Vaz Read online

  The ref stood them up and raised a grinning Dante’s hand. With a tone of wonderment, Lisanne said, “He won?”

  Vaz nodded cheerfully, “He won.”

  Lisanne clapped her hands and stamped her foot enthusiastically. She hugged Vaz. “I’m glad I came. I thought I’d hate it, but it’s really pretty exciting… Well, I guess it is, as long as he wins… and doesn’t get hurt.”

  When the meet was over, Lisanne surprised Vaz by wanting to go down and congratulate Dante. Vaz had always just gone home once the meet was finished. Sometimes as soon as Dante had wrestled. Dante’s team had won the meet and so everyone was pretty excited and bouncing around. The hyper crowd made Vaz a little uncomfortable but he managed to stay calm. Dante saw them and came over grinning, “Mom! You came too? How’d you like it?”

  “It was fun, though I don’t think I would have liked it if you’d lost.”

  “Bite your tongue! That’s not gonna happen.”

  The coach turned, “Mr. and Mrs. Gettnor?”

  Dante turned to him, “Yeah, Coach Avery. This is my mom and dad. Mom’s never come to a meet before. Afraid I’ll get hurt.”

  “Oh, no Ma’am. Don’t worry about that. It’s the other guys that have to worry. I’m pretty sure Don’s going to win State if he can just stay in the 74 kilo weight class.”

  Vaz and Lisanne glanced at one another. Dante had implied he was winning some matches but not that he might be doing that well.

  Dante had turned back to his parents, “I might get a scholarship to help pay for college.”

  Lisanne said, “That’s wonderful!” at the same time that Vaz said, “You shouldn’t worry about that.”

  They glanced at one another but then Dante asked, “Got any pointers for me Dad?”

  Coach Avery said, “Did you wrestle, Mr. Gettnor?”

  Vaz shrugged, embarrassed. “Back when I was in school. I certainly don’t have anything to offer that your coach wouldn’t be able to tell you better than I, Dante,” at a grimace from Dante, Vaz quickly corrected himself to, “Don.”

  As they broke up Lisanne started talking to Steve’s mother, leaving Vaz and Dante next to one another. Dante raised an eyebrow, “Suggestions, Dad?”

  Vaz tilted his head. “Really, Vaz, it’s been forever. You’re a much better wrestler than I ever was. I couldn’t offer you any suggestions.”

  Dante said, “Come on Dad! I know you know more about it than you’re letting on.”

  Vaz drew his head back in surprise. “Why would you think that?”

  Dante waved a hand in dismissal, “OK. You can’t help, I get it. I’m goin’ out to dinner with Steve, OK?”

  “Sure...?” Vaz watched Dante walk away in bemusement. What gave him the idea that I’d be the right person to ask for wrestling tips?

  ***

  Gettnor’s house AI unlocked the door for Smint and said, “Go on down to the basement Dr. Smint. Dr. Gettnor is waiting for you.”

  Jack opened the door, went inside and headed down the stairs. For a moment he wondered if he should knock on the door at the bottom of the stairs, but decided he’d already been invited. Opening it he said, “Vaz?”

  “Hey Jack. Almost ready.”

  Gettnor was sitting on his rolling chair, screwing bolts down the side of a long stainless steel pipe about a foot in diameter. Cables appeared to be entering the pipe in several locations and it was suspended from the ceiling above with sets of ropes. Since Smint had last been there, a huge steel tank had been installed in the basement. “Wow, that’s quite a setup!”

  “Yeah,” Gettnor said, standing up and patting the pipe. “The apparatus is inside this big tube. Now we’ve got to get it into the tank. Can you man the ropes over there?”

  Smint took hold of the ropes at the right end of the pipe, saying “Tank?”

