Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets

by Kate Moretti

  It had all been worth it to get rid of him and put good Queen Anya on the Sandstone Throne. Still, it was time for Katie to put the failed experiment aside and do the hour-long exercises Dr. Jablonski had prescribed for her.

  An hour later, she was just finishing up on the gym mat on the floor when her best friend stuck her head full of curly red hair into her bedroom.

  “Your mother said I would find you here,” Rachel Zilber said in her overly precise English—her father, back in old Warsaw, had been a history professor. “I hope I am not interrupting.”

  “Naw, I’m done anyway. Toss me that towel, will you, Ray?”

  The redhead did so then reached down to help her off the mat, but Katie slapped her hand away. “I can get up myself. Else what’s all this sweatin’ for?” Grunting, she lifted herself up on her powerful arms, gained a little traction with her still-sluggish legs, and collapsed, panting, into her wheelchair. Rachel developed a sudden intense interest in the hallway outside Katie’s bedroom. The walls were the same rust color as the rest of the house.

  “So how’s canal digging goin’?” Katie asked after gulping down half the pitcher of water her mother had left on a corner of the lab table, as far as possible from all the electronic parts.

  Rachel sat down on the bed with a sigh. “Better you shouldn’t ask.”

  “I never did get that expression you like so much,” Katie said. “Why would it be better if I didn’t ask? It’s always best to face reality, don’t you think?”

  “You may have a point, but where I come from, not everybody could bear to,” Rachel said.

  Now it was Katie’s turn to look away. Rachel Zilber had been one of almost half a million Jews forced to live in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. Trying to forget what was going around her as people slowly starved to death on the inadequate rations the Nazis allowed, she’d written pulp science fiction stories on her typewriter—stories that sprang to impossible life, a whole universe emerging from that curly red head like Athena bounding out of Zeus’s forehead.

  So here they all were on Mars, but the place was even drier than the Panhandle had been.

  “The channel north of Lodzhin was so silted up, it wasn’t worth clearing, so we’re cutting a brand-new channel, taking advantage of some gullies a half-kilometer to the west,” Rachel said. “But it’s still hard work, and the construction teams need close supervision. You wouldn’t believe how many of these guys are trying to sabotage the work. But why? The water benefits everyone!”

  “Lotta soldiers out of work since your twin cut the size of the army in half,” Katie said.

  Rachel reddened. “Queen Anya isn’t my twin!”

  “No, she ain’t,” Katie said drily, “she’s actually you, how you liked to imagine yourself when you were writing ‘Zap-Gun Jack.’”

  Rachel’s eyes darted left and right. She leaned closer to Katie and hissed, “I thought we agreed never to talk about that!” They both were afraid that if they stopped believing in Rachel’s made-up reality, they’d find themselves back in their old reality—Rachel facing death at the hands of the Nazis in 1942 Warsaw, and Katie stuck on her parents’ failing farm in the scrappily independent but desperately poor Texas of the twenty-second century, where she had first read Rachel’s tale of adventure on a lushly living Venus, “Zap-Gun Jack Flash and the Dame-Eating Monster of Venus,” and dared to dream.

  Katie sighed and rubbed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Ray. It’s just that it’s been a long day for me, too.”

  “Still no luck building that trensitor?”

  “It’s called a transistor. And no, I ain’t had no darn luck.”

  “What’s the problem? I thought you said you had all the materials you needed.”

  “I thought so, too. Especially when I figgered out that all I had to do to get my semiconductor was crack open one of these here primitive radios.” She wagged her chin at a toaster oven-sized radio that lay in pieces on the work table.

  Rachel frowned. “How come you always say the radios here are primitive? They look perfectly ordinary to me.”

  “They would, Ray, because you came here from 1942 Poland. Y’all still use vacuum tubes, which are bigger’n a breadbox and burn out all the time. That’s exactly what I’m trying to replace with transistors. Luckily, even a 1940s-type barn of a radio has some electronics in it, like this sweet baby here.” She rolled over to the table and picked up a pea-sized rounded cylinder with wires sticking out of it. “It’s called a cat’s whisker diode.”

