April

by Mackey Chandler

  "For me, money is just to use to get what I want, which right now is to stay on M3 and survive whatever happens in the next couple months. If we need to use my money - fine. When it's gone we will make more. Right now my folks are used to me asking, if I want to spend most of my money on something, even though I don't need a signature or anything to access my account. Even my brother, still shows them a deal that's going to take most of his free funds and he'll be an adult in a year. We both trade our own accounts without consulting anyone, but it's never a bank breaking amount. Neither of us ever invest everything, in one make it or bust gamble anyway."

  "I can start building up cash, if I need funds that I can spend and not answer to anyone. There's always ways to make money here, unless you are dumb or lazy. Does that answer hit on anything you were trying to understand about me?"

  "I'm being an idiot and I've just embarrassed myself," Heather said. "I've been worried, because Jeff is developing things which will be worth some real serious money and I'm worried about others taking advantage of him. It was not a thought worthy of you. Here you are offering up whatever you have and I'm the one holding back."

  "You're right." Heather told Jeff. "Bring her in all the way with us, or not at all. But I think you should show her what she is getting into, before we finalize it. We know more about her now, than she knows about us."

  "We have reason to believe," Jeff said, "that the spy you told us about was probably sent here to spy on my dad, rather than anything about the Rock. Come on, we need to show you something," he said, getting up. Jeff led them over to the first of the three doors off the living area.

  April had assumed it was one of the bedrooms, with a small bath in the middle. It was a common layout. The door was swung almost closed, but not latched. Jeff took a pen from his pocket. "Don't touch," he warned, with a small guarding motion of his left hand. He stuck the pen in the crack and very slowly pushed the door full open.

  The room was trashed.

  "My dad is at the Second International Space Station until next week for a conference on nanoelectronics. He went Saturday and last night was the first he has been off station in almost a year. It was posted on the web he'd be a speaker, so anyone could know when he would be gone. This is his room."

  The mattress on the bed was slit open. A pile in the corner was the carpeting that had been pulled up. The plates had been removed, where every line, or switch, or access came into the room. Every item of clothing in the closet had been searched and dropped in a pile on the floor. There were a few paper books and it was obvious they had been fanned open and dropped on the floor. The room was tiny, so the wreckage looked even worse concentrated in such a small space.

  Worst of all was a small stand alone computer, on the desk and com console. It was visibly charred, with a fist sized hole through its side. You usually didn't see a separate box for a computer unless it had some serious power. The sort of box they'd use to predict long term orbits, or model solar activity. April recognized the hot metallic smell again she had noticed when she first came in, but had forgot about quickly.

  There was another charred hole through the console, with melted and bubbled laminate around the hole. The steel drawer from underneath was pulled out, with a hole through its bottom. She could guess by the lines of sooty ash on the wall, with a water streaked pattern, that someone had used the wastebasket on the bed as a bucket to quench a fire. There was also a lump of blackened metal melted into the decking, in a slumped depression.

  Any doubt about who did it ended with a look at a wall screen, where a laughing seal and globe was drawn with a marker.

  "Yeah, it's the same guy," April confirmed. She found herself grinding her teeth. "He can't resist rubbing our noses in it with the drawing."

  Heather took a turn explaining, as Jeff pushed the door slowly shut with the pen and led them back to the table. "There are several reasons Jeff's dad might be spied on. First of all, he is one of the eighteen Rock investors just like your family. It's the second reason he is at ISII. He was scheduled to speak there anyway, but he is also supposed to meet a lawyer afterward, who represents the investors. He told Jeff not to be surprised if he was gone a full two weeks. Why I don't remember any Lewis on the list of investors?"

  "Because our share is held as Strategic Materials Inc., but that company is privately held by family. They don't talk about it a lot, but my granddad was not only one of the guys who flew out and put the thrusters on it, but one of the originators of the whole plan."

  "He was?" Jeff asked, looking up from the dinner cleanup. "Boy, I would love to sit and hear the whole story some time."

  "So would I," Heather admitted. "We don't see each other enough and he has never told me as much about it, as I'd like to know. In fact they never told me anything about the legal problems being so serious. Gramps will talk serious to me, but I have to admit, yesterday was the first time I have ever felt my dad treated me seriously, like an adult, when he explained this problem to me."

  They both Earth nodded and winked a yes in helmet talk at the same time, for double emphasis, understanding what she was saying.

  "So have you told your dad about this?" she asked, waving her hand toward the bedroom. "You've talked to him, haven't you?"

  "Well, no. We haven't really had any other reason to call and I don't want to call him about this. We can't be sure someone wouldn't be listening in." Jeff explained. "There isn't much we could say, that might not tell someone listening in way too much. He might even run back home out of concern for me, when what he's there for is really important. And this is over and done. Nothing he can do to change it."

  "I can't imagine my mom going off to another station and not calling me a couple times while she was gone. Do you and your dad not get along real well?" April asked concerned.

  "Not at all," Jeff assured her bewildered. "I mean, other than this, which was unexpected, what would we talk about? He'll have the conference recorded for me and I doubt if anything is so radical and new, he will call me all excited about it. And not much else was happening here."

