Tiona (a sequel to "Vaz") (4 page)

Eisner
was
excited when he saw the figures Nolan had generated. Instead of a jumping up and down hug, he pumped Nolan’s hand enthusiastically. “You’ve got to replicate. Don’t forget you’ve got to replicate! Make sure you can turn out more of these; then we can publish.” He washed his hands together, “If you can do this reproducibly, industry will be
all
over us. High volume, high quality production of the next best thing to a superconductor—that also happens to have incredible tensile strength. Wow!”

Back in the lab, Nolan braced Tiona for help. “I need to replicate my experiment! Can you help me make a few more runs tomorrow afternoon?”

Tiona blinked at him a couple of times; then glanced up at her HUD. “Okaaay, 1 o’clock?”

“Sure, that’d be great! I’ll have everything set up so all you need to do is start dripping!”

Tiona nodded and turned back to her desk.

Nolan felt vaguely disquieted by her lack of enthusiasm.

***

The next morning, when Nolan arrived in the lab, he found some glassware set up on his part of the lab bench. There was a note next to it saying, “Check your email.” When he checked his email, he found one from Tiona. It said, “Not that I don’t just
love
dripping sodium hydroxide, but the setup I put on your bench should make precipitating your graphene less labor-intensive.” A diagram showed his reagents in the flasks above, then running through a mixing chamber on the way down to the copper disc where his precipitation would occur. The small dish the copper plate was in would overflow so that the reagents were constantly being refreshed. Thus, precipitation of the carbon out of the reagents wouldn’t have time to change the pH very much before the reagents were replaced.

Nolan was still looking back and forth from the diagram to the setup when the door to the lab opened and Tiona stepped inside. Her T-shirt had the symbol for pi with a little wedge missing out of it. She didn’t look at him, the setup, or the diagram; she simply went to her desk and set down her backpack. Her screens lit up and her music came on. She turned to study the electronic circuit she’d been building for the past weeks. After a moment more he realized the T-shirt was supposed to symbolize a “slice of pi.”

Nolan looked at her, then back at his set up. “Tiona, I appreciate what you set up for me here, but it’s going to waste a lot of reagent.”

She turned to look at him; then raised an eyebrow. “Your reagents are cheap. My
time
is valuable. Buy some more reagents.” She turned back to her electronics.

“Come on,” he said, feeling a little frustrated, “I spent a lot of time helping you get up to speed here in the lab.
You
should be willing to help me a little in return!”

She turned again and studied him. She shrugged, “You did, and I appreciate it. However, getting me up to speed in the lab was something that couldn’t be done by ten dollars’ worth of reagents. Someday, if you need me to do something that can’t easily be done by a machine, ask me. I’ll be happy to help. I’m sure I’ll need your help again sometime, but I promise not to ask you to do menial tasks for me.” She winked at him, “The two hours you had me dripping lye are a chunk of my life that I’ll
never
get back.”

Nolan blinked a couple of times, then grinned, “Come on, it was only an hour and a half!”

She grinned back, “It
felt
like
three
hours.” She glanced at the setup she’d put on his lab bench and lifted her chin at it, “I also spent an hour and a half figuring that out and setting it up for you, but that was a
lot
more interesting than watching a pH meter and squeezing a bulb.”

“Okay, okay,” he laughed, “your time is precious. I’ve got it.”

***

Zack and Ralph were out with some of the other astronauts, having a small celebration ahead of their launch date. Zack sat next to Sophie and nudged her, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about how Ralph is going to drive me crazy. Living with him in that little tin can for months at a time, I’ll go absolutely nuts.” He gave her a wink, “Now, you and I would be
much
more compatible. What say we slip him a Mickey and you fly the mission with me instead?”

Sophie stared at him for a moment, then said wistfully, “Oh, I
would
really, really love to go.” She glanced over at Ralph, “But I couldn’t do that to Ralph. He’s
such
a sweetie.” She turned back to Zack, “Besides, it would mean welching on the deal I have with Ralph to slip
you
a Mickey.”

Zack drew back, round eyed, “You
couldn’t
do that to Ralph, but you
could
do it to me?!” Theatrically, he let his head sag, “Woe is me. The love of my life hath peddled her soul to a demon and they have calculated my demise.”

Sophie grinned at him, “Actually, I couldn’t do it to either of you. But I
am
planning to be the maid of honor at you and Ralph’s wedding when you two lovers get back.”

Zack blinked at her a couple of times, then grinned back, “Now that I’ve found how dastardly, dishonorable, reprehensible, and devious womankind can be, I
may
have to seriously consider marrying him.” He looked up at the ceiling as if pondering, “In fact, maybe we should get married
before
we leave on this trip…?”

***

Nolan and Judy split the tab at Spanky’s like they’d agreed. He’d met Judy online, and after a few messages back and forth they’d chosen Spanky’s to meet in person. On the way to this dinner he’d been thinking that he would pay for the whole meal if he liked her. She’d seemed pleasant enough when he’d been messaging her and he’d thought the possibilities were good. However, in person something about her put him off.

She spent most of the meal talking about herself, someone who she found quite interesting. She’d been a lot of places and liked talking about famous people she’d encountered or actually met. In fact, as he thought about it, it seemed like the only really interesting things about her were the celebrities she’d somehow come in contact with.

He could tell she wasn’t that enthused about him either. She didn’t seem to know what physics was and certainly didn’t care a whit that he was getting an advanced degree in it.

“Well, maybe we can do this again sometime,” he said to be polite even though he didn’t intend to waste his time on another encounter.
At least not until I’m famous, then she might want to have an actual conversation instead of just talking
at
me,
he thought to himself.

