Now technology marches so quickly that many of you may not understand that there was a time when long-distance calls cost money. When I was in school you had to be very careful how much time you spent on the phone calling home to beg your parents for more cash or you might find the entire exercise self-defeating. I knew a girl who spent seven hundred dollars on a single call to her boyfriend in Toronto, because Bell South considered Canada to be an overseas call destination. So when he said "free long distance" I forgot all about Jane Proudfoot and became very interested in what Brian Holmes had to say.
He showed me his pocket calculator. It no longer calculated, because he had rewired the keypad. We went down to the pay phone at the front of the residence and I gave him my parent's phone number in New Orleans. He plugged a speaker into the recharge jack, held it against the phone's mouthpiece and dialed directory assistance in Hawaii. When it rang he dialed again on the calculator before the operator could answer. The speaker made a high-pitched whistle, then a series of tones like touchtones, but -different. Smiling, he handed me the receiver. Not quite believing it, I held it to my ear. My mom answered. I hung up. He was smiling, proud of his trick. "Intersil eight-oh-thirty-eights. Aren't they beautiful?"
I had no idea what he meant. I didn't care either. "Can you make more of these?" I asked him.
"Sure."
I offered my hand and he shook it somewhat bemusedly. "My friend," I told him, "you and I are about to get rich."
We didn't get rich right away. The first problem was getting him to actually make more calculators—blue boxes he called them. He kept promising them and then not delivering. Having solved the problem of hijacking the entire North American telephone system for his private amusement the mundane act of building more boxes simply held no challenge for him. Nor was money a motivator. It turned out Brian was already rich, if you call a hundred grand in the bank rich, which I did back then. Every high-tech corporation in the nation was throwing scholarships at him in hopes of luring him into their research centers. I finally got him to draw the circuit diagrams and hired some of his less brilliant and more penurious classmates to actually build the boxes. We sold about a hundred that year, at five hundred dollars a pop. Not exactly wealth, but a tidy little sum, even allowing for expenses. There were some tense moments when the FBI busted some of our clients, but when they came and asked me some pointed questions I simply denied all knowledge. It was easy to demonstrate I knew barely enough about electronics to change channels on TV, and though they ransacked my apartment I was too smart to have anything incriminating there. I never told Holmes about the investigation, but I gave him fifty percent of the net. I knew the future when I saw it coming. I convinced him to let me manage his assets too, for ten percent of all he made over bank interest, and rode the waves of boom and bust, war and peace. I may not know much about technology, but I know how the world works and I have a knack for the markets. I doubled his money in four years and the profits kept me in pizza and beer. I came out of school with my law degree and an MBA, Holmes just kept on taking classes. He never finished a program because he refused to take the boring subjects on the "required" lists.
In my spare time I tried to commercialize the gadgets he invented, a difficult process since around ninety-nine percent of what he comes up with is technologically brilliant and absolutely useless. Like the anti-flashlight—just a normal flashlight, except the lens plate is made of this special barium phosphorous crystal he developed that splits every photon that enters into two photons exactly out of phase with each other. Result—no light comes out. He was immensely proud of it and couldn't understand why I didn't want to market it. I stuck with him anyway, and in the third year of my law degree he came up with the split-ring convolver. I don't know what that is any more than you do, but you've got a few million of them in your house, submicron-sized circles etched on the silicon chips that run our world. I did all the paperwork for the patent as a class exercise and took it to the big semiconductor houses. My professor sniffed at the language in my filings and slapped me with a B+, but the patent has netted Baker Technologies over a billion in royalties. Baker Technologies is our company. Get the pun? His next useable brainstorm was the vortex cell windmill, which now powers ninety percent of the world and netted many billions more. I'm what you'd call comfortably well off.
That money has given us the freedom to do whatever we want with our lives. For Holmes, that meant buying Wild Oaks, the old Grafton plantation house, and cramming it with lab gear. Every time he gets a new research interest he buys all the best equipment and puts another wing on the house. As for me—well, I do what you'd expect an MBA and lawyer to do with limitless wealth. I try to get more of it. Wealth beyond the wildest dreams of starved avarice is my goal, to quote a great writer, and power such that mighty gods shall tremble before me, to quote him again. I plan to rule the planet someday, and I'm well on my way to doing it. You can laugh at me if you like, but don't make the mistake of lumping me in with deluded world conquest wannabes like Napolean, Khan and Caesar. World domination through military conquest is doomed to failure because it automatically generates resistance. Eventually the rest of the world gangs up on you in sheer self defence. My plan is economic conquest, and I'm betting I can buy all the nations of the world before any of them even notice. I just need more money.
Holmes remains the principal tool in my campaign, which is why I was driving up to Wild Oaks once more, wondering how he was managing to project ghostly and paranoid warnings into my car. Usually I just let Brian invent things and commercialize what I can, but this time I had a plan in mind. It was time to start the big gamble. I guided the Porsche up his long, winding driveway, overhung with ancient cypress trees, and pulled in to park next to a battered VW van. The rear windows had been removed and the entire back of it was crammed with tanks, hoses, machined steel and sundry less identifiable gadgetry. Some bizarre arrangement of hydraulic pistons protruded from the back. In the side -garden an eight-wheeled wagon was rolling along, video cameras switching this way and that as it towed a roller mower efficiently over the grass.
