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CHAPTER FOUR

NUCLEAR PHYSICS

They drove to San Jose. Not far from the freeway was a major street that had been upper middle class once, gone downhill, and was in the process of regentrification. They turned into a side street of large houses, some large enough to have been called mansions in their prime. About half the houses on the block seemed to be residential. The other half had signs identifying them as commercial offices, but they still looked like houses. Lee parked the Dodge van in the driveway of a two-story house that sported the sign Universe Software and Communications.

“This is it,” Lee said. He led them up on the porch. Before he could unlock the door, it opened. “And now it’s time to meet the third member of your team.”

She was small and wiry, vaguely Italian in appearance with brown eyes, dark hair, and small features except for a Romanesque nose too large for the rest of her face. With a smaller nose she might have been beautiful, Saxon thought, but even with the nose she was pretty enough. She wore tan trousers and shirt, both neatly pressed, and had a radio and baton in her wide, black equipment belt. A badge said security officer, and the nametag above her shirt pocket said sandori.

“Lorraine Sandori,” Lee said. “We usually call her ‘Spirit.’ Bart Saxon, meet Spirit. And Cal Haskins.”

“Which one’s the boss?” Sandori asked. There might or might not have been a smile, and Haskins chuckled.

“Well it sure ain’t me. Good to meet you, Officer. I think we met before.”

Sandori nodded.

“Where?” Dr. Lee asked.

“Tenderloin,” Sandori said. “I rousted him for hustling tourists. One of the crackdowns.” She turned to Saxon. “I’ve seen you before, too. Same places.”

Saxon nodded.

“Never busted you, though. So now you’re the boss.”

Saxon thought about that for a moment.

“If he says I am.”

“Okay, that’s settled then,” Sandori said. This time she did grin. “Gentlemen, may I show you to your rooms?”

* * *

They each had a room on the second floor. Saxon’s was sparsely furnished with a bed, dresser, table, and chair. Haskins’ room was similar. All the furniture was used, some very much so, as if this had been a rooming house before Lee rented it. Saxon’s room had a private bathroom attached. There was another down the hall, and a third in the tiny servant’s suite Sandori had claimed. There were clean towels in the bathroom, and someone had made the beds with clean sheets.

“Housekeeping service comes for two hours every other day,” Lee explained. “They get here at eleven sharp. Rooms all right?”

“Sure,” Saxon said.

“Good. We’ll get started downstairs. You can have ten minutes to unpack.”

Saxon grinned to himself. He didn’t need ten minutes. He was wearing everything he owned, and so was Haskins.

He tried to remember what he’d seen in the papers about Officer Lorraine Sandori. He didn’t often read the papers, but sometimes, so he would have something to talk about Wednesday evenings at Lefty’s. It had been something involving a shooting, a gang member with friends in the Mayor’s office. Black kid? Saxon couldn’t remember. Young kid, sixteen maybe, carrying a gun. There hadn’t been any question about the shooting being justified, but there’d been demonstrations even so, as well as threats from the other gang members, promises of retaliation against the whole police department. Some cops complained that their lives weren’t safe with her on the force. The Mayor had taken Officer Sandori off the streets, put her in some desk job. It hadn’t been all that long ago, but he couldn’t remember any more. Maybe she resigned, he thought. I can see how she would. Quit and get a job as security.

Security for who? CIA? Haskins was sure of it.

There was a knock on his door.

“Time to get started,” Sandori said through the door.

* * *

The old living room was set up as an office, with a computer, two telephones, mostly empty bookcases, and tables with nothing on them. The dining room was furnished with a big formal dining table, shield-backed chairs, and varnished wood sideboards. All the furniture was scarred and battered, but it had been expensive once.

The meeting was in the dining room. Sandori had made coffee in the kitchen. She brought it out and set it on the sideboard, poured herself a cup, and sat down at the table.

Saxon grinned to himself. She’ll make coffee but she’s damned if she’ll serve it. Okay by me, but Lee doesn’t look all that happy about it.

George Lee waited until Haskins and Saxon had poured their own coffee, then went to the kitchen for a glass of water. He came back to sit at the head of the long table and looked at his watch.

“Four. A little late to get anything done with the electronics places, so we’ll start early tomorrow. Tonight after dinner we’ll go to Sports Chalet and get you three some new clothes, outdoors gear. Do you have questions?”