  “Really? A cat’s whisker?”

  “Yeah, on account of these here wires. Not that it looks all that much like—Thumper, git off my lab table! Scat! Naughty kitty!” An overweight orange tabby thumped onto the floor and stalked away, his tail held high.

  “Anyhoo, these diodes have germanium in them, and that gives me my semiconductor,” Katie said. “Mars ain’t got a native plastics industry on account of there ain’t no oil here, but I got as much as I need off a shipping pallet from Earth. I was a little worried about where I’d get the gold foil for the contacts, but I guess it’s a good thing to have royalty on your side. Your twin told the palace jeweler to give me anything I wanted.” Katie made a face. “He’s a creepy old guy, and he kept asking me whether I wouldn’t like some nice earrings instead!”

  Rachel covered her mouth but couldn’t completely stifle a giggle at the thought of her blunt-speaking Texas farm-girl friend running around in fancy gold earrings. “It sounds like you have it all worked out,” she said once she could hold a straight face.

  “Yeah, ’ceptin’ it don’t work.”

  Rachel drummed her fingers on her chin. “Maybe you should take Anya up on her other offer. You know.”

  “You mean set up a lab in the palace? Uh-uh, not for me. Them dried-up old excuses for scientists they got on this planet won’t take orders from no Earth girl, no how, and I ain’t inclined to sit at a desk and give orders to a bunch of old farts. Plus, none of them believe it can be done. And maybe they’re right.”

  Rachel’s eyes went wide. “You can’t be thinking of giving up!”

  Katie slouched down in her wheelchair. If Ma saw her sitting like that, she’d bawl her out, and rightfully so. But at the moment, she didn’t care. “Maybe I’m doing it wrong, or I ain’t got the right materials. It’s not like I can go back and consult the manual. The book I read was one I salvaged from that abandoned library out the Abilene road, a piece from my old home. It’s still in my old room, or it would be if those damn Dixies hadn’t burned the place down.” She swiped her bangs away from her eyes, wishing she could wipe away the mental image of Alabama rednecks looting her room on their way to raid Abilene. “It worked back there, though. I made a whole passel of field-effect transistors from parts I found in abandoned houses, and I would’ve built my own computer, given enough time. I thought making a point-contact transistor, which was the first kind that was invented in 1947 back where we come from, would be easier.”

  “Which is what you want to do here, too, right?”

  “I was kinda hoping I wouldn’t have to do all the work. Once I prove it’s possible to build a solid-state transistor, even them lunkhead scientists they got here on Mars oughta get excited about it and start crankin’ them out themselves. And we’ll have a whole electronics revolution here, just like the end of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first back on Earth.” She scowled and clenched her fists. “But none of that is gonna work if I can’t make this gówniane ostokoty carry a current!”

  “Kaitlyn! Language!” Ma called from the kitchen.

  “Your mother has really amazing hearing,” Rachel said.

  “Yeah, but when I ask for money, she goes stone deaf.”

  “I heard that, too, Kaitlyn!”

  “What is it you’re afraid of, Katie?” Rachel asked after a pause
.

  “Here’s the thing, Ray. You know how I told you that back in the real—well, back where we come from,” Katie added quickly, seeing her friend’s green eyes widen. “Back there, Mars is a cold, dead world, with a whisper of a carbon dioxide atmosphere.”

  Rachel nodded. “I remember you told me that. And Venus isn’t a jungle. It’s an oven, pitch-black on the surface because there are sulfuric acid clouds overhead. But so what? That’s not the case here.”

  Katie leaned forward. “Here’s why it matters, Ray. One reason Mars don’t have an atmosphere thick enough to breathe back there is that it’s so much smaller than the Earth—so its gravity is only a fraction of Earth’s.”

  Rachel smiled. “That’s right. That’s why I weighed just over fifty kilos on Earth—before the ghetto, anyway—but only twenty kilos here on Mars.”

