Porter

by Dahners, Laurence

  In actual fact, Allie’s dad had given up on understanding the port phenomenon for a couple of years but then recently had awakened in the middle of the night with an idea regarding quantum tunneling and how very low power electromagnetic fields such as a brain could generate might allow particles to appear at a new location. So his port research was back on, full speed ahead and he was spending every waking moment thinking about it.

  The band was on break and Allie walked out behind the bar to hang out with her bandmates. She sat at the corner of a little deck looking up at the stars while the three guys shared a cigarette over by the door. She knew they smoked dope too because she could smell it on their clothes, but they knew better than to smoke it around her and they bought what they used in each town and never kept a stash in their van. She’d laid down the law. They didn’t drink more than one beer during a set either. Joe arranged their gigs, ran their finances and was their nominal “leader,” but Allie was far and away their best musician. Her guitar licks and eerie vocals were what commanded the substantial fan following that they had developed so far. They all knew that the band would be just another bunch of “wannabes” without her. So, when she made a rule, they followed it.

  The back door of the bar slammed open and a large, obviously drunk man stumbled out. “Where’s Eva?” he slurred.

  Eva was Allie’s stage name but she didn’t like talking to drunks so she turned back to continue looking up into the sky.

  “Where’s Eva?!”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Allie saw the big guy tap forcefully on Joe’s shoulder. It looked like the guys had been trying to ignore the drunk too. Joe looked up at him.

  “Where’s Eva?!”

  Joe shrugged and turned back to reach for the cig. The big guy shoved him and said ominously, “You know where she is!”

  Allie said, “I’m over here. Are you a fan?”

  “Of you babe! Not of the rest of these losers… only you.” He waved a deprecating hand at the rest of the band as he lurched her way.

  Allie wrinkled her nose, “We’re a band, not a one person show.”

  The man came too close, invading her personal space. His breath stank of beer and garlic. “Hey, I can set you up with some real musicians! You could really be on your way.” He grasped her elbow.

  She looked down at his hand. “Please let go of me.”

  “Aw, I’m jes bein’ friendly.” His hand stayed put.

  She looked up into his unfocused eyes. “Please, let, go.” The other band members were shuffling her way. Obviously, they wanted to help her get rid of this guy, but he was huge. Forcing him to let her go would be a pretty dangerous endeavor and they hadn’t joined a band because they liked to fight. Joe turned and trotted back to the bar, presumably to get a bouncer.

  The big guy pulled on her arm, “Lesh go shumwhere an’ talk.” He peered at her. “Heeey, You’re really beautiful, ya’ know?” His eyebrows went up as if she should be astonished at this revelation. “Why do you wear such baggy clothes?”

  Allie resisted the pull on her elbow but it inexorably pulled her up off the bench she’d been on. She took a few reluctant steps with him. His grip on her arm hurt. Startled she realized that this guy could be a real problem. She jerked and twisted on her arm trying to get it loose. He was pulling her out toward the parking lot!

  He said, “Heeyy, don’ be sush a downer, we’re jus’ gonna go si’ in my car and talk about your career.”

  He seemed oblivious to the fact that Allie was pulling as hard as she could to go the other way. Her feet were sliding on the pavement as her struggles slowed him not at all. Allie’s heightened senses were focused on the big man including the one that allowed her to feel the pressure of the blood flowing through his arteries. Although her ability to make ports had actually returned the week after that Thanksgiving years ago, Allie had carefully kept the secret completely to herself. She certainly didn’t want her dad to know about it! Allie hadn’t made a port in a couple years because they seemed useless except as “party tricks” and she was worried that a “party trick” would come to the attention of her dad and he’d be all over her to allow more testing. But maybe she could let blood out of an artery in the big man and that would stop him? She had thought of this “weapon” aspect of a port in the past but “back of napkin” calculations had determined that she couldn’t hold a port open long enough to even weaken a big man like this with the amount of blood that would flow through a 3mm port. But maybe she could make him think he had a bloody nose and he’d let her go? She sensed the vessels in his head. There was a big one in his neck right next to his windpipe! Suddenly he started to cough. At first it was just a little; then big wracking coughs doubled him over. Her bandmates were startled to see blood on the hand he used to cover his mouth. He let go of Allie’s arm and she patted him on the back. “That’s a bad sounding cough. Probably ought to go to the ER and have it checked out. Especially coughing up blood like that.” Her tone fairly dripped with false concern.

