I heard the supervisor's voice drone on as he showed her the temper ovens and the gas chromatograph in the next room. When they returned, the super was following her.
I looked up from the lab bench and she was staring at me. "So you're the genius," she said.
That was the first time she pointed it at me. The look. The way she could look at you with those big dark eyes, and you could almost see the gears moving—her full mouth pulled into a sensuous smile that wanted to be more than it was. A smile like she knew something you didn't.
There were a dozen things I could have said, but the nuclear wind behind those eyes blasted my words away until all that was left was a sad kind of truth. "Yeah," I said. "I guess that's me."
She turned to the supervisor. "Thank you for your time."
Hal nodded and left. It took me a moment to realize what had just happened. The laboratory supervisor—my direct boss—had been dismissed.
"Tell me," she said. "What do you do here?"
I paused for three seconds before I spoke, letting myself process the seismic shift. Then I explained it.
She smiled while I talked. I'd done it for an audience a dozen times, these little performances. It was practically a part of my job description since the last corporate merger made Uspar-Nagoi the largest steel company in the world. I'd worked for three different corporations in the last two years and hadn't changed offices once. The mill guys called them white-hats, these management teams that flew in to tour the facilities, shaking hands, smiling under their spotless white hardhats, attempting to fit their immediate surroundings into the flowchart of the company's latest international acquisitions. Research was a prime target for the tours, but here in the lab, they were harder to spot—just another suit come walking through. It was hard to know who you were talking to, really. But two things were certain. The management types were usually older than the girl standing in front of me. And they'd always, up till now, been male.
But I explained it like I always did. Or maybe I put a little extra spin on it; maybe I showed off. I don't know. "Nickel-titanium alloys," I said. I opened the desiccator and pulled out a small strip of steel. It was long and narrow, cut into almost the exact dimensions of a ruler.
"First you take the steel," I told her, holding out the dull strip of metal. "And you heat it." I lit the Bunsen burner and held the steel over the open flame. Nothing happened for ten, twenty seconds. She watched me. I imagined what I must look like to her at that moment—blue eyes trained on the warming steel, short brown hair jutting at wild angles around the safety goggles I wore on my forehead. Just another technophile lost in his obsession. It was a type. Flame licked the edges of the dull metal.
Then all at once, the metal moved.
It contracted muscularly, like a living thing, twisting itself into a ribbon, a curl, a spring.
"It's caused by micro- and nano-scale surface restructuring," I told her. "The change in shape results from phase transformations. Martensite when cool; austenite when heated. The steel remembers its earlier configurations. The different phases want to be in different shapes."
"Memory metal," she said. "I've always wanted to see this. What applications does it have?"
The steel continued to flex, winding itself tighter. "Medical, structural, automotive. You name it."
"Medical?"
"For broken bones. The shape memory alloy has a transition temp near body temp. You attach a plate to the break site, and body heat causes the alloy to contract, thereby creating a compressive force on the bone at both ends of the fracture."
"Interesting."
"They're also investigating the alloy's use in heart stents. A cool-crushed alloy tube can be inserted into narrow arteries where it'll expand and open once it's heated to blood temperature."
"You mentioned automotive."
I nodded. Automotive. The big money. "Imagine that you've put a small dent in your fender," I said. "Instead of taking it to the shop, you pull out your hairdryer. The steel pops right back in shape."
She stayed at the lab for another hour, asking intelligent questions, watching the steel cool and straighten itself. Before she left, she shook my hand politely and thanked me for my time. She never once told me her name. I watched the door close behind her as she left.
Two weeks later she was back. This time, without Hal.
She drifted into the lab like a ghost near the end of my shift.
In the two weeks since I'd seen her, I'd learned a little about her. I'd learned her name, and that her corporate hat wasn't just management; but upper management. She had an engineering degree from out east, then Ivy League grad school by age twenty. She gave reports to men who ran a corporate economy larger than most countries. She was somebody's golden-child, fast-tracked to the upper circles. The company based her out of the East Chicago regional headquarters but occasionally flew her to Korea, India, South Africa, to the latest corporate takeovers and the steady flow of new facilities that needed integration. She was an organizational savant, a voice in the ear of the global acquisition market. The transglobals had long since stopped pretending they were about actually making things; it was so much more Darwinian than that now. The big fish ate the little fish, and Uspar-Nagoi, by anyone's standards, was a whale. You grow fast enough, long enough, and pretty soon you need an army of gifted people to understand what you own, and how it all fits together. She was part of that army.
"So what else have you been working on?" she asked.
When I heard her voice, I turned. Veronica: her smooth, pretty face utterly emotionless, the smile gone from her full mouth.
"Okay," I said. And this time I showed her my real tricks. I showed her what I could really do. Because she'd asked.
Martensite like art. A gentle flame—a slow, smooth origami unfolding.
We watched it together. Metal and fire, a thing I'd never shown anyone before.
"This is beautiful," she said.