  “Yeah, we need neutron and x-ray shielding so I welded up this big stainless steel tank and lined it with boron. With the device in the center of it we’ll have a meter of water, surrounded by boron to absorb neutrons and two layers of steel to absorb x-rays.” Vaz directed Smint and they used the ropes to lift the pipe up over the edge and slowly out to the middle of the tank where it floated on the surface. Then they changed to a different set of ropes and pulled it down into a cradle inside the tank, watching their progress with a tiny video camera inside the tank. Other cameras inside the pipe confirmed that the contents of the pipe were staying dry. Finally they pulled covering plates over the top of the tank.

  Vaz pushed his chair back over to his control station saying, “Still dry inside, good.” He washed his hands together excitedly, “OK, the disk is already loaded with hydrogen. You ready to fire it up Jack?”

  Smiling at Gettnor’s enthusiasm Smint said, “Sure.”

  “OK, here goes the hammering current.”

  They sat watching for a while without much happening. Then some of the graphic indicators started to rise on one of the screens. Vaz excitedly said, “OK, x-rays and heat climbing. Oh, and look at the current! Wow, we’re really generating some power!”

  “Do you have detectors out here in the room to be sure we aren’t getting any x-ray leakage?”

  “Yeah, the two flat lines at the bottom are the x-ray and neutron detectors out here in the room with us. Wow! It’s really starting to heat up.” He gave a command to his AI and turned back to Jack, “I’m running some liquid nitrogen through the frame of the device to keep it cool. We’re not going to have any meltdowns today!”

  Later that afternoon Smint and Gettnor leaned back and looked at one another in giddy near disbelief. There could be no doubt; the device had generated enormous numbers of alpha particles which had induced huge currents in the coils. Fusion was the only possible explanation for that and for the much greater energy produced as compared to what the device consumed. The fact that there were relatively few neutrons released confirmed that it was aneutronic fusion which pretty much had to be due to the hydrogen-boron reaction. Smint put up his hand for a “high five.”

  Vaz stared at his hand.

  “You’re supposed to slap your palm against mine.”

  “Why?”

  “Celebration, congratulations, high five! Haven’t you ever done it?”

  “Oh, no. But I’ve heard of it.” He smacked Jack’s palm so hard it stung, leaving Jack shaking his hand out.

  “Damn! You don’t have to break my hand! It’s more like a clap.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Vaz looked embarrassed.

  Jack looked surreptitiously at Gettnor. The baggy sweats he wore gave the impression of someone hiding a big gut… but might just be baggy. To look at his face, he wasn’t carrying much extra fat. “I’ll start talking to someone about a patent. I’m thinking that I’d like to work with Jim Milton. He’s done most of the patent work for Querx so I’ve gotten to know and trust him over the years. I don’t feel like his relationship with Querx will affect his ability to work with us. Would that be a problem for you?”

  Vaz shrugged, “I don’t know much about these kinds of things Dr. Smint, that’s why I’m so grateful that you’re willing to deal with them. Whoever you think we should go with is fine with me. I’ll be happily working on the apparatus, trying to improve it ‘cause it’s pretty inefficient right now.”

  “Call me Jack.”

  “Uh, OK, please call me Vaz.”

  ***

  James Milton leaned back in his chair. “Cold fusion! Come on! You don’t really believe it works do you?”

  Smint shrugged, “Yes, I know, it shouldn’t be possible. That’s what everyone says, but I’ve watched him run a cycle on his apparatus, it actually does work.”

  “Well, we can’t just submit a patent for that like you can for other things. Just like perpetual motion machines, you have to have a working model to submit a patent on cold fusion.”

  Smint said, “We have that, how are we going to show it to them though?”

  Milton laughed, “I don’t know. Never had to do it. I’ll ha
ve to call them and ask. Probably whoever I talk to won’t know how it’s done either, ‘cause it probably just doesn’t get done.”

  “Can they fly down here to look at it? It might be pretty hard to take it up there and set it up?”

  “I’ll ask, but that’ll cost more money. Querx probably won’t mind that though. Not if they think they’ll get a patent for fusion anyway.”

  Smint’s eyes had widened, “We don’t work for Querx anymore! I hope you haven’t said anything to anyone over there about this?”

