The Far Side (2 page)

“No fuckin’ idea!  Give it a rest, Kris!  This is the real fuckin’ shit!  No fuck!”

“Whatever.”

“Nobels, Kris.  I’m gonna get one or two of the fuckers.  Maybe three.  At least that many, maybe a couple more.”

“For what?”

“Well, right now this little fucker is putting out about 48 kilowatts.  Six fuckin’ grand, Kris!  That’s all I’ve spent on it!  I bet I can get the cost down by half if I had the right shit to work with!”  Andie laughed.  “That’s running 480 hundred watt light bulbs at once for an hour.”

“I bet LA uses a few more than that,” Kris said mildly.

“Fuckin’ A!  Except you could scale this fucker up to two, maybe five thousand megawatts and do the whole fuckin’ city.  Maybe a hundred million bucks!”

Kris swallowed.  That sounded like a lot until you realized that about two million households in the LA area paid a hundred or so bucks a month for electricity.  “You’re sure?”

“I love ya, bitch!  But you figure it out.  A thousand kilowatts in a megawatt.  Twenty of these...” she waved at the apparatus.  Five thousand megawatts... 100,000 of these at six thousand bucks a pop, assuming no efficiencies of scale.  There’s just gotta be fucking efficiencies.”

“This is incredible, Andie!  Wow!”

“Yeah, but I got sidetracked with the fuckin’ frame-dragging shit.  I did the math; I thought I had it down.  But...”  Andie spread her hands.  “Watch this.”

She turned to a little control panel and started flipping switches.

A motor started humming and Kris could see a rubber belt about four feet long and about eight inches wide, start to move.  There were three comb-like gizmos along it that in the bad light of the closet had started glowing blue.

Escaping electrons, Kris thought.  Andie knows that I’m a genius too... but even so, Kris knew she wasn’t in the same class as Andie.

“Right now,” Andie explained, “not much is going on.  Call it de-fucking-tuned.   Now I’m going to crank up that rotating magnetic field.  Think of it as something like what a generator generates, except this fucker is virtual -- no moving parts.  I can get the fuckin’ shaft rotation one fuckin’ lot faster than you can get a real shaft to turn.”

Again, there was nothing visible -- just Andie studying gauges and dials.  The device’s most noisy part was the motor turning the rubber belt of the Van de Graaff.

Kris sighed.  Andie had built her first Van de Graaff as a freshman.  She’d gotten permission, after a demonstration, to build a larger version in their high school’s rotunda.  The principal should have known better!

Everyone in school had been there when Andie turned it on.  The rotunda was thirty feet high and a hundred feet in diameter.  The first lighting bolt had been fifteen feet tall and had scared the pee out of half the students present.  Literally.

It had been like a bad science fiction movie, lighting bolts striking at random after that, around the room.  Kris had seen Andie turn it off, and so she had stood stock still.  She’d been hit by one of the bolts, but she wasn’t grounded.  Microamps.  She grinned at the memory.  Every hair on her body, including her shoulder-length hair, had stood on end.  Andie had said she not only had her hair on end, but she had been glowing blue as her body shed excess electrons.  Kris had refused Andie’s request to try for a photograph before they made Andie tear the machine down.

“Okay, here goes, Kris.  Please, suspend disbelief.”

Kris wasn’t sure if she was surprised more to hear two sentences ‘fuck free’ as it were, or what Andie had said.

Something flickered in front of her.  It was blue, about six or seven feet tall, just a bit smaller than the closet’s ceiling and about four feet wide, about two-thirds of the closet’s width.

It shimmered like a glowing blue curtain, blowing in the wind.  After a second it stopped “blowing in the wind” and settled down to a simple blue rectangle.

“I can’t remember what the name of a section of a sphere’s surface is, but that’s what this is, only projected on a plane,” Andie said, continuing her matter-of-fact explanation.

“It a projection of the surface of the reaction chamber, expanded from three feet to six plus.  I have no idea why the vertical dimension is expanded at a different scale.”

