Coming in the door, she hung up her coat and looked around. Things were neat and clean like they always were when Myr was home. However, Myr was slouched on the couch watching TV with Connor. They both gave Carol a wave and Carol tried to tell herself that Myr had probably spent much of the day looking for a job. Nonetheless, coming into the house feeling wrung out and finding Myr sprawled bonelessly at ease grated on her nerves. “How goes the job search?” Carol asked, trying not to sound angry.
Myr shook her head, “No bueno, unfortunately. I’m starting to worry that I’m going to have to take Miller’s job.”
Trying to suppress the surge of disbelieving anger which had just risen inside of her, Carol did her best to speak calmly, “Miller’s job?”
“Yeah…” Myr said offhandedly, “It’s my last resort but…”
Carol interrupted to say disbelievingly, “Dr. Miller’s offered you a job and you haven’t taken it?!”
Turning to look at Carol for the first time since she’d entered, Myr said, “Yeah, but like I said, it’s my last resort…” she trailed off, apparently realizing for the first time how upset Carol was. “What’s the matter?”
“Myr, my finances are stretched to the breaking point! If someone’s offered you a job, you need to take it!”
Myr stared at her for a moment, then said, “But as soon as I figure out the static field…”
Carol interrupted again, “Yes, yes, you and your damned static field! Have you ever heard the saying, ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?’ I need money now! Or at least for you to stop being a financial sinkhole.”
Myr’s face had frozen. After a moment, she stood up and started for the stairs up to her room. “Okay, I’ll call them in the morning,” she said over her shoulder as she climbed.
Carol chewed her lip as she watched her daughter go up the stairs. She felt bad, but not bad enough to tell Myr she didn’t have to take the job. Carol turned to look at Connor, thinking how, on that night of all nights, she really could have used some help getting him into bed.
Connor was staring at her, wide-eyed. “Mom?” he asked uncertainly.
“Come on kid,” she said tiredly, “let’s get you to bed.”
***֎֎֍֍***
Myr set down her backpack and looked around the lab they’d assigned her at Miller’s company. She’d tucked her tail between her legs and called Joe about the job Miller’d promised.
Now, despite some apprehension about whether promises would be kept, she felt stupid for having not taken Miller up on his offer immediately. Not only was he going to pay her more than any of the other jobs she’d applied to, he was only assigning her enough work to fill half of her time so she could work on her electrostatic field the other half of her time.
The space they’d given her was generous and well set up with common lab equipment. A stack of boxes over in the corner promised to be the rest of the equipment she’d requested so she could do some of the static field experiments she’d never been able to afford in the past.
She tried to ignore her fear that once she got her experiment set up, someone would sneak in at night, study the setup and figure out how to generate her field without her. She thought, I’ve got to remember to zero the settings on the signal generators and amplifiers every day before I leave.
Chapter 1
Myr massaged her temples, dreading the incipient headache that threatened. She’d been working at Miller technology for almost two years now. Half time she worked with Nelson Randall, one of Miller Technology’s senior scientists. She felt like she’d helped Randall make significant progress on his attempts to develop better fuel cell membranes. Randall was already a leader in that field, but he made her feel good by constantly complimenting her on her insights. She liked working with Nelson and felt like she’d learned a lot more about doing science from him than she had from Dr. Krishan back in grad school.
However, she wasn’t making progress on her own project. She could still create her field and suppress static electrical repulsion and attraction. More careful measurements had confirmed that the field suppressed electrostatics without significantly discharging the electrical charge that had produced the effect.
But she couldn’t seem to scale it up into any kind of useful strength.
Several months ago she’d had a few hours of panic when measurements had shown that the field did slightly increase the humidity of the air near her coils. Humid air was well known to be capable of discharging static fields. In fact, almost anyone knew it was easier to generate static electricity sparks if the air was dry. Detecting the increased humidity had made her fear that her field’s suppression of electrostatic effects was merely due to the fact that her equipment somehow increased the water content of the air. She’d previously believed that it couldn’t be due to static discharge because of the fact that her hair stood back on end when she moved back out of the field. However, once she’d detected the humidity she began worrying about the fact that her hair didn’t stand back up quite as much. Careful measurements had shown that at least some humidity-induced discharge was occurring, but eventually she was able to convince herself that the field must also be suppressing the electrostatic effect independently of the higher humidity.
But, even without humidity—however the hell the water content of the air managed to increase around her field—posing as a bugaboo, she was getting more and more frustrated with her inability to make any progress. When she’d started, working half-time with Randall and half time on her own project had seemed like a miracle job. Collaborating with Randall would stimulate her mind and give her someone to bounce ideas off of. She’d hoped that having time to work by herself on her own project, in her own lab, with excellent resources would let her make rapid progress.
