[fic] Forward the Machine (AT, Action/Adventure) - Chapter 6 - Part II
Eckart lead him back along the corridor several paces, much faster than Dr. Kessler had. Alfons kept up gamely, though he could feel himself starting to wheeze. His lungs were like a pair of billows in his chest, fanning the flames that were searing him with each additional inflation.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” the director said in a conversational tone. She did not make eye contact, but continued to charge briskly forward, clearly a person used to being followed and obeyed.
“All good things, of course.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” Alfons managed to speak without choking, but his eyes were beginning to water. He was starting to wonder how much more of this he could endure. This strange, trouser-clad woman walked like a man too, with purpose and speed.
Eckart pulled up abruptly next to a tall oak door, and Alfons tried not to sigh in relief. The door was labeled, he noticed, with a small white placard. Laboratory Space #7, it proclaimed.
Below it, more troubling, was a stark, machine-typed warning:
Hazardous Materials. Authorized Entry Only.
GUARDS POSTED. DO NOT ENTER.
Eckart seemed to read the questions in his eyes. She offered a gracious smile.
“The Society sponsors many types of scientific research,” she explained. “All of it cutting edge. Like your rocketship.”
Alfons got the sense that this disclosure was meant to win his trust. He made sure to smile and nod.
“Naturally, we have need to keep these things a secret.” She rubbed a thumb briefly over the word ‘guard’ on the sign. “The technology we’re working with is years beyond anything the world has ever seen.”
“For the glory of the nation,” Alfons said, though the words sounded hollow now to him. All that he had seen so far today…the armed guards, Kessler’s sweating face…Noa…the pieces were adding up to a whole he was no longer sure he believed in.
Your sponsors are planning something, Edward had tried to tell him. War. And even though it had been couched in the terms of Edward’s usual madness, the vexing thing was that once again, it was looking like Edward might in fact be right. Edward had known.
And if Edward had knowledge of the Society…if Noa was here…
Could Edward be here somewhere, too?
Eckart turned and leaned back against the door, hands on her hips, obscuring the placard. Shielding the lab from him.
“What I am about to show you is proprietary,” she said. “And we are at a very crucial stage in the development. If I am to show you this…I will need your word that no one else will know.”
That came uncomfortably close to impugning his honor. Alfons clenched his jaw.
“I signed a non-disclosure agreement when you commissioned me to build the rocketship. You can ask anyone in the aerospace community, not a soul knows.”
Another reason to be concerned. He had put all his eggs into this one last, rickety basket, in a hopes that he might be able to realize his legacy…but outside the Society, no one even knew he had this contract. Miss Gracia thought he was working for a professor. His family was dead. Edward was the only one who had known the importance of what he was doing here, and now Edward was gone.
The corner of Eckart’s lip quirked up, again, as though laughing at some private joke.
“Indeed, you have proved very trustworthy. It’s time the Society trusted you as well.”
She turned away from him, still smiling in that bemused fashion Alfons was increasingly coming to dislike. She did not reach for keys to unlock the door but instead raised her arm, rapped her knuckles thrice against the door frame, and it opened immediately. There were indeed guards posted just inside the door, two of them at least, both wearing that same dyed-brown uniform. One of them held the door open for the director. The other saluted. Alfons followed her in, wondering not for the first time if he was only digging himself deeper.
Not that it mattered much, he supposed. His grave was already waiting for him.
The door closed behind them and the guards moved to stand at either side of it, stiffly, each one the very picture of military discipline. Alfons could feel their eyes boring into the back of his head.
The ‘laboratory’ itself was exceedingly sparse, nothing like the work spaces he had been accustomed to at the University. The outer edges of the room were ringed with filing cabinets and crates, a plethora of fire extinguishers, and chairs here and there holding personal belongings but no other furniture. The center of the room was completely bare, save for six large circles painted on the floor at evenly spaced intervals. There were a few men huddled around one of them, looking down at a pile of…something at the center. The stench of ozone was absolutely everywhere.
The researchers were wearing thick protective gloves and lab goggles, though a couple of them had the eyepieces pushed up onto their foreheads. They seemed to be debating something vigorously amongst themselves.
“Gentlemen,” she acknowledged, and all of them immediately fell silent, made room in the circle for her. Whatever she might be ‘director’ of, her authority here was abundantly clear.
“I would like to introduce Mr. Alfons Heiderich. He’s the aerospace engineer in charge of designing our rocketship.”
There was a collected murmur of how do you do. Alfons ducked his head in acknowledgment, not sure what he ought to say or do. These men were all older, and more than a few of them were eyeing him in obvious disbelief. He straightened up a little taller and stuck his chest out, set his jaw in a firm line and tried to think ‘older’. If only he were capable of a beard like his father’s. That was another axis on which fate had cheated him. The best he had ever achieved was a ratty patch of down across his chin.
“I need a space,” the director said, and a couple of the men nodded toward one of the circles on the far side of the room. She gestured for Alfons to follow her to it.
“A broom as well, please.”
Alfons was still trying to figure out what the lump was that the men were experimenting with. It looked a bit like metal that had been liquefied and stretched like spun taffy, then cooled into an amorphous mass. It had a lustrous finish to it. Alfons wondered if it were actually some kind of glass. The confusing part was that as far as he could tell, the room had no heat source at all. Yet the material must have been heated…because the test area’s boundary line was not just dark paint. It looked as though the shape was charred into the floorboards.
