Hood

by Laurence Dahners

  Kazy snorted, “It’s not free. It’s going to be turned into medicine that’s going to save their lives! Pretty good compensation if you ask me.”

  Rachel laughed, “I swear you could sell pig shit to pig farmers.”

  Kazy grinned, “I am pretty persuasive.”

  Rachel turned to Morgan, “Getting that benzene took you so long you missed seeing how your idea turned out.”

  “Did it work?!”

  Rachel nodded, “It not only took a day less to synthesize with your modification, it improved our yield by two hundred percent.”

  “Yield of what?” Kazy asked.

  “Doxycycline,” Rachel said, picking up a package and holding it out. “Here’s the product of Morgan’s test run of his new synthesis. Now we know it works, we’ll run a bigger batch. We should have a lot more for you tomorrow.”

  Kazy gave Morgan a huge smile, wide eyes sparkling.

  He suddenly realized she was really cute. Not gorgeous like Daussie, but still, impishly pretty.

  She arched an eyebrow at him, “So, you’re not just handsome eye-candy, you’re smart too?”

  Embarrassed, Morgan shrugged, “I just made a guess about whether a certain catalyst might speed up one of the really slow steps in the synthesis.” He looked at his aunt, “A lucky guess, right Aunt Rachel?”

  She gave him a fond smile. “You know what they say, ‘Luck favors the well-prepared.’ You make a lot of lucky guesses.”

  Morgan managed not to stammer as he said, “I think I just got lucky.” He felt himself blushing.

  Chapter Three

  The caravan was lined up to get dinner. Several people told Tarc how much they missed his mother’s cooking.

  When he sat down and took his first spoonful, he could see why. He was eating beans prepared by people in one of the wagons that sold food. The beans obviously didn’t have any bacon or spices, not even salt. Worse, some of them were undercooked suggesting the beans hadn’t been stirred frequently enough. The accompanying cornbread was mushy. With some astonishment he thought, I could probably make better beans than this myself.

  Shoveling another spoonful of beans into his mouth, Tarc wondered what he’d been thinking when he’d told Henry Roper he might be able to power one of the ancient devices. He obviously couldn’t just show up with a wire, hook it up to one of Roper’s devices and start pushing electrons through it with his talent. If I had a battery, that’d be believable, he thought. After a moment, he had another thought, Maybe I could use a fake battery? But then, if my wire with a fake battery on it works, what happens when Henry wants to know how I made the battery because he wants to do his own experiments?

  Tarc’s thoughts were interrupted when Henry sat down next to him. Roper said, “You ready to try flowing electrons into one of my devices this evening?”

  Reluctantly, Tarc shook his head. “No. Sorry. I forgot we’d need a thing the ancients called a ‘battery.’ Batteries were electrical devices that pushed electrons out one side and pulled them in on the other. I don’t know how to make one, and they weren’t supposed to last long, so even if you had a salvaged one it wouldn’t be any good anymore.”

  “Oh,” Henry said, brightening, “I know how to make a battery. They’re one of the few electrical devices people still know how to make, but they’re not good for much.”

  “Really? You’ve hooked them up to some of your old electrical devices?”

  “No, I’ve never tried that.”

  “Then, how do you know they’re actually working as batteries?”

  “When you touch a wire from one end to the other end you get little sparks. They’re like incredibly tiny pieces of lightning. But the sparks aren’t strong enough to do anything useful. You can’t even light a fire with them like you can with the sparks from a flint and steel.”

  “How do you make batteries?”

  “Believe it or not, all you have to do is stack up alternating plates of copper and aluminum. You stick a piece of cloth soaked in saltwater between every other pair.” He looked at Tarc and apparently decided what he’d said wasn’t clear. “So, you have a piece of aluminum, then saltwater cloth, then a piece of copper, then a piece of aluminum, then saltwater, then copper, then aluminum, then saltwater, then copper. Supposedly, you can just keep stacking them to get more strength. Bridge a wire from one end to the other. When you first make the bridge, you get a little spark. The sparks are so small you can’t see them unless it’s dark.” He tilted his head thoughtfully, “I’ve never done it with more than six layers. Maybe if you stacked up a lot more, the spark’d be bigger and you could use it to start a fire.”

