Chapter 19
By the time the police arrived, the man was long gone. Heather’s parents had neither seen nor heard anything out of the ordinary. If it had not been for the note and the chewing gum, Heather doubted the two officers would have believed her account of what had occurred.
After taking statements, the officers took the gum and put it in a plastic bag. One of them examined the note.
“Looks like our man tore this out of a cheap Bible. The type you find in drawers at two-star hotels.”
Either the cop had some highly developed deductive reasoning or he had way more personal experience than Heather cared to think about. As she was about to settle firmly on the latter conclusion, the officer paused in his study.
“Isaiah 64:2. Six letters, the number six, then two numbers that add to six. Mark of the beast, isn’t it?”
Heather’s father raised an eyebrow. “Superstitious nonsense.”
“Oh, I agree with you, Mr. McFarland. I don’t put a bit of stock in it. The question is, though, what about our man out there? Does he? Anyway, we’ll let the boys back at the lab take a look at it.”
With a nod, the officers departed.
“Their ‘lab’ is going to ‘look at it,’” her father huffed. “Unless I miss my guess, that stuff is going into a shoe box on a shelf.”
“It’s all right, Dad,” said Heather. “I shouldn't have overreacted in the first place. I can’t believe I screamed.”
Her mother shook her head. “Baloney. Any time a man climbs up to a young lady's second-floor window and starts sticking threatening-sounding notes to it with chewing gum, it calls for a bit of overreaction.”
Her father’s eyes tightened. “If he shows up again, he’s likely to come down with a case of forty-five-caliber lead poisoning.”
“Dad, please. I’m sure he’s just some unhappy homeless person who needs help.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I hope he finds it before he threatens my family again.” With that, Heather’s father turned and left the room.
Heather turned to her mother. “Dad wouldn’t really shoot him, would he?”
“Don’t get paranoid, now, but pay attention, won’t you? At least until this guy is caught.”
That didn’t answer her question, but Heather nodded anyway. “I will, Mom. Don’t worry.”
Sleep seemed an unlikely possibility as Heather crawled back into her bed and pulled the down comforter up under her chin. But before she knew it, she found herself rising to greet the new day. Once again she had beaten the sun.
She glanced over at the pile of books that awaited her and then at the snow piled on the outside of her windowsill. Something about snow, especially when it was falling heavily and piling high enough to call off school, made Heather feel like goofing off. All that study, and she still hadn’t figured out a reference in the ship's imagery that would give them a key to understanding the tiny component they were studying.
They had tried to organize a good, specific query to the onboard computer system by coming up with a question about data transfer. Jennifer had gotten the idea, and Heather thought it a good one, that if they could get the ship to show them how it stored and transferred data, it would be a very basic starting point in understanding the underlying alien technology. But no matter how they phrased or visualized the question, the answering imagery was the same.
It looked like a simple pair of transistors or electronic microswitches. The problem was there were no wires or connections of any type between the switches the ship described, merely some symbols and mathematical equations that Heather did not understand.
It was frustrating because she thought they could probably build the switches themselves, given a good microscope, a computer, some small RadioShack stepper motors to accurately control the instruments, and an appropriate semiconductor material. But since it wouldn’t form a circuit, why bother? What was the point of a pair of tiny electronic switches that weren't connected to each other?
The really annoying part was that they had gotten this far a couple of weeks ago. Despite Heather pushing herself through as many advanced mathematics books as she could read, she was no closer to understanding the mysterious equations than she had been when she first saw them.
“Oh well,” she said to herself, sliding into her big, furry slippers and wrapping her flannel robe around her body. “It looks like a good cartoons and hot chocolate day.”
The morning slipped away in wonderful wastefulness, aided along its path to Lounge Lizardsville by a breakfast of homemade biscuits and honey, followed by a pot of hot cocoa set on a coaster beside the couch. The television was tuned to the Cartoon Network as huge, puffy snowflakes drifted down outside the windows. By ten, Heather still had not dressed and had no intention of doing so anytime soon.
At the moment, an epic battle of wits raged between Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. Having just plummeted to the bottom of the canyon—where he kicked up a small mushroom cloud of dust—the coyote had come up with a bold new plan.
Heather had always related to the hapless fellow. After all, his plans were truly ingenious, sometimes awe-inspiringly so. Still, no matter how brilliant a scheme he put together, the stupid bird would somehow violate several laws of nature and leave the coyote to suffer the consequences.
Curled into a tight ball on the couch, sipping happily at a fresh cocoa refill—“Thanks, Mom”—Heather watched as the coyote finished painting a perfect picture of a black tunnel through a rock wall. The wall, which lay along the bird's projected path, completely blocked the road so that when the bird came running down it, he would speed directly into the trap, pre-tenderizing himself in preparation for becoming roadrunner stew.
It was really impossible to get too much of this stuff. Sure enough, as she and the coyote watched in anticipation, the roadrunner screeched down the road directly up to the cliff. Then—once again thumbing his pointy nose at the pile of physics books that lay upstairs on Heather’s desk—the bird passed harmlessly through the fake tunnel, continuing out the other side.
And, as could be expected, the coyote raced after the roadrunner, only to splat against the black paint on the near side of the rock wall. He stumbled around afterward in a dazed fashion until he fell off the cliff, generating another small mushroom cloud at the bottom.
Fire exploded in Heather’s brain as everything clicked into place. Of course. The wall had two sides.
She jumped up and raced for the telephone. Hearing a familiar hello on the far end, she barely managed to keep her excited voice low enough that her mother did not hear.
“Jen! Jen, you won’t believe it. I can barely believe it myself, and all because of a cartoon. Never let anyone tell you cartoons are mindless.”
“Heather, I have no idea what you’re talking about or where this is going.”
Heather paused and took a deep, gulping breath. “I figured it out. I know what the microswitches do. I know how they work. With Mark’s help, I think we can make them.”