There’d be a significant disturbance during installation because they’d be drilling huge Stade screws into the Earth to provide a stable foundation. They’d also trench in some big power lines for the motors that would lengthen and shorten the leg coming off the Stroud’s land in order to pivot the main leg of the tower so it could be pointed different directions.
“How noisy is that motor going to be?” Marnie asked suspiciously.
The real estate agent said, “Not very. They’ll be electric motors that don’t make a lot of noise to begin with. But the company plans to mount the motor about a mile and a half up the tower. You shouldn’t be able to hear it.”
Marnie glanced doubtfully at Charlie. He shrugged. “We can get our own lawyer to look over the contract for us, right? Make sure we aren’t getting hoodwinked?”
“You bet,” Mackie said.
“And where, ‘out in the middle of the farm,’ are they gonna want this tower base located?”
“That’s, to a large degree, at your discretion. They want it three-tenths of a mile from any of the edges of your farm so your neighbors will have less reason to complain.” She paused and put up a map of their farm with a central area highlighted. “But that still leaves a big area in the middle you can choose from. Hopefully, that’ll let you site the tower where it’ll cause the fewest problems for your farming operations.”
“So,” Charlie asked, “Could I let you lease this spot here for the tower?” He pointed to a spot that had several huge boulders and some poor soil. The boulders were too big to move and the dirt wasn’t worth remediating so he never farmed it anyway.
“Sure,” Mackie said cheerfully. “That’s where we figured you’d want it.” She hesitated a moment then said, “But don’t forget you want to site it so the road leading to it won’t be a problem for your fields either.”
“Could it take off my road here?” he asked, moving the pointer from his farm road out along the edge of the farmed fields to reach the site for the tower.
“Uh-huh, they’d have to strengthen and pave your road as well as that addition. Strong enough so they’ll tolerate heavy equipment.”
Charlie looked out the window, “I’m not sure the county’s road to the farm will tolerate heavy construction equipment. You might get hassled by the DOT.”
Mackie smiled, “Maybe I should’ve said, ‘medium-heavy equipment.’ They have some huge blimps that’ll carry in anything too heavy for the roads.”
“Why do they want the whole farm someday? Why not just stick with those five acres out in the middle?”
“Um,” she gave them a bit of an embarrassed smile. “Tourists. They’re thinking someday there might be a market for an observation point and hotel about a mile or so up the tower. The view should really be something. But the tourists are going to need parking etcetera, so they want to plan for that.”
An hour or so later, Mackie left them with tentative contracts and all the information she’d shown them. As she left, she said, “Don’t worry if you decide you don’t want to have it on your land. Though your farm’s the best site for it, any of your neighbor’s farms would work almost as well.”
Charlie wasn’t sure whether that was intended to make Marnie and him feel better about refusing, or was a subtle threat that if he gave them too much trouble there’d still be a tower and tourists, but he and Marnie wouldn’t benefit…
***
Kaem was sitting in a café having a hot chocolate and reading ahead on his class assignments before his first class.
Someone said, “Excuse me.”
He looked up.
A pretty young woman holding a study tablet in one hand and a coffee in the other was standing, looking down at him. She said, “Sorry, all the tables are full. Can I sit at yours? I promise I won’t bother you.”
“Oh, sure,” he said, waving carelessly at the other chair. Though I wouldn’t mind if you bothered me, he thought, glancing at her again, surreptitiously—he hoped.
She caught his glance with a knowing smile.
He immediately looked back down at his laptop. Why am I so bad at this? he wondered. Is it just because I was too sick to get any experience with girls when everyone else my age was pairing up? Or is it some congenital defect like my blood dyscrasia?
Distracted from his reading, Kaem started thinking about his social life. He hadn’t gone out with Lee again, perhaps in reaction to his feeling that Arya had been pushing him at her. Somehow, he hadn’t gotten up the courage to ask Dez again after she saved his life on their disastrous first date. Arya’d made it plain that he’d better not ask her. She’d also made it clear that she thought there could be repercussions if he dated any of Staze’s employees. Though still only about a quarter of physics majors were female there were some nice women in his physics classes. Unfortunately, they all knew who he was and held him in an alarming amount of awe. Their reactions when he talked to them made him uncomfortable.
Maybe I’ll have a whirlwind romance with a stranger during our vacation in Tuscany, he thought. Then, disgusted, Fat chance of that. I probably won’t be able to bring myself to talk to anyone there either.
He glanced up at the girl sitting at his table just as she knocked over her coffee. The lid stayed on, but a few drops sprayed out of the drinking opening and splashed onto his laptop. Kaem picked up the laptop in case more coffee flooded out, but it didn’t.
The girl bolted to her feet, setting her coffee back upright. Handing him her napkin she turned, saying, “Sorry! I’ll get more napkins.”
His own napkin would’ve been enough, but he took hers. When she came back with a wad of additional napkins, she stopped, assessed the damage, and said, “I guess these are overkill, huh?”
“Yeah,” Kaem said with a laugh. “Don’t worry. No harm done.”
“But I promised I wouldn’t bother you,” she said wistfully.