  Excitedly, Tarc asked, “Can you show me?”

  Not sounding excited at all, Roper said, “Sure, but let’s finish dinner first.”

  ~~~

  After dinner, Tarc showed up at Roper’s wagon with a piece of his copper wire, some heavily salted water, and a piece of rag.

  Roper studied Tarc’s wire in the light from his lantern. “This is some nice salvage. Where’d you get it?”

  “Um, there’s a guy in Clancy Vail who has a secret underground source of salvage,” Tarc said, not revealing that he himself was the one salvaging.

  Roper looked up at him briefly, “I hope you’ll introduce me to him the next time we come through?”

  “Yeah,” Tarc said. Suddenly a big sigh gusted out of him. Worry about his home and family had suddenly struck hard. “If Clancy Vail’s still there.”

  Roper seemed to recognize how hard the moment had hit Tarc. After a minute he patted Tarc’s shoulder and said, “They’re going to be fine. They’re the healers that’re going to save everyone else, right? If they’re going to do that they have to be okay themselves, don’t they?”

  Somehow Henry’s blithe statement made Tarc worry even more. “But they’re not going to save everyone. Some people are so sick…” Tarc stopped himself before he said something about how they might be too sick to waste the limited supplies of antibiotic on.

  They sat in silence for a moment or two, then Henry said, “Maybe we should put this experiment off to tomorrow night.”

  “No.” Tarc said, “I need something to take my mind off what’s happening in Clancy Vail.”

  “Okay,” Roper said with a wave at the little table. “I’ve got these five little squares of aluminum. If you’ve got some coppers, we can stack them up alternating aluminum and copper.”

  Tarc dug in his pocket and pulled out five coppers, laying them next to the aluminum squares.

  Henry held out his hand, “we need to cut out little pieces of rag about the same size as a copper.” When Tarc handed him the rag, Henry used his knife to cut the rag in half, handing one piece back to Tarc. He looked up, “Cut pieces big enough so you can fold them a couple of times to get them down so they’ll be the same size as a copper. I think they need to be a little thicker than a single layer of this rag.”

  Tarc fished in his pocket and pulled out another copper to use as a template. Then he started cutting little squares of rag that, when folded twice, were about the size of a copper.

  Once they had five little rags, they folded them, soaked them in Tarc’s saltwater and started stacking them between each aluminum-copper pair. Stack completed, Tarc tilted it a little so he could stick the end of his wire underneath the stack, pinching it against the table. He brought the other end of the wire around and touched it to the top of the stack. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Wait,” Roper said. He shuttered the lamp, then said, “Try it again.”

  In the dark, Tarc easily saw a tiny spark jump from the end of the wire to the piece of aluminum on top. Holding it in contact, he leaned his head down next to the wire. Sure enough, the fuzzy stuff in the wire was flowing from one into the other without him pushing it.

  He was about to try using his talent to stop the flow in the wire when Henry said, “Tarc, you okay?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Why’re you all bent over
the battery?”

  “Oh…” Tarc sat back at, “I was, uh… trying to see if I could hear the electrons flowing through the copper. You know, like you can hear water flowing through a pipe?”

  “Did you hear anything?” Henry asked, surprised.

  “No.”

  Tarc desperately wanted to know whether he could stop the flow or speed it up. And, whether when he stopped the flow it prevented a spark being generated. And, if he sped up the flow, whether he could generate a bigger spark. I’m just going to have to get some aluminum so I can do my own experiments, he thought.

  On his way back to where he slept under the guards’ wagon, Tarc pulled out his loop of wire. He held it so it looped around his head, with the two ends out where he could see them. He brought them together.

  Nothing happened.

  He started pushing the fuzzy stuff around the circle of wire as hard as he could. When he had it speeding around the circuit, he pulled the ends of the wires apart.

  A fat spark snapped across the brief gap when the ends separated.

  Yes! he thought.

  ***

  Morgan waited on tenterhooks as Rachel checked the product of the synthesis he’d run overnight. She finally looked up at him, “Purity’s good.”

  Trying not to let the excitement show on his face, he said, “Shall I take it down to them?”

  She looked at him consideringly. He hoped she didn’t suspect his ulterior motive. “You think they need it now?”

  He shrugged, offhandedly, he hoped. “I’d hate to learn that someone died because we didn’t get the antibiotic to them right away.”

  His aunt tilted her head and examined him thoughtfully. “You were up all night. Charlotte could take it down there.”

  “Charlotte hasn’t shaved her head.” Which Morgan thought was idiotic. More and more people had started shaving their heads after they saw the bodies being trundled out for cremation. And saw that the people moving the bodies had shaved their heads. Shaved heads were getting to be stylish.

  His aunt didn’t give up, “Someone else then.”

  “They wouldn’t know where to go,” Morgan said, letting a small note of exasperation seep into his voice.

  Aunt Rachel rolled her eyes, “Okay. I wouldn’t want to stand between you and your new girlfriend.”

  “Kazy’s not my girlfriend!” Though I wouldn’t mind it. But I’d be much happier with her cousin.

  Rachel waved dismissively. She put a batch of her new rubber tubing on the counter. “Take this to them when you go. I’m not sure if or how tubing might help with the plague, but they wanted it months ago, back before the plague even started. Maybe they could use it for the epidemic but just gave up on me ever synthesizing it.”

  Morgan nodded as he started packing up his big batch of doxycycline.

