Chapter 2: Chemistry Test
June 18, 1984. Regional office for Ship’s Petroleum & Chemicals, Neighagra Falls [Niagara Falls], New York.
Zero minus 10 days.
“It says here that you graduated from the University of Chicago in 1978, Mr. Catalyst,” Steady Ship drawled, looking up from his desk at the young man with orange skin and green hair dressed in a white lab coat. “Who was your freshman chemistry teacher?” The CEO of SP&C was a fat man with a small pair of spectacles at the end of this round nose, his skin lemon yellow and his thinning hair turquoise.
Mr. Catalyst tried desperately not to roll his eyes as he tried to remember the answer to the question. In a chair placed against the back wall sat Truth Delver, flanked on either side by his assistants Gnosi and Meridiem; all three of them shared equal looks of growing exasperation.
Delver was a gentle-looking man, with blue-green eyes, short neatly-combed hair that was nearly fluorescent in its blueness, and chalk-white skin. The skin was matched with a spotless white suit with bowtie, shoes, and kid gloves, leaving only his head exposed. The fingers of his gloved hands were interlaced over his crossed knees while he was sitting. His mark of a magnifying glass over an ancient parchment was monogrammed on his lapel. “Mr. Ship, the chemical inspection must take place today, as per our contract,” he gently reminded the CEO.
“Yes, and I have final say on who will perform that inspection,” said Mr. Ship as he casually inspected his fingernails.
At that moment, Gus Guiseman barged into the office wearing his own lab coat. It was noticeably more stained than Mr. Catalyst’s. “Hello, am I late?” he asked impishly. Tucked under one arm were stacked a half-dozen of the plates he had invented.
“And the chemist I want is Professor Gus Guiseman,” Mr. Ship said before anyone had a chance to react.
Gnosi’s lips silently mouthed out the words “Oh, no.” Gnosi Augur was a man barely into his twenties, with extremely pale yellow skin, yellow-orange hair, and pale blue eyes that would normally belong on an albino. He was a tall man, but perpetually hunched over in an attempt not to be noticed. He had been the one on the receiving end of Gwen Guiseman’s outrage over the attempt by GDS to hire her husband.
With his part in the negotiations at an end, Mr. Ship started packing his things into a briefcase.
“As you wish, Mr. Ship,” Delver said calmly. “Meridiem, Gnosi, could you please head over to the school and see how the chamber’s preparations are proceeding? You can inform Miss Point that we will be ready for her between 1:00 and 1:30.” After the pair had left, he reached into his satchel and removed a stack of typewritten pages more than a centimeter in thickness before finally standing to face the newcomer. “Professor Guiseman, what a pleasure it is to finally meet you. My name is Truth Delver, and I represent the GDS Corporation.” He gingerly extended a white-gloved hand.
“And it is an honor to meet you, Mr. Delver!” Gus exclaimed, grabbing onto Delver’s hand and shaking it vigorously before noting his obvious discomfort and letting go. “I’ve been watching your TV show with my kids for years. I dare say I learned more about world history from Eyewitness to History than I was ever taught by any teacher.”
“Oh, well I am flattered to hear that,” Delver replied. “And a bit disappointed at the American public education system.”
“I am curious to know why GDS employed your services,” Gus said, suppressing his instinct to slap an arm around the other man’s back by tightly grasping his hands behind his back. “Are you to be their spokesman?”
Delver smiled slyly. “I’d be happy to answer all of your questions, once you’ve signed off on this non-disclosure agreement.”
Gus looked down at the massive pile of paper with distaste. “No,” he said simply. “I’m not signing it.”
“Are you sure?” asked Delver.
“Positive.”
“Is there a problem?” Mr. Ship asked eagerly as he stepped between them. “Because if my chosen chemist is having reservations at such an early stage, that would be cause for cancelling the contract.”
“There is no problem at all,” Delver replied crisply. “The professor will simply be forced to obey my instructions, no matter how bizarre, without knowing the reason for them…until he breaks down and signs the NDA. For someone with his reputation, I give him an hour.”
Gus frowned. “You underestimate me, Sir. I will gladly follow your instructions without question, and afterwards I will submit a complete report of my opinion to my good friend Steady. And then he will make the final determination of whether this already-suspicious deal will go through or not. Now, shall we proceed?”
