Jon Quick: Boy Genius
April 6, 2006 in Articles
Jon Quick: Boy Genius
By Eric R. Ashley
In order to properly describe the amazing career and gifts of the first person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, Astronomy, and Chemistry by the age twenty-five, we must go back to a fated meeting in the green-plush velvet waiting room of the Dean of Students at Wundermark University. Now Wundermark, whose school fight song is one of the worst of the lot in the Ivy League, and so I won’t inflict it on you, is mostly known for its law school, but in truth that has faded with the passing of greats, and it should be known for its Physics and Music programs, the point of which will become apparent momentarily.
Alfred Quick sat uneasily in one of the leather and brad-dotted chairs. He was built like a box. His square face, jutting jaw, broad shoulders, and chest muscles to match had helped him in the few fights he had found himself since he had grown up in a very nasty place, where disputes over food were often settled with automatic weapons, and it had taken him a while to understand that police in New Brunton, the college town that served the Ivy League university of Wundermark, did not want a bribe. Or at least not a bribe for simply leaving him unmolested as they passed each other in the street.
Still his brain buzzed, and hummed, and jiggled despite growing up in a place that valued cunning rather than logical speculations. Equations danced before his eyes, and transmuted into giant pictorial representations of the numbers involved. He was a brilliant man, who despite his somewhat beaten up appearance preferred quiet and numbers.
But he posed for the Dean of Students a problem. He wanted entrance into the High-Energy Physics program. This was run by the redoubtable Dr. Lawrence Winchester, who along with his other faults of being an excellent public speaker, and a brilliant theoretician crowned this by being totally unimpressed by any notions of political correctness, or polite speech. Others had tried to tame the gold, now going to gray, lion of Physics, but he ran his department with an iron hand, liberally decorated with spikes from which hung the political scalps of his enemies.
For Dr. Winchester wanted only one thing from the world. He wanted genius. Or to put it another way, he was a perfectionist and a grouch, and completely unashamed of these traits.
And Alfred Quick was black enough to be almost purple. Granted, his grades were high, and his SAT was stellar but well, Dr. Winchester wanted results and not artificially padded numbers which the DoS would have been glad to accept. He would happily toss the earnest young man out on his ear, and enjoy the stink made. The Dean of Students would not. So the DoS was most inclined to let the young man go, despite the stink that that would make, and despite the fact that his never to be called by that name quotas needed two more students.
Which brought him to his second hair-tearing out student. Caroline Arwell was supposed to be a scholarship student from overseas, a Music major with a minor in Tennis, which would look very good on his reports, and he had heard, not having seen her picture, that she was attractive. Most attractive. This was good, for they needed a beautiful co-ed to put in a picture on the Begging-Alumni-For-A-Spare-Nickel Brochure as the ungrateful DoS thought of it. And if it was a beautiful black girl, an African-American as her entry form stated, well, that would insulate them from charges of sexism from the Women’s Studies professors. And he could always do without the static from that quarter.
The problem with her was that she was white. Oh, she was from Africa, South Africa. Her mother was American, and her father was South African. So she was most definitely African-American, just not the expected kind.
So now he was two short on his not-a-quota quota.
He sighed inside his office trying to see some way out of this that did not involve him personally getting down on his knees to beg some bright black kid in a community college or a second rank engineering school which suited them to a T to jump into the more competitive waters of Wundermark where they could sink. He hated doing that to kids, but sometimes you just had to make a sacrifice. He thought the Russians had called it ‘throwing someone off the troika to the wolves’ or something. Here only the best of the best had a chance to succeed. If you were brilliant, driven, had incredible stamina and work ethic, and bucket loads of money, Wundermark was the place for you to shine.
And then something happened, indeed some might argue that this thing that happened was the principle point of his life, other than his life in its own right of course. The fact that he was not even in the room when it happened tells you something about his life.
Caroline was tall, blonde, beautiful, no gorgeous, and a natural athlete. Nearly everything that she had ever tried had come easily to her. She skated, skied, played concert piano, and all with the same unconscious ease that led some magazine writers to refer to her as a ‘goddess’, perhaps Diana of the Hunt. So being in this small room, with the stupid little man next door, the so-called Dean of Students, holding up her right to get on with her education did not improve her temper.
