The Lost World (7 page)

"
Thorne Mobile Field Systems" was stenciled in black lettering on a large rolling metal garage door, at the far end of the Industrial Park. There was a regular door to the left. Arby pushed the buzzer on a small box with a grille. A gruff voice said, "Go away."

"It's us, Dr. Thorne. Arby and Kelly."

"Oh. Okay."

There was a click as the door unlocked, and they walked inside. They found themselves in a large open shed. Workmen were making modifications on several vehicles; the air smelled of acetylene, engine oil, and fresh paint. Directly ahead Kelly saw a dark-green Ford Explorer with its roof cut open; two assistants stood on ladders, fitting a large flat panel of black solar cells over the top of the car. The hood of the Explorer was up, and the V-6 engine had been pulled out; workmen were now lowering a small, new engine in its place -it looked like a rounded shoebox, with the dull shine of aluminum alloy. Others were bringing the wide, flat rectangle of the Hughes converter that would be mounted on top of the motor.

Over to the right, she saw the two RV trailers that Thorne's team had been working on for the last few weeks. They weren't the usual trailers you saw people driving for the weekends. One was enormous and sleek, almost as big as a bus, and outfitted with living and sleeping quarters for four people, as well as all sorts of special scientific equipment. It was called "Challenger" and it had an unusual feature: once you parked it, the walls could slide outward, expanding the inside dimensions.

The Challenger trailer was made to connect up through a special accordion passageway to the second trailer, which was somewhat smaller, and was pulled by the first. This second RV contained laboratory equipment and some very high-tech refinements, though Kelly wasn't sure exactly what. Right now, the second trailer was nearly hidden by the huge stream of sparks that spit out from a welder on the roof. Despite all the activity, the trailer looked mostly finished-although she could see people working inside, and all the upholstery, the chairs and seats, were lying around on the ground outside. Thorne himself was standing in the middle of the room, shouting at the welder on the roof of the camper. "Come on, Come on, we've got to be finished today! Eddie, let's go." He turned, shouted again, "No, no, no. Look at the plans! Henry: you can't place that strut laterally. It has to be crosswise, for strength. Look at the plans!"

Doc Thorne was a gray-haired, barrel-chested man of fifty-five. Except for his wire-frame glasses, he looked as if he might be a retired prizefighter. It was hard for Kelly to imagine Thorne as a University professor; he was immensely strong, and in continuous movement. "Damn it, Henry! Henry! Henry, are you listening to me?"

Thorne swore again, and shook his fist in the air. He turned to the kids. "These guys," he said. "They're supposed to be helping me." From the Explorer, there was a white-hot crack like lightning. The two men leaning into the hood jumped away, as a cloud of acrid smoke rose above the car. "What'd I tell you?" Thorne shouted. "Ground it! Ground it before you do anything! We've got serious voltages here, guys! You're going to get fried if you're not careful!"

He looked back at the kids and shook his head. "They just don't get it," he said. "That IUD is serious defense." 

"IUD?"  

"Internal Ursine Deterrent-that's what Levine calls it. It's his idea of a joke," Thorne said. "Actually, I developed this system a few years back for park rangers in Yellowstone, where bears break into trailers. Flip a switch, and you run ten thousand volts across the outer skin of the trailer. Wham-o! Takes the fight out of the biggest bear. But that kind of voltage'll blow these guys right off the trailer. And then what? I get a workmen's-compensation suit. For their stupidity." He shook his head. "So? Where's Levine?"

"We don't know," Arby said.

"What do you mean? Didn't he teach your class today?"

"No, he didn't come."

Thorne swore again. "Well, I need him today, to go over the final revisions, before we do our field testing. He was supposed to be back today."

"Back from where?" Kelly said.

"Oh, he went on one of his field trips," Thorne said. "Very excited about it, before he went. I outfitted him myself - loaned him my latest field pack. Everything he could ever want in just forty-seven pounds. He liked it. Left last Monday, four days ago."

"For where?"