  "It's a guy thing," Heather informed her. "They sit all evening in the same room and never even grunt at each other. I've seen them sent text messages across the room, rather than talk."

  "Well, if he's concentrating on something it's rude to interrupt his line of thought," Jeff explained. "If I send him mail he can choose to ignore it if he doesn't want to break his concentration. He knows it's not an emergency if I don't flag it priority."

  Heather and April just rolled their eyes at each other.

  "Hey, we like each other," he said defensively and then decided to stop digging himself deeper, seeing the look on the girl's faces. They simply weren't going to understand. "There is another factor - the second big thing we want to tell you. The spy might have been looking for evidence of an invention, on which they may think my dad is working. If money is the key, the financial potential involved would be even bigger than the amount represented by the Rock."

  April looked at him for some clue he was joking. But his big brown eyes stared back at her as serious as could be. "You are talking about billions of dollars? It's really that big?

  "Billions a year," Jeff assured her, "as big as the computer chip or laser, if you want to go back, maybe as big as video. The trouble is, one of the first devices I made emits pulses of neutrinos when it's running. I didn't think it was any problem, because they are so hard to detect. Little did we know, the USNA military is working on using neutrino pulses for communications. When my point source in orbit started sending out a flood of neutrino pulses, their detector went nuts. They also were able to triangulate the location with multiple receivers, just like using a GPS unit. The neutrinos flux has little variations they can time. So they knew within a couple meters where it was coming from, at my dad's lab in Lucent's cubic," he said, with a grimace.

  "Okay," said April."If this is something your dad was working on for Lucent, isn't it their problem? I know how intelle
ctual property law works. His name may be on the patent, but what he develops on their time, it belongs to the company, even if he's the inventor, right?"

  "I said they thought it was my dad," Jeff explained. "Being a single parent, he'd often take me in to work with him and I'd do my school work and read when I was younger, but when I started making things with Heather he'd let me use a bench at work and sometimes borrow equipment when nobody else was using it. He knew Heather and I make things for people, but about my inventions I kept my mouth shut. I wanted to prove them out first, so I wouldn't look silly."

  "He didn't know the full story of what I was working on until we got a letter, an actual paper postal letter from Singapore, written by a North American scientist he knows, about the neutrinos they detected. He mailed it when he was out of the country attending a seminar, just like my dad is doing now. Then I had to show dad everything I was working on, just before he went to ISSII. It kind of totally floated him loose," he illustrated, with a hand slowly drifting away with wiggling fingers, "to hear such a biggie right before he was leaving and we didn't have time to talk it out."

  "Here," Jeff said pushing the supper containers across the table to her. "Put these back in the thermo-pak, please. I'll go get something to show you." He went off through the door into the other bedroom.

  April was thinking about what sort of person lived in such cramped quarters, yet had enough money to buy a full share in the Rock. She wanted to meet Jeff's Dad and find out more about him and what made him tick. She put the Pak by the door and wiped the table off, before Jeff returned.

  Jeff came back with a small foam board box, big enough for a pair of shoes. He pulled out two plastic tubes with soft push-on end caps. The device he slid out in his hand looked like a really big old electrical fuse she had seen. It was a ceramic cylinder, sized like a flashlight, with two metal rods coming out of the ends of the ceramic. The ends were of warm, purple tinted metal, which were pressed thin in a big flat, for lots of contact area and a hole was drilled through the flat so it could be fastened down with a stout bolt. The flanges ended up tapered out, as wide as the tube between them. And the end was trimmed off square. The metal was a funny mottled hue.

  "Is this copper?" she asked reaching to run her finger along the big tab.

  Jeff grinned big. "Actually, it's a gold and silver alloy with aluminum and a little tin and a few other traces for making a low resistance contact. It takes almost a troy ounce of gold each unit, so they are fairly expensive. It took every dollar I've saved for three years to buy the metal. They are the transition points, from the superconducting micro-fibers inside the unit to the conventional conductors outside. So they need to pass heat to the cooling units on the feeder bar.

  "And it does what?"

  "You put deuterium in this tube at high pressure," he indicated with his finger. "And you put a pulse across the electric tabs with the correct rise time. After about the fourth or fifth pulses, you start getting a bigger pulse back out of the tabs than you put in and you get helium out of this tube, which should be attached to a vacuum source," he indicated.

  You hook it to a circuit tuned to the right frequency and after the first few hundred actuating pulses, it is self sustaining and delivers an energy surplus of about 30 kilowatts for this size unit." It was a fusion generator, although he had not used the term.

  "Gee, I don't know Jeff," April could not resist joking in the face of this revelation. "Is there enough demand for helium to generate it on site? And you have to get rid of all this waste energy," she said, with a straight face.

  They all started cracking up. It felt really good after all the tensions of the last couple days.

  "Seriously, a fusion generator this small has so many applications," Jeff told them. "It is a gold mine. The smallest fusion unit you can buy right now is a Bussard – polywall unit that runs on hydrogen – boron fuel. It is very expensive to get a unit smaller than nine cubic meters and you need twice that for the support gear."