“A million of them,” Saxon said. “But I’m not sure where to begin. We’re going to need stuff, some expensive.”

“Let me worry about the expense.”

“Sure. But I thought about what I need while we were driving down. There’s a lot.”

“I know. There are limits, but money isn’t our major worry,” Lee said. “Shipping is, both volume and weight. I’ll have some cargo containers delivered. All your stuff will have to go in them. Two, I think. Three at the most. We’ll pack them here.”

“I can help with outfitting,” Haskins said. “Tell me the climate, I’ll get us gear for it.”

Lee nodded.

“Glad to hear it. Climate varies. Wet, usually hot, but it can get cold in the mountains.”

“Mountains,” Haskins said. “Snow?”

“There can be snow.”

“Hmm. Now where in Africa—”

“I never said it was Africa,” Lee said. “Just think tropical shorelines and high mountains with snow.”

“Not too many places like that,” Haskins said.

“Mosquito nets? Snakes? Scorpions?” Sandori asked. She wasn’t laughing.

“Probably not,” George Lee said. “But I never thought about it. I’ll have to ask. You keep thinking that way, think about what you’ll need.”

“I’m not much for the rugged outdoors,” Saxon said.

“That’s why we brought Ms. Sandori aboard,” Lee said. “And Mr. Haskins. Let them worry about that aspect.”

“I pretty well have to,” Saxon said. He sat in thought for a moment, rubbing his chin, then refocused on Lee.

“Okay. So we’re looking at some tight weight and volume limits. Laptop computers, then. Cost more but they’re smaller, use less power—”

“By all means.”

Inscrutable Chinee, Saxon thought. Well, I’m not sure he’s Chinese, but he’s inscrutable enough.

“What about power?”

“There isn’t any,” Lee said.

“None? Can we at least assume petroleum supplies?”

Lee chuckled.

“Assume nothing. You can take some diesel fuel with you, but not enough to operate beyond a few months. There’s oil in the ground, even some bubbling oil pools, but all the refineries have been blown up.”

“Blown up. You mean like in a war. Guerrilla action?” Sandori asked.

“Not precisely,” Lee said. “That war’s long over. But look, the place is primitive. I can’t promise you peace and tranquility. There will certainly be bandits, and hell, the government’s no better than it should be.”

No better than it should be, Saxon thought. The phrase was mildly jarring. Why would a Chinese-American sociologist be using an English lower-middle-class expression? Another question to be answered someday.

“Maybe this is too dangerous,” he said.

“Chicken?” Sandori asked, and Haskins chuckled.

“More dangerous than the streets here, man?” He laughed again.

“All right,” Saxon said. “The point is made.” He turned back to Lee. “But without oil, kerosene, something, we can’t run a diesel generator. You already said there’s no reliable electric power. What do we run the computers on?”

“Computers don’t use much juice.” Lee waved dissmissively. “Get solar cells and batteries.”

“Expensive,” Saxon said.

“Labor’s cheap there,” Sandori said. “Right?”

Lee nodded.

“Man-powered generators, then,” she said.

“Yeah!” Haskins said. “I’ve used those. You need a bicycle to do it right, though. And we take the diesel generator in case there’s kerosene.”

“You might be able to distill kerosene from sludge oil,” Lee said. “Whether it would run a diesel generator I don’t know. But in any event manpower and solar cells will do. With batteries. And a bicycle generator, they use those in Vietnam. I’ll get all that in the budget. Spirit, you can make some calls about solar-cell suppliers. And windmills. Do they make windmills that would power a computer? How big are they? Find out.”

“Now?”

“Sure, now,” Lee said. “Look, people, time’s short and there’s a lot of work to do, and talking about it gets none of it done! You’ve got an hour before closing time. Use it.”

“Okay.”

“And tonight, all of you, make lists. What you need. Survival gear. Clothes, toothbrushes—”

“Spare eyeglasses,” Haskins said. He looked significantly at Saxon’s bifocals. “Captain broke his glasses once, it was two weeks getting new ones.”

“It’ll be more than two weeks replacing them where we’re going,” Lee said. “Right. Make a note, get to one of those cut-rate places and have them make you five pairs. Which reminds me. Dental work. Spirit’s already started. Bart, we have appointments for you with a local dentist. We’ll work Cal in, too. We want to make sure you won’t have any dental emergencies.”

