FSF, October-November 2006

by Spilogale, Inc

  The kid is down on the floor, shoving blocks under the table. Stacking and unstacking. It catches sight of me. It's got blue eyes and a shy smile. I get a twitch of it, again, and then it scrambles up off the floor, and buries its face in its mother's breasts, hiding. It peeks out at me, and giggles and hides again.

  I nod at the kid. “Who's the dad?"

  Stone cold face. “I don't know. I got a sample shipped from a guy I found online. We didn't want to meet. I erased everything about him as soon as I got the sample."

  "Too bad. Things would have been better if you'd kept in touch."

  "Better for you."

  "That's what I said.” I notice that the ash on my cigarette has gotten long, a thin gray penis hanging limp off the end of my smoke. I give it a twitch and it falls. “I still can't get over the rejoo part."

  Inexplicably, she laughs. Brightens even. “Why? Because I'm not so in love with myself that I just want to live forever and ever?"

  "What were you going to do? Keep it in the house until—"

  "Her,” She interrupts suddenly. “Keep her in the house. She is a girl and her name is Melanie."

  At her name, the kid looks over at me. She sees my hat on the table and grabs it. Then climbs down off her mother's lap and carries it over to me. She holds it out to me, arms fully extended, an offering. I try to take it but she pulls the hat away.

  "She wants to put it on your head."

  I look at the lady, confused. She's smiling slightly, sadly. “It's a game she plays. She likes to put hats on my head."

  I look at the girl again. She's getting antsy, holding the hat. She makes little grunts of meaning at me and waves the hat invitingly. I lean down. The girl puts the hat on my head, and beams. I sit up and set it more firmly.

  "You're smiling,” she says.

  I look up at her. “She's cute."

  "You like her, don't you?"

  I look at the girl again, thinking. “Can't say. I've never really looked at them before."

  "Liar."

  My cigarette is dead. I stub it out on the kitchen table. She watches me do it, frowning, pissed off that I'm messing up her messy table, maybe, but then she seems to remember the gun. And I do, too. A chill runs up my spine. For a moment, when I leaned down to the girl, I'd forgotten about it. I could be dead, right now. Funny how we forget and remember and forget these things. Both of us. Me and the lady. One minute we're having a conversation, the next we're waiting for the killing to start.

  This lady seems like she would have been a nice date. She's got spunk. You can tell that. It almost comes out before she remembers the gun. You can watch it flicker back and forth. She's one person, then another person: alive, thinking, remembering, then bang, she's sitting in a kitchen full of crusty dishes, coffee rings on her countertop and a cop with a hand cannon sitting at the kitchen table.

  I spark up another cigarette. “Don't you miss the rejoo?"

  She looks down at her daughter, holds out her arms. “No. Not a bit.” The girl climbs back onto her mother's lap.

  I let the smoke curl out of my mouth. “But there's no way you were going to get away with this. It's insane. You have to drop off of rejoo; you have to find a sperm donor who's willing to drop off, too, so two people kill themselves for a kid; you've got to birth the kid alone, and then you've got to keep it hidden, and then you'd eventually need an ID card so you could get it started on rejoo, because nobody's going to dose an undocumented patient, and you've got to know that none of this would ever work. But here you are."

  She scowls at me. “I could have done it."

  "You didn't."

  Bang. She's back in the kitchen again. She slumps in her chair, holding the kid. “So why don't you just hurry up and do it?"

  I shrug. “I was just curious about what you breeders are thinking."

  She looks at me, hard. Angry. “You know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking we need something new. I've been alive for one hundred and eighteen years and I'm thinking that it's not just about me. I'm thinking I want a baby and I want to see what she sees today when she wakes up and what she'll find and see that I've never seen before because that's new. Finally, something new. I love seeing things through her little eyes and not through dead eyes like yours."

  "I don't have dead eyes."

  "Look in the mirror. You've all got dead eyes."