  A bouncer trotted up, Joe behind him. “What’s going on?” he said with authority. Then he stepped back, looking a little apprehensively at the coughing man mountain who’d just stood to his full height and taken a long gasping breath.

  Allie smiled up at him. “I’m not sure but this fellow has suddenly developed a terrible cough and he’s bringing up blood. Can you help him get some medical attention? We’ve got to get back for another set.” She grabbed Joe by the elbow and tugged, “Let’s go guys.” Shaking their heads the guys started back into the bar, turning occasionally to look back at the big fellow who was bent over again, hands on his knees. The coughing had cut back to an occasional wet hack. Just as they went in the door he threw up a large quantity of foul smelling bloody beer.

  Then next day Joe bought each of them a can of Mace. Allie’s was a little pink cartridge to go on a keychain. She never carried a purse but she started carrying the Mace in the front pocket of her trademark baggy jeans.

  Despairing of understanding the port phenomenon alone, Dans had recently decided to try collaboration. He’d spent months going over the data he had from the past in light of his quantum tunneling idea. Such tunneling over a distance, aided by fields still seemed promising but he hadn’t been able to develop any hardware that would make it happen. Maybe a fresh viewpoint on his data would shake something loose? The question had been who to collaborate with? The other academics in his department were too fusty and really were specialized in small areas that seemed unlikely to be related to the porting phenomenon. People from other universities would be too far away for the kind of intense collaboration that he envisioned. Academics also would want to see the phenomenon reproduced, a first principle in science, before they would be interested. However, Randall Forst, one of Dans’ old graduate students, had established quite the private enterprise right there in the city. As a grad student, he’d always been better at the engineering than the theory side of physics. He had demonstrated a real talent for turning out excellent equipment and was making a very good living doing just that. He had a phenomenal eye for producing devices no one else had been able to concoct and a string of lucrative patents. Albert made an appointment with Forst and then spent several entire evenings going over the literature that he had accumulated that might be relevant. He wanted everything fresh in his mind for his meeting.

  “Eve of Destruction” had become an east coast phenomenon. The crowds at their gigs had gotten so big that they were now being booked into small to medium concert halls instead of the bars they’d started in. Joe even interviewed a number of “managers” and they had moved from their van into a bus. On this particular morning they had all gathered in a coffee shop to talk to one of the manager candidates. Allie came back from the restroom to find him at the table with the other band members. Immediately she thought that he didn’t fit their image, too slick. He wasn’t wearing a suit, but looked like he was. When she sat down across from him he looked mildly startled. “Holy shit
! Eva, you’re gorgeous! Why don’t you dress like this for your shows?”

  Allie looked down at herself. She was wearing a snug midriff t-shirt, cutoffs and sandals. “Doesn’t fit our music.”

  Joe said, “Give it up Steve. Yes, she’s beautiful, but she wants us to succeed on the music, not her sex appeal.”

  “Come on! It’s hard enough to make it in this business, For God’s sake, you’ve gotta play all your cards!”

  Allie got up from the table. “Joe, let me know when you’ve got someone else for us to talk to?”

  They all watched wistfully as she walked out the door. “Joe, you’ve got to talk some sense into her! Are you the leader of this band or what?”

  “Yeah,” he chuckled ruefully, “I’m the ‘leader’, but I do exactly as she says, just like the rest of the guys.”