“I got good teeth,” Haskins said. He grinned. “Won’t hurt to get them looked at, though. Hey, I like this, it’s like the Army.”

“Five pairs of glasses,” Saxon said. He scribbled on loose-leaf paper. “Speaking of notes, there are some great new electronic gadgets. Make notes with a stylus. Talk to computers and everything.”

“You may have all the toys you like, Mr. Saxon. Well, within reason. Particularly if they are small and light and don’t use much electric power.”

“Good.”

“You’ll also take books,” Lee said. “Textbooks and reference books. Presume the power fails and you have no access to your computers. Assume you will not have access to libraries or book stores, and that the books you take with you may be the only ones you’ll ever have.”

Saxon looked at him quizzically.

“Just how remote is this place?” he asked, and noticed that Sandori had a thin, knowing smile. Did she know something he didn’t?

“It is primitive and remote and communications are difficult,” Lee said. “What’s the most remote community you can imagine?”

“Upland New Guinea,” Saxon said. “Barring that there’s no Lost City in the Amazon Basin. Wasn’t there some anthropologist killed looking for that? Sometime in this century, at that.”

“I don’t recall, but you will not go wrong thinking that way,” Lee said. “Remote, and both communications and transportation depend on factors we don’t always control. Plan for long periods without much contact with civilization.”

“Medical support?” Haskins asked. “We’ll have that, won’t we?”

“You should,” Lee said carefully. “But once again, you’ll be better off if prepared for minimal support.”

“So we take medical manuals. Prescription drugs? Morphine?” Saxon asked.

“Make a list. I’ll see what I can do,” Lee said. “Medical and surgical manuals, yes.”

“Surgical?” Saxon said.

Haskins laughed.

“Do it yourself brain surgery. Be sure to have a good handbook,” he said, but Lee wasn’t smiling.

“It’s happened, you know,” he said. “Anything else?”

“Weapons,” Haskins said. “I’m supposing you’ll have some military units along with us, but do we need personal weapons? ’Cause if we do, with my record, somebody’s going to have to buy them for me. Maybe for Mr. Saxon, too.”

“Spirit will take care of that,” Lee said. “Do you have preferences, Mr. Haskins?”

“I like the old Government Model .45 just fine,” Haskins said. “But I expect Saxon would rather have the Beretta nine-millimeter, and I could live with that just to keep the ammunition supplies simple.” He grimaced. “Comes to rifles, I’m no great hand with a long gun anyway. Know my way around ’em, but not my thing. Never had a preference, anyway. Army standard is fine by me.”

“I think we already have H&K rifles,” Lee said. “The G3 in seven-point-six-two-millimeter NATO standard, I believe.”

“They’ll do. What kind of troops will be with us, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “But we’re not sending you there to fight. You’ll be there to teach.”

“Fine by me,” Haskins said.

Saxon nodded. Fine by me too.

* * *

Saxon unpacked the shopping bags and put his new clothes carefully away in the dresser and closet. There was another box that would go directly into the shipping containers, but he still had plenty of new stuff to wear. It was chosen for function rather than style, although the bush jacket was fashionable enough. It was all expensive, too, Gore-Tex mountain parka, Tilley adventure-cloth pants and shirt and hat, thermal underwear, photographer’s vest. All very natty.

Lee hadn’t seemed to worry about how much he put on his platinum American Express card. It was all first class, and anything Saxon or Haskins thought they might need had been bought without question, often with spares.

“Weight and volume,” Lee had said, so they bought most of their personal equipment from the backpacker section of the store.

Bart Saxon got comfortable in the easy chair and turned on the reading light. He opened a book he had picked up, James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed, and began to read. It felt good to be warm and dry and clean, well fed, with a place to sleep; but mostly it felt good to be an intellectual again. Burke’s writing was a bit wordy and tedious but made an interesting point about how a change in knowledge dramatically altered human understanding of themselves and the world around . . .

* * *

Saxon closed the heavy steel doors of the cargo container with a slam and applied the big padlock. There was a certain finality about locking it up. Three weeks of work, and they were done.

