Lifter: Proton Field #2 Read online

  Lifter

  Proton Field #2

  By

  Laurence E Dahners

  Copyright 2017 Laurence E Dahners

  Kindle Edition

  Author’s Note

  This book is the second story in the “Proton Field” series of books:

  Though this book can “stand alone” it’ll be much easier to understand if you read it after the story Discovery (Proton Field #1). I have minimized the repetition of explanations that would be redundant to that first book in order to provide a better reading experience for those who are reading both of them in order.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Epilogue

  The End

  Author’s Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Gerhard Voeller, Verification Chairperson for the CTBTO (Comprehensive Test-Ban-Treaty Organization), leaned back in his chair and asked, “What’ve we learned about that detonation north of Hawaii a few months back?”

  Several people at the table glanced uncomfortably at one another. Jordan Renner faced Gerhard and said, “It didn’t have enough power to be a nuclear blast.”

  Gerhard frowned, “How small was it?”

  Renner shrugged, “Less than a ton of TNT. Probably about a quarter of a ton. The smallest successful nuclear devices have produced the equivalent of at least five tons. Besides, there wasn’t any fallout.”

  “I thought satellite assets detected a spike of gamma radiation?”

  Renner looked uncomfortable. He didn’t say anything, but after a couple of minutes he nodded.

  “And our friends in the United States?” Gerhard asked, “What do they say?”

  “They say nothing. Of course, that’s what we would expect if it was their test, but we have the distinct impression that they don’t know either.”

  Gerhard noticed a young woman near the far end of the table fidgeting. “Ms. Trudeau, you look like you have an idea?”

  She looked like she’d bitten something sour. Gerhard thought she didn’t like being put on the spot, but then her expression firmed and she said, “Yesterday an American company announced that it’d developed technology with which it could produce proton-proton fusion. They claim that it does not progress to the release of any neutrons. Therefore, though it does emit gamma radiation, it does not produce neutrons or other forms of particle radiation normally associated with fallout.” She hesitated for a moment, then said, “They claim to be able to control this fusion process very tightly. Supposedly they can achieve fusion of nanogram quantities of hydrogen and they intend to use it to produce power.”

  A number of heads began shaking. Someone muttered, “Another claim of cold fusion. They’ll be retracting those assertions soon enough.”

  “Ms. Trudeau, what do you have to say to those objections?” Gerhard said, waving an idle hand in the general direction of the naysayers.

  “The CEO of Miller Technology, Arlan Miller, rented a boat in Honolulu the day before the detonation.”

  Gerhard smiled as other people at the table darted surprised looks at Trudeau. That young woman will bear some watching, he thought.

  ******

  With Connor so happy about the antigravity setup in his bedroom, Myr had come over to install antigrav in the rest of the condo. She’d already screwed the frame to the ceiling in the hallway, kitchen, bathroom and living room of her mother’s condo. As she clipped focal point generators into their attachment points on the frame and plugged them into the power cables, something kept niggling at her mind. By the time she was nearly done, she’d decided it had to do with the fact that the clips that held the generators onto the frame were so weak. After all, the generators would lift someone off the floor if they were given sufficient power, yet they snapped into place—and pulled back out of place—with little force. She’d designed them that way but…

  It just felt counterintuitive, she decided. Something that could lift you off the floor seemed like it should have to be bolted securely to the ceiling. Logically, she knew that the focal point generators didn’t actually pull you up into the air; they only warped space in the focus region. That warped space caused the hydrogen molecules in your body to sort of fall toward the focal point generators. Nothing pulled on the generators, or, perhaps if it did, since space was warped symmetrically, the pull in one direction counteracted the pull in the other.

  At least, that’s how she and Vinn understood it. Counterintuitive or not, the pull felt by an object that had been attracted to a focal point was not reciprocally felt by the focal point generator itself. Myr frowned, she always felt like somehow it violated the rule that there should be an equal and opposite reaction. Even when we fell down—pulled by Earth’s gravity; the earth was pulled towards us as well. We just couldn’t tell it with our senses. However, as far as protons were concerned, a focal point generator made them want to fall towards the focus, even though the generator didn’t experience a reciprocal pull. When she’d been trying to get her head around this phenomenon, Vinn had referred her to the Alcubierre drive, a 1994 speculation on Einstein’s general relativity field equations that suggested space could be warped in front of and behind a spacecraft, thus moving the craft in violation of Newton’s third law.

  It didn’t seem to Myr that Alcubierre’s speculation was at all related to the proton field warp, but it did seem that warping proton space worked somewhat along the same lines.

