Chapter 67
If there was anything on the planet more awkward and uncomfortable than a hospital gown, Heather didn’t know what it was. If the damn thing wasn’t trying to come open at an inopportune moment, it was wadding up uncomfortably when you sat or lay down in it.
The opportunity to slip out of the gown and into her normal attire improved Heather’s mood as much as anything that had happened all day. Even though she’d hoped to be released by ten o’clock that morning, the doctors kept her imprisoned at the hospital until well after noon.
Despite her growing appetite, Heather resisted the mandatory offering from the hospital cafeteria, firm in her determination that the next food to pass between her lips be edible. In an act of family solidarity that she found awe-inspiring, her Mom and Dad waited to have their own lunch until they managed to spring her.
By the time they got back home, Heather was so hungry she had begun questioning her decision to wait. As her mother slid the prepared casserole dish from the refrigerator into the oven, Heather headed upstairs to indulge in a hot bath. She glanced at the floral design on the bubble bath bottle, sniffing it before squeezing a couple of dollops into the tub. Herbal Springtime. Perhaps it could help get the lingering scent of hospital disinfectant out of her nose. One could only hope.
All doubts as to the worthiness of the wait came to an end before the first bite of steaming casserole made its cheesy way from Heather’s fork into her mouth. Her mother was a sorceress who used a ladle instead of a wand. Of that, there could be no doubt.
Although she had been warned that the casserole was hot, Heather found herself having to shift the first bite around in her mouth as she puffed out air in little whooshes to try to keep her tongue from blistering. Even though a chuckle escaped her father’s lips, it didn’t matter. It was still worth it.
The meal had barely ended when there was a knock at the door. It was Mark.
“Everybody decent?”
Heather grinned up at him as he made his way inside, followed by Jennifer. “If we aren’t, then you’re in for a show.”
“Can I offer you two some casserole?” her mother asked.
A look of disappointment creased Mark’s features. “Unfortunately, no. Mom cooked us lunch a while ago. Thank you, though.”
Heather rose from the table, sliding her place setting into the dishwasher before being shooed away by her mother. “I’ll get the kitchen. You go talk with Mark and Jen.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Heather started to guide her friends to the couch in the living room, but Mark shook his head. “Do you feel up to visiting the workshop for a second?”
“Mom, I’m going over to the Smythe’s for a little while.”
“All right, but don’t push it. No more than half an hour. Then you are going to bed. You don’t get over something like that right away.”
“Okay, Mom.”
As she stepped into the Smythe garage, Heather suddenly found herself engulfed in a three-way hug between Mark and Jennifer.
A leak in Jennifer’s plumbing sent tears streaming down her face. “Oh my God, it’s so good to have you back home. I have never been as scared as I was when Mark and I heard you calling us in our minds.”
Heather’s mouth dropped open. “You heard me?”
“You bet we did. Mark even broke the railing on our staircase as he was scrambling into his running suit.”
“Running suit?”
Mark nodded. “I could feel you out there, tugging me toward you. I ran like I’ve never run before. Thank God it was a full moon. Anyway, I found the cave where the Rag Man had you.”
Heather’s knees almost buckled as the memories came crashing back in on her. She sat down on a crate. “I don’t remember a cave.”
Mark repeated the story, only leaving out the most graphic details of the Rag Man’s death.
Heather did not move for several seconds as she tried to absorb what Mark had just said. “But that isn’t the story that Jack told Mom and Dad, or to the police.”
“Interesting, isn’t it.” Mark leaned closer, reminding Heather of someone telling a ghost story around a campfire, just as they were getting to the good part. “One other thing. The Rag Man was fast and strong. Maybe even faster than me. But Jack killed him anyway. From what I saw, Jack’s a professional killer. A damned good one, too.”
Jennifer put a hand on Heather’s arm. “We think he and Janet are NSA agents.”
Heather’s mind whirled. Despite the shock at what she had just been told, a huge wave of relief swept through her body. Jack had killed the Rag Man. Despite her brave outer facade, a deep terror had been growing inside her since long before last night. To know that the maniac was dead lifted an invisible weight. She could feel the tension in her shoulders ease.
Jack had killed him.
For the next several minutes, Mark and Jennifer filled her in on everything, including Jennifer’s progress on the cold-fusion powered subspace transmitter controls.
“And check this out,” said Mark, pointing her attention to the laptop and recording equipment he had retrieved from the Second Ship. “The tape had a bunch of garbage on it and has a lot of gaps, but I saved the interesting parts in an audio visual file on the laptop.”
Mark pressed the play button on the screen. Dr. Stephenson was talking to someone, although neither person appeared in the imagery, most of which was blocked off by some obstruction on the shelf where their small airplane was being kept.
“I am not happy with your progress.”
“I’m sorry, sir. The nanites work perfectly, but the suspension fluid is not holding up well at temperatures above about three degrees Celsius.”
“That is completely worthless to me. I told you to find a way to keep the suspension valid indefinitely at temperatures up to sixty degrees Celsius. What did you not understand about that?”
“I understand what you want. I’m just telling you that our team has not yet found a solution that doesn’t decay at higher temperatures.”
“What is the decay rate?”
“As you would expect, it gets worse the greater the temperature. At room temperature it lasts about as long as a non-refrigerated carton of milk.”
“Bullshit. The original fluid had those characteristics. Are you trying to tell me your high-powered team can’t do better than my first attempt?”
The other man cleared his throat. “We do have a new formulation that hasn’t been tested. The production process should give us a testable sample size within two days.”
