Discovery: Proton Field #1 Read online

  It only took a couple of minutes for the young woman to empty the tank. She lifted her bat so that the putative focal point off the end of it would rise up out of the top of the glass barrel she’d been holding it in. “Now, despite the suppression of electrostatic force, compressing all of that water down essentially to a point has generated heat. I’d bring it over close enough that some of you in the front row could feel the heat emanating from it. But, it’s dangerous. I’ll remind you, in case you haven’t considered it yet, that your own tissues are loaded with water. If it got too close, it’d suck you in just like it did those fifty gallons of water. So,” she picked up what looked like a rod a half an inch in diameter and eighteen inches long with a three-inch meshwork sphere at the far end, “I’m going to make it safe by covering the focal point with this stainless-steel rod that’s got a meshed stainless steel basket at the end of it. Steel doesn’t have hydrogen, so it’s not affected by the field.”

  She looked around at the dubious appearing crowd and grinned again, “Now, this is a little freaky. Remember that there’s fifty gallons of water compressed down to a point so small you can’t see it, out there in space about eighteen inches from the end of the focal point generator. As you can imagine, that little dot of water is now a pretty firm structure and so when I hit it with this stainless steel,” she moved the rod she had in her other hand and it definitely hit something, making a clink sound like you might expect if you hit a stainless-steel rod up against a hard, sharp point, “it’s like I hit something solid.” She wiggled the rod around a little bit. “Now I’ve slipped one of the holes in the mesh on the basket at the end of this rod over that dense point full of water.” She screwed the back end of the rod into the end of the bat shaped cylinder. Holding it up and carrying it toward the front row of seats, she said, “Now it’s safe because it wouldn’t be able to suck your hand through the mesh. If you’ll put your hand near it, you’ll feel two things. First, the focal point’s still hot from compressing all that water. Second, you’ll feel it attract the water in your hand.”

  The young woman walked along the front row holding the mesh cage at the end of the rod close enough for people to put their hands out near it. Frank wanted to lean out over the first row and try and put his hand near it too, but had to settle for just looking at the astonished expressions on the faces of the people in the first row. A lot of people had their hands up, wanting to ask questions. When the young woman didn’t call on any of them, a guy from Space X just broke in loudly, “It’s all well and good for you to claim you’ve got fifty gallons of water squished down to a point in space, but I have doubts based on two issues. First, water’s incompressible; and second, fifty gallons of water weighs somewhere close to 200 kilograms. You obviously aren’t strong enough to carry over 400 pounds around out at the end of that stick!”

  She grinned at him and said, “Good observation! Besides, if I did have 400 pounds of water on the end of the stick it’d have a lot of inertia which would make it difficult to start and stop its movement, right?” She lifted an eyebrow, “But what you’re forgetting is that the field generator just generates the proton field wherever I point it. Then, the water itself follows the focus of that field.” She paused to let everyone think about it for a moment, then continued, “So, I don’t feel any resistance to moving the field, and all the water at its focus, whether it’s side to side or up and down. However, lest you think we’re breaking some kind of law of the conservation of energy, the field needs a lot more power if it’s going to hold 400 pounds of water up in the air than if it isn’t.” She winked at the guy who’d asked the question, “That’s why I’m towing around this big power cord. I need it to supply enough juice.”

  She swept the auditorium with her gaze, then said, “I’m sure most of you’re still dubious, so I guess it’s time to prove there actually is something—besides my imagination that is—at the focal point.” She turned and walked over to the second larger glass barrel, saying, “Now, as I get ready to release some of the water into this large glass container over here, I want you to consider the fact that just like compressing the water generated heat, allowing it to expand…” She held the cage at the end of the rod up over the larger glass barrel and did something to one of the controls. Clouds of vapor and a fountain of snow exploded out of the small cage. She turned and smiled at the rapt looking crowd as snow kept pouring out of the end of the device. “Allowing it to re-expand makes it cold.” She lifted the wand away from the top of the barrel which was suddenly completely full of snow. She started walking back over to the first large glass container. “Since snow takes up a lot more space than water, I’m going to have more than enough snow to fill both these large glass vats.” She stopped at the first container, held the wand over it and fountained huge quantities of snow into it as well.

