Vaz Page 3

  No, she finally decided, her plans would just make him uncomfortable.

  ***

  Stillman Davis had been out visiting the R&D staff. He didn’t intend to be one of those managers who just sat in his office and interacted with his people through his AI. His mentors had emphasized the importance of personally knowing and relating to your staff if you wanted top performance from them. Even though he continued to be disturbed by the casual dress of the research scientists, he’d begun to appreciate that dress clothing might not be appropriate if you were working with chemical and physical processes.

  He’d enjoyed speaking with Gerrold Rogers, a chemist whose assignment was to optimize fuel cells. Rogers had shown Davis some graphs demonstrating that a several percent increase in the power output of the company’s cells might be achievable by doping the cathode catalyst with manganese. He’d even given Davis a sample of the new cathode to “put on his desk.”

  With a warm satisfied glow he opened the door to Gettnor’s lab. This time, less frustrated than he’d been before, he noticed that the lab had a completely different look than any of the other labs. It looked compulsively organized, not a thing out of place. Pieces of equipment on lab benches, exactly squared in position with precisely the same spacing between them. It had the appearance of a lab someone had set up, then never used. Certainly none of the energetic looking clutter that Davis had seen in other labs.

  Gettnor was slouched back in a chair staring at the big screen on the wall which displayed some kind of 3D multicolored graphic. The graphic changed slowly as Gettnor manipulated a touchscreen with his right hand. Gettnor hadn’t noticed when Davis opened the door so he cleared his throat. Still no response so he said, “Dr. Gettnor?”

  Gettnor still didn’t respond! Was he really that focused? Or ignoring Davis on purpose? Davis leaned close behind him and heard the faint sounds of some kind of music coming from Gettnor’s earphones. It sounded like some kind of new age or classical composition. Davis reached out to tap his shoulder, then paused. He stood undecided a moment, remembering Smint’s admonitions and Gettnor’s claim that his interruption the other day had ruined his understanding of something or another.

  Personally, Davis thought that was just so much bullshit. He’d personally never had any trouble getting back to whatever he’d been doing prior to an interruption. On the other hand, he didn’t really need to talk to Gettnor now. Maybe he should just come back later, when Gettnor didn’t look so focused. After another moment with Gettnor still unmoving, Davis turned and went to talk to the folks in the next lab.

  There were three PhDs and a couple of lab techs all working in the next lab. All bustled around, doing something in an atmosphere of purposeful disarray. One seemed to be assembling a mechanism. Three were measuring out solutions with pipettes. One cursed as she opened and closed drawers, apparently looking for something. All the activity made Davis feel better about his department. Something seemed to be getting done here as opposed to Gettnor looking like he might be playing some kind of game with his AI. They noticed him and one said, “Hello, Mr. Davis. Can we help you?”

  With a warm feeling Davis said, “No, no. I’m just going around, trying to learn what my people are doing. If you aren’t pressed for time, can you tell me what your objectives are in this lab?”

  “Yes sir. We’re trying to further optimize the nanoparticles for our old solid state lithium cobalt battery system. We hope to improve capacity another 15% without losing our safety margin. John is reassembling the lab’s trial vacuum deposition system. Julius, Mary and Rick are making up our new trial solutions.”

  Davis nodded knowingly. Even though he didn’t really have a clue what they were talking about, 15% sounded like a respectable improvement. He shook hands all around, and then asked if there was anything “administration” could do to help. They wanted more space and more lab techs to “get the job done more expeditiously.”

  Davis explained that they didn’t have money in the budget to hire more help. He wasn’t sure whether money was available or not, but wanted to work toward a positive, not a negative budget. Then he had an idea and grinned internally. “I see that there are five of you working in this lab. Isn’t Dr. Gettnor all alone in the next lab?”

  They nodded, though several of them glanced at one another, he thought with some apprehension.

  “Would it help your overcrowding here if some of your equipment and experiments were moved into his area? I’m sure he’s not using all that space all the time.”