“I don’t care what you have to do or how late your people work. I’m giving you two weeks. I need a solution that can survive shipment to third-world countries. And I don’t want to hear about refrigeration. You better not disappoint me.”
“I will do my best.”
“For your sake, I hope you do better than that. Now get out of my office.”
Mark stopped the playback. “There are a couple of other short references to nanites and suspension fluid on the tape, but this was the only section that makes any sense.”
Heather’s mind raced. “Could you make out who he was talking to?”
“No names were mentioned in any part of it.”
“Nanites are microscopic machines,” Jennifer said. “That must be the second technology the Rho Project team is working on.”
Heather nodded. “Apparently. But designed to do what? It sounded like the nanites need some sort of solution to survive.”
Jennifer shook her head. “They are machines. Technically it would be more accurate to say they need the solution to keep running.”
“You know what I meant.”
“Well,” said Mark, “whatever they do, I didn’t like the sound of Dr. Stephenson’s shipping them to third-world countries.”
“He must think it is something that people are going to want, like cold fusion,” said Heather. “I mean, the president will probably have to come out and announce this new thing too, right?”
“Unless Dr. Stephenson thinks he can get this thing out there secretly.”
Jennifer shook her head. “That doesn’t seem too likely. He’s obviously up to something, but the government is funding his research through the lab. I doubt he could hide a project that big.”
Mark thought for a bit. “Well, I think we finally have something that our NSA agents are going to be interested in. Maybe we can get them off our backs and onto finding out what’s going on at the lab.”
“Carefully, though,” said Heather. “These people are better at tracing things than we thought. We have to wait to send out our next message until we have the subspace transmitter working. Then we can remotely tap into a secure line that can’t be traced back to us.”
“Doc said that she would have that working in a couple of days.”
“I never said that.”
“That’s what it sounded like to me.”
“What I said is that I have the control system working. We’ll need a couple of weeks of testing. And that’s if we don’t encounter any major gotcha’s.”
Mark frowned. “Crap. I don’t know if we have that long. It sounded like Stephenson was really pushing his team hard. What do you think, Heather?”
“I think Jennifer’s right. If we push our system before we’ve fully tested it, we could run into problems that could make us all very dead. Cold fusion is a wonderful thing, but if we cause an unexpected spike in the energy, then this shielding wouldn’t be adequate.
“My calculations say these lead panels will shield us fine, so long as the power stays low. We just have to make sure our control station doesn’t give us too much of a good thing.”
“Shit,” Mark gasped. “You mean this thing could run away like some sort of Chernobyl meltdown?”
“No. There’s no way a chain reaction could become self-sustaining. But that doesn’t mean we might not accidentally generate a really big power spike. It wouldn’t spread out of control, but it could sure cook our collective geese.”
“How come our dads agreed to this experiment if that could happen?” Mark asked.
“Because the published theory doesn’t predict that it can with this small an apparatus.” Heather pointed toward the computer screen. “I made some slight modifications that Jennifer coded up for us. The embedded algorithms are so subtle I doubt that anyone other than Dr. Stephenson would even notice.”
“You tinkered with the equations? What if you made a mistake?”
“That’s hardly likely.”
Mark laughed. “Really? The world's greatest minds have been spending the last several months analyzing these equations, and you come up with a better variation?”
Heather shrugged, then reached over onto Mr. Smythe’s workbench and grabbed a handful of sawdust. With a flick of her wrist, she tossed it out onto the clean concrete floor.
“3,487.”
“What?” Mark asked.
“There are 3,487 individual grains of sawdust in that spread I tossed on the floor. But if you were to count them, there would be 3,492.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“There is a 93.65894 percent probability that five of the loosely connected granules would break into two parts as they were spread out during the counting process.”
Mark just stared.
“Now, if you can show me some scientists that can do what I just did, then I’ll withdraw my statement.”
“That’s if I buy your count.”
Heather walked over to the bench where Jennifer had done her fine soldering, grabbed the large magnifying glass, and handed it to Mark, pointing toward the sawdust on the floor. “Be my guest.”
Mark grinned. “Okay, I believe you. But then what’s the point in all the testing delay? I mean, if you’re that confident in your equations, why waste the time?”
“The equations are the easy part. Checking the responsiveness of the control circuits and doing the tuning is the really tough work. It looks like Jennifer is making incredible progress, but she needs a chance to conduct her testing. Otherwise, we may not need a tanning bed, ever again.”
Mark threw out his hands. “Okay, I give up. You girls get with the program then. We can’t let Stephenson complete what he’s up to before we get another message to the NSA. And we need to be very worried about Jack in the meantime.”
Jennifer nodded. “That’s why we need you to finish off that bug detector and run a sweep on both our houses.”
“That’s just what I was going to do. In the meantime, we have to assume that the only safe places to talk are here and in our rooms or outside somewhere. If those areas were bugged, they would have already nailed our butts to the wall. Oh, and if we do find bugs, we won’t be able to remove them. That would be a dead giveaway.”
“At least we’ll know where they are,” said Jennifer.
“I’m going to be reading up on the subject in my room.” Mark paused at the door, turning back toward Heather. “Good to have you back in the land of the living.”
Heather smiled back at him. “Good to still be with you.” As he turned away, Heather called after him. “Mark.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for coming for me. I know Jack was there, but if he hadn’t been, I know you would have saved me.”
Mark’s smile warmed her soul. With a slight nod, he turned and disappeared through the door.