She let it out by drumming a staccatto beat on the arm of the chair, and then a decelerando that appealed to her that led back up into a crescendo. She saw the poorly dressed man across from her look up from his cogitations. She waited for him to rebuke her, for she intended to give him a piece of her mind when he did. Not that he was the true source of her anger, but he would do in a pinch as a lightning rod.
She had some of a goddess’ arrogance as well. Instead, he pointed out the mathematical relationship between the beats she was drumming out on the chair. With a feeling of ‘knowing’ she grasped that this was what she had been trying to put into the proper form, this was a key.
So she smiled at him. Now he had been smiled at before, but when Caroline smiled at someone, they stayed smiled at. So he faltered a moment, and then recouped by pointing out another deeper mathematical relation. She frowned, and then smiled as it clicked for her.
And then another, and another, and she found herself having to ask him to repeat a bullet point that he had made. It had been clear, but she still had not grasped the twisty, but elegant logic of it. This was a first for her.
Unlike some other very talented people, Caroline was not afraid of visibly not knowing something, or not very afraid. She would boldly plunge in, and expect to master it. This time, she could not. This man, handsome enough, but no great looker could go places she could only see from a far-off. But by the time, she realized this, she did not care, for she was in love. He, of course, had been in love since she smiled at him.
And the Dean? Oh, Caroline had a talk with Dr. Winchester expressing her view that he had best listen to the new student before letting MIT steal the brightest genius of the year. So he did, and then he told the DoS what for, and everyone was happy, even the DoS who accepted it as one of those things a DoS Was Not Meant To Know.
By the end of the year, they were married. Two years later, they both entered their respective Master’s programs, and then he got his Doctorate while she started performing in orchestras with a flair that began to bring her some small fame.
This did not bother him. Instead, he proclaimed that it merely proved the rest of the world could learn what he already knew. The ‘goddess’ deigned to accept his worship with a smile.
He took a job in industry since he wanted a free hand, and he had such skill that he could demand such. The big bucks appealed as well, since Caroline had expensive tastes, when she could afford it.
And then she finally became pregnant. They had prayed long and hard for this, and a boy finally came to them. Eight and a half months later, he was pulled from inspecting the guts of a cyclotron by a grinning assistant who drove the shell-shocked man to the hospital.
That long night was strange. Distant booms were heard over the hospital, and out near the old college where they had met (for they had moved to a company in the area of Wundermark), and when he left to move the car, and then rush back, he saw state troopers around the hospital, but dressed in an odd uniform.
A number of visitors came by, doctors they said, to check on things, but everything went very smoothly indeed. And on Easter morning, Jon Clancy Quick entered the world with ten toes, ten fingers, and a piercing wail.
Later, Alfred, or Dr. Quick as he was called, talked to some police, and casually, or so it seemed, mentioned the State Policemen guarding the hospital. No such uniform he was told. Must be a joke. And the booms had been ‘peculiar atmospheric phenomenon’ which was Scientese for Don’t Have A Clue.
Jon seemed a bright, and attentive child. He walked a bit late its true. But then Alfred had as well. Although Caroline panicked because she had walked at seven months. But he would not talk. Not one word.
His hearing checked out just fine. His second birthday went past, and still nothing. Therapy was prescribed, and only the Quick’s exalted position kept people from nasty comments, and interference.
His third birthday passed, and all this time, Alfred had been noting the way the boy played with blocs, and spools, and tapped out rhythms on the floor, and he had been convinced that something was going on inside the little boy. But the schools wanted him declared ‘autistic’ or ‘retarded’. But Caroline and Alfred were all too familiar with the danger labels posed, and fought back. And when they fought as one, which was most of the time, no one dared stand in their path.
And then just short of his fourth birthday, Jon Quick spoke his first words, his first sentences, his first paragraph.
"Daddy, I want you to buy me a telescope. I want to look at the moon tonight to see if its really made of cheese. I mean, mozza-mozzarella cheese, since it can’t be cheddar. Cheddar is yellow. Unless the moon changes to different cheeses as the color changes?"
Needless to say, he got his wish.
From then on, he took off. He had already been reading. Now, he questioned the logic and assumptions behind the stories. And his endless parade of ‘Why?’ could last for hours before, he found another topic to interest him.
Now the schools wanted to call him ‘genius’, and Alfred found it hard not to punch out the principal of the local school who had been denying the boy entrance into the regular classes. But he managed, by deriving pi out to the twentieth decimal before he spoke again.
And refused.
