In the Waves by Rachel Lance

Author:Rachel Lance [Lance, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

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The thick, black foam sausage floated in a line from the pier to the center of Pitt Pond. We had already failed twice, still measuring almost nothing, and we had pulled the model boat out of the water as a result. I had dubbed her the CSS Tiny one late night at the lab, and stenciled the moniker onto her stern. She was sitting back on the shore this time, and the goal of this experiment was simply to measure the waveform from the black powder charge that was floating in the pond water, suspended from a chunk of foam pool noodle.

Brad and Luke huddled on towels in the grass while I crouched at the end of the pier, staring at my equipment. Nick sat with them, having been relieved of his assignment pulling the boat back and forth from the folding chair across the pond.

“THREE!” Brad yelled. “TWO! . . . ONE!” He depressed the second button on his setup box to set off the charge. When I saw the plume, I smacked the key to manually trigger the data recording and held my breath as the acquisition box whirred away, processing numbers.

The waveform on the screen was small. Bigger than before . . . but still far, far smaller than I expected. But this time it was smooth! The wave had a beautiful shape, a clean rise, and a visible decay. Gone were the jagged and unpredictable spasms of signal noise that I had previously measured. It still didn’t seem correct, but it was progress.

Brad, Luke, Nick, and I sat together in the grass on the shore to regroup and think through our next steps. Luke snacked on a bag of Cheetos he had fished out of my trunk.

“What if it’s the charges?” Brad suggested quietly. “The plumes have been smaller than I expected.” I nodded. He had to be right. It made sense. We had carefully eliminated all the other variables.

We had placed the gauges in the water first this time, and I had swum out to tap them, both before and after. They had worked; we were cleanly sending signals from Newfoundland to Ireland.

“You know, I talked to one of the explosives agents at the ATF,” he continued, “and he said he wouldn’t technically classify our science tubes as bombs if he found them at a crime scene. They would be too weakly confined to do real damage.”

I turned my head to look at Brad, slowly. Standing up, I walked toward the water, dropping my towel and heavy coat, and kicking off my flip-flops on the way. I waded until the freezing water reached my hips, then began to swim. The bottom of the pond was smooth; my bribed-with-chicken friends and I had verified it. It was man-made, and mostly free of other debris. I took a breath, squeezed my eyes shut, and inverted, hitting the shallow, even bottom with my hands after one swift kick. Kicking to stay submerged, my fingertips ran over

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