Chapter 4

I delivered the homework to Billy. Mrs. Bascom hadn't asked me to, but I went over the work with him in detail and explained it to him. I asked if he had any questions, but he just glared at me the whole time and didn't say a word. He looked a little anxious like he was expecting someone to show up. I had been anxious to leave myself, but I felt I needed to do that much for him, at least. There was a lady doctor in the room at one of the other beds in the ward and she kept glancing at me, smiling at what she thought was an act of friendship.

With my job done, I exited the room and just about collided with the foulest smelling foursome of American pulchritude I had never imagined. The two in the front were young adult males, muscular but tending to fat, blurry-eyed, unshaven and smelling like a brewery. They were followed by two others — and I hesitate to describe them even as 'human — one an older adult male, probably the two boys' father given the similarity of their morphologic features; although I'm not sure there is a specific genome for sneering. The father wasn't tending to fat, he had already made it. He had greasy black hair that looked artificially colored with deep 'Elvis' sideburns. His pockmarked face was partially obscured by an unkempt full beard and he was wearing a wife-beater T-shirt with a good portion of lunch still clinging to the shelf made by his protruding belly. All in all he was filthy and the source of most of the foul smell emanating from the quartet. The last individual in the group was a quasi-feminine amorphous blob of jiggling flesh scantily wrapped in the most garish outfit I had ever seen. If a girl at my high school had worn such an outfit to school she would have never been let in the front — or any — door of the building.

I turned to watch the group lumber into Billy's room. 'Poor bastard doesn't have a chance, ' I thought. 'That's not going to change the outcome, but the bastard doesn't have a fucking chance.' I recognized the three males from the memories from Mr. Griggs' mind, even though he might not know he had seen them. The mind plays funny tricks under stress. These were his attackers, the people he had identified as the 'Jones'.

While I was standing by the nursing station watching the interplay between the five of them in Billy's room and I overheard one of the nurses commenting to another about the apparent 'maturity' of the boy with the broken leg in Room 358. That was Billy's room and he was the only kid in it with a broken leg. There was an appendectomy, a tonsillectomy and an unidentified rash in the other three beds.

The other nurse commented back that his dick and his sexual appetites were more appropriate for a 25 year old than a 16 year old. She said the doctor felt the same way and had ordered a bunch of tests on him tonight to try to determine his real age. They were going to sedate him after dinner, then run him down to radiology when it was quiet later tonight. That got me thinking of a plan for tonight, but then the nurses noticed I was within earshot and they glared at me until I got moving.

I walked back to the empty wing of the hospital, turned into an empty hallway and vanished. I didn't think the people walking behind me would notice. Most people in a hospital have other things on their minds and are not really too observant of the things around them.

One of the experiments that Charlie and I were going to have to do soon was to see if we could teleport while we were invisible. I suspected we could and it seemed to me that it would be a lot safer, just in case we missed our location or if someone had moved the furniture and we ended up in the middle of a filing cabinet or the wall or something; or if there just happened to be someone in the room when we appeared.

I was starting a list of things we still needed to try when Charlie appeared in the lab with me. She dropped off several large bags, waved at me and disappeared again, only to reappear with another load of clothes. She had really gotten into this shoplifting thing.

I was stacking the bags in the sphere when she blinked out and back again. This time she carried a bunch of backpacks and other canvas bags. She helped me fill the space inside the sphere with all of the booty and I started the process.

"That's a lot of stuff, Charlie. I thought you'd get just a couple of things and then we'd do our other clothes at home."

"That was my thought, too, and then I realized that most of your pants have metal zippers and rivets and some metal buttons. You needed more things than I did. I got us a couple pairs of shoes each; I needed to get a bunch more sports bras and underwear. I got you a couple of pairs of shorts, but if you start growing you're probably going to have to go 'commando.' All together, it turned out to be a lot of stuff. It would sure help if we knew for sure what would happen if the clothing had metal pieces in them."

I blushed at the thought of not wearing underwear, but there were worse things in life, I guess.

"I know. I'd like to know about the metal, too. But do you really want to find out now? What would happen if the metal broke the sphere or the laser?" I said. "By the way, how much do we need to pay for all of this?"

"Around $1000.00. Since we're probably going to be pretty active in these clothes — running around, standing out in the cold and stuff — I wanted to get good quality. I looked at the big department store first. They had a lot of stock so they might not miss even this much stuff, but their stuff was crappy and poorly made. So, we need to pay back that small boutique on Hanson Street pretty quick as they will miss this much stuff and it could hurt their business. They're just a small business but they have really good stuff." She giggled and added, "I left them an IOU and ordered a bunch more stuff. I, uh, didn't actually sign the IOU. I just wrote 'Super Chuck.' I hope that was OK."

I was stunned at the cost of the clothing. I had no idea. For me, clothes just magically appeared in my room at the beginning of the school year and then more appeared under the Christmas tree. Once in a while I would get a nice shirt at Easter. Shopping for clothes was a topic I knew nothing about, but I was glad for Charlie's skills.

