Discovery: Proton Field #1 Read online

  Miller got a secretive smile on his face, “Something like that, though the output’s pretty hot.”

  Ellen reminded herself, I can’t afford to make this man angry even if he is lost in a blind alley. “That’s a pretty bold claim,” she said quietly. She’d already started thinking about how disappointed her husband would be. He’d grown up down the road in Lawrence Kansas and still had family in the area. He hadn’t liked California in general or Livermore in particular, so he’d been excited about the possibility of moving back to the center of the country.

  “Let me ask you to assume,” Miller said, “that we’re already able to cheaply achieve net-positive fusion of regulated quantities of hydrogen. Quantities small enough that we could controllably generate steam to run a small turbine. Something that might generate enough power for a single home or vehicle. What would your concerns be?”

  Ellen tried not to stare. There’s really no point in trying to sugarcoat it for this guy. A job here wouldn’t even last as long as the one back in Livermore. She said, “Well, my first concern would be related to the impossibility of your claim. But, if I grant that you’re actually able to achieve controlled fusion on a small scale and can generate more energy than you’re consuming, I’d be worried about radiation. Particularly, since I’d assume you’re fusing deuterium and tritium, I’d be concerned about neutron activation of the chamber.” She tilted her head, not sure that he’d understand what she was talking about, “The neutrons released by your fusion reaction will be captured by the nuclei of the atoms in the wall of your reactor vessel thus making the nuclei in the chamber walls unstable. The vessel itself becomes radioactive.”

  Miller said, “Suppose I told you that we’re only fusing protons? No deuterium or tritium involved.”

  “When you fuse two protons to make a diproton, they almost always decay back into hydrogen so you don’t get any net energy. When they do stay fused, it’s because one of the protons became a neutron, so you do have deuterium.” She shrugged, “Essentially you always have deuterium. Next the deuterium fuses with a proton to make helium-3…”

  “Granted,” Miller interrupted before she could go through the entire chain of events, “except that in our set up the deuterium no longer participates in the reaction so all we have is proton-proton fusion to deuterium.”

  “Okay,” Ellen said slowly, “even if that worked,” which it doesn’t, she thought, “you’d still have a fair amount of gamma radiation.”

  “We do,” Miller granted. “What could we do about that?”

  Ellen grinned at him, “Scuttlebutt is that someone at your company has improved a plate that converts gammas into electricity?”

  Miller grinned back, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

  She shrugged, “Even without that, a lot of the gammas could heat a stainless-steel steam generation chamber. The ones that get past the steel could be absorbed by a lead layer.”

  “That’s what we’ve been thinking,” Miller said, looking at her thoughtfully. “I’d like to have you talk to two of the people who’ve really been doing the work on this, okay?”

  “Sure,” Ellen said. But she was already thinking about how she should visit her husband’s family in Lawrence before heading back to California.

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  Aleks saw Myr Sevii close her front door and walk out to her car. Picking up his coffee he slugged back the lukewarm dregs. Once her car had exited the parking lot, he picked up the nice briefcase he had his tools in, got out of the car and started across the lot to her apartment.

  Arriving at her door, he pretended to ring the doorbell. He slowly glanced around as he pretended to wait for somebody to come to the door. No one was visible. Leaning back, he lashed out with a foot. The door flew open.

  Cheap ass apartment doors, he thought disgustedly. He spun and quickly backed inside, pushing the door shut and holding it there with a foot while he opened his briefcase. Pulling out a battery-powered electric drill with a screwdriver attachment, he quickly drove a sheet rock screw into the door frame so it’d hold the door un-suspiciously shut. Setting down the briefcase, he took off his nice jacket and slacks, folding them carefully and putting them away. He pulled out a cheap coverall and put it on along with a baseball cap, mirrored sunglasses and a painting mask. They represented a cheap disguise, just in case there was a security camera in the apartment.

  He put on nitrile gloves and, finally ready, he turned around and looked the place over.

  A couple of hours later, the apartment looked like a war zone. Aleks had started by opening the case of the desktop computer and taking out its hard drives. Since then, he’d been systematically trashing the place in his search for other forms of computer memory. He had a few optical disks and some USB drives that didn’t look promising. They were all labeled to hold less than 500 gigabytes.

  Aleks had used a hammer to break all the outlet covers in order to confirm that they weren’t false outlets hiding stuff in the walls. He’d pulled off the bed clothes and slashed open the mattresses. The closets had been emptied and every piece of clothing checked for lumps. The drawers had all been pulled open and dumped, checking the drawer bottoms for taped on chips. The insides of the cabinets had been inspected for the same. A tiny pantry had had every box of cereal torn open and every can stomped. Bigmouth jars had been emptied into the sink. The refrigerator was empty with the fruit broken open to be sure it was really fruit. Same for the freezer. There were only two sick looking potted plants, but they’d been dumped as well. A couple of big wall screens had been torn down to make sure they didn’t have something taped to their backs. The bathroom medicine cabinet had been emptied, then pulled out of the wall.