A video camera in a tree pivoted to follow me and the door opened as I approached. A synthesized female voice said, "Good afternoon, Mr. Watson."
"Hi, Pandora." Pandora is Holmes' computer—or rather, she's software that runs on his network. She runs the house and, though Holmes assures me that she's not actually sentient, she certainly does a good job of faking it.
"Did you have a pleasant drive?"
I pushed my momentary brush with paranoia out of memory. "Yes, I did, thanks."
"Mr. Holmes is in the main lab. Please go in." Pandora sounds downright sultry and I can't help but imagining a body to go with that voice. I headed down the hall when Holmes himself came barreling out of the lab.
"John! Excellent! You're just in time! Come and see this." He grabbed my hand and dragged me into the lab. Still wild blue eyes and tangled blond hair and still—I'm not kidding—wearing the same "Wrath of Con" T-shirt he had on when I met him ten years ago, now too faded to read clearly. I don't mean to imply he's never had it off since, but his wardrobe is, shall we say, limited.
"Listen, Brian, I've got something I need you to build . . ."
"Wait wait!" He wasn't even listening. The main lab used to be the Grafton's ballroom, and the finish on their beautiful parquet dance floor has been ruined by lab-cart wheels and heavy pieces of equipment dragged over it with callous disregard for antebellum sensibilities. High on the south wall a ten-foot-high portrait of Colonel Wolfe Beauregard Grafton in full Confederate uniform stares down disapprovingly on the chaos. He let me go to close the door behind us, and I noticed that the entire inside surface of the room had been covered in chicken wire on a rickety frame of two-by-fours, even the floor and the ceiling. The wire bulged considerably in places, to clear the huge chandelier, and to go over some of the larger pieces of lab equipment that couldn't be lifted to get it under. It looked like he'd installed it himself, whi
ch was probably accurate. Colonel Grafton looked like he'd been caged, and he didn't look happy about it.
"Okay, they can't hear us in here."
"Brian . . ." I looked at him askance. He did seem a little more wild-eyed than usual. "Nobody is listening to us."
He looked surprised at that, taken aback, but quickly recovered. "Good, very smart, but it really is safe. I checked and there's no field leakage outside the lab. The chicken wire blocks it perfectly. You can speak freely."
I looked at him, opened my mouth to say something, thought better, closed it and started again. "I need you to build—"
He held up a hand. "Wait one more moment. You're just in time. You have got to see this."
In a cleared space in the center of the room stood what was clearly Brian's latest pride and joy. Two induction coils bigger than forty-five-gallon drums were stacked in a wooden frame. In between them was a thick, plexiglass cube with a single copper helix as thick as my thumb. Firehose cables snaked off to a twelve foot cubical array of what looked like paint cans.
I knew better than to argue. He wouldn't listen to me until he'd shown off his gadget, whatever it was.
"What does it do?" I stayed a good ten feet away from it. I have learned to be cautious about Holmes' inventions in their early stages. Sometimes they explode.
"Watch!" He threw a switch large enough to serve as the main circuit breaker for a nuclear power plant. There was a deep, ominous hum and the high-pitched whining sound that I'd come to recognize as a capacitor bank charging up. A big capacitor bank—that was what the paint cans were. Merlin the lab cat slunk out from between some equipment racks, leapt to a bench by the east wall, squeezed through a gap in the chicken wire and vanished out an open window. I wished I could do the same. Holmes fiddled with some instruments, then turned to me.
"Do you have a quarter?"
"A what?" I was regarding the array with distrust. The voltages involved looked dangerous.
"Twenty-five cents."
"Oh sure." I dug some change out of my pocket, gave him a quarter. He put it in a paper drinking cup, the kind that comes in stacks. He balanced the cup on top of the bottom coil, positioned it with delicate care, then turned back to the stacked controls on the lab bench. He flipped a couple more switches and the quarter jumped out of the cup, bobbed in the air for a moment and then just floated there, hovering exactly between the two coils.
That was neat, the big coils were obviously magnets of some kind. I relaxed, breathing out. There was a lot of extra equipment involved just to make a quarter float, but sometimes Holmes' experiments were a little anticlimactic. I already told you about the anti-flashlight.
There was a blinding flash and a crack that seemed to split my head in half. I jumped back reflexively and fell over some nameless piece of equipment on the floor behind me. My vision swam with fluorescent spots and the air smelled of ozone and burnt insulation. I couldn't hear flames crackling or feel heat, so I resisted the urge to bolt blindly for the door.
"Hey, you okay?" I peered through the glowing spots to see a blur that could only be Brian standing over me. He helped me up. "It's a little loud when the capacitors discharge."
"A little loud. Sure." I stood, rather unsteadily.
"Here! Look!" I squinted as he held out the paper cup. Inside was a little silver ball bearing, rolling around.
"What happened to the quarter?"
"That is the quarter." He had the self-satisfied expression of a puppy who's just pulled off its best trick.
"It's a little ball."
