On ‘Plainview 6’ It seems strange that whilst science is utterly fascinating, it can be so boring to learn. I had some great teachers when I was younger. My chemistry teacher was always blowing himself up, and my physics teacher electrocuting the class. But this was back in the good old days when you could do proper experiments in school, not the sanitised ‘look at what happens when we mix these miniscule quantities in the fume cupboard’. And they wonder why so few students are taking science subjects at university? Kids like things that smell, burst into flame, change colour, emit noxious smoke, snap fat sparks across the air, fly, spin, whirl and crash. That’s why I’m a great fan of a BBC programme called ‘Local Heroes’ – presented by the completely mad Adam Hart-Davies, who cycles about the country to find the birthplaces of forgotten scientists. Once on site, he recreates their famous experiments with a variety of bodging not seen outside ‘Scrapheap Challenge’ (that’s ‘Junkyard Wars’ to you Yanks). He even blew up his garden shed with Roger Bacon’s black powder. And Joseph Swan invented the first light bulb. Not Edison. So there.   Plainview 6 – June 2006   Science Fair. I appreciate that these two words were enough to strike mortal fear into the heart of most students, but since I wasn’t most students, I was cool about it. I’d been blowing stuff up for years, and could have made a pretty good attempt at putting the science block into orbit, but that’s not the sort of thing the teachers have in mind when giving out the prizes. I realised a second after the class had stopped groaning that I couldn’t do anything remotely connected with explosives. Not a good idea at all, which was a shame, because I’d just about cracked the way to get my fuel slurry into an aerosol. The way the Air Force did it was to drop the container from ten thousand feet, but that luxury was denied to me. I had to be more inventive, and using helium-grade balloons seemed to be working great. I thought briefly about rocketry, but that had been done before, and hey, it wasn’t the nineteen-fifties. I settled on an electronics project, and figured I’d end up with a robotic mouse chasing its tail around a maze. Then I wondered what would happen if I had two robots, programmed differently, both trying to get to the centre of the same maze. Things kind of got out of hand for a while: my imagination took off and after I’d had one robot trying to catch the other in a maze – a kind of Theseus and Minotaur thing – and taking away the maze completely to leave nothing but a straight predator/prey scenario, I knew I’d got way out of my league. Real scientists did that level of programming, and spent their whole lives dedicated to the theory. This was a County science fair; competition wasn’t going to be that stiff. But I still liked the idea of robots. It was visual, and the judges would go for that. And obstacles, too. Some sort of assault course? In the way of these things, inspiration suddenly struck. The obstacles would be hidden; mines, in fact. And the robot would have to detect the mines or get blown up if it drove over one. They’d have to be spring-loaded, the mines. Not real ones. Which was also shame. But probably safer that way. Somewhere out in the garage I had an old battery-driven car. It wasn’t radio controlled; there was a wire going from the control box to the car, but it had forward, reverse and steering. I could fit a wire loop on the front, like a real metal detector, and have a little speaker that growled or squeaked depending on how close to a mine the car was. I wrote down everything I needed. I didn’t think that Dad would spring for a real metal detector, let alone one of those miniature wands that they used at airports for body searches, but I could build one, no problem. Out here in the boondocks, we were used to getting stuff mail order. When I checked on the internet, Radio Shack even had kits. I envisaged the car going across a sand pit. I didn’t rightly know whether the little car would be able to drive across loose sand, so I’d have to think about balloon tyres or tank treads. The mines were more difficult. I figured I’d need may be twenty or so to scatter around and make life interesting. I thought straightaway of using microswitches and little servos to bump the car into the air, but after a few sketches decided I’d go blind wiring them all up. I needed a mechanical solution, some sort of pressure plate that would release a spring. I could make it out of old cans. It took me half a day of rummaging around in boxes to find the car. I didn’t mean it to take half a day, but you know how it is with boxes of stuff you’ve put into storage and forgotten all about the contents. There was school work from the first grade; cards from kids I had to my parties then and don’t even speak to now; toys which were fascinating then and fascinating now, but during an inbetween time seemed too babyish to keep. Even the old newspapers used to wrap the bits and bobs up in were like a time capsule, going back to the heady days of the mid-nineties. I never knew about some of the stories they told me, but I must have lived through them all the same. I’d left the batteries in the last time I’d played with them, and the inside of the battery case was coated in a thick brown goo. I cursed my younger self and set about stripping everything out with white spirit. It was all pretty corroded, and I had to set to with Dad’s metal files to scrape the oxidised layers off the contacts, but when I’d done and slapped some fresh D cells in, what do you know? It worked. Over the next few weeks, I assembled the other bits I needed. Wood for the sand table – the car was pretty big so I needed a proportionate-sized box for it to run around in – and lots of empty tins, having tried and rejected drinks cans as not having the required strength. I built the induction loop when the kit arrived; a simple RC circuit to provide the oscillating current, and a receiver loop to pick up the changes in inductance. It almost sounded like I knew what I was doing. I stuck it all on the car, and used a separate set of batteries to power