“Mr. Heiderich, if you would?”
Eckart was waiting for him with two of the men, looking rather impatient.
“Of course, ma’am,” he said, and hurried to join them.
They were now standing at one of the empty circles, a space perhaps three meters in diameter. A bold scrawl of red paint next to it noted that this section of the floor was ‘Test Area Five’. It too bore deep gouges and what looked like burn marks at the edges.
Eckart directed the men to sweep the circle clean with a big corncob broom, then seized it and tossed it to Alfons.
“Mr. Heiderich?”
“Ma’am?”
“I want you to break that.”
Alfons stared at the wooden broom handle for a long moment, not comprehending in the slightest. He figured he must have heard her wrong.
“You want me to break your broom?”
The men around them snickered openly. A few of them exchanged knowing grins. Again, it was as though they were all in on the same joke - one he wasn’t privy to.
“Yes,” Eckart replied, and her smile was just as broad as the rest of them, anticipating and eager.
“Into as many pieces as you like. Just make sure they’re all in there,” she gestured at the ‘test area’ with a great flourish, obviously enjoying the spectacle she was creating. She reminded him of a ringmaster at the circus.
Feeling increasingly put upon, Alfons hefted the broom up and snapped it in half over his knee. The thin wood made a satisfying crack as it gave, and he broke each of the resulting pieces in half again for good measure, then looked up to judge the crowd’s reaction. A paranoid part of him kept conjuring the image of Noa, fenced in by poles not unlike the shaft of a broomstick. The jagged edges of the sticks he’d made looked like weapons.
“Set them there and stand back,” Eckart said, waving an impatient hand at him. Alfons dumped the pile of broomstick bits into the center of the test area and stepped back over the boundary line, waiting to see what came next.
The director walked over to one of the filing cabinets pressed against the wall and withdrew a single sheet of paper from one of its many hanging files. A respectful hush went over the crowd as she returned with it. Alfons strained to see what was so special about it, but from the angle he was standing at, all he could see was the blank backside of the sheet. Whatever secrets it held, apparently they only filled one side of one page.
“You said the charge we have given you is impossible,” Eckart said. She was standing directly opposite the circle from him, staring at him, clearly meant him to answer. Alfons nodded on cue and she beamed at him.
“But the theory is there, correct? Dr. Kessler has informed me you have come up with several hypotheses regarding liquid propulsion systems in the past.”
“Correct,” he replied as he could tell she wanted him to. This was the director’s show, and it was increasingly clear his participation was required if he wanted to learn anything.
“The problem isn’t a dearth of ideas, it’s practical application. To achieve the kind of thrust you’re talking about - the force that lifts the craft from the ground,” he translated, unsure of his audiences’ jargon level, “you would need a constant supply of an oxidizing agent - a chemical, like liquid oxygen - and it would have to be injected into the combustion chamber -- the place where the fuel is being ignited -- at an incredibly high pressure. So far, no one in the astronautics community has found a way to do that. Liquid oxygen has to be kept under a hundred and eighty degrees Celsius, and it’s prone to explosions if you’re not careful…and it’s expensive, as I said previously. I’ve never had the luxury of being able to use it.”
Because the University was uninterested in funding his ‘science fiction dreams’, that was, especially not in the hell that was the shattered remnants of the financial system. He felt the need to keep harping on the expense, not only because the bottom line was the bit that the others were most likely to comprehend, but because there was a chance they would be able to give him the funding. A part of him was starting to expect that Eckart was going to turn that paper around and show him a bank note in some foreign currency actually worth a damn. That would be a dream come true.
Except, that pile of broom shards…that still made no sense at all. Not even as a loyalty test. Alfons tried to shift discretely to the side to take a peek at what she was holding, but Eckart chose that moment to wave the paper with a flourish, high up over her head.
“What if I told you there was a way to take your oxygen from the air itself? Not by fractional distillation, but instantly, right in the center of your combustion chamber? In whatever quantity you needed, for however long you need it. Air separated on the atomic level.”
She knew what fractional distillation was, which was fascinating. The rest was science fiction, and he told her so.
Eckart brandished the paper again, and this time, he thought he caught the faintest impression of dark pen lines shining through the sheet from the overhead lights.
“Ours is a technology, Mr. Heiderich, that may seem like science fiction, but I assure you, what we are developing is real. I would ask you to keep an open mind.”
She set the sheet down right at the center of the test area, on top of the pile of broomstick remains, and Alfons’s heart turned over in his chest, because he knew this.
Right in the center of an otherwise unassuming piece of paper was a stark glyph, a circle bisected by a large triangle, with several other unrecognizable symbols interspersed in the union of the two larger shapes. He thought he could pick out the roman numeral two, and perhaps, a crescent moon? Not that it matter. The details paled in comparison with the fundamental truth: this was an alchemical symbol, what Edward had called an “array”. Alfons had seen too many of them not to recognize the basic structure, those damned polygons superimposed on circles, physical symbols of what was wrong with his friend’s mind. Symptoms of Edward’s disease.
“The ancients once labored over the pseudoscience known as alchemy,” the director said. It seemed she was searching his face. “They believed that with sufficient understanding of the art, man would be capable of anything.”
Eckart reached out and a man handed her a phial and an eye dropper that Alfons had not noticed him procure. She unscrewed the cap and plunged the tip in, squeezed out exactly one drop of a dark liquid down onto the broken broom.
“They were right.”
