by Rich Handley
What was so interesting about the plans and specifications? They weren’t the thousand-pound gorilla in the room. That honor belonged to the length of pipe that came with the proposal and now lay where it had been tossed on top of a jumble of correspondence and scrolls on the old doctor’s worktable.
Doctor Hiatt stopped abruptly in his wanderings, and said, “Yes.”
Darius jumped.
“S-sir?”
“You say the discovery of this… aluminum came about by accident?” Doctor Hiatt said.
“Yes, sir. Sidd. Professor Sidd. A colleague. Some aluminum was tainted with silicon, and when he heated it to its melting point it, it formed an alloy,” Darius said, his mouth sand-dry. “Well, it took him several attempts to find the right proportions, of course. But when he showed it to me, I thought it was the perfect medium from which to mill pipes for my irrigation project. It’s strong, lightweight, resistant to corrosion, easy to machine, and with both aluminum and silicon in such abundance, we have a near-endless supply—and we will need it, Doctor Hiatt, I know it. There are countless uses to which we can put this alloy once it’s…”
“Yes,” Doctor Hiatt said sharply when Darius paused for breath. “It is quite miraculous. I am, however, attempting to ascertain the inspiration for the miracle.”
Doctor Hiatt’s suspicions didn’t come as a surprise to Darius. He had come prepared with what didn’t, he hoped, sound like an over-rehearsed response and he used it now, complete with a submissive grin and embarrassed avoidance of the old orangutan’s eyes:
“I’m sorry to say, sir, Professor Sidd’s discovery was not so much an inspiration as it was the result of sloppiness. He used a vessel that hadn’t been properly cleaned.”
Doctor Hiatt made a rumbling sound in his throat. Darius couldn’t tell if it was an angry growl or phlegm, but he plunged on. He had already climbed to the top of the tree; he might as well reach for the top banana.
“But inspiration or accident, sir, the fact is that there is so much…”
“We,” Doctor Hiatt said sharply, “will determine what are the facts, Professor Darius. That will be all for now.”
Darius was surprised. “S-sir?”
“I said that will be all.”
“But the project…?”
Doctor Hiatt peered at the young chimp with an expression Darius couldn’t read and said, “You will be informed,” before turning his attention to the papers he picked up from his worktable. Darius gulped, then rose and got out of there as quietly as he could.
* * *
Several tense weeks passed during which Darius stayed well clear of where he had hidden the evidence of his crime (and he had, in his anxiety, begun to think of it as a crime) and saw accusation in the eyes of every gorilla and orangutan who looked his way. He had started to berate himself for his stupidity and arrogance in thinking he could outwit all those wise old heads with his juvenile lies, and he wondered why they were waiting so long to come for him.
But it was, in the end, a lot of worry over nothing. One morning, his supervisor, Doctor Shia, informed him, casually and in passing, that the plans for the irrigation system had been approved, in full, and would proceed immediately, good job, good job. Darius was speechless. In that moment, he felt as though he could breathe again. Sidd, who tried without success to hide his own shock, replied that he had been telling them all along not to worry, hadn’t he? Kya allowed herself a few moments to let the news sink in, then said: “Promise me you won’t do this again.”
That shouldn’t be a difficult promise to make, he thought.
Except now that the danger had passed and they had gotten away with it, he couldn’t stop his imagination from doing what it did.
* * *
Once Darius finalized the irrigation plans, he and Sidd worked with the foundry making the aluminum and the factory that would mill the raw material into the necessary piping and pieces of structural support. By the end of a month, the first aluminum was being laid in the fields while the lightweight main ducts were starting to be horsed up to the reservoir high in the surrounding hills.
In all that time, they were too busy to give any thought to Taylor’s legacy, but once all the new processes had been implemented and were running smoothly, Darius found he couldn’t stop thinking about the signaling devices. Communication between the Academy and the work crew at the reservoir was through written messages delivered by riders on horseback, a process that could take better than two days. When big problems arose, that time could be crucial, even fatal—but imagine if they could communicate almost instantaneously? Such an ability could save not just time, but lives.
He didn’t bother to mention to Kya when, the next morning, he went to retrieve the devices from their hiding place. But only after taking every precaution to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
* * *
By the time the first water from the new irrigation system was flowing into the fields, Darius and Sidd had solved the mystery of the suspected power source in the signaling devices. It consisted of cells of oppositely charged chemicals that converted its own energy into electrical energy. While they couldn’t hope to duplicate the compact units found in the devices, they had soon cobbled together a crude approximation that, when connected to one signaling device, produced a sustained crackle that Darius suspected was the sound of electricity itself.
And when both devices were connected to their own, individual power source—Sidd suggested they call it a “cache”—and the correct button depressed, they discovered, to their astonishment, that they could send their voices from one device to the other. This excited them to no end, until common sense won out with the realization that to present this finding to the Academy would be suicide—and, as it turned out, they couldn’t duplicate the result in anything they devised. With a little improvisation, though, they had soon rigged a crude device that sent a steady electrical charge from a cache through a copper wire. By interrupting the electrical charge, they could create breaks in the electrical hiss and crackle that could be heard clearly by a receiving device at the opposite end.
