In time, Jose graduated from Emory (cum laude) in a pre-med track and entered medical school. After the first year his professors determined that what they had in their midst was not a student, but a very knowledgeable colleague who was stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare. The rest of med school was remarkably smooth. He attained his (second) doctor of medicine degree, stayed at Emory and eventually became a full professor. His wife, in the meantime, had opened a prominent and successful Cuban restaurant. Their combined income had finally caught back up to what they had lost nearly ten years before.
Miguel Castanuelo, in the meantime, had become totally Americanized. The Hispanic community in Atlanta in the 1960s and ’70s was infinitesimal and his father had no intention of raising his child as a “separate but equal” citizen. Miguel quickly became Mickey, using Spanish rarely at home and never in public. He played American football and was indistinguishable from the Chads and Tommies and Blakes around him, until an announcer had to try to pronounce his last name. But his senior year at St. Pius, it had become a game. Whenever the announcer at some away game stumbled, the entire Pius side would resound: “Cast-a-new-Way!-lo!”
He had decided that on graduation he would enter the Army, much to the dismay of his parents. But Mickey had become more than Americanized, he was a fervent patriot. He knew that everything in life that really mattered was represented by that Coast Guard cutter that had risked stormy seas to save him and his family, by the sponsorship families who had welcomed them with open arms and the society that had let his father have that all-too-rare second chance. He felt that he had to give something back. And if that meant a tour in the Army before he went to college, so be it.
However, in his junior year of high school, a father of one of his classmates made a presentation to the physics class. The father was a senior officer in the United States Navy, stationed at the eminently land-locked Georgia Institute of Technology. What the father discussed was the opportunities open to bright young men (and women) who would be willing to give a few years to the U.S. Navy. The Navy was always desperate for anyone who could pass the rigorous academic challenges involved in nuclear power generation. And Georgia Tech had one of the premier schools in that subject. The Navy would pay for the education of eligible men (and women) who were willing to give six years of their life to the Navy.
Miguel practically broke an arm signing up.
He was easily accepted at Georgia Tech since his SAT score had been 1527 and his GPA was 3.98 (he’d gotten a B in Latin one year) and graduated in four years with a BS in Nuclear Power Generation. He then went to the Navy’s nuclear power school “where we’ll really teach you about generation” and then into service with the active fleet, working in nuclear “boomers,” where he developed his long-term love of elaborate practical jokes.
Unfortunately, after one tour of duty he was beached with a previously undetected heart murmur. Unsure what to do with himself, he went back to Georgia Tech and got the rest of a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. From there he went to the Department of Energy, but at Tech the second time his focus had changed from generation technology to weapons tech.
He ended up at Oak Ridge, which was no longer in the weapons building business but was involved in basic research. From Oak Ridge he moved to the University of Tennessee, to which he officially transferred his football allegiance when Georgia Tech started a business school. UT was pretty much right next door and had a long and fruitful revolving door policy with the government facility. He then spent a decade cycling from one facility to the other, with his theoretical research becoming more and more esoteric over time. Or so, at least, it seemed.
When the news of the Posleen invasion had come, he thought he was going to be going back into a blue suit; the conditions of space-board battle were similar enough to subs that submariners were at a premium in the Fleet. Instead, he had stayed at the University and Oak Ridge because it was there he could make the greater contribution. Because the “theoretical” research he had been involved in at Oak Ridge was the manufacture, capture and management of antimatter.
Mickey was just a tad on the “Green” side. He recognized that fossil fuels were both limited and an environmental nightmare. Not so much from the much overblown “greenhouse effect,” which was clearly junk science, but from the extraction and distribution end. Not to mention traffic of which Knoxville, Tennessee, had more than its fair share. But he also was a realist and knew that to replace fossil fuels you had to have something equivalent or better. Petroleum, at its theoretical base, was a means of transporting energy. Hundreds of millions of years before, tiny marine algae (not dinosaurs) had gathered the energy of the sun and then died. They were overlaid with limestone and compressed, resulting in petroleum. It was relatively easy and cheap to extract and transport.
From Mickey’s perspective, the only viable answer was antimatter. It could be produced in remote locations using nuclear power and transported easily and cheaply. An amount of antimatter the size of a thumbnail sliver would power a car (or even a flying car, which would help out the traffic no end) for a reasonable lifetime. Of course, if the containment was destroyed the car would become a nuclear fireball. But that was just engineering.
The real problem, which his colleagues were happy to point out, was making the antimatter in the first place. Until there was a way to make it in quantity, and control it, he was researching science fiction.
With the coming of the Posleen, and the Indowy, and the Darhel, and the Tchpth, it was apparent that his “wild ideas” were anything but science fiction. The Indowy could make antimatter like there was no tomorrow and microencapsulate it for safety. Suddenly, all the planet’s problems, excepting only that it was about to be invaded by cannibalistic aliens, were solved.
As it turned out, the Indowy technique for making antimatter was trivial; it was one of the few things that human theory could comprehend about the new technologies. And they could contain it. The latter was important. Antimatter that contacted “regular” matter converted all of its mass to energy. It was that energy release that made it so alluring. Best of all, it could be contained in very small amounts. That way if some of the encapsulation failed, there wouldn’t be a massive nuclear fireball. Microencapsulating it, though, or even containing it, turned out to be tricky. The Indowy knew how, but nobody else did.
But Mickey was a fanatic. Whatever it was he put his mind to, he threw himself at fully. The theory of manufacture was easy. And the Indowy could microencapsulate. It was only a matter of reverse engineering.
Unfortunately, that was not the case. After studying Indowy techniques (to the extent that they would allow) for nearly a year, he came away a frustrated man. The Indowy defied the laws of probability and that was just not fair.
All quantum mechanics, all chemistry, all metallurgy, comes down to probabilities. When two chemicals are mixed, there are several ways that they can recombine. But only one way is “probable.” Therefore, almost all of the molecules combine in that way, with a scattered handful combining in others.
Often the “alternate” combinations are more useful. But they are also hysterically unlikely. The Indowy got the alternate combinations every single time. It was like hitting Lotto not once, but Every. Single. Time. What a rip.
It was the answer to all the problems. Not just microencapsulation but their armor, their drives, their energy and gravity technologies. All of them depended on hitting the Lotto, consistently and dependably. He didn’t understand how they did it and they couldn’t, apparently, explain it in terms that made sense. They just “prayed” and it happened.