"Yeah, and as long as I don't know what we can't do, I know we're all right," chimes in Kirk, poring over plans for the new Holotronics office for which ground is to be broken this spring. The new headquarters, which will incorporate a clean room, optics lab, and engineering and office space for 22 people, will eventually be equipped to manufacture systems that use Kirk's Optical Tunnel Array. Other joint commercial ventures are relegated to the realm of possibility.
Kirk swings his 1979 Lincoln Town Car down Main Street. Past the Marathon Oil building and the baronial homes where many of its top executives reside. Through a public park by the banks of the Blanchard River, where Tell Taylor wrote the music and lyrics of the classic "Down By the Old Mill Stream." Kirk is recalling his decision to move back to Findlay eight years ago. His father, he says, was overjoyed when he passed the fireman's exam. His other interests -- the electronics stuff -- were "way over his head." But Findlay, a big-company city with a small-town ambiance, held no particular romance for the returning son. "Coming from Toledo," he says, "I could see right away how clean and nice it seemed. But then, most plastic structures look clean and nice." His words are tinged with the same cool cynicism he usually reserves for the paper-pushers and big-oil bigshots that are the bane of his existence.
It is a Monday in November: a day off from his captain's duties at the north side station. Findlay is going about its usual business as it usually does: quietly. On other days off, Kirk is more apt to be in Washington, D.C., conferring with intelligence officials about plugging his SLM into missile guidance systems, than dropping by the firehouse for a cup of coffee with the boys; but he is willing to indulge a visitor's whim. And yes, he acknowledges the "schizophrenia" of his two careers dealing with pixels one day, fire axes the next. He says it is a situation that will soon resolve itself by his leaving the department. Not because of the threat to his well being, but because of the time commitment Holotronics now demands. He admits that living two lives is becoming increasingly distracting.
"More and more," he sighs, "I find myself having to be two completely different people. In the station, you can't talk over peoples' heads. Or down to them, either. You're part of a team here. One of the guys. Then I go to Washington to talk about [Department of Defense] contracts, and I find I not only have to reinvent my future, I have to reinvent my past."
A fiction writer rummaging around for thematic nuggets would find much of richness in Findlay's own past. A century ago, the discovery of natural-gas deposits turned Findlay into a town aflame with entrepreneurial heat. "The Brilliant City," they called it then, and the Midwest -- indeed, the country -- had not seen anything like it before. One well, the great Karg Well, pumped out 12 million cubic feet of gas a day, the highest flow rate in the world. Gas became so plentiful that Main Street was lit with roaring methane torches, and any company willing to move here could have free fuel, free light, even free building sites for the asking. So many did that land values quintupled in a single year. It was an era of almost profligate indulgence. When the Karg ignited, locals say, it spewed forth a flame so high and so hot you could spread a blanket in the grass on a January evening and picnic with the family by gaslight. The flame burned for four months before anyone bothered extinguishing it. Soon afterward, the gas dried up; and Findlay's dreams, like fine soot, settled back to earth. Only Marathon's arrival, in 1905, would rekindle the economic hopes that have carried the town through most of the 20th century.
And now comes Kirk and his spatial light modulator. By chance or design, the peculiar financing of Holotronics has rigged a very interesting deal.
"I get the feeling," says Jack Oakman, "that if Holotronics ever strikes it rich, this town will have to do a whole lot of hiring [in its police and fire departments] all at once."
"Do we dream?" says Moose Jeffery. "Hell yes, we dream. We dream about buying the station, locking the chief inside, and setting the whole thing on fire. We dream about the day we won't have to work two jobs to support our families, or scrounge from paycheck to paycheck." He pauses. "Look, there are a lot of public officials around here who are pretty small in their thinking. They see Ron getting all this publicity, and they resent it. I know at least some of them are thinking, 'I hope the little son of a bitch fails so we can take this Holotronics stuff and shove it right up his butt.' In three years, if this company's what we think it is, they'll have so many public employees bailing out you'll think somebody yelled 'Fire!' in a crowded theater."
It will be, at minimum, an interesting sequel in the continuing series about a boyish inventor who turns the technocrats on their ear. In the latest volume, our hero reinvents a laser light source and turns his town once again into the Brilliant City. Call it Ron Kirk and His Spatial Light Modulator. In Findlay, it already promises to be a best-seller.
