Discovery: Proton Field #1 Page 17

  A glint in his eye, Smith said, “Yeah, you do that. Too bad your appetite got you into this, huh?”

  Joe started to rise, but realized he hadn’t extracted his payment, something the FBI had told him to be sure to do. “I could sure use a smoke,” he said, eyes on the pack into Smith’s pocket.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Smith said pulling out the already opened pack and shaking it to extend a single cigarette. Joe took the cigarette and stood up. He would’ve been angry just getting one in the past, but today he was happy. One was all the FBI needed. Joe was about to simply walk away when Smith said, “I’m pretty sure they’re not going to be happy with whatever you gave me today. I’d suggest you start working harder on finding better info. You don’t want to get any visits from people who aren’t as patient as I am.”

  Jerking his head in an unhappy nod, Joe headed for the door. Despite his strong desire to do so, he didn’t look around to see what Deming or any of the other FBI people might be doing.

  And, as if betraying Smith hadn’t been rough enough, he still had to tell Dr. Miller what he’d been doing…

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  “The new arrangement improves the efficiency of the focal points a lot.” Vinn said, “I’ve run the numbers and we really should be able to get to space.”

  Arlan thumped a fist on the table, “Yeah!”

  “I’ve been studying nuclear thermal rockets,” Vinn continued, then spoke to his AI, telling it to throw up some diagrams on the wall screens. Arlan and Myr looked up at the screens as Vinn said, “There was quite a bit of research on them back in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.”

  Arlan said, “Using fission reactors?”

  “Yeah. One of the big problems was that those reactors were really heavy and, of course, they generated a lot of neutron radiation. One of the important things I learned from that research is that the hotter you can run a thermal rocket the more efficient it is—as measured by the specific impulse produced.”

  Arlan frowned, “Fission gets really hot.”

  “Yeah, it does.” Vinn quirked a lip, “Hot enough to melt the reactor.” At Arlan’s questioning eyebrow, Vinn continued, “So, the issue is that you have your nuclear pile generating heat inside a chamber. The propellant, usually liquid hydrogen, flows over the outside of the chamber. The hot chamber heats the hydrogen so it expands. Unfortunately, you can’t afford to let the chamber get any hotter than the melting point of the material it’s made out of so you can’t max out the efficiency of the rocket. This led to their experimenting with reactors that actually had liquid or gas cores…” He paused, then waved a hand dismissively, “All that’s just to say we have some significant advantages. We don’t have a fission pile which saves a huge amount of weight, and we can achieve fusion in the middle of a chamber full of water—far away from the walls of the chamber—so they won’t have as much of a tendency to melt.”

  “Why did they use hydrogen instead of water for propellant?”

  Myr said “It expands more and gives you a bigger impulse. But we can’t use it because if you feed large quantities of pure hydrogen to a focal point it’s all going to fuse.” She moved her hands violently apart in an exploding motion and said, “Boom!”

  “Wait a minute,” Arlan said. “If you’ve established your focal point in the middle of the chamber to suck hydrogen in and cause fusion, why isn’t it also going to suck the water into the focal point?”

  “It does,” Myr said, “but remember the focal point attracts hydrogen far more effectively than it does water molecules because the hydrogen protons in water are bound to oxygen and oxygen has a bunch of neutrons. Once fusion starts generating a lot of heat at the focus, it converts the water into steam and blows it right back out of there. We think it probably pulls a layer of hydrogen in beneath the water and that layer forces the water to the outside.” She shrugged, “The heat of the fusion drives the water away as well.”

  “Won’t it melt the tube you’re using to inject the hydrogen into the focus?”

  “We can inject the hydrogen into the water pretty far away from the focus. The focus does a great job of sucking the hydrogen right through the water.”

  “How much of this have you actually tested out?”

