“Yeah,” Vivian said, “I’m fresh out of ideas though.”
“Let me think about it.”
***
Ell’s Ford Focus dropped her off in front of the Sparlock’s house and she went up to knock at the door. Ruth opened the door and her eyes flashed wide to see Ell standing there. “Oh!” she clapped her hand to her chest, “Ms. Donsaii… I mean Dr. Donsaii!”
Ell gave her a crooked smile, “Please call me Ell, and thank you so much for the invitation! I brought a dessert… where should I put it?”
“Oh! Thank you. Right over here.” Ruth gave Ell a hug and took the pie from her, noting with a mild sense of superiority that the pie looked store bought. She carried it over to the dining room table where the food was being set up, speaking back over her shoulder, “We’re so glad you could come. Everyone told me you’d be far too busy.”
“Well, knowing your neighbors is important. Do you have these get togethers frequently?”
“No, this is our first one, but I think we should have them every so often so we can all get to know one another.” Setting down the pie, she guided Ell out the back door, “Jack!”
One of a group of four men outside on the patio turned and looked at Ruth.
“Ell, this is my husband Jack.” Ruth turned back to Jack, “You remember that Dr. Donsaii lives on the farm out back?”
Two of the men standing with Jack looked as startled as he did. A moment later, realizing that he should, Barrett from Ell’s security detail raised his eyebrows in surprise too.
Ell stepped over to them and shook their hands, “Call me Ell.”
Even though she’d hired one of the neighborhood teenagers to keep an eye on the little kids, playing the hostess kept Ruth busy. Even so, she managed to keep an eye on her famous guest. Donsaii might have brought a store bought pie, but she didn’t act the least bit uppity. She talked to people easily. Ruth found it irritating the way the men’s eyes followed Donsaii around, but the girl was just wearing jeans, flip flops and a loose t-shirt. It wasn’t as if she’d purposefully dressed sexily to draw the men’s eyes.
Ruth approached the little group of people the young woman was with; somehow expecting that Donsaii would be holding forth on some topic.
Instead Mary Fenster was telling everyone about how her new dog had chewed her expensive furniture! Donsaii listened with no indication of boredom. When Mary finished her story Ruth felt sure that the conversation would turn to their famous guest. Instead Jake Stelbecht started his own story about a difficult to house train beagle.
When Donsaii finally said something, it was in response to a direct question from Bill Newkirk, “So, Ms. Donsaii, how do you feel now that you’re the fastest human on the planet?”
Donsaii actually winced at the question. “No different than I did a few weeks ago Bill.” Then instead of expounding on her answer she asked a question about the story Stephanie Jones had been telling just before Bill asked his question. This successfully turned the conversation away from Donsaii herself.
Ruth was just noticing that her next door neighbor Raquel, the one who had given her the idea to have the party hadn’t arrived yet, when Ell came up. “Yes Ell?”
“Thank you so much for having me over. I’ve just had a call from work and there’s a problem I’ve got to go in for.”
“But we’re just about to eat! Can’t you just stay a few more minutes to eat some of your neighbors’ food?”
Ell winked, “Maybe I could just take a stack of cookies with me?”
Ruth bundled some cookies up in a napkin and saw her to the door where Ell gave her a hug before leaving. When she returned to her guests she felt no surprise to hear them describing Donsaii in glowing terms. “Such a nice young woman.”
“Not at all stuck up like I expected.”
“Couldn’t even get her to talk about herself.”
“Wouldn’t even know she had a gold medal if I hadn’t seen it in the news.”
“A lot of fun to talk to.” This last surprised Ruth because she’d hardly heard Donsaii say anything. She hid a grin when she realized the truth of the statement. Talk to, indeed. The young woman had been a great listener, and after all, almost everyone secretly preferred to speak themselves rather than listen to anyone else.
“Hey Ruth, sorry we’re late.”
Ruth turned to find Raquel behind her with a fruit salad. She arched an eyebrow, “I’ll say you’re sorry. Donsaii was here!”