For he had seen how the schools often mistreated both the bright, and the dumb, and frankly everyone else at the same time. He might have sent his child to school unknowing, but after being exposed to their ways, he saw too much of the same attitude he had seen in his childhood from the governmental soldiers who thought they could do whatever they liked because they had an automatic weapon. Alfred still had not told Caroline of the soldier he killed when but a boy of twelve, and he did not intend to. It gave him enough nightmares saving his sister from the ‘helpful men in blue helmets’ who had been even worse than the regular soldiers. There was no need to share the nightmare.
And so they found themselves without a plan. They needed teachers for their child, and the stifling environment of a public school would not do.
And here Caroline stepped to the fore. She was not afraid of anything, and she surely could handle this. So she cut down on her schedule, and started home-schooling. Soon, she had to be sending frequent calls to work to ask advice on questions like "Why do black holes not all clump together?" which she could answer, if her brain was not frazzled. But, little Jon was a ball of mischief inside a dynamo.
The people at work weren’t happy with this, and his drives home. Especially because they were the new owners, and they didn’t see why they had to pay his salary which was too high in their opinion. So he left, and between the two of them they were able to keep Jon learning, and from burning the house down with his solar mirror experiments.
This was Jon’s first patent at age six. He invented a rippling technique for getting extra energy from solar mirrors for short time spans. It did not bring in much money, at first.
And the Quick’s found themselves having to sell their home, but in truth they did not mind. They were having a blast being with each other, and learning with Jon. And a sibling was on the way.
Not sure what to do, Alfred got in the car and drove with Jon, just driving. And then Jon pointed out an old school, abandoned in the center of Valleton which was down the road, and down the social ladder from New Brunton. It had a playground was Jon’s first criteria.
Buying the school was not hard, once Dr. Winchester called in a couple favors to clear up the buearaucratic mess. It had seemed like the city was determined to hang onto it, even though they had no use for it, and not enough money set aside to renovate it back to usefulness either. But a few strings pulled by their friend, and they got the abandoned building for a song.
Once inside, cleaning, fixing and upgrading took up most of their time. Alfred greatly enjoyed working with his hands, but Jon was daunted by the scale of the project. So in his spare time, when he wasn’t helping his father hammer and saw and chisel, or learning math and English and German, and Afrokanns, and music, and a dozen other topics from his parents, or one of their scholarly guests (who were often poor enough that they enjoyed a classroom as a bedroom), he put his mind to solving the problems.
In a catalog, he saw a cleaning device. It was very expensive. So he took some tools from the abundant supply in the basement, figured out the likely structure, and built a copy. It worked wonderfully well, especially after he tweaked it.
It was only after he was quizzed on where he got the idea from, when the job was mostly done, that he found out what he had done was not exactly polite, and possibly illegal. But then he was seven at the time, and had not heard of copyrights, or properly understood patents.
The embarrassed, but proud father wrote the company in question, and at first dubious about the truth of the story, they sent an investigator who reported the truth to his astonished superiors. Despite several lawyers advice, the company owners could not see suing a seven year old, and as it turns out they were glad of this because Jon had made two key improvements to their design. One made repair vastly simpler, and the other boosted suction by nearly fifteen percent.
In return for these ideas, the company sent their clean and renovation crew over the school, and redid the whole place. This show "Schoolhouse Home" for C&R Team became one of their more popular reruns, as much for the work done, as for watching Jon continually pester the workers for explanations on what they were doing. But his naïve questions worked very well, since it let other people, adults, who knew zero about renovation in on the ground floor.
Once it was completed, the Quick’s became aware of a problem. The local neighborhood was unsafe. And it was becoming worse, for the Quicks had been targeted as wealthy, and thus people suited to making ‘donations’. Before it got violent, or even the threats were verbalized, the two elder Quicks took a dozen gang bangers with them to a target range. There Alfred demonstrated his cool nerve, and steady hand. But that was not the worse for the gang bangers who were having a hard time even hitting the target.
No, worse came, for Caroline stepped up and rippled off shots in a quick flurry. Most hit the bullseye. She continued, and as she casually explained to the fear struck watchers, it was like music. One had to know the proper time to wait, and the moment to strike the key, or pull the trigger.
After that, there was little trouble for some time.
The playground was expanded, and modernized, and the dangerous items disposed of which ranged from a roll of rusted barb wire, to a sandbox full of syringe needles. Jon had two contributions to the playground. One he built a robotic copy of a smaller robot dinosaur (after getting permission, and talking to the design team about the differences between large and small design) that stalked the playground, and kept an eye on troublemakers. He was eight at the time.
