by Diane Duane
“Food science.”
“Good Lord,” Peter said. He got an image of someone who designed the sugar for doughnuts.
“No, he’s good, don’t worry.” Faint keyboard clickings ensued, and then Roger said, “Here we go. Doctor Liam Kavanagh.” He read off an address in Coral Gables, followed by two phone numbers. “Liam was always such a research junkie,” Roger said, “that I can’t believe he doesn’t know about your hydrogel—lots more than I do. Will that help?”
“I think so. Rog, you’ve saved my life.”
“Just our usual service. When are you going to get back here and go out with some of us for dinner? There are people here who want to heckle you about not finishing your doctoral project.”
Peter moaned softly. “Let’s not get into it. I might be back in a couple of weeks…”
“Call me, then, and we’ll get together. Say hi to Mary Jane for me.”
“Right. Thanks again, Rog.”
Before Peter could hang up, the phone rang. After a moment, he realized it was the cell phone MJ had given him. He picked it up, fumbled with it a moment, not quite sure how to turn it on. At last, he found a button that said Receive, and hit it. “Hello?”
“Peter!” MJ said. She sounded a little breathless. “How’s your new toy?”
“I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet—been too busy this morning.”
“With what?”
“The ‘smoke.’ I’ve got at least a hint about what it is, thanks to Rog Hochberg. He says hi, by the way. Anyhow, I have to go see somebody down in Coral Gables, if he can make time for me. Listen, MJ, I’ve got to try and talk to this guy right now if I can.”
“Okay.”
“Where are you?”
“On the way to Boca.” Peter heard, quite clearly, the sound of MJ rolling her eyes. “I’m going up with one of the staff vans—we slopped for a rest break. The director for the shoot,” she said more softly, “is, uh… a character.”
“Oh? Good or bad?”
“I would say he had the brains of a duck, but that would be an insult to ducks everywhere. Can’t seem to make up his mind about what he wants, generally. This whole thing may turn into a disaster.”
“Hope not.”
“We’ll see. Where are you?”
“The hotel.”
“Where’s your friend?”
“Vreni? She had something to do this afternoon. So I’m going to Coral Gables alone.”
“Right. Oh, gosh, here they come. We’re leaving. Bye bye, Tiger! I’ll call you later.”
“Bye,” Peter said, and turned the phone off, pocketing it. He got the feeling that whatever he did, MJ was going to call him every five minutes for the next while. New toys, indeed, Peter thought, and grinned. He picked up the thermos and the other bags and headed down for the car.
* * *
CORAL Gables was south and west of the city. Kavanagh’s building was near a road called Killian Parkway, which Peter found without too much trouble. The drive down was studded with odd road signs suggesting that Peter go to places with names like Parrot Jungle, Monkey Jungle, Orchid Jungle, and the peculiar name he remembered hearing that morning, Matheson Hammock Park. The image of a forest festooned with tropical hammocks stayed with him for a while.
Kavanagh himself, when Peter had managed to reach him on the phone, had been succinct almost to the point of eccentricity. Peter explained to the scratchy voice on the other end that he had been recommended by a friend at Empire State, and the response was, “Oh, God, not that dump!”
“Dr. Kavanagh,” Peter had said, “I have a research problem—”
“Don’t we all, my son, don’t we all. Well, bring it along.” Kavanagh had issued him directions which sounded more like a football play than anything else—I-1 to 41, 41 to 826, 826 to 874, then east to 174th…
“So far so good,” Peter murmured as he got onto Route 874. Then something in his pocket shrilled, and he jumped almost out of his skin. It was the phone.
Peter pulled over and answered it, knowing perfectly well who it was. “Joe’s Deli,” he said, “Joe ain’t here.”
“Peter!” MJ said. “Can I kill somebody?”
“Hmm. Don’t think Florida state law permits that at the moment. Why?”
“The director. Maurice.”
“Maurice.”
“The ducks would be right to be insulted, honey.” She was whispering now. “The man does not know what he wants. My hair is right, but the light is wrong. The light is right, but the wind is wrong. Nothing is ever all right at once. He’s infuriating.”