  Katie scowled. “Don’t rub it in, Slim Jane. The point is, Mars is the same size in both universes, and its gravity is the same. But here, it’s got a perfectly nice, breathable atmosphere, no thinner than at the top of a mountain on Earth. So gravity don’t work the same here.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “Yeah, I do. How come it’s so easy to travel between the planets here?”

  “It doesn’t seem so easy to me. You know I don’t like drifting around weightless in space. I get nauseous.”

  “Your delicate stomach ain’t the point, either, Ray. In real—that is, in the history I read—it took a huge effort to put people in space, so we never got any further than the Moon. We might have made it to Mars, eventually, if those jihadi terrorists hadn’t destroyed New York and the old United States hadn’t fallen apart. But here, rockets fly back and forth all around the solar system, easy as you please, just because it was like that in all the pulp science fiction stories that inspired you. I’m telling you, gravity ain’t the same deal here. And if gravity ain’t, the electromagnetic force likely ain’t, either. Maybe it’s weaker, too.”

  Rachel puckered her lips. “If so, you could design some experiments to test that theory out, right?”

  “I suppose I could, but I’m not a real scientist. I’m only a tinkerer. No, no”—she waved her hands as Rachel started to object—“I’m really not, Ray. And even if I could think up a way to test my theory, I don’t remember all the books I read back in my old home so well as to be able to compare all the results. The long and the short of it is, it may be impossible to reinvent the transistor—or at least, I may never be able to do it.”

  Rachel stood up and put her hand on Katie’s shoulder. “This doesn’t sound like you, Katie. You always say you’re not a quitter. Maybe what you should do is just put the whole project aside and take a vacation. It’s only a couple of weeks until school starts again.” Both girls were already sophomores at the planet’s top academic institution, Wandanian University. “Anya is always pestering us to come visit her at the palace. Why not take her up on it?”

  “You’re right. Maybe I will,” Katie said, without enthusiasm. She eyed Rachel as her friend stepped over to the lab table and began picking things up. “Hey, Ray. Be careful with that stuff.”

  “I’m not as clumsy as I used to be. Honest, I’m getting better. I haven’t dropped any rocks on my feet at the worksite at all this week,” Rachel said. She picked up the centimeter-long piece of gold-foil-wrapped plastic Katie had thrown at the wall earlier. “Is this little thing what all the fuss is about?”

  “Yeah, but Ray, be careful—”

  “Oops! Oh, no,” Rachel said, reaching her hand into the water pitcher. “I’ll fish it out—a little water won’t hurt it, will it?”

  “Well, water’s a good conductor—Ray, for Pete’s sake!” Katie made a grab for the device, but it was too late—Rachel had already split the gold foil with her dirty thumbnail. She dropped it on the table as both of her hands flew to cover her mouth.

  “I wrecked it, didn’t I?” she said in a small voice.

  Katie turned the plastic triangle over, held it up to the light, and peered at it. “I don’t rightly know, Ray. You know, I think I remember reading that one of the inventors of the first transistor accidentally dunked it in water. That actually made it work…” She slapped her forehead with her free hand. “Of course! The gold foil is supposed to have a slit in it! How stupid of me! Ray, you’re a genius!”

  “I thought I was a klutz.”

  “You’re a genius klutz!” Katie put the transistor in her lap carefully and rolled back to the lab table. She hooked it up to a battery and a little voltage meter and squealed with excitement when the red hand twitched on its analog dial. “It works! By gum, you did it, Ray!”

  “No, you did it, Katie!”

  “Okay, we’ll compromise. We did it!” Katie whooped and popped a wheelie. Catching her excitement, Rachel reached for her hands and hauled her out of the wheelchair. When Katie’s Ma came running in to see what all the noise was about, she got dragged into the makeshift hora dance, until both girls collapsed, giggling, onto the bed and Mrs. Webb leaned dizzily against the wall. “You’ve got to take it easy, Kaitlyn. The doctor said—”

  “Fiddlesticks, Ma!” Katie sat up and shook the dark hair out of her face. “If this don’t call for a celebration, I don’t know what does!”