I showed her the butterfly, my little golem—its only movement a slow flexing of its delicate steel wings as it passed through phase changes.
"You made this?"
I nodded. "There are no mechanical parts," I told her. "Just a single solid sheet of steel."
"It's like magic," she said. She touched it with a slender index finger.
"Just science," I said. "Sufficiently advanced."
We watched the butterfly cool, wings flapping slowly. Finally, it began folding in on itself, cocooning, the true miracle. "The breakthrough was micro-degree shifting," I said. "It gives you more design control."
"Why this design?"
I shrugged. "You heat it slow, an ambient rise, and it turns into a butterfly."
"What happens if you heat it fast?"
I looked at her. "It turns into a dragon."
That night at her townhome, she took her clothes off slow—her mouth prehensile and searching. Although I was half a head taller, I found her legs were as long as mine. Strong, lean runner's legs, calf muscles bunched high like fists. Afterward we lay on her dark sheets, a distant streetlight filtering through the blinds, drawing a pattern on the wall.
"Are you going to stay the night?" she asked.
"Do you want me to?"
She was silent for a moment. "Yeah, I want you to."
"Then I'll stay."
The ceiling fan above her bed hummed softly, circulating the air, cooling the sweat on my bare skin.
"I've been doing research on you for the last week," she said. "On what you do."
"Checking up on me?"
She ignored the question and draped a slick arm across my shoulder. "Nagoi has labs in Asia running parallel to yours. Did you know that?"
"No."
"From years before the Uspar merger. Smart alloys with chemical triggers instead of heat; and stranger things, too. A special copper-aluminum-nickel alloy that's supposed to be triggered by remote frequency. Hit a button on a transmitter, and you get phase change by some kind of resonance. I didn't understand
most of it. More of your magic steel."
"Not magic," I said.
"Modern chemistry grew out of the art of alchemy. At what point does it start being alchemy again?"
"It's always been alchemy, at the heart of it. We're just getting better at it now."
"I should tell you," she said, curling her fingers into my hair. "I don't believe in interracial relationships." That was the first time she said it—a thing she'd repeat often during the next year and a half, usually when we were in bed.
"You don't believe in them?"
"No," she said.
In the darkness she was a silhouette, a complication of shadows against the window light. She wasn't looking at me, but at the ceiling. I studied her profile—the rounded forehead, the curve of her jaw, the placement of her mouth, positioned not just between her nose and lips, but also forward of them, as if something in the architecture of her face were straining outward. She wore a steel-gray necklace, Uspar-Nagoi logo glinting between the dark curve of her full breasts. I traced her bottom lip with my finger.
"You're wrong," I said.
"How's that?'
"I've seen them. They exist."
I closed my eyes and slept.
The rain was still coming down, building puddles across the Chicago streets. We pulled onto Dearborne and parked the car in a twenty-dollar lot. Veronica squeezed my hand as we walked toward the restaurant.
Voicheck was standing near the door; you couldn't miss him. Younger than I expected—pale and broad-faced, with a shaved head, dark glasses. He stood outside the restaurant, bare arms folded in front of his chest. He looked more like a bouncer than a scientist.
"You must be Voicheck," Veronica said, extending her hand.
He hesitated for a moment. "I didn't expect you to be black."
She accepted this with only a slight narrowing of her eyes. "Certain people never do. This is my associate, John."
I nodded and shook his hand, thinking, Typical Eastern European lack of tact. It wasn't racism. It was just that people didn't come to this country knowing what not to say; they didn't understand the racial context. On the floor of the East Chicago steel plant, I'd once had a Russian researcher ask me, loudly, how I could tell the Mexican workers from the Puerto Ricans. He was honestly curious. "You don't," I told him. "Ever."
A hostess walked us down dark carpet, past rows of potted bamboo, and seated us at a table near the back. The waitress brought us our drinks. Voicheck took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The lenses were prescription, I noticed. Over the last decade, surgery had become so cheap and easy in the States that glasses had become rare. Only anachronists and foreigners wore glasses anymore. Voicheck took a long swig of his Goose Island and got right to the point. "We need to discuss price."
Veronica shook her head. "First, we need to know how it is made."
"That information is what you'll be paying for." His accent was thick, but he spoke slowly enough to be understood. He opened his hand and showed us a small, gray flash drive, the kind you'd pay thirty dollars for at Best Buy. His fingers curled back into a fist. "This is data you'll understand."
"And you?" Veronica asked.
He smiled. "I understand enough to know what it is worth."
"Where is it from?"
"Donets'k, originally. After that, Chisinau laboratory, until about two years ago. Now the work is owned by a publicly traded company which shall, for the time being, remain nameless. The work is top secret. Only a few people at the company even know about the breakthrough. I have all the files saved. Now we discuss price."
Veronica was silent. She knew better than to make the first offer.
Voicheck let the silence draw out. "One hundred thirteen thousand," he said.
"That's a pretty exact number," Veronica said.
"Because that's exactly twice what I'll entertain as a first counter offer."
