Rocket Girl

by George D. Morgan

  He shook his head. “Law doesn't require ’em.” He found the correct key and unlocked the door. “Besides, the ceiling fans pull out most of the fumes.”

  As he opened the door, Mary glanced up. About a half dozen small fans were mounted in the ceiling, three of them working. The other three appeared to be rusted in place.

  “Come on in.”

  The room had two long wooden tables with Formica countertops. There was the usual assortment of Bunsen burners, beakers, and ovens. A large blue test tube centrifuge sat in a far corner. On the wall to her left sat a metal cart. A large number “96” was painted on the wall above it. On the far wall was a similar cart, above which was painted the number “92.” She looked up to check for ventilation fans. There were none, but what she did find were large swaths of paint bending away from the ceiling and curling downward, each with that same yellow hint.

  “What will I be doing in here—and please don't say ‘a little of this, a little of that.’”

  “You'll be testing the incoming nitric-acid shipments.” He pointed to a long row of twenty-five-gallon barrels lined up against the far wall. “A lot of what we make here requires nitric acid as an ingredient, and the acid purity must be at or above 96 percent. Absolutely essential.”

  He pointed to the carts.

  “Any barrel that tests ninety-six or better gets put on that cart. Ninety-two or better goes on that cart. We can use the ninety-two for some applications.”

  “And if it's under ninety-two?”

  Mr. Hollingsworth opened a drawer mounted beneath one of the Formica counters and pulled out a pad of large orange stickers. Each sticker read, “REJECTED FOR IMPURITIES.”

  “If that happens, slap one of these puppies on it and let me know—I'll have it sent back to the distributor.” He spread his arms wide to indicate the entire room. “It's your baby.” He turned to leave.

  But it was all too much for Mary. To open, test, and analyze high-strength nitric acid in a small, enclosed, unventilated space like this; it was very hazardous—almost suicidal.

  “You can't be serious! You expect me to spend eight hours a day working with highly pure nitric acid—whose fumes are extremely toxic—without any masks or safety gear? What kind of place are you running here!?”

  Mr. Hollingsworth seemed hurt. He went to a metal cabinet mounted against the wall by the door and opened it. Inside were several gray jumpsuits, gloves, boots, glass air masks, and backpack oxygen bottles.

  “I recommend you use some of this stuff.” He opened the door to leave, then turned around. “And as far as what kind of place we're running here; Plum Brook Ordnance is a crucial part of the war effort, Miss Sherman. Everyone who works here is helping our troops liberate Europe. Is that important enough for you?” He stepped into the factory proper and shouted above the din. “We need all those barrels tested by the end of the day. Lunch is at eleven-thirty.”

  He closed the door and a modicum of quiet returned.

  Mary noticed all the gray jumpsuits were the same size. She found the one that looked to be in the best condition and removed it from its hanger, holding the suit against her body. It became clear right away this equipment had not been designed to accommodate five-foot-five, one-hundred-eleven-pound young women. Putting this thing on would swallow her up. She set the suit down on the table, folded her arms, and began to walk the room. Surveying her new work environment, Mary rounded the second table, glanced at the acid barrels, and briefly checked the equipment. Arriving at the blue centrifuge, she detected a ripping sound behind her and turned around just in time to see a car-size sheaf of ceiling paint float gently downward and land on the far table.

  I hope the war in Europe is going better than this place, she thought, giving the centrifuge a moderate spin.

  Still, a job was a job was a job, and she needed it. Mary consoled herself by remembering that working in her chosen field, no matter what the conditions, was better than waitressing—the employment most of the other coeds at DeSales ended up with.

  Returning to the jumpsuit, she put one leg into it, then the other, then both arms. Zipping it to her neck, she almost laughed at how the suit sagged on her tiny frame. Next were the ankle-high boots, the oxygen bottle, the facemask, and finally the gloves. It took a few moments to figure out how to get the oxygen into the mask, then she spent a minute testing the gear. With the glass mask covering her entire face, the sound of her breathing became accentuated.

  Confident the equipment was working properly, Mary turned toward the wall and lumbered robot-like toward the first acid barrel. As she approached, she thought back to the first time she had worked with nitric acid in her chemistry class back at DeSales. It had been a small one-pint bottle, and she would never forget its warning label: CONTENTS DISSOLVES HUMAN FLESH.

  And that was only a 30 percent solution.

  The tops of each twenty-five-gallon barrel were sealed with a locking steel band. Pulling on a handle released the locking mechanism and loosened the band. She deftly pulled the band off and set it atop the second barrel.

  Then, with both hands, she removed the lid and looked inside.

  “All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers.”

  —MITCH ALBOM, THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN

  My parents have asked me to help them run a garage sale. When they say they want me to “help,” what they really mean is they want me to do all the work. I live closer than any of my siblings, so I'm the one who usually gets these calls. Since my father has diabetes and Parkinson's disease, and my mother has heart problems and emphysema, I feel guilty if I don't readily agree. My mother has just turned eighty-two, and she has fifty feet of oxygen tubing attached to her body. It follows her wherever she goes. She stopped smoking years ago, but by then the damage had been done.