Delver nodded curtly. “We shall.”
Gus looked around him at the chemical lab that Delver had taken him to. “Alright,” he said as he put down his plates, “this place will do.” Each plate was a flat hexagon of unglazed ceramic, bone-white in color and 25 cm in diameter. If you didn’t look at them very closely, you’d swear they were made of cheap plastic.
“I only need two tests performed to know for sure if your ‘artisanal plaques’ are adequate for our uses,” Delver explained, “and only the first test is chemical in nature, so you will simply be witnessing the other one. What I need to know first of all is: what is the melting point of your product?”
“Ah, well I didn’t have the equipment at the time I invented them to make that determination, so I just assumed it to be around 1500 °C like other ceramics with similar properties,” Gus replied. “So you need the exact figure?”
“Yes.”
Gus placed one of the plates face-down on the lab table, handed over a pair of safety goggles and put on his own, and then picked up a nearby hammer and smashed the plate to smithereens. He then collected some of the resulting dust in a small crucible, which he placed with a metal probe into a chemical oven before turning it on. “That display over there shows the temperature of the ceramic dust,” he explained as he removed his goggles. “It will rise at a constant rate until the melting point is reached, at which point the temperature will remain steady while the heat input instead is used to melt the dust, before rising once more. This other display will measure the amount of heat absorbed during the phase transition. It will take about thirty minutes for this device to get high enough to give us results. So perhaps we can talk until then.”
Delver removed his own goggles before silently pulling the tome-like NDA out of his briefcase.
“Oh, we don’t have to talk about the plates,” Gus said, waving his hands in the air. “I was more curious about your former career. What made you get into television instead of academics?”
Delver leaned against a table as he thought back. “I’ve always gotten along well with showy types, and the local station was certainly the showiest place in Canterlot when I was growing up. I had a friend who wanted to be a producer and nobody willing to trust their careers to his uncertain future, so I agreed to be his guinea pig. We had no intention of creating a show that the networks would actually get into a bidding war over, but there you are.”
“Wait, Canterlot’s firmly in Markist territory, right?”
“Yes.”
“So why was there any doubt? Didn’t your friend have a TV-related mark?”
“No, as a matter of fact he was a Christian—one of the very few to live in Canterlot. It was an odd thing, seeing the usual prejudice in reverse.”
“Huh,” was all Gus could say in response. After glancing over at the oven’s displays he continued. “What would you say your favorite episode was of Eyewitness to History?”
“Of the ones that aired, I’d definitely say the one on Gudea of Lagash. The research and the chance to walk on the very sites central to so many faiths and legends was something very special to me. That was in 1973. I met Saddam Hussein, the current president, at that time.”
“What did you think of him?”
“A dangerous and crazy man. If we didn’t need Iraq as a bulwark against Iran I’d tell President Shooter to have nothing whatsoever to do with him.”
“You deal with a lot of crazy people?” Gus asked with a grin.
“Far more than I’d like,” Delver admitted. “May I ask you a question?”
“Fire away.”
“However did a nuclear physicist get around to inventing dinnerware?”
Gus smiled. “I’m insatiably curious. About anything and everything. After I had settled down at Caltech, putting out revolutionary papers every decade or so, I found that it wasn’t enough. I started asking professors in other disciplines if they minded me sitting in on their classes. From there, I used my contacts among my former graduate students to get consulting gigs with various local tech businesses, and honed a reputation for telling things like they are, and finding solutions for some tricky real world problems. Then came SP&C’s little ‘mishap’ in 1983.”
“The ‘Poisoning of Bittsburg’ [Pittsburg]?” asked Delver.
“The same. The company’s stocks were in free fall when Steady Ship announced that he was taking personal responsibility for the oil spill, and that he was hiring me for a full year to root out any problems I could find, completely unrestricted. That investigation took me nine months, as I traveled up and down the country doing interviews and writing up my report. After I submitted it, Mr. Ship was so pleased with my thoroughness that he invited me to use the remaining time in my contract to poke my nose anywhere else in the company I wanted to go. He was hoping I might find some gross inefficiencies that could be corrected.