  “Uh, I’m not sure that would be a good idea.” Julius said.

  Davis frowned at this rejection of what he’d thought of as a perfectly good idea. “Why not?”

  “Uh, Dr. Gettnor doesn’t do well if he’s disturbed.”

  Davis snorted. “Well, maybe he needs to learn to adapt.”

  The group laughed nervously. Mary said, “I have a feeling that isn’t going to happen. We’ll be OK.”

  Davis frowned again but moved on to the next lab.

  Pleased about his “morning with the troops,” Davis headed back to his office. He only remembered his intent to check back on Gettnor after he’d passed Gettnor’s lab. For a moment he thought about skipping it. After all, Gettnor set him on edge and might ruin the pleasant satisfaction he felt at present. But, he didn’t like to think of himself as someone who skirted unwelcome tasks. Especially personnel issues where he prided himself on his skills. Resolutely he turned back and entered Gettnor’s lab.

  Gettnor didn’t look like he’d moved since Davis had been in his lab earlier! Still slouched way back in his chair; same 3D graphics on his big screen, though they’d stopped changing. Davis narrowed his eyes, Gettnor’s hand no longer moved on the touchpad.

  Quietly, Davis moved up alongside Gettnor so that he could see the man’s eyes. They were closed!

  Indignantly Davis reached out and peremptorily tapped Gettnor’s shoulder.

  Gettnor didn’t move except to slowly raise his hand as if halting someone.

  Davis tapped again, a little harder.

  Gettnor slowly waved the hand he’d lifted.

  Davis pushed on Gettnor’s chair, turning it toward him.

  Gettnor exploded up out of the chair, ripping off his headset and boring into Davis with flashing eyes.

  Davis stepped back uncertainly; suddenly feeling like Gettnor was looking down on him, even though they were much the same height.

  Gettnor said, “I hope…” he closed his eyes and almost sighed, “Oh, I so hope this is important this time!”

  Davis drew himself up. “Dr. Gettnor, you were asleep again! Do you ever do any work here?”

  “I was not asleep,” Gettnor grated out. “Just as before, I was attempting to visualize…” His voice faded out as he, for a moment, felt like he might get the picture back. He looked distantly up toward the corner of the room, and then slowly closed his eyes as he began to feel the pieces drop back into place again.

  “Gettnor!”

  Gettnor’s eyes squinched shut a moment; then he wearily opened them with a discouraged look. “Go ahead. What’s so important?”

  “I’m going around learning what each group of scientists are doing. I dropped by your lab earlier and you were listening to music and staring at your display so I went around and talked to all the other teams. I came back here and found you, hours later, asleep in front of the same screen!”

  With an aghast expression Gettnor said, “You destroyed a morning’s work to chat?! Really?! You had no reason to interrupt me except that you wanted to talk?!”

  For a moment Davis felt defensive; then remembered their relative positions in the company. “You weren’t doing anything!”

  “I was thinking man! You should try it sometime!”

  Davis rolled his eyes, “And what, pray tell, were you thinking about?”

  “I was trying to reconcile the actual electrical properties of a new boron-vanadium-palladium alloy with the predicted values, they’re way off
.”

  “What does that have to do with your mission?” Davis glanced up at his HUD, “I thought you were supposed to be working on hydrogen storage?”

  Gettnor sighed, “The boron-vanadium-palladium alloy is a hydrogen storage alloy.”

  Davis narrowed his eyes, “Alloy? Are you saying that you’re trying to create some kind of better tank to put hydrogen in?”

  Gettnor’s eyes widened. Then as if speaking to a particularly obtuse child, he said, “Some metals absorb hydrogen. Palladium can absorb 900 times its volume in hydrogen. We’d probably use palladium for hydrogen storage if it weren’t so expensive.”

  Davis drew his head back, “Really?”

  With a disgusted look Gettnor replied, “Really.”

  “OK, then. But why do we care about this alloy’s electrical properties?”

  “We should understand all the properties of anything we create here in the lab, there’s no telling what we might miss if we don’t completely characterize them.”