Peter sighed. This new toy is going to be a mixed blessing, he thought. “And also,” said MJ. “Is my hair ‘carroty’?”
That one brought him up short. MJ’s hair was one of his favorite things about her. When they first met at his aunt’s house all those years ago, it was the first thing he noticed. The blaze of it in the sunlight was a conflagration in the evening, like embers. “Well, I call you ‘carrot-top’ every now and then, and you don’t seem to mind.”
“You don’t make it sound like the vegetable associations of the word should also be applied to the hair’s owner,” MJ hissed. “Which Maurice does.”
“Ignore him,” Peter said. “He’s a loony.”
“Murder would be quicker. He suggested I go blonde.”
“Definitely a head case,” Peter said. “Plainly having difficulty with reality.”
MJ sighed. “It’s good to hear you say that. Oh gosh… here he comes. I’d better get on with it. Thanks, honey.”
“De nada. Have fun.”
She snorted at him, and hung up.
Peter put the phone away again, resisting the urge to turn it off. This is the first day she’s got hers, he thought. If I turn it off, she’ll kill me. I can cope with one day of this.
As long as that’s all it is.…
He finally reached Kavanagh’s address, turning into the parking lot of a small professional building, the kind where doctors and dentists have their dwelling. Its lobby even had a corrugated noticeboard. Even as he had thought, there were indeed three doctors, two dentists, a chiropractor, an orthopedist, and a company called Dextro Sugar International. Underneath, in smaller letters, the sign said “DR. LIAM KAVANAGH.” Peter raised his eyebrows, wondering how all the dentists felt about the company name, and went upstairs.
Peter walked up the single flight of stairs to the next level of the building, and walked around past the dentists and so forth to the door of Dextro Sugar. He knocked.
The door was pulled open by one of the single tallest people Peter had ever seen. Liam Kavanagh was seven feet tall and a bit. He stooped—Peter suspected this was likely to be a habit—and looked down at Peter the way Gulliver would have looked down at Lilliputians. “You Parker?” he said.
“That’s me.”
He took Peter’s arm and pulled him in, then slammed the door behind him as if there were enemy agents outside. Peter managed not to react to this as if he was in a fight situation—mostly because Kavanagh was just too unusual to take seriously. He looked like a beanstalk wearing a polo shirt and jeans and a white lab coat, and big horn-rimmed glasses—the biggest and thickest ones Peter thought he had ever seen. No one, Peter thought, could possibly be that nearsighted without needing to wear a radar box around their neck.
“You want some coffee?” said Dr. Kavanagh. His accent was purest New York Bronx.
“Uh, thanks, I just had lunch.”
“It’s good coffee.”
“Do you make the sugar for it?”
Kavanagh smiled. It was a wry smile, one that spoke of a very wicked sense of humor. “Caught the ‘Dextro,’ did you? No, I drink mine black.”
“Milk,” Peter said, “and two sugars. Thanks.”
Kavanagh produced a couple of mugs and poured coffee from a filter-coffee set on one side. “It’s a general tag,” he said, “that’s all. Our kind of life runs on dextro-rotatory molecules, ones that bend light to the right when cr
ystallized out. Levo-rotatory ones don’t do us much good. The ‘sugar’—” He shrugged. “It’s a private joke. What is it exactly that I can do for you, Parker?”
“May I show you a specimen of some material I found?”
Kavanagh sat down in a chair by a desk with a computer and many books on it, and leaned over to clear off a spot on a small side table. “Right there, if it can sit on a table unprotected.”
Peter produced the thermos. Kavanagh looked at it and said, “Nice! European.”
“Is it really?” Peter said.
Kavanagh nodded. “Better than our local brands, by and large. Whatcha got in there?”
Peter opened the container, and on the clean, white composite tabletop, dumped out the piece of smoke. Kavanagh leaned over it like a vulture examining a potential piece of prey, his eyebrows going higher and higher as he gazed. Then he glanced up at Peter. The expression was not entirely interest or surprise; there was some envy mixed in it. “West Coast connections?” he said.