  Dans and Forst had just watched a split screen video with two views at right angles of absolutely nothing but a black background. The start of the video showed the setup of the two cameras and the black cards and lights. The split screen views showed the black background for 20 seconds, then, suddenly a spray of water erupted in the middle of the space, shooting upward out of nothingness. For that video Allie had opened a port from a cold water pipe in the lab to the spot at the focal point of the cameras.

  Forst’s head jerked back, eyes wide. “What just happened?”

  Dans looked at him intently, “Something like a wormhole was just opened from a vessel containing pressurized water to the viewing area. The vessel was about 15 feet from the visible opening you saw on the video.” Dans didn’t want to say it just came from a water pipe in the wall. Didn’t sound sophisticated.

  Forst raised an eyebrow, “This is real?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Because it’d be pretty easy to fake with a good video editing program…” He trailed off tentatively.

  Grimly Albert said, “That video has not been manipulated at all. Not even an adjustment of brightness or contrast.” He ran the same segment, and then others repeatedly to let Forst look for video editing artifacts.

  Forst turned to Dans, “Wow! Amazing. Can you bring the equipment here? Or do I need to go to your lab to look at it? Will the University let you sell me the manufacturing rights?”

  Albert looked down at the table. His jaw bunched and he muttered, “I can no longer reproduce the phenomenon.”

  “What?” Forst guffawed and slapped his knee. “’If you can’t reproduce it, it ain’t real.’ I’m pretty sure I’m quoting you correctly on that one!”

  “It was reproduced hundreds of times and I collected reams of data!” Dans said hotly, “I just can’t reproduce it anymore…” He trailed off.

  Forst leaned back in his chair, “You have got to be shitting me!”

  “I’m looking for a collaborator that can go over the data I obtained, see what I’ve missed and help me figure out how to do it again. And to do it bigger and better.”

  Forst looked up at the ceiling. An irreproducible phenomenon would be worthless. On the other hand if he could figure out what had gone wrong with the equipment, which was kind of his specialty, and they could scale it up - the possibilities seemed tremendous! They started to talk over rights, how they would share them and the University’s inevitable piece of the pie since Dans was employed by them.

  Thunder rolled off Joe’s fingertips as they drummed on the low string of his electric bass. A spotlight gradually illuminated him dressed entirely in black, standing in the center of the stage, back slightly arched and legs apart. The crowd, which had been gathering excitement during the agonizingly long bass note, started to whoop, holler and whistle. Shan kicked the bass drum once and a powerful thump echoed back and forth across the packed medium sized arena. Another thump, then the crack of a snare lighted a spot on the snare drum. That spot gradually enlarged to encompass the entire drum set as Shan established a simple but solid beat. Joe’s rolling bass thunder developed punctuations to match the beat established on the drums and then a spot faded in on their big Leslie speaker. The rotor spun up and a Hammond organ chord filled gradually in over the beat as another spot came up on Davis at the keyboards. The crowd, frenzied now, began to chant, “E-va! E-va! E-va!…” The unmistakable evanescent sound of Allie’s guitar faded slowly into the mix adding to the pulse of the sound but still carrying that first chord which had now been sustained for so long that the listeners were anxiously waiting for a change. The pulse sped gradually and Allie and Davis added some higher notes to the chord but the listeners’ anxiety for a chord change simply built, and built and built. Then Joe raised the long neck of his bass guitar and chopped down with it, the next chord finally blossomed, and another spot lit Allie. It was hard to tell how slender and tall she was in her trademark ripped baggy jeans and heavy vest festooned with charms. Spiky black hair stuck up out of a visor that shaded her face. The crowd went wild as she leaned to the mike from a wide stance,

  “Another may be

  The master of my fate

  But I will be

  The captain of my soul

  Over deep seas

  I’ll sail this soul

  Against the breeze

  And through the shoals”

  The crowd rocked slowly back and forth as if in a trance. Her eerie vocal blended perfectly with Davis’s simple baritone harmony. Some ecstatic fans had to be carried out of the arena after fainting. Hundreds of others had been turned away from the sold out concert.

