Complete Stories (11 page)

“About the automatic shut-off?”

“You mean you
designed
the null-ray to stop working?” Kreementz demanded.

There was a sudden crunching. The little ball was drilling through our wall and into the next room. When the noise died down again I answered.

“We wanted it to be…foolproof.”

“You see,” Harry added, “If you leave something under the null-ray long enough…say five years…then it goes black hole.”

Kreementz mopped his brow. “What would have happened if we’d gotten a black hole in Stack Seven?”

“I’ll give you the good news first,” Harry said, his ropey lips twisting into a smile. “Quantum effects would force the hole to evaporate into pure energy. By measuring the energy released in the evaporation event, scientists would be able to tell whether or not the quark theory of matter is correct. Fletch, give him the bad news.”

“According to Stephen Hawking’s calculations, the ‘evaporation’ of a hundred kilogram black hole would be the same as a ten megaton nuclear blast. Of course, if the quark theory of matter is wrong, then the blast would be some ten thousand times stronger.”

“You guys would have been great on
Laugh-In
,” Kreementz said sourly.

“What’s
Laugh-In
?” Rosie asked.

“It was a TV show when Mister Kreementz was little,” I said. “He seems like a person who watched television a lot as a child, doesn’t he?”

“At least I
had
a childhood,” Kreementz retorted. “You guys look like you was hatched. Especially him!”

Harry was staring at the wall, shoulders hunched and fists thrust into the enormous pockets of his baggy grey polyester pants. There was a muffled crash as the little ball left the next room.

Harry turned slowly. “How many tons?”

“He means how many tons are in the stack,” I explained.

“I ain’t weighed it,” Kreementz said sullenly. “Five years worth of smoke. Maybe two hundred thousand tons.”

“But smoke is light,” Rosie protested.

“Not at Murden Chemical,” I said.

“Not when these guys are through with it,” Kreementz added. “They built us a ray which kills all the atoms inside Stack Seven. They stop vibrating and shrivel up. We have a cap on the stack. Every few minutes it gets as full of smoke as it can hold, and then the null-ray triggers, and everything inside the smokestack disappears.”

“You keep forgetting that the stuff doesn’t disappear,” I corrected. “It just collapses down to a very small size.”

“Like a trash compactor,” Rosie suggested.

I nodded. “That’s what we had in mind. One smokestack full of crud was supposed to make a hundred-kilogram block the size of a brick. But Mister Kreementz left the stuff in there to get collapsed a little more with each pulse of the null-ray. We warned him not to do that, but he did it anyway. If I hadn’t put in a mass detector coupled to a shut-off circuit, then Mister Kreementz would have turned Central Jersey into just another beautiful memory.”

The rumbling had stopped after the last crash. The shiny little speck of degenerate matter had probably sunk into our flower bed. “How dense is that stuff?” I asked Harry.

He had been scribbling on the blackboard ever since Kreementz had given him the two hundred thousand tons figure. “I get ten-to-the-eleventh grams per cubic centimeter. That’s neutronium. Plain neutrons with just enough degenerate electrons and protons mixed in to keep it stable. I’m surprised it worked.”

“Is neutronium valuable?” Kreementz wanted to know.

Harry opened his mouth to answer. I stepped in front of him. I had a policy of never letting Harry answer any question relating to money.

“Are you kidding?” I asked Kreementz with a mocking laugh. “Is sewage valuable? Do people like cancer? Are oil-spills good for fish? Is the Pope Jewish? You’ve got a big, dirty cleanup ahead of you, Kreementz. One false move and you’ll blow the plant sky high. I don’t envy you.” One hand was behind my back, making shooing gestures at Harry.

Kreementz sighed heavily. “You wouldn’t have a drink handy, would you?”

Rosie got him a Coke and a few ounces of lab alcohol. He took a long, thirsty pull. Deftly I set the hook. “We
could
organize the cleanup, but it’d be …”

“No, Fletch,” Harry said. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t think we should risk it.” He was right on the beam.

“I’ve been authorized to make you an offer,” Kreementz said, naming a reasonable sum. “It’s a lot to pay, and I still think we could win the lawsuit…but the management wants to get her started up again.”

“Triple that and we’ll have it clean in two days.”

“Double.”