  It was Milton’s turn to look startled, “Uh, I was at a local dinner meeting for patent attorneys last night and saw Phil Dennis. You know, the in house counsel for Querx. Because I knew we were meeting today I said something to him about Gettnor ‘doing it again.’ Of course, I didn’t know anything about what the IP (intellectual property) was and certainly not that you thought you had cold fusion, so I couldn’t have given much away. Come to think of it, he did look a little surprised when I said it.”

  Smint sighed. “Crap! I really didn’t want them knowing about it until much later in the process.”

  “Why not, if neither of you work for them anymore, it doesn’t have anything to do with them does it?”

  “No. But they may try to claim it does,” Smint said ominously. “On another issue, they modified Gettnor’s contract with them to reduce his cut of the royalties from all of his other inventions, reducing it from an original two percent of gross or thirty percent of licensing, down to a tenth of a percent of gross and three percent of licensing.”

  “Why did he agree to that?”

  “Come on, you’ve talked to him haven’t you? He’s absolutely clueless about this kind of stuff.”

  “But they must have gotten him to sign a modification of his original employment contract. Wouldn’t even he have gotten suspicious over that?”

  “I don’t think they did. He says he’s sure he didn’t sign any documents to that effect. I think they just told him they were changing it, implying that that was what was supposed to happen after he’d gotten a million dollars from it. Then I’m betting that when he didn’t object they put the audio-video record of his lack of complaint on file as ‘agreement’ to the change.”

  “Damn!” Milton breathed, “I suppose it would depend on exactly how it was done but I don’t think that would hold up in court. The courts have been accepting a lot of audio-video recorded agreements as binding but generally there needs to be evidence that the parties both understand they are entering a negotiated agreement.”

  “Would you be able to help us take them to court?”

  “Oh my goodness no. That’s not my field, and besides, I’m hardly an uninterested party. Querx is my largest client. You’d never be sure I was doing my best for you. I can refer you to someone who has a lot of experience with the ramifications of ‘contracts’ bound by audio-video records.”

  ***

  Phil Dennis knocked on the door of Gettnor’s lab and stuck his head around the corner. Gettnor was supposed to tell Dennis about patentable IP before he talked to any attorneys and obviously he needed a reminder. “Dr. Gettnor?” His eyes widened as he saw a couple of the lab techs from the battery lab in there. Gettnor was famous for being a loner and Phil had never seen anyone but Gettnor himself in his lab.

  The people in the lab looked curiously at him, “Uh, Dr. Gettnor doesn’t work at Querx anymore,” one of them ventured.

  “What? That can’t be, he’s talking to our patent attorney about a new patent of some kind.”

  “Not a Querx patent then, he got fired weeks ago.”

  “Who in the world would have done a dumb ass thing like that?”

  “Uh, it was Mr. Davis, the department head. Uh, Davis has been fired too and the rumor is, that it was, like you say, because he did something truly ‘dumb ass,’” he grinned, “like firing Gettnor.”

  After an hour or so spent trying to track down what happened to Gettnor, Phil wound up in Vangester’s office. Wide eyed he began his conversation with “Davis fired Gettnor?!”

  Looking grim, Vangester nodded. “Goddamn him anyway.”

  “Nobody told him how important Gettnor was?”

  Vangester sighed. “I assumed Smint would brief him before he left. Apparently, hard as it may be to believe, he avoided talking to his predecessor.” Vangester closed his eyes and shook his head, “Smint even went to his office unannounced to try to ‘give him a clue,’ but it didn’t sink in. Ultimately, I’m the idiot who put Davis in position to screw things up so royally. The board is probably going to have my ass if I can’t find a solution for this debacle.”

  “Jim Milton let slip that Smint and Gettnor are applying for a patent on something. I don’t think he knew that they weren’t working for us any more or he would have kept it confidential.”

  Vangester’s eyes had widened, “Smint!?”

  Phil nodded.

