Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) (3 page)

“Yes, currently the turbine is on a cart in your lab, is that not correct?  The cart has wheels, does it not?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Stan said, wondering what she could mean.

“Come with me.”

She got up and led them from her office.  They followed her in silence.  They shared a mystified shrug when she went out of the building and towards the faculty parking lot.  She stopped at a crew-cab pickup and unlocked the passenger doors.  “Get in,” she told them.

She climbed up and drove competently towards the freeway and then west.

“Professor,” Stan asked, “where are we going?”

“Patience,” she told them.

Stan subsided.  Thirty minutes later they were off the freeway and drove up to a locked gate.  A guard came out and unlocked it, without a word.

“This is the Campbell Air Park,” Stephanie told them as they drove down a road towards old, rusting hangers.  “My father is a gambler, as was my grandfather before him.  Some gamblers go to Las Vegas or now the Indian casinos to get their fix.  My father and grandfather got their jollies buying up acres of farmland around the northern periphery of the San Fernando Valley and holding onto it until land prices escalated.”

She stopped in front of a old, rusting hangar and got out.  The two young men followed her inside.  The building was warm in the March sun, but there was plenty of light.  She walked just a few feet and stopped in front of what looked like a go-cart.

“A friend of my father’s owned the go-cart; it belonged to his son, who has gone on to bigger and better things: the Air Force Academy.”

“I’m not sure I understand, Professor Kinsella,” Stan told her.

“I want you to move the turbine here; I want you to transfer it and its fuel supply to the go-cart.  It would be nice if the cart could be controlled remotely, but we can run it from a tether, if need be.  At least a thirty meter tether, at least a hundred meters from the building.  Do you understand?”

“Yes, Professor,” Johnny said.  “I used to fly radio-controlled model airplanes in Singapore.  I know how to do something like that.”

“It’s not going to go very fast,” Stan told Professor Kinsella.  “We’ve tweaked the output and the best we’ve done so far is about 58 centimeters a second.”

Stephanie grinned at Stan sardonically.  “Mr. Benko!  Did I just hear you offer a prediction?”

Stan tried not to blush, but nothing stopped his ears from flushing.

“First steps, Mr. Benko, first steps!  The Wright brothers flew less than a hundred meters on their first flight.  The go-cart won’t move very fast.  The important thing, Mr. Benko and Mr. Chang, is the fact that the steps are taken.”

“How are we going to get the turbine and other things here?” Johnny Chang asked.

“Do either of you have a driver’s license?”

Stan Benko nodded.  “I do, Professor.”

Stephanie had been holding a set of keys in her hand; now she held them out to him.  “You may have use of my truck.  When do you think you’ll have results?”

“Monday,” Johnny Chang told her.  “We’ll have to work over the weekend.”

Stephanie Kinsella nodded.  “If you have any questions or problems, I’ll be in my office.”

“How will you get home, Professor?” Johnny asked.

“My father doesn’t live that far from here; he’ll take care of it.”

She dipped into her purse as she started to walk away, pulling out a cell phone.

“Oh gosh!” Stan exclaimed.  “A car!  Oh gosh!”

“To be used for the experiment,” Johnny cautioned.

“And to get to the store, the kid to the doctor’s...”

“Stan, if something happens on one of those trips, you’re toast, do you understand?  No matter whose fault it is, you personally are toast!”

Stan just grinned, humming to himself.

When they went to leave, this time the guard plunked himself down in the middle of the road, forcing Stan to stop.

“Professor Kinsella says you may be admitted at any time, any day,” the guard told them.

“Yes,” Stan said, not understanding the point of this.

“You’ll have to sign in and out.  Please be ready to stop at the gate.”  He handed Stan a clipboard.

Stan looked at it.  It was blank.

“Doesn’t Professor Kinsella have to sign in and out?” Stan asked in what he thought was a reasonable tone.

The guard laughed.  “Look around you, sonny.  This here is a thousand acres of prime real estate surrounded on all sides by subdivisions.  It’s worth, give or take, about a million bucks an acre.  This is just one parcel the Prof’s father owns.

“You guys going to make any noise?”

Stan blinked.  “Nothing much, I guess.”

“This used to be a private airfield, back in the day.  Except as the Valley grew, people started bitching.  The bitching finally killed the airport.  Then the boss leased it to some guys who ran drag races and street races.  My goodness!  If you think planes are loud, wait until you hear a rail going the quarter mile!  The boss won’t have a problem with mild noise, but he’ll hear about anything more.  You’ll want to be ahead of the curve, if you get my drift.”

“Not much noise,” Johnny said, across Stan’s body.  “A gas turbine.  About as much noise as a car.”

“Cool!  No problem!  Just don’t forget to stop!  Some of the guys on this job are young and take themselves too seriously.  They’d just love hauling out their pieces and shooting at someone who didn’t stop.”

He waved them forward and Stan drove away.  “That family is entirely paranoid,” he said as he drove, shaking his head.

Johnny laughed; he was quite at home with real estate.  “Stan, after all those warnings, you need to learn to do the math!  A thousand acres at a million an acre.  That’s a billion dollars in round numbers.”

Stan managed to not drive the truck off the road.  Oh!

On Monday, the two of them showed up early in Professor Kinsella’s office.  She smiled at them as they stood nervously in front of her desk.

“Professor, it’s gone really well,” Johnny said.  “We can have a demonstration tomorrow.  We’re working on the last of the bugs.”

“No problem.  And your regular test protocol?”

Stan turned three shades of purple with anger, and Johnny simply said, “We haven’t worked on it, Professor.  You have control of the apparatus for a few days.”

“Ah, I forgot!” she told them.

With sudden clarity, Johnny knew she was pulling their legs, mostly Stan’s.  And with that came the realization of something else.  It was something he was going to have to think about...