“Done.”

* * * *

Actually, the cleanup was a piece of cake. We opened up the side of the smokestack and brought in bulldozers. The stuff on top was something like high-grade iron ore. The lower layers had been under the null-ray longer. We had to truck most of it out a few cubic centimeters at a time. Our trucks could only carry a hundred tons. But we’d rented a fleet of them.

Harry had poured a titaniplast floor into our basement. The stuff was a metallic compound based on the new quark chemistry. No one knew yet how strong it was…since no one had ever been able to break a piece of it after it hardened. We dumped the neutronium in the basement window. Harry was happy to have the stuff, said it had arrived just when he needed it. He took some waldoes down there and got to work. I was happy to get him and his soap bubbles out of my office.

My job right then was to run some computer simulations for the nuclear energy people. How many would die if we buried the radioactive waste in a diamond mine. What would happen if you put it in the polar ice-cap. How much would it cost to rocket it into the sun. They’d been stockpiling the waste for forty years now. Every time it looked like they’d decided on a solution, someone came up with a new “but what if.” Fletcher & Co. had taken an NRC contract to improve the simulations and, by God, make a decision.

Harry had promised to try to think of a brand-new solution, but I wasn’t counting on it. I just concentrated on debugging my programs. The extra money from Murden Chemical had helped, but if I couldn’t make the NRC happy enough to pay big bucks, then the leaser was going to repossess my central processing unit. I would have sooner given up my own medulla.

A week went by. Rosie brought me my lunch as usual, milk and tuna-salad sandwich. I didn’t like to stop programming when I was hot. But instead of quietly leaving, Rosie stayed standing next to me. Today’s dress was hologrammed to make a fountain out of her. It was distracting.

“Is there a problem, Rosie?”

“It’s Doctor Gerber. He’s been acting strangely.”

“When Harry
stops
acting strangely, I’ll worry. Meanwhile, could you get me some more milk?”

I went on eating and punching keys for a while, but then I realized she was still standing at my elbow. “All right,” I said, finally looking up. “Tell me about it.”

“I guess you know that Doctor Gerber and I are…are …”

I hadn’t. The possibility had never occurred to me.
Harry
?
Rosie
? They were my genius and my receptionist. It was hard for me to think of them as being anything else. It wasn’t in the flowchart.

“I didn’t feel it was my place to interfere,” I said finally.

“He moved in with me two months ago,” she said with a toss of her head. For a second I glimpsed her aquiline nose. “I’ve been after him to take me somewhere, somewhere far away. But now he hasn’t come home for a week. He just stays in the basement here and he won’t come out.”

So, I wanted to say, that’s what he
always
does when he’s onto something. Leave him alone! Instead I said, “Perhaps I’d better have a look.” I stood up.

“And tell him that I’ll stop nagging him about the trip if he comes back,” Rosie added.

Harry didn’t notice me at first. He was asleep. The basement looked like a minimalist sculptor’s studio. The main exhibit was a bowed ramp of titaniplast that looked like it had grown out of the floor. The ramp slanted down from one wall, and then swooped back up to the other wall. The ramp had a semi-circular groove on top, and at the low point there was a black titaniplast sphere. The setup reminded me of the ball-return gutter in some unearthly bowling alley. The ball was one-and-a-half meters across and looked heavy.

I walked past the greasy vinyl couch that Harry was lying on and looked at the sphere. The utterly rigid black material shone dully under the yellow electric lights. There was a hole cut in one side, a pentagonal hole big enough to crawl through. There was something funny about the space inside. It was like staring into a lens.

As I leaned closer I felt an unpleasant pressure on my temples. I straightened up, but the sphere kept getting closer. I was sliding across the floor. I jerked in fear and fell backwards. Crablike I scuttled back across the room.

“The only way to get in is fast,” Harry said suddenly. “It’s not so bad inside, I think. Positive curvature instead of negative.”

I sat up and looked around. Harry was lying on his back with his arms and legs sticking straight up. It must have been exercise, but it looked terrible.

“Rosie sent me,” I said, before I forgot.

“Why?”

“She wonders why you haven’t come to see her this week.”

“I’ve been busy.”

I decided I’d done enough for Rosie. “What’s the sphere for?”

