“I have no idea,” Oliver admitted.
“About a hundred in Southern California, but twice that many in New England. Those pansy fuckers really like their sports!
“My property management company owns a couple of small malls, and I’m partners in a couple larger ones. There are lots and lots of other things as well, Oliver.
“I’ve been getting my affairs in order. There’s no way they’ll let someone like Andie own a bar, much less a raft of them, even through a REIT. You do know what a REIT is, right?” Otto laughed at his own wit.
“Yes, I know what a Real Estate Investment Trust is.”
“Good! So, I was in the process of divesting that, but now I’ve changed my mind. It’s yours now, Oliver. Spend the money to get Andie back! Put the rest in your pocket, make a couple of movies and dedicate them to me. Put fucking sports bars in those movies, and lots and lots of fucking car chases with some sexy cars!”
“I already have plenty of money, Otto.”
The man laughed. “Whatever. I know how much, because guys like me, we know these things. I just doubled it. Sue me!” He doubled over with laughter again but ended up on his knees.
“Oliver,” Helen told him. “Otto needs an ambulance. Take care of our daughters.”
“You bet! These are going to the sorriest assholes on the planet when I get done with them.”
* * *
The next morning Oliver held a meeting. The police had come to arrest Linda Walsh, but she had talked with Jack Schaeffer, who’d arranged for her to surrender herself in a day. Helen was with Otto, who was now in the hospital with little hope for survival for more than a day or two, according to his wife.
David Solomon and another of his attorneys were also there for the meeting, plus another attorney representing some of David’s clients. Also at the table were Kurt Sandusky and a man of about thirty who had only a fine stubble of hair on his head. At a guess, Oliver was sure that he was looking at a serving Special Forces soldier.
Oliver stood up. “I’m going to be candid and forthright, because even though the authorities haven’t admitted it yet, they seem to know.”
He went on to explain the fusor project and then, while everyone was digesting that, he explained about the blue door to the Far Side.
Jack Schaeffer’s eyes were glowing with, Oliver thought, an unholy glee. Jack was a friend and one thing Jack had often lamented was that most of his jousting was with pygmies for peanuts. He had, he’d told Oliver, ethics and wasn’t about to join something like the ambulance chasers suing for smokers, asbestos, breast implants and the like. No, he wanted a real, formidable adversary.
“Going back to the power thing for a moment, Oliver. How much power are we talking about? How much does it cost? Most of those fusion machines cost tens of billions of dollars and have trouble keeping the lights lit at their plant.”
“Linda?” Oliver asked the young woman.
Linda Walsh stood up. “I worked with Andie, and most recently, Lin Xi -- he’s the one they are now saying is a Chinese spy. Since I know his family dates back to the gold rush days in Sacramento, I don’t think so. Anyway, I know how much the fusor Lin was working on, cost. Right at eleven thousand dollars.
“It was intended to be a pure power machine, and he increased the fusor size from three feet to six feet in diameter and used a better source of extremely high voltage current, although still with only a relatively small amperage.
“We just got it working, you understand, on Tuesday. Today is Wednesday. We had to keep it detuned, because it was exceeding the thousand-amp service that the sound stage had available in the area close to the fusor. That was where we stood when I went to meet Andie at her house.
“That’s more than a thousand amps at 240 volts... call it 240 kilowatts of continuous production. That’s a quarter of a megawatt, and we had to hold it back. Lin told me before I left he thought he could get three or four times that from it... around a megawatt. A 500 megawatt oil or gas plant costs a couple hundred million dollars.
“You do the math and multiply eleven thousand dollars by five hundred and check which is smaller.”
“Christ!” Kurt said... “That’s not much more than a couple of million!”
“And very early days -- Poppa One is the first fusor designed from start to finish to put everything into energy production. Six feet is probably the largest fusor chamber we can hope to make without a lot more engineering. Just remember that the number of fusion reactions will go up with the cube of the diameter. In theory, a well-designed ten-foot fusor could well produce a gigawatt. And it’s not going to cost billions of dollars like a nuclear reactor would -- more like millions.”
“Radiation?” asked the nearly bald young man next to Kurt Sandusky.
“Zero, zip, nada,” Linda told him. “Andie had me install some alpha particle detectors close to the fusor. There are some of them a few feet from the machine... but not very many. Ten feet away, there are none. There are no radioactive byproducts other than alpha particles, and they are eliminated by the reaction that generates the electricity.”
“And the other thing,” Jack Schaeffer asked. “The Far Side Door?”
“At last report, we had no idea where it went,” Linda told them. “I imagine Andie knows now. She’s not one to sit and wait for things to happen.”
“So,” Oliver Boyle said, summing up. “I see two tasks for right now. We need to find a way of retrieving the three who are missing. I have no idea how we’re going to do that, from the descriptions of what the results at Crenshaw and Fox Two were. The location here seems to be critical to where you go. I have no idea how we’re going to find the specific spot.”
Linda spoke up again. “I’m supposed to be pretty smart. I don’t hold a candle next to Andie Schulz. That said we were on track to be -- more than friends. She trusted me with things. One thing she trusted me with was asking me to make sure that we drilled holes at the corner of the machine bases at any spot we found that looked interesting.