He also instituted a payment plan for the playground. Since money was scarce among the neighbors, and he himself had little use for it, he bargained for ten minutes of clean-up time for every hour of playtime. It took some work, but he talked everyone into it, and thus the playground was always sparkling clean.
It was there that he met his lifelong pal, Walter Winters. Walt was a large kid, known for his slow movement. What Jon saw was that the kid was afraid of hurting those around him by knocking them down. So, he got a visiting professor to teach Walt how to dance, and it was problem solved, and best friends from then on out.
Another friend moved into his life. Keith Morton was a homeless man who lived near the school. One time he explained his problem, he was forgetful. He forgot to take his pills which ‘keep me with both feet on the ground’. So, Jon built a small robot which would carry Keith’s things, and remind him at the right time.
Still, Keith had issues. He was partially crippled from an exploded mortar from his time in the Army. The mortar had damaged his spinal cord. He could only move his legs with difficulty. So Jon designed a bypass, a small box is preferable to a large one, so he made it small. This device let the various part of their bodies talk to each other.
Keith wanted to help his friends use this, but here government got in the way. It would take at least ten years of testing before such was legally allowable, and it would require several millions of dollars to pay for all the tests and fees. Jon has fifty-four dollars, and little patience. He published the design on the Internet, free of charge, and let anyone who wanted to build themselves a copy. This was illegal, at least to build a copy, but suddenly, all over the nation there were a lot of ‘spontaneous cures’ of people with disconnected nervous systems.
From then on, the Quick Home became even more a cultural center. Scientists from all over, particularly ones with odd ideas, made their way, and visited for a day, a week, or a month. In the case of about half a dozen, they just moved in.
However, the school was huge, a long, low four story thing on a ten acre lot in the midst of the city, built of massive concrete, and admirably suited as a research center. Soon enough, there were several new businesses across the street.
A burger joint, with robotic waiters appeared when Jon was fourteen because he thought robot waiters was just cool. A bowling alley, because Jon needed a place to take Cassandra Monroe, his girlfriend, and another home schooled genius.
While on the subject of the community, it went through some progressions. At first, gangsters ruled the roost, but then the Quicks demonstrated that they were the Alpha Lion and Lioness in this particular jungle in that memorable shooting exercise. And then the community shunned them for a while, but then a few women started visiting. Asking questions, and inquiring about home schooling their little ones.
The local school board reacted with fury, which did them precisely no good at all. Just by walking in the door, Caroline beat them. And then Alfred would start with the facts, the numbers of students, and the monies spent ever increasing, and the ever declining skills, and bury them in the accountability they so desperately tried to avoid. In the end, most of the board ended up finding honest work.
And the district began to go home school. Literacy shot up, and reading about shootings of school children went down. The community blossomed, and soon it started to get downright pleasant.
So the landlords tried to kick people out, but foreseeing this, the contracts had been rewritten a year ago to forestall such a possibility. In the events detailed in the book Jon Quick and His Amazing Tunnel Machine the landlords hired thugs and lawyers, but Jon was able to stop the arsonists, thugs, and also eavesdrop on the unscrupulous landlords association through his use of underground tunnels.
This led to many of the homes being sold to the residents, and things became positively suburbian in the heart of the great city. But better, since you could walk to your stores, instead of driving a car twenty miles to a store.
In the events detailed in Jon Quick and the Astonishing Land-Lev, a train that used the Earth’s magnetic field to lift it off the ground, the community even got its own set of mass transport, light rail. And Jon got his first vehicle which had been his aim.
He also crossed swords with Pierce Blankley, a developer with strong connections in City Hall, who had tried to have Quickling (as the area around the school was now called) condemned so he could build a highway through it since he had bought land on both sides of Quickling, and hoped to sell at a profit due to his arranging both sides of the deal.
Later, Jon dealt with a threat from a coalition of gangs which were threatened by the rising tide of honesty, and respectability, and middle-classness of Quickling which was spilling over into the neighboring districts. A spate of crimes headed toward a riot, but as detailed in Jon Quick and the Momentous Metal Man, he was able to teach a group of video game addicts to run Metal Man robots which patrolled the streets, and restrained criminals with carefully padded iron hands.
