Chapter 2

Montreal was the busiest airport I’d ever seen. Considering that the airports I was familiar with had one Dassault Falcon 20 parked there, that wasn’t saying much. Montreal had more planes of various types than I could count. We checked in while Cap’n Jack went to deal with the airport authorities.

Linc’s Black American Express card made short work of the car rental agency. We waited a few minutes and Cap found us. “Amazing what money will do. We paid some fees and got a refuel,” he said. “She’ll be ready whenever we want to go. We’re all US citizens, so no problem there.”

We got our van and checked in at the hotel. We had four rooms: Linc’s, Cap’s, one with twin beds for the boys, and mine. I kept the connecting door to the boy’s room locked. This was a business trip. They’d have to make do with pay-per-view porn, although maybe they didn’t have to watch it, these days, considering our normal nightly workouts. Then again – they were young men, so no amount of looking at people having sex would be too much. We were all adjacent on the fifteenth floor. The five of us traipsed down to the hotel restaurant and had a light supper. By 5:00 p.m. we were ready to go and find Charlie.

Linc and I went to McGill’s student housing, and looked him up in the student directory. Naturally, he wasn’t in the published edition, but the student attendant found him. We walked over to his dorm and found room 204. We knocked. There was no answer. Linc knocked again.

The door was opened by a thin young man. If he wasn’t Charles White Earth, I’d eat my hat. His hair looked like a typical bowl cut, he wore Clark Kent glasses, and there couldn’t be a single soul in North America that had a more typical set of American Indian features. Or Canadian Indian features.

“Hello, Mr. White Earth,” I said. “I’m Alexis White Owl. I’ve come all the way from the Navajo Reservation in Arizona to talk to you. Can we come in?”

“Who’s he?” Charlie asked.

“This is Mr. Lincoln. Call him Linc. He’s my protection. I do a lot of traveling.” As if that explained why I’d need protection.

“Uh ... well ... oh ... I guess. Okay.” His speech was slow and halting. Mumbled.

He sat at his desk chair, sideways and looked at us. I sat on the bed, Linc stood by the closed door. Charles White Earth didn’t talk, so I didn’t talk.

After about ten minutes, he said “Well ... I ... um... (mumble) ... dinner.” He got up, and searched under his desk for his slip-on tennis shoes.

“We haven’t eaten either. Do you like pizza? I could order us some pizza,” I said.

He stopped putting on the second shoe, and paused, as if thinking about pizza. “I like pizza. With pepperoni.”

“Linc,” I said, “could you go and find us a large pepperoni pizza, please? Charles, what do you like to drink?”

“Lemonade. I like lemonade.”

“Me too! Linc, could you get us a large pepperoni pizza with four lemonades, please?”

“Four?” Charlie had a puzzled look on his face.

“We might want to have some later,” I explained.

“There’s a Mr. Luigi Pizza just across the quad,” he said.

“Right. I think I can find it,” said Linc. And he slipped out the door.

One shoe on and one off, Charlie turned to face his desk and turned on his computer.

“Charles, do you mind if we talk. I’ve come a long way to see you. Do you prefer Charles or Charlie?”

“I like Chas. Or White Earth. But nobody here calls me Chas.”

“Chas it is then. I like that.” He was watching his screen go thru it’s warm up exercises. “I know you like science. That’s why I came. We have a tremendous science project, and we want you to be a part of it.”

“Who is we?”

“‘We’ is the Spirit of the Hunter company. Do you know about the Great Spirit?”

“Oh sure,” he was still watching the screen. The system was now testing RAM memory.

“Well, the Great Spirit sent me a giant bald eagle and a huge owl. So I named the company after the Hunter. I think of the Great Spirit as the Hunter. Sometimes I call him Red, though.”

“My uncle knows about the Great Spirit. He talks to him all the time. Why Red?”

“I was in the hospital when I first heard him. I didn’t know who he was, so I called him Red.”

“I know about hospitals. I hate hospitals. I had to go there for some tests, back when I was a kid. They talked AT me like I was an idiot.”

