by Mark Lingane
“You know that if he stays here, they will come.”
Nikola shook his head. “You’d prefer it if he walked the deserts alone to be taken on the first night he sleeps?”
26
MELANIE STORMED INTO Nikola’s office. She hadn’t been paying attention at the ball and it had just sunk in that she would not be going with Gavin. And the reason? Sebastian. She had to nursemaid him.
Nikola was standing behind his desk leafing through a thick book. “I know,” he said, “we could really use someone of his power, but he’s too young. You’ll need to look after him.”
“But why me? Why do I have to do it?” She closed her eyes, but was haunted by the vision of Gavin cheerily smiling as he left, but returning in a zipped-up canvas bag.
Nikola put the book down on the table and focused his attention on her. “Because you’re developing into a great fighter. Sometimes the strongest people need to be around that which needs to be protected the most.”
“Huh?”
“Because I said so.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
“Well, technically I am. That’s what ‘guardian’ means. And ‘commander.’” He leaned forward on the desk, resting on his hands. “This is something you’ll have to trust me on.”
“But what have I been training for? And with Gavin … it’s so …” She folded her arms and looked down at her feet, lost in her emotions.
“You’ll have to trust me.”
“Why should I trust you when you’re being so secretive?”
“Because I’m so secretive. In the same way that I know your real name, yet I haven’t told the authorities that you’re here.”
She shut her mouth and thought heavily about that statement.
“You need to trust me. And to do the adult thing, you will trust me. I hope one day to repay you for that trust. You will learn, you will see and you will understand. But not today.”
“What happens now?”
“We prepare for war.”
*
“Have you ever been out the back of the city to the dumping grounds?” said Isaac.
The general consensus among the boys was that the ball had been a success, and the opposite gender were not the most disgusting and dull things on the planet, although they should probably stay at arm’s length for the moment. Many had considered the upcoming excursion into enemy territory with quiet optimism. After all, they would have the element of surprise for the first time. And most had woken the morning after the ball feeling upbeat. Most, except for Sebastian.
“No, I haven’t,” he said. “What’s out there?”
“Garbage and stuff.”
“Sounds like a blast. How come we’ve been avoiding it all this time? Garbage and stuff. Sounds like an awesome day out.”
“No need to be like that. It was just an idea.”
“Pretty stupid idea.” Sebastian mulled over the other opportunities presenting themselves to the day, which numbered zero. “But since we’ve got nothing else to do, let’s go.”
They wound their way through the narrow cobbled streets that formed the complex maze of ad-hoc town planning until they came to the city’s rear gate. It was shut but the gatehouse next to it was open for daytime activities. During the day people were allowed through without too much scrutiny. The thin doorway allowed sufficient space for individuals to walk outside but it would block the chance of an army trying to squeeze in, especially an army with fat sergeants like the one sitting at the table.
He smiled thinly at the boys as they ran through, and watched them closely as they ran off into the wilds outside. He made a note in his Suspicious Movements notebook.
In minutes Isaac was halfway up the largest mound, which stuck up severely from the surrounding plain, indicating frantically for Sebastian to catch up. Sebastian could see bits of old metal scattered, buried, twisted and tortured by the sun and sand. Running up the mound was hard work, harder than he was expecting a sand dune to be.
“This isn’t an ordinary hill,” he said as he crested the top.
“Isn’t it?”
Sebastian scuffed around various spots, digging with his heel to see what he could unearth. The soil had been cooked hard over the years and failed to budge. He closed his eyes and tilted his head.
“This hill has a power source,” he whispered more to himself than Isaac.
He noted the curve of the path they had just come up. It meandered around gently then turned back on itself. He wandered over to the other side of the hilltop. That pathway down curved to one side, then ended abruptly. He started to walk down the path, but ended up running as his momentum picked up. His legs started to go faster than he could control and he ended up running off the end, into the air, and tumbling down into the sand.
He got up and dusted himself down. “Planned to do that,” he shouted back at Isaac.
As he continued to empty sand out of his pockets he noticed that the curve of the pathway seemed peculiar. He ran his hand over the wall closest to him. It was hard. He picked up a rock and chipped away at the sand until some of it started to fall away. He continued to pound into the hardened sand until it suddenly clanged. He rubbed his hand over the surface. Over the metal was a strange cloth.
A couple of minutes later Isaac had joined him. “What are you doing?”
“There’s metal under here,” replied Sebastian.
“Yeah, well, there’s a lot of junk in this hill, bits and pieces, old derelict stuff dumped over the years. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were a few pieces of metal buried here.”
“No, it’s all metal. The whole hill is metal. At least whatever is below this strange material is metal.”
“No way.”
“Yes, way.”
Isaac ran his eyes over the huge scale of the mound. “Nah. Hey, look, I can see some old hydrolifts.” He pointed at some half-buried pieces of rusted metal a hundred yards away. He left Sebastian examining the mound.