  Aleks made another circuit of the entire apartment, looking for any other possible hiding places. I’m betting there’s nothing on those drives. She’s keeping the data somewhere else, he thought with irritation.

  After changing his clothes again, he peered out the window, then let himself out the other door. He didn’t want to have to figure out how to keep the broken front door closed.

  Back at his place, Aleks rubbed his head and stared off into space. The optical disks actually had video on them. He’d checked them for extra data without success. All the hard drives and jump drives were encrypted in a fashion that hadn’t responded to any of the software Aleks had. He’d deliver them to his handler, along with all the information he had on Sevii so they could guess at passwords. But, since he couldn’t even get to a window that requested a password, he wasn’t sure they’d have any better luck. Personally, he thought Sevii’d modified an encryption program somehow so that only her own program would be able to open them.

  Even if they were able to decrypt the data, Aleks suspected the information they wanted wouldn’t be there.

  Kelley would not be happy. And, when that bitch wasn’t happy, Aleks couldn’t find any peace.

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  Vinn stared at Myr when she trotted out onto the court. She never wore makeup at work, but she had on makeup now. She must have had to drive directly to the gym after they’d left work just like Vinn had. He didn’t know much about makeup and so wasn’t quite sure what all she might be wearing, but he could tell she at least had on lipstick and some kind of eyeshadow and mascara.

  With some dismay, he pictured her putting on makeup in her car’s visor mirror during her ride over to the gym. She was wearing one of the jerseys the team had had to buy in order to play in the league. On Vinn, it looked like the cheap one-season jersey that it was. Somehow, just like the silky-looking jersey she wore when she was sharking guys at H-O-R-S-E, the team jersey looked sexy on Myr. With dismay, he thought, I would have expected, if she wanted respect as a basketball player, she’d have toned down the girly, not cranked it up!

  Scott looked disconcerted by her appearance as well. Vinn wasn’t surprised when Scott left Ed and Myr as the two players on the sidelines at the start of the game. Concerned about her reaction, Vinn glanced
at her to see if she looked angry. When he did, she gave him a wink.

  He had no idea what that meant.

  Out on the floor, the guy guarding Vinn said, “Wow, you guys must’ve had a really hard time finding a seventh, huh?” When Vinn didn’t respond, the guy said, “You know she’s gotta play at least five minutes, don’t you?”

  Vinn said, “She’ll play, don’t worry.”

  The guy snorted, “Sure she will.” A minute or so passed, then the guy followed up with, “She’s cute, I’ll give you that. Nothing like having a bimbo on the sidelines to make the rest of you guys play harder, huh?”

  Vinn told himself to just let it slide, but he just couldn’t. Instead, he muttered, “That bimbo’s gonna bring you some pain when she comes in.”

  The other guy just laughed.

  Vinn took a break early because he wanted Myr to get in the game. He felt a little worried about what Myr’s reaction might be if she decided the guys were trying to keep her on the sidelines. Ed subbed in in Vinn’s place, leaving Vinn and Myr standing on the sidelines. He glanced at her, wondering if he should say something about her makeup.

  She grinned at him, “Go ahead, say it.”

  Trying to look innocent, Vinn said, “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, you know you want me to lose the makeup.”

  “Um, well, I am a little surprised.”

  She snorted, “Yeah, they’re gonna be surprised too, aren’t they?”

  “But… don’t you want them to take you seriously?”

  She arched an eyebrow, “Oh, they’re gonna take me seriously.”

  Steve came out before Vinn had to think of a response. When Steve joined Vinn on the sidelines, he said, “Playing full-court is too much like running wind-sprints, and after the other night we all know how I suck at those, right?”

  Vinn didn’t answer; he was too focused on Myr, worried about whether she’d be able to hold her own. She was bringing the ball in from under the basket and the guy guarding her evidently thought pressuring her would be a good way to score a turnover. He was in front of her, arms out to signal his intent to keep her from bringing it in. Myr said something to him that widened his eyes; then she blew him a very visible kiss.

  The guy looked flustered and she fired a bounce pass under his outstretched hand.

  The pass went unerringly to Scott. Scott was their best ball-handler, and he drove hard down the floor, evidently hoping to catch the other team off guard while they were focused on Myr.

  Myr beat Scott down the floor.

  Vinn thought Scott’d been hoping to go all the way for a layup, but one of the defenders got out in front of him so he pulled up. Myr was waving for the ball, but Scott ignored her, shooting it to Mark at the post instead. Mark put the ball up, but missed. He did, however, grab his own rebound. Bringing it back down, he dribbled it once, evidently thinking he could try to go back up, but he got stymied. Looking for someone to send it back out to, he ignored Myr and threw it to Ed.

  The guy guarding Ed stole the ball from him and turned for the other end of the court. Everyone else turned too, but somehow Myr had the ball back! The guy guarding Myr had also turned for the other end of the court which left her all alone.

  She put up a three pointer.

  It wasn’t one of her best shots and Vinn gritted his teeth when it banged into the rim and shot up, but it went straight up and came right back down through the hoop.

