Six Bits (15 page)

His mother said, a sad tone in her voice, "Son, Steban didn’t
have
a brother. When the rest of his family was killed at the end of the war, he changed his name to Lante because he didn’t want people thinking of him as a killer."

Steb turned wide eyed to stare at his father, goosebumps running over his body.

Lante stared back calmly. Finally he said, "I guess I can’t stop you trying to revive the Macos, kii… son. So,” he paused, then continued heavily, “I suppose I’d better start helping you. Otherwise you’re
surely
gonna get yourself killed.” His voice took on a wistful tone, “I’d never forgive myself if that happened."

Steb drove on in dazed silence for a minute,
My hero… is my father?
he thought, almost plaintively. Finally, he turned toward Jos’ house.

Jos probably needed some help.

The End

Inspired (distantly) by the movie Target

PORTER

Allie Dans formed her first “port” shortly after she turned eleven.

She was at her cousin Mindy’s birthday party. It was a hot summer day and Aunt Stella hotfooted it across the burning pool deck to hand Allie and Mindy each a glass of icy Kool-Aid. In the humidity, the glass was sweating nearly as much as Allie was. She bowed her strawberry blonde head over it in puzzlement. “Aunt Stella, how does the water get to the outside of the glass?”

Stella looked where Allie was focused and then, in an uncertain tone her aunt posited, “Maybe the heat makes the glass leaky.”

“For God’s sake, Stella!” Allie’s dad said without opening his eyes behind his sunglasses. “It’s condensation! The cold condenses water onto the glass!”  He laid his head back against the deck recliner and adjusted the brim of his hat to cover his eyes again.

Not knowing what “condensation” was, Allie thought to herself that her dad’s explanation wasn’t at all helpful. Big words, but a complete lack of enlightenment. However, she didn’t want to ask her dad about it. He’d subject her to a long and complicated explanation. Everybody thought her Dad was a genius, but he had a tendency to explain things in such detail that they became even more confusing than they were to begin with.

Still thinking about it, she squinted and pictured a tiny tunnel through the glass, from the Kool-Aid on the inside, to the air on the outer surface. As she visualized it, to her astonishment a big drop welled up on the surface of the glass, right where she was imagining the hole! During her moment of startlement, the drop stopped growing, but, when she concentrated on it again, it then resumed growing and began dribbling. Eventually it became a steady stream. After a moment, the level of Kool-Aid in the glass fell to the level of Allie’s “hole” and the stream slowed down and stopped. Allie picked up the glass and tasted the dribble. Yep, Kool-Aid. She tasted the other tiny drops covering the rest of the glass… they were just water.

Allie took a sip and looked over at Mindy. Mindy was raising her glass to her lips. Allie focused on Mindy’s glass and was rewarded with a dribble down Mindy’s chin. “Ew!” The fastidious Mindy set the glass down and wiped her chin, staring suspiciously at the rim of the glass and running her finger over it. She wiped sticky fingers on the table top with distaste. Then Mindy brightened, “Let’s get in the pool!”

The next night, when the Dans family sat down to dinner, Allie looked at the condensation on the surface of the glass of iced tea her mom had just served. Remembering, she held the glass up over her plate and pictured a tunnel through the bottom of the glass; sure enough the bottom of the glass began to drip onto her plate when she formed the port.

She looked over at her dad. He’d brought a paper to the dinner table and was studying it. His reading at the dinner table always made Mom mad, but he did it a lot anyway. He lifted his glass. Allie made a port just behind the lip and giggled as she saw tea run down his chin. “What the hell?!” he swore, setting the glass down and reaching for a napkin. He looked suspiciously over at Allie who was desperately trying to stifle a giggle. Then he examined the glass. It was one of their regular glasses. It didn’t have a convoluted surface like dribble glasses have. In fact, it had a perfectly smooth, one could say “glassy,” surface. “What the hell?!” he repeated and looked at Allie again. “Did you do that somehow?”

Hand over her mouth, Allie giggled a little more while nodding her head.