“Oh! Did I miss her?”
“Completely!” Ruth raised an eyebrow, “Next time you won’t be fashionably late to one of my parties?”
“Oh, I’m sorry I missed her,” She shrugged, “but I work for D5R, so I do see her out there sometimes.” Raquel indicated a handsome man with tousled blond hair standing beside her. “This is my husband, Shan.”
Wow! Ruth thought, that’s a good looking man! “Hello Shan.” She gave him a little hug. Turning to Raquel she said, “You didn’t tell me you work with Donsaii!”
“Oh! I don’t really work with her. I work at the same place and run into her occasionally. I get sent here and there by the company so I don’t even spend all that much time out there at the local facility. And, Donsaii herself isn’t there all the time. Besides, we don’t work on the same things, so we don’t actually see each other very much.”
Ruth thought Raquel seemed a little defensive. I’ll bet if I asked Ell, she wouldn’t even know who Raquel is. “Well she seemed very nice.” She lowered her voice, “The men certainly enjoyed looking at her if you know what I mean.”
Raquel said, “She is kinda cute.”
Now that’s an understatement, Ruth thought to herself, I’ll bet Raquel’s a little jealous, but then, who wouldn’t be? “Well the food’s served; let’s get you guys some plates.”
Chapter Three
“Ah, September in Carolina,” Steve sighed, leaning back in his chair.
Ell had sponsored a barbecue for her security team at the farm. Perfect weather had graced them. A caterer had delivered pulled pork and chopped beef brisket with big buns to load it onto. Potato salad, green salad, beans and some peach cobbler to finish it off with. A cooler full of a variety of beer provided a mellow atmosphere. The team’s members were taking turns trying out the hoverbike, staying low over the field out in the middle of the farm so that the trees would hide them from view of the road.
Barrett got up and headed out for his turn on the bike, leaving Ell and Steve alone on the porch for a bit. Quietly Ell said, “Steve?”
Steve lifted his head and turned her way, “Yeah?”
“I’d like to have an unrecorded conversation. Can you pop the chip out of your headset?”
He said nothing, just pulled off his headband, popped out the chip and raised an eyebrow.
“You know about the Blaustein bill before Congress?”
His eyes narrowed, “Uh huh?”
“Even if it passes, I don’t think I could release that technology.”
“Couldn’t… or wouldn’t?”
“Wouldn’t, I guess.”
“Because?”
“It’s a horrific weapon. Remember when we rescued Vivian, you used it that night?”
“I thought that might be how we did that. I was using a one ended port to shoot two ended ports into that trailer and you put gas through them?”
“Uh huh.”
“And if anyone could get their hands on them?”
“No one would be safe… Poisonous gas could be squirted into your house from a block away.”
His eyes widened, “And?”
Ell described some other horrific scenarios.
“And you don’t think that if you explained to the government just how dangerous it is that they’d back off their demands?”
“Oh, I don’t think they want the public to have it either. But they want it for themselves… and once they have it, it’ll leak… someday… it’ll leak.”
He let his head sink back against the back
of his chair and closed his eyes as he considered the implications. “But… if the bill passes, then not releasing the tech would be what… against the law, I guess?”
“Uh huh.”
“Aw crap! And here I promised myself to always stay on the right side of the law.”
“Yeah, I kinda thought so. I don’t want you to do anything illegal.”
“There’s illegal… and then there’s immoral.” He sighed, “I agree with you that letting that kind of tech go is immoral and nothing’s secret when more than one person knows it.” He turned to look her in the eye. “To me, ‘moral’ is more important than ‘legal.’”
“Thanks,” she said, “Though I still don’t want you to do anything illegal.”
Steve snorted, “Why’d you bring it up then?”
“Uh, well, if I get thrown in prison…”
“Bite your tongue.”
“You know it could happen. Anyway, I want to make sure my people—your team—are getting paid.”