  "I'm a hundred and fifty and I feel just as good as I did the day I went on."

  "I'll bet you can't even remember. No one remembers.” Her eyes are on the gun again, but they come up off it to look at me. “But I do. Now. And it's better this way. A thousand times better than living forever."

  I make a face. “Live through your kid and all that?"

  "You wouldn't understand. None of you would."

  I look away. I don't know why. I'm the one with the gun. I'm running everything, but she's looking at me, and something gets tight inside me when she says that. If I was imaginative, I'd say it was some little bit of old primal monkey trying to drag itself out of the muck and make itself heard. Some bit of the critter we were before. I look at the kid—the girl—and she's looking back at me. I wonder if they all do the trick with the hat, or if this one's special somehow. If they all like to put hats on their killers’ heads. She smiles at me and ducks her head back under her mother's arm. The woman's got her eyes on my gun.

  "You want to shoot me?” I ask.

  Her eyes come up. “No."

  I smile slightly. “Come on. Be honest."

  Her eyes narrow. “I'd blow your head off if I could."

  Suddenly I'm tired. I don't care anymore. I'm sick of the dirty kitchen and the dark rooms and the smell of dirty makeshift diapers. I give the Grange a push, shove it closer to her. “Go ahead. You going to kill an old life so you can save one that isn't even going to last? I'm going to live forever, and that little girl won't last longer than seventy years even if she's lucky—which she won't be—and you're practically already dead. But you want to waste my life?” I feel like I'm standing on the edge of a cliff. Possibility seethes around me. “Give it a shot."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm giving you your shot. You want to try for it? This is your chance.” I shove the Grange a little closer, baiting her. I'm tingling all over. My head feels light, almost dizzy. Adrenaline rushes through me. I push the Grange even closer to her, suddenly not even sure if I'll fight her for the gun, or if I'll just let her have it. “This is your chance."

  She doesn't give a warning.

  She flings herself across the table. Her kid flies out of her arms. Her fingers touch the gun at the same time as I yank it out of reach. She lunges again, clawing across the table. I jump back, knocking over my chair. I step out of range. She stretches toward the gun, fingers wide and grasping, desperate still, even though she knows she's already lost. I point the gun at her.

  She stares at me, then puts her head down on the table and sobs.

  The girl is crying too. She sits bawling on the floor, her little face screwed up and red, crying along with her mother who's given everything in that one run at my gun: all her hopes and years of hidden dedication, all her need to protect her progeny, everything. And now she lies sprawled on a dirty table and cries while her daughter howls from the floor. The girl keeps screaming and screaming.

  I sight the Grange on the girl. She's exposed, now. She's squalling and holding her hands out to her mother, but she doesn't get up. She just holds out her hands, waiting to be picked up and held by a lady who doesn't have anything left to give. She doesn't notice me or the gun.

  One quick shot and she's gone, paint hole in the forehead and brains on the wall just like spaghetti and the crying's over and all that's left is gunpowder burn and cleanup calls.

  But I don't fire.

  Instead, I holster my Grange and walk out the door, leaving them to their crying and their grime and their lives.

  It's raining again, outside. Thick ropes of water spout off the eaves and spatter th
e ground. All around me the jungle seethes with the chatter of monkeys. I pull up my collar and resettle my hat. Behind me, I can barely hear the crying anymore.

  Maybe they'll make it. Anything is possible. Maybe the kid will make it to eighteen, get some black market rejoo and live to be a hundred and fifty. More likely, in six months, or a year, or two years, or ten, a cop will bust down the door and pop the kid. But it won't be me.

  I run for my cruiser, splashing through mud and vines and wet. And for the first time in a long time, the rain feels new.