  ~~~

  Daussie broke off stropping the razor when she heard Guardsman Tanner calling Kazy’s name outside the shack. Kazy was bent over a new victim of the plague, convincing the girl that doxycycline didn’t taste bad. She’d already convinced the girl’s mother that she’d look cute with her head shaved. Daussie said, “You want me to see what that’s about?”

  Staying bent over, Kazy nodded.

  Daussie pushed the door open and looked out. Morgan! she thought, quickly pulling the door shut. She turned to Kazy, “It’s Morgan!”

  Kazy turned just far enough to send Daussie a grin, “Well, go see what he wants…” after a pause she whispered, “besides you.”

  Daussie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and told herself there was nothing to be afraid of. She pushed the door open and started out toward Morgan. “Sorry, Kazy’s busy with a patient. Can I help?”

  Morgan swallowed. Then he cleared his throat and held out a package. “I brought more doxycycline,” he said in a raspy voice.

  Somehow immensely pleased by Morgan’s shy discomfort, Daussie reached out and took the package, “Whoa, this is heavy. Is it a lot more than yesterday’s batch?”

  Morgan nodded eagerly, “Almost 100 times more. Yesterday’s batch was just a test run. Now that we know the synthesis works, we scaled it up.”

  “You worked overnight?”

  He bobbed a nod.

  “You’re the one that did this?”

  He shrugged an acknowledgment.

  “Wow! That’s really… Thanks, this’ll make a huge difference. I’d give you a…” She stopped, embarrassed to say “hug.” Instead, feeling like she’d fumbled the entire conversation, she just said “Thanks” again and turned away.

  “Oh, wait,” Morgan said.

  Daussie stopped and turned back around.

  “A couple of months ago, Kazy asked us for some rubber tubing.” He held out a bundle of flexing yellow-brown… Daussie would’ve said they were “sticks” if they weren’t so bendy. “Aunt Rachel’s been working to produce synthetic rubber ever since. She finally got it to work.”

  Daussie looked down at the sticks and realized they were hollow tubes. “Oh, for IVs!” She held them up as if they were some kind of trophy, “These’ll be great! Thanks again.”

  Morgan grinned in response, looking really happy.

  Stepping back in the shack, Daussie excitedly explained Morgan’s delivery to Kazy. “I’m going to take the antibiotic straight to Eva. She’ll want to liberalize our dosing regimens.” By this, Daussie meant Eva might want to start giving antibiotic to people thought to be too sick to survive—in the hopes they might make it despite their grim prognosis.

