Chapters / The Assistant, part 1
the man black as coal offers an escape, over the circled wagons
Imagine lasers. A room filled with water chiller, big ol' power supply with controls the size of a steering wheel, and two pool table sized benches floating on pistons. On the front table are two long glowing tubes, dripping with condensation, and a spinning mirror whining at 12Khz with the hiss of an air jet motor. All focuses down onto a small crystal deep inside a stainless container, also slowly venting condensation smoke out its top.
And that was the ghetto of the labs! We scrounged an old PDP11 that had some graphics software on it. Clueless!! The C-SCI jocks there were NOT going to help, not with that tar baby of a project. Clueless! Read the protocol docs, build chip by chip a box to send ASCII codes to sync it up. No idea.
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Imagine a repair shop. Battery chargers. Battery chargers! They need love too, after all. Greasy and beat up, the fancier the panel the simpler the inside. Stench of Selenium, hint of Tellurium, strange magic alchemy mingling in the fumes, Moon and Earth, Luna/Terra. Filthy smocks. 'what is that place, a dye factory?'.
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Imagine a tube the size of a freight train, the diameter of an 18 wheeler truck, slowly turning, with red hot pebbles tumbling down the center under a roaring flame filling the space. Insulated ducts so hot, the platinum thermocouples sometimes melt. Tanks of churning dirty water bigger than a swimming pool, bins of dusty clay that could drown you if you fell in. 'The closest thing to Hell on earth.' says my Dad.
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More lasers. Big as a small car, home-made by some guy in their garage with the classic NST, long expensive quartz tubes in slick housings, dye jet pumps whining, vacuum pumps chuffing, glowing gas venting through thick vacuum hoses. An entry into the slippery slope of animal's used in research. Sharing the halls with the ghosts of electroshock therapy experiments. Next door, the big shots squeeze light till it turns white.
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In a jar on my desk are a few ounces of gold flakes. I looked at some of them under a microscope; they flatten out if you smush them with a ball, you could maybe inscribe messages or symbols into the tiny flattened flakes. How to test their purity at times occupies my thoughts. Perhaps some electrolytic potential set up, balanced against silver with a little salt bridge tongue to lick the grain. Calibrate that against a Canadian (fanatics for purity of their gold) gold coin. My friend has (I hope still has) an old HP Electrometer that would serve, though a simple DVM probably is high Z enough.
The gold came from the Yukon, 90 years ago. I am not quite sure of the process, but likely simple crushing and panning. Other bits of a gold prospector's tools are still in the house, here, and memories of my father describing their use are there, too. Not quite enough to reconstruct this dust's exact history, but I can guess. One method of refining was to dissolve the gold in lead, then boil off the lead. I recall clearly the point of adding some gold to the assay to help it along or maybe to bring the result up to a measurable quantity. I do not think this particular sample was subjected to that, or the other similar process with mercury; wouldn't it be more clumpy from that?
There was, for a while, a bottle of mercury in the house. We would take it out and play with it. So strange, that it could be cleaned by pouring through filter paper. Some sort of unbelievable trick! Only recently do I understand the tinge of concern in my father's voice when he would ask how my memory was.
The wealth my father built came from a love of geology, knowledge of mineral benefaction, wisdom and integrity. The gold dust testifies to the testing of those qualities, out in the Yukon. The funds accumulated from slow attentive awareness of successful industry.
So when some will-o-the-wisp carried me away from the above reality, and I had cast most of the last of my funds into the maw of adventure, there was a lifeline, borrowed from my father's estate. Crippling and liberating at the same time, I became a lesser 'trust fund baby'.
