Return of the Ancients

by Greig Beck

  Arn laughed and looked forward through the window towards their destination. Mr. Beescomb had told them in their briefing that it was Fermilab’s main auditorium, and Arn could see a tall building looming up in front of them that looked a little like two bits of sagging white bread stacked together. He grunted and nudged Edward. ‘And what’s the story with the weird building?’

  Edward looked up at the structure for a second or two, then shrugged. ‘Dunno – wino architect maybe.’

  They passed various personnel on the ground, walking large dogs. Some looked to be security personnel, but others wore white smock laboratory uniforms, and carried electronic notepads as though they were testing the animals. Arn counted at least two dozen huge beasts before the bus pulled away from them. One of the wolf-like creatures paused to stare, its eyes creepily intelligent as it watched the vehicle pass by.

  *****

  The old wheezing bus squealed to a halt, and no sooner had it stopped than the entire group of students erupted from their seats.

  ‘Okay everyone, we have landed. Thank you for flying with us today.’ It was Jefferson the driver. His eyes in the rear view mirror stared back at them.

  Edward went to stand up, but Arn stopped him. ‘Let’s give it a minute, okay?’

  His friend looked at him for another second, and then over his shoulder, his eyes going from Steve Barkin to Becky and her friends. He shook his head. ‘Please don’t try and say anything to her – at least not while Barkin is with her.’

  Arn shrugged. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Arn had turned in his seat to watch her begin to come down the centre aisle, while Steve Barkin, still seated, kept up a constant stream of bad jokes and Neanderthal babble from behind. He saw Arn looking towards her, and he leaned forward in his chair to stage whisper something to her, causing her eyes to flick towards Arn for a moment.

  Arn fumbled in his bag as she drew near. She slowed and smiled, raising her eyebrows. Arn gave her some folded pages, and she quickly looked at them, smiled again and winked, before turning away to the front of the bus.

  Arn quickly added, ‘I’ll see you on the field trip. I can do up the other notes as we go.’ She might have sort of half nodded – at least his ego hoped she did.

  Beside him, Edward groaned. ‘Please tell me you’re not still doing her assignments for her.’

  ‘No way . . . just a few tips and things, that’s all.’ Arn got to his feet, not wanting to look his friend in the eye.

  Edward dragged his pack over one of his shoulders. ‘I don’t know why you chase her. She obviously only knows you exist cause you’re her personal homework slave. Besides, I don’t think she’d ever date a . . .’

  Arn spun at him. ‘A what?’

  Edward shook his head furiously. ‘No, no, I meant that she used to date Barkin – doesn’t that tell you something? Even if it’s only about her taste in cavemen.’

  ‘Used to date, buddy . . . used to date.’

  Edward surveyed the damage to his comic. ‘Anyway, thanks for going in to bat for me.’

  Arn shrugged. ‘You’d do the same for me.’

  Edward looked at him for a moment, and then looked away. ‘Sure.’

  As they neared the doorway, Mr. Jefferson cleared his throat. ‘Putting yourself in harm’s way for a friend is a noble thing. Some might say courageous.’

  Arn turned and shook his head, feeling his face redden once again. ‘Ahh, it was nothing. Not really courage . . . more stupidity, I think. I’m sure I’ll get some payback later.’

  Jefferson cocked one eyebrow. ‘You know, courage is about being scared, but acting anyway.’ He chuckled. ‘Or you can think of courage as fear that never stopped to think.’ He laughed and reached out to slap Arn on the shoulder.

  Arn chuckled. ‘Okay, thanks.’

  Jefferson winked and turned back to his steering wheel, glancing in the rear side mirror in preparation for pulling away from the kerb.

  *****

  He stepped down and walked a few paces from the doorway. Edward was immediately at his side and was looking over his shoulder as Barkin and Otis jumped from the last step onto the grass. ‘That guy sure knows how to hold a grudge, doesn’t he?’

  Arn grunted, but didn’t look back. ‘Maybe if we just let him give us one each in the breadbasket, he’ll get it out of his system.’

  Edward snorted. ‘We? Hey, you first, and we’ll see how it works out.’

