The God Patent (25 page)

When Kat came downstairs half an hour later, Ryan and Dodge were still arguing. She went out the door and tossed her skateboard in front of her. Ready to vault across the stairs and down the street, she changed her mind. She’d never thought of a skateboard as a toy before and, as much as she loved the acceleration, freedom, and gymnastic-like power of skating, carrying a toy around all night seemed so childish. Plus, her skateboard didn’t go with her outfit. She tucked her skate back under the bench and walked down to the boulevard. She’d walk by the Skate-n-Shred, and if a good band was playing, she’d go in and dance, but if not, she’d try to get into a bar with some of her older friends.

I
t had been a year and a half since Foster first met with National Engineering Group, the men-in-black meeting at the church in Alexandria. Foster assumed the business maneuvering was finished; after all, the contracts were finally signed, and the funding was in. Nothing could stop them.

Then Mabel guided a man wearing jeans, a T-shirt, work boots, and a “Wayne’s Feeds” cap into the lab. The instant Foster looked up, the man seemed to shake Mabel’s hand off of his arm.

She was smiling, of course. Mabel smiled most of the time. She said, “Dr. Reed, I’d like you to meet my—”

The cowboy interrupted her. “Foster Reed? This envelope is for you.”

Foster took the envelope, and the man said, “You’ve been served.”

Mabel looked confused. The man glared at her wide-eyed, turned, and walked out. From that instant, Foster’s attention was consumed by the contents of the envelope.

After opening it and cursing Ryan under his breath, Foster rushed across campus to the chancellor’s office. That he was caught by surprise was, as Jeb Schonders put it, “a testimony to naïveté. After all, Judas always goes for the silver.”

Two hours later, Foster, Jeb, and Blair Keene, who was still their attorney but now their
second
largest investor, assembled in a conference room.

Blair said, “Stay calm. This is part of doing business.”

Foster started, “This is part of the battle.”

“How embarrassing can this be to National?” Jeb addressed Blair.

Foster spoke louder. “Come on, let’s go. We can win this.”

Blair said, “I’ve known Bill Smythe since fifth grade. He’s a good man but very sensitive to appearance.”

Jeb put his hand on Foster’s shoulder. “Son, as much as I’d love to take on Judas head-to-head, the fact is we haven’t done very well in court.” Then, to Blair, “All he wants is a settlement…”

“I think we should consider it,” Blair said. “A public fiasco right after we sign—”

Foster pounded a fist on the table between the other men. “This isn’t the Scopes trial. It’s not the Dover School Board. This is real science, technology that is already approved by the patent office. We shouldn’t surrender when we can win.”

Blair stared at Jeb for a few seconds and then slowly nodded. “Let’s find out what they want before talking to NEG. The prudent thing might be to pay them off and shut them up.” Then, to Foster, “It may be real technology, but it doesn’t work yet. Maybe we will fight, but we need to know all of our options before we decide. The best thing we can do is get a price—it will be a lot cheaper to pay off Ryan now rather than once you’re generating energy.” He turned back to Jeb. “My office will set up a meeting with Ryan McNear and his mouthpiece—what’s his name?” He focused on the summons. “Wayne Dodge Nutter? You know what they say about California: once you
take out the fruits and nuts—I’ll wager this Nutter guy is a flake.”

As Blair stood, Jeb said, “I reckon your office oughta do a background check on this fella. We may have more options than we think.”

“Y
ou’ve got a
date
with her and you’re bringing me.” Kat waited for Ryan in the hallway. She hung her head, then she let her shoulders droop, and, finally, she fell to the floor. “That’s not how it works, you blowfish!”

With his goofy auburn hair and freckled pinkish complexion, it was hard to tell when Ryan was blushing—this time his crazy grin gave him away. He said, “Well, I don’t think it’s a date. Emmy agreed to meet with us to help figure out how to handle Creation Energy.” He raised his eyebrows provocatively. “Though, she did say that she wanted to find out more about me. But look, you have to come—you know the QED stuff, and I’m not taking you all the way down to SLAC and then ditching you when it’s time to eat.”

“She asked you out. You can’t drag along your fourteen-year-old sidekick.” Kat flailed around on the floor as though writhing in agony. “God, you’re so stupid.”

“You’re
thirteen
,” Ryan said, putting his keys in his pocket. He stepped over her and headed downstairs. “It’ll be more fun with the four of us.”

“Four? You’re bringing her brother?” Kat hopped up and onto the banister, slid down, and waited for Ryan at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t run down and catch her like he had when
she was a little kid. For an instant, she was serious: “Don’t worry, you’ll get your date with Emmy.”

The Probe made a few new discomforting sounds on the drive to SLAC, Kat noticed. “This car, I believe, does not like to go to the left, because it squeaks going left but not right.”

“Are there any left turns in the directions?”

Katarina ran her finger down the printout. “You’re in luck, but the drive home…”

“How tacky is it to ask Emmy to drive when we go for dinner?”

“Hmmm, having never gone with a boy who could drive…but! Since she knows the area, it makes sense for her to drive. She’ll probably offer. You must park as far as you can from her office.”

“You’re good.”

“Plus, she won’t see your car.”

“Oh God. What’s going to happen when she figures out this tank is my car?”

“Ryan, Mr. Materialist, she’s not that kind of woman.” They drove along for a while before Kat added, “Besides, she already knows how fucked-up your life is.”

“Don’t say
fuck
.”

They pulled up a hill to SLAC and passed a big sign that read, “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center—Operated by Stanford University for the US Department of Energy.” Kat started to feel tingly and couldn’t sit still.