The next day the go-cart went down the field at something a bit faster than a slow walk, but not by much.  “I’ve been thinking about ways to improve the velocity, Professor,” Johnny said helpfully as she stood mute, watching it.

“Good.  Let me know how that works out.”

The go-cart straightened out and went another few meters, then started to turn back to them.  A few minutes later it pulled up next to them and stopped.

“Braking is an issue,” Johnny said, trying to sound helpful.

“We use gravity,” Stan interjected.

“Good choice,” Professor Kinsella said mildly.

Johnny wanted to kick Stan.  This was the whole ball of wax!  They’d been college students now for six years.  They either finished their thesis topic or they were finished.

Professor Kinsella turned to them.  “A number of ideas occur to me, in addition to the test protocol you already submitted.  How about you write a new protocol and have it to me by, say, Friday?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Johnny Chang said politely.

“I’ll see you then.”

After she left, Stan was livid with anger.  “We get her go-buggy idea to work, radio control and all in just a couple of days, and do we get a thank you?  An attaboy?  Nope, just more homework!”

“Stan, she asked us to produce something and we did.  She asked us for a time frame — how long we thought it would take.  She gave us an extra day when we said we couldn’t meet our original estimate.  She said ‘Good!’ just now when she looked at our work.  When was the last time she said something other than a criticism?”

“And that’s it?” Stan sneered.  “She merely doesn’t kick us when she tosses us a tiny tidbit?  You think that deserves respect?”

“I think it deserves paying attention to, Stan!”

“Yeah, well I told my wife that I was going to be free the rest of the week.  Her mother is here and they wanted to hit a few casinos.”

“Stan, priorities!  Priorities!”

“I suppose.  You know, this is just a big ball of shit she’s wrapping us into.  What on God’s green earth does it matter that we’ve got a go-cart that can move just a smidge slower than a walk?  Who cares?”

Johnny suddenly turned pale as a sheet.

“What?” Stan asked, more in anger than in curiosity.

“What?  What if she’d asked us any questions?  Like how much does the go-cart mass?  How much does the fuel mass?  What was the temperature, pressure, humidity, the time of day, the zodiac sign?  Jeez!  She’s setting us up!”

Stan turned pale as well.  “We’ve been working on the mechanics, we haven’t had time to take notes.”

“Oh, like that’ll fly as an excuse!” Johnny said sourly.

Which of course, it wouldn’t.  Maybe a little nit here and a little gnat there, but they’d missed the boat once again.

So, the next few days were filled with plans, plans, plans.  Johnny had no idea how Stan balanced family duties with planning duties.  Trina seemed to be perpetually upset with her husband.

Still, on Friday afternoon, they walked into Professor Kinsella’s office and handed her the new experimental protocol.

She didn’t say anything, she just read through it.  When she finished, she held it up and waved it slightly.  “This is it?”

“Yes, Professor,” Stan said, trying to sound ingratiatingly polite.

She tossed it into her wastebasket and picked up her phone.  After a second she said simply, “Anna, would you and David step into my office.  Now, please.”

She looked up at them.  “Do you know why you are going to be present for this meeting?”

Stan shook his head.  Johnny had no idea.

“Because, buried way in the back of your protocol you suggested varying the location of the gravity singularity, as you call it.  It’s not a singularity, but that’s another story.”

“We considered,” Stan said, trying to sound confident, “varying the angle up to 45 degrees.  We weren’t sure what effect that would have.  Perhaps it would reduce the mass in the front of the vehicle, allowing it to move marginally faster... or perhaps it would increase the force on the rear wheels slowing it down.  We planned on taking measurements on how that works.”

“Mr. Benko, that measurement is something freshman physics students calculate in their first semester when we introduce them to vector arithmetic.  It is not a serious topic for graduate-level experimentation.”

Two other grad students entered the office.  Anna Sanchez was tall and dark, a person who showed even less expression than her boss.  David Louie was from Beijing.  He was perpetually excited about everything he saw.

“We are going,” Professor Kinsella told her grad students, “on a field trip today.  Mr. Benko will drive.”

Two thirty on a Friday afternoon is not the best of times to try to get around the LA area, particularly the San Fernando Valley.  It took nearly two hours to get to the airfield.

Professor Kinsella walked up to the hangar where the go-kart was and gestured to it.  “One or both of you, explain this.”

Stan was very nearly at the Vesuvius stage, Johnny thought, so he did the explanation.

Professor Kinsella’s students listened raptly.  Both had PDAs and calculators; both used them frequently.

When Johnny finished, he turned to Professor Kinsella.  “That’s all I have, Professor.”

She grimaced.  “That, people, sums up where we are today.”  She waved at the go-cart.

“The gas turbine that runs the cart has a mean-time-between-failures, at the current operating speed, of about a thousand years.  Which means there is a measurable chance it will fail today.  In that event, people as far away as hundreds of meters could be at risk.”

Both of Professor Kinsella’s students looked at the go-cart, now wary.

“The experimenters have no satisfactory plan for going forward.  We need to start moving forward.  Anna, I want a list of ideas for parameters we can change in the basic equations to enhance the depth of the gravity well the device produces.  David, let Anna know if you have any ideas on that.  In the mean time, David, I’d like to see if you can reduce the risk from turbine failure.  Tomorrow, team, I’d like to have the start of a plan!”

“You’re going to take this away from us,” Stan said bitterly.

“Mr. Benko and Mr. Chang.  You are now my graduate assistants’ assistants.  When you aren’t answering their questions, work on a paper.  Include everything you know or have theorized.  You have a month from today to have it ready for my review.  There are a number of issues about the publication date, but I assure you that your paper will be sitting the day you declare it ready, in both the Dean’s office and the President of the University’s office.