  “You’ve got to be shittin’ me! We hired Smint as a consultant to try to get Gettnor back on our payroll. He said it couldn’t be done! I’ll bet the SOB found out that Gettnor had some cool new IP and decided to do an end run on us, trying to get a piece of it for himself.”

  Phil shrugged, “Maybe. But Gettnor only left a few months ago right?”

  Vangester’s eyes widened, “Yeah. Are you thinking that whatever they’re patenting is something he figured out while he worked here, so we own it anyway?”

  Phil frowned and pulled on his ear, “Maybe.”

  “That’d be great! You start checking through the records of what Gettnor was working on here before he left. Materials requisitions, lab records, video records from the security cameras in his labs, conversations he might have had with other researchers. Whatever you can find. I’ll start working on finding out what those bastards are actually patenting. Then we’ll determine if the two are related.”

  Phil scratched his head uncertainly, “I’m not sure I’d know what Gettnor was doing from watching vids.”

  “Then have one of the scientists analyze whatever you find.”

  ***

  Ben Carter looked up as a student stepped into his office. He glanced at his HUD. “Ms. Gettnor?”

  She nodded and took the seat he indicated.

  “How can I help you?”

  “I’m trying to figure out what kind of college scholarships I might be eligible for?”

  “Your parents can’t afford to send you?” He was a little surprised. Most families that sent their kids to Allenton Prep could afford college for those selfsame kids. There were a few kids here on scholarship of course but, he glanced up at his HUD again, Tiona Gettnor wasn’t one of them. Generally if you couldn’t afford college, you couldn’t afford Allenton.

  “I don’t think so.” Tiona shrugged, looking uncomfortable.

  He frowned, “What do they say?”

  “They say they can, but they seem broke. I think I’d better come up with… something on my own.”

  Carter studied her. She looked like she might break down and cry. “Are there other problems in your home?”

  Eyes glistening, she nodded.

  Carter felt himself tense at the thought that this pretty young girl was being abused. “Who’s doing it?”

  She looked puzzled, “Doing what?”

  “Whatever… they’re doing that has you upset.”

  “My Mom and Dad.”

  Feeling like he was pulling teeth, he asked, “And what are they doing?”

  In a small voice she said, “I think they’re getting a divorce.” She hadn’t grasped until that moment just how worried she felt about the possibility of a divorce or how much she didn’t want it to happen. She realized that if someone had asked her a couple of months ago if she cared if her parents got a divorce, she would have said “no.” But now that her family actually seemed to be falling apart, she realized suddenly that their little unit of four held tremendous importance for her.

  Relief exploded over Carter that it wasn’t abuse, tho
ugh he carefully didn’t show it, “So they aren’t actually doing anything to you?”

  She looked puzzled a moment then exclaimed, “Oh! No!”

  Relaxing back into his chair he said, “But if they aren’t getting along, it must make you feel pretty awful, huh?”

  She sniffed and nodded, a tear beginning to track down her cheek.

  Carter picked up the box of tissues he kept for these occasions and offered her one. “It’s important that you understand that your parent’s relationship with one another is not your responsibility or your fault. Are you comfortable with that?”

  Tiona shrugged uncertainly.

  “In any case I’m very sorry to hear about this. Have they already started proceedings?”

  She shrugged and whispered, “I don’t think so.”

  “So, is your biggest concern that your family will break up, or that you won’t be able to go to college?”

  She sniffed, “Both.”

  He thought for a moment. “Let’s talk about college first. What do you want to study?”

  Gettnor wiped her nose and said, “Physics.”

  His eyes widened. He just hadn’t expected that. “Physics! That’s great! Not all that many girls want to go into the field. What do you like about it?”

  “I’m good at math,” she said quietly. “And I like all science classes, but especially the parts that I think have to do physics, even though I haven’t had an actual physics class yet.” She frowned, “Though I’m not sure that I should study it.”

  “Why not?”

  “My Dad’s a physicist, but he doesn’t make very much money. That’s a big part of why I don’t think they’ll be able to send me to school.”

  “I think most physicists make decent money. Who does he work for?”

  “Querx.”