Neither Here nor There Read online

  Jay was again amazed at the ease with which his friend was so creative. He sat silent for a moment, and was happy when Helen returned with the beer. She slid the chips and salsa between them, and turned to put the serving tray on the next table. There wasn't anyone sitting nearby.

  She pulled out an old-fashioned paper order pad and asked, “Are you guys ready to order?”

  Jay was glad. He always got nervous, expecting the order to be wrong, if they tried to impress him by memorizing the order instead of writing it down.

  “I'd like the Coconut Shrimp, a bowl of the Seafood Gumbo, and sourdough bread.”

  She nodded and looked at Buddy.

  “Give me the Fajita Feast for Two, and a bowl of the chunky guacamole,” he over-ordered as usual. The waitress didn't ask if someone was joining them. Jay kept waiting for Buddy to start putting on weight from eating that way, but it had yet to happen. He knew he couldn’t indulge himself like that and stay slim. He figured Buddy had good genes.

  “Thanks,” she said flipping her pad closed and heading for the kitchen. Having a human server was part of the charm of the place, and why it was kind of pricey. Most people now found it beneath their dignity to work a service job, no matter what the pay. Service work had acquired a bad rep as demeaning, since it had become popular to portray it that way on TV and in music. Self serve had become the norm, even when it was more expensive to operate that way.

  “That's why I wanted to talk to you over here. I know you have a contract with the college, but frankly, they will take advantage of you, if you develop a viable product. If I were you, I'd quietly take your machine home, and any other hobby type projects you are working on. If they get a licensing agreement for something you develop, they won't kick in a nickel to sweeten your salary. That's simply not right, when you weren't hired to do development.

  “They even put that clause in the contracts for the grounds people and cafeteria workers! If I am working on something for them involving manufacturing that's my job, I'd never try to steal it. But if I have an idea for something unrelated, like a t-shirt design they'd still try to take it away from me. Remember Harris in Economics?” Buddy asked. “He published a book about his hobby of dwarfing fruit trees, and they sued him for the advance payment on the book. Believe me, if they can even prove you thought about something while flying across the campus in an airliner, they will claim to own it.”

  “It might be pretty hard to sneak the stuff out, now that it's there,” Jay said. “How would you go about it if it was yours?”

  “Well for that rig I saw today, I'd order myself a convection oven or a coffee maker or something, and have it shipped to work FedEx or UPS. Then I'd swap it into the box, and reseal it to take home.

  “You can either leave the appliance in the lab, or break it up and dispose of it. If anyone notices, say you liked it so well you wanted one at home too. I order all sorts of things to come to work on purpose, so they have gotten trained to it, and don't check inside anymore. You should assume the walls have ears now too. I wouldn't be surprised if they do audio monitoring of our work space. You can use that against them. You can declare the device a failure to me or others, and say you are giving up on it,” Buddy suggested.

  “Unfortunately, that's getting to be damn near true,” Jay pointed out.

  “Jay my boy, as many of these crazy ideas as you chase, one of them is going to pan out. But since even my machines are monitored now you better not have me build anything new for you. It’s a lot worse now than just a few months ago. When one of your ideas does work out, don't forget your buddy who told you how to keep it for yourself. Let's unwrap your phone now, and not talk about this anymore. OK?”

  Jay agreed, and took the phone back, watching Buddy ball the foil up and tuck it beside the chip basket. They talked about their students and classes for awhile.

  “What do you think of the Japanese?” Buddy asked. “They said on their space program website today, they added another module to their moon base, to house another twenty-four full time residents. What do you think it would take to get a spot up there for a foreigner?”

  “You'd stand a better chance as a movie star, than as a scientist,” Jay assured him. “The American base may be shut down for periods, and just opened up when a team goes up for specific field work, but at least if you have the money you can lay down the cash and get a ticket. The Chinese would assume you are a spy of course, so they are out. I don't think the Japanese would put up with a dirty Gaikokujin actually sitting elbow to elbow with them, and sharing their bath, for any fee.”

