Tiona (a sequel to "Vaz") by Laurence Dahners Read Free Book Online Page A

eyes, Tiona flipped the current on and off, seeing the membranes squish down then float slightly up, over and over again. A niggling suspicion rose up.
    She switched the polarity of her electrodes and turned the current up again.
    The membranes flopped up out of the dish and tore themselves loose from the electrodes! This set was worse than the first set!
    Flabbergasted, Tiona simply sat there looking at the membranes and occasionally turning the current on and off again as she thought furiously. There were no significant electrical or magnetic fields around her lab bench for the currents in the membranes to physically react to.
    Were there?
    She left the lab to check out some equipment to measure field strength—on the off chance that something was creating a field and she just wasn’t aware of it.
     
    Tiona leaned back in her chair and thought through the tests she had run. The equipment she had brought in didn’t show any significant fields were present. She’d tested to be sure the equipment was working by bringing a magnet into the region of her lab bench. The highly sensitive field strength meters had reacted as expected. They also detected a magnetic field of a strength comparable to what would be expected from the Earth’s magnetic field.
    Musingly, she turned, “Nolan, have you ever run any currents through your graphene membranes?”
    “No,” he said, “do you need any help?”
    Tiona blinked. She could have sworn that, for some reason, Nolan had been acting like he was worried about her recently. Offering to help and asking if everything was okay. He’d taken to telling her that he’d brought too much food for his lunch and offering her some of it. She wondered if he thought she was anorexic. She knew she was thin, but it was mostly because she still ran almost every day. “No, I was just wondering because my doped membranes move around when I run current through them and I can’t explain it. I was wondering if maybe your pure membranes moved too.”
    Nolan shook his head, “I haven’t tried it. I’ve got some extras of my membranes here though if you wanted to try running current through them?”
    Tiona got up and walked over to his side of the lab, “I’d like to if you don’t mind? This is driving me crazy.”
    “Okay, let me know if you need any help,” he said, picking up a file folder from his desk. He opened the folder and slid a couple of the thin filmy graphene membranes out onto a sheet of paper for her. As he handed her the sheet, he picked an apple up off the desk, “Here, take this apple too. I won’t be able to eat it.”
    Tiona snorted, “Okay Grandma.”
    “Grandma?”
    She winked at him, “Yeah, my grandma’s always trying to feed me, just like you do.”
     
    Nolan watched as Tiona moved back over to her side of the lab. She represented quite an enigma for him. As time had gone by in the lab he’d recognized more and more just how whip-crack smart she was. At their lab meetings with Eisner it seemed like the discussions usually revolved around her ideas. He would swear sometimes that she knew more about Nolan’s project than he did. Certainly when Eisner quizzed her about her own research he never caught her lacking in knowledge.
    At first, when she’d set up the lab equipment to let him make his membranes without her help, he’d thought she was just being lazy. But, since then she had given him several good ideas on easier or better ways to do his project. He was embarrassed to realize that he really hadn’t been of much help to her on her project, despite her more junior status.
    Why someone as obviously brilliant as Tiona would have to eat at the homeless shelter was a complete mystery to him. He’d since investigated and learned that you didn’t have to be “homeless” to eat at the shelter. Essentially, you just had to show up at dinner time. They didn’t check to see if you could afford to eat somewhere else. Apparently, a fair number of low income people