“No bother,” Kaem said, checking his watch and standing. “I’ve got to get to class.”
“Oh,” she said, wide-eyed, “so do I.” She picked up her tablet and coffee and they both turned toward the door. “What year are you in?” she asked.
“Senior.”
“Then blasting-off, or going on to grad school?”
He gave her a little smile, “I’ve got a job.”
“That’s great. I’m only a junior. Trying to get into med school and sweating the admission tests. It’ll be a long time before I start earning my keep.” She shrugged, “Unless I blow the tests, then I’ll have to decide between grad school and getting a job. What made you decide to take a job?”
Kaem shrugged, “Got a great opportunity.”
Where’s your new job?”
“Believe it or not, right here in Charlottesville.”
As they continued, she asked about his taste in music and his hobbies. The fact that he didn’t care much what music was playing and had no real avocations left him feeling only partly formed. He asked her a few questions but felt like she always turned the conversation back to him. As they separated to go to their classes, she pulled out one of her napkins and a pen, saying, “Hey, in case a drop of that coffee actually got into your laptop and does some damage, here’s my phone number.”
She waved cheerfully and walked off, leaving Kaem wondering whether she really thought there might be hidden damage to his laptop, or whether she hoped he’d call her. I didn’t even get her name! he realized, then looked at the napkin again. “Ronnie,” it said next to her number.
***
Arya was on another date arranged through the Select Singles website. She saw Aarav as soon as she entered the restaurant’s waiting area. She gave him a little wave and he stood and approached. Stopping, he gave her a polite little bow and introduced himself—a pleasant change from her last three dates who had all tried to hug her, forcing her to fend them off, saying something like, “Not until we know each other better.”
Once she’d introduced herself, he asked, “Shall I tell the hostess we�
�re ready to be seated?”
As they approached their table, Aarav stepped ahead and pulled out a chair for her, then seated her before taking a seat himself.
He’s so… too polite, she thought. Then, irritated, she asked herself, And why do I find that annoying! Am I going to find fault with every man I go out with?
She looked over the menu, found something to her liking, then looked up at Aarav. He’d been watching her and seeing her look at him, he opened with, “Did you go to school here at UVA?”
She answered and he went on to elicit her story. Where she’d grown up. When her family moved to the U.S. How difficult it’d been at first. How her parents’ business was now thriving. The scholarship she’d gotten that allowed her to attend UVA. Her course of study. The haunted house tour business she’d started as an undergrad. That she was working at Staze, “In the financial end of things,” she told him, reluctant to brag by claiming CFO.
During this conversation they placed their orders, their food came, and they ate.
She suddenly realized that he’d learned her life story but she still knew little about him. When she asked, it turned out his father was the first in their family to come to the U.S., having come over to attend University. He’d gotten in the motel business and made quite a success of himself, with Aarav now joining him in running the business. “I wish I could say that I worked hard to get where I am,” he said, “but in truth, my dad did all the hard work. All I had to do was jump on a running horse.”
He’s humble, not a braggart like the others, Arya thought. Yet he’s successful, even if it was due to his father’s efforts. He didn’t dominate the conversation, telling me about himself. He doesn’t look pudgy. He’s like a dream come true.
So why do I have no respect for him?
“What do you like to do?” she asked hopefully.
“Oh,” he said enthusiastically, “I’m a huge sports fan!”
As he launched into a description of the sports he followed—not played, Arya thought, Now I have something substantial to dislike… but really, isn’t it a minor thing? How can I dismiss him because he likes to watch sports? Most men seem to enjoy it.
Fortunately, Aarav didn’t try to come in for a hug at the end of the evening. I should go out with him again on that basis alone, she thought.
But she knew she wouldn’t.
Chapter Three
Jack stepped into the metal workshop to find Stitt already there. “How’s it going?” he asked in an effort to assess Stitt’s mood.
“Great, though you’re late,” Stitt said cheerfully. “Hey, I’m a poet, even if I didn’t know it.”
Mood’s good, Jack thought. It hearkened back to when they’d been frat brothers in college. Back when Jack had been drunkenly skimming by on his way to a business degree and Stitt had been drunkenly sailing through hard courses on his way to a degree in aerospace engineering. He said, “I’m two minutes late, you reprobate.”
Stitt gave him a wide-eyed look, “You’re a poet too? I didn’t dream that you might have such culture.” He looked down at the laptop, “I’ve been here for hours searching the operating system of this POS with a whole raft of programs I downloaded off the dark net. Believe it or not, the damned thing has no protection whatsoever. No locator programs. Nothing that’ll lock up the hard drive on unauthorized use. Nothing that’ll communicate back to the owners to tell them where it is.” He snorted and shook his head disbelievingly, “It’s as if they never considered the possibility someone might steal it.” He looked up at Jack, an unbelieving look on his face.
Jack said, “So, we ready to staze something then?” Stitt was in such a good mood that Jack wondered uneasily whether the obnoxious little shit might be high.
Stitt said, “Yup. Plug in the stazer and connect the cables. I’ll turn on Wi-Fi and fire up the stazing program.”