The woman pressed her other hand to the very edge of the paper and then it was on fire. There was no other way to explain it. The lines of the array lit up like the hottest coals of a fire, a white so bright it was edging into blue. Tendrils of electricity started crackling all around the woman, almost to the edges of the boundary lines on the floor, and Alfons could smell ozone so sharply it seared at his lungs. The symbols turned orange next, then yellow, then white themselves, and then the entire paper was glowing so brightly that he almost couldn’t see what happened next.
Inexorably, impossibly, the shattered pieces of the broom shaft writhed on the floor and began to slide toward each other, twisted around each other, as though they were made of putty, not wood. The glow was racing over them accompanied by an audible crackling sound, as though the broom was burning - but there was absolutely no smoke and there seemed to be more of it now, not less. Alfons watched in awe as the broom’s handle slowly but surely grew up once again from the lowly bristled head at its bottom, glowing white but otherwise in the exact same shape it had been before he’d savaged it.
The array flared once and then faded, leaving spots to dance in his eyes, and questions to dance over his heart.
Eckart stood and hefted the newly repaired tool in one hand, looking slightly paler than before but her smile was radiant. The lab technicians dutifully clapped.
“How was that for empirical evidence?”
“…it can’t be real,” he gasped. Choked hard, wound up coughing. He was beyond caring about suppressing it, beyond rational thoughts like self-preservation. He had just watched…he had just watched every known law of physics be turned on its head. How was he supposed to feel? She had applied no energy to that system…unless the floor itself held a forge beneath it, but in that case, how had she not been burned? How had the wood not been burned? How had wood - which he knew was wood, he had touched it himself, splintered it himself - twisted back together so seamlessly? It was a trick, some kind of parlor game, it had to be.
It had to be a trick, or surely he was going mad.
Eckart strode over and thrust the broom into his hands, forcing him to acknowledge that it was, impossibly enough, solid and whole once more. He ran his fingers up and down the shaft in the places where he’d snapped it and didn’t catch so much as a splinter.
The director seemed to know what he was thinking. “If you like, we can run the demonstration again,” she said. “I’ll get a pen and you can write your name on it, if you want to be sure this isn’t sleight-of-hand.”
There was a slight murmur of discontent from the researchers around them and a mousy little man stepped forward. He looked to be some kind of authority figure himself, the way the other men deferred to him. Alfons knew the type - he was a small man, but probably endowed with big brain, if he was research lead, and threw that fact around to make up for his other ‘short’-comings.
“Director, I apologize, but that phial’s nearly empty,” Mousy told her. “And we’ve got other arrays slated to test.”
And there they were using the same damn word. “Array”. Like a series of numbers, or a collection of reference books, or a regiment of soldiers. “Array” was supposed to mean science, logic, order. Nothing about this witchcraft was orderly.
“Dr. Kessler shall be arriving shortly with fresh stock. You should be more than set for the next two days,” Eckart told the discontented research lead. He seemed to cheer up immediately and offered no further resistance. The director turned her gaze back to Alfons, looking very pleased with herself.
Alfons was only half-listening. He had no idea what was in the phial they were going on about, but that was the least of the many questions the past few minutes had raised.
“How?” he asked finally. “That energy had to come from somewhere. Thermodynamics requires it. There was so much light…”
Energy, in the form of light and sound and motion…but energy had to be conserved. For all that to have happened, something should have been consumed, petrol or electricity or even the broom itself. But not even the paper with the array on it showed signs of degradation.
“That’s part of our work here,” Eckart said. “We’ve been trying to determine the mechanic behind transmutation, though so far, we haven’t had much success. We have a number of reliable, reproducible properties that I can detail, though.”
She smiled at him, the way one might do a favored student, or a pet.
“For now, it’s easiest to think of alchemy like gravity…a force that we can observe and categorize, but not entirely explain.”
Alfons wondered if she’d thrown in the reference to the theory of gravity because she knew it was crucial to his own field.
“Such as?”
“The design of the array affects the type of transmutation. The skill and experience of the particular person activating said array affects the quality of the result. Not everyone is capable of activating an array in the first place,” Eckart ticked them all off on the fingers of her right hand in rapid succession.
“All these things have been rigorously tested using proper experimental controls, and the effects are reproducible. I have the data if you’d like do your own analysis.”
“I would,” he said. Statistics, numbers, hard science…that was something he could believe in, at a time when he didn’t trust his own senses. Too many miracles required faith, and faith unfortunately had yet to provide him solutions when he needed them.
“If the phenomenon can be studied scientifically, I’ll believe it,” he admitted.
Eckart nodded as though she’d expected that would be his response.
“Dr. Kessler has spoken highly of your analytical mind,” she said. “We have been discussing whether we ought to test you. So far the ability has proved relatively rare among the general population, but there is a high correlation between alchemical and academic aptitude. As is beneficial to our overall work. One of the Society’s guiding principles is to shed light on the mysteries of nature, how some races of man came to be so dominant in their stations. There may be a specific innate relation between high intelligence and important skills such as alchemy. If we can find a pattern in the breeding, it would benefit all humankind. Imagine, a world in which every man knew his best potential! We could shape the course of history - with our skills, create a better and brighter future!”
The men around her nodded in proud agreement, glad to be named part of this new intelligentsia. Alfons wasn’t sure how he felt. The world seemed to be spinning too fast beneath him, and his heart was skipping beats in his chest.
