Phase Shift (12 page)

There he goes again, playing Devil’s
Advocate. The fact that Palmer worries about me, about losing me,
is a strange kink in our relationship. I was the one who spent the
first few years of our relationship worrying I wasn’t good enough
for him, and that I might lose him. It took me a while to see
Palmer as Palmer and not the handsome, smart, popular head of the
department. That he might be as worried about losing me as I once
worried about losing him frightens me for some reason. "Don’t
worry,” I tell him. “Prescott said it was perfectly safe."

The waitress practically tosses our plates
on the table. She's mixed the orders up. We trade plates. The eggs
and potatoes are cold and underdone. The toast is barely toasted.
Palmer seems oblivious to the quality of the food. He digs in, as
if it’s Sunday dinner at Mom's.

"Prescott had a new modulator with a full
and proper charge," he reasons.

"Well what do you suggest, then?" I say,
surprised at the level of frustration I hear in my voice.

We glare at each other for a bit, and then I
sigh, take a deep breath, and say, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it
that way." I push my eggs around on the plate a bit, mixing them
with the potatoes. "It's just that...the thought of all this—I
mean, Prescott, juicing the modulator, being abused by
Suzanne—"

He smiles and laughs once, short and
breathy, perhaps at the thought of how terribly Suzanne treated me
earlier in the evening. “Sorry,” he says, “it's no laughing
matter.” He grabs my hand across the table and holds his free hand
to his heart. “I take full responsibility for the debacle at the
hospital. I should have shut Suzanne down at the start.”

I smile at him, and then say, "It's," I
pause as I try to think of a word to describe it, "overwhelming," I
say, the moment the word finds my tongue.

He nods and leans forward in his seat. "I'm
feeling a little giddy myself."

"The thing is (and this is what really blows
my mind), what does someone do when faced with something like this?
A decision so—"

"Monumental," he says.

I nod. "Something that could turn—never mind
my world, our world, but the entire scientific community on its
ear? And on two planets at that."

Palmer takes a sip of his coffee and
contemplates his potatoes, stabbing as many as will fit onto the
tines of his fork, wedging them off with the side of the plate, and
then again. "I don't know," he says with a sigh. "If we could only
figure out a way to test it somehow."

"Test it?"

Palmer nods.

"And how do you propose we do that?" I take
another sip of my soda.

"I don't know," he says again. "If we could
attach it to a camera somehow. Send it over there with the camera
before you go, just to see what we're up against." We stare at each
other for a moment.

"Wouldn't work. According to Prescott's
notes, the modulator relies on bio-electric energy to maintain the
bubble. If we test it, it has to be on a living creature."

"Okay," he says.

The eggs, I've noticed, are somewhat
palatable when sopped up with the bread. I take a bite, chew, and
try to swallow.

"So we strap it to an animal," he says.

"Unless you happen to have an extra
chimpanzee lying about that knows how to press a button, that won't
work either."

"I don't follow."

"The energy bubble is initiated with a
button press. It's terminated the same way."

"I was thinking more along the lines of
something more expendable. A mouse or a rat, maybe.

"Maybe..."

"Maybe what?" I say, prompting him when he
doesn’t finish his sentence. I love this conversation. The fact
that Palmer’s bought into the Gaia dilemma at all tells me there’s
something to it, something real. It’s all really exciting. Gaia's
been first and foremost on my mind ever since I started researching
Prescott and reading up on his notes. Once more the thought of
consequences push to the forefront. What if it were a one-way trip?
What if it were the last trip I would ever take? While I have to
admit that having my name attached to a scientific breakthrough
such as this is intoxicating, I'm not willing to gamble my life in
exchange for notoriety.

"What if we could create a device,” Palmer
says, “One on a timer. One that would depress the button to send
the mouse to Gaia and after a particular amount of time, depress
the button again to bring it back. We could still attach a camera
if we wanted. To get a better feel for what to expect when you
finally go."

"And how would we make such a device?"

"It should be fairly simple. Just a simple
timer and a hammer to depress the button. I'll bet Jake Adams over
in Engineering could help us."