  The one time as a student Jay had traveled to Japan, everyone had been painfully polite and proper. He had felt very welcome in every private home, and subtly unwelcome in every public place. It was a strange contrast.

  They made an indefinite date, to go fishing for a two or three day break. Buddy still seemed relaxed as could be, but Jay was uncomfortable with the new realization that the college spied on them. He was reviewing everything he wanted to say, as if a security officer was sitting at the table with them, with an open notebook. He wasn't sure how he would ever feel relaxed again in his own offices. It didn't seem to concern Buddy at all, to have to weigh each word. He just fell naturally into intrigue.

  Jay walked back on campus with Buddy and watched as he climbed in his own vehicle, a classy grey Mercedes four wheel drive, with multi-fuel capability built into its fuel cells. It reflected the relative importance of his department, and thus his salary, to the college.

  He climbed in his own vintage Toyota pickup truck, and was amazed when it started again. It was a 2034 model, one he had first admired new before he was even old enough to drive. The oval cab over style had been a bold experiment in a truck when it was new, but now it was at best quaint. The composite bed was all fuzzy, delaminated from sunlight rot, and the fenders were freckled with spots of bare plastic, where the paint had worn away.

  The seat was so broken down he’d added a second layer of foam, and more duct tape on top of the first generation tape, from seven or eight years ago. It was a diesel hybrid, with a ceramic soot trap, but the batteries had died some time ago.

  Whatever charge was held on the ultracapacitors could give him a brief kick off the line. However, any longer challenge like a long uphill climb, meant that either the rugged little three cylinder motor could handle it on its own or he couldn't go there.

  Jay had disconnected the batteries and scrapped them out, so at least the pickup didn't have to haul the dead weight of them around. The hazmat disposal fees for the batteries hadn’t been too bad, back then. A new set of batteries would have cost three times what the truck was worth. The variable transmission could gear way down, until it could climb most any grade, but at a pace that would be suicidal in traffic. He'd never think about trying to take it out of town again.

  The last time it had been on an automated highway the batteries had been going, and he had been kicked out of controlled traffic when it couldn’t keep up to minimum speed. The control computers wouldn’t run you to the next exit on the shoulder. They just parked you. That meant an expensive mandatory tow, by a specially licensed towing service, as well as a hefty fine. Still, it reached sixty kph in a reasonable time on the flat, and it was pretty flat all the way home on manual control streets. The truck was as much a survivor as his lab building.

  The next morning Buddy's words kept working at him, until he went online and ordered a deluxe ice cream machine. The deluxe model had thermoelectric cooling instead of a compressor, so it was silent. It also self packed the finished product in a removable container. It could self clean, do a second flavor, and hold them both in its freezer box. Jay carefully read the box size in the shipping information, to make sure his frame would fit. He'd always wanted one anyway, and it was the perfect excuse to do the switch Buddy had suggested, but he decided on a variation to get it out. He had no desire to train the guards to expect regular packages as Buddy had done. He didn't have the patience, or know what he could order in that often.

  Buddy seemed to buy new clothing or toys every week to train the guards, but Jay didn't have the pay to constantly be buying new things. When the machine came two days later, the cart came around from the school's mail room, and his machine was on the bottom shelf in a FedEx box. The college would take a fee off his pay for the mail room handling a personal delivery. They used a human distributor at the school instead of an automated cart, so he made a big deal of how happy he was to get it, and described to the mail clerk in great detail how good the homemade ice cream was that his family had made as a kid.

  When Jay got it back to the lab he stuffed it in the supply closet, and ignored it for some hours. Later he went in and opened it up. The machine nestled in a piece of molded foam, top and bottom. He took everything out, carefully razor-slit the edges off the bottom foam and inserted the laser frame. It was a snug fit to the box, but the shipping dimensions the company listed on the sales page were right on the money.