“There’s a test for this?”
If he too could do what Eckart had just done --assuming he even understood what it was that she had done, which seemed to be fusing many parts into a whole -- what possibilities would be open to him then? If he could line say, sheets of metal up next to each other and touch a funny bit of paper to make them seamless, how many rockets could he build then? If alchemy was real…
Edward had spoken of buildings springing up from his hands, geysers rising in the desert, entire cities demolished overnight. If this power was real, it would change the world as they all knew it.
Eckart came over and took the broom from his hands, stepped on one half and yanked up with her hands to break it once again. She set both pieces right next to each other in the center of the test area, and lined the edges up as though the broom were not actually broken. Alfons gaped after her, a little insulted that she had just ruined the miracle.
“If you have the talent, the array ought to respond to you. Even in a minute way,” the woman said. She pulled out the eyedropper again and dabbed a bit of whatever her phial contained down onto the broken section of the broom handle.
“What is that?” Alfons remembered to ask this time, now that he was actively analyzing this insane procedure.
“A catalyst. For the time being, it is necessary, though we are looking into a number of work-arounds.”
She lay the paper with the array down on top of the broken section very gently, then stood up and backed away from center stage for the first time since they had entered the room. She brushed her trouser legs off - such a very effeminate gesture, despite her male clothing - and gestured for Alfons to take her place. He did so with trepidation. The ring of faces surrounding him was becoming claustrophobic, expectant, hungry stares in every direction.
“Just touch your fingers to it and picture what the broom is supposed to be like,” she instructed from the sidelines. “Imagine the broken places coming together, how smooth it used to be.”
This was sounding like science fiction again - no, not even, this was pure and utter fantasy. But now that she had put the idea in his mind, there was no way he could avoid thinking about it. It was like trying to tell himself to forget something; the paradox was he had to remember what it was that he was supposed to be forgetting. The image of the broom was there in his mind, a long, perfectly cylindrical staff with a bundle of bristles at the bottom, as well as the memory of Edward, telling one of his apparently no longer crazy stories.
Transmutation? It comes from within you…you know what you put in, and what you want to get out, and if there is equivalence, it flows the way you picture it.
It’s as easy as putting two hands together.
If he was going to join in this insanity, at least he had a fine guide. Alfons touched his hands together briefly, the way he so vividly remembered Edward doing, and pressed a careful hand down over the array.
He was so primed for something to happen that when it actually did, he nearly jerked away. A faint tingle ran through his fingertips the second they brushed the dark lines, like a current running through his hand, and his fingers spasmed violently away from the unusual sensation. Paper wasn’t supposed to hold an electric charge. But then, broken wood wasn’t meant to restitch itself either. Down was up, and up was down, night was day, and Edward would be so happy if he knew Alfons were trying this.
The lines sputtered light for a moment and there was a sputter of crackling, and then it was gone again, as his imagination strayed toward the thought of Edward’s reaction instead of the broom. No, that wasn’t right. He had to stay focused. Edward was amazing at focusing. Edward could calculate for hours without coming up for air, Edward drank books like water, if Edward were here…
Alfons took as deep a breath as his cramping lungs could hold and pictured the broom again, pictured Edward beside him, guiding him through this.
Light blazed up from beneath his fingers, enough to shine right through them, making his flesh seem transparent, highlighting bones like an x-ray. White light, blue light - yellow light, and then as his vision receded it felt as though that was all that he could see. There was a roaring in his ears now, a popping noise like the breaking of bones, and then an immense rushing sensation. His body was heat, his body was light, and he could see nothing, hear nothing, and he was hurtling toward something very quickly now, a darkness amid the yellow.
There was the image of the opening of doors, and something in there was reaching out toward him. Alfons cried out and stretched his arms out, wanting to embrace it back - and that was when it all started pulling away from him, as though he had reached the apex of his flight and now, inexorably he was falling back down.
The broom, the broom! He tried to bring the image back, but it did not slow the free fall. The energy was bleeding out from him, a vast shuddering release like a long orgasm, terrifying in its beauty. He thought of Edward’s face, and of flying, and then his eyes were his own again, and he was once again aware of his own body.
The array’s light dulled, then dimmed, then went out completely.
For a moment, he didn’t feel capable of movement. When he did, he first felt himself all over, making sure everything was all there. He was aware the process hadn’t completed - it had felt wrong, he’d lost his concentration, he’d let himself get distracted - but it had been enough, he realized with abject fascination. He pushed the paper to the side to see the broom handle was once again whole. It wasn’t perfect - there was a visible seam, a hairline crack where the wood wasn’t quite together - but when he pushed at it with shaking hands, the shaft held.
I did it. I did.
…Edward was right.
“Let me see!”
In an instant the director was on the floor with him, nudging him over. The broom handle was yanked from his hands.
A triumphant smile spread across Eckart’s face as she held it up. Her compatriots crowded close too, examining what he had done.
“Not bad,” the mousy researcher pronounced. “The junction is stable…”
Alfons just let them shove him, feeling strangely drained, like he wanted to lay down and sleep. He knew he ought to feel elated, energetic, any of the emotions associated with a breakthrough, but somehow fatigue was all there was, and a deep rattle in his chest. He leaned to one side and then found he could not stop. Luckily, the floor was comfortable.
“Alfons?”
Someone was calling his name, far above him, but it was too much work to speak. Lethargy washed over him in a crushing wave, and he closed his eyes against it. The only thought that was running through his head was that for the first time in his life, he thought he must understand what it was like to be Edward Elric.