“I think we can safely assume that she did the same thing to hers. Which means, we can save one hell of a lot of work if we can make sure they don’t tear up the slab at Andie’s house. The debris -- it would be nice if it was gently removed, but the slab -- we can probably figure it out eventually but it might take months of trial and error. They have food for about seven months, and water for about that. We don’t want to take longer than we have to.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Jack Schaeffer told Oliver. “I’ll enjoin them six ways from Sunday.”
“What about those two, Richards and Foster?” the soldier asked.
Kurt turned to him and spoke coldly. “Right now, lay off them. People, this is Jacob Lawson, Ezra’s cousin. They both served with special operations groups of the US military and Jake still is. These guys, a lot of them, owe their lives to certain individuals, some of them many times over. Ezra was one of the better soldiers and saved a whacking lot of lives.
“If those two were involved in what happened to Ezra, I’m sorry -- it’ll be ultimately out of our hands. They’re dead. That said, Jake, right now you need to lay off. From the sounds of it, they’ve committed criminal acts. Get them in a prison yard and they’ll be fair game, but right now, if one side starts piling up bodies, the other side will as well. None of us want that.”
Jacob Lawson looked innocent. “Kurt! We wouldn’t hurt a fly! They will have accidents! Safes will fall out of airplanes flying over and land on top of their heads! One-in-a-trillion accidents!”
David Solomon spoke up. “And my tenants? What about them?”
Jack Schaeffer smiled. “Like I said, I’m going to enjoin the authorities every which way. I would hope your attorney, as well as those of your affected tenants, would join in. Have those with ongoing TV projects let it be known among their fans that the government has shut them down for no discernable reason.”
An administrative assistant rushed in and whispered in Oliver’s ear. He lo
oked at her incredulously for a second, and then told her he’d take care of it.
Oliver looked around the table. “The government has sent agents here and to Crenshaw. They are going to quarantine anyone who has had direct contact with Andie, Kris, or Ezra or anyone in close contact with that group. It seems they’ve decided that the girls have gone to an alien planet and may have brought back alien pathogens. They closed Crenshaw and the surrounding area because several thousand gallons of alien water ran into the sewers from there.”
“Jack, you need to alert your firm, right this second, because I have a hunch that that ‘detain’ order is going to include everyone here.”
Kurt Sandusky cleared his throat. “We need to get Jake out of here, Ollie. Our friends know we’re here. If three of us vanish -- well they are going to be taking names and asking questions. Those questions will be asked less than politely. And, after that, they’ll get downright rude.”
Oliver looked at Jacob Lawson. “The door in the side of this room goes into my private office. The door directly opposite it is my private bathroom. There’s a skylight about two feet on a side.”
“I can get through that,” Jacob said. “See you Kurt; be well, the rest of you.”
He was out of the chair like a lightning bolt.
Linda was closest to the door and lifted a jeans-clad leg and pushed it shut behind him.
Oliver waved, and the assistant went towards the outer door.
Linda looked at Oliver curiously. “Why haven’t they already come?”
Everyone else at the table laughed and chorused two words: “Studio security.”
Chapter 8 :: Melek
Melek stared out the observation bunker’s slit window, sipping his first mug of kef for the day, as he watched the sun set in front of him.
Behind him Private Landrew came up and joined him at the slit step and he too peered outwards.
“This is going to get very boring, Sergeant Melek, in the next twenty weeks,” Landrew told him.
Lieutenant Menim joined them. “Men, we’re here to do a job! How can you get bored with that?”
The three of them laughed. Menim, as a lieutenant, had proved surprisingly competent, Melek had found, on the march out here.
Menim eyed the setting sun and spoke again. “It is, so far as I can tell, second watch, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then, Sergeant, you and Private Landrew have the watch. Corporal Kisson, Private Zerga and I will see about dinner. You will, of course, alert me promptly if you see anything.”
Everyone in the bunker laughed at that. No one had seen an intruder here in a hundred years. But, of course, there had been that once, a hundred years before...
“Of course, Lieutenant. Shall I log your order?”
“Don’t be crazy, Sergeant! What a stupid log we would return with if we did that? Twenty weeks of logging that one order, three times a day! They’d think we faked it!”
The truth was, of course, that everyone assigned to the Southwestern Watch Point of the Eastern Finger faked everything. This day would almost certainly be the high point in their attention to the surrounding landscape.
East Finger had been where their ancestors came to this land, twelve hundred and seven years before. More than twenty cargo ships and fifty galleys had set out on that journey. Two battered cargo ships and one that had somehow escaped unscathed had arrived on this shore after three months of sailing westwards. All of the galleys and the other ships had been swallowed up by the great ocean, never to be seen again.
In those first days the East Finger was what they knew. It was a southward-running peninsula, about four hundred miles long and sixty wide, except at the tip. The eastern slopes of the mountains were relatively flat, and the rise of the mountains relatively slow.
It was a land of gentle winds, warm rains and beautiful nights. The nearly four hundred surviving refugees had prospered quickly and well.