The sound of Isaac cursing and kicking the bits of old metal came floating to Sebastian from the distance. “It’s no good,” he muttered to himself. “I can’t tell what it is from here. I need to be further away.”
He ran back over the sand for several minutes and then turned. He closed his eyes and reached toward the buried shape. It was still too big. He turned and ran further until sweat rolled down his face and he was out of breath. He turned. He could sense the huge device within his field of perception, but it was too weak to make out any definite shape.
He started to walk toward it again with his eyes closed, hoping he wouldn’t trip. With each step, definition grew stronger, but the device was growing too quickly. He knew he only had a few steps before he was going to be too close again. Then it was too close.
A large eye was staring straight at him.
There was a very big metal animal lying under that pile of sand, and it had been there for centuries.
He wondered who else knew about it.
“Hey, Sebastian, check this out.”
Isaac’s voice came from the other side of the hill. Sebastian made his way toward him, thinking about what he had unearthed. There were many questions he wanted to ask, and he knew only one person who could help.
As he rounded the hill he was surprised to see a dozen airships being dragged out of the city gates by SUVs. The huge metal pods, each the size of a small hut, were on the back of carts with wheels bigger than a horse. In turn, they supported half-inflated balloons. Zeppelins. Sebastian couldn’t believe his eyes. The armored pods beneath the huge balloons looked ominous, with huge sheets of metal pierced and held together by large rivets. Each had four cannons protruding from each side. Scores of men ran around the slow-moving vehicles, shouting and pointing in various directions.
Sebastian recognized Captain Hawk from the ball and sidled up to him.
“This looks intense. Are you expecting trouble?”
“We are the trouble. And the cyborgs won’t be expecting us
.”
“How can you be so sure? I know from when they were chasing me that they have some pretty advanced equipment.”
“We’ve never attacked before. They think they’re totally hidden and undetectable. It’ll be the ultimate surprise.”
“If you haven’t attacked before, and you’re going into an unknown place, how can you be so confident? I’ve seen the cyborgs, and they take some beating.” Sebastian couldn’t shake the image of the cyborgs chasing him through the forest. He thought they were almost unstoppable, unless you had a Merv on hand to protect you.
“We have keener minds than the cyborgs,” the captain said. “They have an army that can only follow one instruction. We have trained soldiers who can think and react on their feet. We assess our circumstances and adapt. We have superior military knowhow.”
Sebastian wasn’t sure how far superior knowhow could get you against a great scary army of dragons and laser guns, but he knew he wasn’t a military expert so he left it to those who said they knew better. He wandered off to look for Isaac.
Isaac had found Nikola. The two were standing next to each other, with Nikola shouting various technical orders to the men working on the zeppelins.
“Hello, Sebastian,” Nikola said. “Good to see you getting some fresh air.”
“Will you be going with them?” Sebastian asked.
“Number Two says I can’t go.”
“Will Number Two be going?”
Nikola laughed. “Only Number Two knows that.”
“And Number One?”
Nikola laughed again. “I severely doubt that. The chances of Number One going are about the same as you going.”
“Have you ever seen Number Two?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that. And the same goes for Number One. Maybe you should ask the same questions of yourself.”
Sebastian scratched his head as he puzzled over Nikola’s response, but the spectacle of the zeppelins being prepared for flight had soon erased it from his mind.
“Nikola, how do these work?” he asked.
“We fill the balloons with helium, which is lighter than air, and the zeppelins float.”
“How can anything be lighter than air?”
“Well, helium is lighter than air, and just as heavy things will fall, the lightest will rise.”
Nikola explained that helium weighs 0.1785 grams per liter, and nitrogen, which makes up eighty percent of the air we breathe, weighs 1.2506 grams per liter. If one bottle were filled with helium and another with air, the one filled with helium would weigh one gram less than the bottle with air.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot,” Nikola told them, “but that’s why blimps and balloons are usually very big. The one-gram difference really adds up in large volumes. Helium balloons follow the same principle as you do when you float in the water. It’s the law of buoyancy. If the water you displace weighs more than you do, you’ll float.”
Isaac looked terminally bored.
Sebastian absorbed the information. He thought how it applied to farting in the bath. It made sense. A fart would weigh less than the water. He wondered how potent a fart would have to be to sink. Maybe a heavy red-meat diet was required. Then you could capture it in a glass and take it with you. Could be something worth experimenting with.
“Sebastian, pay attention,” Nikola said.
“Sorry, I got distracted thinking about gases.”
“The gas lifts the balloon into the air. So tell me, how do we make it go back down?”
“Let the gas out?”
“Correct. What if we want to go back up?”
“I don’t know. You’d need more gas, wouldn’t you? So unless you carry it with you … but that would also make you lift into the air.”
“What if we compressed it so much that it became a liquid?”
“Wouldn’t that make it weigh even more?”
“But didn’t we have that on board when we originally filled the balloon?”
“Ah.”