  Looking back at her audience, she focused on a guy whose desk was labeled “Vail,” “I’m thinking ski areas might find this technology pretty interesting when natural snow fall is less than they would like… And here’s something else that could be pretty nice. Remember how the field only attracts hydrogen atoms? Well, that means it doesn’t attract sodium, or chloride, or other minerals. We think at first the ions dissolved in the water travel with it toward the focal point. But when the pressure at the focal point gets crushingly high, all those ions just get forced right out of the focus. In any case,” she pointed to the huge barrel on the other side of the room, “when that snow melts, the water will be astonishingly pure. This tech is going to make desalination and water softening very easy.”

  She put down her baseball bat and walked toward the left side of the auditorium. Lifting an eyebrow, she looked at a couple of guys in the third row and said, “I’m betting your companies will find all that snow pretty interesting, huh?” Frank looked at the nameplates on the desks in front of the two men and saw that they worked for Trane and Carrier, two big air-conditioning companies.

  The young woman looked around the crowd, “According to our calculations, using proton fields for heating and cooling would be significantly more efficient than current heat pumps. Still, heating and cooling is a relatively minor benefit of this technology. Think back to what our friend from Space X pointed out. Essentially, if you provide the power, large quantities of hydrogen containing liquids can be made essentially weightless and inertialess.” She winked at the guy from Space X and used a stage whisper everyone could hear to say, “I hear a big expense for the space program is lifting water up to orbit. With enough electricity to run a proton field generator, that’s just become pretty easy.”

  As the young woman walked back out into the middle of the room to survey the gaping faces in front of her, Frank whispered to his AI telling it to get his boss on the line, urgently.

  The young woman stood boldly, with her feet a little apart and her hands on her hips. She said, “Admittedly, it’d take quite a bit of power to maintain a proton field that contained a lot of water while it was being, not just lifted, but accelerated up toward orbit.” She lifted an eyebrow, “And you should rightfully be wondering where all that power’s going to come from… Let me introduce you once again to Ellen Mitchell,” she waved at the other woman who looked to be in her thirties. “Ellen’s going to explain where power’s going to come from in the future. Don’t forget,” she winked, “Ellen’s got her PhD in nuclear physics.”

  As the other woman was approaching the middle of the room to begin her spiel, Frank’s boss, Larry Wilson, spoke into Frank’s ear through his AI. “Okay Frank, what the hell’s so damned urgent? This had better be good!”

  Speaking in a low tone, Frank whispered, “You need to be watching this presentation here at Miller Tech. They’ve got a device that’s going to change the world and GM’s going to want to be bidding…”

  “Come on! Record it and just tell me about it when you get back! Bidding on new tech’s never an emergency.”

  Frank had been keeping his eye and one ear on the woman at the front of
the room. She’d just said, “So, if you use a very high gradient proton field to squeeze hydrogen… you get fusion…”

  Whispering into the mic for his AI, Frank said, “Boss, they’ve got fusion.”

  There was silence of the other end of the connection and Frank thought perhaps Wilson had hung up, but then Larry said, “Well, if that’s real and not imaginary, maybe it is an emergency. I’ll keep watching while I’m heading to the airport.”

  The woman had directed everyone’s attention to a sphere mounted on a rolling table. She said, “This sphere has a stainless-steel chamber, surrounded by a thick layer of lead.” She looked up at the people in the auditorium, “This kind of fusion does produce gamma rays, which lead is pretty good at blocking. It does not produce neutrons, one of the major problems with the other types of fusion people are trying to develop. Those systems typically fuse deuterium or tritium and release a lot of neutrons. Such neutrons activate the materials of the chamber making the reactor radioactive.” She went on to explain how the plumbing on the chamber brought water with a tiny bit of hydrogen in at one side. The hydrogen was fused, generating heat which turned the water into steam.