“You roll it back and forth. It’s a dodecahedral skeleton of neutronium bars embedded in a shell of titaniplast. A padded jungle-gym for gravitons. What else did Rosie say?”

“She said that if you came back she’d stop nagging you about the trip. What happens when you roll the sphere back and forth?”

“I hoped she’d say that. I hate travel. I ought to go up and talk to her …”

He started out, but I caught him by the shoulder. “Harry, please tell me what you’ve built here.”

He looked back at me, baffled. “Can’t you see?”

“I see a hollow black sphere sitting on a rocker track. Why don’t we take it from there.”

“You remember my super-bubble ring? This is sort of the same thing. It’s to get rid of nuclear waste. Anything that’s inside the sphere disappears when the sphere rolls back and forth.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Have you tested it?”

“No. Wait a minute. I’m going to get Rosie.” He flicked on a switch and went upstairs.

While he was gone I looked the thing over some more. Harry had started a system of winches and pulleys running. Almost imperceptibly, the sphere was creeping up the ramp. I hoped it didn’t fall off. That degenerate matter packed a wallop. I sat down on the couch and started drafting my letter to the NRC. All things considered, a half billion a year didn’t seem like too much to ask.

When Harry and Rosie finally came back, I could see that hunky was still far from dory. Harry didn’t understand about apologies, about white lies. I wondered what she saw in him.

But with both of us there to impress, Harry became more communicative. His soap solution and super-bubble ring were under the couch, and he dragged them out. He made a big film and blew at the center of it. The film wobbled and bulged.

“That’s what space is like inside a massive object,” Harry said. “It curves towards the fourth dimension. Now, if I blow harder …”

He did, and a little bubble pinched off the film and floated away. “That’s the way a black hole does it. But we can’t use them. So instead…“

He blew out a little bulge in the soap film again. But this time instead of blowing harder, he jiggled the film back and forth. Ripples darted around on the film’s surface, and suddenly two of them happened to meet near the bulge. The walls met and a little bubble floated off again.

“That’s what the neutronium skeleton is supposed to do for us. The space inside it bulges way out towards the fourth dimension. Now when the sphere starts rolling down the ramp, those moving bars of neutronium are going to churn up waves like a mix-master. Sooner or later two waves will meet, and the bulge inside the sphere will pinch off to make a little hypersphere outside of our space.”

The winch motors turned off with a click. The sphere was poised at the top of the ramp.

“What happens then?” Rosie asked.

“The hypersphere floats away. Maybe it lands on a different space; maybe it comes back to ours someplace else.”

“Another space …” Rosie said slowly. “Like the astral plane?”

Harry shrugged. “If you want to call it that.”

The sphere had come to rest at the top of the track with the hole on the side pointing towards us. Harry had a little loading chute ready by the track there. It was aimed so that anything that slid down it would zip right through the hole in the sphere.

“What do you want to put in?” Harry asked.

“Would it…would it be dangerous for a person?” Rosie wanted to know.

“What a question!” I burst out. “You’d be squeezed to death! And then the gravity waves would work you over. And if by some wild fluke you lived through all that, where do you think you’d end up? Even if your space bubble ever did join up with a normal space again, what do you think the odds are that you’d land on the surface of an Earth-like planet?”

“Maybe it would take you to a different
kind
of space,” Rosie suggested mildly. “Where you don’t
need
planets.”

“Rosie will always have the mind of a secretary,” Harry said cuttingly. “What do you say I put this in?” He picked up an empty cardboard box from the floor.

“Fine,” I said. “But let’s try something massive, too. A sandbag.”

Harry set the cardboard box at the top of the little sliding-board and let it go. The sphere’s field accelerated the box down the chute and it zoomed through the hole, getting somewhat crushed by tidal forces on the way.

Once inside, it bounced around for a minute before settling to the bottom. The bouncing had fluffed it back up again. Except for all the box’s right angles being a little too big, it looked fine.

“Why doesn’t the gravitational field in there crush it?”

“Anything inside is pushed and pulled in every direction at once,” Harry said. “Which adds up to nothing. Of course there’s still a strong positive curvature of space in there. And when those bars start moving around…but I don’t want to bore Rosie.” He shot her a nasty look, but she just stood there, stiff and alone.