Chapter 33

One and a half years later.

Time: Friday, December 31, 2010 11:33 PM Eastern Standard Time

Melanie and I and the rest of the house decided to sack out early and not wait up for New Years. I was lying with my wife in my parents' house in Exeter PA. Patricia and her boyfriend Jim are sleeping downstairs. The house became quiet a half hour ago.

So much has happened this year. Melanie got her M.D. degree, and is spending a fifth year at Harvard doing genetic research. She's also applied to a three-year residency program at Boston Children's Hospital. We submitted all the paperwork in October. Melanie is very hopeful, and I'm sure the Harvard staff has written glowing references for her. I think it's in the bag.

This year has been a real transition with Melanie's parents. Our trip last year to Italy was very frustrating for Melanie's mom. But this summer we all went to Hawaii, and Patricia brought along Jim, an assistant professor at Boston University. Melanie's parents, and her mom in particular, are finally resigned about the issue of Patricia dominating Melanie. At least I think they are.

Finance wise we have no worries. Melanie has a full post-doc research grant for this year, and she'll get over $60k per annum as a resident starting in June. And her parents made us and interesting offer last fall. They offered to pay off 10% of our student debt if we paid off the rest. Melanie and I had been discussing paying it down anyway, and given our healthy cash flows, we decided to accept the present.

So now we have about $10k in blue money, $20k in gray money (our nickname for my IRA and 401k accounts), $1.3 M in U.S. cash, and our only debt is the $233k remaining on our mortgage. Even ignoring the platinum and euros, we're in fine shape.

And my kinetic abilities! This sixth rotation has been very interesting. The first period was full growth, then seventeen periods of growth only on my sense-sphere radius, and now I'm back to full growth. The last period of the sixth rotation started eleven days ago, and will end on January 21, 2011, at 5:54 PM.

Currently my sense-sphere is over three light-years in radius and I can lock photons as low as 158 Hertz. My maximum force is at 9.3e25 Newtons and power output 1.08e28 Watts, 120 mega-tons of matter per second. At the end of my sixth rotation, I think I'm going to terra-form Mars.

By that time I should be able to produce 791 mega-tons per second. At that rate, it will take me about fifty-six days to build up a Martian atmosphere to an Earthlike standard pressure. Mar's atmosphere will be a lot thicker than Earth's. It has to be. With a surface gravity of 38% of Earth's and its smaller radius, there has to be about 2.7 times as much air above to exert the same pressure. But the thicker atmosphere will serve a very useful purpose. I plan to push the CO2 concentrations above 400 ppm, providing a thick thermal blanket to trap the heat.

I'll be spending the rest of March and April creating Martian water. I'll be able to produce 79% of a cubic kilometer of water every second, more if my power limit keeps growing. That's a minimum of two million cubic kilometers by the end of April, enough to create some shallow seas. I also plan to liquefy the iron core and spin it. I'll need a magnetic field to protect the atmosphere from being stripped by the solar wind.

Melanie was dozing by my side, breathing easily and more than half asleep. We got here to Exeter yesterday evening, after spending Christmas in Sterling Illinois at a big family reunion hosted by Melanie's parents. Her parents can be so nosey sometimes, and in the strangest ways. They asked about our itinerary several times during our stay, and had even called here late this evening to be sure we had arrived okay. I kept thinking, wasn't yesterday the day to do that?

The four of us will be heading back to Boston on Sunday. Melanie and I wanted to be here with my dad over New Years. It's the tenth anniversary of my mom's death, and we wanted to be here with dad and my step-mom for that.

I sensed a tickle in my mind from our Harvard Square condo. I keep a permanent low- level lock on the place. In a couple of seconds I brought up a full scan, and what I saw astonished me.

A man I didn't know had the keys to both locks on our entrance door, and had just let himself in. He was carrying two large suitcases. I probed the suitcases and was surprised to find them full. He was carrying stuff inside my condo?! This didn't seem like a typical burglary. I decided just to observe and see what happened.

He went right to work, opening the suitcases and dispersing the contents around the condo. It looked like magazines and video tapes and disks. He put a few magazines in all the rooms, but the mother lode went into our bedroom. What the hell was this? The only things left in the suitcases were a clock radio and a large plastic bottle of, of what? I sensed inside and realized the bottle was filled with nail polish remover. The man went back for the radio and bottle after he was finished disbursing the magazines. I watched in silence.

The party sounds from outside drifted in through the closed windows. It was shortly after midnight, and there were several groups of people in the halls outside leaving various parties. This one extra man had aroused no one's suspicions. The holiday was a perfect time for a break-in.

He set some of the house newspapers on one of my wooden end-tables, and then dribbled a splash of the nail polish remover on the papers and wetted the label on the plastic bottle with the fluid too. Then he plugged in the radio and set everything right next to each other on the table on top of the newspapers. He spent of few moments setting the time, and then he went back across the room and silently closed his suitcases. I realized he was about leave. What the hell was he doing?

I probed into the radio. One of the wires was frayed and shorting, dumping its heat into the plastic insulation of the wire above it. I realized it would take some time, maybe as much as a half hour, but when the main power wire above lost its insulation, the clock radio would have a major arcing short. And it was sitting on newspapers sprinkled with nail polish removal. Hell! Why did this man want to burn our condo?!

I took a closer scan at the magazines and videos, and gasped as the recognition hit me. They were full of child pornography, spread all over my home. In a burst of insight, I saw the intent. The fire on the end-table was sure to set off the sprinkler system. The danger to the lives of the other people in the complex was actually quite low. But the fire department was sure to be breaking down the door shortly after the fire occurred. They'd find what would look like an accidental fire, in a vacant condo filled with child pornography.

Melanie! My gosh, my gosh! My dear wife! The monstrous intent shocked me into action. Melanie's vocation and lifelong desire to be a pediatrician were about to be ruined. The stain of being associated with child pornography would lose her the license to practice medicine, probably even without a criminal conviction. Her dream and all her years of work to become a pediatrician were about to be destroyed.

No fucking way! I locked and pushed, sending all the smut into oblivion. Then I did the same for the clock radio and bottle of nail polish remover. My anger was boiling out of me.

The man picked up his suitcases and was about to walk out the door. I think if he just would have left, I would have let him go. But he took one last look at the end-table across the room, and he could no longer see the red display of the clock in the darkness. Frowning, he put down his suitcases and walked across the room.