Kid? He’s only fourteen now!

The computer screen filled with a huge number: 341,000,062,918,413.

“Do you know the 3x+1 conjecture?” He hit a key and beneath the number, flashed another set of numbers.

[Lexi, I know it. If you have an odd number, you multiply by 3 and add 1. If that results in an even number, divide by 2. Tell him there’s no known solution that doesn’t resolve to 1. It has a dozen names, one is the Collatz Conjecture.]

I answered Chas’s question: “Yes, Chas. I know the Collatz Conjecture, but there’s no known solution that doesn’t resolve to 1.”

“Not yet. That’s my latest try.” The computer screen was still flashing numbers. Then it flashed 16, 8, 4, 2, 1. Then it stopped. “Rats,” he said, deadpan.

At Reds prompting, I said, “All the integers up to 2 to the 2048^th power have been tried. They all resolve to 1. Try a number that’s lower than -4. The negative numbers DON’T resolve to 1 or even -1.”

His attention turned to me. “How do you know that? There’s no computer that will let you deal with a number that large. I never thought of trying a negative number.”

“I have access to a very special computer. But Chas, forget the Collatz Conjecture, there’s no known number, take my word for it,” I said. “Mathematicians have wasted their careers trying ... Listen, we want you to build a fusion bottle and then put a fusion reaction inside it.”

“No such thing.”

“Me and the Great Spirit say there is.”

“So, make it.” He was stubborn, I’ll give him credit for that.

“I can’t make it without you,” I said. “There is no one I can find who will believe me. That’s why I need you. I need a scientist – a physicist, a practical physicist. I’ll tell you a secret: The physicists at this school, or any other school, will teach you that it can’t be done. And if you believe that, well ... then it can’t be done. But you haven’t been taught that negative view yet. The teachers here don’t know everything.”

He laughed. “That’s not a secret. I already know that. I even corrected some mistakes on their so-called final tests. That’s why they gave me a scholarship.”

Linc reentered the room, carrying a large pizza box, a smaller pizza box, four lemonades, and a can of Coke. He put the large pizza on a corner of the bed, and put the lemonades on the floor. His smaller pizza went on the other bed and he sat down.

Chas seemed startled by Linc’s presence.

“The lemonade will get warm.” So he picked up two bottles and opened his mini-fridge. There must have been two dozen bottles of lemonade in there, to which he added another two. I laughed.

“You didn’t tell us you already had lemonade,” I said in mock reproach.

“You asked me what I liked. Not what I had,” he answered simply, as he began to eat some pizza.

[HAHAHA. He’s right, Lexi. I like Chas already.]

“Linc, I think Chas and I would be more comfortable if it was just us.”

“Okay, Lexi. I’ll be in the lounge at the end of the hall,” he replied, although I got the feeling that he wondered why he had to leave. He gathered up his pizza and coke and headed for the door. When I heard it ~snick~ closed behind him, I felt a little easier.

Chas seemed to relax some, too.

“So, Chas,” I said, pushing the question at him, “what would it take to get you to leave this university and come to work with us?” I was especially proud of the use of ‘work with us’ instead of ‘work for us.’

He typed into his computer, got a ‘Enter Password’ prompt, and entered a very long password. The screen came up with a document that was a list of his requirements. The list was:

An adequate lab for me to use

A home with no lab

A home separate, but close, for my grandmother and uncle to live in

A $100,000 annuity for my grandmother and uncle

Computers in my home and lab. Such computers to be updated every 6 months

Transportation from home to lab and lab to home, available to me 24/7

Telephone connections in home, lab, and grandmother’s home

Normal high school environment

Advanced mathematics and science learning environment

“Chas, you haven’t listed any pay for yourself,” I said, after reading the list.

“I don’t care about that. You aren’t going to be stupid enough to pay me nothing. And I don’t need a zillion dollars. If you give me an interesting project and a way to actually do it, that will be enough. I would have said ‘no time travel’ and ‘no cold fusion’ and ‘no Artificial Intelligence’ but I don’t rule any of those out, any more ... IF what you propose is true.”