Disc (28 page)

Nolan had been able to recognize setups for precipitating multi-monolayer graphene. They were essentially exactly the same as the ones he used for undoped graphene. Nothing about the setups told him which chemicals they’d used to dope the graphene, nor how they’d hooked up electrodes to it. Nor, for that matter, anything about the kind of currents they used to induce thrust.

Dante had been called away to deal with something at GSI, but had suggested that Nolan stay to see if any ideas came to mind. The only thing that had come to him so far was the aching, longing, pain of Tiona’s absence. That and the sense of utter failure he felt every time he even tried to
think
of something that he might do about it.

***

When Khang arrived back at the facility where the Gettnors were kept, he found himself staring around in surprise. His supervisor had sent him away for several weeks on a different assignment and another hacker had been left in charge of watching Gettnor’s internet activities. When Khang had met with Li, the man had told him that Gettnor had done little besides draw parts up on his CAD/CAM program and tell Li to order them. Well, that and he’d also continued to demand more equipment and materials that he’d looked up whenever he’d been online.

In the corner of the biggest room, Khang saw a limousine that had been brought in so that it could be modified to fly the supreme leader. Shelves had been set up to hold some of the equipment as well as massive quantities of supplies and machined parts. Despite the enormous increase in materials and equipment of all types, all of this stuff continued to be rigidly organized and aligned.

There were literally thousands of objects in the rooms of the lab now, yet Khang knew that if he moved one of them a few millimeters, Gettnor would stop the next time he passed by and put it exactly back in its place. Khang had known people who kept things compulsively organized in the past, one of his schoolmates for example, but he’d never known anyone as obsessed as this Gettnor fellow.

As Khang walked through the rooms of the lab, looking for Gettnor, he almost ran into a fifteen centimeter disc which was simply floating in the air in the middle of the room. Later, Khang decided that the reason he hadn’t seen it before he almost bumped into it had to do with the total unexpectedness of finding a six inch diameter object floating in midair. He’d reached out and touched it and the disc had floated away. At first, Khang had thought it must be suspended from the ceiling by some kind of small fiber that he couldn’t see, but this was obviously not true as the disc coasted slowly through the air. It gradually slowed and Khang thought it might be about to come to a stop, but then it entered the stream of air blowing from one of the air conditioning ducts and meandered off in the direction the air pushed it.

The air-conditioning was one of the things Khang really appreciated about this job. Air-conditioning was rare in Khang’s country, but Gettnor had demanded it, saying that they would be unable to reliably perform the necessary chemistry for the project if the temperature wasn’t controlled. Khang had expected back pressure from his government, but instead they’d immediately acquiesced and installed air-conditioning units in each of the rooms.

Khang started after the floating disc, wanting to look at its little legs more closely, but suddenly the Gettnor girl came in the other door of that lab, saw it and plucked it out of the air. Khang followed her, wondering what she was going to do with it. She took it directly to Jiao. When Khang arrived at their side, she was saying, “We made this as a test of our process, but I thought it might make a good present for your supreme leader.”

Khang restrained his impulse to pluck at the disc or simply request that he be allowed to play with it. Instead, he listened attentively as the girl showed Jiao how the lightweight plastic disc would land on its charger when its battery got low. The disc had three 10cm wire legs underneath that would contact plates on the charger. It could find the charger by looking for a small set of infrared lights on top of the charger with tiny infrared cameras. It had four switches on top of the disc. The girl demonstrated the function of each. The first one simply caused it to maintain its altitude like it’d been doing when Khang first encountered it. The second switch caused it to maintain its altitude relative to objects underneath it. Apparently this was controlled with some tiny infrared laser emitters which were picked up by the infrared cameras. If you turned it on while it was six inches above the table, then gave it a shove, it would coast to the edge of the table and then fall to toward the floor, slowing toward the end of its fall to stop six inches above the floor. She demonstrated this to Jiao, causing Khang to catch his breath when it fell off the edge of the table and looked like it might be destroyed by striking the floor. The third switch caused it to maintain its position in the room. Once that switch was flipped, the disc would stay at the same altitude, and if pushed out of place, it would immediately swoop back to its first location as determined by the infrared lasers.

The girl told them that the fourth switch would cause it to maintain its position even if it were outside. It would do this by accessing GPS data. “Unfortunately,” she said, “I can’t test to make sure that that function is working since GPS is blocked here inside the building. It might save some embarrassment if you let me take it outside and test it there to make sure its GPS function works.”

“And then we can send it to the supreme leader?” Jiao asked.

Khang glanced at Jiao, suddenly realizing that the supreme leader would absolutely love the little flying saucer. Khang wanted the credit for getting the disc to Kim himself.

The girl nodded at Jiao.

“No!” Khang said vehemently. “First you must open it up and let us look inside!” He turned to Jiao angrily, “What if they put an explosive or some dangerous chemical inside?!”

Jiao looked cowed and suitably frightened, but the girl just shrugged her shoulders and said, “Okay, let’s open it up.”

A few minutes later, she had removed four screws and pried the top half of the disc off the bottom half. The little disc was filled with wiring and electronics, but certainly didn’t contain any reservoirs for poison or materials that looked like they could be explosive. Khang focused on the one fairly large object in the case, “What’s this?”