As they parted on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, Nolan thought of Tiona. He still found her irritating much of the time, but was beginning to realize that he liked her dry sense of humor as long as it wasn’t aimed at him. Not that she would ever be interested in him. He realized that he was far too bread-and-butter, middle-of-the-road, and ordinary for her. He’d decided she was looking for someone exotic.

As he turned toward the parking lot, Nolan was surprised to realize that Tiona was walking on the other side of Columbia Street, going north. For a moment, he raised his hand and thought to call out and wave at her, but then thought again. Somehow, she made him feel like he was back in high school. Just like then, he wasn’t one of the cool kids, but she was. He’d felt the same tension with one of the pretty girls in his high school. She’d responded when he spoke only because his parents and her parents were friends.

In Tiona’s case, she spoke to him because Dr. Eisner would expect her to.

Nolan felt frustrated when he had these kinds of thoughts. He had a feeling that he should have grown past them. Tiona was exotic and he was not an exotic kind of guy. He should be looking for a more ordinary girl. Someone like Judy, he should be happy with someone like Judy. He turned and glanced back to see if he could still see Judy, but she was gone.

Nolan turned and started towards the parking lot, his eyes drifting over to track Tiona as she walked down the other side of the street. She wore her rolled up baggy jeans and some kind of a T-shirt which he felt sure must have either a musical or science theme since that’s what she always wore. She had her backpack on and her hands stuffed in her pockets.

As Nolan turned the corner into his parking lot he was startled to see Tiona start into the homeless shelter!

Shocked, he stood and stared at the shelter for a couple of minutes, his mind racing.
Maybe she volunteers there?
Uncertainly, he started walking that direction, all the while wondering what he was about to do. If she was working in the kitchen he wouldn’t be able to see her. If she was working the serving line, she might see him! How would he explain what he was doing there? Worst of all, what if she
was
homeless? It didn’t seem possible, but what if it were? She’d be humiliated if she realized he’d seen her there.

Finding himself at the shelter, he slowly ascended the steps. He found himself in a line behind a filthy, malodorous man wearing Army fatigues. He shuffled along behind the man, trying to keep his head hidden while peeking around the man for a glimpse of Tiona. From behind him a woman’s voice came with a snicker, “You’re dressed pretty nice to be eating at the shelter.”

Nolan turned to look behind him, seeing an emaciated looking woman with bad teeth. “I’m, uh, looking to see if a friend of mine is working here.”

“Well then, just scoot on in. You don’t need to wait in line.”

“I, uh, don’t mind,” Nolan said, shifting nervously from foot to foot and trying to look past the man in front of him again. Suddenly he saw Tiona, sitting at one of the benches with a cafeteria type tray in front of her. Head down, she was spooning something brown, maybe chili, into her mouth. Nolan drew back, astonished to realize that his heart was thumping hard as if he’d just seen something horrific. He turned and went back out, mind spinning as he wondered what to make of this turn of events.

***

Tiona stepped into the lab. Nolan Marlowe, Dr. Eisner’s other grad student, turned a brief, wide-eyed glance in her direction, then immediately huddled back over his desk. He seemed nice enough, handsome though dorky. She usually turned immediately to her own desk when she came in the lab to avoid starting a conversation. She wasn’t quite sure why. They’d had some nice talks and occasional spirited debates about physics. Once she started talking to him, she usually found him to be quite enjoyable.

To her own amusement, she recognized that she just thought she was much too cool to be talking to someone as square as he was. His clean cut handsomeness meant that he couldn’t be her kind of guy. Edgy and troubled, that was her kind of man.

Nonetheless, it seemed odd the way he’d stared at her wide-eyed for a moment and then gone back to his own project without even saying “Hi.” She felt like he’d avoided talking to her for some reason. Mentally, she shrugged to herself. It saved
her
having to avoid talking to him, so no reason to worry about it.

Tiona turned to her own experiment.

Twenty minutes later Tiona was gritting her teeth in frustration. She’d been using Nolan’s new precipitation technique to create graphene monolayers doped with lithium and copper. Using his system produced round sheets of graphene since he precipitated on copper discs. Her latest batch had just finished drying overnight, so she put two of the multi-monolayer discs of graphene, one atop the other in a big, flat-bottomed, glass dish. She attached electrode clips to the discs at opposite edges and measured their resistance. Typical for graphene the discs were excellent conductors and had low resistance. She switched her current to a high-frequency alternating current. Most superconductors worked best with direct current because AC induced magnetic distortions, but by Eisner and Tiona’s theory her doped graphene should do better with AC. The graphene disc continued to have low resistance. She poured some liquid nitrogen into the dish to cool the membranes. Absently, she noticed that the membranes were lifting a little out of the bottom of the dish before she poured in the nitrogen.

She’d been hoping for a precipitous drop in resistance as they became cold. Such a drop would suggest the superconductivity that she was looking for. Doped graphene was relatively easy to make in the wake of Nolan’s findings, and of course very strong. If it would superconduct high frequency AC current at a reasonable temperature that would be awesome! The number of industrial applications would be enormous. Her calculations had suggested that this particular doping scheme
should
work.

The problem with calculating such things was that the phenomena were inherently unpredictable.

Instead of the straightforward measurement she had been planning, as soon as the membranes cooled in the liquid nitrogen, they started lifting out of the bottom of the dish even more! Turning down the current quieted them, but when she turned it up, the edges not bound down by the electrode clips flopped up out of the dish, splashing some of the liquid nitrogen out onto the floor so that Tiona had to dance back to keep it off her shoes.