Chapter 23

Chas was back on track after lunch. His UFH delivered him to the factory site about 1:00. I watched, though his own eyes, as he walked through the solar panel assembly area and settled in his own lab space.

The first thing he did was take two of the crystals from each of about twenty little boxes and put each into a plastic baggie. On the outside of the bag he wrote a serial number, that corresponded to the ID written on the box it came from. He packed up the baggies into a satchel and headed for the office.

He got frustrated. The office doors were locked and the only people he could find were the guards ... and of course the people on the factory floors: technicians who were making chips or putting them into solar panels.

I picked up my phone and called Chas. “Yo, Chas! What’s up dude?”

“Oh, hi, Lexi. I need a ride.”

“Where are you, Chas? What’s up?”

“I don’t have the equipment to do the chemical analysis here in the lab. I need something that will do that.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m sorry we didn’t get that equipment for you in advance of when you needed it. Where do we have to go to find it? How long will it be until it can be delivered?”

He laughed for a long time. “Lexi, it’s not like going down to Walmart and getting a microwave. We’ll need a technical salesman from one out of maybe fifty companies in the country. Then we’d have to get it delivered. I don’t know. We don’t need to BUY one. We need to USE one. And we need to have somebody who knows how to use one. That’s not me.”

“Okay, well, I can get you a ride. Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know. We need a university chemical lab, or someplace like that.”

“Let’s get together at the factory offices, and start the search. We’ll be about twenty minutes.”

Red! Help!

[Yes, Lexi. I’m already searching the area. I believe he’ll need a qualitative analysis, and depending on what it turns up, a more detailed quantitative analysis. Both of these have been around for centuries, well back to your current time: the 1980s and earlier. It’s just a question of finding a lab that will do it. The cost will be minimal, perhaps a thousand dollars or so for each sample. Probably we’re going to have to go to a big city: Phoenix, Los Angeles, Dallas, who knows.]

Okay, S2D2. I have no idea what all this analysis stuff is about. But I can provide air travel to wherever. And hold Chas’s hand while we go there.

... .

By the time we got from the remote research center – that’s what I was calling the cave – to the factories, Chas was back in his lab. He was on his computer. He was using a cobbled up version of a CoCo-1024 computer that Gerry had put together for him. He looked up as me and the guys approached.

“Hi, Lexi. Rock. Bear. Cool t-shirts, guys. I’m a big Road Runners fan. They played great last Thursday.” Rock and Bear were wearing t’s that had the Road Runners logo with ‘beep beep’ beneath it. I knew that Chas could talk for hours about his favorite basketball team. I tried to redirect the conversation.

“Any news on the equipment hunt?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” he enthused. “S2 found a lab. It’s in Los Angeles. He thinks they’ll have idle time.”

The computer screen was filled with text between Chas and the S2D2 super-computer. I read it. USC in LA had unused capacity in its advanced chemistry labs.

[I hacked into their network to access the availability information, Lexi.]

Well, if they didn’t want the world to know about it, it shouldn’t be online.

[It’s not like there is an internet, you know, where any East European scammer could get to it. It took me two whole minutes to find the back door.]

[Do you want to contact any backup institutions? USC is the only one with idle equipment, right now.]

Let’s see what progress we make with USC, before contacting people who can’t help immediately.

More text came up on the computer screen.

It said: “S2D2: Lexi, are you there?”

I reached for the keyboard. This was totally weird, talking to Red via a computer screen.

“Oh,” said Chas, “you don’t need the keyboard. I wrote a speech-to-text interface. Just talk into the mic.”

“Hello, S2D2,” I said. “This is Lexi. I see you found a lab at USC that we can use.” The words popped up on the computer screen.

“Not exactly,” S2 / Red said. “They have the time, and their equipment is not in use. We’ll need a human to contact them and make arrangements.”

“I see. Well, I can do that.” S2 had gone on to provide contact information for the head of the chemistry department, one Melinda Schmidt, PhD.

[Lexi, please call her ‘Doctor’ in your phone call. She signs her emails ‘Dr. Schmidt.’ I think she may be proud of it.]

She should be proud of her accomplishment. You don’t understand what an accomplishment it is for a woman in 1985 to be in charge of a department at a major university. Especially in the hard sciences.