If he told anyone now, who would believe him?
On to Chapter 7
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” the director said in a conversational tone. She did not make eye contact, but continued to charge briskly forward, clearly a person used to being followed and obeyed.
“All good things, of course.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” Alfons managed to speak without choking, but his eyes were beginning to water. He was starting to wonder how much more of this he could endure. This strange, trouser-clad woman walked like a man too, with purpose and speed.
Eckart pulled up abruptly next to a tall oak door, and Alfons tried not to sigh in relief. The door was labeled, he noticed, with a small white placard. Laboratory Space #7, it proclaimed.
Below it, more troubling, was a stark, machine-typed warning:
Hazardous Materials. Authorized Entry Only.
GUARDS POSTED. DO NOT ENTER.
Eckart seemed to read the questions in his eyes. She offered a gracious smile.
“The Society sponsors many types of scientific research,” she explained. “All of it cutting edge. Like your rocketship.”
Alfons got the sense that this disclosure was meant to win his trust. He made sure to smile and nod.
“Naturally, we have need to keep these things a secret.” She rubbed a thumb briefly over the word ‘guard’ on the sign. “The technology we’re working with is years beyond anything the world has ever seen.”
“For the glory of the nation,” Alfons said, though the words sounded hollow now to him. All that he had seen so far today…the armed guards, Kessler’s sweating face…Noa…the pieces were adding up to a whole he was no longer sure he believed in.
Your sponsors are planning something, Edward had tried to tell him. War. And even though it had been couched in the terms of Edward’s usual madness, the vexing thing was that once again, it was looking like Edward might in fact be right. Edward had known.
And if Edward had knowledge of the Society…if Noa was here…
Could Edward be here somewhere, too?
Eckart turned and leaned back against the door, hands on her hips, obscuring the placard. Shielding the lab from him.
“What I am about to show you is proprietary,” she said. “And we are at a very crucial stage in the development. If I am to show you this…I will need your word that no one else will know.”
That came uncomfortably close to impugning his honor. Alfons clenched his jaw.
“I signed a non-disclosure agreement when you commissioned me to build the rocketship. You can ask anyone in the aerospace community, not a soul knows.”
Another reason to be concerned. He had put all his eggs into this one last, rickety basket, in a hopes that he might be able to realize his legacy…but outside the Society, no one even knew he had this contract. Miss Gracia thought he was working for a professor. His family was dead. Edward was the only one who had known the importance of what he was doing here, and now Edward was gone.
The corner of Eckart’s lip quirked up, again, as though laughing at some private joke.
“Indeed, you have proved very trustworthy. It’s time the Society trusted you as well.”
She turned away from him, still smiling in that bemused fashion Alfons was increasingly coming to dislike. She did not reach for keys to unlock the door but instead raised her arm, rapped her knuckles thrice against the door frame, and it opened immediately. There were indeed guards posted just inside the door, two of them at least, both wearing that same dyed-brown uniform. One of them held the door open for the director. The other saluted. Alfons followed her in, wondering not for the first time if he was only digging himself deeper.
Not that it mattered much, he supposed. His grave was already waiting for him.
The door closed behind them and the guards moved to stand at either side of it, stiffly, each one the very picture of military discipline. Alfons could feel their eyes boring into the back of his head.
The ‘laboratory’ itself was exceedingly sparse, nothing like the work spaces he had been accustomed to at the University. The outer edges of the room were ringed with filing cabinets and crates, a plethora of fire extinguishers, and chairs here and there holding personal belongings but no other furniture. The center of the room was completely bare, save for six large circles painted on the floor at evenly spaced intervals. There were a few men huddled around one of them, looking down at a pile of…something at the center. The stench of ozone was absolutely everywhere.
The researchers were wearing thick protective gloves and lab goggles, though a couple of them had the eyepieces pushed up onto their foreheads. They seemed to be debating something vigorously amongst themselves.
“Gentlemen,” she acknowledged, and all of them immediately fell silent, made room in the circle for her. Whatever she might be ‘director’ of, her authority here was abundantly clear.
“I would like to introduce Mr. Alfons Heiderich. He’s the aerospace engineer in charge of designing our rocketship.”
There was a collected murmur of how do you do. Alfons ducked his head in acknowledgment, not sure what he ought to say or do. These men were all older, and more than a few of them were eyeing him in obvious disbelief. He straightened up a little taller and stuck his chest out, set his jaw in a firm line and tried to think ‘older’. If only he were capable of a beard like his father’s. That was another axis on which fate had cheated him. The best he had ever achieved was a ratty patch of down across his chin.
“I need a space,” the director said, and a couple of the men nodded toward one of the circles on the far side of the room. She gestured for Alfons to follow her to it.
“A broom as well, please.”
Alfons was still trying to figure out what the lump was that the men were experimenting with. It looked a bit like metal that had been liquefied and stretched like spun taffy, then cooled into an amorphous mass. It had a lustrous finish to it. Alfons wondered if it were actually some kind of glass. The confusing part was that as far as he could tell, the room had no heat source at all. Yet the material must have been heated…because the test area’s boundary line was not just dark paint. It looked as though the shape was charred into the floorboards.
“Mr. Heiderich, if you would?”
Eckart was waiting for him with two of the men, looking rather impatient.
“Of course, ma’am,” he said, and hurried to join them.
