Chapter 11

December 1993

Washburn was a wizard – and for a fifty-year-old man, he looked like Gandalf (or at least how Gandalf would look in the movies in a decade). You know: the long gray beard that the Army would never have allowed, the weathered face, and he seemed to always have a staff – except that it was a rifle these days. All he needed was to pound it into the ground and yell ‘You shall not pass.’ He had almost all of the Burnside North work force digging at ventilation holes over the caves that were going to become ‘disposal sites,’ or working on the underside of the ventilation hole installation a high-volume air sucker.

He’d figured how many of those orange elephant-trucks we’d need to haul 2,000 dead bodies to a storage area in the caves, and how many braves we’d need to load ‘em. Finally he decided on motorized conveyor belts to move the bodies faster into the trucks. He pressed Uncle Funny Hat and Nanta, of all people, into service. They were doing things they could do from a home phone. They were ordering the body bags and organizing the truck convoys. Unfortunately, there was no date certain for the attack, so they couldn’t organize a couple of dozen large dump trucks for ‘sometime in the future.’ So they organized a relay of a hundred or so pickups to handle the duties. The two elderly Ojibwe Canadians felt free to modify Gandalf’s plans; after all, they were older than him, so they clearly knew more. Just ask them.

And we all knew that if the Navajo took a lot of casualties, nobody was going to be in any kind of mood to drive anything, anywhere. Everything was going on the basis that that kind of casualty rate wasn’t going to happen. Fingers crossed.

In mid-December I got a phone call from Chas. He was as bubbly as a two-liter bottle of Coke that just came out of a paint shaker. “Lexi, meet me at the firing range as soon as you can get there.” And then he hung up.

I didn’t even get to ask if it was an emergency. I looked at my Mamma’s Special Cheeseburger and Fries. Well, he didn’t say it was an emergency. “Eat up, folks,” I said to my family. “We gotta get to the firing range. But we’ve got time to eat.” It was a durn shame to see five people wolfing down perfectly fine burgers or, in the case of the kids, a pizza. We soldiered through, though.

Half an hour later, our Suburban pulled up to the shooting range, to see two NavEl pick ups already there. One had a generator (not a fusion powered one, I noticed) and something that was plugged in to it, under a canvas, in the bed of the other. Linc and Washburn were in the cab of the pickup with the generator.

“What’s up, Chas?” Rock greeted the boy genius.

“Hi, Linc ... Wash,” said Bear.

“Oh, nothing that’s ever been done before,” Chas grinned. He handed out a set of binoculars to everybody. “Find a big rock with a red ‘X’ on it. It’s off to the left side of the regular targets.” We found it, about a quarter mile down range. The rock was about the size of a home freezer, I’d guessed. I was focused on Chas’s mind, so I knew what was coming.

He motioned to one of his assistants – I was surprised to see it was David – and they hauled the canvas off the machine on the truck bed. I saw a box the size of a mini-fridge, attached to something like a double size shotgun. On the top of the big shotgun was a hopper that held what seemed to be lithium crystals of some sort. The hopper fed a smaller box at the base of the ‘gun’.

“Can everybody see the rock?”

“Yes” “Yup” “Uh huh” and so on came from everybody.

’This is gonna be so cool, Mom.’ That was a telepathic call from Jim.

David settled behind the gun and looked into a scope. He dialed the red targeting laser in until it showed on the rock. Then he pushed a button and the machine started to hum. The machine went ‘Hummmmm. Whoosh.’ And not a whole second later, the rock exploded. There was no kick-back like there would have been from a standard gun.

“Okay, Chas. I take it you’ve built the rail gun. Tell me some details please,” I said.

“We’ve decided to call it the Navajo Silent Bow. Or NSB for short,” said Linc. “That way, when words gets out, nobody will know what a NSB is.”

Chas was beaming. “The hard part was limiting the range. It’ll only go about ten meters past where the laser pointer hits something. Otherwise, it’ll go for miles. With a bigger charge of melted lithium crystals, it could bring down a satellite. Of course, that would take some sophisticated sighting laser software. But ... theoretically.” He patted the NSB like you’d pet a dog. “Software is just a detail.”

Linc said, “Normally, it’ll be plugged in, but it can run on a dedicated generator. But it will take about five minutes to recharge all the capacitors from the generator until it can build up a charge ... This one is ready now to bring down a chopper or a tank. We need a couple of others, ‘cause it’s limited to line of sight.”

Washburn said, “It’s not exactly a weapon you could carry around ... unless you’re The Hulk. But it’ll run on the back of a pickup, as you can see.”

’I don’t get it,’ sent Alex via our mind link. ’So it blows up a rock. Big deal.’

BearDad provided an answer: ’Alex, suppose that rock was a helicopter with a bad guy in it, pointing a rifle at you.’

’Oh,’ she replied, ’that’s different.’ Life is so much simpler when you’re only seven-and-a-half.

Rock asked Chas, “How fast does the charge go? It seemed to be faster than a real rifle. I mean, I can’t see an M16 bullet, but this was almost instantly.”

“That’s because it was ALMOST instantly. How fast does electricity move?” Chas answered. “There’s a little loss of speed ‘cause the plasma has to move through the air. At sea level, the air is thicker than here in the desert, and on top of a mountain it’s even less. And down in Death Valley, where the...”

“STOP! STOP! Don’t explain it to me, Chas. You’ll fry my poor little brain,” Rock covered his ears and laughed.

Chas gave him a look that roughly translated to: How could anybody NOT want to know?

“RockDad, you’re such an anti-geek!” said Jim. “It’s just basic physics.”

“I suppose you could figure out how long to barbecue a steak, but you’d need a calculator,” said our anti-geek.

“How thick is the steak?” Chas asked. He was working on the steak problem. “Now a typical fire would be three inches away and...”