Kya didn’t have to be told what they were up to. Darius’ frequent absences and his bad, stammered excuses were all the evidence she needed that he was hiding something. Once confronted, he confessed everything, and as much as she wanted to be angry with them, what they had created was too fascinating to ignore. In fact, she found her mathematician’s mind going instantly to work devising a simple code that translated letters and words into the short bursts of various lengths and combinations on the static-filled line. With a little practice, they were sending messages from one station to another almost as fast and as fluently as speaking.
* * *
“…And we can’t ever show it to the Academy,” Darius said, late one night as he and Sidd worked by flickering firelight at the engineer’s workbench. The copper wire and caches for their communication device were carefully hidden, while the transmission terminals could be quickly disassembled into their component parts and scattered on the tabletop with other random pieces strewn there.
“Why not?” Sidd said, hunched over to squint at the delicate connection he was attempting in the dim light.
“Why not?” Darius said, manning his friend’s distracted surprise. “They were suspicious enough about the aluminum, and we had a perfectly logical explanation for its so-called discovery.”
“You should thank the Lawgiver I’m such a renowned slob.”
“So what do we tell them this time? You accidentally put some electricity in a dish contaminated with copper wire?”
Sidd cast an irritated glance at the flickering torch over his shoulder and bent closer to his work. “A different kind of accident. Static electricity, a stray bit of wire… or something. Anyway, how are we supposed to keep this to ourselves? You know you can’t keep a secret to save your life.”
He sat up and looked at his handiwork. Then he reached up and flipped the lever on his transmission terminal
, and sat back with a sharp bark of surprise as the short length of wire attached to it began first to glow, then flare suddenly into a short, brilliant burst of light. The wire was ruined, reduced almost to ash.
Sidd looked up with eyes as wide as a baby discovering sweets and shouted, “Wow! Did you see that?”
“How could I miss it?” Darius replied, rubbing his eyes. “It was almost like looking into the sun. What did you do?”
“Nothing. I’ve just been trying out different elements to see if I could find something as efficient as copper but more common to use for wire. I connected the wire to the cache and… poof!”
“Did the cache experience some sort of surge? What kind of wire were you using?”
Sidd inspected the cache, looking over the terminals and touching tentative fingers to it. “No, it’s fine. The wire was made of ore refined from wolfram,” he said. “I was fairly sure it wouldn’t be viable because of its high melting point, but I had some so I tried it anyway…” He stopped and looked in surprise at Darius.
“Electricity plus resistance produces heat,” Darius said.
Sidd nodded furiously. “Wolfram has a high resistance to heat.”
“So at a certain temperature, it starts to radiate the excess energy as light.”
“But it quickly passes that stage and reaches its melting point.”
“So we would need to control the rate of the wolfram’s oxidation.”
“How?”
Darius bared his teeth and laughed. “We’re smart chimps. We should be able to figure it out.”
* * *
“What do you call it again?” Kya asked, her awed expression awash in the steady white glow of light from the glass cylinder inches from her face on the workbench.
“The illuminated orb,” Darius said.
“It’s magnificent,” she said and quickly switched it off. “And it will get us killed.”
“No, no, this invention springs directly from the discoveries made coming up with the signaling device,” Sidd said.
“Which we still haven’t told anyone about.”
“Then we really should get started on how we’re going to accomplish that.”
“This is serious, Sidd,” Darius said.
“Yes, it is, and not just because I’m worried about our skins. No matter how the discovery’s been made, it’s been made and now we have to share it with the world. Look at what we’ve been able to accomplish in less than a year. Imagine what we could have done if we didn’t have to work in secret, in the dark.” He flipped the switch and the illuminated orb began to glow. “The Lawgiver is good, but our religion is science, and science doesn’t have any boundaries. Certainly not based on ancient superstitions and archaic rules. Look at this… we’ve given every ape a way out of the darkness, but we’re prohibited from sharing it because of its source.”
Kya said, “You’re just one chimp. You can’t fight the whole world by yourself.”
“I’m not by myself,” Sidd said, grinning at the glowing orb. “I’ve got science on my side.”
“Some common sense would be more useful.”
Sidd waved his hand dismissively. “Relax, Kya. We’ve kept everything well concealed and only work on it late at night, after everyone else has gone home. No one suspects anything.”
“Suspects?”
The voice from the doorway froze Darius in place.
“Quite the contrary, Professor Sidd.”
Darius couldn’t make himself move, but he didn’t need to turn to know who it was.
“We’ve known almost from the very start.”
Doctor Hiatt.
* * *
This wasn’t like any trouble Darius had ever found himself in. He had been cuffed and yelled at by his parents, made to sit in corners, berated in front of colleagues, and once even threatened with dismissal from his studies at the Academy for a prank that had gone wrong, but nothing that ever rose to the level of requiring an armed gorilla escort.
The hard-faced soldiers stood at attention in the doorway while Doctor Hiatt stepped into the laboratory. Kya grabbed Darius’ hand and Sidd seemed to suddenly shrink into himself. The old orangutan didn’t speak or look at them. He went straight to the workbench, casting a long gaze at the glowing orb and the rest of their contraband technology. He flipped the switch off, then on, then off again. After a few moments, he grunted and turned, leaving as he came, through a wall of gorillas.
