Einstein's Bridge

by Cramer, John

  “No problem,” said Belinda. “That’s just the kind of thing our video data-base was designed to do. And we’re always delighted to give NASA another object lesson in how the technical support of science should be done.” She grinned.

  The head and upper torso of the remote swiveled toward Alice with an audible whirr. “Do you have a car, Alice?” George asked.

  “Sure, it’s just outside,” Alice said. She glanced downward to the bulky rollers on the base of the remote. “However, I don’t think you’d fit.” She was beginning to enjoy her conversation with the little machine. It was like being Dorothy in Oz, talking to the Tin Woodsman or the Tick-Tock Man.

  “Not a problem,” said George. “Belinda will give you a map, and I’ll meet you in the reception area of the LEM Building on the East Campus.”

  Alice looked down at the little machine. “You’re going by a different route?” she asked.

  George’s face registered a smile. “You might say that, Alice,” he said. “It will take you about twenty minutes to drive to LEM. While you’re in transit, I’m going to park this remote in a charger bay, disconnect, and eat my sack lunch in my office here. When you arrive at the LEM Building, I should be waiting at the front door.”

  Alice blinked. “This is like a Star Trek rerun,” she said. “You’re going to beam over to the other building.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” George agreed, “except that I’m already here, or should I say ‘there’.”

  Alice took her little digital still camera from her purse and took several shots as the image of George winked at her. The remote pivoted sharply to the right and whirred away down the corridor.

  Just then a familiar figure in blue coveralls strolled up to Belinda’s desk. “Belinda, you sweet thang, would you mind callin’ me a Shuttle,” Whitey said. “I need to go over to the LEM Buildin’ on the East Campus.”

  “Hello, Whitey,” said Alice. “I was about to drive to that very place. Can I offer you a ride? You can show me the way.”

  CHAPTER 3.4

  Drive Across

  ALICE followed the curving tree-lined SSC campus road to the point where it exited to a farm-to-market highway.

  “Go that way, Ma’am,” said Whitey. “Goes through the middle of Waxahachie, but it should be quicker this time of day.”

  She turned on the road he had pointed out. “You have work to do on the LEM detector?” she asked.

  “No, Ma’am,” he said. “They want some more wiring done down in the ring, and the LEM Buildin’ is the closest access point. There’s a fast little monorail down in the ring that I could ride over on, but drivin’ across the middle of the ring in a car or riding the SSC Shuttle Bus is faster. Somebody borrowed my truck for another electrical job, or I’d drive myself.”

  “How long have you been an electrician, Whitey?” Alice asked. She was glad to have another chance to interview him without being too obvious.

  “Got m’ trainin’ in the Marine Corps,” he said. “I was a demolition expert and did a lot of wiring that way. Of course, my Daddy was an Oil Man ...”

  Alice could hear the capital letters.

  “... and I did electrical wirin’ for him sometimes when I was in high school, but I didn’t get real good at it ‘til we was down in the Persian Gulf. After they let me out of the Marines, I got a job with a construction company when the SSC was being built, and then got a staff job with the Laboratory. Been here ever since.”

  “How old were you when you joined the Marines?” she asked, interviewer style.

  “Oh, I was about nineteen,” he said. “It was Summer, and I’d just graduated form high school. I’d played football for the Waxahachie Indians, but I hurt my knee when we was playin’ the Italy Gladiators so I didn’t get a college scholarship. I was plannin’ to go to Texas A&M anyhow, but Daddy was goin’ bankrupt. So I made a deal with the Marine recruiter to get electrician trainin’ if I joined up. Guess it worked out pretty well for me, though I near got myself killed once or twice down in the Gulf, defusing Iraqi booby traps at the Kuwaiti oil rigs and around Ol’ Saddam’s hidey-hole in Baghdad.”

  “Your father had problems in the oil business?” she asked, remembering the stories she had heard of the high rollers. She hadn’t seen much evidence of Big Oil since coming here. Despite what one might think from the old “Dallas” TV series reruns, she had learned that most of what remained of the Texas oil industry was concentrated in Houston, while the Dallas-Ft.-Worth economy was driven primarily by aerospace, biotechnology, banking, and insurance.