  She was starting to attach the last row of focal point generators to the ceiling frame and still had the long power cord dangling down from the frame. She hadn’t actually played with these focal point generators very much. At least not the ones that produced a linear field. Until she’d thought of using the proton field to make her brother Connor nearly weightless, she’d pretty much only worked with generators that made geometrically progressive fields. Those fields were dangerous. They didn’t pull much at a distance, but as you got closer to the focal point of a geometric generator the pull rapidly increased to levels that could crush tissue and kill by sucking important parts of you into the field’s focus. Geometric generators wouldn’t be good choices for lifting Connor, both because they didn’t pull much at a distance, but also because they were so dangerous if you got close to them. You had to protect the focal point with something to keep parts of you from being pulled in.

  The linear generators she’d been installing could obviously pull hard. After all, they could lift most of a person’s weight. But even though the force could be felt a lot farther away, it never got strong enough to crush tissue. She felt pretty sure that linear generators could be built powerfully enough to be dangerous, but it would require a lot more power than a geometric generator needed to be hazardous.

  On a sudden impulse, she decided she wanted to mess around with one of the generators before she mounted it. She hadn’t just played with any of the linear generators. When she’d had them built a month or so ago, she’d immediately mounted them on the ceiling of Connor’s bedroom.

  She paused to think about whether there was any way she could do herself serious harm and decided it should be safe enough if she kept the power low. She attached one of the focal point generators to the power cord that was dangling down and lifted it off the floor. She put her other hand out close to where the focus should form and told her AI to send a low level of current to that particular generator.

  As expected, she immediately felt a pull from a spot six inches from tip of the generator. In fact, a momen
t later she found the fingers of her left hand wrapped around the point in space where the generator was focusing the field. They weren’t being sucked in and crushed down to a microscopic point like they would’ve by a geometric generator; nonetheless, even at this low power it took some effort to open her hand and pull it away from the focal point. I’ll bet you could make something like handcuffs by turning up the power on a linear generator, she thought.

  She told her AI to turn the power down further before it trapped her hand again, then sat thinking for a moment. She pointed the generator up at the ceiling and told the AI to increase the voltage enough to move the focal point out to a spot about two feet above her in the air. With it that far away, she couldn’t really feel the attraction at this low setting, so she had the AI slowly boost the current. She barely noticed her hair lifting away from her head. Doing what she did nowadays, rising hair was such a common event that she cut her hair short to avoid problems. She felt surprised when she began to feel a bit lighter, but still felt no downward push on the hand that held the generator. Rationally, she knew she shouldn’t feel any push or pull from the generator despite the fact that it was warping space sufficiently to make her feel lighter. After all, that was what she’d just been going over in her mind. But it was so damned counterintuitive. It seemed like every time she formed a new proton field she got a feeling of unreality—even when it did something that she’d seen before and cognitively knew should happen.

  Myr kept increasing the current and feeling lighter and lighter. It pulled harder on her upper body since it was closer to the focal point. She could feel it stretching her spine. She was simply enjoying the sensation, but then she suddenly experienced a sudden, violent, swirling sensation, as if she’d been turned upside down.

  She could see she was right side up, but the conflicting perceptions made her queasy. In reaction, she’d immediately shut off the power. The sensation disappeared, though it left behind some nausea. For a moment, she had no idea what’d just happened since the testimony of her eyes put the lie to her feeling that she’d flipped over. A suspicion surfaced, so she spent a few minutes googling. First she looked up the inner ear, which she knew had something to do with balance. This led her to the semicircular canals which turned out to be the structures that actually sensed the position of your head. She realized what’d happened was that the upward pull had displaced the fluid in her superior semicircular canals. They were vertically oriented circular canals with rings facing front to back—in close to the same plane as the ring of the external ear on the sides of the head. When her head was right side up, the fluid in the canals rested at the bottom and told her that her head was in its normal vertical orientation. When the proton field lifted hard enough, it pulled the fluid around to the top of the semicircular canal where the liquid would be if you were hanging upside down. Presumably, the conflicting information—between her eyes which were telling her that her head hadn’t moved, and the sensation from the canal which told her she’d just flipped upside down—led to the bizarre feelings she’d experienced.

  She slowly increased the power once more. She experienced the wrenching sensation again, but this time didn’t turn off the power. After a moment she seemed to adjust to it, though she still felt weird—as if the floor had suddenly become the ceiling and she was hanging upside down from it.

  A minute later, as she kept boosting the current, she felt her buttocks shift lightly around on the carpet beneath her. She thought, Am I just going to be able to float up in the air?!

  A moment later she drifted free. As she floated higher in the air, holding the focal point generator that was lifting her, she thought, It’s like the old saying about “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps!” What was once inconceivable suddenly turns out to be possible!

  Tilting the focal point generator a little bit to the right caused her to start floating across the floor in that direction. Oh my God! It’s like the flying dreams I have some nights!

  Connor called to her from his bedroom. “Hey Myr, are you almost done out there? I’m dying to start walking around the rest of the house.”

  “Almost,” Myr called back as conflicting emotions exploded over her. Joy that her brother was excited. Sadness that muscular dystrophy had so reduced his world that the fact that her invention could let him walk around the condo could make him so happy. Near ecstasy as she realized she might be able to do something even better for him. Lifting her voice, she said, “I just need to install one more row of the generators, then we can turn it on and you can walk on out here.”