“It looked like fabric, blowing in a breeze,” Kris offered.

“I thought that too.  But...”

The blue surface seemed solid.  “I swear, Kris, I’m not stupid.  I stuck a broom into it first.”

Kris jerked her head around and stared at Andie.  “I swear, Kris, I had no idea what was going on, but I was careful.  Still, you know me -- I have to try anything new.”

“What did you do?”

“I put my hand into it.  I felt nothing unusual.  Nothing.  The broom handle went and returned and looked normal.  I decided, ‘fuck it!’ and put my head through.”

Kris felt faint.  She couldn’t have done that for all the tea in China.  Actually, she couldn’t have done that at all, no matter what the reward.

Andie went on, as matter of fact as she always was, but without her favorite word.

“I can’t describe it.  I mean, literally, I can’t.  I couldn’t feel anything different from if I’d stuck my head through a door.  A big nothing.  Well, almost nothing, because it was black as the ace of spades on the other side.”

"Andie, you might think you're sane, but your not."

Andie laughed. "Yeah, I thought you'd say that.  Which is why you are here with your camera."  She pointed at the camera.  "I built a light bar.  We're going to hang the camera and light bar on the broomstick and try again."

"That sounds sensible," Kris told her friend earnestly.

Andie laughed.  "Remember back in seventh grade?  They explained about masturbation to us in school.  We'd both heard about it before then, and both of us had tried it without success.  You ran home after school and tried it again.  After that you told me that you don't like masturbation because you lose control."

Kris blushed.  "Yeah."

"Well, my friend, now you're eighteen and I'll be that in a couple of days.  Sex is legal for you, and soon it'll be for me.  I never said anything to you that day or since... but you have to know I've tried it a bunch of times.  I lose control every time I rub myself.  Me, I like the feeling of being out of control.  You're afraid of it."

"I don't like to lose control," Kris said with the dignity that she could muster, but knowing she sounded defensive.

"I know, Kris.  Me... it's who I am.  You also told me once that your idea of heaven was to die in bed, at home, when you're a million years old, your extended family around you."

"I was younger then."

"But you meant it."

"Yeah."  Actually, Kris had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, but she did know that she wanted to keep Andie from killing the both of them -- so she’d said that in the hopes it would tone down of Andie’s ideas.  It hadn’t, so far as Kris had noticed.

“And we both know I’m not going to die in bed,” Andie said matter-of-factly.

"Kris, we can do the same experiment we've done since fourth grade when you grew six inches and I didn't.  We can go in my bathroom, stand next to each other and look in the mirror.  There you'll be, and I need a stool for you to see me.

"You know it and I know it.  We're different you and I."

"Yes," Kris admitted.  "I've never thought it was a bad thing."

"I think it's a good thing," Andie told her.  "So, sure, I put my head through there -- once.  Now I'm going to risk your camera."

For fifteen minutes the two of them worked, Kris mostly supervising.  It was no surprise to find that Andie was a wizard with duct tape.

They pushed the camera into and through the blue glow.  After a minute, they pulled the camera back and looked at the replay.

Kris was silent while the tape played and only at the end did she look at Andie.  "It looks like a cave."

“Yeah, that’s what it looks like.  No light, that’s for sure, but lots of rocks.”

Kris studied the camera and light and then looked at Andie.  “You want to put more than your head through.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“And what happens if this thing of yours breaks?”

“I’m fucked,” Andie said, her voice steady.  “I don’t have a death wish, Kris, but I have a huge bump of curiosity.”

“What’s your plan?”  Andie always had a plan, no matter how much she looked or sounded like she didn’t.

“I’m going to take the broom and light bar with me and a flashlight in my pocket.  I’m going through and I’ll look around and take a few better pictures than what we’ve gotten so far.  There’s some white liquid shoe polish on my dresser.  I’m going to move ahead to this rock,” she pointed to one frozen on the playback screen, “and paint a happy face on it.

