Chapter Three: Seneca's Shocking

Dawn came late and the dreary gray of a drizzly morning lit my camp in Beetee's basement. I folded up the bedroll, neatly, hiked up to the kitchen, and helped myself to a pair of boiled eggs and some odd round bits of hard, chewy bread, with holes in the center and covered with salt crystals, that I thought were called bagels. I brewed a pot of coffee for Talbot and Beetee, and I grabbed myself a taste of it. Bitter, but not bad. Another luxury we lacked in Thirteen.

With some Peacekeeper doing the boring job of listening to the bug in Beetee's house, I thought it best to sound like a servant. So I scrubbed the guest bathroom. When Beetee rose and showered, I made up his bed. And Talbot's. I cooked breakfast...a cheese omelet with bits of spicy sausage and chopped green peppers, overlaid with sliced tomatoes, and more of those hard chewy round bread loaves, with a garnish of sliced melon and green grapes.

I finally learned from Beetee's conversation with Talbot, that the tiny loaves were indeed called bagels, and that they originated in Eastern Europe many years ago, among some people called Jews. If my education has the facts straight, three Jews in Nazi Germany, named Hahn, Strassman, and Meitner, discovered atomic energy, but the Nazis persecuted Jewish Germans so severely, murdering nearly all of them, that the inventors tried to defect, and their discovery got developed by the Americans and British and was put to use. Hell, dictators always fear smart people. There was another Twentieth century dictator named Pol Pot, who drove bulldozers over people for the crime of possessing three or more books, or owning a pair of reading glasses. When one of Mr Pot's accomplices was tried for war crimes, years later, the new government had to deploy twenty thousand grunts to protect the judge and the hangman while they did their duty. Apparently a quarter million or so of the survivors rioted before the trial, demanding to tear the bastard limb from limb, before the new government could finish convicting and hanging him. And then there's our recent pain in the arse, Coriolanus Snow. Our esteemed guest, Seneca, needed to be curious enough to want lightning in his Hunger Games, for Beetee's plan to work. But the risk to Seneca, and to Beetee, of displaying such curiosity, was how Snow would see them both. They were dead meat, if Snow saw them as rivals. Or even as potential rivals. Even if they didn't want Snow's job.

If I started speaking out loud today, I'd likely spend my last week alive, in Snow's torture chamber, I thought. A reason to get back to work.

I went upstairs after serving breakfast, scrubbed Beetee's shower stall and bathroom sink, then returned to clear the table and scrub the dishes and cookware. Then I cleaned the entry and parlor carpeting. I was finishing up when two men in dark blue trench coats drove up in a limousine. In the rear seat was a dapper fellow who had the most elaborately-trimmed beard I had ever seen.

I pointed to my throat as I opened the door. Trenchcoat Number One crawled back in the limo. Trenchcoat Number Two peered at my Avox card, and asked for my master. I motioned for him to come in and be seated. And then went out in the garage to look for Beetee.

On the way there I stumbled into Wiress, sipping hot coffee and wearing flannel pajamas with a pink robe.

She lifted her right leg and grabbed the toe of her black slipper, hollering "Watch where you walk, you big oaf!".

I blushed and bowed to Wiress. And pointed to the visitors.

"Aha! Seneca Crane has come to Beetee's humble home! We are so honored by your presence, young man. Follow me to meet Beetee, please.", said Wiress, pulling on an overcoat to chase the chill, and leading us all, with a trace of a limp, into Beetee's spacious garage.

In the farthest bay of the cavernous garage sat what can only be called an historical find: A 1972-vintage Mustang Shelby GT, announced a small sign. The paint job was bright red, with black racing stripes, and oversized tires looking very shiny, indeed. It obviously had cost Beetee a small fortune to keep the vehicle in this condition. The rubber tires and hoses and drive belts, and the vinyl top, all tended to become terribly brittle and crack after a few decades. Yet this masterpiece was fully intact after a couple of centuries had passed. Somehow, Beetee must have made replacement parts for those items. I would have been speechless at the sight. Fortunately, my cover as an Avox required me to stay speechless all the time. I did make the effort not to stare at the centerpiece of his collection, for as Beetee's servant, I ought to be familiar with the garage.

The two nearer bays appeared to be a lab and workshop for Beetee. There were a few mechanical items: A drill press, a milling machine, and assorted hand tools for working with metal, wood, and plastic. And an electronics bench replete with some impressive test equipment. Directly in front was the demonstration we were about to witness. A contraption of coiled wires that shined like gold, surrounding a curved tube of glass, reposed beneath a floodlight. I recognized a grey machine to be a vacuum pump. Four glass insulators, each a foot long, connected a pair of fat gold wires to some sort of coil. And a tall, cylindrical tank labeled "Nitrogen".

