial success out of coating existing objects with diamond or lonsdaleite to prevent wear and scratching. Then, taking your idea we’ll coat Styrofoam objects with graphene to make fancy balloons and with graphend to make incredibly strong but lightweight objects, then dissolve the Styrofoam out of them.”
Ell’s right eyebrow bounced up and she lifted the big plastic bag in her hand, “Want some Styrofoam objects to practice on?”
Gary laughed, “Bring it in here and let’s see what you’ve got,” he said. They went in a small room and Gary leaned forward to look in the bag as Ell opened it. At first all he saw were Styrofoam beads by the millions. “You must have something really delicate packed in there.”
“Well actually, I want the beads coated with graphene too. But,” she reached in and pulled out a long Styrofoam rod with a pointed end and a handle. It was shaped like a rapier though it didn’t have sharp edges.
Gary looked at it bemusedly, “You want a balloon sword?”
Ell thought to herself, Gary hasn’t figured out what happens when you blow one of these up with really high pressures yet, but didn’t comment, only nodded. She grinned at him, “And some graphene underwear.” Beads falling everywhere, she partially lifted out the upper part of a Styrofoam shirt she’d had shaped from laser measurements of her torso at full inspiration. He could see that the Styrofoam seemed to be partitioned into sections. There were front, back and side chest sections visible but he couldn’t see the abdominal section still down in the beads. The arm, forearm and wrist sections were separated by shoulder and elbow sections that seemed each to be made of many small segments. The shirt had a tremendous segmented collar or hoodie that extended up and over the wearer’s head.
Gary stared at it for a minute. “You want that coated with graphene?”
Ell nodded, “Yeah, I know it seems kind of weird.”
Gary hadn’t taken his eyes off of it. Musingly he said, “You’re trying to make some kind of armor aren’t you?”
Ell sighed, “Yeah. I’m worried that some of the people chasing me might use more force than I’d hope when they’re trying to catch me.”
“What’s with the huge collar? It’s practically a helmet.”
Ell tilted her head to the side while studying the Styrofoam model still. “That’s the idea.”
Gary frowned, “Are you thinking you can inflate the graphene collar to make it stand up like the Styrofoam does and protect your head?”
Ell nodded.
“But, Ell, when you inflate it, the inner layer will simply move away from the outer layer until it’s squeezing your head and suffocating you!”
“Ah,” Ell said, as she understood Gary’s concern. “Actually, there are thousands of tiny perforations lasered from the inner to the outer surfaces of the Styrofoam. Hopefully, graphene will form inside the perforations as well, binding the inner and outer layers together so they don’t move apart like you’ve just described.”
Gary’s eyes widened as he considered that possibility. “That’ll be pretty cool, if it works.”
Ell reached into the beads again, moving her hand around and coming out with a stack of thin Styrofoam boards. “Here are some practice boards with the same kind of laser perforations to practice on. In order to let us optimize the design some of them have smaller and larger perforations. They’re marked with the size of their perforations. If I need to perforate the shirt and pants to a different size, we’ll just redo the lasering.”
“There are pants in that bag too?” Gary asked in surprise.
“They’re stacked. One leg’s inside the shirt, the other’s on the outside.”
***
Tucson, Arizona—Dr. Gregory Skipriti of the Department of Astronomy here at the University of Arizona has described the Epsilon Eridani system that they have explored through their grant of access to one of ET Resources’ rockets. This stellar system contains two large debris (asteroid) disks and two supra-jovian gas giant planets. There are two small rocky planets in the inner system, but as both are quite close to E. Eridani, there is no evidence of life on either one.
Ben Stavos sat down saying, “So, I hear you have concerns about landing radioactive waste on Pluto?”
AJ and Carter glanced at one another. Carter said, “Well, yeah, as head waldo driver, I think we’ll have waldo problems there. You know they were designed to work in unfriendly environments but, wow! Pluto’s really cold. We’re talking an average of forty-four degrees above absolute zero. Assuming that the ports that are supposed to deliver the material don’t suffer failures at that temperature, I’m pretty sure we’re going have several waldo problems. First, it would take forever to fly the waldoes there so we’d need to deliver the waldoes out there through very large ports which are expensive to run. Second, I suspect we’d have mechanical failures in the waldoes from frozen joints and occasional fractures of components made brittle by the cold.” He looked at AJ.
AJ said, “We could of course design waldoes to be heated either electrically or with fluids, but then they might melt into the frozen gasses that Pluto is made of.” He shrugged, “However, I think the best reason not to put our waste there is we don’t know what we might find there. That ultra-cold environment might have condensed some interesting molecules, or we might discover that it is an ideal location for some type of research or manufacturing.”
Ben looked back and forth at them, “Hopefully you aren’t just coming to me with a problem you don’t have a solution for?”
“Uh, no sir. We would suggest Juno. It’s an S-type, or stony asteroid so wouldn’t be expected to have great value. Its average temperature is somewhere around a hundred below zero Celsius. Cold, but we know from our mining experience that our waldoes work OK at that temperature. Gravity at its surface is only 1.2% earth normal but its escape velocity is still about four hundred miles per hour, so the radioactive waste we put there isn’t going
to just fly away if it gets bumped hard.”
“Also, Juno has a crater that’s a hundred kilometers in diameter. If we put the waste down at the bottom of the crater it should be permanently shaded from the sun. So even though the sun facing surface of Juno occasionally gets above freezing, we should be able to spray water onto waste placed at the bottom of the crater. That way we can freeze the radioactives solidly into place.”
Ben looked back and forth at the two earnest young men. He liked each of them, but together they synergistically formed a team stronger than the sum of its parts. “Way to go guys. Let’s get a waldo on its way out there to do some exploration. Two objectives: first to make sure we haven’t missed some important feature or resource present on Juno that we would want to harvest, and, second to explore the depths of that crater to see if it’s truly suitable and really does stay below freezing.”
After a little more discussion they broke up.
***
Ell threw the covers off.
Shan rolled over and eyed her, “You OK?”
“Jeez, why’d you have to get me all pregnant and huge like this in the summer? The hormones make me hot. My size makes me hot. The weather makes me hot! I’m seriously considering moving up on to one of our properties in the mountains for the rest of the summer.”
Shan said, “You’re not huge—yet. You’re really just kinda big.”
“I’m still hot!”
“You can afford to turn down the thermostat you know.”
“I know, I know. It’s just when I’m laying here with nothing to think about but how I feel, everything seems to irritate me.”
“Hmm, seems like you ought to put on that shirt my dad gave you.”
“Ooh! The cooling shirt?” Ell rolled out of bed and dug through her drawer for the t-shirt with the cooling tubes woven into it. Rather than her original idea for a shirt with cool water tubes in it, this one blew cool air out of little vents all over its inside. She pulled it on and had Allan turn it on. “Ohhh! That’s nice, how could I have forgotten this!”
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