“We decompress the gas, so we lose the weight and it goes into the balloon providing buoyancy. We can control it with the large fans at the back. They work independently so we can go full forward, full reverse. But what happens if we have one in full forward and one in full reverse?”
“It blows up?” Isaac ventured. “There needs to be more stuff blowing up.”
“No. That comes later with the cannons.”
“Would you turn?” Sebastian said.
“Yes, very good. And these are the levers.”
Both boys jumped on the levers, pulling and pushing them, fighting their own private war in their imaginations against the evil nemesis.
“All right, enough of that. It’s not a toy. If you break it you have to pay for it.”
The boys instantly stopped.
“That’ll be enough for today,” Nikola said. “You should be back inside the walls anyway while these dangerous activities are carried out. People don’t like it if you laugh when they get hurt, as they inevitably will when they ignore all the safety instructions.”
He turned to look at the toiling men. “Like this idiot. Simpson! What possessed you to put a ladder on top of another ladder on top of a chair? Anyone with half a brain would at least do it the other way around.”
Nikola strode toward Simpson, shaking his health and safety policy at the bald-headed buffoon.
Sebastian called out after him. “Nikola, what’s the device under the hill?”
Nikola stopped in his tracks, mid-policy wave and turned. “What do you know about that?”
“Nothing, other than it was looking at me.”
“It’s still awake? That can’t be. We’ll talk about this later.”
“But—”
“Later. Now go.” He made a shooing movement with his hands.
As the two boys made their way back to the city gates, Sebastian took the opportunity to listen in on a few conversations, hoping that someone would tell an inappropriate joke or swear in an amusing way. One of the snippets he caught worried him. One man said to another that the helium wasn’t buoyant enough to meet the lift specifications. The other responded with the instruction to swap it for hydrogen. He said he was making “an executive decision.”
27
ALBERT EXAMINED THE experiment setup.
“You have been practicing vit the screws?”
“Ja. Er, yes.”
“Okay, ve have the magnet. Could you reverse its polarity?”
Sebastian looked at the two magnets with their opposite poles attracting. He concentrated and the magnet on the left spun around one hundred and eighty degrees.
Albert smiled. “Now transfer the magnetic field onto the screw.”
The screw flew across the bench top and stuck to the side of the magnet on the right. Albert picked up the left magnet and tested it against a small piece of metal. It fell away as a dead piece of metal.
“Now transfer the field from the screw back to the magnet.”
Albert was watching the magnet intently when suddenly his hand started to bleed. He shook his hand and licked off the blood. He searched for the screw, but it had vanished. He stared at the bench top, tapping his fingers. After several moments he got up and searched among the various strange devices stored in the back cupboard.
On his way back to the bench he closed all the curtains in the room, making it as dark as he could. He placed a long thin object on the bench and flicked a small switch. Slowly a strong purple glow emanated from the box, casting an eerie glow and making his face look possessed by the physics demon himself.
He held up another screw. “Transfer the magnetic field to this screw.”
Sebastian concentrated.
“Now, slowly, transfer it back. Slowly.”
Sebastian tried to slow the process in his mind. He closed his eyes and let the image crawl across the darkness in his imagination.
“Stop,” whispered Albert. “Now open your eyes.”
There,
standing in mid-air, was a perfect outline of the screw, glowing purple in the strange light.
“You have transferred the particle field to the air.”
“What does that mean?”
“You have created a ghost. Some people might call it teleportation.”
Sebastian was rubbing his temples with his fingers. His eyes were closed.
“Does it pain you?” Albert asked.
“Yes. But it’s not too bad. Just like being stabbed with a pencil.”
Albert returned his amazed attention to the floating ghost screw. “You have matched the electromagnetic configuration of the screw to the elements in the air. So, even if you can’t see it, it exists as an electromagnetic form.” He prodded the image floating in the air. “And you can touch it.”
Albert delicately picked up the ghost screw and scratched it down his arm. He could feel the sharp point cutting into his skin. It felt hard, exactly like the real screw.
“Now stop concentrating.” A large spark flew from the ghost screw, making a loud zapping sound. “So the electrons must earth. Interesting. And the original screw is now just inert dust. Interesting.”
The last of the pain ebbed away from Sebastian’s head.
Albert was lost in thought. “It is very important you don’t tell anyone about this. I’m not even sure I understand the implications.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Who knocks vitout?” Albert said.
The door squeaked open and an old lady entered. “Nikola would like to know if Sebastian has a moment,” she said.
“Thank you,” Albert said. “He vill be up shortly. Now, if you could clean from the back, and leave the blackboard as it is.”
He turned back to Sebastian. “Think about it. I think you should tell Nikola. See if he can find something in those dusty pages.”
*
“Sebastian, take a seat. I’m sorry but I don’t have good news for you.”
Sebastian sat down in the big chair opposite Nikola’s desk, where the usual array of books and book-repair equipment lay scattered around. He was still a little dizzy from the teachings of the day.