Doorways to Infinity by Geof Johnson Read Free Book Online

forth from Jamie to Mr. Bass, as if she expected them to say more, until she finally cleared her throat and said, “Mr. Bass, do you live here now?”
    “I have a home in Hendersonville, about a ten-minute drive from Pete’s warehouse, and then I come through the magic doorway in the building across the road from here.”
    “Who’s Pete?”
    “He’s my grandfather,” Jamie said. “He’s handling the money and other stuff for all of this. Mr. Bass is sorting out the technical challenges.”
    “Please call me Eugene,” Mr. Bass said. “Let me show you what we have here, Dr. Tindall.”
    “Call me Nancy, please.”
    “All right, Nancy.” Mr. Bass grinned and pointed to a doorway at the back of the building. “That’s our storage room for the batteries for the solar panels. I rewired all of them so they connect in here, then I redistributed the power back to the individual buildings. That way, if one of them has more demand, the rest of the system can pick up the slack. That’ll make a difference when it gets cold.”
    “We were going to use gas to heat the classrooms,” Jamie said, “but he talked us into using electric instead.”
    “Gas is more efficient,” Mr. Bass said, “but it’s dangerous. These folks aren’t used to it, and all it takes is one person turning a valve on and forgetting about it and boom! ” He flung his hands out with his fingers spread.
    “It’s not cold today,” Dr. Tindall said. “What time of year is it here?”
    “November, same as Earth. I hear it won’t get really cold until January.” Mr. Bass gave a satisfied smile. “But we’ll be ready.”
    “What else do you have to show us?” Jamie asked. “Is the generator room ready?”
    “Almost. It’s back here.” Mr. Bass led them through another door on the rear wall and down a short corridor that opened up to a square room that was mostly empty. He pointed to a pair of rectangular concrete pads on the floor, both slightly bigger than a queen-sized mattress. “This is where the generators will go, soon as they come in.”
    “What will you power them with?” Dr. Bass said.
    “Methane. We’ve just about finished the gas collection system, which is behind this building.”
    “We decided to go for methane because it was the lesser of several evils,” Jamie said. “I don’t want to use gasoline unless we have to, and methane produces less carbon dioxide when burned.”
    “I can tell you’ve been paying attention in class,” Dr. Tindall said. “How are these people heating their homes?”
    “With wood or coal. I’d like to wean them from that if we can, but it would be expensive.”
    “Do any of them have solar panels, besides you?”
    “Just a couple friends of ours. I’d love to help everybody get them, since most of them can’t it afford it, but gosh…I’d need a lot of money for that.”
    “You might have it,” Mr. Bass said, “if you okay that mining deal.”
    “What mining deal?” she asked.
    “It’s complicated,” Jamie said quickly. “I’ll explain later.” He turned to Mr. Bass. “Why don’t you show us the methane collection tank?”
    Mr. Bass led them outside to a squat metal cylinder that stood behind the building. It had pipes running from it into the ground, and one side of it had a chute with a flap on it. Mr. Bass said, “We put organic waste in there, like grass clippings and such. I just worked out an arrangement with the town to bring us the horse manure that they clean off their streets, and I think some of the parents here at the school will bring us the crop waste from their farms. All that will go into the bottom of the tank, and as it composts it releases methane. That gets siphoned off to another tank behind it, which compresses and stores it. We’ll run pipes from that to the generators, and that should give us enough power.”
    “I’m not an engineer,” Dr. Tindall said, “but this seems like overkill.”
    “Not if we expand, like I’m hoping to,”