A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5) Page 2

  She cleared her throat and to her surprise, he paused for a moment. “Well, I’ve got an early day tomorrow,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, looking around, apparently noticing for the first time that the restaurant was clearing out. He checked his watch. “Yes, I suppose I’d better be getting back as well.” He cleared his own throat and signaled their waiter, “I’ve truly enjoyed getting to know you.”

  You mean you’ve enjoyed telling me about yourself, Arya thought. Because you’ve learned nothing about me from this conversation. She smiled, “It was a pleasant evening and the food was good. What’s not to like?”

  He walked her out and waited for her Uber with her. “I used to use Ubers myself,” he said, “but now that I can afford it, I find I prefer having my own car.”

  “Do you now?” Arya asked as if she found it interesting, rather than an obnoxious brag, as well as a putdown.

  When the Uber arrived, Vihan turned and clumsily hugged her. Oh! He’s soft and pudgy! she thought with some horror, mentally comparing him to the way Kaem felt. It’s well hidden under those clothes. But… ugh. She reluctantly hugged him back, then quickly turned and opened the door of the Uber, afraid he’d move in for a kiss.

  “Thanks for a pleasant evening,” she said before quickly closing the door.

  As the Uber pulled away, she tried to think rationally about him. He’s successfully started his own business. He knows his stuff. He was thoughtful enough to drive up here to go out with me. He has a pleasant face. She felt embarrassed to be thinking of superficial physical characteristics, but she needed to remember that she’d liked his face to counterbalance her dislike for his squishy physique. Which is another superficial sentiment, she thought, dismayed with herself.

  She shook her head and reassured herself, I don’t like him because he’s a self-interested braggart who talks too much. The fact that his body feels like it’s never had a bit of exercise has little to do with it.

  She still felt guilty about her reaction. But, not guilty enough to go out with him again, she decided.

  ***

  Lee’s earbud said, “You have a call from Mr. Will Goran, Chief Technical Officer at Space-Gen.”

  I wondered who was going to get Prakant’s spot, she thought. “I’ll take it… Hello, Mr. Goran. Congratulations on your promotion.”

  “Thanks,” he said, “I hope things are going well for you there at Staze?”

  “Things are great. They’re doing some amazing things here.”

  “Um, I’ve noticed you’re not exactly spending fifty percent of your time working at Space-Gen.”

  “Yes, sir. Mr. Prakant and I talked about it. He said Mr. Marks preferred I spend more time here so I’d be up to date on changes that might affect Space-Gen. So, I’ve just been coming to Space-Gen when it’s time to cast more Stade for you guys or to consult on designs, etcetera. Would you like me to convert to being a full-time employee here at Staze?”

  “Maybe if we split you 25-75?”

  “I asked the people here at Staze about that once. They feel like my shepherding your products from here and giving you the inside track on what’s going on with Staze is worth more than fifty percent, so that’s as low as they’ll go. They’d be happy to pick me up entire though.”

  “No,” Goran chuckled. “They drive a hard bargain, but they’re probably right. Um, we have another issue. Someone stole the stazer out of our Texas facility a few weeks ago.”

  “Oh! How’d that happen?”

  “Inside job. Bastard packed it up and mailed it out on UPS using our own system. Space-Gen got ripped-off and paid the damned postage for it!”

  “Wait, couldn’t you just send the police to the address where it was delivered?”

  “We weren’t using the stazer, so it was a day and a half before we realized it was gone. You know how it is in a big place. It wasn’t where it usually was, but everyone just assumed someone else had moved it. Then it took a while to figure out from the security cams that it’d been sent out UPS. It was sent to a private home in a poor neighborhood without any cameras. The people who live there say they never saw it. We’re thinking someone else picked it off their porch. In any case, by the time the police got to the address, it was gone.”

  “But you have the thief on camera, right?”