  Forst was appalled. Dans had provided him with data out the wazoo but claimed that the apparatus that had created the ports had been destroyed. When asked for the remnants of the destroyed apparatus, Dans said that it “had been completely demolished in one of the tests and had been put in the trash.” Construction notes and diagrams? Didn’t exist! It had been “an accidental side effect of a couple of unrelated pieces of equipment purchased for something else and misconnected.” Photographs of the effect were abundant. Pictures of the device creating the effect? Nonexistent! Forst wasn’t just appalled, he was pissed. Dans was obviously hiding something about the apparatus. This could be huge! He was sure he could make another device and he could make it work but Dans wouldn’t give him any idea how the first one had been constructed. Dans wanted them to “try to figure out another way to create the same fields.” What a crock of shit! If you’d built one working airplane, you wouldn’t send an engineer into a closet to “build something that flies” with no more guidance than “it’s been done before” would you? Forst felt like a tight band was around his head and knew that his blood pressure was up again. Dans was coming over and they were going to have to have a serious talk!

  Albert knocked on Forst’s office door, hoping that Forst had finally been able to produce a prototype that could generate the funny twisting electric field effects that he’d measured around Allie’s ports. Forst had been getting really uptight and demanding though. Albert had begun strongly considering a different collaborator. Nonetheless, he was genuinely surprised to see the bright red look of fury on Forst’s face when he stepped into the room. “What’s the matter?” he began.

  Forst exploded. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter! For Chrissakes! You’ve got me wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on an important project with both of my hands tied behind my back! That’s what’s the matter! What’s the matter is that you need to tell me how your first goddamned machine worked! I’m not spending another dime on this piece of shit project while you pretend you don’t ‘have any idea’ how the original device was constructed.”

  Dans rocked back in astonishment. He’d seen Forst get pretty irritated when devices didn’t work as expected back when he’d been a grad student, but Dans had never seen this kind of rage before. And never directed at himself! He swallowed and shrugged, “Well OK, let’s just give up on it then.” He thought to himself that he certainly didn’t want to continue working with someone who had this kind of temper. He’d just have to go ahead and find some other coll
aborator.

  Forst’s eyebrows shot up his crimson forehead. “Give up? Give up! I’m the one with hundreds of thousands invested! We are not giving up! You are going to tell me how the first damned model worked!”

  Dans made placating motions with his hands, “Randy, I’ve told you, I don’t know how it worked.”

  “That’s a load of crap!” Forst hurled a vase off his desk and it exploded against the wall behind Dans. “You are going to tell me! And you’re gonna to tell me now!”

  Flinching in startlement from the vase, Dans turned quickly to the door but to his surprise found it blocked by a large man with a goatee. He turned back to Forst, “Let’s talk about this some more when you’ve calmed down.”

  His face dark, Forst ground out, “I am not going to calm down. YOU, on the other hand, are going to provide some answers today. NOT after I’ve calmed down. Today, damnitall!”

  After signing autographs until their fingers ached, Eve of Destruction stumbled out to their tour bus. Allie turned on her phone and plugged it in. It immediately started chirping. She pulled off her shirt and peered blearily at the screen. It listed scores of calls from her mother. There were almost always a few, but this was way more than usual. She virtually never listened to any of them, though recently the cold attitude she’d held toward her parents had started to melt. Then she saw there was a text from her little brother Stephen. That was unusual. Her heart skipped a beat as she touched the icon. “Sis, pls call home. Dad missing for three days. Mom going crazy.” A chill ran down her spine. She leaned her head back against the wall. Missing!? Could he have a girlfriend? Somehow she knew that wasn’t true. It just didn’t fit with his dreamy eyed focus on physics. Damn! It was the middle of the night. She’d call in the morning and he’d probably be home by then – save a lot of trouble. She pulled off her jeans and crawled under the sheet but then lay staring at the roof of the bus. Finally, with a sigh, she got up, hit the shower and started washing the black crap out of her hair. They didn’t have another concert for four days and it was only a two hour drive home from here.