Six Bits (17 page)

Albert made an appointment with Forst and then spent several entire evenings going over the literature that he had accumulated that might be relevant. He wanted everything fresh in his mind for this meeting.

***

“Eve of Destruction” had become an east coast phenomenon. The crowds at their gigs had gotten so big that they were now being booked into small to medium concert halls instead of the bars they’d started out in. Joe had been interviewing “managers” and they’d moved from their van into a bus.

This morning they’d all gathered in a coffee shop to talk to one of the manager candidates. Allie came back from the restroom to find him at the table with the other band members. Immediately she thought that he didn’t fit their image. He seemed much too slick. He wasn’t wearing a suit, but looked like he was. When she sat down across from him he looked mildly startled. “Holy shit! Eva, you’re gorgeous! Why don’t you dress like this for your shows?”

Allie glanced down at herself. She was wearing a snug midriff t-shirt, cutoffs and sandals. “Doesn’t fit our music.”

Joe said, “Give it up Steve. Yes, she’s beautiful, but she wants us to succeed on the music, not her sex appeal.”

“
Come on
! It’s hard enough to make it in this business. For God’s sake, you’ve
gotta
play
every
card you’re dealt!”

Allie got up from the table. “Joe, let me know when you’ve got someone else for us to talk to?”

They all watched wistfully as she walked out the door. The guy they’d been interviewing said, “Joe, you’ve got to talk some sense into her! Are you the leader of this band or what?”

“Yeah,” he chuckled ruefully, “I’m the ‘leader,’ but I do exactly what she says, just like the rest of the guys.”

***

Dans and Forst had just watched a split screen video with two views at right angles of absolutely nothing but a black background. The start of the video showed the setup of the two cameras and the black background cards and the lights. The split screen views showed the black background for 20 seconds, then, suddenly a spray of water erupted in the middle of the space, shooting upward out of nothingness. For that video Allie had opened a port from a cold water pipe in the lab to the spot at the focal point of the cameras.

Forst’s head jerked back, eyes wide. “What just happened?”

Dans looked at him intently, “Something like a wormhole was just opened from a vessel containing pressurized water to the viewing area. The vessel was about 15 feet from the visible opening you saw on the video.” Dans didn’t want to say it just came from a water pipe in the wall. Didn’t sound sophisticated enough.

Forst raised an eyebrow, “This is real?”

“Absolutely.”

“Because it’d be pretty easy to fake with a good video editing program…” He trailed off tentatively.

Grimly, Albert said, “That video has not been manipulated at all. Not even an adjustment of brightness or contrast.” He ran the same segment, and then others, running them repeatedly to let Forst look for video editing artifacts.

Forst turned to Dans, “Wow! Amazing. Can you bring the equipment here? Or do I need to go to your lab to look at it? Will the University let you sell me the manufacturing rights?”

Albert looked down at the table. His jaw bunched and he muttered, “I can no longer reproduce the phenomenon.”

“What?” Forst guffawed and slapped his knee. “‘If you can’t reproduce it, it ain’t real.’ I’m pretty sure I’m quoting
you
correctly on that one!”

“It was reproduced hundreds of times and I collected reams of data!” Dans said hotly, “I just can’t reproduce it anymore…” He trailed off.

Forst leaned back in his chair, “You have
got
to be shitting me!”

“I’m looking for a collaborator that can go over the data I obtained, see what I’ve missed and help me figure out how to do it again. And to do it bigger and better.”

Forst looked up at the ceiling. An irreproducible phenomenon would be worthless. On the other hand, if
he
could figure out what had gone wrong with the equipment, which
was
kind of his specialty,
and
they could scale it up - the possibilities seemed tremendous! They started to talk over rights, how they would share them and the University’s inevitable piece of the pie since Dans was employed by them.