I nod slowly, mulling it over. "I see two
problems with this," I say. "One, where are you going to get the
mouse from?"

"Johnny Marcus over in Psych. They're always
experimenting with mice in Psych."

"Okay, but we have no way of knowing if the
modulator's charged or even how much it's charged. We don't even
know how much juice is used up by a round trip. What if there's
only enough juice for one trip and we use it up on the mouse?"

"Then we'll figure something else out."

I smile. "Know many wealthy benefactors of
the museum who just happen to have a mummy lying around to
cat-scan?"

"I'm serious, Moll," he says.

"So am I, Palmer." I hate that I sound like
I’m whining, but I’m all argued out. Either we press the button or
we don’t. Either we go to Gaia or we don’t. It’s really that
simple.

He smiles at me and reaches across the table
for my hand again. "We'll figure something else out."

We pick at our meals for a while before
Palmer blurts, "What if we could figure out a way to measure the
modulator's charge as well as how much the charge is depleted with
each round trip?" He leans back into the worn bench seat.
"Radiation can be measured. I wonder if it generates an EM field.
Adams would know."

"And while we're on the topic of Jake
Adams," I say, "you're not seriously suggesting we hand over a
charged modulator for him to use when he's making his trigger
device, are you? I mean, what guarantee do we have that he won't
push the button himself?"

He thinks about this and then says, "You
could make a set of measured drawings. (Sure, engineers work from
blueprints all the time.) I'm sure that would be enough for him to
create a prototype that we could test."

The waitress comes to top up Palmer’s coffee
but he stays her hand, and asks for the bill.

"Okay then," he says, "so we're in agreement
then? Do nothing until Jake gets back to me?"

I agree.

Palmer opens the door when I knock, but only
a crack. Stale air wafts into the hall from his lab. I am struck by
the odors of mildew and bleach.

"Rosy said you were in your lab," I say. I
waited fifteen minutes in his office before giving up and checking
with Rosemary, the department secretary.

"Did you bring it?"

I say I did. He opens the door wider to let
me enter. "Are you alone?" He peers into the empty corridor.

"Palmer, are you okay?" I ask. He doesn’t
seem himself.

He closes the door behind me and slides the
deadbolt in place.

"What's going on?"

He turns his back to me for a moment. When
he turns back to face me, he’s holding a mouse. It looks as if it's
sitting cross-legged in the palm of his hand. He holds it still
with two fingers from the other hand resting on its hips. "This is
Mickey," he says, holding the mouse at my eye level.

"Cute," I say.

"Here, hold him for a second." He thrusts
Mickey at me.

My hands fly up, until they’re about level
with my shoulders, seemingly of their own volition. "You have got
to be kidding.”

“Watch this." He walks toward the large,
three foot square, wooden maze on the counter beside me. Beside the
maze is a small block of cheddar cheese. Palmer breaks off a small
corner of the cheese and places it at one end of the maze. He
releases Mickey at the opposite end and sets a stop-watch in
motion. No sooner has he unleashed the mouse than it begins to move
at breakneck speed through the maze. In a flash it finds the cheese
and begins to eat. Palmer depresses the fob of the stop-watch.
"Twenty-six seconds," he tells me, "a personal record for
Mickey.

"We've been at this most of the afternoon.
He's knocked four seconds off his original time since we
began."

"Okay. Palmer? Are you alright?"

"Over here," he says, ignoring my question.
He takes me by the elbow and leads me to an adjacent counter, where
he hands me a small steel object about half the size of my hand.
It’s made up of a small circuit board upon which two digital timers
are mounted. A myriad of brightly coloured wires jut from beneath
the timer and terminate at the circuit board. A small, silver bar
coiled in copper wire is soldered to the edge of the circuit board,
opposite a battery pack consisting of four, stacked, AAA
batteries.

"Courtesy of Jake Adams," he says, plucking
the contraption from my hand and setting the timers. "Watch this."
Palmer holds the circuit board in his outstretched hand and we
watch as the first timer counts from ten down to zero. The silver
bar fires like a bullet from a pistol. It slowly resumes its
original position as the second timer begins to count down. When it
reaches zero, the bar fires again. Brilliant! It'll work like a
charm—once to turn the modulator on, and a second time to turn it
off.

