Chapter 32

Chas was still working on a bottle that wouldn’t go ‘poof’ when somebody sneezed. He finally settled on using the dirty lithium crystals, the ones with the 0.25% carbon, more or less. They all came from the same mountain. A little investigation of that mountain showed an abandoned coal mine that yielded too little coal to be commercially profitable.

Chas was developing larger and larger fusion bottles as time went by. One problem: what to do with the original stable bottles. They were very hard to destroy. He wound up just storing them into the back of the cave. All his scientific pals still couldn’t make a stable one. His ‘pals’ of course were the Drs. from CalTech, USC, and Stanford. Of course, we didn’t update the patent data with the information about the carbon content, and that information was only in the original analyses done at USC.

The bottles that he kept were damn near indestructible. Chas’s bottles, that is. Not the CalTech / Stanford / USC bottles. Nor, I suspect, the bottles made in the secret labs of the US Government.

One day I queried Red about the carbon content of the crystals. He just shrugged – mentally of course.

[Lexi, I can’t take credit for the exact formula for making the crystals. In 3750 C.E., which is where and when I came from, the bottles were like buying paperclips at Walmart. Who looked at the content of a paperclip?]

Red, I thought you had everything on file.

[No, Lexi. Everything is a whole lot of data. Nobody, not even an ABE, can store everything on everything.]

ABE was what Red called himself: ABiological Entity.

So you just keep the vital information. Like the song lyrics to Country and Western songs, or obscure movie references, like where the last scene of ‘Casablanca’ was filmed.

[Yes, Lexi. First of all, I happen to like C&W songs. And ‘Casablanca’ is an important cultural reference.]

Wait, wait. You like C&W music? Red, you’re an ABE. You don’t have ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes.’

[Why not? It hasn’t come up in our talks, so I didn’t mention it. But I don’t happen to like Mozart. Beethoven, Bach, Rachmaninoff, yes. Mozart, no. Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn, yes. Elvis, not so much. I like Ray Charles and Blind Willie Johnson, too. Billie Hollilday is, if I may use the phrase, to die for. I don’t have a vast storehouse of information about archaeology, past about 1700 C.E. I do store the general history of American Indians in North America. One needs to be selective.]

I actually prefer the Canadian use of ‘First People’ to ‘American Indians,’ Red. One is more description, the other has a note of ownership. I think I’ve given up on the ‘American’ everything. Afro-American, Amer-Asians, that sort of thing. Too much inordinate opinion of one’s own importance, if you ask me.

[Very un-American of you, Lexi.]

Is that an ironic opinion, or just a wise ass opinion?

[Yes, it is.]

To get back to Chas. His latest bottle was about three meters in diameter. It barely fit in his lab. He let me know that he was about ready to try his first attempt at putting a fusion reaction in the big bottle in/on a massive electro-magnetic field. He had an impressive array of solar panels, backed up by a connection to Arizona Power, feeding a BIG bunch of capacitors feeding the EM field. I didn’t want to know what happened if the field went away.

I was standing next to Chas when we watched the first attempt on a remote TV hookup – from five miles away. He pushed the button that zapped a large bunch of pure lithium crystals with the three lasers. It worked! There was a very bright, very small thing inside the bottle. It was bright like the sun. You had to squint when you tried to look at it.

“That’s it?” I asked Chas.

“You’re not impressed?” he replied. He turned on me, angry as a cat in a bathtub. “The entire field of physics and chemistry is set on its ear. The impossible is possible. The electric generation capacity of the world is obsolete. And your reaction is ‘That’s it?” He looked at me like I was a gecko lizard sitting on a rock.

“SooorrEE!” I said. “I didn’t mean to stomp on what you’ve just done.”

“Isaac Newton caught an apple falling from a tree at the same time as he looked at the moon. Albert Einstein thought about riding a wave in space looking backward. Thomas Edison tried putting a carbon filament in a vacuum tube.” He looked at me. “12:14 on September 15, 1985. Write down the date. I may not do anything nearly as important in the rest of my life ... And you made it possible, Lexi.”

He hugged me, hard. He even kissed me, which he never did. Then he started jumping around.

“Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison ... and me.” He stopped jumping and looked at me again. “Can I skip school tomorrow? I have some tests to do. They’re not going to be happy that I didn’t do the theoretical work, you know. They’re gonna hate that.” He had a huge ‘bad boy’ grin. “I just did it. Even S2 didn’t know how much lithium to use. He just said, ‘Do it.’ And I did.”

I laughed. It was contagious: Bear and Rock had joined in the celebration. “Yeah, Chas. I think you can take off a couple of days from school.”