“Then I’m coming back and we’ll turn the thing off and then back on.”

“You want to know if you’re coming back to the same place?”

“Yeah.”

“What if there’s no air there?”

“Well,” Andie said reached into a drawer and tossing a rolled up pair of socks through the blue door, “if there wasn’t before, there is now.”

Kris nodded, Andie’s point made.  “Two minutes, Kris, that’s all,” Andie remonstrated.

“Do me a favor and as soon as you go through, try talking to me.”

Andie laughed.  “Yeah, that’s a good experiment!  I didn’t think of that one!  You should be able to hear me as good as if I was in the next room.”  She laughed again.  “Theory says.”

It took a few minutes to get things organized and then without hesitation, Andie stepped through it.  Try as she might, Kris couldn’t hear anything from Andie.  “I can’t hear you, Andie,” Kris said loudly.

Andie stuck her head through the blue door.  It looked decidedly odd.  “You hear me?”

“No, and I don’t think you heard me just now, either.”

“Nothing,” Andie agreed.  “I didn’t feel anything special, going through.  No dizziness, no nausea, nothing.  Just like walking into the kitchen from the dining room.

“There’s a mild breeze here, coming from left.  I don’t think it’s associated with the door.  I’m going to mark the rock now.  I’ll toss the shoe polish back to you when I’m done.”

Andie’s head vanished.

A few seconds later the shoe polish bottle came flying out and Kris almost caught it.  A moment later Andie reappeared, a rock in her hand.  She handed the rock to Kris and started shutting the machine down.  The blue door took on its curtain appearance, shimmered and then vanished.

Kris lofted the rock.  “Eeew, now I have space alien boogers on my hands!”

Andie laughed.  “Any space alien that bites you is going to make a face, roll over and die, Kris.”

Kris stuck her tongue out.  “You’re so smart, you look at the rock.  It’s full of fossils.”

Andie leaned close and she could see them too.  They looked like little clams.  Andie ran her fingernail over the surface of the rock.  “This looks like limestone.  One sec.”

She turned around and vanished into the rest of the house.  A moment later Andie was back with a small plastic bowl for soup or ice cream and a bottle of vinegar.  She put the rock in the bowl and dribbled the vinegar on the rock.  Bubbles immediately appeared.

“Yeah, calcium carbonate,” Andie said.  “Limestone.  About what you’d expect in a cave.  I was in Carlsbad once, it was fuc...,  umm, it was pretty cold in there.  This cave was much warmer.”

“You almost fucked up there,” Kris said trying not to grin.

“Watch your mouth, girl!” Andie said and the two of them burst out laughing.  “Sometimes I let my hair down with my best friend.  Don’t you go messing up my act by trying to get in on it yourself!”

Kris looked at her watch.  “Andie, it’s almost nine and tomorrow is a school day.”

Andrea scoffed.  “Like two weeks before graduation, who cares?”

“Andie, you told me once the reason why you have a perfect attendance record is to show up everyone else.”

“That was pure luck.  Who could count on getting both measles and chicken pox in the summer?”

“But it means something to you.  And you know you want to give that speech.”

“You should have seen Principal Stone’s face when I gave him my first draft!”

Kris grimaced.  That had been Andie at her vulgar best.  The second draft, where she’d inserted “Praise Jesus!” every place she’d had “fuck” or “shit” before hadn’t been any better received.

The final draft had two versions -- the one Dr. Stone saw and approved -- a plea for continuing to learn, and the other was the same plea with a pithy sentence at the end.  Kris wasn’t sure just how many people were going to understand, “So long and thanks for all the fish!” but that sentiment expressed Andie’s true opinion of the school -- even if the school was a top technical preparatory, students drawn exclusively from the children of the rich and the super rich.

Andie busied herself in her closet getting the machine started again until the flapping blue curtain stabilized once more.  She promptly stuck her head through it, flashlight in hand and laughed as she pulled back.  “Well, there’s still a happy face there!”  She snapped off the flashlight, grinning from ear to ear.