  Arn laughed and then spoke out of the corner of his mouth while looking up over the heads of the other students. ‘Gimme a minute.’ He threaded his way through the milling students as Beescomb leafed through some paperwork.

  Arn walked towards Becky and her friends, racking his brain for something cool or funny to say to her. He gulped. By herself, she intimidated him, but her friends . . . now they had cutting sarcasm down to an art form.

  He stopped behind her, his lips moving in rehearsal. Monica Struan, standing at Becky’s shoulder, saw him first. ‘Oh God, no.’ She smirked and nudged Becky, who turned, smiling. Her face dropped slightly when she saw who it was.

  Seconds passed as his mind refused to give up any pearls of wisdom, or even humour. His face grew hot. Becky’s friends started to snigger. At last he managed to stammer something.

  ‘That metal sculpture was an optical illusion.’

  She frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, if you look at it from one angle it looks symmetrical, and from another angle it . . . doesn’t.’

  The frown stayed in place, and she quickly looked over her shoulder at her friends, perhaps to see if they were still watching – they were, intently, as though something amusing, embarrassing, or hopefully both, was about to take place.

  Becky turned back to him, her expression morphing from a frown to a look of haughtiness. She took a half step back as though his mere presence was dragging down her street cred, and allowing him to be in her space would mean his nerdiness would somehow rub off on her. She folded her arms and raised her eyebrows questioningly.

  He nodded quickly. ‘It was made from the deck plates of . . .’ Arn shut his mouth and just grinned, or tried to. He guessed it looked more like one of those faces that chimpanzees pulled when they were scared.

  Then she sort of came to his rescue.

  ‘So, the notes?’ she asked, with a small shrug.

  ‘Yeah, ahh yeah, that’s what I was trying to tell you. I was going to include the sculpture in my notes for you. Make a good starting point.’

  She tilted her head, and her expression softened. ‘Thank you for doing the notes for me, Arnold.’ She smiled as she looked over her shoulder, perhaps this time feeling her cred was moving back up the cool scale by having someone do her work for her.

  Now, ask her, he thought. ‘Any time. Hey, I was wondering if afterwards, we . . .’

  Beescomb began calling them to order. Becky mouthed, gotta go, and turned her back on him to move into a huddle with her friends.

  ‘Okay, well maybe later,’ Arn said to her departing back, and then shrugged, knowing she probably either didn’t hear him, or had already blanked him from her consciousness.

  ‘Ahh, unrequited love – the toughest love of all – especially when you’re the unrequitee.’ Edward watched as Becky and her friends giggled and pranced away like a small herd of colourful, long-legged deer.

  Arn sucked in one cheek and then exhaled.

  ‘Be even better if she liked you, and not just your note-taking skills.’ Obviously, Edward wasn’t ready to give up salting the wound.

  ‘Sooner or later she’ll see me – see the real me – and see how I feel about her.’ Arn kept watching her as she flicked hair that shone in the sunlight.

  Edward slapped his friend on the shoulder. ‘Ha, you’re dreaming. Maybe someone will, one day, but I’m not so sure it’ll be Becky Matthews. I think you’re just too . . . different for her.’

  ‘Hmm, different? Real feelings are blind to differences.’ Arn shrugged. ‘Besides, got to
start somewhere.’

  *****

  Steve Barkin was one of the last on the bus. He sat next to Otis Renshaw and watched tight-lipped as Arn laughed and joked with Becky as they stood among the other milling students.

  Otis followed his friend’s gaze outside the bus, and spoke out of the side of his mouth. ‘You used to date her, didn’t you?’

  ‘Ages ago.’ Barkin kept watching.

  Otis nudged him. ‘Well, better watch out; Sitting Bull’s going for it.’

  ‘Never happen. She’d never go out with an Injun charity case. Anyway, so what? I dumped her. She was high maintenance, kept hassling me.’

  Otis nodded. ‘Well, she’s certainly over you now.’ He laughed and sat back.

  Barkin shrugged and blew air from his lips in an I don’t give a crap type of way. Then when he noticed his friend had turned to stare out of the opposite window, his eyes narrowed and drifted back to where Arn and Becky stood.