  “Oh, come on Gettnor. This reeks of a scientist who likes to piddle around. All Querx needs to know is how much hydrogen it absorbs right?”

  “No! If its electrical properties are weird, other properties might be weird too! We need to understand them and have some idea why this is happening.”

  Davis sighed, “Wrong. Querx needs something that stores hydrogen. That’s your job! Test that. If it’s good, let’s think about whether it’s good enough to put into production. If not, move on to the next idea… for storing hydrogen.”

  Gettnor stared at Davis mulishly but said nothing. Eventually Davis stepped back and said, “Work on your assigned project.” He frowned and as he turned to go said ominously, “You’ve been warned.”

  Vaz had to go to his office after the conversation with Davis and rip out his usual sets of pull-ups, pushups and sit-ups. Once the warm flush of an endorphin release rolled over him he sank gasping into his chair and relaxed until he fell asleep for a twenty minute nap. When he woke he saw the graphic representation of the electrical properties of the new alloy still displayed on his wall screen. Unmoving he found himself again in a state of expanded consciousness, able to grasp all sides of the problem. Desperate to avoid interruption this time he blindly groped out to close his office door. He told it to lock. His head felt fizzy with occasional events that he thought of as lightning bolts exploding in it. Goose bumps came and went.

  An hour later Vaz had a good hypothesis and a plan for extensive testing. Mindful of Davis’ demand, and because he needed to know, he set the disk he already had to evaluate its capacity for hydrogen absorption. Then he stoked up the automated casting system in the lab to make another hundred disks of the alloy. Ten of them were just more test disks of the same alloy, but the other ninety were distributed among slight variations in the concentration of the metals or the special crystallization conditions he’d been using.

  He felt like he was back on edge again. His feeling of omniscience had faded and as he worked on the mundane tasks of setting up the lab for the absorption test and to cast the alloy he found his mind wandering repeatedly back to his confrontation with Davis.

  Smint would never have told him to ignore bizarre findings like these. Smint would have asked what they were and puzzled over them with Vaz. He probably would have had some good perspectives and some suggestions of his own for further testing. Smint understood the value of understanding, not just applying a finding.

  Everything was set up and in progress twenty minutes before his specified quitting time. Vaz stood uneasily shifting from foot to foot. There wasn’t anything to do until sometime tomorrow morning, but Davis had told him that he was expected to be physically at work from eight in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon.

  Should he just sit in his office until 4:30? Just the idea of wasting time like that started to make his head pound.

  Screw it, he thought and headed for the door.

  A truck had broken down on Vaz’s route home and his car’s AI took him a little out of its normal way to avoid the resultant traffic jam. Normally completely oblivious to the sights on his way home Vaz found himself gazing around at the differences. “Stop,” he said to the car’s AI. Take me to,” he had to turn in his seat to look back over his shoulder. “Mike’s Mixed Martial.”

  Jen looked up as a man in his late 30’s approached the desk. Completely bald, without even eyebrows, he wore a baggy muted Hawaiian print shirt over a loose long sleeved t-shirt and pants that looked like they didn’t fit right. The pants were jeans that were… too big? They looked like they’d belonged to someone bigger than him and had been belted up into pleats to stay on him. She tilted her head as she examined him. Her first glance had made her think, fat and out of shape. Now she wasn’t so sure. She could only see his head and hands but his face contained angular planes that made her think that he wasn’t actually overweight. Yet, somehow he exuded a soft nerdiness. “May I help you?”

  He glanced up at her face, then back down at the desk. “Do you have fights here?”

  Jen’s eyes widened, “We teach self-defense. We have sparring matches but not fights. If you want to watch fights you’ll have to go to MMA events.”

  The man looked embarrassed, eyes darting here and there, “I’d… actually like to… get into a fight myself,” he said, just above a whisper.

  “What kind of training have you had?”

  He looked down, “Haven’t.”

  Jen snorted, “You do not want to get into a fight without any training.”

