She rose and shepherded Gettnor and Smint toward the door. Vaz had no idea why she thought all this was so funny. However, Smint had assured him that, because in addition to her fee, Singh also stood to gain a two percent share of whatever she negotiated for them, she would have his best interests at heart. He felt bemused to realize that he would normally have expected to feel very angry about what Querx had been and was still trying to do to him. It didn’t meet his expectations of what was fair or right. However, Anbala’s laughing at them somehow kept it from being quite so infuriating.
Shortly after they’d left, Vangester stormed into the room, “Singh may look like a cute thing, but she’s a real bitch!”
Dennis sighed, “I told you she was tough.”
“Well, the lab guys are going to figure out how to make that alloy. And, you’re going to figure out how to nail her hide to the wall.” He stormed out, presumably to go light a fire under the lab people.
***
When Vaz came upstairs in response to Lisanne’s call and found Dante and Tiona there too he wondered what was going on. They hadn’t been out to dinner as an entire family for years. He’d asked Lisanne once why not and she’d told him that teenagers didn’t want to be seen in public with their parents. He looked back and forth from one to another, thinking that they were still teenagers and wishing that he was better at reading other people’s emotions. He couldn’t be sure whether Lisanne had told them that they had to go and they were angry about it or whether they had grown out of their reluctance to be seen with their parents. Since Lisanne had been complaining about their behavior only a few months ago it seemed unlikely that they’d grown out of it to him. He shrugged, “Are we ready to go?”
They took Lisanne’s larger car to Sal’s Pizzeria. Once they’d ordered and received their sodas, Lisanne lifted her cup and said, “A toast.”
Vaz lifted his cup with the others and looked back and forth at the members of his family. This little celebration of whatever they were honoring made him feel warm and happy. Lisanne said, “To scholarships!”
Vaz tilted his head curiously, “Scholarships?”
“First you have to say ‘Hear, hear.’”
“OK.” Vaz said “Hear, hear,” with the rest, then said again, “Scholarships?”
“Dante got offered a wrestling scholarship to ECU and is still hoping to get one from NCSU.”
Vaz turned in surprise to look at Dante, “Congratulations!” A moment later, he belatedly put his hand out to shake and Dante took it.
Vaz looked back at Lisanne who said, “And, Tiona’s counselor thinks she’ll get an academic scholarship. He’s putting her up for several. Though I know it isn’t a sure thing, I’m very proud of her.”
Dante stared at his mother a moment then said, “Mom, it is pretty much a sure thing you know.”
Lisanne said, “Dante those types of scholarships are pretty competitive.”
Dante stared a moment, then said, “You do know that ‘T’ has the highest GPA in the school?”
Lisanne, taken aback, looked at Tiona, “Really?”
Tiona blushed, “Yeah.”
“Well, don’t look embarrassed! Shout that from the rooftops!”
“Mom! Shhh, I don’t want everyone to think I’m some kind of nerd!”
Lisanne laughed merrily. Vaz blinked, then leaned to Tiona and said “Congratulations.” He held his hand out to shake.
Tiona, surprised that her father would offer to shake hands, nonetheless shook his hand and said, “Thanks Dad.” Shouldn’t he have given her a hug like her mother would have? Of course, as she thought back on it, even when he’d given her hugs as a little girl, they had been wooden and uncomfortable rather than the warm comforting embraces that her mother administered.
Dante said, “And, you know she got a perfect 800 score on the math part of her SAT?”
Lisanne let out a little whoop, “‘T’! Why didn’t you tell me?!”
Tiona shrugged, still blushing.
Lisanne said, “I am so, so proud of you! Can I give you a hug?”
Tiona glanced around and, seeing no one she knew, gave a little nod.
As Lisanne hugged her Vaz watched. This, he realized, made him very happy. He wondered if he was supposed to hug Tiona too. Hugs always made him uncomfortable. Except private ones with Lisanne of course. When Lisanne let Tiona go he settled for reaching out and patting her clumsily on the shoulder, “Congratulations,” he said again and wondered how common 800s were. He himself had had an 800 on the math section but had no idea whether a lot or a few were awarded, just that they were good scores.
As his family ate, they excitedly discussed scholarships, how much they might be worth and which ones Tiona might be up for. Though Vaz had little to contribute, he continued to feel highly contented with his family’s new dynamic. He’d hated it when he and Lisanne weren’t getting along and, though sometimes he hadn’t personally recognized the ‘surly’ behavior of the kids himself, he had been able to tell when it upset Lisanne.
He hoped that this happy state would persist. He’d only had to work out to exhaustion once today and that had only been because he’d been frustrated once again by his failure to generate a successful mathematical model for the hydrogen-boron fusion events.
***
Stillman Davis examined himself in the bathroom mirror as he slid off his wedding ring, kissed it and put it in his pocket. He didn’t feel guilty this time; after all, he was playing a single guy tonight in the best interests of his wife as well as himself. He ran his comb through his thick, dark hair, re-tucked his shirt and headed back out into the bar.