When the riot came, it was more of a non-event than an event, and a dozen Metal Men operating a fire truck with water hoses were able to convince the hard-core gang members at the center of many riots that it would be more profitable to try to steal another day.
During all these adventures, Walter was at his right hand, and occasionally used his large fists to good advantage, and Cassandra was always available for good, even if eerie advice. And Keith, his former homeless friend, kept an ear to the ground to advise Jon of anything untoward happening in the streets.
So it was Keith that kicked off the next adventure of the astonishing young teenager. A garbled message, and the teenager went racing off in his Land-Lev, which since it wasn’t a car, he could legally drive the hovering train. Someday, he wanted to build an airplane, and a rocket, but that was for later.
At first, everyone thought Keith had been kidnapped by drug lords, but then the more terrifying truth became apparent. Someone from the failed nation-state, if one wanted to be generous of Liranis, had decided to deal with the West once and for all. He planned to start in the Great City which housed the small district of Quickling.
Dr. Hiram Borshan, a renegade scientist, had hired himself out to the Liranis to build a doomsday virus. But, as shown in Jon Quick and the Instant Innoculizer, he was no match for Jon’s inventive genius.
The virus was released, but the quick production of Innoculizers meant that everyone got protected from the Doom Virus before its worst effects became apparent. The Innoculizer was able to vaccinate, in effect, after the virus had begun to do its damage.
But before the police could capture Dr. Borshan, he escaped in a rocket he had hid in an old factory building. But they were able to rescue Keith Morton who told Jon where the evil doctor had gone.
Into orbit.
In the events detailed in Jon Quick into Orbit, he won a great prize for being the first teenager into orbit, and also forced the evil doctor to abandon his space station which housed a bio-weapons facility. In Jon Quick and the Orion Overture, he built an Orion rocket, and zoomed out to meet the doctor in what he hoped was final combat. For the doctor had decided to drop a Texas sized asteroid, on Texas.
The Orion rocket was vastly more powerful than the doctor’s conveyance, but the evil doctor’s asteroid had picked up speed. So in the end, Jon was just barely able to save Earth, by pushing the asteroid aside, but it caused his ship to crash, and explode in the Amazon.
Happily, all the nuclear bombs used in an Orion rocket were gone, and the ship just feel to Earth. The doctor was assumed to have died on the asteroid as it floated sunward to its eventual immolation.
Jon woke, and found himself being cared for by a primitive tribe. He did not remember who he was since he had sustained an injury to the head. However, his inventive genius asserted itself, and he began by building dams, and fish ponds, and barriers to hold out alligators. In the process, he learned much about hunting and native medicines, and taught much about engineering, and his faith which was two-fold. For he was a Christian and a scientist. And thus he doubly believed in an orderly, and benevolent cosmos.
He found this under attack when government officials tried to get the tribe to move so they could steal the now more valuable land (after the tribe adopted Jon’s improvements), and the tribe resisted. So the officials turned to a worker of dark magic to destroy Jon and his tribe. But his faiths in both God and science were rewarded when the magics failed to touch him, and the ‘dreadful beasts’ turned out to be hoaxes, and were revealed as simple tricks.
This is described in Jon Quick Amongst the Astounding Amazonians. Eventually, his memory came back, and he was able to create enough fame for his friendly tribe that it would look very ill in the world press if something bad were to happen to them. So he left them with a sore heart, but glad to see his family again after a year apart.
His parents had not given up hope, and they had nearly found him when he recovered on his own, and found them.
After this, his mind and body toughened by a year in the Amazon, he began to pursue science and adventure with even more skill and enthusiasm.
He fought slavers in the Mid-East, who used neck control devices to keep their slaves in line, in Jon Quick and the Selective EMP, a blast that shorted out all such control devices while leaving benevolent electronics undamaged.
He dealt with a malevolent AI in Jon Quick and the Intelligence Amplifier. This device made even Jon cautious. He foresaw that it would be used, but he felt that morality and social conditions were not ready for its widespread use. And it could be absolutely disastrous in the wrong hands. So he hid it in the Quick Vaults along with his Hypertime Accelerator, and his Inverse Mirror Gate. All these devices he felt would have their use, but the potential for misuse was too great, right now.
In Jon Quick and the Robot Army, he faced a horde of assassins, and an army of robots bent on conquering the world. He counterpunched by building his own robot army by using nano-technology.
