Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7) (22 page)

“Phantom hand?”

“Yeah, amputees have the sensation that their hand is still there after it’s cut off. It’s called a ‘phantom hand.’”

“Sounds pretty cool.” Emma said.

“Yeah! Watch this.” He turned and picked up his modified “waldo” hand. “Control hand,” he said, evidently to his AI. Suddenly the waldo hand started curling some of its fingers down. John raised his eyebrows, “Pretty cool, huh.”

Emma looked at her own hand and wiggled
her fingers around, then narrowed her eyes, “It seems like you should be able to do more movements?”

John grinned, “I’ve only got the median nerve hooked up so far, remember? The ulnar nerve controls most of the little muscles in the hand and the radial nerve controls the muscles that straighten the fingers back out. Without them, the hand is really clumsy. I have an appoi
ntment Monday with Dr. Hanson. Hopefully I can talk her into installing neurotrodes on the other nerves then.”

***

Frank Alston felt like getting up and doing a little jig when Donsaii actually entered the studio. She virtually never did interviews and he’d just about given up on getting one before he’d had the idea to get the Olympic committee to ask her to do it. The committee was very interested in promoting next year’s Olympics and getting an interview with the elusive Donsaii on the sports newsfeeds would really grab attention. Despite the fact that she had competed for only one day in, not the last Olympics, but the one before that, she had greater name recognition with the public than virtually any other athlete. His eyes ran over her. She had on tights and a little skirt. She had on heels, though they were much lower than he’d thought at first. Slender, short strawberry blond hair, brilliant green eyes, perfect comp [ pels, lexion, pixie face, no makeup.
My God,
he thought,
she’s just as beautiful in person as in all those photos I’d thought were retouched.

He stood, “Hello Ms. Donsaii, thank you so much for coming in. An interview with you will really help
in promoting the coming Olympics.”

She shrugged, “
I’m not at all sure that’s true. I wasn’t even in the last Olympics.”

“Trust
me; you have better name recognition than any other athlete in the world.”

Donsaii frowned, “That can’t
actually be true!”

“It is, it is,” Frank said, ushering her into the chair. Once they were seated and the camera people were happy
, he began by asking background questions that he knew the answers to. They’d splice this stuff together later. Next he got her to comment on the upcoming Olympics which she said she, “looked forward to.” He had a feeling that she wasn’t really as interested as most sports fans, but she put on an enthusiastic air for his cameras that should serve the US Olympic committee’s purposes.

Finally Alston got to the little ‘T-bone’ he’d been working up to. Crashing in from an unexpected direction he said, “So, what do you think of Michael Fentis’ recent comments?” He hoped to get a rise out of her. Nothing like a little controversy to spark viewing.

Irritatingly, Donsaii smiled sweetly, raised her eyebrows and said, “What did Mr. Fentis have to say?”

“Well first, he said he hadn’t met you. However, we’ve found video documentation of the two of you speaking during the opening ceremony.”

“Oh yes, but at the ceremony, I just asked for his autograph. No reason he’d remember that, he gets asked for autographs all the time.”

“So, you have a ‘Fentis autograph’?”

“Well… no. I don’t think he signs very many.”

Alston felt disappointed. He’d so hoped that Donsaii would call Fentis out for being a jerk. Sports journalists hated him
, but couldn’t take someone of his stature down a peg without losing future interview prospects. It would be great for someone like Donsaii to put him in his place though. “Then Mr. Fentis opined that you’d just ‘gotten lucky’ in winning four gold medals
and
that ‘gymnastics’ wasn’t really a sport.”

Donsaii only grinned.

After waiting a little longer for her to explode, Alston raised an eyebrow, “You’re going to let that comment stand?”

“Well, Mr. Alston,” she said pleasantly, “I
was
incredibly lucky to win those medals, and, certainly we’re all entitled to our own opinions. Obviously,
I
think gymnastics is a sport, but I doubt I’ll convince Mr. Fentis of that.” She didn’t appear the least discomfited by Fentis’ comments.< [ > think/font>

Alston leaned closer, as if revealing a secret, “The interviewer pointed out that the video record shows you running faster than his top speed during your run-up to the vault.”

Donsaii raised her eyebrows, “Does it really?”

Alston
knew
she must have heard that, it was all over the news back then. “Yes it does. However, Fentis blamed that on faulty video recording and ‘sprung gymnastic equipment.’”

Donsaii smiled sweetly again, “Well
the vault runway
is
much shorter than the 100 meters. He’s probably right don’t you think? It just doesn’t seem reasonable that a girl could have outrun him. He is the ‘world’s fastest man’ after all.”

Alston almost barked a
laugh;
butter wouldn’t melt in that girl’s mouth!
He obviously wasn’t going to get a rise out of her but, he had a feeling that with the right title for this vid clip and some incredulous responses from other interviewees, he could bring in more views than if she had gone off on Fentis like the bastard deserved. Alston wound the interview down and effusively thanked Donsaii for coming. Just before she took her mike off he said, “Is there any chance you’d enter next summer’s Olympics?”