  She turned it on and a steam turbine on the left side of the table spun up, turning a generator which, if you believed the meters they had hooked up to it, produced over thirty kilowatts of power. She told them it could easily produce 200 kilowatts. She pointed out how this was far more power than you would need for a household, and the equivalent of 270 horsepower for a car… “In fact,” she said, looking at the man from Space X, “you could use fusion to launch rockets. Vinn Saigler’s going to tell you guys about that.”

  The young guy, who looked even younger than the woman who’d started the presentation, came out to show them diagrams of how fusion could heat the chamber of a steam powered rocket nozzle. A nozzle that could generate more thrust than the rocket engines Space X was currently using. “And,” he said, “remember that the rocket won’t have to lift huge tanks full of fuel. Just a tiny tank of hydrogen and a focal point full of water. So, the size of the overall rocket can be a lot smaller. Well, and it’ll also have to lift a fusion powered steam engine that’ll be generating the power for the focal point… But still you should be able to get to space with something only a little bigger than the family car.”

  Frank felt like his head was about to explode. Trying to understand all the ways this was going to change the world was boggling his mind.

  Miller came back in and started giving details on how companies could bid on licenses for the technology.

  Epilogue

  Vinn shook his head as he watched Myr bring the ball down court. It was hard to believe that their little team of seven was playing in the championship game for the league. Of course, they didn’t have much of a chance against these guys. There were nine of them, all of them over six feet tall, in good shape, and pretty good athletes. The guy guarding Myr obviously thought that she was their weak link and that he was going to get a turnover. He was defending her hard—hands out, swiping at the ball and blocking her view of her teammates, trying to make it difficult to pass the ball away.

  Under intense pressure like that, Vinn knew he’d be feeling a little flustered. If Myr was feeling any strain, it didn’t show. She let her dribble get a little too close to her opponent and he lunged for it. Vinn thought the guy was already looking at the wide-open highway to the basket when he pounced. But Myr had passed the ball behind her back to her other hand. With the guy off balance, now she was the one with a wide-open lane to her basket.

  She drove hard toward the paint, but the guy guarding Vinn dropped him to step into Myr’s way. Myr jinked left and the guy surged into her path. The dude had to move his feet so Vinn hoped Myr was about to draw a blocking foul from the guy.

  Instead, the ball slammed into Vinn’s hands.

  Damn! What a pass, he thought as, undefended, he turned and put the ball up and into the basket.

  They won the game.

  Vinn had no doubt that the other team would have beaten them if they’d played the way they usually did. And in fact, they did play at their usual level—except for Myr.

  Myr upped her game.

  She upped her game, as Vinn now realized she did every time they really needed her to play better so they could win. Tonight, playing against a team that should have dominated them, she was simply unreal.

  Over and over, the other team thought they had her trapped, but she threw passes through holes no one else could see, delivering them to teammates who were undefended. Charging down court against an intense defender, she’d pull up abruptly to fire beautiful three-point jumpers while the guy guarding her desperately tried to stop.

  She got fouled a lot and never missed a free throw.

  Vinn found himself wondering whether she could take her game to yet another level if she needed to.

  At the bar where they’d celebrated all their wins, the guys were pumped. Steve, the guy she’d drubbed at wind sprints before she even joined the team, crowed over how she’d run the other guys into the ground. Grinning at her, he said, “And I know how that feels!”

  Happily, Vinn exclaimed, “Yeah, I know how it feels too. I tried to keep up with her for a run on the beach in Hawaii. I had to pretend I had something else to do and turn around.”

  Myr gave him a gentle slug on the shoulder, saying, “Hey! You could’ve kept up!”

  Chris said, “Hawaii?! You two went to Hawaii together? You’re not about to get all romantic and ruin the team, are you?”