In Jon Quick and the Teleport Machine, he visited the Outer Planets in a powered body armor, and saw some intriguing glyphs on the surface of Triton. Following them up, he found himself in a trap. The evil Dr. Borshan claimed to have planted the glyphs to draw Jon in. Now he planned to use the Teleport Machine to teleport chunks of antimatter into the Earth’s atmosphere, and destroy the planet from his Triton Base. But Jon saw through his deception, and deciphered the glyphs.
He was able to call for help from the Xtian Aliens, and stop the evil Doctor. The Xtian Aliens however refused to come back with him. They were on a higher level of development, having mastered the widespread use of the Intelligence Amplifier, and the Hypertime Accelerator, but not yet the Inverse Mirror Gate which in their minds marked a truly advanced society. It was generally thought through their sector of the galaxy that too much contact between higher and lower civilizations was ‘intimidating’ for the lower civilization.
================================================================
You could take the Teleport Machine as the final adventure of Jon Quick as a boy. It does bear the marks of an ultimate adventure. Or you could continue onward as he discovers new things still as a boy. Or you could insert the verser meeting Jon at an earlier point in his stellar career.
Here are some other astounding events that can be weaved as the game master wishes for proper effect.
Jon Quick and the Damaging Dissolver Goo. Jon creates a dissolve anything goo, and now he has to save the Earth from his experiment. Jon Quick and the Perilous Pastwatch. Jon builds a rocket that goes faster-than-light, and accelerates away from Earth. There he uses a miniature quantum black hole to draw light to itself. This light is snatched up by clever receptors built of Elemental Iron in front of the black hole, and correlated with others by his MegaComputer. The idea is that light from Earth if caught far enough out is a window onto the past. Five hundred lightyears out, and you can see five hundred years into the past.
But some people don’t want the secrets of the past dug up.
This adventure occurs after certain technologies are developed by Jon.
Jon Quick and the Extraordinary Elemental Iron details Jon’s efforts to create a forge which will make Elemental Iron. It takes him to a hidden Aztec tribe with ancient technologies from before the Flood, and to orbit to the evil Doctor’s space station which is now Jon’s. In orbit, he builds a forge, which allows him to make this super-strong material. Jon Quick and the Amazing Megacomputer explains how he built the world’s first benevolent AI, and rescued Walter, his best bud, from a Liranis prison camp in the process (also rescuing Dr. Omar Sa’din, one of the world’s greatest computer scientists, and a prisoner of conscience of the cruel regime of Liranis.) Jon Quick and the Baffling Black Hole follows his adventures as a Neo-Luddite gang of terrorists try to stop him from building the quantum black hole. They fear it will destroy the Earth, and none of Jon’s explanations seem to reach their closed minds, even when he explains that the structure of the hole makes such damage impossible, and he offers to build the hole in deep space just to assuage their fears. In the end, he has to accept that there are certain people that logic won’t reach. Jon Quick and the Warbling Wave Machine details his efforts to stop Doctor Konrad Victor who believes that there are too many humans on the planet, and decides to remedy the situation by using sonic energy to break up the Artic ice cap, and then to cap it with using sonic energy to create the world’s largest tsunami. Jon resolves the issue with a much larger version of his Tunnel Machine. He sabotages the icecap breaker, and tunnels out the Northwest Underwater Passage so that the wave can be directed to expend its energy in safety. Meanwhile, Jon lays the foundations of what he hopes will one day eventually be the world’s largest city, an underwater paradise capable of holding fifty million people. And as he points out, one only needs a hundred twenty of them to hold everyone on the planet, and that would just barely take five percent of the space in the Gulf of Mexico, and take him a couple years to build, and leave the rest of the planet open for sports, and bird-watching. Jon Quick and the Quicklotron describes how Jon built his famous power satellite in orbit which provide beamed energy (the beaming device was the Quicklotron) free of charge for the Great City for a day before nervous regulators, and oil company execs shut it down, and was also used to push a robotic solar sail to escape the solar system. Jon did not explain, but he evidently had plans which required some sort of extra-solar platform.
The Quicklotron was able to convert energy to neutrinos, which fly through pretty much anything, and are thus pretty harmless, and then self-convert back to solar energy mere yards above the ground-based receptors.
===============================================================
One rule of thumb for Multiverser worlds based on Children’s series: The adults are frequently capable, but they are absorbed by their own duties, and have little time to spend doing the neat things in life, and this often also leaves them not doing the most important things like catching the saboteur because they were busy at the office shuffling paper.
Hope you enjoyed.