  Science: Happy Birthday, Ben Franklin by Paul Doherty & Pat Murphy

  January 17, 2006, was the three hundredth anniversary of Benjamin Franklin's birth. As you no doubt know, Benjamin Franklin was one of our country's Founding Fathers, which means he was a troublemaker. (If you don't believe us, ask King George.) Franklin was also a writer, a philosopher, a statesman, a printer, a scientist, and an inventor. As you might guess, we're most interested in these last two occupations.

  Franklin made scientific discoveries in a wide range of fields. While he was postmaster general, he invented an odometer and used it to measure the length of postal routes. He invented the Franklin stove, a urinary catheter, bifocals, and the lightning rod.

  Though we respect Franklin's industry and inventiveness, Pat has a bone to pick with him. Her complaint relates to the area in which Franklin made some of his greatest discoveries: electricity.

  But before we get to Pat's complaints, we'll tell you a little about electricity. Usually, at this point in our column, we connect our topic to science fiction, citing this story or that novel. But when it comes to electricity, Pat maintains that the connection is actually to fantasy. Understanding electricity requires accepting the existence of worlds that you can't see or experience directly. When you start poking around, trying to figure out what's going on, you find out things are much weirder than you ever figured. You don't exactly open a door in the back of a wardrobe and walk through into another world, but close enough.

  Just as so many fantasy novels begin in our familiar world, we will begin with something familiar: the spark of static electricity that jumps from your finger to a doorknob after you walk across a wool carpet. That's static electricity or electrostatics.

  Suspended Children and Spinning Sulfur Balls

  In Franklin's time, scientists in Europe had been studying electrostatics for hundreds of years. They knew that if you rubbed wool on the fossilized tree sap known as amber, then the amber would attract little pieces of paper. In 1600, William Gilbert coined the name for the science of electricity from the Greek name for amber: elektron.

  In 1660, Otto Von Guericke experimented with a spinning sulfur ball about the size of a child's head. Rubbed with his hand, the ball made sparks and attracted bits of leaves, gold dust, and snips of paper. A woodcut of the period depicts a more elaborate experiment in which a child suspended on silk ropes rubbed a spinning ball of sulfur with one hand while attracting bits of paper with the other.

  In 1746, Pieter van Musschenbroek experimented with collecting the electric charge produced by an electrostatic machine in a device later called the Leyden jar. (He got a nasty shock in the process.)

  The Leyden jar not only revolutionized the study of electrostatics, it also became a popular sensation. In the 1750s, experimenters all over Europe demonstrated electricity with Leyden jars, often sending the charge through chains of people holding hands. In a demonstration for King Louis XV, French clergyman and physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet sent a current through a chain of 180 Royal Guards, making all the soldiers jump simultaneously.

  Through experimenting, people made discoveries about how electricity behaved. But they had had no simple theory to explain the results of their experiments. What was it about rubbed amber that made it exert an invisible attractive force on the distant pieces of paper? What exactly was stored in the Leyden jar? No one knew. Based on their experiments, European experimenters surmised that there were two kinds of electricity: vitreous, which you got by rubbing glass with silk, and resinous, which you got by rubbing amber or resin with wool.

  That's where Ben Franklin came into the picture.

  Ben Franklin read about the European experiments and repeated them. He explained the results with a single form of electricity, hypothesizing that there was an “electric fluid.” There could be too much of this fluid (a condition he called plus) or too little (a condition he called minus). This fluid could move from regions of excess to regions that were depleted.

  Of course an object could also have neither excess nor deficiency and be neutral or have zero electric charge. Franklin also noted that an object in the plus condition attracted an object in the minus condition. Plusses repelled each other and minuses repelled each other. (From this we get the saying that “Like charges repel and opposite charges attract.")

  Franklin designated vitreous electricity (which you got by rubbing glass with cloth) as “plus.” It was an arbitrary choice. He could equally well have called resinous electricity “plus.” We'll get back to that (and explain why Pat regards Franklin's choice as troublesome), in a bit. But before we do, we want you to do a little experimenting.