  The guy who’d been guarding Myr grabbed the ball to bring it in. Myr stood in front of him with her hands only slightly up. Vinn thought, She’s got to get her hands higher, the guy’s a lot taller than she is! Evidently the guy thought the same thing because he threw it in from up high.

  But Myr deflected his pass anyway. One of the guys from the other team recovered it, but it was a near thing.

  The other team took the ball down court to make a two pointer. Mark came out, putting Vinn back in the game.

  That trip down the floor, Scott made a two pointer. The other team brought the ball back down court where they ran what looked like a practiced play. However, when the play had developed and they put up their shot, it missed. The ball came to Vinn who rebounded it.

  Turning Vinn scanned the court. Holy crap! Myr’s way the hell down court and still going! Finding it hard to believe she’d pulled so far out in front, Vinn took a step to the right and fired a long pass down court. It wasn’t his best throw, but Myr snagged it without even looking like she’d had to stretch after it. She was all by herself, so Vinn expected her to go in for a layup. Instead, she pulled up at the three-point line and dropped another bucket.

  Noticing the stunned look on the guy guarding him, Vinn patted him on the shoulder, “Told you she’d bring you pain!”

  Although they played in a clumsy and undisciplined fashion, made a lot of errors, and missed a lot of shots; their team won the game by a comfortable margin. Over and over, the guy who got the rebound looked down court to see Myr already there. She constantly stole the ball and kept putting up fade-away jumpers from unreasonable distances—which kept falling in.

  They all went out for a beer afterwards. By the time they got to the bar Myr’s lipstick and eyeshadow had disappeared. Once everyone had a full mug, Scott raised his in the air and said, “To our secret weapon, Myr Sevii!”

  “Hear, hear,” they all chorused.

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  Myr still felt pumped from the game when her car pulled into her apartment’s parking space. She told the car’s AI to set the locks and got out.

  At her apartment door, she felt surprise when her key unlocked the lock, but the door still wouldn’t open. It felt like it was jammed in the middle because she could still move it a little near the top and the bottom. Maybe it’s just swollen from a humidity change? She thought about shoving really hard, but decided to go around through the other door to have a look at the jamb from the inside.

  When she pushed open the other door, the devastation she saw inside made her pull back in shock. Pausing motionlessly, she pondered whether she should call 911. Could whoever did this still be inside? she wondered pulling her Taser out of her jacket. After a moment’s listening to silence, she decided they had to be long gone. Calling 911 was certainly a priority, but she wanted to have a quick look around herself first. She pushed the door back open and walked through her place, getting more dismayed at every step.

  The destruction was so thorough it made it seem like vandalism. At first she felt violated, but then she slowly became enraged.

  She decided to call 911 before her head exploded.

  The policeman pulled off his cap and scratched his head in puzzlement. “Any high-end jewelry or other reason someone might suspect you’d have some small, highly-valuable items?”

  Myr shook her head saying, “Why?” wondering why anyone would think of her as a burglary candidate.

  “When they toss a place like this they’re usually looking for something small. You have any secrets they might have been looking for?”

  “No,” she said, even as a sick dread rose up inside of her. Data files! she thought in horror. I didn’t check to see if my data drive was still there! I’ve been so paranoid about keeping my data secure and yet I didn’t even consider that the data might’ve been what they were after! She shook her head in disbelief. We’ve just had an immensely valuable breakthrough at work and I thought someone was trying to steal my cheap-ass jewelry!

  While the two cops continued taking pictures and searching for evidence, Myr stepped back outside and went to her car. “AI.” she said, speaking to her phone, “Call Vinn Saigler and Arlan Miller.”

  “It’s after 9 PM,” the AI responded, in an effort to keep her polite.

  “Call them anyway.” While she waited for the connection, she reached up under the dashboard and down into a little crevice under the floorboard carpet. With great relief, she found the data drive she kept in the car. She plucked it out and stuck it in her front pocket.

 
The AI said, “Arlan Miller and Vinn Saigler are both on the line.”

  Trying not to let her anger show in her voice, Myr said, “Someone’s broken into my place and trashed it, searching for something. I’m assuming information about…” she paused, suddenly deciding she didn’t want to say anything about their fusion discovery on a public network. After a second, she continued, “About our generator.”

  A stunned silence greeted her for a moment, then Vinn said, “Holy crap! You think they found anything?”

  Miller reacted more to the traumatic event Myr was going through by saying, “I’ll come over and sit with you until the cops are done. You should stay at my place tonight.”

  Even though Myr was more angry than fearful, she found Miller’s response heartwarming. She responded, “Thanks for the offer. My place is completely destroyed, but I’ll stay with my mom until I get it straightened out. What I’m more worried about is whether anybody’s come after you guys?”

  They both responded negatively.

  “Dr. Miller, can you get building security to check over our offices and make sure no one’s tried to break in there?”

  “Good idea,” he responded. “In fact, I’ll go over there and have a look around myself.”

  “You guys are keeping your data encrypted, right?” Myr said.

  Miller said, “All the drives on Miller Tech computers are encrypted.”