“Oh, my goodness Mr. Alston,” she winked at him, “I’m much too old
for that, don’t you think…?”

***

Stacy’s heart beat a little faster. They were making ports for small jet engines today. They’d pass flammables like Bart wanted for his hot rod. She checked her assignment. Yes, she was a “final inspector” today! This was the day she’d been waiting for with a mixture of dread and anticipation. All she’d have to do was down-check one of the ports that came to her station, then toss it in her purse. She could just place her purse next to the discard bucket so it would look like an errant throw. It would go home with her and if they caught her, she could be all wide eyed about how she’d just missed the bucket. Of course the down-checking of a perfectly good port might be harder to explain.

But
really, how could they catch her? And Bart had more money than he knew what to do with. The fact that he was offering five grand for a port for his hot rod proved that! If they paid her more for this damned job, maybe she wouldn’t be tempted.

Stacy tried to ignore the fact that they
were
paying her more at this job than she’d ever earned before. On top of that, she’d been unemployed for a while before they hired her. As she settled into her workstation she wondered about turning Bart in for the reward Portal Tech was offering. At ten grand, it was double what Bart had offered her after all.

But… she liked Bart. He’d been nice to her. Taking her to dinner, buying her beer. He hadn’t even pressed her for sex. A real gentleman, she’d decided
. Then she’d decided he was a challenge and eventually invited him to her apartme [o hdednt and seduced him. He’d been kinda clueless and innocent in bed, which she’d enjoyed. He hadn’t invited her over to his place yet and for a while she’d worried that he might be married. His sexual inexperience had reassured her on that point. He had taken her to the races a couple of times and he’d given her money to gamble with, though he didn’t gamble himself. That had been a lot of fun, especially when he’d let her keep the winnings. She shook her head, she couldn’t turn Bart in. She’d rather have five grand he gave her than ten grand for turning him in. Besides, why shouldn’t he have a port for his hot rod?

It’d be fun watching him race his old car too.
I wonder why he hasn’t shown it to me. Men usually love to brag about their cars so much that you can’t avoid being taken out to look at one.

As the lunch break approached, Stacy tossed one of the ports into the open mouth of her purse, even though it had tested fine. “Hey, Stace’,” her friend Helen said, “that one missed the bucket and fell in your purse.”

“Oops! Really?” Stacy said, heart suddenly pounding. She hadn’t dreamed anyone would notice. She got down off her stool and
stirred through her purse, “Oh my God, you’re right!” she pulled it out and tossed it in the bucket, cursing inwardly to herself.

Helen grinned at her, “Girl, you owe me a beer for keepin’ you out of jail.”

Stacy exclaimed, “Jail?! They wouldn’t send someone to jail for accidentally missing the bucket with a bad port, would they?”

“Hah! You
know there’s a guy from the FBI hanging around a lot of days. He’s trying to improve our systems so
none
of the ports go missing?”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah, they’re
real
serious about this stuff. They think that terrorists and foreign militaries want ports real bad.”

Still testing ports at a steady pace Stacy said, “Terrorists?” Her stomach had turned to ice. Bart
said
he was a redneck, but he just didn’t act like most of the rednecks she’d known. And sometimes he just didn’t understand things that any self-respecting redneck would’a learned at his mother’s knee.
Could
he be…?

Helen said, “Yeah, imagine you send this here jet engine port to
One World Trade, then late at night you started pouring jet fuel through it…” She waggled her eyes at Stacy.

Stacy narrowed her eyes and decided that she needed to ask Bart some
hard questions. She plugged in another port. She didn’t think her Bart could be a terrorist, but if there was one thing Stacy’s dad had raised her to feel strongly about, it was the “good ol’ USofA.”

***

Gary felt amazed at how fast things had moved along since heved ۀ since d come up to D5R. Clemson had given him a leave of absence like he’d asked. They were pretty excited about his new process. Ell and her lawyers had helped him extensively in crafting agreements favorable to himself, both in regards to Clemson and even in regards to agreements with D5R itself.

D5R had not only agreed to pay for
the newer versions of the “graphene spinner,” it turned out they had a great machine shop and excellent machinists that were able to make most of the stuff he needed in house.

They flew him up to orbit for “trials” with the new equipment whenever he wanted because they had flights going up all the time. He’d succeeded in making nearly perfect multilayer graphene thirty nanometers thick by eleven centimeters
wide. Before it left the spinner, the machine trimmed it to ten centimeters, curled it so the edges touched one another and catalytically fused them together so that it formed a tube ten centimeters in circumference with a strength of 270 Newtons or about 61 lbs. This from a faintly visible tube that, when he twisted it into a thread, had a diameter under three thousandths of an inch!

The results were so exciting that
they were helping him build a larger spinner to install on their new space habitat. There they would start really producing material in quantity. They’d bought the rights to production for their space enterprises but had also licensed production to sell to others for more money than he’d ever dreamed of. They needed him to make some trips up to the space habitat, setting equipment up and teaching some people to use it; then he’d be able to go back to Clemson if he wanted.