His jaw hurt. They’d found half a dozen cavities, which shouldn’t have been a big surprise given the way he’d been treating himself. Now they were all fixed, and he had new toothbrushes, one an electronic thing that ran on rechargeable batteries and did sonic cleaning so he wouldn’t get gum disease. They all had them, as well as the usual variety. Each had a backpack of personal gear. Toothbrushes, binoculars, personal radios, eyeglasses, camping equipment, flashlights, guns, all packed into one of the cargo containers. Repair kits for every damned thing, like they were going to the Moon.

Otherwise the big steel containers were jammed full with everything Saxon thought he’d need to teach science to “smart but primitive future leaders.” He had laptop computers, batteries, solar cells, books, and hundreds of CD-ROMs each containing the equivalent of a dozen and more books. There was an Encyclopedia Britannica as well as several smaller and less complete encyclopedias. These were both in print and on CD-ROM. Another set of CD-ROMs held the classic eleventh-edition Britannica; then he’d found a printed copy in a used book store in Silicon Valley and bought that as well. It was bulky, but worth it. That was when they’d decided there would be three containers.

The number of books he could carry was limited, but CD-ROMs were compact, and he had a number of readers. They ought to last a while if he took care of them. He hoped they would, anyway; and on CD-ROM he had nearly every classic of English literature, plus dozens of other literary works in languages Saxon didn’t know. Math and science disks, textbooks, illustrated lectures, science demonstrations, Burke’s Connections, all on CD-ROM. There were also copies of papers like Einstein’s that had once changed the world. Engineering texts, the Feynman lectures on freshman physics, the complete Loompanics catalog of “primitive living” titles, five mathematics simulation programs including both Macsyma and Mathematica, computer design programs with expensive math and physics add-ons, a program that claimed to be a complete chemistry lab simulator and another that simulated electronics breadboards. He was short of student laboratory equipment, but there was a pretty complete chemistry research lab with reagents, and five excellent microscopes from small compound wide angle to an extremely powerful microbiology scope.

There was a good telescope, and mirror blanks for making an even larger one. A small machine shop that fitted into a large sample case. All told, he was better equipped than he’d been in the school in Blackhawk. Electric power would be a problem, but they had both manual and diesel generators, and a knockdown windmill, as well as the solar cell collectors. Rechargeable batteries were both heavy and bulky and there weren’t enough of them, but he had as many as Lee would allow him. There might not be enough power for a machine shop, but there would sure be enough for his laptop computers.

Saxon waited until Haskins had gone inside, then stopped George Lee on the back porch of the big San Jose house.

“You have to know that a lot of that stuff is over my head,” he said. “Look, I taught high school science. I know math, and I could teach college freshman chemistry and physics, but I can’t even read Einstein’s original papers on relativity! I sure can’t teach that!”

“You don’t have to.”

“Then why do we have all that advanced stuff?” Saxon gestured towards the cargo containers. He’d concentrated on buying equipment and books and software for teaching elementary science, and had been astonished when the higher-level programs began arriving by UPS and Federal Express, first a trickle, then a flood of them, all ordered by George Lee from catalogs he’d gotten by answering ads in Scientific American and Science Digest.

“Does it hurt to have the information along?” Lee demanded.

“No—”

“Is there anything you need that we’re leaving behind to make room for it?”

“No. I guess. I mean we could use more student computers.”

“You’ve got a dozen. That’s more than you asked for.”

“I hadn’t thought it through. We need more. Maybe some of those new digital cameras they’re marketing. More laptops . . . ”

“All right, how many more laptops do you want?” Lee asked.

“Maybe another dozen? With built-in CD-ROM readers.”

“Let’s go get them. It’ll be a squeeze but we’ll get them in.”

The salesman at Fry’s would be very happy indeed.

“Now?”

“Why not?” Lee asked. “And anything else you need. We’re short on time in case you don’t remember. Now what else?”

“How about those LCD projectors? And spare copies of some of the CD-ROMs.”

“Good. I already put in some spare copies of the ones I thought were most critical. I also threw in a few crates of books. Just in case your power systems don’t work.”

“Thanks. I mean, there’s got to be more I didn’t think of, but—”

“Better think harder, then. We’ll be leaving soon enough, and it’ll be a bit late then. If you don’t have it going in, you may never get it. Let me make that clear. If you don’t take it with you, you very likely will never have it. So think now.”

“All right, I’ll give you another list in the morning, but I still can’t teach nuclear physics!”

“No one is asking you to teach nuclear physics,” Lee said. He seemed very serious.


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