“I was giving myself an unguided tour of Ship’s R&D facility outside Neighagra Falls—just down the road from here, in fact—when I discovered a lone engineer by the name of Steady State (no relation to the CEO). Mr. State was trying to perfect a machine to manufacture cheap dinner plates out of unwanted petroleum derivatives. A team at Fillydelphia State had developed the process, but it turned out to be far too finicky to be easily streamlined. When the process was methodically performed in a lab, it took two days and succeeded 92% of the time. Mr. State’s machine was doing the same process in less than two hours, but with only a 60% success rate. Not only was that an unacceptable amount of waste, it also destroyed the hoped-for cost savings in using the machine as opposed to just disposing of the materials in a responsible manner.
“What caught my eye were the rejects, just sitting in a big garbage can waiting to be thrown out. Half of them were so soft that I could crumple them in my hand, while the other half were brittle, and broke into some really sharp shards. Those rejects had pretty obviously crystallized, but the crystals appeared to be five-sided, which is kind of rare in nature. So I took some of those pieces over to the really-excellent X-ray crystallography setup that the Neighagra Falls facility had, and that allowed me to see that what I had was a genuine penteract quasicrystal.”
“I suppose that’s a big deal?” asked Delver.
“You bet it is,” Gus answered. “Quasicrystals have only recently been discovered, and they’re all the rage in materials science. I just happened to read George Grectman’s paper on the subject, and the mathematical aspects really appealed to me. Quasicrystals are different from ordinary crystals in being regular, but not periodic in their microscopic structure.” Gus spent a moment looking around for a chalkboard or other surface to write out his thoughts. Failing that, he tried in vain to show what he was thinking of with his bare hands. “That is to say that a crystal of salt, for example, is made up of millions of tiny cubes…fused to each other. Table sugar is made from hexagonal pillars, graphite is made of flat hexagons, and so on. Quasicrystals, on the other hand, are not one shape repeated over and over again, but two or more different shapes fitting together to form a repeating pattern. Mathematically, you can turn a quasicrystal into something with a single repeating shape, but only by imagining that the shape exists in a higher dimension.”
This last fact got Delver’s attention.
Gus paused for only a moment before continuing. “Grectman’s aluminum-manganese alloy had a structure that made far more sense in five dimensions than it did in three. Now of course I should emphasize that I never thought of these higher dimensions as being real, but merely abstract—Grectman’s crystal looked like a five-dimensional shape as seen with three-dimensional eyes, but obviously it was just an extraordinarily complex three-dimensional mineral.”
Delver rolled his eyes.
Gus pondered this for a bit before continuing. “Now my crystals (or I suppose I should say Mr. State’s reject crystals) really took the cake. Not only were they the first organic quasicrystals, as far as I knew, but they also came dangerously close to being, not a five- or even six-dimensional construct, but rather a full twelve-dimensional construct in their simplest form. And as the universe as we currently understand it is twelve-dimensional, that really pulled at me. I wanted to tweak this crystal, bend it ever-so-slightly, until I had a perfect twelve-dimensional crystal. But thinking in twelve dimensions is hard, even with the help of Ship’s supercomputer that I may have borrowed without permission. One day I was practicing polyrhythms on my bongos when it suddenly came to me: how to redirect the crystal shaping techniques I learned at—” He suddenly stopped himself.
“Yes?” asked Delver.
“I can’t tell you,” Gus said coldly. “I’m bound by the terms of a non-disclosure agreement. Now you see why I don’t want to sign yours—it gets in the way of good storytelling. What I can tell you is that it was an undisclosed number of years ago, when I assisted an undisclosed company in a project I can’t tell you about, other than the fact that it obviously failed. All I was allowed to take out of the experience was a few new chemical techniques that I thought I’d never had a use for. Except now I did have a use for them.
“So I talked Mr. State into letting me have a little corner of his lab, and I did some chemical doping of the plastic waste products, similar to what you do when you’re making semiconductors, and when I was done I had,”—he reached over to pick up an un-smashed plate—“well, one of these. It was no longer crystalline or even quasi-crystalline in appearance, but it was nearly indestructible under reasonable kitchen conditions, stain-proof and oven and dishwasher safe. In short, it was exactly the plate that Steady State was looking for, but with three little problems: it was a bit on the small side, it was flat instead of a bit concave like a plate is supposed to be, and it completely dissolved into mush if you left it covered with any weak acid overnight—even orange juice was enough to do it. That last one, of course, proved to be the real kicker, because nobody is going to buy a plate that will dissolve in orange juice, no matter how cheap it is. And if you try to coat it in something to protect it, well there go your cost savings again. For a moment there, I really thought I had wasted my time.”
