The Far Side (7 page)

She turned to Kris.  “I know you think you should have yelled sooner -- but I trust you, Kris.  You didn’t hesitate once you were concerned.  We just need to develop a better system is all.”

Andie smiled.  “And I hope my old man doesn’t go looking for his elephant gun very soon or that your dad doesn’t want the camera back in the next couple of days, because all of that is on the far side.  We were just finished up the mapping we were going to do and when you called, we dropped everything.  We didn’t do anything but run like scaredy cats.”

She looked at Kit whose green had faded to pasty white.  “You okay?”

“Yeah.  I was so excited.  I got to go twice, you two once each.  I was so excited, so pleased!  God!  This is like the space shuttle -- Russian roulette!”

“Yeah,” Andie exclaimed.  “Are you glad that I took notes the first time?  I’ve even transcribed them onto my computer.  In theory, someone could have put it back together.”

Andie drew herself up.  “I’m going to be mean and run you both out of here now.  I want to get started on a list of stuff I’m going to need to fix things.  A new brand of glue and an iron are going to head the list!”

“I’ve got a clothes iron at home,” Kris told her.

“Whatever.  Bye all, take care!  See you tomorrow.”

She really did hustle them out.  Outside, Kit took a deep breath, speaking to Kris.  “I can do something about the radios.  Electromagnetic waves don’t go through the interface, but it’s obvious a hard connection does -- which is why the light bar works.  I’ll gen up a repeater -- a device that repeats whatever it hears on one end, a hard wire to a transmitter to go on the other end and a transmitter to pass it on.  Piece of cake!

“You did good, Kris, and I owe you a deep debt of gratitude.  Except the only word of yours we could make out clearly was ‘Run.’  So we dropped everything and ran.”

Kris felt faint again.  For a second he put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes.  “You did good!  You understand?”

“Yeah.”

“We all know this is dangerous.  Maybe I’d have noticed, maybe not.  You did and we’re safe.  Bottom line, Kris, is that we’re all safe.”

He dropped his hands away from her as if suddenly aware he was touching her.  He smiled wanly at her, climbed into his car and drove away.  Kris went home and curled up in bed, trying not to think about it.

Chapter 3 :: Other Explorations

Christopher Richards knocked on Oliver Boyle’s office door, and the director looked up and gestured him forward. “Kit,” the director said.

“Sir,” Kit stopped, still debating what his duty was in this.  This was his future he was playing with, and the stakes had suddenly become enormously greater than even he had imagined could be possible.  It was like walking through a minefield, where the least misstep would be fatal.  Of course the rewards were greater than anything he’d ever imagined as well.

“You get my daughter taken care of?” Oliver asked.  Both men realized that hadn’t been an artful way to ask the question.

“Partly,” Kit admitted.

“Partly?” Oliver asked, thinking one thing, since he’d so competently misdirected himself.

“Sir, you told me once that if I had a problem with someone on the staff, and if I couldn’t work it out myself, to bring it to you.”

“I said that, yes.  Do you have a problem with Kris?”

The minefield metaphor grew stronger in Kit’s mind.  He’d never had to balance risk and reward like this before.  “Sir, what I’d like to do is explain something to you.  Please, listen to what I have to say, suspend disbelief and wait to ask questions until the end.”

“Now I’m -- mildly -- intrigued.  What happened between you and Kris?  Go ahead.”

“Between her, her friend Andie and me, sir.”  Kit went on then to sum things up.  He hadn’t expected Oliver Boyle would sit there silently, but he did.  “That’s how I left it, last night, sir.”

“You understand that if someone presented this to me as a script pitch, I’d laugh them out the door?  High school girls discovering fusion, gates to other dimensions?  Really?”  Kit started to speak, but Oliver Boyle shook his head.  “You spoke without interruption, now it’s my turn. It’s how pitches work, by the way.

“My first instinct is to think that you’ve lost your mind.  But, I’m fairly confident of my ability to deal with you in that case.  That leaves the possibility that what you are telling me is, in some degree, true.  In that case, my next instinct is to grab up a baseball bat and beat your head in.”

“Sir, I can give you the keywords for a Google search.  I can give you the names of a dozen of my fellow students at Caltech who were working on this.  I don’t know how well you know Andrea Schulz, but she is one smart cookie.”

“Okay, let’s suppose it’s true.  Why shouldn’t I send Kris off to Europe for the summer -- right after your funeral?”

“Because, sir, if you did that, you might as well as kill her too.  Sir, this has been my dream my entire life.  Andie said it as well, and I’m sure Kris believes the same thing.  This is our holy grail, sir.  We want to go out there.  Like Heinlein said, the Earth is too small a basket to hold all our eggs.  I don’t even know if you could succeed, sir, but even if you did, you would have effectively killed her.”

