Vaz

by Laurence Dahners

  He was finally ready. He had his rescued sample of the alloy mounted and it had absorbed hydrogen he’d electrolyzed from distilled water overnight. It was in a new chamber he’d had machined just for this testing, complete with thermistors, neutron and radiation detectors and a small window behind which he’d mounted a camera. Everyone was out of the house so he began applying the high voltage, high frequency intermittent current that he thought of as “hammering” or driving the hydrogen protons into the alloy while trying to keep an eye on the temperature and the video at the same time.

  At first he sat forward on the edge of his seat as the temperature climbed.

  But then the temperature leveled off at about the temperature—he had calculated many times now—that should be achieved by the electrochemical processes in this setup.

  For a while he continued to sit attentively, thinking that there might have been a leveling off back at Querx. After all, he hadn’t followed the temperature there. It could have leveled off, then started going up again after a pause.

  Hours later, Vaz still slouched back in his chair, eyes on the screens but unseeing. The temperature remained the same.

  When his AI reminded him that he had a training session at Mike’s, he turned the experiment off, put on his sweats and headed out. He felt an ineffable sense of sadness at the failure of the experiment to reproduce its prior results.

  Walking into Mike’s he tried not to think about Pons and Fleischmann who had thought they had a wonderful finding, only to have it turn out to be irreproducible as well. He didn’t even think about the fact that he had an alloy that absorbed over a thousand times its own volume in hydrogen. Such an alloy would be worth a lot of money but Vaz was oblivious to that possibility. Even though that was what he had set out to develop, it wasn’t what he’d been thinking about for weeks now.

  Vaz hoped that a good exhausting session with Mike would clear his mind.

  Mike shook his head over the way Vaz attacked and punished the bags and training paddles. Mike had found a training partner for him and had Gettnor work in slow motion to throw his new partner. Then they simulated various submission holds.

  When their time was up, Mike said, “Hey, you remember when you came in you were looking for a real fight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you still interested?”

  Vaz got a distant look as he pondered his feelings. When he’d come in that first time he’d wanted to beat on someone as a surrogate for Davis. Now, he actually felt happy that Davis had fired him. He didn’t want to work for Davis anyhow.

  He realized that yesterday he would have said no. He had been happy yesterday. Doing his own research. No hassles from work.

  Well except he’d been sleeping on a pad in the basement.

  And he hadn’t seen his family.

  And he wondered how Lisanne was explaining his absence to Dante and Tiona.

  He realized he wasn’t happy after all. Now that the experiment had failed to reproduce, he was even less happy. He shrugged and answered, “Yes.”

  Mike said, “Remember Rich Durson, the guy you sparred with a while back? You laid him out with a punch?”

  Vaz nodded.

  “He’d signed up for an amateur MMA fight and paid the entrance fee. Their doctors won’t let him fight because he’s recently been knocked out. He’s hoping that someone will take his place and reimburse him the entrance fee.”

  “How much is the fee?”

  “Two hundred fifty.”

  “When’s the fight?”

  “Two weeks Thursday. You’d have to be there by 7. I’d be in your corner.”

  Vaz tilted his head a moment, then nodded once. “OK.”

  Mike said, “Remember that Durson was bigger than you? You’d be fighting up a weight class or two. You sure you’re up for that?”

  Vaz nodded.

  Mike watched Gettnor leave after they’d agreed on some additional training sessions before the fight. This fight, Mike had a feeling, would be horribly lopsided. However, he wasn’t sure which way. Gettnor sometimes seemed so clueless about fighting, but he was unbelievably powerful and frighteningly tireless. Sometimes it seemed that Gettnor moved so slowly and robotically that another fighter would be able to dance around him dishing it out, but then, unexpectedly, he would throw a lightning punch like the one that had knocked Durson out.