“I have a few,” Peter said, though he doubted they were the kind that Kavanagh meant.
“You are a genteel and nonviolent-looking young man,” Kavanagh said, leaning back in his chair again. “Normally not one who I would assume was involved in industrial espionage, or any other kind. Otherwise I would have to ask you serious questions about how you got this out of Livermore. They were the last ones to be working seriously on hydrogel that I know about for sure.”
“Can you tell me something about this?”
“Sorry?” Kavanagh said, looking at Peter for a moment as if he had just arrived from Mars. “You’ve stolen this, but you don’t know what it is?”
“I didn’t steal it,” Peter said.
“Let’s put it this way, then,” Kavanagh said, leaning farther back and folding his arms. “You have—come by? come into?—a piece of a substance which is presently sufficiently rare that stable examples of it exist in only three places on the planet. Not that the technique of its making is a secret. It’s simply involved, and requires a lot of specialized equipment and expertise. But you don’t know what it is… and you’ve come to me to ask me to tell you about it.”
“That’s about right,” Peter said, getting slightly annoyed. “Can you help me? Or should I try the orthodontist next door?”
Kavanagh gave him a long look, and then began to laugh. He took a drink of his own coffee, and then toasted Peter with it. “All right,” he said. “This is a peculiar situation, but not illegal—that’s my gut feeling. But when we’re finished, I wish you’d tell me where you got this. For real.”
The doctor sat down by the table again, and prodded the hydrogel. “It’s an accident, you know,” he said.
“It is?”
“Was, originally. They were looking for a spin-off from clathrate technology. You know what a clathrate is?”
Peter nodded. That was fairly elementary biochemistry, and he was much more than an elementary biochemist. “It’s a sort of latticework or cage of atoms of one element, sometimes more than one. The cage holds another atom, a guest atom, trapped inside. The substance produced by that structure often has properties that don’t have any relation to what a normal compound of those elements would behave like.”
Kavanagh nodded. “Right. They were looking at ways to extend clathrate structure, make it more complex—possibly increase the number of atoms which could be held in one of these cages, thereby producing materials with new and unpredictable behaviors. So they tried something unusual. They mixed oil and water.”
“Can’t have gotten them very far,” Peter said.
“Well, at normal heats and pressures, it wouldn’t. Specifically, they were using silica oils, which are not structurally similar to normal oils or lipids. Then they added water, and fractional amounts of other compounds, and they mixed them together under high temperature and considerable pressure.” Kavanagh grinned. “And when they did that, something happened.” He nudged the little piece of smoke. “This.”
Peter looked from it to Kavanagh. “What’s it do?”
“Do? It doesn’t do anything. It just sits there.” Kavanagh took another swig of coffee.
“No, I mean… what’s it for?”
“Ah!” Kavanagh said. “They’re still working on that. But what I can tell you is that this is one of the most stable compounds ever to be produced. I don’t mean nonreactive, as such, nor do I mean inert. I mean stable. It resists being changed. The whole molecular structure of the thing simply resists being shifted out of its present state into any other, and that makes it very valuable.”
“Why?”
“Here. Have you held it?”
“Not for long…”
Kavanagh picked it up, felt it for a moment, and then slapped the piece of hydrogel into Peter’s hand. Once again he felt its great lightness. It hardly felt there at all. There was also a strange, friendly warmth to it.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Kavanagh said. “The Scientific American articles mentioned that odd feel in the hand. They called it ‘re-ambient heat.’ Like something else is there, isn’t it?”
Peter nodded, almost reluctantly. “I’d think it was alive, if I didn’t know better.”
“No chance of that. However, you don’t need to be alive to be useful.”
He turned away from Peter and went over to several very crowded cabinets, deeper in the office. “Ah,” he said, reaching up to one, and came down with a big square-headed hammer. Peter looked at it, and Kavanagh said, “May I? Thank you.”
He took the hydrogel, put it up onto a workbench. “Here,” Kavanagh said. He took the sledgehammer two-handed, and swung it at the hydrogel with all his might.