  You just wait, he mouthed, and sprung up, heading for the door.

  *****

  Arn and Edward turned away from Becky and looked straight into the dead-eyed faces of Steve Barkin and Otis.

  Barkin put his hand on Arn’s chest and pushed him. ‘You should leave her alone.’

  Arn pulled an incredulous face. ‘Leave her alone? Why? Your property is she, Barkin, huh?’

  Barkin shrugged. ‘Listen Pawnee: stay away for your own good. Besides, she thinks you’re weird. We all think you’re weird . . . and don’t belong here. Just piss off back to the reservation . . .’ He looked at Edward. ‘. . . And take your boyfriend with you.’

  Edward seemed to shrink at being included in Barkin’s spray. Arn felt his face get hot again. ‘Really?’ Arn turned to Becky and her friends. ‘Becky!’

  She turned. He made writing motions in the air and yelled, ‘Catch up later!’

  She nodded and turned back to her friends, and they started to head to where Beescomb was gathering all the students.

  Arn turned back to Barkin. ‘We write to each other all the time . . . and you?’ Barkin opened his mouth, but Arn cut in. ‘And it’s Shawnee, not Pawnee. We’ve been here nearly four hundred years – I think it’s you who doesn’t belong.’ He pushed past him, and he and Edward walked towards the class group.

  Edward waved his arms in front of them to clear a path. ‘Comin’ through, dead men walkin’.’ Edward looked up at his taller friend. ‘He is so gonna kick your ass.’

  Arn shrugged. ‘Probably, but it was worth it to see that look on his face.’

  ‘The I’m gonna kill you one?’ Edward laughed. ‘You know, it’d be worth it if she liked you as much as you liked her.’

  Arn just sighed.

  Chapter 3

  The Speed of Light

  The group moved like some many-legged organism towards the main entrance of the giant, sagging sandwich building. Arn was amazed by how modern the interior was, how clean, how . . . sterile. But something else struck him as strange – it was almost empty.

  ‘Where is everyone?’

  A balding, smallish man was making his way towards them, and Arn’s voice must have carried in the library-like hush of the high-ceilinged building.

  ‘Mostly under your feet. Like just about everything else in the Fermilab community.’

  Beescomb cleared his throat and walked forward to introduce himself. The small man nodded, shook his outstretched hand, and held out his other hand for the paperwork. He quickly scanned it, and then stepped back from the shadow of the larger teacher so the students could see him.

  As he did, a number of large dogs raced up, pushing in between the crowd and quickly sniffing pockets, bags and fingers. Some of the girls squealed, and Arn reached down to pat one of the largest dogs, who gave his fingers a quick sniff before racing off after a discreet signal from its keeper.

  ‘Don’t mind them,’ said the small man. ‘Just working members of the security detail. In those few seconds they were among us, they searched for everything from explosives to drugs, and even for excessive nervousness – they miss a lot less than the most sophisticated electronics. In fact, you might be interested to know that Fermilab is breeding some of the best and smartest guard dogs in the entire world: increased intelligence, size, and a higher tolerance to ionising radiation – our new guardians if you like.’ He gave a small nod, like a bow. ‘My name is Dr. Albert Harper, and I’m the chief physicist working on the Tevatron project. I’d like you all to follow me to the theatre for a short background briefing before we descend for the test-firing.’

  A couple of hands shot up, but Harper held up his own like a traffic cop. ‘Whoa, not yet. I’ll take questions following the presentation – we simply cannot be late; the project has cost about a billion dollars, and is being monitored and managed by a very large, very expensive, and very impatient team.’

  He laughed as though he was joking, but Arn knew the head scientist had got his message across: you’re on my turf and my time – jump to it.

  The group filed into the amphitheatre, and Arn let his long hair fall forward over his face to try to avoid seeing a glaring Steve Barkin skulking at the rear.

  Before the last student had sat down, the theatre darkened and Harper’s voice droned from speakers around the room.

  ‘Welcome to Fermilab . . . funny name right? He peered around the room, his eyebrows raised and an ironic smile indicating no answer was really expected.