  Back home Vaz ordered parts to make a testing apparatus exactly like the one that had melted down at Querx. He’d found the specs for it in his AI. His first searches hadn’t used the correct keywords and he’d thought that its design was only on the Querx servers. Now, once the parts came in he could exactly repeat the bizarre experiment. It wouldn’t have the built in thermistors, radiation detectors or the window for a camera that his new one had had. But the first order of business was to reproduce the experiment and he was pretty frustrated that he’d tried to do it with a completely different chamber. Though perhaps I don’t need to reproduce it all the way to meltdown, he thought with a grin. As he sat looking at the plan for the apparatus he was replicating from the one at Querx, a chill went over him. The ceramic plate that supported the electrode at the top of the chamber, could it be...? He looked it up.

  It was a piezoelectric ceramic! Which meant that the high frequency pulsed current he’d been running through the electrode would have generated ultrasonic mechanical deformations, creating waves which, because of the concave shape of the ceramic would have been focused… he had his AI calculate it… almost perfectly onto the thin boron-vanadium-palladium disk.

  This meant that he had a boron-vanadium-palladium disk with huge numbers of hydrogen protons in it. Then more protons were being forced into the disk by his “hammering” current, some crashing into the disk. And, he had inadvertently been focusing high intensity ultrasonic sound waves onto it at the same time. And the current made it hot too, though not billions of degrees hot by any means. In any case, there were a lot of things going on at once. Absorption of the hydrogen into the alloy was forcing the hydrogen and boron molecules together. Then the “hammering current” was crashing more hydrogen protons into the matrix. Then, as the disk flexed up and down when the ultrasonic waves struck it, deformations in the matrix would squeeze molecules together as well. He ran another calculation, yes the ultrasonic wave frequency was very close to what he estimated would be the harmonic frequency of the disk which would produce large deformations. He tried to run some calculations to determine how much force would be impacting the nuclei of the molecules together, but there were too many unknowns for him to get a good approximation.

  However, using the poor approximations he had made, it still wasn’t nearly enough to cause nuclei to fuse in the numbers that might have caused his meltdown.

  Vaz sat, arms crossed, staring in frustration at the numbers, then caught himself twisting hair follicles out of his upper arms.

  He designed and ordered a concave piezoelectric electrode to go in his new chamber selecting an even more active piezo-ceramic for it.

  ***

  Dante sat down at the dinner table and said, “Dad ever gonna eat with us again?”

  Lisanne said, “Let’s say the blessing.”

  Blessing done, Dante dug into his salad saying, “OK, what’s the deal with Dad?”

  Lisanne sighed, “I’m not really sure.” She considered telling the kids that Vaz didn’t work at Querx anymore, then decided there was no reason to get them even more upset. She’d tell them about that after Vaz had another job. “It seems that it’s very important to him to carry out some experiments here in our basement.” She’d almost said, “as well as at work,” but stopped in time. “You should know, though, that I’ve checked our accounts and we’ll be able to send you guys to college.” Even if we may not be able to retire, she thought to herself.

  Tiona said, “God, he’s sooo weird. Why did you ever marry him?”

  Lisanne drew back in disappointment, “Tiona! You wouldn’t even be here!”


  “So is that the only reason you can think of? Just because he stoked you with kids?”

  Lisanne gritted her teeth. When she’d demonstrated that she was willing to cut off Tiona’s connection to the net, Lisanne’d successfully stopped Tiona’s rude refusal to answer questions and ended her sullen responses.

  But, now Tiona asked questions, phrasing them as if she wanted to know the answers. However, the questions contained a subtext implying that Lisanne was an idiot. They weren’t obviously rude or confrontational enough to push Lisanne to cut her off again, but they managed to dance right there at the edge. It made Lisanne want to explode.

  Lisanne focused on Tiona, trying to remain calm, “No, Tiona. I married your dad because I loved him. Your dad, he’s sweet, and smart, and a good friend. Admittedly he’s not a ‘people person.’ None of us are perfect in every way. Your dad really has trouble with conflict. His mother told me that it’s because he hurt another boy in a fight when he was young. So he doesn’t want to argue with me about his equipment. He also really hates when he’s not allowed to study whatever he wants to study in his research. I suspect that his job told him he couldn’t follow up some finding he made at work, and he wants to study it so badly that he decided to buy the stuff to do it here at home. I don’t agree with it, but I respect him for it.”