“Bring them,” he said as he went, and the soldiers streamed in, each of them grabbing one of the frightened chimps roughly by the arm and yanking them out into the corridor, where still more soldiers waited. There, they were separated and marched away, too scared to protest. For all their conspiratorial talk, Darius had never really considered the possibility of arrest. He thought discovery of their work would result, at worst, in another innocent-sounding summons to Doctor Hiatt’s sanctum and… what? A stern lecture? The punishment, he realized now, surrounded by the gun-toting soldiers, would likely be far more severe.
He was brought outside and put onto the back of a wagon. One soldier faced front to drive the horses. Two more stood over Darius, arms at the ready. No one said a word while the wagon trotted through the night-darkened streets. There was no further sign of Kya or Sidd.
The wagon drove straight down the main boulevard outside the Academy, then beyond the city’s boundaries and out onto bumpy trails that, to Darius’ recollection, led nowhere. The first light of dawn illuminated unfamiliar terrain, a place Darius had not yet ventured in his secret explorations. Not yet… as though he would ever be free—if he even survived the day—to do anything ever again, he thought with a shiver.
They rode until the surrounding lush greenery gave way to dusty brown and gray and the rough trail rose into the stunted foothills of the Northern Mountains. It was there that they finally stopped, and, following the wave of a rifle barrel, Darius stumbled from the wagon and was shoved under a low-hanging ledge of rock that hid the mouth of a cavern. His gorilla guards had to stoop almost in half to fit beneath it, but they dragged him into the opening and, in the sudden darkness, he stumbled on the steeply inclined ramp. But several dozen yards down and into the darkness, the way took a series of sudden, sharp turns which, once navigated, opened into a large cavernous space. A hundred feet across and almost as high, the cavern’s walls were neatly ringed with openings to small side chambers, most of the openings of uniform size and shape, dug by the hands of apes. A rough wood table with a chair on either side of it sat in the center of the brightly lighted cavern.
The light from electrified illuminated orbs hanging high on the walls.
One of his escorts pushed Darius forward and growled, “Sit.” Then the gorillas turned smartly and marched back into the dark tunnel.
Darius walked tentatively across the cavern to take his seat, his hair bristling and his ears flattening against his skull. He couldn’t get a clear look at the glowing orbs themselves, but they appeared to be designed along the same lines as what he and Sidd had concocted in his lab. Had Doctor Hiatt been watching them so closely that he had already duplicated their work?
He would have a very long time to think about it, sitting in that cavern under the cold, accusing light of his own transgression.
* * *
The electric lights were like a sun stopped dead in its trek across the sky. How to mark the hours, much less the minutes, without any outside reference point? Outside, the shadow of a stick on the ground or the position of the sun or the moon in the sky was enough to show the hour, the time of the month, the month of the year. What to replace that with when those natural indicators weren’t available? Well, time was merely the sum of regular natural intervals, so if a reliable mechanical device could be substituted…
Darius wasn’t sure if he had fallen asleep or had just gone so deep into his own imagination that he had lost sight of the real world, but he was suddenly aware of Doctor Hiatt, standing on the other side of the table, looking down at h
im with hard, analytical eyes.
“Doctor Hiatt,” he gasped, starting to rise from his seat in an automatic gesture of respect. The old orangutan stopped him with a gesture.
“What were you thinking about?” the old orangutan said.
“Sir?”
“You were so lost in your thoughts, you failed to see my approach.”
Darius’ lips moved but he couldn’t speak.
Doctor Hiatt pulled the second chair from the table and sat. “We have been watching you, Professor Darius. You have scarcely moved for hours.”
“Kya,” Darius said, his voice dry and raspy, as much from fear as thirst. “Sidd. Where are they?”
“Your friends are unharmed, I give you my word,” Doctor Hiatt said.
“How… how do I know I can trust you?” Darius said, more surprised by his own words than was the orangutan at whom he threw them.
“Have I ever given you cause to question that trust?”
“You had me arrested,” Darius said in disbelief. He wondered why he wasn’t more frightened.
“A result, Professor, of your dishonesty, not mine,” Doctor Hiatt said.
That brought Darius up short, but before he could frame an answer, Doctor Hiatt again asked, “What were you thinking about?”
And again, almost without thinking, like he was still a student in the classroom, Darius responded to Doctor Hiatt’s question. “A… a time-keeping device, sir, utilizing a pendulum to regulate the intervals.”
Doctor Hiatt arched one brow. “But a pendulum’s interval would vary as its arc began to decay.”
“Yes, sir. A pendulum is ultimately unreliable and unstable, so I was designing a series of gears and levers that could mimic the pendulum but be easily regulated by the size of the gears.”
“And what would supply a reliable energy source to keep the gears turning?”
Darius frowned. “I haven’t quite worked that out. I was looking at some manner of spring or coil that could be tightly wound, with the gradual, regulated release of tension to drive the gears.”