  I don't mind helping my parents with these kinds of projects—that's not the problem. The real problem is that they are incapable of dealing with certain kinds of reality. Their house is filled with half a century of accumulated possessions, almost none of them worth more than a few dollars, though they don't see it that way. For example, they have a cheap, off-brand backpack left over from their Sierra hiking days. It's in horrible condition. They paid seventeen or eighteen dollars for it forty years ago, and they expect me to sell it for ten. They would never pay that much for it now, yet they expect me to sell it for that. I know all of this, of course, when I agree to help, so I go into it with eyes open. Still I marvel at how the two brilliant rocket scientists I call my parents can solve intense math and engineering problems on one hand, yet fail to understand the simple economics of a worthless backpack on the other. They're not alone; many people have this problem, including me. The reason is simple: an old, beat-up backpack is never just a backpack—it's a repository of memories of all the places it's been. Aren't those wonderful memories worth at least ten bucks?

  Yes, but only to those who created the memories—the original owners.

  I go to their house in Canoga Park and open the garage door. Everything they want to sell is in a pile in the center. They've put price tags on how much they want each item to go for. Not one single gimcrack or knick-knack is priced to actually move. But a promise is a promise, and I start laying items out onto the driveway. We had placed an ad on Craigslist the previous week, and now people start arriving and going through the junk. I can see their eyebrows furrow when they see the price tags. My sister Karen shows up, having driven two hours from San Clemente. She has a CD player with speakers she doesn't want anymore. She puts a price tag on it and sets it with the other items.

  It's the first item to find a buyer, and sells in seconds.

  As she and I laugh at how much more valuable her stuff is than our parents', I continue putting more items out for sale. I come across an old game of Trivial Pursuit—one of the original ones from 1979. It brings back a flood of memories. I had bought it for my mother for her birthday s
ince I knew how much she enjoyed any sort of intellectual game. The first night our family opened the game and played it turned out to be the last night as well. Our mother knew so many of the answers that she dominated the match, slaughtering everyone. Nobody wanted to play with her after that experience, and so the game went into permanent closetry. My parents had piles of stuff like that: trinkets and trifles too valuable to throw away, not usable enough to keep.

  The day wears on and we manage to sell a few items. By the time we're done, the cashbox has less than $30 in it, half of which came from Karen's stereo. She and I each chip in twenty bucks. While I put most of the remaining items into my SUV to throw away later, Karen tells our parents how we sold almost everything.

  “See,” my dad says. “I told you that stuff was worth money.”

  As I get in my car to go home, I retrace my route and take down all the “Garage Sale” signs I've taped up around the neighborhood. An hour later, I arrive home, boot up the computer, and start paging through the voluminous pile of family records I have accumulated. So much of what I have has yet to be read, let alone closely examined.

  The public library in Sandusky was always quiet on Friday evenings. Most everyone would be off at some party or movie or restaurant. Mary looked around the room; there were a couple of high-school students doing homework. Two tables away was a skinny guy who had been rejected by the Selective Service due to some foot problem. At the end of her table was a young woman of college age reading a textbook and making notes with a number-2 pencil. Mary recognized her from many previous visits to the library.

  Mary turned the page of the chemistry textbook she had brought with her from DeSales, arriving at the chapter titled “Gas Stoichiometry.” She stared at the page, willing her mind to read, study, remember. She wanted to study, she needed to study. There was so much she needed to know in order to perform her job. If only she had listened better in class, studied a little harder.

  Focusing on learning more chemistry, however, was blocked by a peculiar math conundrum that persisted in superseding everything chemical. Numbers kept flowing into her conscious—one number in particular, buzzing around inside her head like a giant bee, bewildering her with its weird coincidental appearance in all facets of human knowledge both scientific and historical. It kept popping up in astronomy, it kept showing up in chemistry. It made occasional appearances in religion and archeology. In math and physics, it was just plain ubiquitous.

  And, of course, there was the biological connection.

  How could I have been so blind not to notice this number before?

  Everywhere she turned, there it was: some new application, some novel convention, some heretofore-unknown praxis of the number.

  The number 28.

  Through one of the upper windows Mary could see the moon framed perfectly. A waxing gibbous, she was pretty sure. Was it waxing or waning? Hard to remember. Too many distractions right now, especially the distraction of coincidence. Mary had never considered the coincidence before, but there was no escaping it. Twenty-eight days—what an odd number. An even number, to be sure, yet odd in its own way.

  She was late—too late. There had been a few one-day-lates over the years. A couple of two-day-lates. Once, after a particularly grueling, hot August, she had been a whopping three days late. But never twelve. Twelve days late? Never. And what exactly was going on with her complexion? Every time she passed a mirror she would stop and look. Something seemed to have changed ever so slightly. She would lean in, squint, turn her face left and right.

  What's going on with my skin?

  Mary had weighed exactly 111 pounds ever since graduating from high school.1 The scale never swayed more than a couple of ounces in either direction. She was pretty sure that was about to change. Soon she would be gaining weight.