  The extra foam he crumbled by hand into the mandatory recycling bin. The plywood base and brackets could be added new at home, far easier than trying to take them out too. The brackets went into the scrap hardware box in the closet, lifting a handful of junk and burying them, and the plywood he slipped back into an assortment of leftover pieces of wood and sheet metal kept for projects.

  Then the ice cream maker went back in the box again. Even without the top foam in place the frame was not visible. If a guard took everything out of the box, Jay thought it likely that he would not know the frame wasn’t part of the package. There were a number of accessories and loose pieces packed in the box, and in the bowl of the machine itself.

  On reflection Jay found a big zip seal bag that was just the right size, and pulled everyt
hing back out to bag the frame, carefully lifting one of the paper labels off another bag with the company logo and a part number, and putting it on the bag with his part. It looked right at home among the other bagged parts. Bagged up, the frame was such a snug fit it went down slowly blowing air out around the edges. With the machine and top foam back in place, Jay resealed the box very carefully.

  When Jay went out, as he expected, the guard spoke through the loudspeaker on his booth and said, “Dr. Coredas, will you put the package on the counter? I need to open all outgoing packages.”

  Buddy might have them trained to expect him to have packages, but he had suspected correctly that it would be out of character for him to have a package, when he'd never had things shipped to work before.

  “Sure Henry. I got a neat machine here. You ever make ice cream at home?” Jay started opening the box, even before Henry came from behind the enclosure. No sense taking a chance he had not sealed it perfectly. By the time the guard came out he was taking the top foam piece off, and the machine was exposed pretty well. The instruction manual, power cord, and several loose propeller shapes were all visible on top, neatly bagged and obviously new.

  Henry had a bit of a belly hanging over his belt. “No Doc, I have enough trouble maintaining my weight. If I bought one of these the department would be making me get back in the weight limits every couple months. I hate to take the medication to do that. Easier just to limit what I shove in my mouth. I guess that's never been a problem for you, huh?”

  “Not yet, but my dad was pretty heavy when I was near to getting out of school. Wasn't too much later he died of a heart attack. I'll probably have the same tendency when I reach that age. But at least they can control that pretty easy now. It wasn't many years ago it could be a real struggle for people,” Jay used the school gym a couple nights a week too, but Henry might not welcome a suggestion to do the same.

  “Well, you enjoy that while you can Doc,” he said, only glancing in the box without any real interest. He didn't pull anything out at all. “I'll see you tomorrow night.” Henry was not on in the morning when he came in. He changed shifts with another fellow sometime late in the morning.

  As Jay walked to his pickup truck, first his knees, and then his hands started shaking. The enormity of what he had done finally came through to him. He had always been the sort to follow the rules, all the rules. He was the sort of kid the others mocked as a hall monitor, and tattletale. Even his parents had only praise for what a good boy he was. However, he remembered that a few times when his mother had praised his obedience, his father had sat silent with a stony-faced look.

  Only later, when he was near leaving home for school, had he come to understand his father had a measure of contempt for his utter obedience. Probably he’d wished Jay had had a little more of the rebel in him. But in an era that saw loyalty drilled into kids every day at school, and encouraged children to turn their parents in to the law for any infraction, how could a father take the chance to say such a thing to his straight arrow son? Now with the man dead and gone, Jay wondered what secrets he might have shared with him. Might they have conspired to share a secret infraction or two?

  But honestly, Jay knew that if his dad had encouraged him back then to be a little less stringent in following the rules he would have rejected it in horror. The fact that he accepted it now from Buddy, was because he had changed and matured finally, coming to the realization that the rules were too often for the comfort and safety of the authorities, not for any noble public good. The harsh fact, he realized now, was that some of those kids he had regarded as delinquents were simply about a decade ahead of him, in understanding how the system worked. They were simply as cynical as he was now, far earlier.