  "I can make my units smaller, cheaper too, if they are integrated directly into devices with superconducting wiring, so you can drop the end conductors," he said, tapping the big tabs on the ends to make it clear.

  "This is small enough to put fusion power in individual pressure suits, small shuttles, com sats, ground vehicles, aerostats, small boats and planes, isolated cabins and vacation homes. Even individual appliances and tools, if you are willing to spend the money."

  April really perked up at that, but didn't pursue it just yet.

  "So," asked April. "While the spy was tearing your dad's room apart, where was this?" she asked, picking up the generator. It was surprisingly heavy from the alloy.

  "It was sitting in this box, on the floor in my room. It had a pile of dirty footies and stuff on top of it, because my laundry sack was full," he admitted, embarrassed.

  "Do you think they have any idea, what kind of device would make the pulses they detected?"

  "No. I'm so far off the beaten path with this idea, I don't think anyone would stumble onto it for years if I don't publish. Right now, I don't even want to apply for a patent. I have plenty of reasons not to trust any government and the possible trouble with the Rock just makes me sure secrecy is the right course. If the government will steal the Rock, they might just as easily try to steal my invention and I want to live up here and continue to work for us, not lose it to some bunch of crooks."

  "Anyway, I think you know enough now, about what we're facing. So, do we form an alliance?" he asked. Exactly what April had hoped to hear and she was glad he proposed it so formally first. "Do we work as partners together, to get what we want? We want to keep what belongs to us. We all want to continue to live here and not face being forced to move to Earth," he ticked them off on his fingers in turn. "Have I missed anything?"

  "I just realized it yesterday," April said, "but if we may have an opportunity, if enough other people feel the same way I do, we do I hope, that we should break off completely from Earth. My dad said he would support the other investors, up until they fight, but if they fight they will lose for sure. Well, I think if the government tries to take away the Rock there may be more resistance than my dad expects."

  "Do you want to recruit then?" Heather asked. "I'm happy for we three to be allies, but I don't think there is anybody else on the hab I'd trust, to sit and talk treason. That's what we're doing you know. This isn't just business; it's politics too."

  "No," April assured her. "We should stay a closed group. If others want to rebel we can aid or encourage them, but we shouldn't ever suggest to outsiders we are anything but business partners. We'll all do business with others like we always have, so it's not like we stand out by only doing things as a threesome."

  "I'd go further," Jeff suggested. "We should never put a name to the three of us that's not strictly business. Once you have a name on something, it will leak and you are half way to having security start a file on you. We don't want to call attention to ourselves and maybe lay the foundation for a charge of conspiracy years from now."

  "Let me summarize," said Heather, watching their faces to see if she had assent. "We pool resources and talents, to keep what is ours, stay in our home and prepare to support a popular rebellion from behind the scenes, if it happens," she looked at each of them in turn and they were nodding agreement. It sounded crazy and very serious to say out loud.

  "We're doing just like I read about the American Revolutionaries doing, when they broke from England," Jeff said. "They pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the cause. We're just trying to be a little more covert about it. Who can begrudge us that when we're just three and kids in the eyes of the law?"

  "I would add, for just us three, we need to pledge friendship and loyalty with each other, for this to work," April suggested. "More than just business, I need to say that out loud."

  Heather and Jeff spoke quiet agreement. They were all three on the same page.

  Jeff poured more tea fo
r them without replying. April waited, guessing what he had in mind. He raised his cup. "To the three of us, our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor, in friendship and loyalty. I propose our alliance and declare our revolution."

  Heather touched her cup to his. "To victory."

  April joined her cup to touch both of theirs. " And confusion to our enemies," she added hopefully.

  They all drank and regarded each other quietly, savoring the moment.

  "It's settled then," Jeff said. "Now, what do we do about protecting these little gadgets and deal with being spied on?"

  "I think you're in the same position I was after my encounter with the spy," April said. "You don't have the resources to deal with him yourself, so you use the man who is charged with protecting M3 and everyone who lives here. Get Jon involved, because he needs to know the spy was looking for something more."

  "You didn't hear how concerned he was about the room he had stayed in. They were really worried he might have left a booby trap, or biohazard in there for someone. Well, seems to me this room, which he knew belonged to somebody involved with the neutrinos, is a bigger danger for that, than the one at the hotel. If he made a trap there it might get just anyone. A cleaning maid, or the next guest. You were smart enough not to go in the room right?" he nodded agreement.

  "But we sat here and ate dinner with the door cracked open. What if he left some biological agent for your dad? The whole place could be contaminated."

  "It's been since Sunday evening I found it, almost two days now and I slept here and don't have any symptoms," he offered.

  "And you might not. An incubation period of three or four days is common. You know that," she gently chided him. "I don't mean to say I would tell Jon everything about these." April said, laying her hand on the box. "Tell him what he needs to know and stop before you get too specific about what these do."

  "I think we need to keep the relationship between we three secret for now," Jeff said, uncomfortable.