It's what life is all about.
Copyright © 2006 Charlie Rosencranzn
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The Alternate View: My Mysterious Father
by Jeffery D. Kooistra
It is not unusual for Analog to feature a seasonally-flavored story or article appropriate to the date on the cover (even though said issue might hit the stands a month or two before that cover date). Hence, the July/August issue might feature something suitable for Independence Day. The October issue almost always has a story appropriate for Halloween. I myself once wrote a story for Christmas ("Easter Egg Hunt: A Christmas Story") that appeared in the December issue of 1997. But I can't remember Analog specifically including a piece for Father's Day in the June issue, though no doubt some such pieces have appeared through the years even if only by coincidence.
I'm going to write one this time because, though my dad died in 1989, these past few months I've been walking down a path he once walked, literally following him step by step. There is a nostalgia factor involved too, what with writing this between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And something about Dad has long mystified me, but I think I've finally figured it out.
I'll get to the mystery, but first let me tell you about my dad.
Franklin Kooistra (he had no middle name), born in 1924, came to the U.S. at the age of four, just in time for the onset of the Great Depression. His parents and his four brothers and five sisters (he was the youngest) settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which was already home to more Hollanders than almost anywhere else in the United States.
Like many boys of that era, he grew up poor but didn't know it. He went to school through the 8th grade and then, this being the depths of the Depression, to work, helping the family make money any way he could.
Despite his lack of much formal education, Frank liked to read, and he was becoming quite the jack-of-all-trades by the time Pearl Harbor rolled around. The then 17-year-old lad cried when his brothers got to enlist but his father wouldn't sign for him so he could go, too. Nevertheless, once he turned 18 the following May, he signed up with the Navy and became a gunner's mate, manning the weapons on assorted merchant ships and seeing the entire planet.
After the war Dad met my mom, Trudy. He fell in love with her instantly, and on that very first date he told her he was going to marry her, which he did.
Their first few years together Frank and Trudy lived in the second floor apartment of his sister's house. This was while he was building, by himself, the house in which I would grow up. I don't know when it was Dad learned to be an architect, because he also designed the house. He also laid the blocks for the foundation alone, and did the plumbing, and the electrical work, and the septic system, and all the concrete for the driveway. Apparently, an 8th grade education went a long way in those days. The only things he had professionally done were the plastering and digging out the basement. But he'd been doing the latter by himself with a shovel when someone came along and offered to bulldoze it out for him.
My account of Dad's abilities is reminiscent of Heinlein's descriptions of E. E. “Doc” Smith, who was the archetype of the “man who could do everything.” You might think Dad's talents were inflated when I was told about things he did prior to my being born. But I saw him do these things, too. He finished the upstairs of our house when I was very young, but I still remember moving into my bedroom. Now that I can appreciate it, I marvel at the precision with which he cut and varnished every piece of trim. In junior high I helped mix the concrete when it came time to redo the driveway. I saw just how expert and accomplished Dad was in real time as over the course of a few summers he pieced it all together one four-by-eight-foot slab at a time. The job was quite the elaborate masterpiece sculpture when he finished, so he must have drawn a few sketches. But most of it was built straight from his head to his hands.
Another summer I helped Dad connect our house up to the city septic system. I used a hand pump to pump the water out of the long, deep, skinny trench he was digging, by hand, from the road to our house. He made portable plywood walls to keep the sides from caving in. His friends never forgot that episode. When later in life he became a maintenance man, his coworkers marveled at his knowledge, range of abilities, and general omni-competence.
Until I grew up, I didn't realize how unique my dad was. Since he really could fix anything, I didn't know most dads couldn't.
Peace did not always reign between Dad and me. We used to argue a lot, though not about the length of my hair or anything like that. We'd argue like the dickens over whether or not it would ever be possible to go faster than light. He insisted that Einstein showed it couldn't be done. Out of love for Star Trek, I argued that there must be a way.
And here is where the mystery shows up. How could my dad, with his 8th grade education, understand Einstein? Hear about or read about Einstein, sure. But Dad understood him.
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Right after he married, Dad got a job as a truck driver, taking a semi all over Michigan, delivering groceries to A&P stores. Wanting more out of life, he decided to take a radio and TV repair correspondence course. This was in the early ‘50s. The manuals he used are very much a product of their time. The early booklets in particular talk repeatedly about how exciting the field of electronics is, how it is expanding, and how great the opportunities are for the man who masters it.
Dad was undaunted by his lack of a high school education. He taught himself whatever additional mathematics he needed to master the course work, since by the time I came along, he did indeed repair TVs as a side business. I fondly recall a time when our basement was full of old televisions in gorgeous cabinets, and even a couple of old console radios, taller than I was.
I remember asking him how it was he knew how to repair TV sets. Though I was still in elementary school, he gave me his old manuals and encouraged me to read them. I didn't read all of them then—there's something like a hundred of them. Yet it was then that I began to learn the wonders of electronics, albeit just in time for vacuum tubes to go out of fashion. However, the education I got from reading those books, checking out tubes on the tube checker, and building a one-tube radio receiver, was nothing short of fantastic.