They were now standing at one of the empty circles, a space perhaps three meters in diameter. A bold scrawl of red paint next to it noted that this section of the floor was ‘Test Area Five’. It too bore deep gouges and what looked like burn marks at the edges.
Eckart directed the men to sweep the circle clean with a big corncob broom, then seized it and tossed it to Alfons.
“Mr. Heiderich?”
“Ma’am?”
“I want you to break that.”
Alfons stared at the wooden broom handle for a long moment, not comprehending in the slightest. He figured he must have heard her wrong.
“You want me to break your broom?”
The men around them snickered openly. A few of them exchanged knowing grins. Again, it was as though they were all in on the same joke - one he wasn’t privy to.
“Yes,” Eckart replied, and her smile was just as broad as the rest of them, anticipating and eager.
“Into as many pieces as you like. Just make sure they’re all in there,” she gestured at the ‘test area’ with a great flourish, obviously enjoying the spectacle she was creating. She reminded him of a ringmaster at the circus.
Feeling increasingly put upon, Alfons hefted the broom up and snapped it in half over his knee. The thin wood made a satisfying crack as it gave, and he broke each of the resulting pieces in half again for good measure, then looked up to judge the crowd’s reaction. A paranoid part of him kept conjuring the image of Noa, fenced in by poles not unlike the shaft of a broomstick. The jagged edges of the sticks he’d made looked like weapons.
“Set them there and stand back,” Eckart said, waving an impatient hand at him. Alfons dumped the pile of broomstick bits into the center of the test area and stepped back over the boundary line, waiting to see what came next.
The director walked over to one of the filing cabinets pressed against the wall and withdrew a single sheet of paper from one of its many hanging files. A respectful hush went over the crowd as she returned with it. Alfons strained to see what was so special about it, but from the angle he was standing at, all he could see was the blank backside of the sheet. Whatever secrets it held, apparently they only filled one side of one page.
“You said the charge we have given you is impossible,” Eckart said. She was standing directly opposite the circle from him, staring at him, clearly meant him to answer. Alfons nodded on cue and she beamed at him.
“But the theory is there, correct? Dr. Kessler has informed me you have come up with several hypotheses regarding liquid propulsion systems in the past.”
“Correct,” he replied as he could tell she wanted him to. This was the director’s show, and it was increasingly clear his participation was required if he wanted to learn anything.
“The problem isn’t a dearth of ideas, it’s practical application. To achieve the kind of thrust you’re talking about - the force that lifts the craft from the ground,” he translated, unsure of his audiences’ jargon level, “you would need a constant supply of an oxidizing agent - a chemical, like liquid oxygen - and it would have to be injected into the combustion chamber -- the place where the fuel is being ignited -- at an incredibly high pressure. So far, no one in the astronautics community has found a way to do that. Liquid oxygen has to be kept under a hundred and eighty degrees Celsius, and it’s prone to explosions if you’re not careful…and it’s expensive, as I said previously. I’ve never had the luxury of being able to use it.”
Because the University was uninterested in funding his ‘science fiction dreams’, that was, especially not in the hell that was the shattered remnants of the financial system. He felt the need to keep harping on the expense, not only because the bottom line was the bit that the others were most likely to comprehend, but because there was a chance they would be able to give him the funding. A part of him was starting to expect that Eckart was going to turn that paper around and show him a bank note in some foreign currency actually worth a damn. That would be a dream come true.
Except, that pile of broom shards…that still made no sense at all. Not even as a loyalty test. Alfons tried to shift discretely to the side to take a peek at what she was holding, but Eckart chose that moment to wave the paper with a flourish, high up over her head.
“What if I told you there was a way to take your oxygen from the air itself? Not by fractional distillation, but instantly, right in the center of your combustion chamber? In whatever quantity you needed, for however long you need it. Air separated on the atomic level.”
She knew what fractional distillation was, which was fascinating. The rest was science fiction, and he told her so.
Eckart brandished the paper again, and this time, he thought he caught the faintest impression of dark pen lines shining through the sheet from the overhead lights.
“Ours is a technology, Mr. Heiderich, that may seem like science fiction, but I assure you, what we are developing is real. I would ask you to keep an open mind.”
She set the sheet down right at the center of the test area, on top of the pile of broomstick remains, and Alfons’s heart turned over in his chest, because he knew this.
Right in the center of an otherwise unassuming piece of paper was a stark glyph, a circle bisected by a large triangle, with several other unrecognizable symbols interspersed in the union of the two larger shapes. He thought he could pick out the roman numeral two, and perhaps, a crescent moon? Not that it matter. The details paled in comparison with the fundamental truth: this was an alchemical symbol, what Edward had called an “array”. Alfons had seen too many of them not to recognize the basic structure, those damned polygons superimposed on circles, physical symbols of what was wrong with his friend’s mind. Symptoms of Edward’s disease.
“The ancients once labored over the pseudoscience known as alchemy,” the director said. It seemed she was searching his face. “They believed that with sufficient understanding of the art, man would be capable of anything.”
Eckart reached out and a man handed her a phial and an eye dropper that Alfons had not noticed him procure. She unscrewed the cap and plunged the tip in, squeezed out exactly one drop of a dark liquid down onto the broken broom.
“They were right.”