“Well I can assure you that what you have done is a tremendous benefit to all mankind, Pr. Guiseman, although of course I cannot tell you how. By the way, shouldn’t you have results by now?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes.” He tuned to look at the oven’s twin gauges and froze. “This can’t be right.”
Delver allowed the ghost of a grin to dance across his face. “Oh? What do they say?”
“They say that the oven has supplied all the heat it safely can, and the temperature of the ceramic has gone down in the meantime. Stand back, I’m going to override the safeties and open it up.”
The two men moved to one side before Gus reached out and prodded a button, causing the lid of the device to pop open. They then cautiously approached the oven, which didn’t seem to be giving off any heat at all.
Putting on a leather glove, Gus grabbed a pair of tongs and removed the crucible, then dumped the dust on the counter. After gingerly poking the substance through the glove, he tore it off and touched it with a bare finger. “I need a lot more heat,” he concluded, his eyes glazed.
“Well,” said Delver smugly, “what a coincidence that this building is an old smelting plant.”
Delver led the non-responsive professor down the stairs to another room equipped with an induction furnace rated to 3000 °C, with the controls located on the other side of a thick insulating wall. “Try putting one of your plates in there,” he suggested.
“You knew this was going to happen,” Gus accused him as he did as he was told and started the furnace.
“Yes.”
“But…how? That stuff turns into wet cardboard when I pour orange juice on it! How is it possibly such a colossal sink for energy?”
“No idea,” said Delver with a shrug. “But I’ve got my suspicions. Suspicions I can’t share until you sign the NDA.”
Gus stared at the paper pile, clearly tempted. Then he violently shook his head. “No, I am going to figure this out.” He looked around, and was gratified to see that this room at least was equipped with a chalkboard, which he immediately began sketching on. “Now here is the molecular structure, with the assumed bond energies. But they must be orders of magnitude higher. So suppose…”
“Yes…?”
“No, that’s impossible! I’ll need to get that actual melting point before I can proceed.”
“Well, while you’re doing that, do you mind telling me how you discovered the artisanal properties of your plates?”
“Oh, nothing incredibly inspired,” Gus answered. “I still had some free time to spend, and I wasn’t willing to let the plates go as failures just like that, so I threw a whole battery of tests at them to see if I could find any redeeming properties.
“I confirmed that a plate wouldn’t melt at temperatures up to 200 degrees Celsius (just so long as there was nothing acidic in the oven at the same time). That I could take the temperature down to -50 degrees and even if I did it super-fast, it wouldn’t fracture. The other tests I thought of gave me some pretty boring results, until I thought to apply electricity to the plates.
“That’s when I found out that these plates had two very distinct sides, although they appeared identical in all tests before this point. If you applied an electrical current to the bottom of the plate, the whole thing changed color. From the original bone white to titanium white, pitch black, turquoise, fire engine red, sky or midnight blue, orange, purple, violet, any bright color you could name, I could find the precise electrical current to produce, by varying the frequency, intensity and duration of the pulse. The only colors I couldn’t get were the drab ones: browns, tans and faded grays.
“The other side of the plates was even more interesting. Now when I applied electricity, I didn’t change the entire plate’s color, but only an area concentrated around the electrical source itself. In effect, I could draw and paint on this side, depicting any design my limited artistic ability could come up with.
“I was happy to have found what I was looking for—a reason not to throw the plates in the trash. I figured I had something that artists could play with, and that was how I represented the matter to company President Ship. I think he was just really happy that I had helped his company escape bankruptcy, so he wrote up a rather generous contract where I gave him ownership of my plate-making technique in return for 20% of the profits. Trust me when I say that I didn’t really need the money, so there was no reason for me to fight for any more than that. So I packed my bags and moved back to Glendale to reunite with my family. I certainly didn’t think I had invented a ‘benefit to mankind’.”
Delver’s response was a mysterious smile. “Your furnace is shutting down.”
“Not again!” Gus ran over to the controls. “I’m disengaging the safeties, this time to give the sample all the heat we’ve got.”