Wiress seemed uncomfortable, standing in her slippers on chilly concrete, and she looked behind the scrap bin, found a worn cardboard box with markings from a paper mill in District Six, set it on the floor, and jumped on it twice, flattening it out, leaving an insulating barrier between warm feet and cold concrete. Amazingly, she didn't spill her coffee while jumping. I was impressed with her talent.

Beetee and Wasserstrom emerged from the house and conversed with Seneca Crane in hushed tones. I caught the words "defector" and "mathematician", and saw a look of surprise on Seneca's face, but none from Trenchcoat, who seemed to know that already. I busied myself picking recyclable scrap out of Beetee's trash and sorting it into bins.

"Boy! Come here!", barked Beetee. Assuming that was master to Avox talk, I jumped up and came to where Beetee stood. "Can you read '30', boy?"

I nodded affirmatively.

"Good. When I say 'Start', you are to open this valve until the needle on the gauge points to 30. Which way is open, boy?"

I motioned counter-clockwise with my right hand.

"Which way is closed?"

I motioned clockwise.

"Good, you understand, boy. I shall not need to find another Avox while you are alive".

I noticed Trenchcoat grinning at that.

Seneca looked frightened.

"You want to live long enough to taste lunch today, boy?"

I nodded affirmatively.

"If that needle falls below 30, open the valve more. If it rises, close the valve a little. If the valve won't turn any more, beat this table with your fist so I hear it, boy. I must stop the experiment if that happens, or the machine will blow up and kill you."

I nodded my head slowly, to show I understood.

"Wiress, where is my good video camera?"

"In the Shelby."

"Thanks."

Beetee popped open the trunk of the Mustang Shelby GT, pulled out a video camera and a tripod, and set it up, aimed at the apparatus. "The gold micropiping is rather pricy, and that's before I plated the exterior with mercurial calcium cuprate. It's refrigerated to 200 Kelvins by shooting compressed nitrogen at three thousand kilopascals, through a pinhole into a vacuum we keep near twenty pascals of pressure. The gold efficiently cools the plating and makes it superconducting, just like in a MagLev Hovercraft, but without using liquid hydrogen. If it overheats there will be an explosive burst and I shall need a new Avox and several weeks to build a replacement. So let's be careful and conserve time."

Seneca looked aghast.

Trenchcoat looked amused.

Beetee continued. "What you see here, is my version of a Tesla coil. It is two concentric coils, one coupling to the other by its induced magnetic field. When I interrupt the field in the first coil by shorting it with the Krytron, the second coil, which is the tall one, must lose its field too. The only way it can do that, is to set off a big electrical spark. Which is what lightning is."

Krytrons I knew about. They were a kind of electrically-activated switch, that turned on rapidly. Some old nuclear weapons designs required them. The Krytron to which Beetee was pointing, looked as big as my fist. The current it conducted must be large, I thought.

"To get the current large enough for arena-scale lightning", said Beetee, "we need a bigger Krytron to short the current. I propose to create one, using a particle accelerator called a Calutron, to make the material for it. And I propose to build it at Capitol Hospital, in the blood cancer lab that our President Snow has authorized."

And there it was. Beetee's leverage.

Boggs and Talbot had confirmed, from four different sources, that Snow was slowly dying of a rare form of blood cancer. His doctors could keep creating more of his blood in the lab. But the new blood had the same genetic failing as his existing blood...and the cancer would spread to it. They were exploring an old treatment, called Synchrotron Radiation Therapy. Powerful X-rays formed by accelerating charged particles around a magnet, would bombard the cancer cells in his blood, to slow their spread into the new blood. If successful, they would keep the cancer in check, until Snow died of something else. Hopefully a rope, I thought.

Beetee was promising to build a Calutron, and run it as a Synchrotron. To keep Snow Alive. And make a lightning machine for the Quarter Quell. And covertly to arm the Second Rebellion with his graphene hyperconductors. He would accumulate Carbon-13 for the Rebel army, in the process of treating Snow's blood cancer. A brilliant move, if he could do it...getting Snow to pay for his own overthrow, without realizing that he had.

"Let's move inside and watch the test on video.", said Beetee. Everyone followed him indoors. I stood there, flummoxed. I had no idea how to play an Avox who was scared half to death, so I stood very still.

"Boy, turn on the nitrogen!", ordered Beetee through a loudspeaker.

I obeyed.