The woman pressed her other hand to the very edge of the paper and then it was on fire. There was no other way to explain it. The lines of the array lit up like the hottest coals of a fire, a white so bright it was edging into blue. Tendrils of electricity started crackling all around the woman, almost to the edges of the boundary lines on the floor, and Alfons could smell ozone so sharply it seared at his lungs. The symbols turned orange next, then yellow, then white themselves, and then the entire paper was glowing so brightly that he almost couldn’t see what happened next.
Inexorably, impossibly, the shattered pieces of the broom shaft writhed on the floor and began to slide toward each other, twisted around each other, as though they were made of putty, not wood. The glow was racing over them accompanied by an audible crackling sound, as though the broom was burning - but there was absolutely no smoke and there seemed to be more of it now, not less. Alfons watched in awe as the broom’s handle slowly but surely grew up once again from the lowly bristled head at its bottom, glowing white but otherwise in the exact same shape it had been before he’d savaged it.
The array flared once and then faded, leaving spots to dance in his eyes, and questions to dance over his heart.
Eckart stood and hefted the newly repaired tool in one hand, looking slightly paler than before but her smile was radiant. The lab technicians dutifully clapped.
“How was that for empirical evidence?”
“…it can’t be real,” he gasped. Choked hard, wound up coughing. He was beyond caring about suppressing it, beyond rational thoughts like self-preservation. He had just watched…he had just watched every known law of physics be turned on its head. How was he supposed to feel? She had applied no energy to that system…unless the floor itself held a forge beneath it, but in that case, how had she not been burned? How had the wood not been burned? How had wood - which he knew was wood, he had touched it himself, splintered it himself - twisted back together so seamlessly? It was a trick, some kind of parlor game, it had to be.
It had to be a trick, or surely he was going mad.
Eckart strode over and thrust the broom into his hands, forcing him to acknowledge that it was, impossibly enough, solid and whole once more. He ran his fingers up and down the shaft in the places where he’d snapped it and didn’t catch so much as a splinter.
The director seemed to know what he was thinking. “If you like, we can run the demonstration again,” she said. “I’ll get a pen and you can write your name on it, if you want to be sure this isn’t sleight-of-hand.”
There was a slight murmur of discontent from the researchers around them and a mousy little man stepped forward. He looked to be some kind of authority figure himself, the way the other men deferred to him. Alfons knew the type - he was a small man, but probably endowed with big brain, if he was research lead, and threw that fact around to make up for his other ‘short’-comings.
“Director, I apologize, but that phial’s nearly empty,” Mousy told her. “And we’ve got other arrays slated to test.”
And there they were using the same damn word. “Array”. Like a series of numbers, or a collection of reference books, or a regiment of soldiers. “Array” was supposed to mean science, logic, order. Nothing about this witchcraft was orderly.
“Dr. Kessler shall be arriving shortly with fresh stock. You should be more than set for the next two days,” Eckart told the discontented research lead. He seemed to cheer up immediately and offered no further resistance. The director turned her gaze back to Alfons, looking very pleased with herself.
Alfons was only half-listening. He had no idea what was in the phial they were going on about, but that was the least of the many questions the past few minutes had raised.
“How?” he asked finally. “That energy had to come from somewhere. Thermodynamics requires it. There was so much light…”
Energy, in the form of light and sound and motion…but energy had to be conserved. For all that to have happened, something should have been consumed, petrol or electricity or even the broom itself. But not even the paper with the array on it showed signs of degradation.
“That’s part of our work here,” Eckart said. “We’ve been trying to determine the mechanic behind transmutation, though so far, we haven’t had much success. We have a number of reliable, reproducible properties that I can detail, though.”
She smiled at him, the way one might do a favored student, or a pet.
“For now, it’s easiest to think of alchemy like gravity…a force that we can observe and categorize, but not entirely explain.”
Alfons wondered if she’d thrown in the reference to the theory of gravity because she knew it was crucial to his own field.
“Such as?”
“The design of the array affects the type of transmutation. The skill and experience of the particular person activating said array affects the quality of the result. Not everyone is capable of activating an array in the first place,” Eckart ticked them all off on the fingers of her right hand in rapid succession.
“All these things have been rigorously tested using proper experimental controls, and the effects are reproducible. I have the data if you’d like do your own analysis.”
“I would,” he said. Statistics, numbers, hard science…that was something he could believe in, at a time when he didn’t trust his own senses. Too many miracles required faith, and faith unfortunately had yet to provide him solutions when he needed them.
“If the phenomenon can be studied scientifically, I’ll believe it,” he admitted.
Eckart nodded as though she’d expected that would be his response.
“Dr. Kessler has spoken highly of your analytical mind,” she said. “We have been discussing whether we ought to test you. So far the ability has proved relatively rare among the general population, but there is a high correlation between alchemical and academic aptitude. As is beneficial to our overall work. One of the Society’s guiding principles is to shed light on the mysteries of nature, how some races of man came to be so dominant in their stations. There may be a specific innate relation between high intelligence and important skills such as alchemy. If we can find a pattern in the breeding, it would benefit all humankind. Imagine, a world in which every man knew his best potential! We could shape the course of history - with our skills, create a better and brighter future!”
The men around her nodded in proud agreement, glad to be named part of this new intelligentsia. Alfons wasn’t sure how he felt. The world seemed to be spinning too fast beneath him, and his heart was skipping beats in his chest.
“There’s a test for this?”