***

Thunder rolled off Joe’s fingertips as they drummed on the low string of his electric bass. A spotlight gradually illuminated him, dressed entirely in black, standing in the center of the stage, back slightly arched and legs spread a little more than shoulder width. The crowd, which had been gathering excitement during the agonizingly long bass note, started to whoop, holler and whistle. Shan kicked the bass drum once to produce a powerful thump that echoed back and forth across the packed medium sized arena. Another thump, then the crack of a snare lit a spot on the snare drum. That spot gradually enlarged to encompass the entire drum set as Shan established a simple, solid beat. Joe’s rolling bass thunder developed punctuations to match the beat established on the drums and then a spot faded in on their big Leslie speaker. The rotor spun up and a Hammond organ chord filled gradually in over the beat as another spot came up on Davis at the keyboards. The crowd, frenzied now, began to chant, “E-va! E-va! E-va!”

The unmistakable evanescent sound of Allie’s guitar faded slowly into the mix adding to the pulse of the sound, but still carrying that first chord. A chord which had now been sustained for so long that the listeners were anxiously waiting for a change. The pulse sped gradually and Allie and Davis added some higher notes to the chord, but the listeners’ anxiety for a chord change simply built, and built, and built.

When Joe raised the long neck of his bass guitar and chopped down with it, the next chord finally blossomed, and another spot lit Allie. It was hard to tell how slender and tall she was in her trademark ripped baggy jeans and heavy vest festooned with charms. Spiky black hair stuck up out of a visor that shaded her face. The crowd went wild as she leaned to the mike from a wide stance,

“Another may be

The master of my fate

But
I
will be

The captain of my soul

Over deep seas

I’ll sail this soul

Against the breeze

And through those shoals”

The crowd rocked slowly back and forth as if in a trance. Her eerie vocal blended perfectly with Davis’s simple baritone harmony. Some ecstatic fans fainted and were carried out of the arena. Hundreds of others had been turned away from the sold out concert.

***

Forst was appalled. Dans had provided him with data out the wazoo, but claimed that the apparatus that had created the ports had been destroyed. When asked for the remnants of the destroyed apparatus, Dans said that it “had been completely demolished in one of the tests and had been put in the trash.” Construction notes and diagrams? Didn’t exist! It had been “an accidental side effect of a couple of unrelated pieces of equipment purchased for something else and misconnected.”

Photographs of the effect were abundant. Pictures of the device creating the effect? Nonexistent! Forst wasn’t just appalled, he was pissed. Dans was obviously hiding something about the apparatus. This could be huge! He was sure he could make another device and that
he
could make it work, but Dans wouldn’t give him
any
idea how the first one had been constructed. Dans wanted them to “try to figure out another way to create the same fields.”

What a crock of shit! If you’d built one working airplane, you wouldn’t send an engineer into a closet to “build something that flies” with no more guidance than “it’s been done before” would you? Forst felt a band tightening around his head and knew that his blood pressure was up again.

Dans was coming over and they were going to have a serious talk!

Al Dans knocked on Forst’s office door, hoping that Forst had finally been able to produce some kind of prototype that could generate the funny twisting electric field effects that he’d measured around Allie’s ports. Forst had been getting really uptight and demanding, though. Al had begun strongly thinking of looking for a different collaborator. Nonetheless, he was genuinely surprised to see the bright red fury on Forst’s face when he stepped into the room. “What’s the matter?” he began.

Forst exploded. “What’s the matter?
What’s
the matter! For Chrissakes! You’ve got me wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on an important project with both of my hands tied behind my back!
That’s
what’s the matter! What’s the matter is that you need to tell me how your
first
goddamned machine worked! I’m not spending another dime on this
piece of shit
project while you pretend you don’t have any idea how the original device was constructed.”

Dans rocked back in astonishment. Even when Forst had been a grad student, Al had seen the man get pretty irritated when devices didn’t work as expected. But Dans had never seen this much rage before. And
never
directed at himself!  He swallowed and shrugged, “Well, OK, let’s just give up on it then.” To himself, he thought,
I
certainly
don’t want to continue working with someone who has such a temper. I guess I’ll just
have
to find another collaborator.