  Goran snorted. “We have a guy, in the middle of the night, wearing an oversized dark shirt, sweatpants, a baseball cap with the bill tipped low. He was also wearing what we think are fake glasses and mustache. He boxes the stazer up and wheels it out to the loading dock, then goes back into the facility and off cam. He wasn’t seen again in the building, or leaving the building. Didn’t come into the building earlier that day. We’re drawing a blank. Once we saw it was an inside job, we thought we’d get him for sure, but we’ve hit a dead end.”

  “Um, Staze may be able to find him if he tries to use it.”

  “Really?”

  “So Kaem said. He didn’t sound like it was a sure thing, so it may not be possible every time.”

  “Well, that’d be great, but it doesn’t help us with the fact that when you come down to staze our second stage and capsule, we’ll need you to bring a stazer with you.”

  “Ah… I’m pretty sure I can’t bring one until you’ve paid for that one.”

  “Paid for? I thought it was just on loan.”

  “More like a rental. Space-Gen’s been paying a monthly fee for keeping it, plus additional fees when they use it to staze something. And the rental contract specifies that you’re responsible for a loss.”

  “I’ll be dipped. How much?”

  “A hundred thousand.”

  “Holy crap. Staze isn’t in cahoots with thieves, are they? Paying them to steal stazers so they can sell more of them?”

  Lee laughed. “No, honestly we don’t want you to let them out of your sight. Therefore, a big penalty when you do.”

  “Damn. We’re going to have to chain them to a security guard, huh?”

  “Or protect them the way you protect your rocket motors. You’ve got some serious security on those.”

  ***

  “I don’t understand. Why’s the administration pushing this tower through in such a damned hurry?” one of the committee members asked.

  “Because,” Tim Mettnor, chair of the committee, said, “they think this tower’s going to win the space race and be a huge economic boon. Besides which, the Virginia delegation; governor, senators, and representatives, all lined up to put their shoulders and all the influence they can bring to bear on it.”

  “Win the space race?”

  Patiently, Mettnor explained how Staze planned to launch rockets off the top of the tower and how it would so far reduce the cost of putting stuff in orbit that none of the world’s current launch facilities would be able to compete. “Besides which,” he said, “launching with rockets is highly polluting. This tower’ll be far better for the environment.”

  James Black was frowning, “Is that assessment accounting for the ecological damage of putting up such a ginormous tower? You know industry’s always touting the environmental benefits of their finished devices while ignoring the damage done while carving the needed steel and other materials out of the earth.”

  “Did you miss the part where they described how they’re building it out of vacuum?”

  Black said, “What?” he glanced down at the executive summary on his tablet. “I know they’re saying it’ll be lightweight, but there’s no way to—"

  Mettnor interrupted, “It’ll be so light that if there’s a problem and they fire their explosive bolts to break it up, it won’t even fall to Earth. In fact, most of the fragments will end up floating in the stratosphere at about 50,000 feet. The reason for that is that they’re going to be stazing vacuum. Those pieces would float up above 100,000 feet if it weren’t for the fact that it’s going to have some normal material attached to it.”

  “Normal material?”

  Mettnor nodded, “Like
the lights our regulations require them to attach to it for aircraft warning.”

  Still frowning, Black said, “How can anything be made out of vacuum?”

  Mettnor sighed. I knew I’d have to explain it to these guys, he thought. He slid a piece of vacuum-Stade out from under his laptop. It shot up to the ceiling, trailing a long ribbon. He passed the end of the ribbon to the woman next to him. “Pass this down to Mr. Black.” As she took it, he waved at the ceiling, “That’s a piece of the material up there. Essentially, they’ve stopped time in a segment of space. That space initially consisted, and still consists, of vacuum. Therefore, it has no mass and floats upward like a balloon. There are no exotic materials in it because there are no materials in it. Apparently, the only costs of manufacture are forming the mirrored mold it’s cast in and some electrical power to initiate the Stade casting event. Well, plus the cost of generating the vacuum.”