Recently, I've had reason to go back and study those TV repair manuals again, and this is my father's path I've been following that I alluded to earlier. I'm not walking it because I intend to fix antique radios for a living, but because so much of the circuitry in use today was pioneered during the post-war explosion in electronics that put a TV in almost every home by 1960, and these manuals are so clearly written. The bulk of the electronics we find on store shelves today are not at all new in terms of the core ideas. We do things faster today, and far more cheaply, and with far greater reliability, and with far less power and tremendously greater efficiency. But the, a-hem, analogs of that commercial circuitry we enjoy today were right there in the TV circuits of yesterday.
To this day I feel the way to teach electrical engineering is to go back to the beginning and understand the basic physics of the early devices. The laws of nature reside very close to the surface in a vacuum tube. In the course of his studies, my father learned why heating the cathode helped to make the electrons come off, and how those negative electrons are accelerated toward a positive anode. Between the cathode and anode are several grids—depending on the tube and what it's supposed to do, there might be none, one, two, even five or more. He had to learn what those grids did, and why, and that involved physics.
As a necessary aside, back in the early ‘90s I ran into a young electrical engineering student (a pretty girl as a matter of fact—times have changed) who had heard of vacuum tubes, but confessed she couldn't recall ever having seen one (CRTs don't count). So for some of you younger readers, think of the inside of a vacuum tube as a collection of concentric metal cylinders, screens, and spirals of wire. The innermost hollow cylinder is the cathode, inside of which is a filament similar to what you'd find in
a light bulb. Exterior to this is a cylindrical screen or spiral of wire—this is the control grid. Outside of that might be several more screens or wire spirals. Outermost is another cylinder, the anode, and all of these are inside an evacuated glass envelope, with pins coming out of the bottom, which is one of the few characteristics tubes have in common with integrated circuits.
Returning to the physics, consider the grid closest to the anode in a multi-grid tube. That one was called the suppressor grid and its purpose was to keep that fraction of high-speed electrons that impacted the anode and bounced off from escaping back toward the interior of the tube. So as a budding wizard of tube technology, Dad learned the physics of particle beams, and he learned it dozens of lessons before even getting to the picture tube (which is all particle beam physics).
And Dad couldn't have begun to do communications electronics without learning the physics of resonance, wave reflection and interference, transmission line theory, parasitic capacitance, and a host of other things. In short, factoring out the vector calculus and quantum mechanics, Dad's TV repair course amounted to about eighty percent of a college physics degree today.
* * * *
How could my dad with his 8th grade education understand so much physics? That was the mystery. Elementary schools may have been good in his day, but you didn't get to Einstein there, or even in high school, not even then. It was one thing for Dad to know how to do so many of the industrial arts. During the Depression, boys could wander around unaccompanied and watch craftsmen at work. Unencumbered by fear of lawsuit, these craftsmen would show an interested lad their trade. But it is unlikely he would have run into a physics teacher scrawling equation-graffiti on the wall of a building.
But now I can picture my dad, sitting in the dark in his basement TV shop, the room illuminated solely by the glow from the tubes of a radio freed from the confines of its cabinet—like the lamps lighting Newton's study. I imagine him, in the quiet, thinking deeply about what was really going on inside those tubes, sorting out the science for himself.
Dad knew so much about physics because he was doing it every day.
Copyright © 2006 Jeffery D. Kooistra
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The Door That Does Not Close
by Carl Frederick
Assumptions are easy to make, and hard to refine....
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Illustrated by Tom Kidd
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As he walked closer, the ancient stone structure looked more like a bunker than a Roman temple. Thorvald felt a twinge of collective guilt. If the guidebook was to be believed, that squat monstrosity had been designed by a scientist like himself.
“Sure is ugly,” said Roger, walking alongside.
Roger appeared to be about twelve years old. He had blue eyes, blond hair, and wore a polo shirt, shorts, and sneakers. He looked more like a stereotype than a kid. Thorvald had to remind himself yet again that the boy was not of this Earth—or indeed not of any Earth.
“Ugly it may be.” Thorvald paused to swat at a mosquito. “But speaking as a physicist rather than an amateur archeologist, this building is impressive. It's survived intact for almost two millennia.” He shook his head. “But I've never seen a Roman building like this. It seems ugly on purpose."
“It doesn't look big enough for many hiding places.” Roger swatted at a mosquito as well—even though the insect didn't seem interested in him. “You really think the codex is inside?"
“Yes.” Thorvald sighed. “I'm afraid so,” he added without intending to. Roger, although he could bleed and feel, was actually an android. But the creature that controlled him through telepresence was indeed a child. And although that child was an alien, far off on a spacecraft hovering above Earth, Thorvald had grown fond of him—or it. And once the codex had been recovered, Roger's mission on Earth would end.
* * * *
“You know,” said Thorvald, “I've been your tutor for about six months now. I'm going to miss you."
“I'll miss you too, sir.” Roger shuffled a foot. “I wish I didn't have to go."