“This building has its own generator, which has been substantially improved upon after GDS bought the building,” Delver explained. “You should be able to double the heat input.”
“Then that is what I’ll do!” Gus exclaimed.
A few minutes later, he shook his head incredulously as he pointed at the video display showing the interior of the furnace. “That plate should be a 5000 °C vapor by now, yet I see water ice crystals forming on it! And now…”
“It’s fading away, isn’t it?” asked Delver with a knowing grin.
“Yes, but not fading as in sublimating into vapor; it’s literally fading from sight. What is happening?!”
The furnace took that moment to fail utterly, cracking open and emitting a blast of superheated steam that should have ripped through the insulating wall and killed the two men, but was instead sucked into the growing ball of blackness inside the furnace.
“This is the crucial phase,” Delver confided to the despairing professor. “Pull it out now while I get the drapes open.”
Gus grabbed the tongs and picked up the plate, not because it was too hot to touch but because it was now so cold that the gases in the atmosphere were turning to ice on contact. At least, that’s what Gus assumed was happening based on the cracking sounds he was hearing, as the plate was engulfed in a meter-wide sphere of inky blackness that was quickly growing.
“Hold it outside the window,” Delver instructed. “Hurry!”
Gus did as he was told, even as he lost feeling in his invisible hands.
Outside, the sun itself seemed to dim slightly for just a moment.
And suddenly the sphere of blackness was gone, and left held in the tongs was a gleaming plate of pearlescent pinkish white.
Gus gingerly put the plate down on a nearby table before racing over to his chalkboard. “It wasn’t a simulation!” he concluded. “The molecules really do bend their bonds through all twelve dimensions! That,” he said, pointing at the plate they had just created, “is not really a solid at all, but an entirely new state of matter. What are you going to do with it?”
Delver pointed silently at the ever-present NDA.
“No!” Gus cried with a wavering voice. “I’ll figure this out myself. I just need to study it.”
“Well to do that you’ll need more than one plate to play with.”
“I can’t make another,” Gus countered. “You saw what happened to the furnace.”
“Come with me.”
“That’s a pizza oven,” observed Gus. “What’s a pizza oven doing in an abandoned smelting plant? No wait, don’t tell me—your NDA told you that you’d need it. But what’s this going to do that an induction furnace can’t?”
“Oh, an induction furnace would have worked as well, but it would have been a case of overkill,” said Delver. “I find that having a finished plate as a catalyst makes the process much easier—so easy that this oven is perfect…and a lot cheaper to replace if we break it.”
Gus placed both the gleaming plate he had created and another of the dull artisanal plaques in the oven together.
“350 °F [175 °C] for five minutes,” instructed Delver. “Same as you would to heat up a slice.”
Five minutes later, Gus pulled a growing ball of blackness out of the pizza oven and “cured” it by exposure to sunlight.
He spent the next half hour doing everything in his power to try and destroy it.
The new plate was now immune to acid, to bases, to extremes in heat and coldness. It could not be demolished with a sledgehammer. Even tying a stick of dynamite to it and setting it off in the middle of the empty parking lot behind the building did nothing. (“I always wanted to try that,” Delver had said while handing over the dynamite.)
“You know, when I hold it the right way, I almost think I can see through it,” Gus told Delver. “I think I’ll try electricity next.”
“I think you should wait for the results of the second test I require,” said Delver.
“What second test?”
The two men found themselves at Neighagra Falls High School, specifically the gym. At one end of the basketball court, a young woman with blue skin and white hair was playing Horse, making the basket seven out of ten times. At the other end of the court was a small cubical room that had been constructed out of prefabricated pieces of clear hard plastic in the last couple of hours. A door at one end opened into an airlock made of a more rubbery plastic. Visible inside the clear room was a couch and a pillow. Standing and watching over everything was Delver’s two assistants. Gnosi was operating a video camera on a tripod that was pointed at the couch. A small green cylinder was attached to the cube via a pair of rubber hoses.
The teenager ran over to the two men as soon as she saw them. “Are we going to do this, or not?” she demanded.
“Yes, we’re going to ‘do this’,” Delver replied. “But watch what you say, as we have an unbeliever here who didn’t sign the non-disclosure agreement. In fact, I was thinking of having him administer the test, if that’s alright with you.”