  Kazy’s eyes were on the flexing tubes. “Some of the really sick people might benefit from getting their antibiotic by IV.”

  Daussie’s eyes went to the tubes as well. “How’re we going to sterilize these? I should’ve asked Morgan. I’ll bet they won’t tolerate sterilization in the pressure cooker.”

  “Soak them in alcohol,” Kazy said, turning back to her patient.

  ***

  Henry and Tarc had been hooking the wires from their battery up to various items in Roper’s inventory of ancient electrical devices. So far, nothing had happened. Thinking perhaps the battery’d died, Tarc brushed the two wires together. They still made a spark, suggesting the problem wasn’t with the battery. Tarc thought, As if it weren’t a lot more likely that the problem was how ancient and decrepit Roper’s devices are.

  He looked back at the line of small colored glass beads with pairs of wires coming off of them, planning to touch the battery leads to the wires on the next bead. It was one of those two red ones, he thought. Was it the first one, or the second one? Deciding the only way to be sure he hadn’t missed one was to go back to the first one, he moved the wires to it.

  Just as Tarc touched the leads to the wires, Henry said, “You just did that one.”

  The red glass bead suddenly lit up. With a huge smile, Tarc said, “I guess I didn’t, huh?”

  Roper stared at the bead. “That’s amazing!” he breathed, awed to have one of his devices actually work. Besides, the bright red light was exciting in its own right. However, after a moment, Henry looked up into Tarc’s eyes, “But… I swear, you did do that one already. Do you suppose…?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe they only light up the second time you touch the wires to them?” His eyes swept all the other devices they’d already touched wires to. “Maybe some of these other gadgets would’ve worked if we touched the wires to them twice?”

  Tarc frowned, “That sounds more like a superstition than a scientific idea.”

  Roper said, “Humor me. Try it a second time on the green bead that was before the two red ones.”

  Tarc touched the battery wires to the wires on the green bead.

  It lit also!

  Tarc stared, “That just seems crazy.” He lifted the wires off and touched them back. The green bead lit again. He tried it on the red bead. It also lit. “So, it’s not like they light up every other time they’re touched.” He started lifting the wires off and touching them back. The red bead
lit every time it was hooked up to the battery. He looked up at Roper, “Doesn’t it seem crazy for it to not light the first time, but then light every time after that? I mean, how would it know?”

  Henry shrugged, “Maybe the first time you accidentally touched the wire to the insul… What do you call that stuff?”

  “‘Insulation.’ I’m sure I didn’t. He laid down the wires from the battery and picked up the wires from the little glass beads. Studying them as best he could in the lantern light, he said, “There’s no insulation down near the ends.” He twisted it around in the light getting a reflection off the metal of the wire. “They’re not even dirty.”

  “Try it again.”

  Tarc did.

  The bead didn’t light!

  “What the hell?” Tarc asked with dismay.

  Roper said, “Try it again. See if it lights the second time.”

  Tarc did but the bead still didn’t light. He glanced up at Roper, feeling hugely frustrated. They should be immensely excited that they’d actually gotten the beads to light, but having them work a few times, then stop… It felt like someone had pulled a chair out from under him. “Wait,” he said staring at the wires. “What if it matters which wire’s hooked up to which battery lead? What if it matters which direction the electrons are flowing through the bead?”

  Roper snorted. “First, you’d have to accept the ridiculous idea that invisibly small electrons flow through copper wire the way water goes through a pipe.”

  As Tarc carefully switched the two wires from the battery in his hands, he said, “But if it’s right, it’d fit with the water idea. You can’t send water through a water wheel backward.”

  “That’s only because water won’t flow uphill. If you could run the water uphill, it’d probably still turn the water wh—”

  Roper broke off when Tarc touched the wires the opposite way and the bead lit up again.

  Tarc leaned closer and sent in his ghirit. The fuzzy stuff they were calling electrons was indeed flowing around the wires of the circuit. He lifted one of the wires out of contact. The fuzzy material stopped flowing and the bead went dark. He touched them again, flow resumed and the bead lit.