Well, in that case, why not just use a human subject?”
“Because of the Helsinki Declaration!” Tristan scoffed.
Oda nodded. “Partly that. But even if there were no regulations on use of human subjects, I would have been stymied by physical limitations.”
For the first time since Tristan had become energized about the solar eclipse photographs, he looked a little deflated. “The ODEC won’t work on a human?” he asked almost plaintively.
“Oh, it would work,” Oda said, “if you could fit a human into it.”
The relief in Tristan’s voice was obvious. “So you would just need to make a bigger one.”
Oda held back before answering, giving Tristan’s face a careful study, with occasional glances at me. “If you wanted to use it on a human,” he said, “then yes. But this was impossible at the time.”
“Your lab space wasn’t big enough?” I asked.
“It was plenty big,” Oda returned, “but that wasn’t the problem.”
My colleague was back to being Sad Tristan. “What was the problem, Dr. Oda?”
“Maybe it’s easy if I just show you,” Oda said, standing up abruptly and spilling the cat onto the rug. He was a slight man, hardly taller than I. “I have it in the basement.”
“You have what in the basement?” I asked.
“The ODEC. Rebecca wanted me to throw it out, but I have a . . . bittersweet sentimental attachment to it, and it doesn’t take up much space.”
He began leading us toward a narrow door beneath the stairway. “Rebecca,” he called out. “I’m taking them down to see the ODEC.”
No answer, just some indistinct clacking of dishware. He gave us a rueful smile. “She doesn’t approve,” he said in a conspiratorial voice. “But she’s making us tea all the same.”
The cramped wooden steps down to the basement were nestled underneath the hall stairs to the second floor. He switched on a light, and the three of us slowly descended.
The basement was wonderful: low ceiling, thick stone walls with small transom windows, and a pounded-earth floor, very musty in a way that said this is an authentic old house (although of course I now know most houses smell that way almost as soon as they’re built, in any time period but the modern). Near the hatch stairs to the yard lay a tangle of wood and wicker lawn furniture, with satellite baskets of sandbox toys, suggesting grandchildren. To the other side of the steps was the furnace, and other systems-viscera of the house. Along almost every wall were shelving units on which were neatly stacked old apple crates, labeled and color-coded. Tristan at once began to read these, muttering his findings aloud. There was a very orderly garden worktable and grow lights in the corner nearest to the hatch. “Rebecca’s the gardener,” the professor said in an affectionate voice. He gestured around. “This house is architecturally interesting because it has an unusually deep cellar for its time.”
“Is that so?” I asked politely, while Tristan kept scanning the crates for the ODEC.
Oda nodded, looking almost tickled. “Becca is the one officially qualified to give the tour, but after fifty years I guess I know the spiel. The whole area, for blocks around, was a farm back in the colonial era. The farmhouse was torn down a few decades ago, there’s a gas station in its place now down at the corner of Mass Ave. This house we’re in was built for the farm manager’s family, when the estate was large and prosperous, and we think he dug the cellar so deep to hide extra food, all the end-of-year gleanings from the field. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Rebecca’s family were abolitionists—but the farm owner, in the big house, was not.”
“Her family’s been in the house since before the Civil War?” I asked, surprised. Tristan continued to eye the neat storage stacks, looking for the ODEC.
Oda nodded. “It was built for her ancestor, Jeremiah East, that very farm manager. And Jeremiah’s great-something-grandmother was—”
“Is that it?” asked Tristan, pointing to the far corner beyond the furnace. God he could be rude.
“Yes,” said Oda, not minding, and led us toward it.
In the corner, under a heavy canvas tarp peppered with mouse droppings, was a large rectangular object. Oda dragged the tarp aside and it folded stiffly onto itself as it fell to the floor.
The ODEC was a little larger than I’d expected; as advertised, the interior volume could just accommodate a cat, but the apparatus constructed around it made it as big as a clothes washer. The cat box itself—plywood, and covered with slabs of pink insulation foam from the home improvement store—was suspended by a web of thin, taut cords inside of a somewhat larger fiberglass tub. This was in turn surrounded by more pink foam insulation. All of it was hung from, and supported by, a sort of exoskeleton of slotted angle irons. Wires were coming out of it all over the place: thick, round black cables like the ones that the cable guy staples to your house, hair-thin copper wires coiled millions of times around hidden cores to make what I guessed were electromagnets, medium-sized wires with colored insulation, flat rainbow ribbons, tubular braids, bare copper that had gone greenish-brown with age, and power cords with two-prong plugs at the end, their plastic insulation now stiff and cracked.
On a shelf beneath the cat enclosure rested a plastic box that looked like the CPU of an old desktop computer, except that instead of beige it was an intense purple color.
“Silicon Graphics Indigo,” Tristan said, reading the logos on its front.
“An awesome machine,” Oda said, “before you were born. Fastest thing I could get at the time.”
The entire thing was mounted on rubber-wheeled casters. When Oda tried to pull it away from the wall, these made noises suggesting they hadn’t moved in a long time. “May I, sir?” Tristan offered, and then put his considerably broader back into it. The ODEC creaked and squeaked its way out into the middle of the room, leaving a trail of mouse turds, dust bunnies, and dead spiders across the floor. I was now looking at the back of it. From here it was obvious that Oda had opened up the back of the Silicon Graphics workstation and routed a number of cables into it.
A miniature Manhattan of electrical stuff covered the top. Oda pushed, and this chittered out of the way on ball-bearing drawer slides, revealing the foam-clad lid of the fiberglass tub. Oda picked this up and handed it to Tristan, who found a patch of bare stone wall to lean it against. Exposed in the middle was the lid of the inner plywood box. Oda reverentially unhooked the simple clasp holding it down. He paused a moment, smiling to himself. I wondered how long it had been since he’d last opened it.
Then he lifted the lid, hinged on the far side. A pair of little chains kept it from flopping back. I don’t know what I had been anticipating, but it was no clumsy contraption. The box itself was plywood, but it was lined on the inside with thin sheets of green plastic, scribed all over with fine copper traces that I recognized as circuit boards. In some places, little electronic components had been soldered to these, projecting out into the airspace within the box, but in others, the copper tracery itself seemed to be what mattered. The linguist in me couldn’t help fancying a connection between these fine whorls of metal and the interlaced figures in old Irish manuscripts. Neat holes had been drilled through the plywood in many places to allow wires to pass through and make connections with these circuit