“The battery,” she said. “Here, I’ll remove it and you’ll be able to see it doesn’t work without the battery.” She made good on this promise. Eventually, Khang had to admit that the device looked safe enough. A few minutes later,
he
took it outside and flipped the fourth switch. He didn’t think she could cause trouble by going outside, but there was no reason to let her. Sure enough, when he nudged it, it floated away but quickly swerved back to the location he’d nudged it away from. He had the impression that its positioning wasn’t as precise as it had been inside the room, but that was to be expected with it using GPS rather than infrared lasers for positioning. Curious, he grasped it firmly and threw it hard as he could. It traveled about three meters, but only went about one meter before it had turned up until he was looking at the top side of it. It slowed, reversed direction, and flew back to where he’d thrown it from. As it approached its original location it tipped the other way to bring itself to a halt. Soon it hung in the air not far from where he’d first grabbed it to throw it.

He took the disc and its charger to the head of the guard detail and told him it was a gift to the supreme leader from the project. He wrote out a note to go with it, saying that he’d disassembled and checked it for dangerous substances, but that he would still recommend that it be subjected to chemical sniffers before it was actually delivered to the supreme leader.

When he came back into the building without it, Jiao looked disappointed. “Did you already send it?” Jiao gave Khang a secretive grin, “I kind of wanted to play with it a little bit myself before we sent it away.”

Khang gave Jiao an ugly look, “It is not for us to be
playing
. Besides, you fool, we don’t want to give it back to them once it has collected GPS data! They might be able to determine their location if it
recorded
the data.”

Jiao drew back disbelievingly, “Knowing their location wouldn’t do them any good!”

“I don’t think it would do them any good either. But I still don’t want them to know. I don’t trust Gettnor, what if he managed to send his location back to his government.”

“How could he do that?!
You
watch him like a hawk when his computer’s connected to the datalink!”

“I
don’t
think he can! But I
know
he can’t if he doesn’t have the data.” Khang didn’t express his disquiet regarding just how good Gettnor was with computers. After all this time, Gettnor’s computer continued to look like its OS had just been installed. Humiliated, Khang felt far too embarrassed to admit that he couldn’t figure out how Gettnor was doing it.

***

Lisanne stared at another message window Vaz had surreptitiously placed on her screen. He hadn’t sent her anything for weeks which had made her worry that something terrible had happened. Now this had arrived, so terse that it had taken her some time to realize that it was simply answers to the questions she had posed weeks ago. She’d had her AI line the questions and answers up for her so she could understand his replies.

Please tell me your location, as exactly as you can give it.

“North Korea.”

How big is the building you’re being kept in?

“500 square meters.”

Are you in that building day and night, or do they move you to a different building to sleep?

“Day and night.”

How many guards do they have watching you?

“Six.”

Are there also guards outside the building you’re being kept in?

“Yes.”

What kind of weapons are the guards armed with?

“AK-47s.”

Lisanne squeezed her eyes shut as she wondered whether the short responses indicated that Vaz didn’t have time or wasn’t able to answer fully.
No,
she thought,
this is just typical Vaz.
Even in person, he frequently produced short answers that
only
addressed the specific question asked. With some disquiet, Lisanne thought about how his answers became even shorter when he was hiding something. Is
he hiding something?
she wondered.
If so, what? Is he trying to spare us the horrific details of their imprisonment?
That didn’t sound like Vaz, but she just couldn’t think of anything else he might be hiding. Maybe Tiona had told him to spare them the details.

His location maybe?
It just seemed so unlikely that Vaz couldn’t pin down their location any better than “North Korea.” The man was a genius at solving puzzles. With a window and his mathematical skills, he could have at least calculated his latitude just from the angle of the sun. She thought he would have delighted in doing so. If they were keeping him in a windowless room, but he had access to a computer and an internet connection, she felt
certain
that he could determine his location better than “North Korea.”

Obviously he had an internet connection or she wouldn’t be getting these messages!

Oh well,
she thought,
I’d better forward this information to General Cooper.

***

Darby Alston, director of the CIA, speared General James Cooper with a disbelieving look. “And you people want our help in covertly entering North Korea for the purpose of retrieving
two
of our citizens?! I hope you realize we’ve left a lot of our citizens moldering in prisons elsewhere. It’s not our habit to invade sovereign countries to retrieve one or two people.” He shook his head, “Have you even considered the fact that you will probably get a lot more than two of our citizens killed going after them, to say nothing of the high likelihood that the Gettnors themselves will be killed during such a risky endeavor?!”

Cooper’d never liked Alston. Now he drew a deep breath and tried to keep his voice even as he responded, “These people are
important
! The technology they’ve developed is going to change our world and we
do not
want the North Koreans to be the ones who have a lock on it.”

Alston waved dismissively, “The tech was invented at UNC. Even without the actual inventors, the University will be able to develop the technology for us.”

“They might be able to,
if
they knew how the Gettnors actually did it!”

“There’ve got to be records. And, lots of smart people to go through those records!”

Cooper glared, “Even if that were true, which it isn’t, Gettnor’s a freaking genius! We want him here, not just for what he’s already invented, but for the other things he might invent in the future! His daughter’s no slouch either!”