Chapter 25

Later that Sunday, the second flight into Burbank arrived and shortly thereafter Nanta and UFH came to the hotel, squired all the way by Bear. I left Rock and Chas at the hotel to greet them, and I went back to USC to babysit the analysis machines.

I felt naked. It was the first time I’d been without either of the boys in years. There wasn’t any risk, of course. Nobody even knew I was here. But it was a little strange, you know?

I was sitting in a comfortable chair in a waiting area outside Dr. Schmidt’s office. I tuned in to her mind, but she was just reading a paper on bismuth’s isotopes – apparently a rare thing. The most ‘common’ isotope is estimated to have a half-life significantly longer than the age of the universe. Common? I don’t think so. Light reading for the good doctor, I suppose. In mid-afternoon I heard the alarm go off in the lab, and I got there shortly after Dr. Schmidt.

She was cleaning out what was left of the first sample and carefully pouring a measured dose of the next sample. When she pushed the button to start the machine on the second sample, she took the tape readout of the results and wrote the sample number on the back of the tape.

“Looks like this one is mostly lithium and iron. Nothing else. Is that what you expected?” she asked me, looking at the readout.

“The iron is a surprise, but I didn’t really know what to expect. I’m not a scientist of any kind at all, so I’m not sure what’s good.”

“The lithium crystals are unusual. Where did they come from?”

“We sorta made them.” I didn’t think I was giving any secret information.

[Lexi, only the source of the dirt is going to be secret. The fact that it’s in crystal form is unusual. Apparently, no one really uses it in crystal form.]

“Made them? Hmmm,” she said. That got me examining her thoughts. ‘I suppose you could form them by heat and pressure,’ she thought. ‘Wonder why there are so many samples?’

“I’m just babysitting the analyses,” I said.

“There’s no need for you to do that, unless you want to,” she assured me. “I’m going to get two of my lab assistants to come in so we can run them around the clock. That’s what we normally do for high priority, rush jobs. They won’t know anything more than ‘it’s a sample, with a number.’ Nothing you told me in private will be revealed, of course. I won’t even tell my superiors at the University what you told me. They’ll just know that we’re running a job for SotH.”

“That’s great!” I said. “I didn’t know what the procedure was, so I came over. But I guess I’ll head over to the Trojan Horse, if you don’t need me here.”

“Sure ... The TH is almost a captive of USC. We put so many visiting dignitaries there they almost work for us, and non-dignitaries, too. Everything from next year’s crop of football tryouts, to poet laureates, to just folks from out of town. The food is a bit pricey, and, honestly, a bit mediocre. You can get almost any kind of food within a mile drive, though. One thing about LA: if you’re walking around, outside of the campus, you can expect to get questioned by a random cop. NOBODY walks anywhere around here. I grew up in New York, so it was a big change for me.”

“Oh. Thanks for the tip. We’ve got Chas’s grandmother and her brother with us, so I don’t expect we’ll be up for any hikes, anyway,” I laughed.

“I’ll check in with you tomorrow morning, or if anything really unusual comes up.”

She was mentally back at her bismuth isotope study, before she got back to her office. Sounded to me like a real page turner, but then I wasn’t the head chemist at a major university. Maybe she was planning to start a rerun of Ronald Reagan’s old TV show, the ‘Twenty Mule Team Borax show.’

[Wow. You are way off base, Lexi. The show was called ‘Death Valley Days’ and it was sponsored by the Pacific Coast Borax company, who made Twenty Mule Team Borax, a laundry additive, among other things. It was Reagan’s last TV show, but there were several other hosts. It ran on radio and TV for years.]

Oh. Well I was just noodling on what she could do with the information about Borax.

[Dr. Schmidt is reading about bismuth, not borax.]

Bismuth, borax. Whatever.

[I’m making a note not to let you loose in a chemistry lab.]

Hey! I’m a child entrepreneur, formerly a hooker. I do not WANT to be in a chemistry lab.

[Noted.]

I rejoined the crew back at the TH hotel. They were looking through a book called ‘The Eater’s Guide to Los Angeles.’

“There’s about a zillion places to eat, around here,” said Bear.

“We should get a car first. I understand walking is almost illegal around here,” I interjected.

“Hah! We’ll prob’ly get lost if we drove – or get stuck in traffic. I’ve heard about traffic jams in LA,” Rock cried. “I don’t want no part of drivin’.”

“How about seafood? You guys ever had good seafood?” Bear asked UFH, who seemed to be interested in the restaurant selection.

“Rock,” I said, “why don’t you call the concierge and see about getting us something that’ll hold six. Get a limo for a week. That’ll give us plenty of time for Disney and anything else we want to do.” I turned to Chas, pulling him away from a Tomorrow Land brochure. “The testing is going well, and we won’t be needed to do anything until it’s all done.”

Red, I completely forgot. We need to transfer $20,000 to USC to pay for the testing.

[This is not going to be like buying a blouse from the Bashas’ Diné. You should alert Arista Moonflower at the Bank of the Nations and get the USC people to contact her. They can handle the details of the billing.]