  “How many classes would I have to take?”

  “Our minimum training program is a five session self-defense class.”

  “And then I could get in a fight?”

  “No!” she snorted. “Then you might be able to defend yourself if someone attacked you.”

  The man stared up into the corner of the room considering a moment, then said, “When could I take a self-defense class?”

  “The group classes start the first Mondays of each month. You can get ‘one on one’ training pretty much anytime.”

  “Like, right now?”

  ”Really?!”

  He shrugged, “Yeah.”

  “But you don’t have your stuff!”

  He frowned. “What do I need?”

  Jen looked him up and down, “Well, you could take it barefoot I guess. Usually you don’t wear jeans, they bind.”

  “These are loose.”

  Jen rolled her eyes, “Mike,” she bellowed, “you up for a one on one?”

  Mike looked up from the strike pad set he’d been repairing and eyed the bald guy at the desk. He uncoiled and strode up to the front thinking that the guy was… odd. When he got close he said, “What happened to your eyebrows?”

  The guy mumbled something.

  “Huh?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Because if you have some disease, I don’t want you rubbing all over the equipment, or me either.”

  The guy dropped his eyes embarrassedly to the floor. “I have trichotillomania, a compulsion to pull out my own hair.” He took a deep breath, “I shave it all off because my wife likes that look better than me having patches missing.”

  Mike lifted an eyebrow. “Humpf. OK, what kind of ‘one on one’ training do you have in mind, Mr.…?”

  “Gettnor. I don’t know. I just like to hit stuff, work off anger and…” he trailed off.

  “Why don’t you just get a heavy bag and hit it?”

  “Got one.”

  Mike chewed a lip, “You want to hit people?”

  Gettnor shrugged. “When I’m hitting my bag, I imagine I’m in a fight. Helps me work out my anger. I wondered if a real fight might help me even more.”

  “Well we don’t hold fights here, but we could help you get ready for one of the local MMA amateur fights if you want.”

  Gettnor shrugged again, “OK.”

  They discussed fees and Mike suggested that they do a one on one session, then decide what c
lass Gettnor might fit into. After agreeing they walked into the back where Gettnor took off the Hawaiian shirt and his shoes. Mike handed him some 6 oz. gloves and said “Let’s see what you do to the heavy bag since that’s something you’re familiar with.” He stepped around and grabbed the other side of the big bag. Mike had glanced toward the front of the studio when Gettnor lunged out; hitting the other side of the bag so hard that it ripped out of Mike’s hands and hit him in the crotch. Hard! It hurt! Gettnor didn’t “box” it a few blows and bounce back. He pounded it with one heavy blow after another. Slower than fighters hit a speed bag but, holy crap, not much slower! He expected the guy to keep it up a few seconds and drop back exhausted but Gettnor just kept pounding. “Stop!”

  Gettnor stopped immediately and stepped back, shifting his weight slowly from foot to foot. Not “dancing” from to foot, just shifting weight. He didn’t look tired, he looked… elated? Mike wasn’t sure what the expression on Gettnor’s face meant. He looked more carefully at the man. It was hard to assess his fitness in that baggy long sleeved shirt. He narrowed his eyes. “Take off your shirt. Let me see what I’m working with.”

  Gettnor got an obstinate look on his face and just shook his head “no.”

  Mike shrugged. “OK. Can you kick the bag?”

  Gettnor had terrible technique, telegraphing a huge roundhouse kick with his right foot. But, when it hit the bag, it knocked Mike off his stance even though he thought he was prepared for a heavy blow this time. Gettnor immediately kicked the bag with his left, then again with the right. Mike’s eyebrows rose as Gettnor heavily battered the bag with his feet long past when anyone else would have quit in exhaustion. “OK, OK. Give it a rest.” Mike shook his head and had Gettnor hit some target mitts. Accuracy wasn’t great, but holy crap the guy hit hard! Even with Mike telling him to punch for speed instead of power the guy still hit the mitts hard. Pretty fast too, though by no means truly quick.