  Someone farther down the table said, “This is the same time-stopping tech that they’re using to save critical patients down at UVA, right?”

  Mettnor nodded. When someone asked another question about stopping time, he interrupted, “We’re getting off-topic here. This technology’s fascinating, but our mandate is to approve or disapprove this tower. Does anyone else have substantive objections?”

  “It’s slanting off to the southeast. I understand that’s better for launching rockets, but that also means it’s inclined over to the south of the cities of Chesapeake, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach, each of which has an airport. This tower’s going to be in their flightpaths.”

  “There are a couple of small executive airfields it’s going to cross over at about 15,000 feet, but it’ll be at 25,000 feet when it’s south of Chesapeake Regional and at 35,000 feet south of the Virginia Beach airport. Not exactly ‘in the flightpath’ for landing and take-off. More of a problem for flights that are already up and going somewhere. They’re planning high-intensity flashing lights to make it visible and it should certainly be something that air-traffic control’s aware of. I won’t deny that it poses some risk, but I don’t think it’s much greater than the risk of mid-air collision in a dense flight space, especially since it’s highly reflective of radar and most of the planes will be outfitted with the FAA’s new GPS avoidance systems.”

  “Are they going to paint it red and white?”

  “Paint won’t stick to it. So, they prefer to use flashing lights even during the daytime.”

  “Paint won’t stick to it? Have they talked to the paint manufacturers? Those guys can create some pretty surprising formulations.”

  Mettnor tried not to sigh. “Nothing sticks to it. Nothing at all. No changes in formulation are going to fix that.” He felt frustrated that the committee members relied on him and never seemed to read the materials in detail—as was obvious from the questions they were asking in the briefing. If I ever miss something important, there’s no way these people would catch it for me, he thought.

  There was more discussion, but eventually the committee approved the tower. Mettnor thought it should be fine, but that didn’t keep him from worrying about whether he’d too quickly knuckled under to pressure from above to approve it ASAP. I did all the diligence I would have if we’d had more time, he thought. I just wish I believed the other people on the committee had put in the same kind of effort.

  As everyone was leaving, Black buttonholed him. “What if an aircraft does run into this tower, perhaps intentionally? Could it turn into a disaster like the one we had on 9/11?”

  Trying not to sigh, Mettnor said, “Did you read the specs on Stade, the material it’s being built out of? The stuff’s thousands of times stronger than steel. An impact would be a disaster for the aircraft but the worst damage it could do to the tower would be to knock out a light. I suppose there could be problems wherever the airplane’s wreckage came down, but it wouldn’t be as big a deal as a mid-air collision because there’d only be one plane coming down.”

  As Mettnor drove home, he wondered once again whether he might’ve missed something.

  ***

  It’d been a few weeks.

  Jerome Stitt finally met his team at the small shop they’d rented for use in the evenings. “Let’s unpack it,” he said, nodding at the big box.

  One of the other men carefully started going at it with a box cutter.

  Stitt said, “Just cut it. Damned thing’s made of Stade. You sure as hell can’t hurt it with a razor blade.” After a couple minutes of more carefree cutting, the box was opened and the packing removed. Stitt saw the dimply, gleaming surface of the stazer. They pulled out the machine and uncoiled the cables that hooked it up to a stazing mold.

  “It doesn’t have any controls!” Jack, one of the men, exclaimed.

  “Nope,” Jerome said with a sigh. “It’s all controlled via a laptop and software.”

  “What the hell!” Jack said, “There’s no laptop in that box. You gonna tell us this thing’s useless to us?”

  “No,” Jerome replied, reaching into his backpack. “It just so happens I’ve got a laptop right here,” he said, pulling out a modern-looking, slender laptop.

  “Have you got the software too?”

  “Not just the software, but this is the very same laptop they were using to staze things at the Texas branch of Space-Gen.”

  Jack looked confused, “But it wasn’t in the box with the stazer.”