  “Daddy was an independent Oil Man, a Wildcatter,” said Whitey. “He did pretty well for a while. Did lots of drilling. Had him a fine cable-tool rig on the back of a truck.”

  “You mean you can drill for oil from the back of a truck?” asked Alice. “I thought it took a big steel tower and massive machinery.”

  “Well,” Whitey said defensively, “it was a pretty big truck. You see, he wasn’t runnin’ one of those giant oil companies. My Daddy was a Wildcatter.”

  “How does that work, being a wildcatter?” Alice asked.

  “Well, he’d buy hisself an oil lease on some land. Where it looked like there might be some oil? Then he’d round up some investors. They’s folks in the East and in California that just love to put their money into the oil bidness. ‘Investing in our Energy Future’ they call it. It’s one of them tax shelter things. Daddy’d take the money and hire himself some roughnecks and go out and drill for the black gold. Can take a year or so to drill a well, and of course they’s lots of expenses while the drillin’s goin on. He never had much of the investment money left by the time the well was done. So when it came in a dry hole, he’d just have to send out the telegrams to his partners telling that they’d had some bad luck. After that, he’d go out and buy another lease and line up some more investors.”

  Alice looked across at him penetratingly. “It sounds like an interesting life,” she said. “His, uh, living expenses were paid from the invested funds?”

  He turned to her with a look of indignation. “No, Ma’am! He wouldn’t take nothing for himself from the expense money for drillin’ the well. Daddy was an honest bidness man, not a damn crook! Only money he got was his standard salary, just like it always said in the investor’s prospectus.”

  “How much of a salary did he get?” she asked.

  “Hardly nothin’, Ma’am. Just two or three thousand a week. Real piddlin’ compared to what the big oilmen pull down.”

  Alice raised her eyebrows. She didn’t need a calculator to understand that Whitey’s father had been paying himself around $150,000 a year for bringing in dry holes. “So what went wrong, Whitey?” she asked. “It sounds as if your father had a permanent livelihood. Surely he couldn’t have run out of dry holes.”

  He turned toward her again with a look of narrow-eyed suspicion. Then he said slowly, “As a matter of fact, Miss Alice, runnin’ out of dry holes is exactly what my Daddy did do. Y’ see, he struck oil with his little rig. He drilled right into this great big old salt dome that nobody had even suspected was down there. It came in a real gusher, squirted oil fifty feet in the air. The black crude was all over the damn place. Daddy like to never got the smell outa his Cadillac.”

  “Your father struck oil?” She glanced at him to see if he was making a joke, but his expression conveyed despair, not humor. “Surely that must have brought him much more money than he’d have made from drilling another dry hole.”

  “Of course it did,” he said. “Millions. Trouble is, my Daddy’s way of handlin’ money had always been to spend it all. So that’s what he did. Gave hisself a big raise in salary for bringing in a gusher. Bought his bidness some more cars and trucks and a jet airplane. Bought hisself a big house in Highland Park in Dallas and another in River Oaks in Houston. He’d fly me and Grandma over to Vega
s or Reno once in a while; he made a lot’a friends there. Had him a hell of a time, just like one’a them big Oil Men.”

  “Sounds very nice,” said Alice without enthusiasm. She never enjoyed hearing about other people doing stupid things.

  “Trouble was, the damn investors expected to be paid. That’d never happened to Daddy before. Always before he’d send them the telegrams tellin’ about the dry hole, and that’d be the end of it. But this time they wanted more than telegrams. They wanted their money, and they sicced their fancy New York lawyers on to him.