Jack hooked the stazer up to power and connected the USB cable. He picked up the two cables that came out of the stazer and looked around. “Is this lumpy thing the stazing mold?” he asked, toeing it with his boot.
Stitt looked over, “Yeah. It’s a discarded mold for a piece of the rocket’s plumbing that didn’t fit. It’ll be useless to us, but still a good test for whether this thing works.”
Jack rolled the mold over and found receptacles for the end of the cables. Once they were plugged in, he stepped over to look over Stitt’s shoulder at the program. The interface was very plain, yet the options looked terribly complex. Noticing a tiny red light at the top of the screen, he asked, “Why’s the camera on?”
Stitt froze a moment, then leaped to his feet screaming obscenities. Powering down the laptop, he said, “Grab the stazer. We gotta get the hell outta here!”
A sinking feeling in his stomach, Jack heard sirens in the distance. He pulled the power cord out of the stazer, tossed the USB cable, and grabbed a handle of the stazer with one hand and the stazing cables with the other. He looked up and saw Stitt going out the door with the laptop. “HEY, asshole! I can’t carry this damned thing by myself!”
With a jerk, Stitt stopped and turned back. He grabbed the other handle and they started running clumsily, the stazer jerking along between them.
They started between a couple of buildings but then flashing lights speared into the opening from the other end. Jack pulled hard on the stazer, dragging the smaller Stitt behind him. “This way. My car’s on the next block.”
As they jogged clumsily down the alley, Stitt said, “What the hell are you doing parking so damned far away?”
“For just this kind of situation,” Jack wheezed out. He might be big, but he wasn’t in shape.
“If they look like they’re gonna catch us, drop the stazer. DNA doesn’t stick to it, so it’ll be clean.”
Jack didn’t have the breath to answer, but he thought about how his DNA was probably all over the cords he’d left in that little metal workshop. Maybe on other things too. He glanced down, Maybe on these stazing cables too?
He resolved to hold onto the cables if they dropped the machine. Maybe they were jacked into the machine and would pull out. To Stitt, he puffed, “Okay, slow down. Don’t wanna be acting… fugitive. We’ll walk across the street… and put this thing in the trunk… as if nothing’s wrong.”
They did. It was too big for the trunk but Jack pulled out a couple of bungee cords and secured the trunk’s lid over it. They got in and, despite the screaming urgency boiling in his veins, Jack drove away slowly. Damn, he thought in amazement after they’d driven ten minutes the wrong way and were starting to circle back around to the north, it looks like we got away with it!
~~~
Kaem woke to his AI chiming at him with an urgent message saying stazer 304 and its laptop had been connected to the internet.
He rolled out of bed and flipped on his laptop. A moment later he confirmed his AI had already notified the police in LA of the approximate location of the stolen laptop, and therefore, presumably, the stazer itself. It wasn’t an exact GPS location because the laptop’s GPS receiver hadn’t been able to get a signal from any satellites. Instead, it was an approximate location based on the known locations of several nearby internet devices including the name of the company the wi-fi router was registered to. He saw the laptop had sent him a video of first one, then two guys peering at the laptop though he didn’t recognize either of them. The audio conversation it’d transmitted began with recorded material from before it’d been connected to wi-fi. This included the first guy’s derision about how the laptop wasn’t protected with any location programs. Then went on to talk about stazing something until one of them noticed the camera was on and they turned it off in preparation for bolting out of there.
I guess it was worth the effort of coding my own locator and laptop control app, he thought. He’d only been thinking it’d be nice to have a single, small-footprint, simple app that booted location, audio, and video all at the same time. He hadn’t borrowed code from commercial locator apps to create it
because he knew he could achieve smaller and therefore more rapidly transmitted information packets with some of his own ideas.
Kaem called the LAPD to let them know the stazer had been in what appeared to be a small metal industrial building belonging to a workshop rental company called “Build it Yourself.” He sent them a screenshot showing the two men and another where the first man leaned to one side, allowing a view of much of the interior of the room and the array of tools in the background.
After wondering for a moment just how hard the police would work on a property theft, he considered posting a reward. However, a quick question to his AI told him police on duty weren’t eligible to collect rewards. Thus, it seemed unlikely a reward would influence their diligence.
He spent a few minutes correlating the likely location of the stazer to the appearance of the buildings in the area on satellite imagery. He found only three likely buildings, all in a row, and forwarded that to the police. A few minutes later he was able to confirm the southernmost building of the three was owned by Build it Yourself.
A quick courtesy call to the police informed them which exact building it was, that the perpetrators had left the building, and reminded them that they might’ve left DNA behind on the chair.
He sat back, pondering. Space-Gen had a significant interest in the issue since they were out $100,000 for their loss of the stazer. He assembled and sent a package of information with the video, audio, and likely map location, designating Aaron Marks, Will Goran, Mahesh Prakant, and April Lee as recipients.
~~~
Determined to act normally, Stitt arrived at work at his usual time the next morning. As he walked in Space-Gen’s main door someone called his name. When he turned that way, he saw a couple of security guards coming his way.
A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5) Page 6