  For a moment Lisanne felt grateful to Tiona. Being forced to put those thoughts into words made her feel better about her husband’s behavior.

  Then Tiona said, “How much money has he wasted on this ‘research project’ of his anyway?”

  “Come on Tiona! It might not be ‘wasted.’ He might discover something important. It could even be worth a lot of money.”

  “Really?” Tiona didn’t say “really” like she wondered if it could be true. She said it like she couldn’t believe that her mother was foolish enough to accept that such an event was even remotely possible.

  Lisanne looked down at her plate, “I admit… it isn’t likely.” She put a forkful of meatloaf in her mouth.

  ***

  The hallway of the school was crowded with the rumble of students leaving their classes. Dante found himself just behind Silvy France. Silvy was also a Senior, blond, beautiful and dating senior football fullback Jack Alexander. Dante and Silvy had been in school together since preschool, often near one another because their last names were close to one another in the alphabet. They were good “friends.”

  Friends no matter how desperately Dante wished they could be more.

  Friends or not, he was admiring her lithe form as it threaded through the other students on her way to her locker near his.

  He reached his locker and began to turn the combination, turning to say, “Hi Silvy.”

  Suddenly Dante found himself slammed up against his locker with Jack growling in his ear, “Stay away from my girl, wrestler boy. I’ve seen the way you stare at her—I don’t like it!”

  “Jack!” Silvy cried out. “Leave him alone, Don’s my friend!”

  Dante started to push back against Jack, thinking that with his wrestling skills he had nothing to fear. He was startled to find Jack nearly immovable. He realized suddenly that with the extra thirty pounds of muscle Jack had on him, wrestling skills or no wrestling skills, he would be in trouble fighting this guy. In his ear Jack hissed, “Yeah, struggle and squirm wrestler boy. You stay away from her or it’s gonna go bad for you.” Jack shoved back and stood, arms akimbo, brows lowered, staring at Dante.

  Silvy smacked Jack on the arm, saying, “Don’s my friend! Do not be mean to him.” Dante noted distantly that she sounded a little excited. He stared balefully at Jack, but didn’t move from his locker. After talking to him in heated whispers for a moment, Silvy steered Jack away and down the hall, speaking softly to him.

  Filled with rage and thoughts of I should have done this, or I could have done that… Dante slowly pushed himself away from his locker, put on his jacket and walked out of the school.

  ***

  Stillman Davis walked down the hallway in his R&D department, doing his weekly “walkabout” to talk to the “troops” who did the actual research at Querx. He almost always felt good after he made his rounds and talked to the scientists. They’d become used to his visits now and often had something set up to show him about what they’d been doing. As time passed, the presentations had become slightly formal, often with a few “slides” up on the screens in the labs and sometimes a demonstration. He felt like more and more he understood exactly what the people in his department were doing.

  The battery people in the lab next to Gettnor’s old lab had been startled when Gettnor had been let go but were happy to have been able to move some of their equipment into his space. They always had a nice presentation on their latest efforts when Davis visited. The presentations were so polished he sometimes had niggling doubts about the time they must have spent preparing them. He wondered if he shouldn’t press them to invest that time in their research. However, he reassured himself that there was nothing to sharpen the understanding of a process in your own mind, quite like explaining what you were doing to someone else.

  He stepped out of the battery lab and saw with surprise that that the CEO of Querx was standing in the hall, looking around in some puzzlement. “May I help you Mr. Vangester?” he asked.

  Vangester turned, “Hello Stillman, good to see you out here where the work gets done.”

  “Yes sir,” Davis said with pride, “I’m a big proponent of the old saw that managers should get out to see what’s going on out at the sharp end of the business.”