Oliver Boyle looked at the young man steadily.

“Then, sir, there are the other implications.  And there, sir, the risk is every bit as great.”

“What other implications?”

“Sir, with this technology, in a couple of years you could go down to Home Depot or Wal-Mart and buy a fusion generator for a few thousand dollars that would power this studio for decades for a few dollars of fuel.  This will disrupt every power market in the world.  You’re talking probably trillions of dollars of investments that will go up in smoke in a decade.  Sir, people kill each other over scraps of bread.  For this kind of money?  Kris and Andie would be worth huge amounts of money to a lot of people if they were dead.

“We’re talking about putting hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people out of work, eliminating not only their jobs, but their entire livelihood.  They would be like the carriage and buggy whip makers were in 1900.  Bleak prospects, sir.  Very bleak.

“The national security implications of this are immense as well, and again, that’s just from the power aspect of this.”

“What about radioactive byproducts, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases?” Oliver asked, trying to temporize.

“There are no radioactive byproducts to speak of.  The process produces alpha particles, which are technically radiation, but a sheet of paper will stop an alpha particle.  Moreover, these alpha particles have an electric charge.  It’s a trivial thing to capture that charge.  The fuel is boron and simple hydrogen.  Boron isn’t the most common element, but it’s common enough, and creating boron ions is another trivial exercise.  Sir, Andie got her boron by rinsing borax soap and filtering out the grit, then grinding it in a mortar and pestle and then zapping it with an electric charge.

“Sir, Andie stopped when she got the information she wanted to and didn’t research further.  The government has restarted Bussard’s research.  I don’t honestly know what she’s done differently, but I don’t think it was a cosmic leap... it’s very possible someone else will come up with this tomorrow.

“Quite literally, Andie is a billionaire or even a trillionaire if she can get this to market.  She’s a nice girl, sir, even if foul-mouthed.  She’ll want to share this with Kris.”

“And you,” Oliver noted.

“And me, and I’ll tell you true that that’s part of the reason I’m here.  A small part, but part of it.

“Someone is going to do this, sir.  It’s too simple.”

“And going into another dimension?”

“Sir, all I have is speculation.  I have no idea what’s happening.  Andie says she created the doorway before she created the strong magnetic field.  I got the impression, sir, that she’s an empiric researcher who makes up things on the fly.  She may be misremembering or trying to obscure how it works.  It doesn’t matter -- it needs to be researched.”

“So, fine... she can give her notes -- such as they are -- to competent researchers and they can go ahead with it.”

“Do that, sir, and you will muddy the precedence for all time.  Not to mention once again, sir, that it is likely if you do that, your daughter will never speak to you again.”

“If she’s dead, I can’t speak to her either.  I know which side of that equation I’m in favor of!”

“Sir, if you let her have her head, she may or may not die.  But if you try to stop her, she will never talk to you again.  Moreover, sir, just how old is your daughter?”

That brought up Oliver short.  Kris was eighteen.  He knew Andie wasn’t far from her birthday, but he wasn’t good with birthdays.

Kit nodded.  “Yes, sir.  She’s going to be hard to stop.  I checked with her school.  She could leave today and not affect her grades.  You try to shut her out of her life’s dream and she’ll leave and never look back.”

Oliver sat still, running scenarios in his head.  There were the wildly optimistic ones, where Kris listened to reason.  At least the reason he favored.  He wasn’t stupid -- he had never been stupid.  Andie had always brought out Kris’ adventurous streak and he’d long ago accepted it.  He’d made sure she hadn’t tried anything truly dangerous, made sure Kris’ teachers were as good as they came -- and then crossed his fingers.

“I assume then, that you have a proposal?”

“Yes, sir.  I have a number of friends who I knew at Caltech.  Most of them, sir, are grad students now and make -- well, you’d be shocked.  Slave wages, sir.”

“Slave wages?”

“Yes, sir.  Graduate assistants are serfs... there is no other word for it.  They are paid ten or twelve thousand a year, although they usually get free tuition and fees.  Sometimes, not often, they get free books.

“Sir, you could afford to double or triple their pay.  They are some of the smartest people on the planet.   Right now, they are having to ‘pay their dues.’”

“There’s a reason professions do that,” Oliver said evenly.