The tall girl turned to give Gus the once-over. “All right,” she reluctantly concluded. “But let’s get this straight.” She held up her right hand. “I don’t know a thing about you, old man. You could be a pervert for all I know. When I’m out cold you’re allowed to touch this hand, and nothing else. Understand? Because my Daddy’s the Northeast lawyer for Ship and he can put you in a world of pain if you try something, especially with that camera over there recording everything for posterity.”
“I understand perfectly, Miss…”
“Point. Miss Trilogy Point. Although I hope to change the first name to ‘Three’ if this all works out like I hope.” She turned to Delver. “So, Father, what do I do first?”
“Go in there and make yourself comfortable,” said Delver, pointing inside the plastic cube.
Gus waited until the girl was out of earshot before asking Delver about his title.
“I went into the Markist clergy while the show was still airing. You could say I was introduced to a new purpose late in life.”
Miss Point knocked on the inner wall of the cube. “Hey, I have to get to classes after this, you know!” she shouted.
“Professor Guiseman, please turn on the gas cylinder,” Delver instructed. “Just a single turn should be sufficient.”
The girl quickly scrambled onto the couch as Gus approached the cylinder. She pointed at her right hand, and then at Gus’ head, a clearly threatening look in her eyes. Five seconds later, she was completely unconscious, and her right hand was trailing down on the bottom of the cube.
“Now go in there and touch her hand to the plate.”
“Hold on, aren’t we going to drain that knock-out gas first?” Gus asked.
“Why should we? It’s totally harmless to you.”
“Well, what was it?”
“The smoke produced by burning hay,” volunteered Gnosi.
“That stuff doesn’t do anything!” Gus exclaimed.
“To you,” Meridiem insisted. “To us it does the same as it did to her.” Meridiem Tempest was a small woman, yellow dress over pale green skin, long turquoise and white striped hair and piercing orange eyes that looked like the centers of sunflowers. Sewn into the side of Meridiem’s shirt was the design of a yellow hourglass.
“I’m human, you’re human—what’s the difference?” asked Gus. “And why does hay smoke have so many health regulations around it anyway?”
“Because you’re a gr—” Meridiem started to say.
“Watch what you say, child,” Delver warned her.
“Oh, right,” said Meridiem.
Gus stared at the pair of them until he was sure he wasn’t getting any more answers. “Alright, fine, I’m going in,” he said. He walked over to the airlock, and used it to enter the cube. Besides a bit of teariness in his eyes from the smoke, he didn’t feel any different breathing in the altered atmosphere.
“Make sure you angle the plate towards the camera!” Delver exclaimed as he placed himself next to Gnosi at the camera.
Gus kneeled, tilted the plate so it faced straight on to the camera, and very carefully lifted the sleeping girl’s hand so that it just touched the edge of the plate. “Is this enough, or do you need more…coverage?”
The moment the girl’s fingers were applied to the plate, it turned the exact same shade as her skin. As he held the hand in place, he felt surges of something akin to electricity passing through her skin and into him, and into the plate. The surges should have been painful, but instead were mildly pleasant. Each surge was accompanied by another color being added to the plate in a particular pattern. After the fifth surge, the pattern of a flaming basketball was complete. This was immediately followed by a bright flash of light, which caused the plate to revert from shiny to dull (and vulnerable to orange juice), while still retaining the same colors and design.
On a signal from Delver, Gus exited the chamber the way he came. Once outside, he intently studied the plate. The new colors each looked like they completely penetrated it from front to back.
While he had been doing this, Meridiem had been at the controls of an oxygen tank, which pumped the smoky air through a duct and out of the roof. Gradually, Miss Point came back to her senses, after which she wobbled out the airlock and into the comparatively fresh air of the gymnasium. As soon as she saw the plate, she snatched it out of Gus’ hands and studied it intently.
“Yes!” she exclaimed with a fist pump. “I knew it!” With the enthusiasm of a girl half her age (or half her amount of cynicism), she ran over to a bucket full of basketballs at the other end of the gym from the net and began sinking basket after basket without fail.
“You got all that?” Delver asked Gnosi, who nodded in the affirmative. Delver felt a tap on his shoulder.
He turned around to have a heavy stack of signed non-disclosure agreements dropped into his arms.
“Tell…me…everything!” Gus Guiseman pleaded.