  Ma folded her arms. “Why? What did you do?” Katie explained, but Ma shook her head. “I don’t get it, hon. What’s the big deal if you ran a little electricity through that doodad?”

  “What’s the big deal? I’ll show you what the big deal is! Bring that radio here from the living room!”

  “Oh, no, Kaitlyn, not the good one Pa’s using to try to learn this crazy Marpolski language…”

  “Yes, that one! I’m not gonna break it. I’m gonna make it work better!”

  “Uh-huh. I’ve heard that one before.” Ma wagged her finger at Katie. “If the radio don’t work after you get through monkeying it, you’re paying to replace it!”

  Katie promised, but she wasn’t worried. For the sake of science, Rachel’s double, Queen Anya, was willing to supply her with almost anything. She waited impatiently while Ma lugged the sofa-sized piece of furniture into her bedroom, refusing all of Rachel’s offers of help. Katie stopped her from plugging it in and attacked its rear panel with her trusty Filipski head screwdriver while Ma stood watching with bitten lip and folded arms. Rachel hovered, offering useless advice until Katie yelled at her to back off. Her lower back was sending out lightning bolts of pain as the price of all that capering around, and she was dropping huge disgusting globules of sweat all over uninsulated wires and contacts, so her temper was short. When she finally succeeded in wrestling a single vacuum tube out of the guts of the radio, it took all her self-control not to shatter it against the wall but to lay it down carefully on the lab table, attach some extra wire to the leads of the new point contact transistor, and install it in place of the tube.

  “All right, plug her in,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” Rachel asked. “You’ve left the back off, and there are loose wires and things all over the—”

  “I said plug her in! Now!”

  Rachel looked at Mrs. Webb, who shrugged. “It’s on your head, hush puppy,” Ma said.

  Katie gritted her teeth and tried not to scream as Rachel put the plug in the wall, a task she could just about be trusted to complete without electrocuting herself. When she heard the plug go in, Katie edged around to the front of the set and turned the big black power knob with a click, mentally ordering the damn set not to short out in a cloud of sparks and smoke. Instead, it warmed up with a satisfied hum, just like usual—maybe a little faster than usual, though that could have been her imagination. “O IS FOR OSTOKOTY, OUR FRIEND THE THISTLECAT, BOYS AND GIRLS,” a voice boomed.

  Mrs. Webb clapped her hands over her ears. “All right, you’ve proved your point. Turn it
off!”

  Katie held up her hand. “Hold on a second, Ma.” A second voice was bleeding through under a crackling storm of static. “Ray, do you hear what I think I hear?”

  Rachel’s face had gone chalk white, something Katie had often read about but never seen in person. She might have been a marble statue with curly red hair. And Katie didn’t blame her, because she was flooded with sick dread herself at what the voice was saying: “…forces all in place… Radio Marpolska studio all under control… soon as we neutralize the palace guard…”

  Rachel came to life. “Your phone! Where’s your phone, Mrs. Webb?”

  “In the kitchen. What on earth…?”

  Rachel dashed out of the room with Katie right behind her in the wheelchair. What if she knocks the phone on the floor and breaks it? Katie fretted. What if fumblefingers here forgets the number? But Rachel had already gotten through by the time Katie rolled up a tad too fast and knocked the phone table over with a crash.

  “Another coup attempt, Anya!” Rachel was yelling. “We heard them saying they’ve taken over the radio station and they’re going after the palace guard and—hello? HELLO?” Rachel dropped the phone on the stone floor, where it did indeed break, and yelled a lot of words in Polish that made gówniane ostokoty sound like—well, a bunch of thistlecat poop. “They’ve cut the phone lines to the palace!” Rachel said when she got herself under control. “We’ve got to get into Krakowicz and do something before the palace is overrun!”

  Mrs. Webb had come into the room. Her eyes were wide as she took in what had happened. “Mike has the pickup truck,” she said. “He took it over to the Podolskis to see if he could trade them for some sprinkler piping. All we got here is the tractor.”

  “It’ll have to do,” said Rachel, and Mrs. Webb tossed Katie the keys.