  ‘Well, the science community you’ve come to today was originally home to the village of Weston, and was once little more than farmland. In fact, you might see some of the first barns still around the place. There’s even a small burial ground with tombstones dating all the way back to 1839. We still maintain it out of respect for the original inhabitants.’

  Arn kept his mouth shut, even though his, and Dr. Harper’s, concept of original inhabitants differed by about 250 years.

  Harper continued. ‘We weren’t always called Fermilab though. We actually started out as the National Accelerator Laboratory when President Lyndon B. Johnson himself commissioned it in 1967. But, in 1974 the laboratory was renamed in honour of Nobel Prize winner, Enrico Fermi, one of the most famous physicists of the atomic age and . . .’

  Edward’s hand shot up, and at the same time his voice sprang from the dark next to Arn. ‘The father of the atomic bomb.’

  Harper pointed to where Edward’s voice had risen, and nodded. ‘Yes, yes he worked on the Manhattan Project, but did you know he also developed the world’s first nuclear rector, and contributed to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics?’ Again the eyebrows went up.

  Harper’s voice had become momentarily rushed as though responding to a challenge. He paused, staring in Edward’s direction for a few seconds before he smiled, and smoothly changed back to talking about the facility, his voice once again relaxed. ‘Since those early days we have grown, adding extra circumference, accelerators, and too many upgrades to mention.’

  Harper waggled a finger in the air. ‘Although there is one worth mentioning.’ A giant image appeared behind him of a ruby red cylinder – glass-like, perfect – a magnificent stone. ‘Diamonds used to only be a girl’s best friend, well, now they’re the nuclear physicist’s greatest gift. They are unparalleled in their transmission of heat and light, and are virtually indestructible. Our friends down under at Australia’s Macquarie University found that their optical properties far surpassed anything else at the unique wavelengths required for high-powered laser technology. And red was best, because it allowed a pure beam without all of white light’s additional, fractious particles.’

  Hands went up around the room – where was it found? Is it expensive? Is it here? Can we see it?

  Harper waved the hands down. ‘For a start, we didn’t find it, we grew it. Took over a year to create this single, three-inch structure via chemical vapour deposition – the result, after cutting and polishing – a lens of perfect, consistent clar
ity. And, at US ten million dollars, it was a fraction of the cost of using a natural diamond. Not that you’d be lucky enough to ever find one like it.’

  Harper looked at the image of the red diamond for a few seconds, the red glow reflecting on his shiny face as well as an expression that was a mix of pride and adoration. ‘Yes, we’ve come a long way.’

  He lifted one arm theatrically to motion towards the screen. ‘To where we are today.’ Pictures of rolling green fields and forested countryside were displayed against a backing soundtrack of birdsong and soft music. It faded out, dream-like, to be replaced by images of the massive Tevatron collider.

  The view shot into the sky, and panoramic pictures from miles overhead showed the size and scale of the gigantic Fermilab project. The physicist recited his lines with great enthusiasm – the world’s second most powerful proton-antiproton collider – four miles in diameter, but able to send particles around its gigantic ring at 99.999 per cent of the speed of light, completing the four-mile trip nearly 50,000 times per second. The objective was to smash those particles together at a rate of almost two million collisions each second.

  Arn nodded in the dark, scribbling notes without looking down at the page. Cool, he thought. He turned his head to the left and saw the presentation screen reflected in Edward’s glasses – tiny copies of the Tevatron in each of the lenses. He smiled – his friend’s face was rapt with awe. Turning slowly to his right, he saw that the light made Becky look even prettier. Again, he wished he could think of something cool or funny to say, but gave up in case he sounded like a jerk . . . again.

  He slowly eased back in his seat, and snuck a look over his shoulder to where Barkin and his friends were seated. Huddled together, their faces were also lit up, but by something Barkin was holding on his lap – a portable PC game, probably. Grades are gonna be looking good again this year, Stevo, Arn thought and chuckled softly.

  Arn turned in his seat, happy that he wasn’t the focus of the dimwit’s attention for at least a few moments, just as a new image appeared up on the large screen, and Dr. Harper was moving into presentation wrap-up mode.