When progress hadn’t come, she’d reassured herself that Rome wasn’t built in a day. She had a phenomenon no one else had ever observed or at least had never reported. A field she could reproducibly generate which seemed somehow to suppress electrostatic force on a macroscopic scale. She felt sure that it must also suppress electrostatic force on micro and nano scales. She dared dream that it might actually work at atomic scales where suppression of electrostatic repulsion between the electrons of various molecules might catalyze reactions that otherwise didn’t happen. One of the things that slowed chemical reactions was the fact that electrostatic repulsion kept the molecules from approaching one another closely enough to react. If she could reduce that repulsion…
The promise of catalysis seemed so exciting, yet, despite a number of attempts, she couldn’t seem to significantly increase the kinetics of any reactions. She had evidence that some reactions sped up a little, but the increase was hard to measure and certainly wouldn’t impress the kind of people she’d envisioned wanting to buy her tech.
She suspected her problem was because she couldn’t generate a strong enough field. The field she’d used in high school to suppress electrostatic repulsion and attraction wasn’t powerful enough to achieve any truly interesting or useful effects. When she’d tried to increase the power, the field destabilized and collapsed.
Or, at least it stopped working. She assumed it destabilized and collapsed, but wasn’t quite sure how to determine whether that was what was happening since she couldn’t really measure the field strength except through observation of its effect on static electricity.
After a year of increasingly frustrating attempts to boost the power of the field she’d given up and began trying to work on ways to focus the field. She hoped that even if she couldn’t catalyze reactions over a broad area that there would be uses for catalysis in microscopic regions.
Now, she was sitting there, dreading the results of her next experiment. She’d redesigned her coils and plates but had gotten so used to failure that she had a gut certainty this attempt would fail as well. Which, of course, would leave her even more depressed. She sighed, There’s no point in wasting any more time, she thought, picking up her bottle of hydroge
n peroxide. She poured 100 milliliters of peroxide into each of a couple of 200 milliliter beakers, weighed them carefully, and then set one beaker just above her new coil system. She moved the support up to hold the beaker at the level where she expected the energy of the field to be focused. The other beaker went on a neighboring table as a control.
Chewing her tongue and crossing her fingers, she flipped on the switch while keeping her eye on the H2O2. The liquid had a few bubbles from peroxide’s slow breakdown to H2O and O2. She used peroxide as her bellwether because the decomposition reaction was easily catalyzed and catalysis should produce visible oxygen bubbles to confirm the reaction was under way. Besides, she could weigh the beaker afterwards to easily determine how much oxygen that had bubbled up out of the peroxide.
Myr frowned. She thought she might be seeing a few more bubbles.
Or maybe not.
She flipped the switch off, then back on. She thought she saw a few more bubbles when the field was on, but she was only too aware of how much a little bit of wishful thinking could influence her perceptions. The weight of the beaker afterwards would measure the reaction much more accurately than her estimation of the number of bubbles that were formed. But even if it is catalyzing the reaction a little bit, it’s so little that no one would ever care, she thought morosely.
Then she heard Arlan Miller’s voice behind her, “Myr?”
Myr bit off a curse. Of course the boss would show up just as another experiment failed. Bitterly, she wondered how she was going to put enough lipstick on this fiasco to convince Miller he shouldn’t just fire her. Well, she thought, he probably won’t fire me. Dr. Randall and I’ve been getting good results, after all. But he’ll either assign me to Randall full-time, give me a different job, or demand I explain the field to him so he can get some of his other scientists working on it.
When she’d fully turned she felt surprise. Miller was there with some nerdy looking teenager. It actually could be worse than getting fired, she thought, he could be about to ask me to babysit his nephew for the afternoon! Despite her dark thoughts, Myr pasted on some kind of smile and brightly said, “Hi Dr. Miller, what can I do for you?”
Miller gave Myr a strange look, making her feel like he could see right through her false cheer. Indicating the young man with him, he said, “I’m wanting to introduce you to Vinn Saigler. We’ve just hired Vinn and I’d like to take both of you out to lunch so we can talk about how you might be able to help each other.”
Surprised to hear the apparent teenager introduced as a new hire, Myr quickly reappraised him. He looked like he’d just finished high school. She’d have believed he might be a college freshman, but if he was actually that young she couldn’t imagine why Miller would bring him around to meet her. Of course, a moderately sized company like Miller’s had to have some unskilled workers to do the janitorial work and run the loading docks, but it seemed extremely unlikely that the CEO would bring an unskilled worker like that to meet or help one of the scientists. Of course, maybe he doesn’t think of me as a scientist since I never finished my PhD, she thought morosely.
Nonetheless, she had no idea how someone with a high school education would be able to help her. Nonplussed, she said, “Um, okay. When did you want to go?”
Miller said, “Is now okay?”
“Sure,” Myr said, happy not to have to explain what was going on with her experiment. She reached back and flipped off the power switch for her set up. Not wanting to hold up the CEO, she didn’t zero the settings on her equipment like she normally did, just turned off the lights and carefully locked the door as they left.
