Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) Read online

  Kinsella

  A novel by

  Gina Marie Wylie

  Copyright ©2005, ©2012

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN-13: 978-1477663431

  ISBN-10: 1477663436

  Chapter 1 — Pizza Lunch

  Stephanie Kinsella looked around the restaurant as she came into Pinocchio’s, blinking at the change in light from the bright California sun outside. Ahead of her, a half dozen students were waiting in line to give their lunch orders to the cashier at the restaurant’s counter. She paid them barely any mind; instead, her eyes went to her professorial brethren at a long table near the back of the restaurant.

  Let’s face it, she thought as she watched them, most of you would rather see my backside going out the door, than my smiling face coming in. In fairness she didn’t think it had anything to do with the color of her skin or the lilting Jamaican accent she’d learned at her father’s knee. Her peers would look you in the eye and swear that neither her gender and certainly not her race was the issue — it was probably even true for most of them.

  Their main concern was because she was twenty-two years of age and while the vast majority of her colleagues had gamed the system to get here, none of them had done so with the effectiveness that Stephanie had — or the youth.

  She’d written her first core paper at sixteen; it had been published a few days before she was accepted as a graduate student at Caltech, where she’d been an undergraduate. Her doctoral thesis two years later had been another core paper and she’d only had to bat her brown eyes to stay as a post-doc.

  The tenure-track assistant professorship, though — that had required a more direct approach. Several full professors, not just in the physics department at Caltech, had expressed their doubts about someone not yet twenty being considered for tenure. But Stephanie had been raised in Southern California. Not only did her family live there, it was a familiar place to someone who didn’t get out much — unless it was to a bookstore. Caltech was where she wanted to be.

  She’d smiled and told the faculty committee that she really wanted to stay at Caltech, but she had this wonderful offer from UCLA...

  That had appalled everyone at Caltech, of course. They’d expected something like MIT or Princeton or Stanford. Someplace significant. UCLA? Give up someone who’d just published her third core paper on string theory to UCLA? They’d offered her the position.

  Almost a year ago, she’d smiled and accepted the professorship they had offered, after the retirement of her mentor. Her peers had smiled knowingly when he announced his pending resignation, and then worked behind the scenes to torpedo her. She’d gotten tremendous offers from Lawrence Livermore, from Stanford, from MIT.

  Stephanie grinned. Physics professors were good at gaming the system, but she played master-level chess and duplicate bridge. She’d produced a better offer from the University of Southern California’s math department.

  The USC math department? USC’s math department taking a Caltech potential Nobel physics winner? The shame wasn’t to be borne — and she’d gotten her tenure-track professorship.

  And here it was, nine months later. She had produced another core paper and two minor ones since she’d accepted her purple gown. It wasn’t as though there were a lot of women theoretical physicists at Caltech or anywhere else. Firing one with her record — and letting someone go without tenure was the same as being fired — was virtually certain to bring about an indefensible lawsuit. As Stephanie was black and a woman had made her, metaphorically, impregnable.

  Stephanie had been thinking about that as she moved forward to stand behind the last pair of students in the line. This was a monthly event, supposedly an informal get-together of the physics faculty and their students to promote “teamwork.” In her seven years at Caltech this was Stephanie’s sixth visit, even though it was supposed to be mandatory every month.

  One of the two young men ahead of her laughed. “It’s amazing how many times the boom box hit the floor before it stopped working.” The speaker was a round-faced, rather short and chubby, graduate student.

  The other, a tall, skinny oriental, shook his head. “It’s called solid state electronics. The real question is why does the boom box fall off the bench?”

  Stephanie recognized them. Stan Benko, from the former Bosnian portion of Yugoslavia. Stephanie wasn’t sure what people from there called themselves these days. Stan was in his mid-twenties, his light brown hair in a ponytail. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with Einstein’s face on it.

  Next to him, Johnny Chang, formerly of Singapore and now a resident of Pasadena, California, was wearing western jeans and a blue-checked western shirt. She glanced down and grinned. Cowboy boots, too!

  Stephanie herself was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a whirlpool galaxy on the front, with an arrow pointing inwards saying, “You are here.” Stephanie wasn’t in much of a position to challenge anyone, sartorially.

  “It’s magnetic,” Stan pronounced with assurance. “It has to be.”

  “It’s epiphenomena,” Johnny replied. “Vibration from the turbine, generating a standing wave.”

  “Six inches further away and nothing happens,” Stan said, sounding like a cat pouncing on a mouse. “That just has to mean it’s magnetic. Inverse-square law.”

  Stephanie heard the term “six inches” and turned up her lip in a grimace of amused disgust. Still, vibration in the building was a concern to her.

  Johnny shook his head. “There’s not much magnetic material in a boom box. It’s a harmonic vibration or a standing wave generated by the turbine.”

  Stephanie’s brow furrowed as she thought about it. At a certain point in her thoughts, she instinctively stepped forward. “I’m a little curious myself,” she told them.

  Both of them turned to look at her, obviously surprised. “Professor Kinsella,” Johnny Chang said, smiling in greeting.

  “Refresh my memory about your experiment,” she told them.