Thorvald tousled the boy's hair. He'd done that simple act so often, he no longer felt self-conscious about it.
Roger leaned in like a cat wanting to be scratched.
Embarrassed by the show of affection, Thorvald reverted to his role as a teacher.
“Do you know where we are?” he said.
“Of course.” Roger padded a few steps ahead. “Constanta, Romania."
“Ah. But the ancient Romans called it Tomis. This was an important town in the Roman province of Dacia."
“Doesn't look very important, now."
Thorvald gazed around at the desolate countryside and nodded. “Dacia Felix, they called it. Happy Dacia. And the region stayed happy until the Visigoths and Carps overran it."
With Roger at his side, Thorvald trudged up to the front of the temple. He carried a flashlight and gestured with it. “The Romans simply abandoned the place. Hard to know why. Some say the evacuation of Dacia marked the start of the disintegration of the Roman Empire."
INTRAREA OPRITA, read the sign hammered into the heavy wooden door.
“'No admittance,'” said Roger, “but of course we're not expected to know Romanian. So let's go in."
“You certainly seemed to know Romanian back when we were renting the car."
Roger shrugged. “Kids learn languages easily."
“Very funny."
Roger giggled. “Okay. I've got translation software."
Thorvald wrinkled his nose—a sign that he was puzzled. “Are you saying your people have done translation software for every language on Earth?"
“No. But yours have.” Roger laughed again. “It's neat having Internet access."
Roger bounded up the stone steps. Thorvald followed the boy inside.
The temple, though reasonably intact, still had sufficient gaps in the stonework that they could see their way by the sunlight pouring through the holes. Thorvald tucked the flashlight under his belt.
The central chamber, dank and smelling of animal habitation, had the usual assortment of divine statuary scattered around the periphery. The domed ceiling, like an ancient planetarium, depicted the sky at late twilight. Timeworn blues as well as faded reds and ochres served as background to dots of white representing the visible planets and the brighter stars. A massive stone pillar stood in the center of the room. Jutting from the middle of each wall, mythical animals, each clearly representing a point of the compass, stood on smaller versions of the central pillar.
“Boy, it stinks in here,” said Roger.
“Strange,” said Thorvald, running his hands along the rough stonework. “The proportions are all wrong. The pillar is too massive.” He walked around the fluted column. “Must be over five feet thick. And this chapel is so small, there doesn't seem to be a need for a pillar to hold up the building."
“Maybe the building is holding up the pillar."
Thorvald chuckled. “Interesting notion.” He circled the pillar again, looking for cracks that might indicate a doorway. “No secret entrance, I'm afraid.” He stepped back and looked up at the juncture of the pillar with the top of the temple and then down at the stone floor.
“Now this is odd.” Thorvald sank to his knees. “This pillar has no stylobate, no real base; it seems to just extend down into the ground.” Crawling around the column, he followed a crack in the floor that completely encircled it. He pulled a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and, using it as a chisel, tried to worry some of the grime out of the crack. But instead of coming out, the dirt fell deeper into the narrow fissure.
“You know, Roger, you might be right.” Thorvald looked up at the boy. “I think the building is holding up the pillar.” He got to his feet and brushed the dust from the knees of his pants.
“This is really neat,” said Roger.
Thorvald smiled. “Yes, it really is.” He pointed to the to
p of the column. “The pillar exudes a sense of permanence. But look how those lintels are pinioned. If you could rotate them, I think the pillar would slide into the ground."
“Wow!” Roger patted the massive stonework, then gazed up at the marble ornaments that jutted against the upper lip of the column. “If I stood on your shoulders, I could reach those."
“And, if you could?"
“I might be able to turn them."
“Fat chance."
“Well,” said Roger. “I could try."
Thorvald nodded. “Fine.” He made a stirrup from his hands and Roger used it to climb onto Thorvald's shoulders. Roger seized one of the lintels and, grunting from the effort, he twisted it. Creaking and scraping against its support, the lintel turned.
“Unbelievable,” said Thorvald.
“I'm stronger than I look."
Thorvald stepped a third around the pillar's circumference, and Roger released the second lintel. At the final latch, Roger had trouble.
“What's wrong?” Thorvald gasped out the words. He bore not only Roger's weight, which was slight, but also the surprisingly intense force of the boy pushing against the ancient marble.
“It's the last one."
“Can you do it?"
Roger grunted as he threw his weight into the task. After half a minute or so, he stopped.
“No. I can't."
Thorvald helped the boy to the ground. “It was a good try.” He wriggled his shoulders. “I think I'm getting too old for this kind of work."
“I could do it if I had a hammer."
“Well, we don't have one.” Thorvald paused. “But there's a tire iron in the car."
“Hey, great!” Roger ran toward the door. “Come on. Let's get it."
Thorvald chuckled at the boy's enthusiasm. “I don't know. If I'm wrong about this, we'll have damaged an important archeological site for nothing."
Roger watched him with an expectant look—like a dog waiting for a stick to be thrown.
Analog SFF, June 2006 Page 14