I had to laugh at the name Charlie left. When we were kids, many of the parents of our playmates didn't know Charlie's gender, especially after hearing of her exploits on the baseball diamond. When they visited to see their kids play, they inevitably wanted to meet 'Chuck.' Charlie took in good humor, and it was a private joke between us when she did something exceptional.

I went over my list of experiments with Charlie, adding her metal test at the end. We still had a couple of items to run through the process, but I wanted the laser disabled tonight. I expected Mr. Griggs to show up anytime to secure the sphere and we were working on borrowed time.

Charlie and I decided to split up; she would transport our processed items back to the house after they were processed and I would run a couple of simple tests with the last run of the process. Then I would have to fix the laser so that it looked like it hadn't been running since Mike, the utility guy, had set it up last week.

I started looking around the lab for a small piece of metal — something that wouldn't create too big of a mess if it shorted out. Then it hit me; why waste this test? If it was successful, why not process something useful? I started to broaden my search. I saw a couple of hammers and tongs that might have some use. There was a long screwdriver in the tool box and a putty knife that could be useful, too.

Suddenly the proverbial light bulb went off over my head and I teleported into the darkened main building of the school. Everyone was gone by this time, even the custodial staff. Our city was pretty good sized and our school was modern but it had not yet succumbed to the trench warfare of many inner-city schools in the larger metropolitan areas of the country. There was no need for a full-time night time guard nor were there metal detectors on the doors.

That didn't mean that the occasional weapon — mostly knives — wasn't confiscated from the students. At one point it had gotten so bad, especially after some of the massacres in other high schools, that the principal had set up a huge display case; he called it the "Westwood High School Wall of Shame". Where before the display case had held all of the athletic trophies and awards the school had won in prior decades, it now held the confiscated weapons.

We were close enough to the great outdoors that many of our students hunted with their dads and uncles. Most of the knives in the display were therefore of the hunting and skinning variety. Of course, it reflected on the relative stupidity of the students who brought them into the school in the first place and then show them off. In the student's defense, however, in our city they were not bringing them in to massacre the other students, but they brought them because they were proud of the equipment.

There were a couple of the knives in the display that were different and had caught my eye, both because of their uniqueness and their deadly purpose. These knives were designed to allow the user to get close to and kill other humans. They were double edged with a tapered point and serrated on both edges near the hilt. They were relatively small, with blades between 5 to 8 inches long and they came with ankle or belt sheaths. They were made of a very light weight metal alloy and were very strong. What was also surprising was that there were so many of them. Rumor had it that they were all from one gang — if you can call a group of naïve kids a gang just because they hang out together. Apparently, carrying these knives to school was part of their 'group-think.' I don't think there was much thinking done by them otherwise, as the first one caught with one of the combat knives rolled over on all of the others.

I blinked out of sight and stepped up into the large case. I was small, so I fit in the narrow space. Once I was inside I blinked visible, slipped several of the knives and the sheaths into my processed backpack, blinked out and stepped back out of the case. I was kind of holding my breath that the sliding glass door of the case wouldn't shatter as the knives were pulled through, but apparently if an unprocessed object was entirely enclosed in a processed container, it behaved as if it was in the other dimension, even though it wasn't processed. It was kind of like they were encased inside of a dimensional bubble. So if they were inside, say my backpack or a bag, then all of the items didn't need to be processed in order to pass through solid objects. This was going to make acquiring things — also known as stealing — much easier.

I teleported back to the lab and used a small piece of nylon fishing line to hang the knives and the sheaths over the top of the sphere. They were sort of in the middle of the sphere, maybe a bit low.

I held my breath as I started the HV generator and then let it stabilize. Crossing my fingers I engaged the switches for the magnets and flinched, waiting for the explosion or whatever.

It didn't come.

I examined the knives in the sphere a little closer and saw that the fishing line had slackened; the magnets had centered the knives in the sphere. I walked over to the laser, checked the focus with the red HeNe beam and then fired the invisible high output laser.

It was a little disappointing; nothing spectacular happened until about two minutes into the process and then the edges of the knife blades started to faintly glow. The bluish-white glow got brighter and brighter; eventually forcing me to turn away from looking directly at it, but by that time I had seen that the glow had involved the entire knife. I kept sniffing for the smell of something burning and thought briefly about the mis-wired smoke detectors. I would have to ask Mr. Griggs about those.

The laser timed out and shut off. The blades slowly stopped glowing. As soon as I could look at them without going blind, I moved closer to the sphere. I tried to feel if there had been any heat generated by the process by holding my hand out as close to the sphere as I could get before the magnetic fields stopped me. I could not detect any heat, but it could have been kept inside by the magnetic fields. Heat was, after all, just the lower end of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum. It made sense if the magnetic fields had some effect on it. Then again, it might not, but strange things had been happening lately and I wasn't sure of all of the rules in the other dimension. Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics may not be the same there as they were here.