  Stan Benko brightened. “We took a gas turbine and took out the rotor. We laid some super-conducting niobium film over it, in the shape of spirals.”

  “That’s the new stuff they’ve come up with,” Johnny Chang added, “that bleeds a little current off to do the cooling. You can get amazing current densities.”

  “I know what it is,” Stephanie told them.

  “It took a bit to rebalance the turbine,” Stan went on, “but now we can spin it up to about 120,000 RPM. We create some very strong magnetic vortices. We thought we might see some interesting phenomena, like what occurs in rapidly rotating neutron stars or black holes.”

  “Or maybe frame dragging,” Johnny Chang said, then added glumly, “We didn’t see anything interesting.”

  “That was your published protocol,” Stephanie agreed. “What have you done to change it?”

  The two young men, both older than Stephanie, looked at each other, like two nervous students caught in a junior high prank.

  “We altered the magnetic vortices to be continuous, instead of pulsed,” Stan Benko told Stephanie. “Johnny’s boom box fell off a lab bench yesterday afternoon, the first time we tried it.”

  “Took a licking and kept on booming,” Johnny said with a grin.

  “This morning we got around to putting it back on the bench before we started the turbine up again. We don’t go in the room when the turbine is running,” Stan added.

  Stephanie had figured it out: the two of them took turns speaking.

  “It fell off again. We’ve tried it a bunch more times this morning,” Stan went on. “It stopped working the sixth time it hit the floor. The radio part of it.”

  “I’d like to see y
our apparatus,” Stephanie told them.

  The two young men exchanged glances and Stan looked at the cashier, who was waiting for them to order.

  “Now?” Stan asked.

  “Now,” Stephanie agreed.

  It was something like a half mile back to the physics labs. Stephanie set a rapid pace that left the other two puffing when they arrived.

  They dutifully paraded their experiment. Stan set the obviously battered boom box on the lab bench, next to a cart-mounted gas turbine.

  Stephanie watched in silence as they made their preparations. When they were ready, Stan waved at a heavy steel door. “We stand behind that when we bring the turbine up to speed. At idling, it has a mean time between failures of something like a million years. At the speed we run it at, about once every thousand years.” He smiled at Stephanie. “Safe as a church.”

  Stephanie stepped behind the door and turned to Stan. “Have you seen many thousand-year-old churches?” It was clear from the pained expression on his face he didn’t understand.

  Johnny Chang twisted a dial and the sound from the turbine on the other side of the heavy steel rose to a shrill, high-pitched whine. A few seconds later, there was a crash as the radio hit the floor. Johnny twisted the dial and the sound died away.

  “That’s it,” Stan said. “It’s some sort of magnetic phenomena.”

  “You said you varied the distance,” Stephanie asked.

  “Yes, Professor Kinsella,” Stan Benko started to say, but Johnny Chang interrupted.

  “We can’t move it closer, because it’s already on the edge of the bench. We did move it a little further away. There is only the one position where it falls off the bench. That’s why I think it’s epiphenomena.”

  “I watched the boom box,” Stan said, “it starts moving and smoothly slides off the edge. If it was vibrating, it wouldn’t be continuous.”

  “Let me see your notes,” Stephanie requested.

  The two exchanged glances again. “We’ve just been fooling around,” Stan said, spreading his hands helplessly. “If we saw anything interesting, we’d investigate properly.”

  “I am going up to my office for a few minutes,” Stephanie told them coldly. “While I’m gone, you will take your lab notebook, you will draw some heavy lines under the last entry, then you will put today’s date and time and the notation ‘Post Hoc Recollections’ and write down what you remember of your tests.”

  They nodded and she left.

  She was back in ten minutes, carrying a video camera and tripod and a couple of small instruments. She picked up the boom box and turned to Johnny Chang who was watching Stan write.

  “Show me where you put this,” she told him.

  He placed it on the bench and went back to Stan. “Aren’t you going to measure it?” Stephanie’s voice sounded like someone speaking to a two-year-old who’d made a mistake.

  Stan looked up and the two graduate students exchanged grimaces. A few moments later Stan handed Johnny a meter stick and he used that.

  Stephanie handed Stan an elegant clear plastic device that normally sat on her desk. “This measures local temperature, air pressure and relative humidity. The time as well; I set it to Greenwich Mean Time every morning when I come in at five.”

  Stan took it and looked at it, then back at Stephanie. He looked like he was about to say something, but obviously thought better of questioning just how much environmental data they should be keeping track of.

  He noted the information while Stephanie turned to Johnnie. “In the snack bar, there are Styrofoam cups for coffee. Get two, fill them as close to the top as you can with water and return.”

  Finally they were ready. Stephanie had set the camera up a few feet to one side of the boom box and the cup. She started it recording, with the boom box just in the frame and centered on the cup. Stephanie had used the second cup of water to top off the first.

  The boom box fell off the edge again. Stephanie played the video she’d made. The box indeed moved slowly at first, then sped up, then slowed, but the momentum carried it over the edge. The cup, a short distance further away, didn’t move.

  “Well,” Stephanie said when she’d played it back a second time. “Conclusions, gentlemen?”