Forst’s eyebrows shot up his crimson forehead. “Give up? Give up!
I’m
the one with hundreds of thousands invested! We are
not
giving up!
You
are going to tell me
how
the first
damned
model worked!”

Dans made placating motions with his hands, “Randy, I’ve told you, I don’t
know
how it worked.”

“That’s a load of crap!” Forst hurled a vase off his desk and it exploded against the wall behind Dans. “You’re going to tell me! And you’re gonna to tell me
now
!”

Flinching in startlement from the vase, Dans turned quickly to the door. To his surprise he found the exit blocked by a large man with a goatee. Al turned back to Forst, “Let’s talk about this some more when you’ve calmed down.”

His face dark, Forst ground out, “I’m
not
going to calm down. YOU, on the other hand, are going to provide some answers
today
. NOT after I’ve calmed down.
Today
, dammit!”

***

After signing autographs until their fingers ached, Eve of Destruction stumbled out to their tour bus. Allie turned on her phone and plugged it in. It immediately started chirping. She pulled off her shirt and peered blearily at the screen. It listed scores of calls and messages from her mother. There were almost always a few, but this was
way
more than usual. She virtually never listened to any of them, though recently the cold attitude she’d held toward her parents had started to melt.

Then Allie saw there was a text from her little brother Stephen.
That
was unusual. Her heart skipped a beat as she touched the icon. “Sis, pls call home. Dad missing for three days. Mom going crazy.”

A chill ran down Allie’s spine. She leaned her head back against the wall.
Missing!? Could he have run off with a girlfriend or something?
Somehow she knew that wasn’t true. It just didn’t fit with her dad’s dreamy eyed focus on physics.
Damn! It’s the middle of the night. I’ll call in the morning and he’ll probably be home by then. It’ll save a lot of trouble.
She pulled off her jeans and crawled under the sheet, but then lay staring at the roof of the bus. Finally, with a sigh, she got up, hit the shower and started washing the black crap out of her hair. They didn’t have another concert for four days and it was only a two hour drive home from here.

***

The doorbell rang and Sarah Dans nearly dropped her coffee. Her heart thumped in her chest. Since Al had gone missing she feared every ring for the potential bad news it might bring. She took a deep breath and went to the door.
Is it the police? No, it’s a young woman.
With despair, she thought,
Oh no, probably some chipper door to door sales girl!
Sarah had just decided to pretend she wasn’t home, when the young woman simply opened the door and stepped inside!

Allie!

Sarah threw her arms around the daughter she hadn’t seen for a year and a half, sobbing uncontrollably. “You got my messages!”

Allie hugged her mom, reluctant to say that she wouldn’t have listened to the messages if it hadn’t been for Stephen. On the other hand, she wondered, why not? What had this plump, pleasant, woman ever done to deserve the disdain Allie had held her in for the past eight or so years? She held her mom tighter, suddenly crying herself. “Have you heard anything?”

Her mom leaned back, looking into Allie’s eyes and shaking her head. Allie found her heart sinking. All the way home she’d been thinking that she’d get home, and her dad would have showed up, and
she’d
be pissed. Now, confronted with the reality that he was still gone, she found herself thinking wistfully of the good times they’d had as a family. All the things that had irritated her so… seemed so trivial now.

Allie and her mom went in and sat at the breakfast table. Sarah jumped back up, “Let me get you something to eat!”

“No! I’m fine. Sit. Tell me what happened.”

Instead, Sarah went to the stairs and yelled up, “Steve, Allie’s home! Come on down!” She returned to the table and just sat staring at her daughter for a moment. Finally, she began, “Your dad just didn’t come home Friday. Nobody at the University saw him after lunchtime. He left his office at the U and never showed up for an appointment at Forst Enterprises. The police wouldn’t really start looking the first day or so. I’m not sure they’re very serious about it yet. They keep asking if he might have had a girlfriend!”