The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(91)

“Unless Dr. Stephenson thinks he can get this thing out there secretly.”

Jennifer shook her head. “That doesn’t seem too likely. He’s obviously up to something, but the government is funding his research through the lab. I doubt he could hide a project that big.”

Mark thought for a bit. “Well, I think we finally have something that our NSA agents are going to be interested in. Maybe we can get them off our backs and onto finding out what’s going on at the lab.”

“Carefully, though,” said Heather. “These people are better at tracing things than we thought. We have to wait to send out our next message until we have the subspace transmitter working. Then we can remotely tap into a secure line that can’t be traced back to us.”

“Doc said that she would have that working in a couple of days.”

“I never said that.”

“That’s what it sounded like to me.”

“What I said is that I have the control system working. We’ll need a couple of weeks of testing. And that’s if we don’t encounter any major gotcha’s.”

Mark frowned. “Crap. I don’t know if we have that long. It sounded like Stephenson was really pushing his team hard. What do you think, Heather?”

“I think Jennifer’s right. If we push our system before we’ve fully tested it, we could run into problems that could make us all very dead. Cold fusion is a wonderful thing, but if we cause an unexpected spike in the energy, then this shielding wouldn’t be adequate.

“My calculations say these lead panels will shield us fine, so long as the power stays low. We just have to make sure our control station doesn’t give us too much of a good thing.”

“Shit,” Mark gasped. “You mean this thing could run away like some sort of Chernobyl meltdown?”

“No. There’s no way a chain reaction could become self-sustaining. But that doesn’t mean we might not accidentally generate a really big power spike. It wouldn’t spread out of control, but it could sure cook our collective geese.”

“How come our dads agreed to this experiment if that could happen?” Mark asked.

“Because the published theory doesn’t predict that it can with this small an apparatus.” Heather pointed toward the computer screen. “I made some slight modifications that Jennifer coded up for us. The embedded algorithms are so subtle I doubt that anyone other than Dr. Stephenson would even notice.”

“You tinkered with the equations? What if you made a mistake?”

“That’s hardly likely.”

Mark laughed. “Really? The world's greatest minds have been spending the last several months analyzing these equations, and you come up with a better variation?”

Heather shrugged, then reached over onto Mr. Smythe’s workbench and grabbed a handful of sawdust. With a flick of her wrist, she tossed it out onto the clean concrete floor.

“3,487.”

“What?” Mark asked.

“There are 3,487 individual grains of sawdust in that spread I tossed on the floor. But if you were to count them, there would be 3,492.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“There is a 93.65894 percent probability that five of the loosely connected granules would break into two parts as they were spread out during the counting process.”

Mark just stared.

“Now, if you can show me some scientists that can do what I just did, then I’ll withdraw my statement.”

“That’s if I buy your count.”

Heather walked over to the bench where Jennifer had done her fine soldering, grabbed the large magnifying glass, and handed it to Mark, pointing toward the sawdust on the floor. “Be my guest.”

Mark grinned. “Okay, I believe you. But then what’s the point in all the testing delay? I mean, if you’re that confident in your equations, why waste the time?”

“The equations are the easy part. Checking the responsiveness of the control circuits and doing the tuning is the really tough work. It looks like Jennifer is making incredible progress, but she needs a chance to conduct her testing. Otherwise, we may not need a tanning bed, ever again.”

Mark threw out his hands. “Okay, I give up. You girls get with the program then. We can’t let Stephenson complete what he’s up to before we get another message to the NSA. And we need to be very worried about Jack in the meantime.”

Jennifer nodded. “That’s why we need you to finish off that bug detector and run a sweep on both our houses.”

“That’s just what I was going to do. In the meantime, we have to assume that the only safe places to talk are here and in our rooms or outside somewhere. If those areas were bugged, they would have already nailed our butts to the wall. Oh, and if we do find bugs, we won’t be able to remove them. That would be a dead giveaway.”

“At least we’ll know where they are,” said Jennifer.

“I’m going to be reading up on the subject in my room.” Mark paused at the door, turning back toward Heather. “Good to have you back in the land of the living.”

Heather smiled back at him. “Good to still be with you.” As he turned away, Heather called after him. “Mark.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for coming for me. I know Jack was there, but if he hadn’t been, I know you would have saved me.”