He looked back at the glass, running a finger over its surface below the rim, both inside and outside. Puzzled, he asked, “How?”

“I just made a leak like Aunt Stella said.”

“What?”

“Well, she said ‘the heat makes the glass leaky.’
You
said it was ‘condensation.’
I
made a little tunnel through the glass ‘cause I don’t know how to make it ‘leaky’.”

“What?!”

“She said ‘the heat made-’”

“I
know
what she said! It was stupid! Heat
doesn’t
make glass leaky!”

Allie bowed her head, “Sorry.” Her dad was mostly pretty nice, but when he got mad, he could be scary.

“No,
how
did
you
make the glass leak?”

In a small voice, “I made a little tunnel...”

“There isn’t a tunnel there!”

A smaller voice, “
Only
when I think it.”

Goosebumps raised the hair on Albert Dans’ neck. “What?” he said turning to stare at his daughter.

Allie whispered, “Only when I think it.”

He was holding the glass in the air looking at it. To his astonishment, a small stream of tea appeared just below the glass and splattered onto his plate. It wasn’t coming from the glass, or through the glass, it was appearing in space about an inch below the bottom of the glass then streaming straight down! He dropped the glass, leaping to his feet and knocking his chair over backwards, “Holy shit!” The glass shattered on his dinner plate, breaking the plate as well.

With a small cry Allie ducked her head and bolted from the table, running up the stairs to her room.

Allie’s mom looked away from Stephen, Allie’s towheaded 4-year old brother. “What just happened?!”

Al set the chair back up, shook his head and said, “
I
have
no
idea.” He got a broom and mop, cleaned up the mess, then dished himself another plate. He took his plate and Allie’s up to her room.

Allie had curled up on the bed and when he entered, she looked apprehensively up through her hair at her dad.

Speaking as calmly as he could, Al said “You’re not in trouble; I brought you your dinner.” Al sat down on the corner of her bed, putting her plate on her desk.

Allie pulled her hair partly back off her face to peer more clearly at her dad, who in fact
didn’t
seem angry. “I’m not hungry.”

“OK.” Her dad calmly began eating his own dinner. “Do you think you could show me what you can do with your ‘tunnels’ later?”

“OK.” Allie got off the bed, wiped her nose and went over to sit at her desk. She picked at her food for a while, but didn’t eat much.

“Are you done?” Her dad asked, nodding at her plate.

“Yes.” She said in a small voice.

He picked up both of their plates and took them down to put in the dishwasher. Shortly, he appeared back in her door with two bowls of ice cream. She raised her eyebrows. “But I didn’t eat all my dinner?”

“I know.” He gave her a little grin, “
Some
rules have to be broken occasionally.”

They ate their ice cream in silence. When it was gone Al asked, “Ready to make me a ‘tunnel’?” Allie nodded, rubbing her wrist under her nose again. He heard a spraying sound and looked down in astonishment to see a tiny jet of water shooting into the bottom of his ice cream bowl. Though his initial reaction was to shout, he managed to restrain himself to an almost calm, “What the hell!?” He looked back up at Allie who was watching the spray too. He swallowed the storm of questions exploding in his brain to say simply, “Where is
that
tunnel coming from?”

“The pipe in the wall there.” She pointed over his shoulder with her chin. The spray stopped.

“How did you know there was a pipe in the wall?”

“I sorta feel them… Don’t you?”

Her dad made a choking sound, “No... I don’t think anybody can… ‘cept maybe you.” He began asking a seemingly endless list of questions, most of which Allie couldn’t answer. She dribbled water out of glasses and sprayed it out of pipes. After a while she developed a headache and became unable to create more than a tiny tunnel. Still he wanted her to do more.

Finally her mother came in and watched what was going on with growing astonishment. After a while though, she said, “Al, she needs to rest. It’s past her bedtime.”

He turned to snap at his wife, then looked back at Allie, all droopy around the edges. “OK, Sarah.” He turned back to his daughter, “Allie, we’ll go into my lab tomorrow and learn more about what you can do, okay?”