There were problems, of course. No one had been surprised that there were problems. There were many hungry beasts in this land and they had to be guarded against. Then, three hundred years after they arrived, King Ganno had a brilliant idea... for the next fifty years, everyone labored two weeks a year building a wall across the northern end of the peninsula, walling it off from the mainland.
By the time the wall was complete, King Ganno was in his grave, but for the first time, the cities and farms were safe from the depredations of the beasts.
A hundred years passed and the suggestion was made that they could do the same thing with Middle Finger, a hundred miles farther west. That idea was blessed with the discovery of huge mountains of coarse sandstone that was relatively easily quarried and was actually better than the limestone of Ganno’s Wall.
That wall had taken a mere forty years to complete, and better still, had been functionally done after ten years, when the palisade of tree trunks had been completed. Six hundred years after they’d arrived on this continent they started on the West Finger, which was twice as wide as the others and even longer, another four hundred miles west of the Middle Finger.
In year 840 of the Fingers, a ship from the East appeared. Only three men survived of its crew, one of them mad with thirst, another near death, and the last only semi-lucid.
King Harad had contemplated the matter for a good ten minutes and decided that he didn’t need to know anything about the East other than what he already knew -- they were murdering, slaving scum. The three survivors were dead moments later.
There had been talk of doing something like a wall, only much longer, on the mainland. There was a major river that flowed south between East and Middle Fingers. True, the wall was going to need to be two hundred miles long, but after a wall sixty miles long, another seventy miles long and one a hundred and fifty miles long it was obviously just a matter of will power.
However, things had changed. In spite of the new territories that had been opened, the East Finger had been the heart of the kingdom, with more than sixty thousand people living on it, while the Middle Finger had twenty thousand and the West Finger ten thousand. The main city was Arvala, the Golden City of the Kings, at the western terminus of Ganno’s Wall.
It hadn’t really been apparent at first. There were a few really bad storms that came, one or two a year, worse than anything that they had seen before. The eastern slope of the peninsula was gradual and relatively smooth, while the western slope was rougher and steeper in those days; there were quite a few swamps along its length as well.
It took twenty years of changed weather before anyone noticed that the swamps on the western slope were shrinking. People took it altogether wrong. Swamps were further drained and many people moved there. But it was hard to ignore the changes by then. Ten years of boom had been accompanied by rainfall that continued to shrink steadily, year after year.
The year 960 was the first year that the number of people moving to the western slope of East Finger was lower than those moving away. In 968, the first of the really bad fires occurred, destroying two small towns and a half-dozen villages -- and nearly a thousand lives.
People looked around and saw that they were surrounded by tinder-dry former wetlands as well and decided it was time to go. By 970 only a few die-hard farmers remained.
In 972 was the first raid by the Rangar outlaws. No one knew where they came from or where they went, but they raided Cellus, the largest town remaining in the southern portion of the peninsula. After three days of looting and rapine, the town burned, most of the inhabitants killed or dead from the fires. Rangar and his outlaws had fled. King Gonno VI led troops that scoured the west slope from south to north and didn’t find them.
Six months later, the Rangar outlaws struck Ambiny, right after the harvest was in. Hundreds of defenders were killed, and the outlaws made off with hundreds of wagons of food. Ambiny was in the center of the peninsula and was the last farming city of any consequence on the East Finger.
King Gonno raised another army
and stormed after them.
It was the death of Gonno... again, he sought the outlaws, this time with a clearly marked trail. In spite of many warnings that the number of wagons was decreasing, he kept on. His own men killed him at the southern tip of the land when they discovered twenty wagons -- all of which were empty. Again, Rangar and his band had vanished.
King Merwan was positive he could do much better, and it was first thought that his aggressive patrols had kept Rangar in check. Rangar struck the eastern shore city of Triblem a year later and looted it and stole the harvest as well. Hundreds of people were killed, dozens more women were missing and presumed abducted. Triblem was close to the eastern terminus of Ganno’s wall and with the exception of Arvala, the only town still surviving.
Merwan marched his army hard south and, thinking they’d gotten ahead of the raiders, turned north.
That had been a mistake. The wagons were found on the eastern shore, directly east of Triblem and a few miles away. Empty again, with plenty of evidence that everything had been loaded onto ships that had then sailed away, no one knew where.
King Merwan decided that in order to save his life, he needed to do something drastic, so he told everyone he’d driven Rangar to flee.
People were upset, but two years later there had been no further raids and people started to relax.
The rains had, in the meantime, failed for most of East Finger. The southern tip got enough to grow some crops, but there was no way to guarantee a crop.
Over the next hundred years, the East Finger dried out. The forests vanished, the trees rotted, and then burned and they too vanished and the land looked, for the most part, like people had never been there.
There was plenty of room in Middle Finger and huge amounts of space in the Western Finger. More importantly, while their rainfall had decreased, it wasn’t nearly as bad as the East Finger.
So, this watch position was the furthest south, watching to see if anyone came north or headed further west towards the other two Fingers of land. About a mile away was one of the few remaining reliable waterholes on the Eastern Finger. The watch position owed its location to being higher up on the same aquifer, and it had plenty of water as well.
The Far Side Page 17