“I’ll see what I can do,” Garner promised. He signed off and relayed the latest updates to Krail and Stimson. The next-to-last group of Charon’s crew was removed from B-82’s topsides and Garner caught a launch with them over to the Rushmore.
As the small boat bucked the icy chop, the bracing wind in his face, Garner smiled as he recalled Byrnes’s bellyaching about their lack of inspired sustenance.
Just Jell-o really sucks.
Then an idea began to gel.
21
After twenty-five years as a polymer chemist, David Macadam thought he understood the industrial invention process. As a research-and-development scientist for an international firm, he knew there were always projects under development and few of them ever survived to justify their ravenous appetite for human capital. For those ideas that did take wing, Macadam was well acquainted with the typical progress to be expected of any intellectual property: anything that he or his colleagues dreamed up, researched, or published was automatically considered the property of the corporation. This was industry standard practice, though it had never sat well with Macadam.
Eventually he admitted aloud what he knew all along: that if he ever wanted to stretch his wings, he would have to become an entrepreneur.
There was certainly no chance that Pegasus Chemicals would satisfy his craving for more in his professional life.
That was why — only a dozen years ago, though it now seemed like a lifetime — Macadam left Pegasus for the sake of a “prolonged personal sabbatical.” His one-car garage was an inadequate replacement for his company lab bench, but he did have fulltime effort and enough creative vigor to begin developing a kernel of an idea.
Macadam called it Plasroc, a high-density, synthetic glaze that might someday be used to contain toxic materials, which were currently processed by sealing them in glass or porcelain inside stainless steel-lined drums or tanks. Macadam knew the containers were more for the convenience of moving the material than for containment; it was the slurry that actually kept the toxins in check, defined the form of the barrels or ingots poured, and determined whether or not the disintegrating particles — enduring little bastards that they were — would ever get out.
What Macadam envisioned was a polymer that, when hardened with a specially modified resin, would be thousands of times more effective than existing containment slurries at a fraction of the cost. It would also be much easier to use. Whereas most alternatives required decanting the toxin into a liquid containment that later hardened, Plasroc could be sprayed over any open or enclosed surface before being sealed. In this way, the compound could be used to bond toxins “on the shelf” in barrels or waste tanks or render wastes inert while they remained in the ground, as was necessary for many of the abandoned chemical weapons dumps. There were dozens of alternative containment compounds, of course, but Plasroc had its innate plasticity as its trump card. Macadam’s compound had the ability to immobilize toxic elements where they lay, whether that was in the water column, the ground, or in a proper waste facility. He was certain of this, on paper at least. He only needed to synthesize a trial sized sample.
Over the next two years, Macadam’s equations became tabletop distillation experiments, then migrated to gigantic vats the size of furnace boilers. When space restrictions and citations from the Adelaide public health office closed him down, he moved his wife and daughter to a farmhouse a hundred miles out into the country where a ramshackle barn served as his Plasroc brewery for the next eighteen months. To Macadam’s delight, Plasroc performed precisely the way he had speculated it would the first time he scribbled some rough calculations on the back of a paper napkin.
Six months later, it seemed as though his timing could not have been better. The perceived threat of chemical or biological terrorism had never been greater and abandoned dump sites of former weapons arsenals were turning up all the time.
Nuclear reactors from the former Soviet arsenal were simply dumped into the ocean or were necessarily sent two thousand miles by train for reprocessing at the Mayak Chemical Combine, a tedious, dangerous, and costly enterprise. Then the arrogance of the modern atomic tests by India and Pakistan had rekindled the debate about nuclear weapons development and what to do about their highlevel wastes. In one especially absurd proposal, Australia had been asked by the nuclear community to consider being the sole repository of the world’s highlevel atomic wastes. As a kind of backhanded compliment, it was reasoned that the island continent was one of the few areas on earth that possessed “both the geological and political stability” to confidently locate a massive, enduring waste-processing facility. To anyone who sought to find applied technology as a remedy to these waste disposal problems, Plasroc could easily be heralded as the wisest containment method for the new millennium. And David Macadam alone held the patent.