  Was it a coincidence that a woman's menstrual cycle matched almost to the minute the phases of the moon? How did that come about, exactly? Was it the result of some sort of ancient evolutionary necessity that had, over the years, become the biological body-clock equivalent of an appendix? Or was there no connection at all.

  28.

  Mary turned to the girl at the end of the table. Since there were only five visitors in the library, there was no urgent need to be quiet.

  “Did you know that twenty-eight is the second perfect number, the first being six, of course, owing to its relation to the Mersenne prime seven. You would have to count to 496 before arriving at the third perfect number.”

  The girl stared at Mary. “Are you a math major or somethin'?”

  “I used to be a chemistry major.”

  “Used to be?”

  “I quit school to work at Plum Brook.”

  The girl nodded. “Yeah. My aunt works in the shipping department.” The girl returned to her textbook, scratching off more penciled notes.

  28. As everyone knew, 28 was a harmonic divisor number and could be found in the Padovan Sequence. A one-year calendar based on thirteen 28-day months would simplify annual timekeeping immensely, but so far no modern culture had adopted such a calendar. Even so, the math to support it had always been there. But most interesting of all, 28 was the only positive integer with a unique Kayles nim-value. And there was more: 28 was the number of days required for the sun's exterior to make one complete revolution around its core. What on earth was so special about the number 28?

  Twenty-eight.

  Rhymes with late.

  Mary skipped past gas stoichiometry, flipping ahead to chemical kinetics and thermodynamic equilibriums, finally letting the book fall open at the chapter marked “Metaloids.” Without reading the text, she mentally recited the metalloid elements: boron, germanium, arsenic, antimony, tellurium, and silicon.

  Silicon. There was some news recently about silicon. Mary remembered reading an article in a paper or magazine about a scientist who claimed that silicon would be the “element of the future.” Something about its semiconductive properties had significance.

  28…28…28…28…

  Mary shook her head several times, as if physically rattling one's brain could dislodge unwanted thoughts. There were more important things to consider than coincidental numerology. She needed to get her mind onto something constructive, so she located the subheading for silicon and started reading.

  “Why can't we ever see the other side of the moon?” Mary was in her freshman year in high school. No more one-room-schoolhouse lifestyle; Ray High School had over three hundred students. It was a much different world. She was frustrated, however, by her science teacher who frequently was unable to answer her questions.

  “The reason we never see the far side of the moon is because the moon makes one complete revolution in the time it takes to make one full orbit,” he said.

  “Yes, yes, I know that,” said Mary. “But why? Why does it make exactly one revolution about its axis in the time it takes to make one revolution around the Earth? And it's been doing that for thousands of years. Probably millions.”

  “What's your point, Mary?”

  “My point is that it's an odd coincidence. Don't you think? If the revolution of the moon on its axis were off by just a few seconds, people on Earth would eventually be able to see the far side of the moon. But the two revolutions correspond exactly. Absolutely exactly. How can you stand that coincidence?”

  The other students giggled. This was just Mary being Mary.

  “We're studying geology this week. Why don't you bring this up when we get to astronomy?” The teacher then continued his lesson on the formation of quartz crystals.

  Eventually Mary would learn about planetary tidal forces, and how those forces easily explain the synchronization of the Earth/Moon system. But until that day came, she would be forced to live with daily frustration. Too many questions, not enough people who could answer them.

  Silicon.

  Silicon was discovered in 1824. Its original name was silicium—a name retained to present day by some countries. It is the eighth m
ost common element. Like carbon, it is mostly inert. It is a solid at room temperature.

  “Its atomic weight is twenty-eight,” she whispered to herself.

  28…28…28…

  Twenty-eight.

  Rhymes with weight.

  Mary had stopped at the nurse's office that afternoon.

  “You're up a pound,” said the nurse. One hundred twelve.”

  Mary had never been over 111—ever. Now she was 112. 112 was a new number.

  “Did you know,” she asked the nurse, “that twenty-eight divides into one hundred twelve evenly—exactly four times?”

  Mary heard a chair move and noticed the skinny student had stood up and was gathering his books to leave. A few moments later, Mary heard one of the large security doors in the back of the library close, echoing throughout the building. A librarian was pushing a cart full of books to a rack in the sociology section—other than that, Mary guessed she and the college girl were alone. She looked up at the clock.

  8:28.

  In four more hours she would be thirteen days late. Technically.

  It was 1943, the middle of what one of her former classmates at DeSales liked to call the “Send-Away Generation.” Her name was Kathleen McNulty, and she was always lecturing Mary about “being careful,” otherwise she would become a member of the Sent-Away Club. They had laughed at it then, but no one was laughing now. It was because of Kathleen that Mary discovered bridge. They had been together one evening listening to the Richfield Oil Company Variety Hour—a radio program involving live music and celebrity guests. One night a week the station would host American bridge expert Alfred Sheinwold, who would take a few minutes discussing the intricacies and strategies of his favorite card game. Kathleen had gotten Mary to listen with her, and together, using nothing more than Sheinwold's radio show, they taught each other how to play bridge. For Mary, it would be a life-changing experience.