They had to stop at a guard booth to sign in. Ryan handed over his license, and the guard wrote on a clipboard. Ryan told him that Kat didn’t have a license and wasn’t yet sixteen. He asked for her social security number, but Kat didn’t even know if she had one. The guard leaned over so he could see her in the passenger seat. Suddenly, she wanted to be invisible.

Her dad would have made sure she had a social security card.

Ryan used one of his tricks. Pulling Kat close to him, he said, “She might look dangerous, but the only weapon she brought along is her cutting wit.” Of course the guard laughed and waved them through—everyone laughed when Ryan wanted them to.

They drove through the campus, avoided a street marked by a big “Restricted Access” sign, and found the building with Emmy’s office. Ryan kept driving and parked on the opposite side of campus.

They crossed a street and walked up a sidewalk to the big glass doors. Kat mixed images of Emmy and Ryan in her mind’s eye to calculate what their children would look like. She looked at Ryan again and, not for the first time, wondered how much the fabled Sean looked like his father.

Inside the building, they passed two men leaning against a wall, arguing. One was old, tall, and wore a rumpled suit; the other was short, young, had a Mohawk haircut, and was waving a paper at the man. Kat whispered to Ryan, “He’s wearing the same shoes as me.”

Ryan whispered back, “Converse All Stars will never go out of fashion.”

Emmy’s office door was open. She was leaning against a table next to an Asian guy with shiny black hair. The office had the faint scent of Emmy’s sweet, rich perfume. She had on tight low-cut white jeans and a white blouse. A tiny gap between her jeans and blouse emphasized her waist. The blouse was tight over her breasts but frilly and buttoned up to her neck. The effect was casual, elegant, and sexy. Kat wondered if she could get an outfit like that at the thrift store and felt underdressed until she remembered that she had on the requisite shoes.

Ryan knocked, and Emmy turned with a smile. “Welcome to SLAC.” She lightly hugged Kat and then bounced up on her
tiptoes to kiss Ryan on the cheek. He hugged her tightly for a second and winked at Kat.

Emmy introduced Tran, her student who had read the patents and Foster’s book. Tran looked like a total geekoid to Kat. She hardly ever talked to boys like him at her school—but seeing him here at the big physics lab, he looked okay. He wasn’t timid like the geekoids she knew, and there was something precise and original, even sexy, about the way he dressed and spoke. Everything about him was sharp. He defied her idea of what it meant to be a cool intellectual.

Emmy led them to a conference room. Tran said that he’d reserved the room for the whole afternoon. Emmy looked at her watch and said, “My brother’s late. What a shock.”

The room had a long rectangular table and no windows. Three of the four walls were whiteboards. Each had trays with markers and erasers. Emmy and Tran sat next to each other. Ryan started to sit at the closest chair, next to Tran. Kat rolled her eyes and pushed him to the chair next to Emmy. Kat sat across from the three of them.

Ryan set his briefcase on the table, fiddled with the combination, and took out two notebooks. He slid one across to Kat. It was pink and had doodles all over the cover. A mix of Feynman diagrams, sketches of dragons breathing different colored flames, and curly-cursive
K
s.

Emmy laughed and said, “Pi.”

Ryan looked confused, as though he’d done something stupid but didn’t know what.

Emmy flipped her hair over her shoulder. “Every engineer I’ve ever known has set his briefcase combination to the first six digits of pi. It’s just so cute.”

“Well, I, um—”

Ryan obviously had no idea what to say, so Kat rescued him. “I’m having trouble writing down a formula to add up all those loopy diagrams.” She showed Emmy and Tran a page of equations and Feynman diagrams. Tran’s eyebrows rose. Kat realized that it was the first time he’d genuinely noticed her. She liked it. “The only way I can get the sum to converge is if I do something funny with the spatial dimensions—like, hey!” She wrote another equation. “It works, but only if you force the universe to have three spatial and one time dimension—which, duh, is obvious, but you have to do it in a weird way to make it work.” She finished the calculation. “Like this.”

Emmy took the notebook and went to the whiteboard. “Nice work—that’s called dimensional regularization—but it’s not in the books I sent you…”

“Wait,” Kat said, “did I just prove that spacetime is four dimensional? Whoa—supergenius over here.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s proof, but if you needed more evidence, then it’s not a bad argument.”

Ryan said, “I tried to tell her…”

For a second it looked as though Emmy thought he was serious, but then she got it and punched him in the shoulder.

Staring at Kat’s notes, Tran’s features creased in confusion. “She’s doing renormalization?”

Ryan leaned over to Tran and said, “I have no idea what they’re doing…”

Tran said, “She’s fourteen?”

Ryan said, “Next month.”

Kat felt the same way she had the first time she grinded her skateboard down the fire escape at Skate-n-Shred—she knew she could do whatever she tried, but it still felt nice when others clued in too. Emmy walked around the table to the whiteboard where
Kat was working. Kat was the same height as Emmy now, which was weird. How do you not look up at Emmy?

Behind them, Tran took out his marked-up copy of the “soul” patent, and Ryan tried to explain how it was supposed to work.

Kat asked Emmy how Feynman came up with his diagrams and the rules for evaluating them.

Emmy practically bounced to the whiteboard and wrote an integral equation. “This is the principle of least action.” Kat asked about each symbol and then started evaluating. It took a lot more work, almost an hour, but when she got the same answer she would have gotten using Feynman’s simple approach, it was as satisfying as jumping a flight of stairs on her skate.