After a few minutes of apparently aimless wandering he fetched up next to his target at the bar. She was pretty, though since she was about five years older than he was, not someone he would normally have been interested in. “How’s your Friday night going?” he asked as he flagged down the bartender.
An hour later he’d purchased a couple of “whisky starkies” for her. He’d drunk a couple with her, but as he’d specified to the bartender earlier, his had been weak and hers had been strong. “So where do you work?”
“At a paten’ offish, you?”
“I’m a business consultant,” he shot her one of the fake e-cards he’d made up for this evening and watched her glance up at her HUD to look at it. “I represent several manufacturing companies. Maybe I could hook up some of your inventors with manufacturers?”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Do you run the office? ‘Cause if you do, maybe you could offer my services, you know, as kind of a ‘value added’ proposition?” He knew she was only an assistant but he knew the value of overestimating someone’s importance.
She laughed, “I don’ think so.” She let her head fall to the side, obviously pretty drunk.
Stillman motioned to the bartender for another round. “Do you ever get to see any interesting inventions?” He raised his hands defensively, “Not that I’m asking for any secrets,” he laughed.
She grinned knowingly, “Mosht of them are sooo boring, and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t ‘splain any secrets to you. The latest one is probably the bigges’ thing we’ve ever tried to patent. An I couldn’ give tha’ secret away no matter how bad I wanted, hah, I’d have to be a nuclear fishi… fiz, physishist! They’re patentin’ a cheap way to make atomic energy… can you believe tha’ shit?!”
Stillman tried not to let his eyes widen as shock flooded through him. Instead he tried to sound drunk himself, “You mean, like fusion, or some such crap?”
She pointed a finger at him, “Yeah! Fushion, fusion. Tha’s it! Just tha’ kinda crap, exac’ly.”
“Oh, come on! No one can do that!”
“You don’ wanna bet againsht ‘dis guy. He’sh really weir’ bu’ he keepsh patentn’ more and more shtuff an’ it almos’ alwaysh makesh a lo’ o’ money.”
Stillman felt goosebumps, it had to be Gettnor! No one else was both weird and had a lot of successful pa
tents. Fusion! This was so much better than he’d hoped for. He just needed to separate himself from this woman, without her suspecting his motivations. He found out that she was a Tar Heel fan so he talked to her about college basketball for a bit. Then he hunched a bit and said, “Shit! There’s my girlfriend. She and I haven’t been getting along, but I want to go over there and try to salvage our relationship.” He got out of his chair and walked away, going over to talk to Esther, a girl he’d known all the way back in high school.
He hoped that his new friend was ready to drop him but that he could reconnect with her if he needed. If so, he could give her a story about he and his “girlfriend” breaking up for good.
***
Vangester stormed through the labs on Sunday. He’d demanded that all of Querx’s scientists work as close to around the clock as they could until they had evaluated and recreated the hydrogen absorption alloy. He’d felt certain that a week would be plenty of time but decided to have them work over the weekend too in case making the alloy was harder than it sounded. Now he had this panicked feeling that a week wouldn’t be nearly enough.
The lab had confirmed that the disks Gettnor had left behind did absorb huge quantities of hydrogen, in the range of 1200 to 1600 times their volume. By Gettnor’s records they knew they were composed of boron-vanadium-palladium and the percentages of each element in the alloy. But, when they casted pellets of boron-vanadium-palladium in the correct percentages, the pellets absorbed pitiful quantities of hydrogen!
He’d asked why they made pellets instead of disks and they’d said that it was because pellets would be easier to use in a hydrogen storage tank. He’d demanded that they replicate Gettnor’s work first by casting disks. They’d grumbled, but done it though it took hours to create molds for the discs. Like they’d predicted, it only increased the amount of hydrogen absorption to about 20% percent of the alloy’s volume.
Then they’d assayed the Gettnor disks to confirm that the percentages in Gettnor’s notes were correct.
They were.
That was when Vangester flew off the handle. He’d been yelling at people pretty much nonstop since then, but not getting the results he wanted.
One of the lab rat guys came down the hall, “Mr. Vangester, Dr. Ohcott would like to show you something?”
Vangester rolled his eyes, “I hope this is something good,” he rumbled, mostly to himself, and followed the guy down to a lab at the end of the hall. Ohcott turned out to be a small, dark, birdlike fellow in a dark room. “What?”
Ohcott said, “Ah, Mr. Vangester, I think I’ve found the problem. Here, look at the surface of Dr. Gettnor’s alloy.”
Vangester snorted, “Come on Ohcott, I have no idea what I’m looking at here.”
“Oh, sorry, I’ve put the specimen in our scanning electron microscope. This is one of Dr. Gettnor’s disks on the left side of the screen and the disk we made here on the right.”
“OK, I see they’re different. What does it mean?”