  “Skinned my Daddy good, they did. He had to file for bankruptcy. They took his cars, his jet plane, his houses, his boat. They took away the red Corvette he’d bought me. They took every damn thing but my Grandma’s house, the one next to where you live? They even took away his drillin’ rig, so he couldn’t even drill no more wells to pay ‘em back. I was a senior at Waxahachie High when it all hit the fan. I was plannin’ to go to A&M and study petroleum geology and help Daddy in the bidness when I graduated. But I decided to join the Marines instead. Some people thought it was real funny when we lost our money.”

  Alice nodded. “Small towns can be cruel,” she said.

  “My Daddy never recovered,” Whitey continued. “By the time I was back from the Persian Gulf, he’d got himself drunk as a skunk and killed himself in a car wreck.” Whitey’s voice sounded constricted. “Guess it was just as well,” he said finally. “Ain’t no Wildcatters left in the oil bidness any more anyhow. My Daddy was the last of ‘em. Texas is pretty much out of oil, at least oil that can be got out of the ground for less than you can sell it for.”

  They were both silent for a while. Then ahead on the right she saw what looked like the stone walls of a medieval city, with many-colored pennants fluttering from the peaked watchtowers and battlements. There was a parking lot beside the place filled with cars, and she could see people, some in bright costumes, walking in and out of the arched sallyports. “What in the world is that?” she asked.

  “Oh,” said Whitey and laughed. “That’s the Scarborough Faire. It’s kinda’ hard to explain, but they have all these buildings made of plaster and plywood that are made to like look real old castles and things. Like in the Middle Ages? Every year about this time they have a sort of medieval folk festival that lasts all of the month of June. They get actors who pretend to be medieval characters, and they have archery matches and jousts and sword fights and things. They have pony rides for the kids. They sing and dance and roast pigs and have a great time. Folks come from all over the state to go to the Scarborough Faire. Some say they like it better than the big Texas State Fair in Dallas.”

  As they passed the Faire, Alice shook her head in wonder. What a lovely setting. It wasn’t at all what she would have expected to find along a rural Texas highway. And it was marvelous for her purposes. She could just see the giant mutant fire ants doing battle with medieval knights in armor. She would write the scene tonight.

  Whitey pointed to the large building looming on the horizon. “That there’s the Ellis County Courthouse. Have you had a chance to look at it yet, Miss Alice?”

  “I’m afraid not,” she said. “It’s on my list of things to do, but I’ve been too busy so far.”

  As they entered Waxahachie, the red and white stone courthouse loomed ever larger. In a few minutes, as she was curving around the courthouse square, she got a close look at the building. Its details, as they became clearer, were hard to believe. There were watchtowers and balconies, columned belvederes and pediments. It looked, Alice thought, like the opium dream of a Victorian building contractor.

  “See those red stone carvings above the doorways?” Whitey asked. “They hired some Italian stone cutters to come over here and make them. And one of them fell in love with the town librarian. Daughter of the woman who run the boardin’ house where they was stayin’? That fella must have really loved her. He carved her picture all over the buildin’. And he started out carvin her real sweet and pretty-like. But after a while they must not of got on, ya’ know? ‘Cause the last carvings he did showed her old and kinda’ strict lookin’, with real hard eyes. They say he just went on back to Italy, poor guy. Hope he did better there.”

  Alice smiled. “That’s a wonderful story,” she said. She had already read it in a brochure and planned to work it into her novel, somehow. Perhaps the giant mutant fire ants would invade the Ellis County Court House and eat a tour guide in mid-spiel.

  They were heading east out of the town now, and both sides of the highway were lined with cultivated fields. “I noticed that some of the farmers seemed to be raising crops right on top of the ring,” said Alice.

  “Sure,” said Whitey. “Ain’t no radiation, it’s so deep down. The state bought the land and gave it to the U. S. government. The DOE leases it back to the farmers to raise crops on, if they want to. Farmers don’t like that much, though, ‘cause they can’t drill water wells near the ring, and the SSC health people get on ‘em when they try to poison the cotton.”

  “Poison cotton?” Alice echoed.

