Chapter 26

Chas was tired, even the next morning, as anyone should be after a full day at Disneyland. He decided he liked Cinderella the best, and I could tell that her bosom was a big attraction, although Goofy was a close second, and he had no discernible bosom.

After breakfast, three of us went over to USC’s chemistry building. Dr. Schmidt was in her office, poring over a technical dissertation on lithium chemistry. Hmmm. I wonder if it had anything to do with the analyses she’d just run for us. I knocked on her office door and she had us enter. Rock took the farthest chair and Chas and I sat down across from her desk.

“Well, we’ve got the qual and quant tests on all twenty-four of your samples,” she said, sliding over a spreadsheet with the data. “As you can see, there were only three samples that had trace amounts of non-lithium elements. One was iron, 0.07%, one was gold and silver, 0.03% and 0.05% respectively, and one was carbon, 0.23%. The others were pure lithium. Usually, one doesn’t find lithium in crystal form.”

Chas was studying the data, and I said, “Thank you very much, Dr. Schmidt. I hope we can use USC again. We’ll have several more batches, but nothing so rushed.” I wasn’t about to tell her that we didn’t exactly ‘find’ the lithium crystals.

“We’ll be here,” she smiled. “Good luck with your experiments, Chas.” She smiled and was trying to put the young man at ease. “Whatever they are.”

Rock and I got up to leave. Chas stayed seated. He looked at the printed spreadsheet. “Are you sure about this one? Number 2148?”

She looked at the spreadsheet on her computer. “The one with the carbon? Quite sure. The quant analysis doesn’t make mistakes.”

“Could you rerun it? It doesn’t make sense. Carbon is so easily bonded to other things. I mean, just carbon? Nothing else?” Chas asked.

“I agree that carbon is usually found bonded to something else. Or, of course, to itself.” She smiled and fingered the diamond in her wedding ring. She showed that to Chas with a smile. “In this case the only other element found was the lithium. And of course, lithium could be bonded to carbon. That wouldn’t surprise me at all. Well, in terms of what it ‘could’ be bonded to. You have a very unusual batch of samples. As I said, pure lithium crystals are so rare that they have never appeared before, in the literature.”

“Can’t we get an electron microscope to look at the bonds themselves?” Chas asked. I stopped leaving the office, and sat back down. Rock did likewise.

“It’s only 0.23% carbon content. We’d have to get very lucky to find the carbon-lithium bond, if there was one. It could take a very long time, perhaps six months, to do the analysis on one of your crystals. The cost would be over a million dollars. And what would it prove? That there was some lithium-carbon bond.”

Chas looked depressed. “Well, that puts it out of range in practical terms. Still, I’d like to know, ya know?” I was relieved that he ‘just wanted to know,’ not that it was crucial to the experiments.

Dr. Schmidt chuckled. “Yes, I do know. Mother nature produces many things that are unknowable, in practical terms. My colleague in the biological sciences has found a plant, and it ... well, that’s HIS story to tell. And it’s a long story.” She laughed again.

“Can I get my samples back? I mean, whatever is left?” Chas asked.

“I’ve got them right here.” She retrieved a box from the credenza behind her. Rock went over to carry it, but Chas was there first. He wanted to make sure every last one of the samples were there. They were.

We carried the box back over to the Trojan Horse hotel, where Chas went through the samples until he found #2148. It was the darker lithium sample. He wanted to put all the samples into the hotel safe.

“Chas,” I said, “we didn’t lock them up before, why do you want to put them in the safe now?”

“Because we know what’s in them now.” He looked at me like I was an idiot for asking such a stupid question.

“But, you have the spreadsheet with the chemical analyses. I would think that is more important than the samples.”

He thought about that a minute. “No, because somebody else could run analyses, like we had Dr. Schmidt do. Maybe they could and maybe they couldn’t, but they’re important. We know, now. So does Dr. Schmidt. Could we get her to erase her records? She knows too.”

[Chas has a point. Eventually we’ll need to convince her that the information she has is not to be divulged.]

Wouldn’t it be safer if you just ‘disappeared’ it from USC’s computers? We’re going to have to test subsequent batches of crystals, I think.

[But that would be destroying data.]

Destroying data somehow violates your rules? And destroying HUMANS would be less objectionable? We are going to have to do that, you know, before we’re finished.

[Touché, Lexi. Okay, I can fiddle with the computer files. I probably should wait until we have finished using their testing facility, just so they don’t wonder what happened to the results.]

Red, I think we’re going to have to run analyses for years. These aren’t the last samples we’re going to need to check.

[I’ll come up with some way of making the spreadsheets unreadable. Maybe some fake hardware glitch.]

There were hardware glitches in the 3700s?

[Hardware will ALWAYS fail.]

What about YOUR hardware, Red?

[I have duplicate equipment and an onboard repair facility, Lexi.]

You can ... um ... take yourself apart? How does that work?

[I could explain it to you, but then I’d have to kill you.]

Ah ... well I’ll think about that later. I currently have too much to think about. But, just thinking here, won’t they be running backups of the data? So maybe you should insert something in the data, now, that we can remove if we need to use it again?