"Well, yes, it is now. But it was the quarter. It's been magnetically imploded."
I looked at him blankly. "And what's magnetic implosion when it's out with friends?"
"Well, basically there's a magnetic field and an electric field. The electric field induces a current in the quarter, which then produces its own magnetic field. This little coil here . . ." The little coil he was referring to was as big as my head. " . . . makes it float at the exact center of the big coils. So then I dump a big current into the big coils—the rise time is the vital thing, the field has to come up fast. That generates a huge opposing magnetic field and the reaction forces crush the quarter. I've been wanting to build one of these for a long time, but it wasn't until I had to install the chicken wire anyway that I could.
"Why the chickenwire?"
"To keep the electromagnetic pulse out of the lab electronics of course. It would fry everything electrical in the house."
He answered the question I asked of course, but not the question I meant to ask. I looked at the plexiglass cube. It was full of shards of copper and shredded insulation. Evidently the reaction forces that crushed the quarter inward also exploded the coil outward. EMP was hardly the biggest danger this contraption posed to the contents of the lab.
I looked at Brian, beaming and rolling the little ball around in his fingers. "So it's a quarter squisher? Is that about right?"
"Absolutely! Not just quarters—it can squish paper clips, small bolts, bits of aluminum foil—the sky is the limit. It's simple really. The hard part is making the collapsing field symmetric when . . ."
"Listen! Brian!"
" . . . the Q factor of the coils . . ."
"Brian!" I grabbed the cup from his hand "This is important."
He blinked, coming back from wherever it is that he is when he's explaining something. "What?"
"I want to build a ship. A spaceship."
"That's a solved problem." Coming from Holmes, this means he isn't interested.
"This one isn't a solved problem." He raised an eyebrow. I had his interest. "I need a ship that can take a crew to the asteroids."
"Why?"
"To mine them."
"Uhhhmm . . ." He hesitated. "I can't really build you a whole ship . . ."
"I need to be able to get into orbit for a hundred dollars a kilogram. Get me that and I can solve every other problem."
His other eyebrow went up. He didn't answer right away. Instead he looked at his quarter squisher. For a long moment I watched him waver, holding my breath. It wasn't yet perfected I knew, and it tore him up to leave problems unsolved, but the bait I dangled was powerful. Deep space travel is the ultimate challenge for any scientist.
Challenge won out. "Okay, I'll see what I can do."
I smiled. "I knew I could count on you."
He got that faraway look in his eye. "Getting cheap specific impulse is going to be the hard part, it's really a materials problem . . ."
There was a clatter of china from the doorway and a smiling garbage can on rubber treads lurched awkwardly into the lab, a wooden tray extended in its pincers—another of Pandora's remotes. Coffee slopped around on the bottom of the tray, soaking into egg salad sandwiches and a plate of cookies.
Twin cameras atop the garbage can scanned, panned and focused. "Would you care for a snack, Mr. Watson?" When I imagined a body to go with Pandora's voice, somehow it was never this one.
"Dammit!" Holmes sounded annoyed. "She cut the sandwiches lengthwise again."
I spent another couple of hours there, mostly going over the details of what I wanted in a space drive. Once I had his attention Holmes was focused on the problem like a laser beam, and he outlined several possible technologies, the least attractive being launching a ship by detonating a fusion bomb underneath it. On the way home his ghostly voice warned me again about the government watching me and I realized who the "they" was that he thought was listening to him. I resisted the urge to look in the rearview mirror again. Of course since Congress passed the Personal Privacy Act and opened the databases to the feds the government really has been watching everybody. All your medical records, academic records, travel records, employment history, insurance history, the netsites you visit, who you call and when you call them, and where you call them from, the magazines you read, the books you borrow from the library, the groups you belong to, all that information is on file somewhere. Combine that with automated video s
urveillance in airports, train stations and shopping malls, cameras at stop signs and highway ramps, satellite tracking of your car and electronic tracking of your bank chip, your credit cards and every financial transaction you make. Tie it all together with the computer power to build the big picture and there's really nothing the government doesn't know about you. That doesn't mean you have to be paranoid, because after all, what have you got to hide? The bleeding heart lefties complain about violation of civil rights, but I'm all in favor of the new Open Society, as the president likes to call it. When I take over everyone will be so used to obtrusive electronic snooping that they won't even notice they live in a totalitarian state. Control America and you control the world. All I need to do is position myself properly and then create another National Emergency.
What about my privacy? Don't make me laugh. The fish swept up in the digital dragnet are the small ones—plumbers cheating on their taxes, doctors cheating on their spouses, college kids using drugs, illegal immigrant fruit pickers, drifters, greenpeacers and people with dangerous political opinions. I pay no taxes at all and it's perfectly legal—you just have to have the money to structure your finances properly, and of course the legislative branch is well aware of the need to structure the tax code so as not to annoy those of us who fund their campaigns. I donate generously to both recognized political parties, don't need health insurance and I really have nothing to hide. Except when I do of course, and in those cases I have the wealth and power to make sure it stays well hidden. And in the unlikely event that one of the three-letter agencies comes knocking on my door—well, I have the President's private number. The SWAT team's careers would be over before their shift was.
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 22
