Chapter 26

  SIZZLE

  Kelton found himself in a maintenance room, where pipes and tools were scattered on the workbenches. The cart holding the Box’s framework was pushed against the wall. Chaz was busy packing sparklers from his backpack into a pipe that was two feet long and eight inches in diameter. There was a threaded cap at one end of the pipe. He was muttering to himself. “Tilly thinks he can double-cross me? Here’s your wake-up call, Dr. Tilly.” He found a box of screws on the shelves and poured them into the pipe. He pulled boxes of chemicals from his backpack, opened them carefully, and sifted their contents gently over the screws and sparklers in the pipe.

  Jacob was exultant. “This boy’s a genius. He’s done this before. I watched him. He’s pretty good at it. You know what he’s building?”

  “A bomb,” gasped Kelton.

  “And a pretty big one!” laughed Jacob.

  “The biggest bomb I’ve ever made,” murmured Chaz.

  “Can he hear us?” Kelton asked incredulously.

  Jacob shrugged, “I’ve been working on him a long time; I have some influence now and then. But he’s probably just talking to himself. He’s been doing that a lot lately. It’s been fun to watch.”

  Kelton pleaded with Chaz. “Chaz don’t do this. Stop now. This is something you won’t be able to undo.”

  “I think the video games have taught him otherwise. He gets a new life if anything goes wrong.”

  Kelton jumped in, “Chaz, Beta, and Alex are your friends. Tilly’s a jerk but think of your good times with Alex and Beta in the lab.”

  Jacob argued, “Good times? They have been getting all lovey-dovey and leaving you alone in the cold. Chazzy boy, you can’t let them get away with that!”

  Kelton stood between Jacob and Chaz. “Jacob! You can’t do that! You can’t encourage this! This is people’s lives you are playing with. “

  “Not really, Doc. I’m just playing with their minds and bodies. Nobody dies. They change a little, but you already know that.”

  “But the pain he’ll cause…” objected Kelton.

  “Is pretty interesting.” Jacob finished the sentence. “You see, I never had a body. I don’t know what it’s like, but maybe I find insight with my little experiments.”

  “Please stop him.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so. You can give it a try.”

  Kelton watched as Chaz finished assembling the bomb. He pleaded continuously with him to stop. Chaz gave no indication that he heard Kelton. Chaz returned to the Box, started adjusting the controls on the power supply, and brushed away the burnt aluminum foil from the contact leads. Kelton’s thoughts turned to Gillian.

  SIZZLE

  Kelton appeared in the vestibule with Alex, Beta, and Gillian. They were silently waiting outside the door. Kelton implored them to leave. He spoke to Gillian first, “Rani, you have to leave, right now! It’s going to be dangerous to be here. You could be killed!” He turned to Beta, then Alex. “You’ve been expelled, you’ve been fired. Why are you wasting time here? Get out of here now!”

  Alex spoke up. “ I don’t know why they are taking so long. We already know what the decision will be. They already know what the decision is.”

  “That’s it!” Kelton shouted. ”Get out of here, take Beta and Gillian with you!”

  “I want them to say it to my face,” said Gillian. “I don’t want to make it easy for them.”

  “It won’t make any difference,” Deke cried in frustration. “And Tilly is going to enjoy telling you! He wants to see you get hurt when he wins. He wants to rub it in your face!”

  Beta said. “It may not be easy for some of them. But the weasel will love seeing our faces when he tells us we have been beaten. I don’t think I want to give him that satisfaction.”

  Gillian sighed. “Beta is right. We should get out of here.” She stood, put on her coat, and picked up her notepad.

  “That’s right, Rani,” Deke encouraged. “Go now, go fast!”

  Chaz appeared at the corner, leading into the vestibule and pushing the Box on the gurney. It was entirely black. “I fixed it!” Chaz called. “I’m going to show it to the panel. They’ll see Tilly can’t be trusted. I’ll show them!” He pushed past the group and through the doors into the council room.

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  “That was unexpected,” said Alex, “maybe we ought to wait a while longer. It just got a little more interesting.”

  “No! You need to leave now!” Deke moved to Gillian. “Rani. Leave now. There’s danger! Chaz built a bomb!”

  Gillian looked at Alex and Beta. “ I’m not feeling good about our prospects. I don’t trust Chaz anymore.”

  Beta said, “Let’s give it five more minutes. What can it hurt? They can’t fire us any harder than they already did.”

  Frustrated, Kelton left the team and went into the conference room to Cohen’s side.

  Cohen chuckled when he saw Kelton. “Things haven’t been going well for Dr. Tilly. His version of events has been called into question by at least four of the board members. I wish I could say it was going well for you, but sadly, you have two PETA members on your review board. They said…”

  Kelton waved his hands. “That’s not important right now. Chaz has a bomb in the Box. Do you have any influence on any of them? We need to get them out of here. “

  Cohen thought it over. “Mmm. Maybe I have gotten a few thoughts across to Dr. Tilly but none of the others.”

  “See what you can do with him. I’m going to work on Chaz.”

  Eight of the members of the board surrounded the box. Tilly sat at the other side of the room behind the heavy conference table. The scowl on his face confirmed Cohen’s statement.

