Trouble Thinking

 

Month 12 Day 9

2010 Hours

Ivy Wilson

 

 The four of them had built a tidy 7-foot-tall cage of sorts, with equipment off to the side that took up twice that much room. Ivy heard Smythe ask, “I wonder what that piece does, exactly.”

Mac’s answer consisted of little more than stutters. “I... I...” And her voice died completely away. Ivy looked up from consulting the translated tech manual to see Mac’s eyes clouded with confusion and... what? Consternation? She had pink flags on her cheeks that blazed in an otherwise white face. What’s going on? Mac hasn’t had trouble talking around Smythe in several weeks. Why is she suddenly having trouble now?

Abdulla spoke from where she was making adjustments to another piece of the machinery. “Well, something has to tear the molecules apart, right? Sounds gory, but how else do the molecules get transported on radio waves?”

A slight movement on Smythe’s part made Ivy realize he’d had his hand on Mac’s shoulder. Now that he had moved it, Mac slipped a few inches away, to complete her work on attaching that particular piece Smythe had asked about. Her face resumed its normal coloring. Is that it? Was she caught by surprise, and had to fight the urge to hit Smythe? She’s very touchy about men touching her. Most men.

“I don’t think that’s the particular piece Colleen’s attaching now,” he stated.

“This piece holds the molecules in a tight stream so they can all be transported more or less simultaneously,” Mac stated softly. “I think Ivy’s working on the part that strips the molecules apart.”

“I am?” Ivy asked. Mostly, she’d just been following the manual for this piece, without trying to figure out what it was for.

“If I remember the manual right, that piece goes right next to the piece I’m attaching. It makes sense that the piece that strips the molecules apart would feed into the piece that keeps them in close proximity. Doesn’t it?”

“Great. Now if it doesn’t work, it’ll be all my fault,” Ivy complained with a half smile.

“Now, none of that,” Smythe chided. “We’ve all worked on it, and there’s plenty of things that could go wrong. Every single piece we’ve built and added to this contraption has at least a dozen places where something could be off just enough to not let the thing work. We think we understand the Yukoskian measurements, but we might be off.”

“How long before you think we might be ready for a test, Mr Smythe?” Abdulla asked.

“He answered, “We’re close. I’ve been trying to think of a suitable test object.”

“I don’t think we should start with a human subject,” Mac stated.

“Oh, Black Space, no,” Smythe agreed at once. “I’m relieved we didn’t suffer any unintentional side-effects from using their transportation device while we were there. For all we knew, the machine might have put us back together with Yukoskian bio-chemistry, rather than our own.”

“I don’t think it would,” Mac demurred. “They use the same transport equipment to transport supplies, food, not to mention the clothes people are wearing. So they early on decided not to assume the biochemistry would be the same as theirs. Or chemistry, in the case of building supplies and such. They certainly did not want to send somebody to the moon to start building the base, only to have them arrive with holes in their spacesuit. So they didn’t take the shortcut of assuming anything about the people or stuff they were transporting.”

Smythe’s forehead wrinkled as he thought about that. “Did you get that from the manual? I don’t remember reading that.”

“No, I think that came in one of Kolla’s letters. I must have asked some question, and she tends to run off on tangents when she’s answering, particularly about the history of their technology. It appears to be a hobby of hers, the history of technology.”

“It’s good to hear, but we should be extra careful to test everything that we send through the machine, just to be sure it came out the same as it went in. A far more in-depth study than how does it look?”

“You mean an in-depth chemical analysis before we send something through, and another when it comes out?” Abdulla asked.

“Yes, exactly,” he agreed. “And the lab will need time to conduct their analysis. So, whenever we do start testing, I propose choosing no more than 3 items to test on any given day, and then seeing what the analysis says the following week.”

“That will certainly slow us down,” Adbulla stated as she finished working on that piece, and moved across the room to attach an identical piece to the twin piece of machinery over there. “Mac, how many pieces do we still need to build and then attach?”

Mac stepped back and ran her gaze slowly over the first cage and attendant assemblage. After a long moment of pointing to one area after another, and ticking things off on her fingers, she looked around. “I think the piece Ivy’s putting together is the last one. I’ll start putting together the 2nd one for the receiver machine.”

“Why are we calling one machine the transmitter, and the other the receiver? They’re built exactly alike and should be able to do either function,” Ivy wondered.

“You’re right,” Abdulla agreed.

“If they were located some distance from each other, we probably would have called them the base unit and distant unit,” Smythe stated. “They really are identical, and we might as well call them Unit A and Unit B.”

“Or Joe and George,” Mac suggested.

Ivy laughed. “I like that idea! It sounds like names one would give a pair of identical twins. And they are identical twins, of sorts. Built at the same time, of the exact same components.”

“Very well, there’s no rule against a bit of whimsy,” Smythe said with a smile. “Joe and George it is.” He started inspecting the pieces that had just been added. “Very good work, ladies, as always.”

“Thank you,” both Mac and Abdulla said.

Smythe turned and bent over Mac where she now sat, his hand on her back. Mac stopped working to look at him, their faces merely inches away from each other. Her work seemed completely forgotten. “You’ve come a far distance from when you first came aboard, Colleen.”

She didn’t respond for a long moment, then she finally got out a faint, “Yes,” of agreement.

Smythe smiled, gave her back a pat and stood up, removing his hand. “Once we get those last components put together and added to, um, Joe and George, we’ll call it a night. Perhaps we could all go to the mess hall and have a piece of cake to celebrate.”

Ivy resolved to hit the gym after the piece of cake, or her uniforms would soon cease to fit. “Sounds good to me.”

Abdulla gave a slight grimace, probably with a similar concern. “Sure.”

“Okay,” Mac agreed softly.

There she goes again, soft voice, like she isn’t sure of herself. But look at how she’s working. Not a single wasted movement. If I’m not careful, she’ll beat me getting this piece built and installed.