  “No, I took note of the brand and model of the laptop when I was there to help them staze some components for the second stage rocket. Had a friend buy me one just like it and trade it to me for an even nicer model. Then I picked up the stazer laptop and left the lookalike behind when I took the stazer. Since they haven’t been able to staze anything, I’m betting they haven’t even fired it up to notice they’ve got the wrong laptop yet.”

  Jack frowned, “What if someone notices you’re carrying around the same kind of laptop the stazer uses?”

  Jerome snorted, “I’ll never take this one out of my safe except to come down here. I have one that looks a lot like it that I use at work. If someone reviews the security cameras and sees me carrying the Staze laptop out of the building, they’ll look at the laptop I’ve got with me and see it looks like the stolen one even though it’s a different brand.” He tapped his head. “Before I called you the very first time, I’d already given this a lot of thought.” He sat down and pulled out a USB cable. Handing Jack one end of it, he said, “Plug this into the stazer and let’s boot up. In a minute or two we’ll know whether this was worth all the effort.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jack said, “What if they’ve got a way to track that laptop when we turn it on?”

  “That’s why we had to rent this windowless metal building; it blocks radio signals,” Stitt said, impatiently waving the end of the cable at him.

  Jack took the cable, found the USB socket, and plugged it in.

  A few minutes later, Stitt got up and threw his chair across the room. It clanged off a rack of shelves as he yelled, “Goddamnit!”

  “What’s the matter?” Jack growled. “Password protected?”

  “No. I’m not an idiot! I lifted the password when they were using the laptop. And the one for the app. But the app’s insisting on an internet connection.”

  “What the hell are we gonna do now?” Jack asked, using a rough voice to cover the roiling in his stomach. Bastard better not tell me we wasted all that time, effort, and money! he thought.

  “First we stop and think,” Stitt said. “I’ll go research ways a laptop can be located when it’s connected to the internet. I’ll search the laptop for software and hardware that could be used to detect its location. If we can’t clean it with some software package off the darknet, maybe we can disable the hardware it uses without disabling the stazer.”

  He sighed, “Remember, if nothing else we can just dismantle the damned thing and figure out how it works that way. Then we’ll build our own.”

  ***

  Mahesh Prakant was b
eginning to get comfortable with the informal nature of the Staze leadership’s team meetings.

  The first one to speak was Kaem’s dad, Emmanuel Seba. He reported on their system for breaking down the toxic waste from the contaminated land at Staze East. They’d released the water and CO2 from their furnace and managed to tap off the toxic metals as they turned from vapor to liquid in fairly pure form. They’d sell the metal, though not for nearly enough to pay the cost of distilling it. Still, they were all pleased to have cleaned up the mess. The ash that was left still had a little chromium but at a level considered safe. They were going to use it in the concrete for the construction of the space tower.

  Emmanuel also briefly reported that Staze had been approved to staze the radioactive dry casks down at Surbury. He’d be leading a team down there and training some people that could travel around the country stazing casks at other nuclear facilities if they got more jobs.

  Kaem’s childhood friend, Dez Lanis, waved for attention. “Do we know yet how they’re feeling about us loading casks on a platter that we spin up as a flywheel?”

  Emmanuel said he hadn’t heard anything.

  When people looked at Kaem he shrugged. “I haven’t heard either. I think we should go ahead and start working on a flywheel that doesn’t use casks. Seems like we’re going to need energy storage whether they’ll let us use casks or not.”

  Dez said, “I’ve done some calculations. The casks aren’t particularly dense because they’ve got a lot of air space in them. So, other than a bit of do-gooder feeling for putting them to use, we’re actually better off using water. Level up a two-meter thick, thirty-meter-diameter flattened cylinder, fill it with water, which will balance itself if you leveled it precisely, then staze it. Voila, you’ve got yourself a massive disc you can spin up.”

  “How massive?” Prakant asked.