  “Epiphenomena,” Johnny repeated.

  “We’d have seen waves in the Styrofoam cup,” she shot that down.

  “It’s magnetic,” Stan said. “The movement is continuous.”

  “Again!” Stephanie commanded. This time she placed the cup where the boom box had been.

  In the little screen, the movement of the cup was more irregular than the boom box’s had been and the cup stopped just a bit before the edge of the desk. Stephanie noticed what happened then; the other two didn’t.

  “Lots of waves in the cup this time,” Johnny said, sounding like it vindicated his theory. “Nothing magnetic in the cup and it moved in jerks.”

  “And there at the end?” Stephanie asked.

  Johnny Chang started to look at Stan, but Stephanie barked a command. “Hold still, dammit! Don’t look at your partner for what to say!”

  “I didn’t see anything at the end,” Johnnie said. “I was watching the waves in the cup.”

  “Both times?” Sarcasm dripped from Stephanie’s voice.

  She went out from behind the barrier and set up her last instrument. When that was done, she asked Stan to come up with his lab book.

  “Read the instrument and note the data,” she told him.

  “Nine point eight zero one five two,” he told her.

  She put a heavy book on the bench, where the boom box had been, then tipped the last device on its side. “Again, a reading.”

  “Nine point eight zero one five two,” he repeated.

  Stephanie moved the camera tripod around to the other side of the lab bench and focused it on the device. She pulled a chair from the bench that Benko and Chang used as an office desk and put it next to the lab bench with the equipment and climbed up on it.

  She delved into her jeans pocket and pulled out a heavy lead weight on a thin piece of wire. “Start it up,” she told them.

  The turbine went up to speed, and when it reached there, the book began to move. Then the book slid off the desk, followed a moment later by the instrument. “Don’t turn it off yet,” Stephanie called.

  “Roger,” Stan replied, peeking around the corner.

  Stephanie moved the plumb bob steadily towards the spot where the book had been, the plumb bob hovering a fraction of an inch off the bench. The heavy weight swung back and forth for a few seconds before stopping.

  Stephanie twitched the wire, lifted the plumb bob higher and it moved again. For the next several minutes she moved it this way and that, until at one point, the plumb bob was moving in a small circle.

  “That’s enough,” Stephanie called after another minute.

  Johnny turned down the turbine. When the turbine was idling, Stephanie hopped off the bench and confronted the two graduate students.

  “It’s almost four in the afternoon,” she told them. “Tomorrow afternoon at two, you will both appear in my office. I want theory; I want numbers. I want testable hypotheses. Do the math.”

  She turned and gathered up her things and left the two students with a last word. “Neither of you saw fit to ask for a copy of the DVD. I’ll copy it for you and have it for you within the hour. I do not expect that between now and then you will have anything more important on your plate than being here, trying to figure out what’s going on.”

  “We don’t have anything to play it on,” Stan said, waving at the video camera.

  “I’ll dub a standard DVD then. If you do not have access to a computer of your own, call Services and they will supply you with one. Tomorrow, gentlemen, two o’clock.”

  She turned and left.

  Stan turned to Johnny. “That didn’t go well.”

  “I don’t have any idea what’s happening. It can’t be magnetic, the Styrofoam cup moved.”
<
br />   “And she was getting a reaction from that pendulum thing of hers,” Stan replied, “so it can’t be vibration, either.”

  “A plumb line,” Johnny supplied. “My father uses them in his construction business.”

  The two looked at each other then at their apparatus. “I don’t have a clue,” Stan said. “Not a clue.”

  “I have a bad feeling about tomorrow if we don’t figure something out.”

  Chapter 2 — A Good Aim Point

  At five minutes after two the next day, Stan Benko and Johnny Chang walked into Stephanie’s office.

  “Professor Kinsella,” Stan told her, “we don’t know.”

  They were both in the same clothes they’d been in the day before, they both looked like they were in desperate need of sleep.

  “Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock, in your thesis advisor’s office. Gentlemen, do or die. Either you have done the math before then or I’ve discovered it, not you.”

  “Could you give us a direction to look, Professor?” Johnny asked, more desperate than ever.

  “Give you a hint? They teach the answer in Physics 101. How many forces are there in physics?”

  “Four,” Stan said, trying to work a degree of surliness into his voice.

  “There’s your answer, multiple choice. Do or die, gentlemen. Nine in the morning, your thesis advisor’s office.” She pointed at the door and the two left.

  About seven that evening, the two were in Stan’s apartment, after having snatched a few hours of sleep.

  Trina, Stan’s wife, came in, followed by Elaine Cho, a Chinese woman from Beijing. Elaine was carrying a laundry bag. “I’ll be a second, Elaine,” Trina told the younger woman.

  She turned to her husband. “You have all your things in the laundry bag?”

  “Yes, Trina.”

  Trina vanished into their bedroom, and Stan looked at Elaine. “You have Professor Kinsella, don’t you?” Stan asked her.

  “Yes. She’s a very difficult professor. Very rigorous.”

  “You have any tips on how to deal with her?” Stan persisted.