Veronica blinked. "So you'll take half that?"
"You offer fifty-six thousand five hundred? My answer is no, I am sorry. But here is where I rub my chin; and because I'm feeling generous, I tell you we can split the difference. We are negotiating, no? Then one of us does the math, and it comes out to eighty-five thousand. Is that number round enough for you?"
"I liked the fifty-six thousand better."
"Eighty-five minimum."
"That is too much."
"What, I should let you steal from me? You talked me down from one hundred thirteen already. I can go no further."
"There's no way we—"
Voicheck held up his hand. "Eighty-five in three days."
"I don't know if we can get it in three days."
"If no, then I disappear. It is simple."
Veronica glanced at me.
I spoke for the first time. "How do we even know what we'd be paying for? You expect us to pay eighty-five grand for what's on some flash drive?"
Voicheck looked at me and frowned. "No, of course not." He opened his other fist. "For this, too." He dropped something on the table. Something that looked like a small red wire.
"People have died for this." He gestured toward the red wire. "You may pick it up."
I looked closely. It wasn't one wire; it was two. Two rubber-coated wires, like what you'd find behind a residential light switch. He noticed our confusion.
"The coating is for protection and to make it visible," he said.
"Why does it need protection?"
"Not it. You. The coating protects you."
Veronica stood and looked at me. "Let's go. He's been wasting our time."
"No, wait," he said. "Look." He picked up one of the wires. He lifted it delicately by one end—and the other wire lifted, too, rising from the table's surface like some magician's illusion.
I saw then that I'd been wrong; it was not two wires after all, but one.
"The coating was stripped from ten centimeters in the middle," Voicheck said. "So you could see what was underneath."
But in the dim light, there was nothing to see. I bent close. Nothing at all. In the spot where the coating had been removed, the strand inside was so fine that it lacked a cross-section. There was only the hint of something—a thing that might or might not be there, at the very edge of perception.
"What is it?" I asked.
"An allotrope of carbon, Fullerene structural family. You take it," he said. "Do tests to confirm. But remember, is just a neat toy without this." He held out the flash drive. "This explains how the carbon nanotubes are manufactured. How they can be woven into sheets, what lab is developing the technique, and more."
I stared at him. "The longest carbon nanotubes anybody has been able to make are just over a centimeter."
"Until now," he said. "Now they can be miles. In three days you come back. You give me the eighty-five thousand, I give you the data and information about where the graphene rope is being developed."
Veronica picked up the wire. "All right," she said. "Three days."
Iron and fire and dark, cool water. The mills jut for miles out into the lake, black structures built on mounds of slag.
My father had been a steelworker, as had his father before him. And now I, too, work in steel. My great-grandfather, though, had been here before the mills. He'd been a builder. He was here when the Lake Michigan shoreline was unbroken sand from Illinois to St. Joseph. He'd built Bailey Cemetery around the turn of the century—a great stone mausoleum in which some of the area's earliest settlers were buried. Tourists visit the place now. It's on some list of historic sites, and once a summer, I take my sister's daughters to see it, careful to pick up the brochure.
There is a street in Porter named after him, my great-grandfather. Not because he was important, but because he was the only person who lived there. It was the road to his house, so they gave it his name. Now bi-levels crowd the street. He was here before the cities, before the kingdoms of rust and fire. Before the mills came and ate the beaches.
I try to imagine what this part of Indian
a must have looked like then. Woods, and wetlands, and rolling dunes. It must have been beautiful.
Sometimes I walk out to the pier at night and watch the ore boats swing through the darkness. From the water, the mill looks like any city. Any huge, sprawling city. You can see the glow of a thousand lights; you hear the trains and the rumble of heavy machines. Then the blast furnace taps a heat, a false-dawn glow of red and orange—flames making dragon's fire on the rolling Lake Michigan waves, lighting up the darkness like hell itself.
The drive back to Indiana was quiet. The rain had stopped. We drove with the windows half-open, letting the wind flutter in, both of us lost in thought.
The strand—that's what we'd call it later—was tucked safely into her purse.
"Do you think it's for real?" she asked.
"We'll know tomorrow."
"You can do the testing at your lab?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Do you think he is who he says he is?"
"No, he's not even trying."
"He called it a graphene rope, which isn't quite right."
"So?" I said.
"Clusters of the tubes do naturally aggregate into ropes linked together by Van der Waals forces. It's the kind of slip only somebody familiar with the theory would make."
"So he's more familiar with it than he lets on?"
"Maybe, but there's no way to know," she said.
The next day I waited until the other researchers had gone home, and then I took the strand out of my briefcase and laid it on the lab bench. I locked the door to the materials testing lab and energized the tensile machine. The fluorescent lights flickered. It was a small thing, the strand. It seemed insignificant as it rested there on the bench. A scrap of insulated wiring from an electrician's tool box. Yet it was a pivot point around which the world would change, if it was what it was supposed to be. If it was what it was supposed to be, the world had changed already. We were just finding out about it.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three Page 46