If he too could do what Eckart had just done --assuming he even understood what it was that she had done, which seemed to be fusing many parts into a whole -- what possibilities would be open to him then? If he could line say, sheets of metal up next to each other and touch a funny bit of paper to make them seamless, how many rockets could he build then? If alchemy was real…
Edward had spoken of buildings springing up from his hands, geysers rising in the desert, entire cities demolished overnight. If this power was real, it would change the world as they all knew it.
Eckart came over and took the broom from his hands, stepped on one half and yanked up with her hands to break it once again. She set both pieces right next to each other in the center of the test area, and lined the edges up as though the broom were not actually broken. Alfons gaped after her, a little insulted that she had just ruined the miracle.
“If you have the talent, the array ought to respond to you. Even in a minute way,” the woman said. She pulled out the eyedropper again and dabbed a bit of whatever her phial contained down onto the broken section of the broom handle.
“What is that?” Alfons remembered to ask this time, now that he was actively analyzing this insane procedure.
“A catalyst. For the time being, it is necessary, though we are looking into a number of work-arounds.”
She lay the paper with the array down on top of the broken section very gently, then stood up and backed away from center stage for the first time since they had entered the room. She brushed her trouser legs off - such a very effeminate gesture, despite her male clothing - and gestured for Alfons to take her place. He did so with trepidation. The ring of faces surrounding him was becoming claustrophobic, expectant, hungry stares in every direction.
“Just touch your fingers to it and picture what the broom is supposed to be like,” she instructed from the sidelines. “Imagine the broken places coming together, how smooth it used to be.”
This was sounding like science fiction again - no, not even, this was pure and utter fantasy. But now that she had put the idea in his mind, there was no way he could avoid thinking about it. It was like trying to tell himself to forget something; the paradox was he had to remember what it was that he was supposed to be forgetting. The image of the broom was there in his mind, a long, perfectly cylindrical staff with a bundle of bristles at the bottom, as well as the memory of Edward, telling one of his apparently no longer crazy stories.
Transmutation? It comes from within you…you know what you put in, and what you want to get out, and if there is equivalence, it flows the way you picture it.
It’s as easy as putting two hands together.
If he was going to join in this insanity, at least he had a fine guide. Alfons touched his hands together briefly, the way he so vividly remembered Edward doing, and pressed a careful hand down over the array.
He was so primed for something to happen that when it actually did, he nearly jerked away. A faint tingle ran through his fingertips the second they brushed the dark lines, like a current running through his hand, and his fingers spasmed violently away from the unusual sensation. Paper wasn’t supposed to hold an electric charge. But then, broken wood wasn’t meant to restitch itself either. Down was up, and up was down, night was day, and Edward would be so happy if he knew Alfons were trying this.
The lines sputtered light for a moment and there was a sputter of crackling, and then it was gone again, as his imagination strayed toward the thought of Edward’s reaction instead of the broom. No, that wasn’t right. He had to stay focused. Edward was amazing at focusing. Edward could calculate for hours without coming up for air, Edward drank books like water, if Edward were here…
Alfons took as deep a breath as his cramping lungs could hold and pictured the broom again, pictured Edward beside him, guiding him through this.
Light blazed up from beneath his fingers, enough to shine right through them, making his flesh seem transparent, highlighting bones like an x-ray. White light, blue light - yellow light, and then as his vision receded it felt as though that was all that he could see. There was a roaring in his ears now, a popping noise like the breaking of bones, and then an immense rushing sensation. His body was heat, his body was light, and he could see nothing, hear nothing, and he was hurtling toward something very quickly now, a darkness amid the yellow.
There was the image of the opening of doors, and something in there was reaching out toward him. Alfons cried out and stretched his arms out, wanting to embrace it back - and that was when it all started pulling away from him, as though he had reached the apex of his flight and now, inexorably he was falling back down.
The broom, the broom! He tried to bring the image back, but it did not slow the free fall. The energy was bleeding out from him, a vast shuddering release like a long orgasm, terrifying in its beauty. He thought of Edward’s face, and of flying, and then his eyes were his own again, and he was once again aware of his own body.
The array’s light dulled, then dimmed, then went out completely.
For a moment, he didn’t feel capable of movement. When he did, he first felt himself all over, making sure everything was all there. He was aware the process hadn’t completed - it had felt wrong, he’d lost his concentration, he’d let himself get distracted - but it had been enough, he realized with abject fascination. He pushed the paper to the side to see the broom handle was once again whole. It wasn’t perfect - there was a visible seam, a hairline crack where the wood wasn’t quite together - but when he pushed at it with shaking hands, the shaft held.
I did it. I did.
…Edward was right.
“Let me see!”
In an instant the director was on the floor with him, nudging him over. The broom handle was yanked from his hands.
A triumphant smile spread across Eckart’s face as she held it up. Her compatriots crowded close too, examining what he had done.
“Not bad,” the mousy researcher pronounced. “The junction is stable…”
Alfons just let them shove him, feeling strangely drained, like he wanted to lay down and sleep. He knew he ought to feel elated, energetic, any of the emotions associated with a breakthrough, but somehow fatigue was all there was, and a deep rattle in his chest. He leaned to one side and then found he could not stop. Luckily, the floor was comfortable.
“Alfons?”
Someone was calling his name, far above him, but it was too much work to speak. Lethargy washed over him in a crushing wave, and he closed his eyes against it. The only thought that was running through his head was that for the first time in his life, he thought he must understand what it was like to be Edward Elric.
If he told anyone now, who would believe him?
On to Chapter 7