  He'd felt this way for some time, but the rule breaking, actually doing it, didn't happen for a while, because at the heart of it Jay was still scared of being punished, as much as when he was twelve. Well, he had just risked his job and a criminal charge and more, over a piece of junk he had yet to make work. What had finally stirred up the fire in his belly he wasn’t sure, but the machine was his idea, and he felt a real proprietary stubbornness to keep it his. It made him determined all over again to make the stupid thing work.

  After he sat awhile he got himself composed and felt he could drive. He’d started the truck up and was ready to pull out, when Buddy came down the lane in his pretty car from the end of the parking lot. He didn't stop, but as he went by he glanced over at Jay and gave him an unexpected thumb up. Had Buddy seen him with a box, and guessed he was doing what he’d suggested with the package? He hoped it was just a guess that he was up to something, even though Buddy had suggested it.

  For a moment the thought flashed through his head that Buddy might be one of those informants, who prod unsuspecting people into doing something they can report. But he firmly rejected it. For one thing it wouldn’t benefit Buddy for him to be gone. It wasn’t like his job was anything worth conniving over. He was sure he knew Buddy too well to be fooled. Still – had he looked guilty at all?

  Over the next couple weeks Jay examined the handful of other toys he had in his desk and cabinet. There was one other device, an improved eDrive that actually produced almost half as much thrust as its weight. That was slightly better than any other published system, but not even worth writing a paper on. What was the point of an incremental improvement, if it still couldn't lift itself? Jay didn't have any prospects of improving it further right now, but he decided he would keep it. The rest he was forced to honestly evaluate as not worth keeping, much less sneaking out, so they were broken down and the pieces saved or tossed. It was sort of liberating too, deciding which were hopeless, so he’d stop wasting time on them.

  June neared July, and the heat was so bad this year the air conditioning was marginal, and it was slightly stuffy and uncomfortable inside. They needed a stand-off radiant barrier on the roof, but he knew they’d never budget it. It was still better than the oven outside. The lawn was past brown. It was dead. Weather patterns for the last couple decades had been chaotic. The harsh winters were joined by equally harsh summers. The idea humans could fix the climate seemed silly when they couldn't even predict it.

  It was on the last hot week of June when Buddy showed up at his lab door, after a long absence. He had been making himself unusually scarce since their dinner at Mitch's.

  “Are you about ready to go up to the lake, and catch some trout?” he wanted to know.

  “It's too hot. They must all be cooked by now. We can just go down to the dock and throw some potatoes and onions in with them,” Jay said.

  “Oh no, down in the dark depths the water is still cold, and the sneaky trout are waiting patiently for your lure. They have been away from their favorite bugs and grubs along the shore so long they've lost their caution. Even you'll be able to catch a couple now. Besides, the altitude at the lake keeps it lots cooler than down here. At night you won't even want the air conditioning. Just an open window, and you can enjoy the smell of the pines. What do you say?

  “When?” was all he asked. A sure sign he had already agreed in principle.

  “After work Friday. We'll be there before dark even if we stop for supplies, and have parts of three days there, and get back fairly early, so we're not whipped for work the next day. Say, no later than noon to start back?” He offered.

  “OK. I'll have a bag here, and I’ll use your old fishing gear. You have to drive you know. My Toyota would never make the climb to the lake.”

  “Do you want to take your truck home instead of it being on the lot all weekend?”

  “No, I'll tell the campus cops I'm leaving for the weekend from work, and it can sit. Who'd want to steal it? If we're coming back early Sunday I'll drive home from here.”

  “Good, then we'll leave here, and I’ll pick up a few things to carry in the cooler on the way.” His eyes went to the corner of the desk where the magic marker circle had been drawn. It had been wiped away with acetone but a faint halo of a stain remained.

  “Where is your mouse zapper?” Buddy inquired, drawing a familiar squared-off shape in the air with his finger tips.