He quirked his mouth, “If you’re in prison, you’ll hardly need a security team on the outside.”
“But I might only be in the clink for a little while. I’d like you to be able to keep the team together.”
He leaned his head back again and stared sightlessly at the ceiling of the porch, “So how are you going to pay the team from prison?”
“Advance you funds now for future services.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll put some money in your account. We’ll call it a ‘bonus’ but you and I’ll know it’s to keep you going for a few years if I do get sent up the river. You’d keep the team on pay. They could disperse, even take other jobs, but would need to stay in shape and be available to reassemble when I needed them again if they wanted to keep drawing that pay.”
“Jeez, Ell, that’d be millions of dollars.”
“Yeah… lots of millions. It’s even conceivable I might ask you to give me some money back in certain situations. Say the government confiscates everything I have? So I’d want to be sure you had a big surplus.”
“How can you trust me with that kind of money?” he asked wonderingly.
Quietly she said, “I trust you with my life, Steve… every day.” She shrugged, “I believe you’re one of the most trustworthy people I know.”
He sighed, “I hope I’m worthy of such trust.”
“You are. I’ll make a deposit in your account.”
***
Going down the hall at D5R, Ell heard Gary call her. He stood in the door of what she thought of as the “dangerous reaction room.” Heading his way she said, “What’s up?”
“Got something to show you.”
She stepped inside, looking around, “Why are you working in here? Doing something that might explode?”
He shrugged, “Methane. And this room already has vacuum and a hood to work in. Just easier to set up in here. No one else was using it.”
“So what are you doing?”
“Testing your pressure, temperature, charge, molecular and ionization conditions for creating the various allotropes.”
“Oh! Cool! What are you finding?”
He shook his head mournfully.
“The plot doesn’t work?” she said, looking broken hearted.
“No, it’s just that you’re taking all the fun out of it for an old style experimental chemist like myself.”
“It does work?!”
“Yeah, it makes better graphene than my personal recipe that I worked on for so long. Breaks my heart.”
“What about other allotropes?” Ell asked excitedly.
“Yeah.” Gary said, sounding like someone had shot his dog.
“Diamond?”
“Yeah.”
“Lonsdaleite?”
He nodded. “Makes them at incredible rates too.”
“And you think this is a bad thing because?”
“My life’s work, and you figured it out on a weekend lark.”
“Hah!” She grinned at him. “We figured it out. You, and I, and Shan Kinrais.” She shrugged, “and, we had a little secret outside help.” She smiled broadly, “This is going to be so cool!”
“Yeah,” he grinned back at her, “it is. Very, very cool.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Wanna see my first product?”
“Of course!” Ell said, looking excitedly around for something that might be the product he spoke of.
He picked up a square black rod about a quarter inch in diameter and twelve inches long. “Well, I needed a substrate to build my graphend on so I started with one of these graphite rods. I just rotated it in the test chamber under the specified conditions. I didn’t have the laser setup you mentioned to stitch layers of graphene together. Instead, first I used graphene conditions; then shifted the conditions to diamond, then back to graphene. After I let it cycle it back and forth a while I had this rod here.” He held up a rod, much like the first one but slightly glossier.
Gary held the plain rod out to her, “Wanna break this one?”
Ell took it and snapped it in half like a piece of chalk. She raised an eyebrow, “Not very strong.”
“Nope. Should have taken less than a half pound of bending force, bending it the way you did.” He grinned, “Pretty typical for plain graphite. Wanna try that with this one?” He held out the glossy one.
Ell took it and tried to bend it. Then got a real grip on it and tried hard to break it. “Ouch!” she said, rubbing her fingers and staring at the undamaged rod. “So how strong is it?”
“Well, of course, it depends on how many layers of diamond and graphene I lay down on them, but the first two I made broke at 350 and at 525 pounds.”
“So I could mount the two ends of this rod on something and stand on it without breaking it?”