it. It was getting kind of top heavy, so I stripped off the plastic shell and built a wide flat platform over the chassis. I could now chase round the garage floor, avoiding tin lids with my eyes shut, just going by the rise and fall of the speaker tone. But the mines were something else. Damned if I could get them right. I set them too lightly, so they’d spring out all on their own, or too stiff so that I needed a screwdriver to pry the plate off the top. The springs were either too weak or too strong, and I was having seven shades of trouble. One Saturday morning, Mom had gone over to Pierce, shopping with Charlie. When they came back in the late afternoon, I was still in the garage, twisting and crimping metal, and coming to the conclusion that it was my basic design that was at fault, that I was just trying to be too clever. As they got out of the car, Mom just happened to say: "Hon, why not use mouse-traps instead?" Epiphany. I stared at her open-mouthed. I guess the old girl still had some spark about her. I dropped my tools and leapt onto my bike, straight down to the hardware store for two dozen mouse traps. Mr. Hoffmann behind the counter said something smart about infestation, and I mumbled something about science project. I don’t think he heard, because he offered me a loan of his cat. And those traps worked a treat. Near enough lost a wheel when I deliberately drove the car over one. There wasn’t enough metal to give a really good signal, but I taped a dime to each one, and that gave a mighty squeak when I passed the loop over it. Two weeks to go, and I was all set. I’d made some posters explaining what I’d done and had pictures of the circuit diagrams, which always look more impressive than the few cents worth of components soldered onto a bit of green board. I’d even made little flags for the operator to mark where detected mines were – red with a grinning skull, pasted onto a cocktail stick. Everything except for the sand. I looked at the volume of my tray, and worked out I’d need almost a couple of hundred pounds of sand. On top of which I didn’t want wet builder’s sand either but the soft white stuff you find on the beach. Or in a golf bunker. I wasn’t going to steal it, for two good reasons. I had way too much respect for Chris Mayer, and it’d take me the rest of the year to bike it away. I needed his help, so I just went and asked him. "Well now," he said, scratching his chin, "sand needs replacing every so often. And the old needs to be taken away. I’ll phone an order through, and you can come down next weekend and lend a hand. Now, rightly that old sand belongs to the club just as much as the new, but seeing as how we’re just going to throw it away…" His voice trailed off and he eyed me meaningfully. "Sounds a fair exchange," I said. "Labour for sand. It’s a deal." The Science Fair was held in Pierce, but it turned out that Dad couldn’t take me. He told me the night before that he had a meeting sprung on him, something about a old-guard Republican filibustering in the Unicameral. He said that was making it nigh-on impossible for the Reconstructionists to do their job. He looked sadly at me and said that Mom would give me a lift over. I wonder if he ever realised how much I resented all the politics. I went back to the garage and packed all the sand back into the bags, dismantled the table, and collected the mouse traps together. "He’s never here anymore, is he?" "Hey, Charlie." I didn’t feel like talking, but that wasn’t going to stop my sister. "I still got Mom. We do things, even if it is always shopping. You and Dad, you used to be close." "Spare me the Psych 101. And I thought you liked shopping." She looked at the posters I’d prepared. I had no idea how much she understood of it. She did pretty well at school. "Yeah, well. I’ve only got one body, and though I hate to admit it, a girl can have too many clothes. Maybe you should ask Dad if you can go with him to the Unicameral sometime. He’d like that." "So what about me? What do you think I’d like?" "I reckon you wanted Dad to take you to the Science Fair." She twisted a lock of hair around and around her fingertip. "You trying to prove something?" "Geez, I’m not trying to prove anything. I don’t care what he thinks anymore." "You just want him to think that you’re as important as some stupid meeting with his Reconstruction buddies." I sat down on a box. "Charlie, does all this bug you too? When did we stop being kids with a regular family? Did I miss it? I mean, what the hell happened?" I dropped my voice for the ‘hell’. Just in case. She scooched me across and squashed up next to me. "I don’t know. Do you think any of this could be our fault?" "Yeah, right. How?" "Just looking for a reason. This sucks, you know? Mom’s got it into her head that I’m her best friend, and she looks hurt when I go off with my girlfriends. Like I’m abandoning her or something. I could do without that guilt trip. And all the stuff she buys for me, it feels like she’s buying me." "I’m not ending up on Oprah. Screw ’em. I have a life. I like it. I’m going to go to college, and then I’ll be free." "That’s years away." "Three years and five months. Yeah, I’m counting." "Good luck tomorrow. Reckon you’re going to win?" "May be." "It’s good. You’ve done a lot, and you didn’t get much help." "I suppose at least it’s all my own work. I guess some kids’ll have their dads’ entries sitting on their stands." "You’re doing fine, Marty." She kissed me on the cheek and left me to my brooding. I didn’t win. I lost out to a working hot-air balloon that rose up and down a thin guide-wire, powered by some of those sit-under hairdryers you see in Ladies’ salons. But I reckon the judges had the best time with me. They all took it in turns to try and navigate the car across the sand, howling with laughter as one after another got snapped up by the hidden traps. Then I showed them how it should be done. Took a while, and I was sweating by the time I made it to the other side. I didn’t tell them it was the first time I’d had the chance to have a go myself. But second place was what I got, and it seemed to sum up my life almost perfectly.