“Well I’m not sure what it means, but the structure of Gettnor’s alloy is much, much finer. In fact I can’t really resolve any structure. It might be that the large crystals in our casting lock the hydrogen out of some areas. Or it might be that boron is clumping in some areas, vanadium in others and palladium in others. Personally I favor the latter. I think the palladium in Gettnor’s alloy somehow dictates the arrangement of the boron atoms and perhaps serves as a catalyst to break H2 into monomolecular hydrogen that enters the interstices like it does in pure palladium.”
“So! Make our alloy with a fine structure!”
“Sir, we don’t know how to do that. Gettnor’s ability to create alloys with weird properties was astonishing. I don’t think anyone in the world can hold a candle to him. Why don’t you just hire him back?”
“Goddammit! He doesn’t want to come back! Weren’t you listening when I briefed you guys?”
“Well, just hire him as a consultant to teach us how to make the alloy then.”
“We can’t do that. You guys need to figure out how to make the alloy yourselves!”
“We can try,” Ohcott said dubiously, “but I don’t think we’ll have any luck. We could probably spend years trying different methods of casting that alloy without getting the same results as Gettnor. Somehow he was able to predict the conditions necessary to produce different crystallizations. I think he’d worked out his own mathematical formulas that predicted crystal structures from casting conditions. It might be that he even had some other substance in the casting that evaporated during crystallization; he told me once that he used a lot of volatile elements to achieve the crystal structures that made some of his materials so amazing. You remember his patent for the J-Point battery? It depends on the cathode being made with an alloy that’s casted using volatiles.”
Vangester headed up to his office to get a couple of aspirin and a neat glass of Parker’s Heritage bourbon. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and contemplated the pain of accepting Anbala Singh’s ultimatum.
***
Vaz accepted a call from Smint who excitedly said, “Vaz, you’re not going to believe what I’ve managed to arrange.” Smint paused to wait for Vaz to ask him “what,” but the silence just stretched until he realized that Vaz probably wouldn’t think to do so. “I’ve been talking to John Vernor at GE. You remember he was the one that ramrodded their licensing of your high temperature superconductor?”
Vaz said, “I remember him.”
“Well, I told him that you had a new product he should look at because I thought it would be a good fit for GE.”
“OK.”
“I didn’t tell him that it was fusion for fear that he’d blow us off as crazy, but believe it or not, I got him to come down and look at it without even knowing what we’re going to show him.”
Gettnor said curiously, “Is it OK to show it to him without having a patent?”
“I checked with Milton. He says it’s OK to show it to them. We’ll have him sign a non-disclosure agreement but we’re confirmed as ‘patent applied for,’ so they can’t very well steal it from us. If they want it, they may bear the patent costs and save us having to pay for patenting.
“OK.”
Smint chuckled at himself for being disappointed that Vaz wasn’t more excited, “He’s flying down here tomorrow to look it over.”
“It’s not functional right now, can we show him recordings?”
Smint’s sphincter’s clenched. Was he about to hear that Vaz couldn’t reproduce the effect? The same as so many other researchers who’d claimed fusion in the past? Heart in his throat he said, “Not functional?”
“No.”
“Why?!”
“I’ve disassembled it to work on the new version.”
“Can you put it back together?”
“No. That would be a waste. The new version will be much better.”
“Vaz, this is important!”
“The old version really isn’t very good.”
“Come on, it produced enormous currents!”
“Yes, but there was a lot of leakage. Also, if my current theory is correct, the new model will reduce the number of side reactions.”
“Reduce side reactions?”
“Produce fewer neutrons.”
“Vaz that’d be great, but we can work on that later. If your new theory is wrong it might not even work! We might not get this chance to sell to GE again if we put him off now.”
“Then we can sell it to someone else.”
“Vaz… I know, and you know, that fusion will be an enormous boon to mankind. We know that companies would have to be crazy to pass up a chance at it. But, you’ve got to understand, it is such accepted dogma that low energy nuclear fusion is impossible, we won’t even be able to get our foot in the door. We can’t pass up this opportunity!”
“What time is he coming?”
“Tomorrow, he’d get here about 11AM.”
After a long pause Vaz said,
“I might have it ready by then.”
“Might?”
“Might. I don’t think so.”
“Vaz, it’ll be a disaster if we tell him we have fusion and then can’t produce.”
“Tell him to come Thursday then.”
“I’ll see what he says.” After a pause he asked, “Would Vernor be able to bring his own meters and detectors.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“To be sure we aren’t faking the results.”
“Why would we do that?”
“Vaz, every previous claim of tabletop fusion has turned out to be a fake.”
“I don’t understand why anyone would fake it. The truth would come out sooner or later.”
“Trust me on this? He’s going to be worried if he can’t check it for himself.”
“OK.”
“Please do your best to have it ready by Thursday?”
“OK.”
***
Jerrod looked up to see Stillman Davis in his hallway again. A flash of irritation came over him, but he told his AI to release the lock on the door. “Hello Stilly,” he sighed.
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