  Myr said, “Really, the little chamber we’ve built to test out our fusion model isn’t too different from the chamber you’d need on a rocket. So, you could say we’ve tested most of it. But, we’ve placed an order for a high-strength, high-temp chamber attached to a rocket nozzle so we can see how much thrust we actually get.”

  Arlan opened his mouth to ask a question, but Vinn spoke first, “You know how you hired Ellen Mitchell to help us with the nuclear physics part?” Once Arlan nodded, Vinn continued, “We need to hire a rocket scientist to help us with this. After all,” he winked, “this really is rocket science.”

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  Myr got home to her new apartment. It was more upscale and closer to her mom and brother as well as having better doors than the old place. Even though the doors themselves were heavier and stronger than her old ones, she’d done some reading and replaced the screws in the lock set and strike plates with longer heavier ones to make it harder to kick open.

  Every time she thought about her better doors though, she wondered why she’d put in the effort. After all, the new apartment still had glass windows that could easily be broken with a rock. She’d looked into getting bars installed on the windows but didn’t think the owner of the complex would allow it. She sighed, I’m gonna have to buy a house of my own one of these days, she decided. She’d been poor for so long that, despite the fact she’d gotten a pretty good salary for the past few years at Miller Tech, she just couldn’t think of herself as wealthy enough to own her own house.

  As soon as she’d finished putting away the groceries, she picked up the bag of flour she’d left out and carried it over to set it on her glass and metal coffee table. Before she hung up her coat, she pulled out an HVAC register and hid away her terabyte jump drive. Hanging up the coat, she reached into its pocket and pulled out what looked like a regular flashlight. Once again it wasn’t a flashlight, but another version of her proton field generator. This one was even smaller than the one she’d demonstrated to the team a while back. More pocket sized, though still big enough to be clumsy in any pocket except the one in her coat.

  Sitting down on the couch, Myr handled the little generator tentatively. She’d gotten so used to having a glass or metal rod protecting the focal point that this one—which didn’t have that protection—made her nervous.

  There were quite a few safety features built into it. In order to turn it on, a rotary switch in the base had to be turned on and twisted to the desired setting. That switch turned itself off if the device wasn’t used for sixty seconds. Even with the rotary switch on, a focus wasn’t generated unless the user’s small finger depressed a momentary switch near the base and the index finger depressed a momentary switch about two thirds of the way up. Finally, the thumb had to push a slider forward at least a millimeter. In that state, the focal field would activate six inches in front of the generator. Pushing the thumb slider further forward upped the voltage, moving the focus out further. With the thumb slider fully forward the focus would appear almost 3 feet away.

  Myr poured out some flour and spread it around till it’d at least dusted the entire top of the table. Taking a deep breath, she turned the switch on the base of the generator to its second detent and gripped the device so she could push the two buttons with her index and small fingers. Holding it level with the top of the table she depressed the pinky finger button, moved the thumb slider forward, and then used her index finger to push the switch near the front. About eighteen inches out onto the table a small splotch of the flour disappeared.

  She let off the button and the flour puffed back onto the table

  Myr practiced for about twenty minutes until she could open the field focus fairly accurately at almost any distance from the minim
um six inches, out to this generator’s maximum distance of nearly 3 feet. Because the thumb slider had a two-inch travel that was being translated into a 2.5 foot distance, she was only accurate to plus or minus a few inches, but she was better than she’d feared. She switched off the generator and went to her utility closet to find stuff to clean up the mess on the coffee table.

  She’d gotten out a dustpan and a whisk broom when she laughed at herself. Putting them away, she went back over, picked up the field generator, and turned the switch on the base to the fourth detent. Turning it on, she swept the focal point back and forth over the table, sucking up swathes of flour about four inches wide. When she was done, the glass of the table looked sparklingly clean. Keeping the device powered up she carefully walked over to hold the focal point above her trash container. She switched it off. With a “poof” sound, the flour billowed into the trash. Unfortunately, just before she turned it off, she got the focal point a little too close to the plastic bag lining the container. The field pulled part of the bag toward itself and sucked it in, ripping a hole and spilling a little garbage into the container itself. Since the container was made out of plastic, she couldn’t use her handy-dandy mess-cleaner-upper to correct that problem. Dammit! she thought, pulling the bag out of the trash can, carefully holding the rip closed so it wouldn’t spill.