  The Most Amazing Electrostatic Diagnostic Tool Ever

  Not long after the invention of the Leyden jar, Jean Nollet (yes, the same one who made those soldiers jump) invented the electroscope, a device for detecting electric charge. Today you can build your own electroscope with a roll of Scotch brand Magic tape. (Yes, it has to be Scotch brand. Don't substitute any other kind!)

  Here's what you do: Take two pieces of tape, each one about as long as your hand is wide. Stick the sticky side of one tape onto the non-sticky side of the other. Now pull the two tapes apart quickly.

  As the tapes separate, they will grab your hand. When you free them from your hand, they will attract and stick to each other. If you and a friend do this at the same time, one of your tapes will attract one of your friend's tapes and repel the other.

  Pulling apart two pieces of tape causes one to become positively charged and the other to be negatively charged. To find which is which we can return to Ben Franklin (who didn't have any Scotch brand tape, but did have something to say about charge). Franklin defined negative charge as the charge on the amber when it was rubbed with wool. If you don't have a large lump of amber around the house, you can substitute your hair for the wool and a rubber or plastic comb for the amber. Run the comb through your hair and it will pick up a charge that Ben Franklin would define as negative, the same as amber rubbed with wool.

  Bring the negatively charged comb near one of the tapes, and then the other. The tape that the comb repels is negatively charged. The tape that the comb attracts is positively charged. Now you can bring your tapes near objects with unknown charges and determine whether those objects are positively charged, negatively charged, or neutral. (An object that is uncharged or neutral will attract both tapes.)

  While you're experimenting, bring your tapes near the front of an operating television—an old television with a picture tube, that is, not a plasma screen or LCD display. Notice that the screen is positively charged. That's why TV screens get covered with dust. The positively charged screen attracts the neutral dust particles.

  Fantasy? Or Science Fiction?

  Let's take a minute and talk about what is going on when you tear those pieces of tape apart.

  When you pulled your tape sandwich apart, you also ripped apart some atoms!

  Here's where Pat says we get into the realm of the fantastic. Like everything else in your house, the tape is made of particles too tiny for you to see. These particles are called atoms. Atoms are made of even tinier particles called electrons, protons, and neutrons. Both electrons and protons are electrically charged particles. Electrons are negatively charged and protons are positively charged.

  When you pull the tape apart, you are pulling some electrons away from their protons. One piece of tape ends up with more electrons—it's negative
ly charged. The other one ends up with more protons and it's positively charged.

  That's the story that the physicists tell—and it's a pretty good story. It explains a lot of things.

  Positive charges and negative charges like to stick together. (Paul says physicists don't know yet why they attract each other. They just do.) The two pieces of tape are attracted to each other because one is positively charged and the other is negatively charged.

  When you run a comb through your hair, the comb ends up with excess electrons and becomes negatively charged. Since negative charges push away other negative charges, the comb pushes the negatively charged tape away and attracts the positively charged one.

  The Mythical Current

  That's all well and good. Pat would have no complaints with Benjamin Franklin if electrical experimentation had stopped with electrostatics. But it didn't. In 1799, Alessandro Volta created the first electrical battery, known as the Voltaic cell. In 1821, Michael Faraday began experimenting with devices that led to the development of the electric motor and the electric generator. One thing led to another, and we ended up where we are today—in a world largely powered by electricity.

  Consider, if you will, one situation in which electricity is used. Suppose you turn on the headlights in your car. Your car's battery has a positive terminal and a negative terminal. A wire runs from the positive terminal, through the headlights, through a switch, to the negative terminal. When you turn on the headlights, the switch closes, letting an electric current flow through the wire and through the headlights, causing the filament in the headlights to glow.

  So far, that description matches Franklin's way of talking about electricity. He said that the electrical fluid moved from one place to another. He would say that the current flows from the positive terminal (the place of excess electric fluid, to his way of thinking) to the negative terminal (the place deficient in electric fluid).