As the gauge approached 30, the vacuum pump started up. About twenty seconds later, I saw fine granules of ice forming on the gold tubing. What felt like hours but was actually about three minutes, elapsed, as the ice needles built up into a thick layer of white, covering the gold. I carefully watched the gauge and kept the pressure at 30.

Then the machinery started humming.

A bright, bluish-white flash came from inside the glass chamber. Then another. Then more frequently.

I wondered if that was the Synchrotron.

Then a huge arc passed between two rods standing on end, about ten feet off the floor and maybe six feet apart. There was a noise like cloth tearing, and then a snapping sound.

And I realized that I was looking at a miniature thunder bolt.

What the hell had Beetee Latier built? I was fairly sure he wasn't trying to kill me, but it wouldn't be the first time someone died in their own experiment.

Another giant arc.

And then another.

My vision was getting spotty from the bright flashes. Perfect time for a headache.

Suddenly a wire began to smoke, on the farthest rod. The arc flashed again, and the smoking wire broke. I slammed my fist on the table.

No wire, the next arc could go most anywhere. I started to slam my fist a second time, when a brighter arc flashed, this time between the rod, and Beetee's historic Mustang. The snapping sound was quite loud. And then came the sound of shattering glass.

"Boy! Turn off the gas!", came Beetee's voice through the loudspeaker, as the machinery shut down.

I obeyed.

Then I saw the extent of the damage. The glass tube had shattered. The floodlight had melted and was smoking. Bits of an odd-looking kind of glass fell all over the floor. One of the gold tubes had melted into a ball.

Beetee's prize Mustang had a smoking hole, about an inch across, burnt through its roof.

Beetee ran frantically into the garage, carrying a fire extinguisher. He pulled the right-side door open, and revealed that the cloth liner under the car's roof, was burning. He gave the fire a couple shots of white ammonium phosphate powder from the extinguisher, and a cloud of white dust blew around. When he emerged, quite a bit of that powder had absorbed in his full head of kinky African hair, and every time he moved, some powder would fall from his head. His deadly serious demeanor contrasted starkly, with his farcical appearance. I got a truly memorable view of him, as he ran up to my position and gave a blast of white powder to the smoking floodlight, white powder dropping off his hair with each step, as he ran.

Trenchcoat, who was in the garage by then, pointed and laughed at the sight. Beetee looked like he'd fallen in a baker's flour bin. Or a bin of baking powder.

Beetee Latier did not look amused.

If he had planned this turn of events, he hid it well. For a moment, I worried he would punch Trenchcoat, and we'd end up at the Head Peacekeeper's office.

Then Wiress spoke up.

"Where's the baking soda?"

Beetee gave her a questioning look.

"Some bicarbonate and water would make bubbles in your hair. We get Finnick Odair to model it in Capitol Couture, and call it 'The Foaming Seas Look'.".

Beetee stared back at Wiress a few seconds, then burst out laughing.

Wasserstrom started chuckling.

Everybody ignored me. The Avox would have nothing to say, except to sneeze at the smells.

Then Beetee spoke.

"We'll need to call Environmental to get rid of this stuff. The mercury is hazardous."

Seneca looked sharply at Beetee. "Doctor Latier, will this happen at the hospital in the Capitol?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I won't put a Tesla coil and a lightning machine at the Capitol. Note, please, the Krytron wasn't damaged."

"And can we make sure the wires don't melt, during the Games?"

"We need more of my hyperconductive fused graphite. This piece of copper wire is what failed. If you notice, see this greenish tinge in the break?"

Seneca nodded. So did Trenchcoat.

"The green is copper oxide. This wire had broken once before, and the last person to use it, probably brazen-welded the two pieces together and didn't clean away the corrosion where it broke. Which left a weak spot, where it broke again. My hyperconductive cable does not corrode. It will take some time to make, but it shouldn't be a problem."

"In that case, let's do a Gamemaker's special. We'll ship it out on the hazardous waste train to District Thirteen, with District Three's radioactive waste, and have the Avoxes dump it down the abandoned mine shaft. I'll keep the origin and composition, secret. Your Avox can do the cleanup?"

"That's all this one knows how to do, is clean up."

"Then turn him loose. I'll tell the President my plans. We'll put a lightning machine in the Quarter Quell. And you will make the parts you need, using the Synchrotron Lab at Capitol Hospital Cancer Center, that will be announced this week. And, of course, you will build the Synchrotron."

They shook hands.

Wiress said, "This calls for a toast. There's a bottle of two century old wine from a place called the Escarpment Vineyards of Ontario, wherever that was, chilling in the fridge. Let's see if it turned to vinegar."

And they left the Avox with the cleaning job.