The 5 minute post laser phase ended. While I was waiting I had disabled the laser and changed out the mirror Billy had used. I replaced it with a beam-splitter device. I also angled the beam-splitter so that the two beams from that expensive piece of equipment were aimed towards our conventional concrete targets. Hopefully if anyone came into the lab and knew about the sphere, they would not put the two projects together. I also moved one of the 6-foot cloth partitions back to its original position where it was directly in the path of the laser beam if it were aimed at the sphere. That should be enough to keep the curious satisfied.

When the HV generator had spun down and the magnetic fields were shut off, I carefully moved over to the sphere to see what had happened to the knives. Nothing had shorted out, no big sparks, no flashes of lightning, balls of fire; nothing, just that bluish-white glow that had now disappeared.

The knives and sheaths were now hanging suspended from the fishing line again, but instead of the blackened metal of the combat knives, the blades and hilts appeared to be made from a crystal clear material. They looked a bit thinner than before, too.

I checked for an elevated temperature using my hand again and couldn't feel any heat at all. Still, I used the tongs from the lab and carefully removed the knives from the sphere and put them on the workbench in the lab. Finally, using one of our scientific thermometers, I check for any heat. The reading was ambient.

Suddenly kicking myself that I hadn't done it before, I also checked for radiation with the Geiger counter we used in the physics lab downstairs. Yeah, it was kind of like closing the barn door after the horse had escaped, but I figured better late than never. Fortunately there was no radiation — at least, none that could be measured by that primitive instrument.

I finally picked up one of the knives in my hand. It felt heavier than it should have for its size. Whatever the new material was that the metal alloy in the knife had changed into; it was very dense. I put one of the knives under the binocular microscope and examined it. The edges appeared to be very sharp. I pulled a sheet of paper across the edge of the blade and watched it in the microscope. The paper seemed to separate before it reached the actual edge of the knife.

I used a higher magnification and a different wavelength light source and it now looked like there was a thin aura surrounding the blade that was almost invisible.

I measured some calipers to measure the thickness of the blade. Again, I kicked myself for not measuring these things for a baseline. Still, I estimated the thickness of the blade was reduced almost 40-50%.

The next test was a test of brittleness. A knife wasn't going to be any good if it shattered when it hit something hard, like a rib. I fastened the blade of the knife into the vise on the workbench and used a block and tackle to pull sideways on the hilt to bend the knife. I was trying to stay out of the way as I applied force to the blade in case it snapped. I was pulling as hard as I could, and even though I was small, the block and tackle amplified my efforts. At full strength, the knife bent a tiny bit, but it didn't break. When I released the tension it returned to the vertical starting position. I was beginning to be impressed with whatever this new material was.

I used one of the knives to try to cut lengthwise with the grain of a piece of Fir 2X4 we had laying around. It cut the wood like a knife through butter. There was also very little resistance when I cut the wood across the grain. This blade was sharp!

I held the ankle sheath in one hand and a knife in the other and watched in the mirror as I blinked invisible. Both items disappeared. It appeared as if Charlie and I could at least have a basic level of defense. I fastened the sheath around my ankle and if felt pretty good. I sheathed the knife and pulled my pants' leg down to cover it.

I cleaned up the lab, put away the Geiger counter and the microscope, swept up the wood shavings and put away the fishing line. I had always been kind of a neat freak, but Mr. Griggs was adamant about cleaning up and putting things away after using them. Some of the students in the physics class had flunked a lab because they left out a Bunsen burner or a set of rollers or something. He had even gotten after me a couple of times.

When I was satisfied with the condition of the lab, I collected all of the remaining items, stuffed them in my backpack and teleported to the house. Directly to my room, actually. Charlie was at home in her room and Mom was just leaving for her night out. Charlie had laid out a set of new clothes on my bed and had put all of my other unprocessed clothes in a large plastic bag. I changed into my new clothes and put the ones I had been wearing into the bag with the other 'old' clothes.

I went into Charlie's room and showed her the knives. When I cautioned her against even touching the blade — most people will run their finger over the edge of a knife to see if it's sharp — she thought I was kidding. When I sliced an old boot in half, including the steel shank in the sole, her eyes got real wide. I showed her how to strap it on her ankle so it didn't show. Of course, she would have to be wearing pants.

I had explained a bit about Billy to her and now I told her what I wanted to do tonight. I had heard he was going to be sedated. I wanted to get into his memories for several reasons. He had tried to kill me and I wanted to know why. He knew, whether he 'knew' it or not, how to run the process. And last, but not least, he knew about our Father. I wanted to know what he knew. I was also curious about his relationship to his four visitors at the hospital.

Charlie got dressed in her new clothes in front of me. She didn't put on a show, but she was watching me watch her. I think it kind of turned her on, knowing how besotted I was with her beauty. Hell, at my age, Miss Piggy naked would turn me on, but she still appreciated that she could get my motor running.

We held hands and I blinked us to the empty room we had used earlier. Sooner or later we would have to find another spot; some poor patient was going to have a heart attack if we suddenly appeared in the room and it was occupied.

We turned invisible and went down to the Pediatric Ward where Billy was staying. We hung around the nursing station until one of the night staff nodded to the female doctor and said that he was out. The female doctor turned and headed down the hallway toward Radiology. This was our chance.