  Chapter 5

  Myr, Vinn, Ellen and a group of their techs were all working in the big room in the basement. Vinn and Ellen were running tests on version 3 of the field generator. Myr was putting together version 4.0 for the next set of tests. Vinn was holding up one side of a sensor ring while the tech fixed it in place. He needed something to do while waiting for the next set of data to analyze. Something besides anxiously hoping the data’d continue to fit his mathematical model.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Vinn watched Myr. He realized that at first he’d simply been infatuated with her slender, fit look and pixyish face even though he’d found her acid personality difficult to tolerate. Now though… now he found himself thinking about her a lot. I still love her look, he thought, but either she’s changed the way she acts or I’ve come to understand it.

  Myr still had a biting wit, but somehow the bite was teasingly pleasant rather than viciously hurtful. She no longer called Patty and Bart Tech-one and Tech-two. Vinn thought they’d come to really like working for her. He wondered if some of her brittle edge had been defensiveness because of her lack of a PhD. Recently she’d started making fun of herself for not having one.

  PhD or not, Vinn thought she was a true genius. Her particular brilliance lay in her ability to… he wasn’t sure what it was; somehow she suddenly figured out things that had stumped everyone else. She might not be able to call up facts from memory, but she had a surprising knack for assembling disparate and confusing results into a suddenly comprehensible whole.

  Besides which, she was freakishly good at basketball. People in the league were starting to talk about her as she helped the team win game after game.

  What’s not to like? he thought to himself. He desperately wanted… something more to happen between them. If only I had the courage to talk to her about something besides basketball or work.

  Myr looked up and saw him watching her. She grinned, “It’s good to see you using all that genius to literally act as a ring stand.”

  He grinned back and shot for a self-deprecating tone, “This is about my speed. I’m thinking about going back and getting another PhD in ring-stand. Just worried about whether I can hack it.”

  Noticing movement out of the corner of his eye, Vinn looked over and saw Dr. Miller standing in the door of the lab. Miller cleared his throat to get their attention and by the time everyone looked around Vinn realized that Miller looked fairly distraught. “Myr, Vinn, Ellen, we need to talk.”

  Myr frowned, “Okay, what about?”

  Miller gave a brief shake of his head, “Let’s do it in the conference room.”

  “But we’re…” Vinn began.

  Miller shook his head again, “We need to talk now.”

  Myr and Vinn both looked a little frustrated when the three of them arrived in the conference room. Ellen had only been working at Miller Tech for couple of weeks and didn’t know how things usually went so she merely looked curious. Vinn looked resigned to the delay but Myr said, “Can I at least go back and get the techs to keep working on my assembly? They’re just standing around.”

  Miller sighed, “I’m worried we need to abandon fusion completely.”

  “What? Why?!”

  “You know I’ve been working on setting up an invitational conference at which we’d have a bunch of companies look at your proton field technology and eventually bid to commercialize it, especially fusion…” he paused, glancing back and forth from Myr to Vinn. “I was working up a presentation for it when I suddenly pictured one of the reps asking me if a focal point generator wouldn’t let almost any Joe Blow build an H-bomb.” Miller stopped again to stare sadly at his young protégés, “I don’t want to rain on your parade, but I’ve started thinking we need to destroy all records of this technology and take our memories to the grave with us.”

  Vinn and Myr both started shaking their heads at him. Vinn said, “Joe Blow wouldn’t be able to do it…”

  Arlan interrupted, “Come on Vinn, all he’d need is a proton field generator and a tank of hydrogen. Mount the generator on the side of the tank, focus it inside, and he could take out Kansas City.”

