He opened the petcock on the fifty-five-gallon drum of Freon that was propped up on a wooden cradle at an angle, like a keg of beer. He watched silently as the Freon splashed in pools on the floor.
“Larchmont next stop,” a conductor announced from somewhere on the train. “The rear four cars only will platform at Larchmont.”
After years of denial and not believing that her unlucky lot in life was due to something as trivial as the size of her chest, Cindy turned 180 degrees in her thinking. So, on this crisp, early fall night, Cindy took the 7:35 Metro-North train from Grand Central Station up through Westchester County to Port Chester, where she intended to spend the night at her sister Paula’s house. The next day, with Paula accompanying her for moral support, she would check into Port Chester Hospital. Then, five hours and one-and-one-half cup sizes later, her new life would begin.
“So that’s the way it went all day, hit the ball, drag Bernie, hit the ball, drag Bernie.”
Hiccock had the room laughing after telling a little golf joke about how terrible it is when one of your foursome has a heart attack and dies in the middle of a game. He was getting the hang of public speaking. Totally off his notes, he forged fearlessly ahead into the perils of the ad-lib.
“Before you go back to the pure logic of the labs and I go back to the pure lunacy of Washington, I’m going to borrow a page from my old college coach. Try to imagine a smelly locker room at halftime.” The room laughed exactly on cue and he knew he had them. “Don’t give up. Do not be distracted. Do not be lured away to defense or commercial endeavors. Do not for one second listen to the naysayers, the ill-informed, the doubting Thomases who equate your quest for artificial intelligence with that of a fool’s journey. Every major advance in science has been the result of someone not following the rules, some individual thinking outside the box, someone standing up for an idea that was, at best, scientific heresy.”
The room erupted as the scientific elite, engineers and programmers all at the top of their professions, reacted to their new champion and the national recognition that he would bring to their long-suffering cause. Their optimism was founded on the notion that among the many Nobel Prize winners and nominees in this Westchester country club dining room, he, Hiccock, was the only one of them who had ever won a Heisman Trophy.
The widening pool of Freon found the hole Eric Holm cut in the floor and started to pour through and out the ragged opening in the third-floor acoustic ceiling. Looking into the draining liquid, he was catapulted back to a time in his youth when he was running through his mother’s kitchen and he hit the mop handle, knocking over the wash bucket. The soapy water found a knothole in the wood-planked floor and seeped down into the basement. He caught two beatings that day — one from his frustrated mother and another from his German immigrant father who came home and found his tools in the basement all wet.
Tonight, Holm’s eyes darted around. He had the distinct impression that he was doing something wrong today as well. But he could not stop himself. As the liquid reached the open vat holding the substrate bath, it proceeded to boil. The small twinge in Holm’s back caused him to twist his torso in an effort to alleviate the tightening of the complaining muscle. He was confused by the pain, having no memory of pulling it a minute earlier.
“For my part, as head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, I will urge my new coach, the president, to support the legislation championed by Senator Dent of California calling for increased funding of the pure science necessary to achieve artificial intelligence in our lifetimes!”
The room combusted into a spontaneous standing ovation. They had found their hero. He was one of them, a pioneer in their field who, as the Science Advisor to the President, now held sway over the national science agenda.
There was a sharp thud as a southbound train sped by on an adjacent track. The doors of the car Cindy was riding in were slammed outward and yanked back by the vacuum created by the two trains passing each other. The noise took her out of her thoughts. Sitting between two men in her oversized cranberry-red sweater, she looked around at the other people on the train. There was the man standing in the doorway listening to his iPod. Tall and on the verge of forty, slightly graying at the temples, just enough to make him look distinguished. That was a pet peeve of hers. Distinguished. What a shitty deal that was. A man could out his gray for all the world to see and he’s deemed distinguished. Let a woman try and go au naturel and she is “just giving up.”
She slowly realized that “Mr. I’m-here-I’m-gray-get-used-to-it” reminded her of a guy she went on a blind date with once. What a disaster! She was an hour late, as she recalled. Always having the worst luck, that icy winter night was no different. Her car locks froze up and she spent an hour in the bitter cold trying to rectify the situation with a Bic lighter. Turned out that the guy was a putz anyway. It was one date and over, as most were.
She unconsciously looked down at her featureless contours and then raised her head to play another round of “Who’s on the Train?” Her eyes landed on an older lady who gave up worrying about her hair and makeup long ago. She’s either really happy or really nuts. The man next to her must have had some kind of Chinese food for dinner because …
Eric Holm’s eyes darted around rapidly in their sockets. His instincts to flee prickled at his common sense, but a strong compulsion to stay put overpowered it. He noticed that the tip of his shoe had concrete dust on it from the drilling. He reached into his pants pocket for his handkerchief. The Freon had now created a roiling surface in the substrate bath. Eric Holm leaned down to dab the tip of his shoe. As he did so, the hydrogen chloride of the substrate bath and the Freon achieved critical mass. Seven hundred gallons of docile hydrogen chloride were violently stripped of their chemical inhibitor and now became a 700-gallon fuel explosive bomb with a boiling surface. In the first hundred milliseconds of the expanding hydrogen-fueled fireball, both concrete slabs that made up the floor and ceiling were instantly pulverized, along with the professor. At 200 milliseconds, the remaining hydrogen — now an aerosol — was ignited by the 3,000-degree central fireball, turning the entire 620,000 cubic feet of the third-to-fifth floors of the building into a superbomb. In total, it took one-third of a second for the building to explode.
Four hundred milliseconds later, a shock wave traveling at 720 miles per hour slammed into the Metro-North station. It violently blew Cindy’s departing local train off its track as if it were a toy smacked by a giant hand, leaving the railcars jutting into the adjacent express track. Cindy felt something snap in her neck as she was catapulted sideways. She found herself crushed under the weight of the man who was sitting on her right a split second before. Their bodies were thrown brutally to one side of the car, pinning the man sitting to her left between them and the window. She didn’t hear well after that. Her ears had popped like on an airplane. Sounds were tightly squeezed and tinny, but she heard screams, moans, and calls for help. She knew something happened, but she had no idea what. The train car in which Cindy was sitting was now at an uphill incline and tilting to one side, giving her the illusion she was laying on her back. She was aware that the man who only a second before was between her and the window behind her was screaming, but his cries were muffled by the back of her sweater. She felt pain in her leg. When the man on top of her started grasping at the seat back in front of him to right himself, it put pressure on her leg and a searing pain shot through her body. She screamed a scream that, to her now shattered eardrums, sounded like a hollow roar emanating from somewhere else. The intense pain knifed into her brain and she saw stars. He mumbled something but kept clawing at the seat. Sputtering blue-white flashes and the spotty, low-powered emergency lights were the only illumination in the train car. The odor of ozone from the electrical arcing outside started to pinch at her nose. Someone had lost control of their bowels. The metal skin of the train, having been stressed and hammered by the force of the shock wave, shed molecules like a beaten rug shed dust, making the air taste and smell metallic.