Inspired by world events in the daily newspaper to aggressively market his invention to the highest bidder, Macadam was decidedly nonplussed by the underwhelming response to his proposal. His wife, Anne, continually assured him that he was simply ahead of his time, though their credit-card agencies and banking representatives could hardly continue to agree. Reluctantly, Macadam came to realize that when he left Pegasus which never would have afforded him the latitude to develop Plasroc in-house he left behind the credibility of an industry association. The three-thousand-square-foot laboratory he had built in his barn, complete with all the steaming vats and wheezing pipes of any mad scientist’s abode, did little to promote the potential of what was inside.
Eventually he had to give up his dream, and returned to Pegasus with hat in hand to ask for his job or any job back. With Plasroc gobbling up a second, then a third mortgage on their farm, he would have to keep the commute out to the country, much to his teenaged daughter’s chagrin. In an especially benevolent gesture, Macadam even offered Pegasus the Plasroc patent outright, in the hopes that they could use their formidable resources to bring the material to its full potential.
It was that promise that kept Macadam from going utterly out of his mind during the daily three-hour round trip to his new, entry-level job.
Pegasus sat on the patent. And sat. And sat. When a brief economic recession hit Adelaide, Macadam’s job was among the first to be downsized. At the age of fifty-eight, Macadam agreed to take an early retirement and the return of the undeveloped Plasroc patent as part of his severance package.
Now nearly sixty, Macadam had all but forgotten about Plasroc. These days, the inventor preferred to spend his time helping to tend his wife’s garden. He endured the evil glares of his daughter, who matured slowly, married badly, and continued to consider Plasroc responsible for all the family’s misfortunes. He drank as much beer as his ulcerated stomach and his meager pension afforded him and he stewed in his bitterness with full appreciation of the word.
With winter now on the way, there was much work to be done in the garden to harvest whatever they could for canning or sale at the local farmers’ market.
The massive vats of Plasroc sitting in the barn were still viable — the solutions could be stored for decades, even centuries in separated, inert form but the brewery was otherwise abandoned. In another week, maybe two, Macadam thought he would begin calling the scrap dealers to come and make him an offer for the metal. Then again, he’d had that thought every few weeks for the past two years.
Anne told him to forget about it after all, they didn’t need the barn for anything else.
As he raked and pulled shoots in the garden, Macadam’s back ached and his head buzzed with a pain threaded by frustration and stitched in granite. All told, Plasroc had cost him twelve years of his life, his stable if uneventful career, his home, his credibility, his daughter’s respect, forty pounds on his already bony frame, and 750,000 perfectly good Australian dollars. The only thing it hadn’t cost him, it seemed, was the affection and respect of his wife. Some days that was almost enough to balance the ledger. Almost.
From the fifth row of vegetables, Macadam heard the telephone ring inside the house. A moment later Anne pushed open the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. Macadam stood and smiled at her. He couldn’t help it, for she was always smiling at him first. Despite their rocky path, she had aged gracefully, the sweet, upturned lines at the corner of her mouth forever hopeful that all things would work out for the best.
“Telephone’s for you,” she called.
“Who’s it?”
“A Yank. Says he’s calling from the North Pole.” With all the frustration and adversity they had endured in the past decade, Anne seemed unwilling to find any surprise in this. A telegram from Father Christmas himself was just another day in the life of David Macadam, madcap inventor and retired rock builder.
“What’s it?”
“He says he needs your magic brew. A lot of it.”
“What d’ya mean,‘a lot’?”
“Twelve thousand yards, he says.” The corners of Anne’s mouth lifted even further, breaking into a full smile.
“Serious?”
“Um-hum. He says he needs it in three days so he can save the world.”
Macadam dropped the rake and began to run.