  “No, he couldn’t. I won’t disagree that he could achieve fusion and make a big boom, but he isn’t even going to be able to destroy a city block.”

  Arlan narrowed his eyes, “Why not? And if you’re going to tell me that we just won’t sell high terahertz generators to anyone except certified utilities, we can’t take a chance that someone won’t just build his own.”

  “I’ve run the numbers already because I had the same concern,” Vinn said. “Even the steepest gradients we could theoretically generate wouldn’t be able to make a really big bomb. The problem is that the focal point becomes more and more microscopic as the gradient gets steeper. So, you have this tiny area where fusion occurs, and as soon as fusion starts happening at the focus you have tremendous heat-pressure pushing the hydrogen back out.” He shrugged, “We’re not even close yet, but I think if we optimize everything, we might be able to fuse about seventy milligrams of hydrogen a second. That’s about ten gigawatts or 12 million horsepower—somewhere close to the amount of power generated by each of the three rocket engines on the back of the old space shuttle.” He tilted his head, “It’s a lot of energy, something like what you’d get from blowing up two tons of TNT each second, but megaton H-bombs were like blowing up millions of tons of TNT.”

  “Even two tons sounds pretty scary…” Arlan began tentatively.

  “Yeah, but that’s with a lot of engineering optimization. We wouldn’t be selling ones optimized for explosion to people to install in their house. They’d be getting ones designed to steadily fuse small amounts of hydrogen in order to power a house or car. But, let’s say some idiot does manage to optimize one himself and hooks it up to a tank of hydrogen…” Vinn shrugged, “Let’s say the idiot manages to generate as much energy as a few kilos of TNT. You can imagine that it’d blow up his hydrogen tank and destroy the field generator almost instantaneously. The fusion process would stop in microseconds. I’m not saying it won’t do any damage. It will, but your idiot could do as much or more damage with a gallon of gasoline and, so far, we haven’t outlawed that.”

  “Gasoline?” Arlan said, surprised by what seemed like a non-sequitur.

  “Yeah, you have to supply the oxygen separately, but gasoline has about ten times more energy by weight than TNT. Surprising huh?”

  Arlan blinked in surprise but then shrugged that off. “Sure, but you’re saying that we’ll be able to generate a lot more energy than those few kilos of TNT you’re proposing…”

  “Yeah,” Vinn said, “but we’re p
roposing to produce that fusion in water inside a chamber engineered to resist the expansion of the water and channel it steadily outward through a rocket nozzle. Joe Blow would be doing it inside a closed hydrogen cylinder that’s going to explode and dissipate the hydrogen before he even gets to the equivalent of a half kilo of TNT.”

  Miller turned to look at Ellen, “You’re our nuclear physics expert, is Vinn’s assessment correct?”

  She shrugged, “Yeah. Running the theoretical numbers it is. Of course, I’m still astonished that it works at all, but I ran the numbers we have and got the same conclusion. The real miracle here is that we can produce sustained, controlled fusion over long periods of time. It doesn’t look like it would be possible to achieve huge amounts of fusion in microseconds like you’d need for a bomb.” She leaned forward, “Barring someone coming up with a way to increase the size and intensity of the field focus beyond what we think’s theoretically possible, it isn’t going to let anyone build bombs that are more powerful than current conventional explosives.”

  Arlan opened his mouth to speak, but Ellen put up a halting hand and said, “I want to point out that everything we’ve said here so far is all based on theoretical numbers. We need to do a real-world test to make sure we’re not catastrophically wrong.”

  Everyone turned to stare at Ellen with wide eyes, “How do you propose to do that?!”

  “Testing of nuclear weapons was initially done in uninhabited regions of Nevada or out on atolls in the Pacific,” Ellen said musingly, “Later they did a lot of testing underground. We could do it way out in the ocean…”

  Vinn interrupted, “They stopped doing that because…” he paused tilting his head thoughtfully.