  “No, no, it was for work,” Vinn said. He caught a flash of a look he didn’t understand in Myr’s eyes. Did I just disappoint her? he wondered. Could she… want more?

  “You guys went to Hawaii together… For work?! Can I get a job at your place?”

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  As Connor drove his wheelchair down the ramp out of their handicap van, he turned toward the door of their condo and waited for his mother to stack some packages in his lap. Once he was loaded up, he headed toward the door and told his AI to open it. It was Saturday and his mom had dragged him out to go shopping. Connor didn’t particularly like shopping, but he knew he needed to get out of the house. Seeing other people besides his mother and his sister was important to his psychological health.

  However, they hadn’t really had any exciting social interactions with the strangers they’d encountered at the various stores. His mother’d had a whole long list of places she’d wanted to go. Connor had thought about begging off the latter half of the excursion, claiming exhaustion, but he didn’t. He’d been feeling depressed because his broken arm had slowed him down. It didn’t hurt anymore and the doctor said it was healing ok. But the whole process had weakened it. One of his friends with muscular dystrophy had gotten pneumonia and died a couple of weeks ago, bringing Connor’s own impending mortality into sharp focus. He and the other two dystrophy patients that he’d been friends with were finding it harder to get together as their weakness advanced and their families got more stressed.

  He was looking forward to getting back to his room and playing some multiplayer video games. The games didn’t require muscle strength and he’d gotten pretty good at them. A huge bonus was that the guys he played against had no idea he was disabled. They treated him like a normal person, giving him shit and crowing when they won. He liked that they didn’t treat him with kid gloves like everyone else Connor knew.

  As he rolled in, he saw Myr lounging in the recliner. “Hey monkey boy,” she greeted him.

  “Myr! What are you doing here? Did your astonishing social life somehow evaporate?”

  She grinned, getting out of the recliner and starting to take the packages off of his lap. “I had to break a lot of guys’ hearts today. Told all my boyfriends I had something more important to do.”

  “More important? Don’t you mean more fun? Hanging out with me and getting your ass kicked at Assassin’s Slayer?”

  She shrugged, “Well, there is that.
But, actually I’ve been working on a little project in your room. That’s why mom dragged your ass all over creation this morning.”

  “Really?!” Connor said, excited. He had no idea what she might have been doing in his room, but pretty much anything his sister might have done was likely to be pretty awesome. He turned his chair toward the hallway to his bedroom.

  Connor stopped abruptly in the doorway. Some bizarre kind of metallic framework was suspended several inches below the entire ceiling of his room. He turned to look back over his shoulder at his sister, “What the hell did you do to my decor?”

  She snorted a laugh, “Well, I’ve got to admit it isn’t all that pretty. Maybe we can hang some silk from it, you think?”

  “Silk?! Are you trying to make it look like some kind of French hooker’s boudoir?!”

  “No, no!” Myr laughed, “What do you want? Mirrors? Pleated leather? Pray tell me, what would be masculine enough for a big-time stud like you?”

  Connor frowned, distracted, “What the hell is it, anyway?”

  “Ah, well, drive in there a little further and I’ll show you.”

  Still staring up at the ceiling, Connor rolled his wheelchair further into the room.

  Myr said, “Tell your AI to increase ceiling attraction to twenty-five percent.”

  Puzzled, Connor gave the order.

  He grunted, saying, “Holy shit!” He suddenly felt lighter in his seat. Turning wide eyes on his sister, he said, “You put field generators up there?!”

  Eyes shining, she nodded her head. “You wanna try fifty percent?”

  “Oh my God, do I?!” He spoke to his AI and suddenly felt himself get lighter yet. Speaking again to his AI, he ordered seventy-five percent. Moaning ecstatically with the sudden sensation that he was light enough to move, he turned to Myr again. He could hardly speak, but managed to croak out a thank you. After swallowing a couple times to get his voice back in control, he looked back up at the ceiling, “Will it go all the way to 100 percent?”