“Sure, right.  Like Einstein, right?  Oh no!  He worked as a patent clerk to afford to do his research!  There were a lot of other researchers, sir, who’ve taken other paths.  Yes, there is value in ‘paying your dues.’  But I submit to you, experience is experience, and that most people would be better gaining that experience on the cutting edge, than grading a professor’s test papers, proctoring his exams and teaching lab sessions.”

“Getting back to my daughter -- where does she fit in this?”

“You get her the best help money can buy, sir.  Advisors of every sort.  Get her to promise to listen to the advisors before she rushes through one of those doors.”

“You want her to do this?  Explore?”

“Sir, that’s what I want to do.  To be honest, sir, I was tempted to go to them and plead to be included in any way I could be, and offer to be an adult shill.  Andie, from what I’ve overheard, has a pile of folding green in her name.”

“Her father is a lottery winner.  He cares about money about the way you or I care about hand towels in a public restroom.  We use what we need, and don’t think about it if we use the last one.  Still, Andie is intelligent and had him put some money by for her.”

“It was my impression that we are talking in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“Millions, as I recall.  At least two.”

“Sir, those girls can only be stopped at this point by killing them.  And I’m speaking literally.  They are legally of age and Andie could go to a court tomorrow, it sounds like, and become emancipated.  You might slow them down a bit, sir, but you’d have to get physical to stop them.”

“You mean appealing to sweet reason won’t work?” Oliver laughed.

“I think it comes down to a definition of terms, sir.”

“So, I get some researchers to help with the work.  Advisors to prepare them for what they might find.  And let her go?”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked at Kit critically for a few moments. “Clearly, you didn’t have to tell me about any of this.  I knew nothing of it, and I don’t think they’ll be very forthcoming, will they?”

“No, sir, they wouldn’t be.”  Kit swallowed.  “Sir, this is my ass out there, too.  There are going to be a lot of different pressures, and a good many of them will be out of my league, much less those two girls.  You, sir, are the heaviest hitter I know.

“I’m no different than they are, sir.  Even if we find this door opens in New York City, it stands to change a lot of things.  It could change everything, sir.  This is my best shot to go out there.”  He jerked a thumb skyward.  “I want to go, but at the same time I’m mercenary enough to want to keep my ass as safe as I can get it.”

Oliver waved towards the door of his office.  “Leave.  Don’t go far, I’m going to want to talk you again.  Go to your desk and send me some Google keywords.”

Kit walked away, his stomach once again firmly where it belonged.  He was pretty sure he’d done as well as could be hoped.  Now the ball was in Oliver Boyle’s court.

He sent the email as quickly as he could, and sat on tenterhooks waiting for things to happen.

It was, he found, anti-climactic.  A little before noon, Oliver Boyle’s administrative assistant called him to come in and he did.

His boss was weird.  “Go to the high school, talk to the principal, and have him call in the physics teacher, one Thurmond Marshall.  Explain to the principal that I am displeased with Mr. Marshall, as he’s decided that Andie Schulz needs to take her physics final because she didn’t do an extra credit science fair project.  Tell the principal that I’m willing to permanently endow a physics instructorship at the school... it can be Marshall if, and only if, neither my daughter nor Miss Schulz have to take their finals.  Both of them, I might add, have a 99+% grade average in physics.  If Mr. Marshall demurs, then the instructorship is to be offered to anyone but him.”

“And why would they believe me?”

“Well, I talked with the principal, what’s his name, Stone, a while ago.”  Oliver picked up his phone and Kit heard him say, “Elaine, are those cards ready yet?”

A moment later Mr. Boyle’s assistant brought in a box of business cards and handed them to Kit.  There was one pasted on the top of the box and Kit raised an eyebrow when he saw it.  There was the “Oliver Boyle Productions” logo, then his own name in bold letters, centered.  In the upper right-hand corner were the words, “Senior Executive Assistant,” and in italics beneath his name were the words “The Hatchet Man” and a phone number he recognized as belonging to the office, but not his usual number.

“That should do it, I think,” Oliver told Kit.  “Get right on it.  Meet me at Andie’s house at three.”

There are certain code words in the movie business.  The lowest of the low was “Production Assistant.”  True, there were some production assistants who were very important, more so than others, but the title, in their case, was misleading.  “Personal Assistants” had a great deal of power, at least in regards to the person they worked for, but in reality, they tended to change a lot.

“Executive Assistant” -- now that was a title to conjure with.  That was someone the producer trusted to get things done.  A senior executive assistant would be the same thing, only cubed.  And of course the nickname was clearly a shot across anyone’s bows who had the least hesitation in deciding if Kit was to be paid attention to.  There were very few places in town that had anything to do with the movie business who didn’t know the names to conjure with, and the titles of the conjurers.