The hammer bounced. The hydrogel compressed no more when struck than it had when Peter poked it with his finger. “Care to try?” Kavanagh said.
“Uh, thank you, yes—” Peter took the sledgehammer, took aim, and hit the hydrogel, hard—no doubt much harder than Kavanagh suspected he hit it. The hammer bounced. There was a spatter of sparks from where the hammer hit the bench top, but nothing else. The feeling of hitting the hydrogel was like hitting a mattress, but one with more bounce.
“Not strictly an inelastic collision,” Kavanagh said. “Not elastic, either. Like something yielding under the pressure, and then throwing the hammer back. Interesting, isn’t it?”
Peter nodded.
“Watch this,” Kavanagh said. He took the bit of hydrogel off the countertop now, came over, and handed it to Peter. Then he turned away, and when he turned back again, he was holding an orange canister with a crooked nozzle. He thumbed a ring valve by the nozzle, struck a match on his countertop, and lit the nozzle. Hissing, a blue flame leapt out.
“Now wait a—!” Peter started to say, but it was already too late. Kavanagh had already brought the flame down on the piece of hydrogel in his hand. He flinched—then realized that flinching didn’t matter. The flame splattered and spread an inch and a half above his hand, and he felt almost no heat at all. No heat whatsoever was transmitted to Peter through the hydrogel itself.
“Go on,” Kavanagh said. “Put it down there.” Peter put the hydrogel down on some papers on Kavanagh’s desk. Kavanagh lowered the torch to the hydrogel again, held it there.
Nothing whatsoever happened, to the hydrogel or the papers; nothing scorched or even curled. “Pick it up,” Kavanagh said to Peter.
Peter did, waving a hand over it first to sense any residual heat. Nothing. He touched it with a finger. It was cool. The hydrogel sat there in its smoky uncertainty, completely unchanged.
He picked it up and looked at Kavanagh. “It doesn’t hold heat.”
“It’s a peerless insulator, certainly,” Kavanagh said. “So the SciAm article said. It’s mechanically stable, chemically and physically stable, and as you see, stable in terms of molecular vibration—heat and, I would also suspect, radiation.”
Peter put it down between them and sat down again, looking at it. “What you could do with
this stuff…”
“Yes, but it’s not easy to make. A lot of heat and pressure is required, and the process as described in the journals is very labor intensive. But once made, the substance resists everything you can do to it. It can’t be broken, bent, marred, eaten, or even touched by most forces known to us. To cut it like that—” He shook his head. “How they did that I don’t know: it might be a little more manipulable when it’s new. Later, I suspect the molecular structure would have so robustly asserted its new integrity that it wouldn’t allow any further manipulation.”
He paused for a moment. “Applications—I know, because they mentioned it in the article, that they were thinking of using it for the tiles in the Space Shuttle.”
“Really!” Peter said, straightening.
“Sure. You felt how light it is. An average Shuttle tile is much heavier. Shape that into a tile of the same size and thickness—” Kavanagh shrugged. “You could decrease the Shuttle’s weight by, oh, eighty percent. Think of how much more payload the beasts could carry then. They might actually become cost-effective.” He smiled. “But think of all the other industrial uses, for example. This—” He gestured at the little piece of smoke. “This stuff could change our world. It’s simply one of the most extraordinary compounds ever invented.”
Peter nodded.
“So, the only question I have for you at this point,” Kavanagh said, leaning confidentially toward Peter, “is—where exactly did you find it?”
Peter opened his mouth, and shut it, and then opened it again and said, “In a swamp.”
Kavanagh snorted, and then smiled. “You would do me a great favor,” he said, “if, in return for this information, the next time you’re passing through that swamp, you would pick me up a bit. This isn’t exactly Livermore—” He looked around the rather shambolic combination of office and lab space in which they sat. “But I wouldn’t mind taking a run at this stuff myself. Trying to work out how to make it on the cheap. An indestructible substance, light as a feather, tougher than steel, impervious to anything you can throw at it—” He shook his head, and looked slightly wistful. “The world ought to have this stuff.”
Peter looked at him. “We could try leaving you a sample,” he said.