"How should I know?" Thorne said. "He wouldn't tell me. And I gave up asking. You know they're all the same, now. Every scientist I deal with is secretive. But you can't blame them. They're all afraid of being ripped off, or sued. The modern world. Last year I built equipment for an expedition to the Amazon, we waterproofed it - which you'd want in the Amazon rain forest - soaking-wet electronics just don't work - and the principal scientist was charged with misappropriating funds. For waterproofing! Some university bureaucrat said it was an unnecessary expense. I'm telling you, it's insane. Just insane. Henry - did you hear anything I said to you? Put it crosswise!"

Thorne strode across the room, waving his arms. The kids followed behind him.

"But now, look at this," Thorne said. "For months we've been mod]fying his field vehicles, and finally we're ready. He wants them light, I build them light. He wants them strong, I build them strong-light and strong both, why not, it's just impossible, what he's asking for, but with enough titanium and honeycarbon composite, we're doing it anyway. He wants it off petroleum base, and off the grid, and we do that, too. So finally he's got what he wanted, an immensely strong portable laboratory to go where there's no gasoline and no electricity. And now that it's finished… I can't believe it. He really didn't show up for your class?"

"No," Kelly said.

"So he's disappeared," Thorne said. "Wonderful. Perfect. What about our field test? We were going to take these vehicles out for a week, and put them through their paces."

"I know," Kelly said. "We got Permission from our parents and everything, so we could go, too."

"And now he's not here," Thorne fumed. "I suppose I should have expected it. These rich kids, they do whatever they want. A guy like Levine gives spoiled a bad name."

From the ceiling, a large metal cage came crashing down, landing next to them on the floor. Thorne jumped aside. "Eddie! Damn! Will you watch it?"

"Sorry, Doc," said Eddie Carr, high up in the rafters. "But specs are it can't deform at twelve thousand psi. We had to test it."

"That's fine, Eddie. But don't test it when we're Linder it!" Thorne bent to examine the cage, which was circular, constructed of inch-thick titanium-alloy bars. It had survived the fall without harm. And it was light; Thorne lifted it upright with one hand. It was about six feet high and four feet in diameter. It looked like an oversized bird cage. It had a swinging door, fitted with a heavy lock.

What's that for?" Arby asked.

Actually," Thorne said, "it's part of that" He pointed I across the room, where a workman was putting together a stack of telescoping aluminum struts. "High observation platform, made to be assembled in the field. Scaffolding sets up into a rigid structure, about fifteen feet high. Fitted with a little shelter on top. Also collapsible."

"A platform to observe what?" Arby said. Thorne said, "He didn't tell you?"

"No," Kelly said.

"No," Arby said.

"Well, he didn't tell me, either," Thorne said, shaking his head. "All I know is he wants everything immensely strong. Light and strong, light and strong. Impossible." He sighed. "God save me from academics."

"I thought you were an academic," Kelly said.

"Former academic," Thorne said briskly. "Now I actually make things. I don't just talk."

Colleagues who knew Jack Thorne agreed that retirement marked the happiest period in his life. As a professor of applied engineering, and a specialist in exotic materials, he had always demonstrated a practical focus and a love of students. His most famous course at Stanford, Structural Engineering 101a, was known among the students as "Thorny Problems," because Thorne continually provoked his class to solve applied-engineering challenges he set for them. Some of these had long since entered into student folklore. There was, for example, the Toilet Paper Disaster: Thorne asked the students to drop a carton of eggs from Hoover Tower without injury. As padding, they could only use the cardboard tubes at the center of toilet paper rolls. There were spattered eggs all over the plaza below.

Then, another year, Thorne asked the students to build a chair to support a two-bundred-pound man, using only, paper Q-tips and thread. And another time, he hung the answer sheet for the final exam from the classroom ceiling, and invited his students to pull it down, using whatever they could make with a cardboard shoebox containing a pound of licorice, and some toothpicks.