“You and I both, probably. And I cheated and let the final diamond run go kinda long so you probably can’t scratch or damage it either.”
Ell stared at the rod for a while, “Wow!” she whispered. “I’ve been thinking about how we could coat things with diamond to make them damage resistant… but really, coating them like this makes them way stronger too, huh?”
“Yeah,” he chuckled, “I was thinking about coating my car and got to thinking about… you know in the old days before AI control of cars, when there were lots of wrecks?”
“Yeah?”
“Cars were designed to ‘crumple’ to absorb the impacts. I guess they still are to some extent. You surely wouldn’t have wanted your car made out of this stuff back then.”
She looked distant for a moment, then shrugged, “Well, you could design a car made out of this stuff with shock absorption built into the frame.”
“Yeah, I suppose they still chould. Not our problem though.” He grinned, “We just deliver the product, sir. Up to the engineers how they use it.”
“OK, Gar’,” Ell said leaning back on the bench. “It’s time for us to start talking to patent attorneys. But here’s something to consider?”
“Oh crap,” he said bemused. “What are you going to hit me with now?”
Eyes twinkling, Ell said, “Imagine a big chamber… Inside you establish conditions to rapidly lay down lonsdaleite in certain areas, then graphend.” She grinned at him, “Like a 3D printer. Then, in some areas, you lay down graphene to conduct electricity, with diamond around it for insulation. The electricity goes to a motor that has graphene around it to the conduct heat away. You lay down a little amorphous carbon between parts you don’t want to be stuck together.”
The stunned expression on Gary’s face was priceless. His feet slowly slid out from under where he leaned against the bench and he descended until he was sitting on the floor. “Holy shit!” he whispered.
“Yeah.” Ell said, one eyebrow up, “Chew on that. I’ll set us up a meeting with my favorite patent guys.” As she left the room Gary still sat sprawled on the floor, eyes still focused unseeingly in the distance.
Down the hall, Ell stepped into Wilson Daster’s office. “Got a mo
ment to talk?”
He leaned back in his seat and raised an eyebrow, “With the boss? Sure.”
Ell rolled her eyes. “I’m hoping we’re friends first, boss-employee second.”
Wilson grinned and straightened back up, “Yeah, I think we are too. How can I help you?”
Ell drummed her fingers a moment, thinking how to say it. Deciding honesty was the best course she sighed, “I need a really smart accountant to help me diddle the books.”
Daster’s eyebrows ascended in surprise.
“And, if you don’t want to do it, I’m out of here. No problem. I can figure another way.”
Daster stared at her a moment, then to Ell’s dismay his eyes brimmed with tears. Hoarsely he said, “Ell Donsaii… I… we all owe you our lives. I’d do just about anything for you… short of killing someone, I guess. I was only startled that someone with as much money as you’ve got would need me to diddle the books. But, you don’t even need to tell me why or what for. I’ve spent most of my professional life catching people who fool with the books, I can probably figure out how to hide some transactions.”
“OK, thanks.” Ell said, a little catch in her voice too. “What I want to do is buy some of the waldoes that have legs. I’d pay for it with my own funds, but I just don’t want to have the purchase show up on the books.”
He narrowed his eyes, “You need a controller for it too?”
She looked off into the distance, then shrugged, “I probably should have one of those too, yeah.
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, I’d like the company to buy two hundred kilograms of gold and transfer it to me.”
Wilson blinked, “That’s, uh, in the range of eleven to twelve million dollars?”
Ell nodded, “Closer to thirteen.”
“I might be able to help a lot more if I knew why? Don’t feel you have to tell me to get me to do it. I just think if I understood, I could do a better job.”
She sighed, “I think the Blaustein bill is going to pass.”
“Ah,” Wilson said, leaning back again, staring at the ceiling. “And you don’t plan to comply.” He made it a statement, rather than a question. “So, you’ll be in violation of the law.” He looked back at her, “Are you thinking you’re going to go into hiding?”
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