  “Yes’um,” said Whitey. “This here is black-dirt cotton country. In the olden days Waxahachie used to be a rich boom town, the cotton capital of East Texas. All those nice gingerbread houses in Waxahachie was built then. When the cotton plants are full growed, you can kill ‘em with plant poison. That way you can harvest the cotton in time to plant a second crop in the same year. The plants die and dry out in a hurry, the bolls open up, and its easy to pick the cotton quick and send it off to the gin. If you look way over there you can just see the big cotton gin at Palmer. It’s too early in the year for them to have any cotton bidness, though.”

  Out her left window Alice could see a corrugated tin structure in the distance. “The SSC people don’t like the plant poisoning?”

  “No,” said Whitey. “The spray fumes was getting into the ventilation system, they said, and makin’ their people sick. Got them EPA inspectors after the farmers, and they made them stop. Now the cotton farmers get only one crop a year. They say the SSC cut their income in half for no good reason, though they still look pretty well off to me.

  “But I hear they’re startin to use some new poison that’s OK, some plant hormone stuff that makes the cotton plant kill itself. Like commitin’ suicide? I just hope it don’t do that to the SSC folks.” He grinned.

  Alice smiled back. This had definite possibilities as an explanation of the origins of the giant mutant fire ants, she thought. Plant hormones plus radiation ... She nodded to herself.

  “Now we’re over the SSC ring on the East Side,” Whitey said. “See where the interstate crosses that highway? The green stripe on the highway marks where the ring goes underneath, and that white building over there is one of the service buildings for cry-o-genics and pumpin’ and things. They got ‘em all around the ring.”

  She nodded, stopping at the intersection. “Where to now?” she asked.

  “Turn south, Miss Alice,” said Whitey. “The East Campus begins right up ahead.”

  She turned and accelerated. “I’ve never been over here before,” she said.

  Whitey nodded. “If you was to keep driving south on this road,” he said, “you’d come to the SDC Building. The other big detector? And further on down south is the town of Ennis. Settled by Czech people in the 1880s. If you like to do the polka, Ennis is the place for you. It’s still mostly Catholic, and at the eatin’ places in Ennis you can get beer and wine with your dinner. Further on down the road is the little town of Alma. Now its real wet in Alma, a regular oasis. You can get anything in Alma.” He looked across at her, then blushed. “Anything to drink, I mean, Ma’am.”

  CHAPTER 3.5

  The LEM Detector

  THROUGH the windshield Alice caught glimpses of a large blocky building. They came to an intersection marked by a neat sign pointed to the right branch of
the road. It bore the inscription “U. S. Department of Energy, Superconducting Super Collider, East Campus North.”

  “That’s where we’re goin,” said Whitey.

  Alice followed the road, which led to the large hangar-like building she had seen from a distance. It looked like one of the large NASA Assembly Buildings at Cape Canaveral. It was flanked by a smaller office building.

  She drove into the parking lot and found an area labeled “Visitors” next to “Handicapped” and “Dr. J-K Wang.” As she opened her car door and left its air conditioned interior, the afternoon Texas heat struck her again like a warm damp slap. Whitey headed off to the large open building, and Alice strode up the walk to the office building’s reception area, already regretting her pantyhose and white business suit.

  The digital clock at the reception area read 2:23. It was blessedly air conditioned. Standing beside the desk was a tall man with sandy blond hair and a darker beard. Alice put out her hand. “Hello, George,” she said. “My how you’ve grown since I saw you last.” She wondered how old he was. Perhaps a vigorous forty-five or so? She decided she liked him, perhaps even felt a certain attraction.

  He laughed as he took her hand. “The telepresence remotes they have at SSC Administration are the cheaper model that doesn’t have hands and doesn’t provide an adjustment for individual height differences,” said George. “It’s a bit disconcerting at first to have to look up at everyone. But perhaps it promotes humility. We physicists could use more humility, I’m told.

  “Over here at LEM we use models that have adjustable height with arms and hands. Perhaps there’s also a certain symbolism. In the Administration Building one needs to talk. Over here there’s work to be done, so we need hands.” He gestured with his hands, as if to illustrate.