  She had the AI turn down the power and sank back down to the floor.

  But her mind was whirling…

  Looking up at the ceiling, she thought, Putting up those generators was a huge waste of time!

  Nonetheless, she finished putting up the last row. She powered them up, set them at a lift of seventy-five percent, then started walking around the rooms she’d put the lifters in, making sure that the generators came on when she walked under them and supported her evenly at all locations. It would be a disaster if Connor walked out into those rooms and stepped into an area where they weren’t actually working. Hitting normal gravity in some area and crashing to the floor would probably break the bones of someone with weakness as severe as his. That was the reason she’d installed a battery backup to the lifter system in case of a power failure.

  Connor said, “Can I come out yet?”

  After turning the lift up to 95%, she said, “Yeah, just don’t go in the kitchen till I finish checking to make sure all the lifters are working in there.”

  She put off checking the kitchen for a minute because she wanted to watch Connor come out and walk around the condo. Seeing the look of joy on Connor’s face as he moved through the hall and out into the main room was incredibly heartwarming. He might be walking in an oddly crouched gait because of his joint stiffness, but he was walking! Myr kept thinking about how this technology was already out of date. She wondered whether she should tell Connor that she’d already had a better idea, but decided she should wait until she was sure she could make it work.

  Instead of participating fully in Connor’s celebration, her mind kept being distracted by the potential of a mobile antigravity device. She also wondered why, with Connor setting the lift in the room at “ninety-five percent,” they hadn’t experienced the sensation of being flipped upside down before now. It seemed that, with the lifters pulling on the upper body harder than the lower part, the lifters should be pulling hard enough to spin the fluid in her ear canals. Developing a suspicion, she got the bathroom scales and weighed herself. Sure enough, what she’d designated “ninety-five percent” wasn’t really lifting all but five percent of her weight. Back when she’d first set up the antigrav in Connor’s bedroom, she hadn’t actually used a measuring device as she’d been designating the strength of the lift in the room. She’d just designated the strength according to the way it felt to her. Since it was pulling more on the upper body, she suspected she’d designated the amount of lift more according to the way it felt as it pulled on her upper body. Shortly after that she’d very carefully given the AI controlling the lifters instructions to never give more lift than ninety-five percent for fear that Connor could get injured by falling up to the ceiling if the field attraction got too strong.

  Her mind also kept drifting back to how much time she’d wasted setting up the ceilings with multiple generators. Time spent designing and building the ceiling lattice with all its proton field generators. And the time she’d spent setting up the software that only powered the generators when the infrared detectors sensed that someone was underneath that part of the ceiling. When she’d first built the ceiling for the bedroom, she’d run all the generators all the time, but with each generator drawing hundreds of watts, running the entire ceiling really hogged power.

  If I’d been smart enough to realize I could just attach a single generator to Connor himself. I could have saved myself so much work. With a
generator strapped directly to Connor, he’ll be able to leave the house! She frowned, But he’d need a portable power source. Even in the house, trailing a power cord would be a pain, but a portable power source would be heavy.

  Connor said, “Have you checked the kitchen yet? I’d like to go in there and try making myself some toast.”

  “Just a minute,” Myr said, turning and walking into the kitchen. Walking in five percent gravity was a slow process because of the lack of traction. As she had in the other rooms, she planned to walk back and forth across the room—like you would mowing a lawn—to be sure she covered every spot. She started along the right wall, but then jerked back in astonishment when the cabinet to her right suddenly opened, spilling Tupperware off its top shelf.

  For a brief moment she thought someone was playing some kind of practical joke on her. Then she squinched her eyes shut in frustration as she realized that her approach to the area had activated the focal point generator in front of that cabinet. Of course, the focus didn’t just pull her up off the floor, it pulled surrounding hydrogen containing material toward it from all sides. The focal point generator had pulled open the wooden cabinet door and pulled the plastic Tupperware—both the wood and the plastic contained plenty of hydrogen—off the top shelf. The Tupperware was now all piled on the ceiling around the generator. It has to be pulling on the wooden joists for the floor above and the cardboard outer layers of the sheet-rock in the ceiling too, she thought, it’s just that those structures can’t move.

  Walking around the periphery of the kitchen, she wondered how much of a problem this was going to be. All of the wooden cabinet doors opened as she approached them. However, most of the cabinets had seldom-used glass or ceramic objects on the upper shelves. She’d worried that the food would come out of its cabinets but Myr’s mom wasn’t very tall so food items were generally kept on the lower shelves. Hydrogen containing materials like food and plastic on the lower shelves were being made light by the attraction of the focal point generators, but weren’t being pulled on hard enough or laterally enough to actually come outward off the shelves. But Connor won’t be able to close the cabinet doors after he gets something out, she thought.