"Over here," he says. Still somewhat manic,
he grabs my arm once more and pulls me toward the desk in the
corner of the room. He holds my hand out and places a tiny camera
in the centre of it. The camera lens is framed in burnished silver
and about the size of an Aspirin tablet. "It's a camera," he says.
"I found it at a local spy shop. Look." He switches on a small,
desktop monitor. It shows an image of the ceiling fluorescents
which is refreshed about every ten seconds. "You have the option of
transmitting to the monitor or saving to a card," he says. He shows
me the memory card, a wafer thin, ice blue piece of plastic, one
inch in length. "When you're done, you plug the reader for the card
into your USB and download the files. This should give us a good
idea of what to expect once you're there, kind of a...mouse-eye
view." He smiles.

"Oh! One more thing." Palmer holds up a
single finger as he says this and then asks for the modulator. I
don’t know why, but I pause for a beat before handing it over to
him. He smiles, as if he senses my apprehension and wants to let me
know I’ve done the right thing.

"We need a way to measure power depletion."
He shows me his iPhone. “It's really cool what they can do with
technology nowadays,” he says. “Download some apps and connect a
peripheral device or two and a glorified cell phone becomes almost
anything you can set your mind to.” He uses his finger to select a
series of icons on the small screen. "This is a multi-purpose
reader. It reads voltage and temperature and everything in
between.

"The most likely measurement, I think, would
be radiation. It's what it's powered by, after all." The iPhone
beeps. “Okay. Geiger counter seems to be working,” he says. He
moves the attachment toward the modulator. It emits a regular,
even, ping. When he moves it away from the modulator, the pings
remain constant. He touches it to the modulator. Still no change in
the speed of the pings. "It's not radioactive. At least, not when
it's turned off.

"Okay. Not done yet." Palmer puts the iPhone
down and reaches for a manual, a small book about the same size as
the device itself. "Give me a...second," he says as he thumbs
through the manual. I wait, trying to be patient. This is kind of
fun. Palmer’s temperament is usually even-keel. It’s not often he
gets excited like this.

"Here it is!” Palmer says. “‘EMFs detected
by Gauss metre’, ‘yellow probe’." He switches the black probe for
the yellow one, and refers once more to the manual before tapping
out another sequence on the cell’s interface.

"EMFs?" I ask.

"Electromagnetic fields. Most electronic
devices emit an electromagnetic field. The question is: how large
of a field does it emit?" He checks the measurement. "This is
good," he tells me, showing me the reading. “According to the
manual, the reading’s through the roof.

“We can measure the depletion in the EMF and
see how much power it loses with each trip. If—and I mean, big
if—it works at all.”

He looks at me tentatively. "Time for Mickey
to suit up."

I smirk slightly, suddenly aware of how
disappointed I am the mouse gets to try it out before me. My eyes
begin to water and I sniffle.

Palmer reaches over and hugs me. "You
okay?"

It’s stupid for me to react this way.

I nod and wipe my eyes with the heel of my
palm.

"Ready for this?" he asks.

I nod. Still locked in his embrace, my head
bobs against his chest.

"Really. It's the only way, Moll." He kisses
the top of my head. "The only safe way."

Much as I hate to admit it, he’s right. "I
know," I tell him. I pull away from him, nodding profusely. "Okay.
Let's do this," I say.

"Okay?"

I continue to nod. "Yeah," I say, but I
don’t think I sound too convinced.

Palmer slides the modulator into Jake's
contraption and fastens them together with some surgical tape. The
camera goes on the same way and then the whole thing gets strapped
onto Mickey's back with an abundance of surgical tape around his
midsection.

The mouse squeals. The whole thing must
weigh at least as much as the animal itself.

Palmer turns on the camera and sets the
timers for thirty seconds each—thirty seconds until the solenoid
bar depresses sending him there, thirty seconds until it depresses
again bringing him home.