Allie sighed and put on her pajamas. She wasn’t looking forward to it. Tomorrow she and Mindy had been going to hang out at the pool. Her head was throbbing. Her mom got her a Tylenol and she curled up to sleep with her cat, Oscar.

Her dad spent hours on the internet trying to find credible evidence of teleportation or whatever the hell this phenomenon was. Not even a “less than credible” claim of the same phenomenon was to be found.

The next morning Allie’s dad got her up early to take her in to his lab in the physics department at the University. He ignored her protests about going swimming with Mindy. When her mother said something about it, he just told her to let Aunt Stella know that Allie was “busy.” At the lab, they did measurements until Allie’s head was splitting again. Her eyes would hardly stay open. They rested over lunch at Burger King, then started again.

Dr. Dans’ magnetic and electrical field measurements around Allie showed nothing different from those about his own head. Measurements around the ports found oddly “swirling” fields. Samples of distilled water and some organic solvents that had been through ports were put aside for assay by a friend in the chemistry department. Later Al learned that there were no detectable changes from the control specimens that hadn’t been “ported.” Bacteria and yeast that had been ported continued to live.

When Allie got too tired to make ports again, her dad spent time on the phone with a friend at the medical school trying to arrange an MRI of her head, “To see if there were any unusual structures.”

Other than the friend at the medical school whom her dad only told that she had “an unusual ability,” no one else was told that Allie was the center of a new research program.

When the MRI was finished no one could find any recognizable difference between her brain and the brains of ordinary people.

Dr. Dans’ grad student kept working on Dans’ grant funded research project, getting barked at when he interrupted the “Allie research” with questions about their funded study. Everyone that came into the lab was told that Allie was there to “keep her out of her Mom’s hair” or to “learn how science worked.” Her dad strictly forbade her to tell any of her friends about her new ability or to do any tricks for
anyone
except him. Videos he made of the effect in action carefully excluded Allie from the field of view.

Needing her cooperation, Al was very pleasant to her, ordering out lunch from all her favorite restaurants and setting up a computer for her to use between testing episodes. But, she was there in the lab all day almost every day! Even most weekends!

The rest of Allie’s summer was ruined with 12-hour days at the lab. She soon began to look forward to the start of school; simply because it would provide a break from her dad. Her mother and father had started to argue about it; out of her presence, but she could hear them fighting through the walls.

At the end of her first day back at school Allie was dismayed to see her dad’s car parked in front of the school. She opened the door, “Dad! I’ve got homework!”

Distractedly he looked up from the paper he’d been reading and smiled at her, “I know, Kiddo. It’ll just be for an hour. Besides you can do your homework during my setup time between the first and second experiments.” He blinked, “Your new clothes look really nice!”

Sullenly, Allie got in the car. As she expected, one hour turned into two. An angry call from her mother was needed to get them home for dinner.

Her dad became more and more frustrated as test after test demonstrated odd, but miniscule physical phenomena around the port area at both entrance and exit. There was a tiny rotating electrical field, fluctuating magnetic phenomena and a slight attractive force, possibly gravitational, around the “ports.” The electromagnetic and possible gravitational fields were so tiny they were at the limits of detection for the most sensitive measuring devices he had available. Worse, the measurements would be different from one repetition of a port setup to the next! He worried that
all
he had detected was the “noise” in the measurements.

Dans determined that materials only flowed through the ports like they would through a hose, from high pressure to low pressure. Interestingly, Allie was able to open ports over a longer distance when the flow of material through the port was energetic. Thus a port from a high pressure pipe could be opened over a much greater distance than a port from a glass of water. When it was opened over a long distance, the water sprayed out with little pressure, as if the energy of that pressure was being used to cross the distance. When Allie was fresh, she could open a port as big as 3mm in diameter, but the diameter dropped off quickly as she got tired.

Her dad had no handle on the phenomenon, and therefore could not reproduce it; much less magnify the effect as he’d hoped. He became more and more irritated and, though it seemed impossible, even more absent-minded. Allie’s parents started to fight. Her mother threatened divorce if he didn’t let Allie have time to “be a kid.”