CHAPTER 6
Grashof and Prandtl

Maud and Sparrow crowded in behind him. "Hey, wait!" warned Wilt. "We need to be real careful not to disturb anything, and this place looks like the great grand-daddy of all trip hazards. Remember, the only other mug we know about ate a big chunk out of Madison."

"But where are Dr. Stevens and Dr. Leong?" asked Maud. "Are there more rooms in this place? Do fallout shelters have back doors?"

Cautious exploration revealed doors to a small bathroom, a tiny kitchen, closets, pantry, and cramped sleeping quarters. Fan sounds came from a louvered cabinet which also held car batteries, a charger, switches, and connectors. The main room they were in was apparently intended as the living space. No signs of occupation, current or otherwise.

And of course, no occupants.

A closer inspection of the giant mug showed it was made of heavy cardboard, about half an inch thick, like the cylinders used by construction crews to pour concrete into for making columns. The massive coils were covered with fiberglass cloth and plastic resin that held everything to the drum in the proper orientation. Inside was a somewhat smaller drum, spaced out from the center of the main drum to form hollow mug walls about six inches thick. Fat cables led into the gap, no doubt feeding coils hidden inside the walls, like the flattened racetracks decorating the outside of the original mug.

On a heavy metal rack to the left of the big shelter door they found shelves holding tools, plus spools of cable and varnished copper wire in assorted thicknesses. Another shelf held what appeared to be experimental mugs of various sizes, made of cardboard mailing tubes in different lengths and diameters. All were adorned with the same arrangement of wire coils as the larger version in the middle of the floor. Some were visibly charred, or had coils whose wire varnish showed obvious heat-darkened regions. A couple appeared to have one end completely missing.

Glancing back toward the entrance, Frax noticed the equipment racks had begun giving off more light than when he first saw them. Three monitor screens glowed softly: One on the rack nearest the mug showed a pastoral outdoor scene, obviously a "wallpaper" image; one on the rack next to it was dark with an old-fashioned flashing green command prompt; and one by the door showed a black-and-white wide-angle view of the outside of the garage, as if viewed from the house — maybe from a camera hidden in a soffit vent near the back door.

"Aha," said Wilt, "Dad probably rigged that so if he saw somebody coming, he could scamper up and pretend he'd been working in the studio all along. Sneaky!" He turned up a volume knob on a nearby speaker grille. "He could even listen, in case Mom called him. And look, here's a switch marked `Out' and `In'." He flipped it to `In' and the scene changed to a view of the studio above. He switched back to `Out' and left it there.

More searching turned up two lab notebooks in the drawer of a little workspace shelf on one of the equipment racks. "OK, gang," said Wilt, "let's take the notebooks into the house and look for clues, and leave everything else exactly as it is."

Just then Mrs. MacGruder's angry cackle burst from the speaker. "What do you think you're doing there?" There was a moment of panic as they thought she was somehow watching them, but a look at the monitor showed two men in front of the garage door, holding gym bags.

"Oh. My. God." whispered Maud. "It's Grashof and Prandtl!"

The two men began smoothly spinning a tale about Dr. Stevens wanting to meet them here, but Mrs. MacGruder wasn't buying it. "Looks to me like you're trying to break in. What's in those bags? Burglary tools, I'll bet. If you don't leave right this minute I'm calling the police!"

"OK, OK, we're leaving. But honest, ma'am, we really are colleagues of Dr. Stevens." They turned and walked back down the driveway.

Maud said what was on everyone's mind: "Just like the Terminator; we know `they'll be back', probably late at night while everyone's asleep. I am seriously creeped out." She paused. "They couldn't have missed seeing my car outside, and I have no doubt they can follow it to Sparrow's. There's no place to hide!"

Wilt puffed his cheeks and blew out a big breath. "OK, where does this leave us? We have to assume that anywhere we go, they'll know. So motels are out. Sparrow's place is out. Dad's lab at the U is one possibility, but I'm sure they can get in there with ease, and if anyone stops them they can sling a line of bull like we just heard, or maybe even show ID that they're on some sort of official business. In fact, Dad's lab and Dr. Leong's are probably the first places they looked for the mug."

"Actually," said Frax slowly, "we're probably in the safest place right now. Even if they do break into the studio, what are the odds they'll find the trap door? They might just see those mug copies and make off with them — mission accomplished, as far as they know."

"Yeah, maybe," agreed Wilt. "But if we're wrong, and they do a serious search, we're sunk. We can't even close this door, let alone lock it. We'd be totally trapped."

"How about if we took down the ladder and left it on the floor?" asked Sparrow. "They wouldn't want to jump down a twelve-foot hole. And if we thought they might, we could scatter something around the landing area to discourage them. You know, like loose bricks or something that'd be sure to twist ankles when they landed. The ladder itself, for that matter."

"This all sounds pretty good so far," said Maud. "But I'd feel a heck of a lot better if we had some way to keep them from getting in the shelter door. Maybe we can tie it shut, at least as far as it can go, almost shut like when we found it."

They inspected the door. Their side had five heavy-duty flat sliding deadbolts spaced from top to bottom, with the bolt mechanisms on the door and the rectangular eyes on the frame. The door and frame were stepped, with a wide lip on the outside of the door that would nestle into the outer half of the frame and compress a tubular seal extending all around the door; with the door closed and the bolts drawn shut for an actual disaster, the seal would be squeezed tight. Maybe not airtight, but close.

"No post-apocalyptic marauders would have gotten into this shelter, for sure," said Wilt. He pointed to a pile of junk in a corner. "There's plenty of electrical cable over there, not to mention whole spools of it on the shelves. We could tie it between the bolt handles on the door, and the eyes on the frame."

"Sounds like a plan," said Frax. "When the cables are pulled tight with the door ajar like this, the bolt blades will hit the frame lip instead of the mating eyes. If the Feds try to pry on the door, they'd have to cut or bend all the blades to get in. And due to the zigzag step in the frame they'll have only a little crack to look or work through; hard to get a saw to reach the bolts, with the cables stretched along their backsides. Which they won't even be able to see."

With a bit more discussion they all agreed it would probably be safe to spend the night in the shelter. "But what makes us think they'd go away after one night?" wondered Wilt. "If they can get into the garage in the first place, there's nothing to stop them coming back night after night, bringing more tools as needed. They could even work during the day, as long as they didn't make enough noise to tip off Mrs. MacGruder."

"Speaking of which," said Frax, "it seems she didn't know we were in here when she chased those goons away. Probably too engrossed in her TV show when we came in. I wonder if they thought we were in here. I mean, they could see Maud's car out front, so they'd figure we were either in the house or out here. They would have rung the front doorbell before they tried to break in, to make sure. For that matter, they may have already been in the house."

"What is with these guys, anyway?" said Maud. "They're like Nazis after the Lost Ark or something!"