When he was not in class, Thorne often served as an expert witness in legal cases involving materials engineering. He specialized in explosions, crashed airplanes, collapsed buildings, and other disasters. These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, "How can you design for people if you don't know history and psychology? You can't. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up." He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.

But as a professor who was popular with his students-and who advocated general education-Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory. But in the end, it was his fondness for Chang-tzu that pushed him out the door. In a departmental meeting, one of his colleagues got up and announced that "Some mythical Chinese bullshitter means fuck-all for engineering."

Thorne took early retirement a month later, and soon after started his own company. He enjoyed his work thoroughly, but he missed contact with the students, which was why he liked Levine's two youthful assistants. These kids were smart, they were enthusiastic, and they were young enough so that the schools hadn't destroyed all their interest in learning. They could still actually use their brains, which in Thorne's view was a sure sign they hadn't yet completed a formal education.

"Jerry!" Thorne bellowed, to one of the welders on the RVS. "Balance the struts on both sides! Remember the crash tests!" Thorne pointed to a video monitor set on the floor, which showed a computer image of the RV crashing into a barrier. First it crashed end-on, then it crashed sideways, then it rolled and crashed again. Each time, the vehicle survived with very little damage. The computer program had been developed by the auto companies, and then discarded. Thorne acquired it, and modified it. "Of course the auto companies discarded it - it's a good idea. Don't want any good ideas coming out of a big company. Might lead to a good product!" He sighed. "Using this computer, we've crashed these vehicles ten thousand times: designing, crashing, modeling, crashing again. No theories, just actual testing. The way it ought to be."

Thorne's dislike of theory was legendary. In his view' a theory was nothing more than a substitute for experience put forth by someone who didn't know what he was talking about. "And now look. Jerry? Jerry! Why'd we do all these simulations, if you guys aren't going to follow the plans? Is everybody brain-dead around here?"

"Sorry, Doc…"

"Don't be sorry! Be right!"

"Well, we're massively overbuilt anyway-"

"Oh? Is that your decision? You're the designer now? Just follow the plans!"

Arby trotted alongside Thorne. "I'm worried about Dr. Levine," he said.

'Really? I'm not."

"But he's always been reliable. And very well organized."

"That's true," Thorne said. "He's also completely impulsive and does whatever he feels like."

"Maybe so," Arby said, "but I don't think he'd be missing without a good reason. I'm afraid he might be in trouble. Only last week, he had us go with him to visit Professor Malcolm in Berkeley, who had this map of the world in his office, and it showed - "

"Malcolm!" Thorne snorted. "Spare me! Peas in a pod, those two. Each more impractical than the other. But I'd better get hold of Levine now." He turned on his heel, and walked toward his office.

Arby said, "You going to use the satphone?"

Thorne paused. "The what?"

"The satphone," Arby said. "Didn't Dr. Levine take a satphone with him?"

"How could he?" Thorne said. "You know the smallest satellite phones are the size of a suitcase."

"Yeah, but they don't have to be," Arby said. "You could have made one very small."

"Could I? How?" Despite himself, Thorne was amused by this kid. You had to like him.

"With that VLSI com board that we picked up," Arby said. "The triangular one. It had two Motorola BSN-23 chip arrays, and they're restricted technology developed for the CIA because they allow you to make a - "

Thorne said, interrupting him. "Where did you learn all this? I've warned you about hacking systems - "

"Don't worry, I'm careful," Arby said. "But it's true about the com board, isn't it? You could use it to make a one-pound satphone. So: did you?"

Thorne stared at him for a long time.

"Maybe," he said finally. "What of it?"

Arby grinned. "Cool," he said.

Thorne's small office was located in a corner of the shed. Inside the walls were plastered with blueprints, order forms on clipboards, and three-dimensional cutaway computer drawings, Electronic components, equipment catalogs, and stacks of faxes were scattered across his desk. Thorne rummaged through them, and finally came up with a small gray handheld telephone. "Here we are." He held it up for Arby to see. "Pretty good, huh? Designed it myself."

Kelly said, "It looks just like a cellular phone."