They trooped through the house to join Roland standing in the kitchen, staring out at the killer pool.
“Watch this,” Doc said, taking out his phone and putting it in front of Kelsey. He played the grill assault.
“Fascinating!” Kelsey said when it came to an end. “The force required to move the water molecules like that in a coherent form. But I wonder why it simply didn’t break the glass when it came after you?”
Roland shot Doc a triumphant grin.
“And you still don’t know what this Firefly thing is that has caused this?” Kelsey asked.
“Not a clue,” Doc said, which earned him a hard look from Kirk.
“I read the reports on your encounters in the form of Fireflies when I signed on,” Kelsey said. “I must say, they act rather irrationally on all levels.”
“We’re not here to analyze it,” Nada said. “We’re here to kill it.”
“Well, that is the key question, isn’t it?” Kelsey said, and they all, except Kirk and Scout, who’d never worked with an Acme before, knew what was coming: the theories every Acme spouted, proving Kelsey had actually taken some science courses and earned his doctorate. They always went to the theories when standing around a group of people armed with guns and intent on killing something, because it made them very insecure at a primeval level. Like they had to prove themselves to the Neanderthals.
“It depends,” Kelsey said. “Do we want spectacular or clever.” It wasn’t a question and no one replied. They knew they had to wait this through. “From a clever standpoint, I’d be tempted to add cornstarch or some other polymerizing agent. From the scientific standpoint, once the cornstarch polymerizes you have a non-Newtonian fluid. Which means that its viscosity increases with applied force. At the very least that would slow the pool down.
“You put enough in, in this case,” he looked out the window, “I would say at least a thousand pounds, it would make it so that you could actually probably run across the surface.”
“But until it solidifies,” Doc said, playing his role, which was bubble-burster on bad ideas, “you’re slowing it down, but you’re also making it more powerful in potential force and coherence. So we could end with the water taking a more solid form and literally climbing out of the pool and killing us.”
“Uh, well, yes.” Kelsey recovered quickly. “And, frankly, we don’t know how the chemicals that are in the pool will affect the process, so I’d say we move on from that idea. It was just a warm-up.”
“Right,” Roland muttered. He was fingering his machine gun, which Kelsey failed to note.
“Water is tricky. Evaporating it is a possibility, but that would require a ridiculous amount of energy.”
“We can get a ridiculous amount of energy,” Doc said, “if it would work, but I definitely would not want the Firefly to go into a single gaseous cloud, which it might be able to do if we evaporated the entire pool.”
“Is ridiculous a scientific term?” Eagle wondered, which earned him a high five from Scout.
“Electrolysis,” Kelsey said.
“Hey!” Roland stepped forward. “That’s what I wanted to do.”
“Not electrocution,” Doc corrected the big man. “He said electrolysis.”
Kelsey nodded. “Apply an electric field to the water and disassociate the H2O molecules into H2 and O, both of which are gases, but”—he quickly added with a glance at Doc—“not a cloud.” As Doc was about to speak, he jumped into the breach once more. “However, it would be dangerous because it would become explosive, very quickly.”
“Water explosive?” Roland said. “Mac would love that.”
“Who is Mac?” Kelsey asked.
“Forget that,” Moms said. “Continue.”
“The other problem is,” Kelsey said, “I don’t know how to electrolyze that much mass.” He nodded toward the pool.
“Whoa!” Eagle said, getting everyone’s attention. “Check it out.”
A column of water about six inches in diameter was rising out of the pool, straight up.
“Fascinating,” Kelsey said.
The water went up, passing above fifty feet.
Moms was on the radio. “Support, we’ve got a situation here. You might get some calls on a column of water.”
The column was now at a hundred feet. The level in the pool was now down appreciably.
“To keep coherence of that much weight in the face of gravity,” Kelsey said, “is truly remarkable. And powerful.”
The column reached over one hundred and fifty feet, then wavered.
A second later all the water came pouring straight down, splashing into the pool.
“Well, what the hell was that about?” Kirk asked.
“I don’t like it,” Nada said. “It’s planning something.”
“Planning indicates intelligence,” Kelsey said. “The Firefly reports have never been—”
“How do we fucking kill it?” Nada demanded.
“Oh. Uh. As far as electrolysis, it would take more than this house is wired for anyway. Too much thermal mass in the water. Going back to the cornstarch, we could add a zeolite.”
“A what?” Kirk asked.
“The stuff that comes in those little packets in things like baby diapers; my wife just had a little boy by the way. Those packets are stamped ‘Do not eat’ and it makes diapers ultra-absorbent. Hmm, you know, if you add a strong acid to water it becomes exothermic. You can boil a pot of water just by pouring acid into it. Again, though, it would take several tankers full of acid to tackle this.”
“I can get several tankers of acid here within an hour,” Moms said.
“Cloud,” Doc repeated. “With acid. Not good.”
“Got it,” Moms replied.
Kelsey was off in his theoretical wonderland. “For spectacular, there are things that react negatively with water. Sodium, lithium, and cesium all react violently and produce an explosion.”
“That much water,” Doc said, “and that much metal, we’d take out the entire neighborhood. And it would disperse the water everywhere and the Firefly might stay in part of it.”
Kelsey sighed. “Supersaturated sodium acetate will instantly crystallize when added to water, but you’d need a lot.”
“That still doesn’t kill it,” Nada said.
“How do you usually kill a Firefly?” Scout asked.
Kelsey ignored her. “More simply, how about we drain the pool into a tanker? That would contain it.”
“Unless it decided to punch a hole in the side of the tanker,” Doc said.
“We flame it,” Roland said to Scout, ignoring Kelsey. “If it’s in an animal or plant, we flame it. I usually do the flaming.”
“What a surprise,” Scout said.
“And if it’s in a mechanical object,” Nada said, also ignoring Kelsey in favor of the girl, “we blast it, like the other night on the golf course, until it’s so structurally destroyed that even the Firefly can’t keep it coherent.”
“Be that as it may.” Kelsey was getting irritated that the adults were talking to the child and not focusing on his words of wisdom. “Perhaps we could use Occam’s razor. We don’t know if the Firefly inhabits all of an object or part of it.”
“Part,” Nada said. “I chopped a rabbit in half and the Firefly kept the front going, but not the back.”
“You killed a bunny?” Scout looked about to cry.
“It was a bad bunny,” Nada said defensively.
“Kidding,” Scout said with a playful punch into Nada’s body armor. “Ouch.”
“We divide the water into portions,” Kelsey said, “trying to isolate the part where the Firefly is.”
“I don’t know,” Moms said. “And while we’re doing that? One of those tentacles could eat one of my people.”
“Flame it,” Scout said.
Roland was eyeing the pool. “I don’t have enough napalm.”
Scout shook her head. “What he said earlier,” she jerked a thumb at Kelsey. “Baby diapers. They absorb water, right? A lot of water. But they can also be burned, right?”