Chapter 20

It turned out to be a multi-hour gab-a-thon. “How are we doing with the...” and “You know the Road Runners are going to...” and “Is he really blowing things up...” and “I hear that...”

Hours on end. Even the King of Silence, Crying Wolf, was sitting on the couch, with a glass of spirits in his hand, gabbing away with Katy of the Moon.

I sat in a corner, closed my eyes and went to level. This time I didn’t go anywhere. Just meandering around my contacts. Chas: just sitting down to a baked chicken dinner at Nanta’s, yum! Fresh sweet corn. Shioban: watching Love Boat reruns. Tommy: riding his motorcycle somewhere in the desert. The dogs. Pack 2 was having a merry time chasing a rabbit, who was on the outside of the fence. Pack 1 was older now, seven years old, mature dogs. A strange thing. Snow, the great white owl, was not on her perch, but was following Doyobi around the compound, about ten feet up in the air. When Doyobi sat down, she hovered over him.

Why wasn’t she here? Okay, I knew that I was more than safe here at Wild Mustang’s. But that never stopped her before. And why was she hovering over Doyobi? Was he in danger somehow? Something to ponder.

[I don’t know either, Lexi.]

I switched over to Linc. He was watching TV, also. Apparently, he’d gotten a video tape of last year’s Army-Navy game. HAH! In his mind it was the Navy-Army game. Juanita was next to him, watching the same game. Awww. She was eating popcorn that he was feeding to her.

Finally, I got to the boys. When I looked in at Bear, he was concentrating on sending a message to Rock. He was getting no feedback. Rock was watching the news on the TV.

’Hi, sweets!’ I sent to Bear. ’You bored?’

’With you around? Never!’

An awfully nice thing to say. But we WERE just married for the second time in two days?

’I was just scouting around. Can you think of any reason that Snow would be following Doyobi around?’ I asked.

’The alpha dog? I wonder if he’s losing a step or hurt somehow. Maybe it’s an omen.’

I glanced at Rock before connecting to him. ’Hey, Rock. You wanna ditch this popcorn stand?’

Rock sent back, ’They got popcorn here?’ But I could tell he was just kidding around.

Bear gave out with a loud “HAH!” Then he got up and walked over to me. “Time to go, I think.” Then he bent over, and put his shoulder in my stomach and lifted me up, slinging me over his shoulder. “Me have woman now,” he said in his best pidgin-Injin-English. “Got to go make whoopie.”

“Help. Save me, Rock.” I pretended to thump on Bear’s back.

Rock jumped to his feet. “Unhand her, you brute! That’s my woman, I’ll have you know.” And he followed Bear out the door.

Flower laughed, and Wild Mustang said, “Me think braves will sort it out.”

We did sort it out when we got back to the hacienda. I took one look into the back yard and found Snow sitting on his perch and all the dogs doing a lot of nothing. I led a parade into the bedroom, where we did a lot of something, over and over, until we couldn’t do it anymore.

...

The next morning was a Saturday, so we checked in at the cave site where a whole bunch of people were building a lab for Chas. It was several miles from the factory sites, where I thought Chas was going to be working. He had set up a table and a rudimentary workspace. Somebody had thought to get him a portable phone and he was sitting outside the cave setting up an experiment. The inside of the cave was not ready for occupancy yet.

We got there just in time to see Chas and all the workers in the cave running out into the desert.

We ran along with the crew. “What’s up, Chas?” Rock asked, when he caught up to the group.

“Nothing much,” he answered. “Standard ‘Chinese fire drill’. When I get everything set up, I call in to the cave. Then all the guys run out to get to the trucks. The timer is set for five minutes. So we all run out and get in, and drive like crazy for five minutes. Then we all drive back and see what happened. I mean ... I go and see what happened. The guys just go into the cave and pick up where they left off.”

By the time he explained it all, we joined the parade of trucks and SUVs driving like the Road Runner being chased by Wylie Coyote. We were still tearing across the desert when Chas called us to a stop. He had a stopwatch in his hand. “Okay!” he shouted out the window. In a normal voice, he said to Rock, “We can go back now.”

It took us about seven minutes to drive back, ‘cause we weren’t trying to get away from an explosion, just trying to survive the drive back to the cave. When we got to the lab table, Chas about exploded himself.

“It worked!” he screamed. It was so loud a couple of cave men came out to see what happened.

“What happened?” asked Rock, who had been shadowing Chas. “Where?”

“There!” He pointed to a raised white ceramic block at the far edge of the table. “See that?”

“I don’t see anything,” I said.

“There was fifty grams of lithium crystals there. I zapped it with the right amount of argon and fluorine lasers at the right power levels from all eight directions.” He pointed to all the laser projections surrounding the ceramic block that held nothing I could see. “If it was too much, there’d be a small pile of dust. If it wasn’t enough, there’d be some charred crystals. But there’s nothing. See? SEE?”

He went over to the computer terminal and typed. “It worked. There’s no evidence of failure.”

The computer answered, “Congratulations. Be careful in handling it.” I assumed it was S2D2 answering back.

“How do we know what happened?” Bear asked our boy genius.

“Hey, man. That’s your idea.” Chas went over to a plug board, and made a connection between one of the high speed cameras and fiddled with some dials. The computer screen came to life. It showed a pile of the small, white lithium crystals we’d been making up at McKesson North. Nothing except a pale orange light and another blue-white light focused on the lithium. He turned a dial and the TV replay started going faster, judging from the timer in the corner of the screen. Suddenly the crystals disappeared.

“SEE? We did it!” He gave me a big hug. Then he hugged Bear and Rock too. They looked at me and I gave them a shrug.

“Congratulations, Chas. I think you just made history,” I told him.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet.” He pulled the plug on his TV camera and plugged in a different camera. “This one is taken with a UV filter.” It showed nothing on the ceramic block, just a different colored representation of the laser beams. It ran the entire length of the recording, and showed nothing.

He cut off the video and typed into the computer, “Nothing showed on the UV recording.”

S2D2 said, “As predicted.”

“And now, we see the coop de grass.” He pulled the UV wire and plugged in a third TV hookup. “This one is with an IR filter. Infra Red. I can’t wait to see it. It’s gonna be so cool.”