  “Good man!” Vangester clapped Davis on the shoulder. “Actually, I’m doing a little of that myself. Every so often I like to come down here and see what Gettnor’s doing. It looks like you moved him to a different lab; can you tell me where I can find him?”

  An icy sensation crawled up into Davis’ gut. The CEO was looking for Gettnor?! “Uh sir, he was a real problem employee.”

  Vangester grinned ruefully, “Yeah, I know what you mean. Like herding cats, working with him, eh.”

  “Yes sir. He wasn’t on time to work, sometimes left early and I caught him sleeping on the job several times.”

  Vangester snorted, “That’s our man Gettnor alright. Then here all night and all weekend the next time you check, eh? Did you tuck him away somewhere out of the main research flow?”

  Davis felt muscles clenching in his buttocks, “Uh, sir, he had a major accident in the lab and I had to let him go.”

  Vangester looked horrified, “He was hurt?!”

  “Uh, no sir. A piece of his equipment burst into flames”—Davis didn’t feel like that was a lie, because even if there weren’t any flames there had been a tremendous amount of heat—endangering personnel. “And it happened right after I’d caught him leaving early and then sleeping on the job. I, uh, I had to let him go…”

  Vangester’s eyes widened, then narrowed. He said, “What do you mean, ‘let him go’?”

  “Sir, he was a menace and a bad example to the rest of our employees. I fired him. I’m interviewing…”

  “Fired him!?” Vangester exploded.

  “Yes sir. I’ll find a reliable replacement and the company will be better…”

  “Good God man! Didn’t you talk to Smint when you were taking over here?!”

  “Uh,” Davis’s head throbbed over what Smint might say about how he’d avoided meeting with him until that morning on his first day, “Yes sir. He told me that Gettnor was a problem employee and that I’d need to cut him some slack. I took it as my mission to try to correct Gettnor’s behavior, but I now believe the man has serious psychiatric issues. Nothing I did to bring him around had any effect.”

  Vangester had actually paled as Davis spoke. Now he said, “Surely Smint told you the man is a genius?”

  “Well, yes sir. I think of him as a kind of ‘idiot-savant,’ but unfortunately, only the ‘idiot’ part seemed to be in evidence. We really don’t need that kind of square peg in
this department.”

  Vangester’s hand had come up to rub his forehead and he’d begun to squint, as if he had a horrific headache. “Are you even aware that over 60% of Querx’s revenues stream from products that depend on one of the twelve patents Gettnor filed in the nine years since he started here? I’m not even talking about the royalties Querx collects on the two patents for products that we licensed to other companies because they were out of our field!”

  Davis felt his bowels clinch and had a sudden urge to visit the restroom, “I, I… I’m sure we can find a good replacement… someone who’ll be more of a team player…” he trailed off at the livid expression on Vangester’s face.

  “No!” Vangester grated out. “You will do whatever it takes to get Gettnor back. Whatever! Understand! Apologize for being such a Goddamned idiot. Triple his salary. Quadruple it; we’ve been paying him a pittance. Give him a bigger cut of the royalties from his patents; we’ve been screwing him on those anyway. Give him a bigger lab, buy him more equipment. He loves equipment; that might actually work. Crawl on your belly, offer to fire yourself, whatever it takes.”

  In a small voice Davis said, “Fire myself…?”

  Vangester exploded, “You’ve killed the goose that laid the Goddamned golden eggs! I thought your cocky attitude might cause some problems but I never dreamed you’d do something this stupid! If you can’t get him to come back you’ll have to be fired just to appease the board. Hell, I’ll probably lose my job for putting an idiot like you in yours! If the only way you can get him to come back is by firing yourself, we’ll Goddamned fire you.” He muttered, “The best you can hope for is that we get him back and find something else for you to do. Hopefully something where you can’t do any more harm.” Vangester turned on his heel and stormed away. He stopped, calling back, “Let me know in two hours whether you’ve had any luck.”