  Chaz was the enthusiastic Kelton Field demonstrator. “…there’s nothing there, but the sides feel solid. Nothing can penetrate the sides. We tried lasers, we tried drills. It doesn’t reflect light, and it doesn’t dull the drill bit.”

  Daniel Dee asked, “Does it allow gamma rays to escape?”

  “Nothing gets in after it’s engaged, and nothing gets out,” Chaz said as proudly as if he had designed the Box himself. “We can’t explain it, but as I said, we think time stops within the Kelton Field. You’ll note that the field is engaged even though it is no longer plugged into the wall.” Chaz checked his watch. “It takes 11 minutes for the field to dissipate after removing power. Again, we don’t know why. This field will dissipate in another, oh, 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I have taken the liberty of recreating one of the early experiments you read about. I lit a sparkler before I engaged the field. You will see the sparkler still burning when the field dissipates, even though it should have burned out minutes ago.”

  Dean Marcos pushed his way to Chaz. ”Why didn’t the device work for the first demonstration?”

  Chaz glowered at Tilly. “Because Dr. Tilly told me to make sure it didn’t operate. He told me he would protect me and make me lead on the…”

  Tilly jumped up, passing through Cohen who had been trying to warn him. “That is a lie! Look at this buffoon. Only a fool would conspire with his ilk and I’m no fool!”

  Cohen said loudly, “Dr. Tilly, there is a bomb in that Box. You need to get everyone out.”

  Tilly blinked and shook his head.

  The room erupted in chatter. Kelton could see that the room was turning against Tilly. He saw a fiery glint in Chaz’s eye. Jacob stood behind Chaz, whispering in his ear. “You have nothing to live for. You’re fat, You’re ugly. You don’t fit in. You have no friends. You’re always gonna be used and abused. These people deserve everything they are gonna get. You’ll never have another chance like this. Seize the day! Go out in a blaze of glory!”

  Dean Marcos pounded on the table with a book. “Let’s get back to order! Quiet down.” The chatter died down.

  Haily Brown spoke up, “I have been concerned about this hearing since I received the notice, about the precedent we will be setting here today. We are considering claiming Dr. Kelton’s work, depriving him of intellectual properties and possibly even millions of dollars. I am not willing to be a party to it. If that’s what is in the employment agreement, the agreement needs to be changed. It seems apparent that many of the charges leveled against Dr. Kelton are the product of an avaricious and overactive imagination. I make a motion that we table this hearing until Dr. Kelton can participate and perhaps consider some countercharges against Dr. Tilly.”

  At least four voices rang out, “Seconded,” and once again, the room erupted in multiple conversations, all discussing charges against Dr. Tilly.

  While Tilly protested, Kelton approached Chaz. “Chaz, you don’t need to do this anymore. The board is backing down. You won’t be expelled. You won’t be fired. Everything is going to be ok.”

  Jacob snarled, “Butt out! I been working this gig a long time. It’s payday!” He addressed Chaz, “They deserve it, all of them, they been laughing at you, you heard Tilly, they all think you’re a fat, lazy buffoon. Don’t let ‘em away with it this time!”

  Kelton spoke loudly. “Chaz, I’m your friend. You have made major contributions to the project. You’ll make more contributions. You’re on the ground floor; you stand to collect millions from your work. You aren’t fat! You have made amazing progress. You’re a physicist! Just like Alex said. Disable the bomb, we’ll blame it all on Jacob!”

  “Oh, you flatter me, Doc. I can’t take all the credit!” Jacob smirked.

  The board continued in their heated conversations around the Box. Tilly stood alone on the other side of the conference table glowering. “Kelton Field, such nonsense” he muttered under his breath. Tilly jumped as he heard a ‘Pop,’ and the black sides of the box winked out to reveal dazzling light and sparks flying out and dying in tiny starbursts from a single sparkler mounted in a small hole drilled into the wall of the galvanized pipe.

  Kelton could see that Chaz had used a sparkler as the timer fuse for the pipe bomb. The sparkler continued to spark and pop as it flared toward the touchhole.

  SNAP

  Ivan staggered a little when the side of the box he had been leaning on winked out. Cheers rang out from the board members, all murmured in disbelief and delight.

  Chaz watched with soft eyes and vague smile, hypnotized as the sparkler slowly popped and sparked toward the bomb’s touch hole. He hummed softly to himself.

  “I likes me a pyromaniac!” laughed Jacob.

  Tilly was suddenly frightened by the look on Chaz’s face, and he dove beneath the conference table.

  Kelton tried again. “Chaz, you still have friends. You don’t want to hurt yourself or your friends, please, stop it now.” His voice was enriched with his love for his wife, his co-workers, his sympathy with Chaz and the intensity of the situation. “Gillian has always been kind to you,” he pleaded.

  Chaz cocked his head to the side, blinked, shrugged, and reached into the framework and plucked the sparkler from the touch hole. Kelton cheered and flashed a thumbs-up to Cohen.

  Chaz waved the sparkler around, looking like he was cheering in celebration of the demonstration. Ivan Blatter and Dean Marcos patted him on the shoulders. Others grinned their approval. The group crowded into Chaz, pushing him back against the Box. As Chaz danced with the waning sparkler, the last sputtering spark popped and flew in slow motion, improbably, into the touchhole of the pipe bomb.