They exited the building and started down the street on foot, Miller saying, “I thought I’d take you to one of my favorite places, Awefull Waffles. In case you’re worried, they do serve other things besides breakfast. Though,” Miller winked at Saigler, “I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t be excited to have an opportunity to eat breakfast three meals a day.”
Vinn grinned and said, “I could go for that.”
Myr shook her head, muttering, “That’s just gross…”
Once they were seated, Myr ordered a BLT waffle sandwich. Dr. Miller ordered a savory waffle breakfast sandwich with bacon, eggs, and cheese. As young as he looked, Myr wasn’t surprised when Vinn ordered a peanut butter and banana waffle sandwich.
With the orders placed, Dr. Miller leaned back in their booth and said, “Now, let’s get down to business.” He looked at Myr, “Vinn here is a certified math genius. I didn’t hire him because Miller Tech has desperate need of someone with amazing math skills; I hired him because a friend told me about him and I believe in hiring talent, even if I have to figure out what to do with it later.” Miller glanced at Vinn, then back to Myr, “Now that we have him, the question is, ‘what do we do with him?’ ”
Myr stared at Miller a moment, then jerked a thumb at Vinn. “He looks like he just graduated high school. How does he rate being called a math genius?”
Vinn answered before Miller could, “Can you spell prod-i-gy? I’ve got my PhD.”
Miller grimaced a little at Vinn’s cocky answer, but let it slide. He turned to Vinn, making a little wave at Myr. “Myr’s also a genius, though in a completely different fashion from you. I first met her when she was in high school. She had an exhibit at the local science fair and presented on a new kind of field she’d discovered.”
Vinn snorted, “Pasture, meadow, farming, sports?”
Myr blinked while she processed the idea that Saigler was disrespecting even the possibility that she’d discovered the kind of field interesting to mathematicians or physicists. The punk was intimating that he thought she must have found a plot of land. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Miller grimacing again. She closed her eyes for a second and reminded herself that Vinn probably didn’t know how she’d struggled to make something useful out of her field. Presumably he knew nothing about it and was simply trying to inject a little humor into a situation where he felt uncomfortable.
Miller shook his head, saying, “Nooo,” in a drawn out fashion. His tone made obvious his distaste for Vinn’s response. “It was a field that suppressed static electricity. She demonstrated it by charging herself enough to stand her hair on end, then stepping into the field where her hair immediately drooped.”
Apparently oblivious to Miller’s displeasure regarding his previous comment, Saigler said, “A field of water vapor?”
Myr struggled to keep her face straight in the face of what felt like another insult. One that struck particularly close to home in view of her recent realization that the humidity was actually slightly increased in proximity to her coils. She was trying to think of a biting response when Miller said, “No Vinn. When she stepped out from under the field, her hair lifted back up.”
Saigler opened his mouth to say something—Myr expected another wise ass comment—but then the young twerp closed his yap without speaking. From the look in his eyes, Myr thought he’d expected to be able to immediately refute the possibility she had a novel field, but hadn’t. She didn’t think he’d given up; he was merely taking a moment to come up with a realistic objection. Finally, his eyes narrowed, “You’re sure she wasn’t just stepping back onto a conductor that re-charged her hair?”
“If she had, the increased moisture retained in her hair would still have suppressed the response, right?” Miller paused to give Saigler a moment to consider, but then he continued, “But in answer to your original question, no. She was wearing nonconductive shoes and there weren’t any conductive mats on the floor. Besides, this was years ago and we’ve checked the effect six ways from Sunday. Trust me, it really works.”
“So,” Vinn said slowly, “you’ve got this field that mysteriously suppresses static charge and…” he stopped, considering, “I haven’t heard about it because…what?” He looked from Miller to Myr and back, “It doesn’t do anything useful? That seems surprising.”
Miller shrugged, then waved to Myr to respond.
Vinn frowned, “You’ve been working on this since high school? That’s what… ten or twelve years?” Having insulted her by implying she was older than twenty-five, he turned to Miller, “If it hasn’t worked so far, isn’t it time to move on to a different area?”
Miller opened his mouth to respond, but Myr couldn’t take the insults anymore. “No!” She felt a little appalled at the way she’d raised her voice and the fury evident in her tone, but she wasn’t about to back off. “You’ve been thinking about this for what… ten seconds?! Ever since you got out of diapers, maybe?” Myr took a deep breath and reduced her volume but not her intensity. “Most things worth achieving take time and sustained effort!”
Miller made a calming motion with his hands, then, turning his eyes on Myr, forced a chuckle. “Perhaps I should’ve started this conversation by mentioning that one of Vinn’s gifts is a first-rate talent for getting under people’s skin.” He turned to Vinn, “You’re correct that Myr has been struggling with roadblocks. I firmly believe that different people have dissimilar talents, and different types of intelligence. My hope is that by bringing two people with diverse skill sets together and asking them to attack this project as a team we might finally make some progress.”
Discovery: Proton Field #1 Page 3