Radiation Hazard (The Stasis Stories #3) Read online

  Felder was fingering the rip in the cloth when Seba said, “Looks like a bullet tried to punch through the gap between those two plates.”

  Felder shook his head, saying, “No. There aren’t any marks on either of the plates. The cloth must’ve been ripped before you guys got here.”

  “Um, Sherriff, nothing marks Stade.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “That jacket got hit all six times. You heard the ricochets. None of the Stades are marked. The only damage is to the nylon fabric between those two Stades you’re feeling. It’s only a partial rip because then the bullet hit the Stade in the second layer and stopped.”

  Felder glanced up at Seba, then back at the jacket, searching it for damage plate by plate. Finally, he looked up again. “Okay. You’ve got me. Either Smits missed every time, or this stuff’s actually… bulletproof.”

  “Do you want to shoot it with the rest of the guns?”

  Felder shook his head. “Don’t want to take a chance that one of those ricochets might come back and hit someone.”

  “Are you satisfied with the test then?”

  “No…” He chewed his lip a moment, then said, “I’m gonna shoot it myself with the AR-15. One bullet, into one of these big plates,” he indicated the big plates over the chest. “That’ll put a scratch in this stuff. If even that doesn’t, well then, yeah, we’d like to have a few of your coats for the SWAT team.”

  Felder made everyone but himself leave the range. Then he lined up the AR on the upper left plate. He did it like a marksman, taking his time and bracing himself solidly on the firing table. When he fired, he knew it was a good shot. But he still heard the angry buzz and thump of a ricochet digging into the dirt. Damn! he thought as he walked over to let the others back in.

  Sure enough, when they got down to the dummy there wasn’t a mark on it. When they opened the front of the jacket, they could see small plate-sized indentation marks in the dummy’s gel in four locations. Smits said he’d aimed for the arm with one bullet. When they pulled the jacket off the arm, they found an indentation there too.

  “Where’d you shoot it with the AR boss?” Smits asked.

  “This big plate,” he said, pulling the jacket back over it and pointing to the plate. He pulled it back open and there wasn’t a mark in the gel.

  Seba said, “The area of those big plates are twenty-two times that of the smaller plates so it’s not surprising the nine-millimeter didn’t make a mark under the big plate it hit. According to my phone, the kinetic energy of a bullet from an AR-15 is only about four times that of a nine-millimeter from a pistol so it shouldn’t have made much of a mark either. Besides, I think I can see a faint indentation in the gel where that plate would’ve been resting.”

  “I told you that stuff’d stop bullets!” Melnick exclaimed triumphantly. “You owe us those beers!”

  Felder fingered the jacket. Even with two layers, it was under an eighth of an inch. “Is it as cool as it is light?”

  “Um, no,” Seba said. “That’s one of its drawbacks. It’s a really good insulator. Great in the winter, terrible in the summer. Maybe you’d want just vests for the summer?”

  Felder contemplated that for a moment. “Zip-off sleeves?”

  Seba nodded. “Sure.”

  “Can you leave a few with us today?”

  Seba shook his head, “Gotta make ’em up. Been waiting for your opinion on how they should be done. You want helmets, neck collars, and pants too?”

  “Holy shit! Full armor?”

  Seba nodded.

  “What about the face?”

  “We could make a face shield for the helmet, but you wouldn’t be able to see through it. If you wanted that, we’d have to mount a camera on the helmet and project the image on the inside of the face shield.”

  “We could try that… but I don’t think it’d work. The guys couldn’t aim their guns.”

  “We could mount a second camera behind the gunsight. Project one image above the other.”

  Felder snorted, “Now you’re talkin’ crazy!”

  Seba shrugged, “Not so different from a first-person-shooter video game.”

  Felder paused, thinking about that. “Okay,” he said slowly, “we could try it. I still don’t think it’d work. Maybe you could make a face shield with bullet-resistant polycarbonate over the eyes?”

  Seba nodded. “We’ll give it a try.”

  “How long till you can have this stuff for us?”

  Seba laughed, “Months probably. Gotta redesign everything, then contract out parts of the fabrication.”

  “Okay,” Felder said, leading them to the exit. But I want that stuff now!

  ~~~

  As they walked out, Kaem turned to Gunnar. “I’ve been wondering if we could connect Stade plates with little Stade wires. The plates’d have slots for the wires, positioned to make sure they overlap a millimeter when stretched apart but let them slide over one another quite a bit when the motion of your joints pushed the plates past one another. It’d give you a lot better flexibility, and you’d only have one layer of Stade with air gaps that’d allow some cooling.” He blinked, “Oh, and the plates could be millimeter mesh screens made of stade. They’d let air through but stop or shred bullets.”

  Gunnar shook his head. “They’d always be getting stuck in odd positions.”

  Kaem frowned, “It’ll all be frictionless.”

  Gunnar stopped a second to stare into space. Starting to walk again, he said, “You’re right.” After a few more steps, he said, “Dammit, Kaem. If you’re gonna have all these ideas, why can’t you have them before we build a crapload of prototypes we’ll have to toss?”

  Epilogue

  Charlottesville, VA—Previous reports have claimed that a local Charlottesville company is selling a high-tech material to Space-Gen and GLI for their rocket engines. We’ve now learned it’s coming from a privately held company called “Staze.” The properties of this material are claimed to be so phenomenal that many have disregarded those claims as fabrications. However, a number of people have been provided with samples and have had them tested. They report that the samples are even stronger than the hard-to-believe numbers claimed on Staze’s website.

  The company asserts that it’s a lightweight material many, many times stronger than steel, yet so slippery it would make an excellent bearing material. It won’t melt or corrode and it blocks radiation.

  It’s unclear how expensive this material will be when it’s being produced at scale, but if the price isn’t high, it sounds like the steel industry and those engaged in ball bearing fabrication are going to be in trouble.

  Herb Filleman of the Department of Energy (DOE) felt uncertain about the meeting he was attending. It seemed like a huge waste of his time. His friend Dan Blackmore of the NRC had urged him to attend it. Since it was supposed to be a review of issues to do with the Surbury meltdown, Herb could understand why Blackmore would have to go to the meeting. It wasn’t clear to him why someone from DOE’s Energy Storage Hub should be involved. NRC was the one that regulated nuclear power plants and tried to keep accidents from happening. Dan had said they were going to be talking about a new material with impressive qualities, but… what a material—whatever its qualities—had to do with energy storage research, was a mystery.

  Dan had introduced him to some people from Vinargy, the power company that owned Surbury. They had included Art Turpin, the manager of Surbury during the crisis. Now, strangely, Dan was introducing him to a young, short African-American man named Kaem Seba. The young man worked for a company called Staze. Why am I meeting this kid? Herb wondered but didn’t ask.

  Turpin opened the conference with a talk. First, he very briefly summarized the events that’d led to the meltdown. Then he took them on a video tour of the inside of the containment building around reactor two where the meltdown had occurred. A good part of the talk focused on how there was space inside the containment to surround the reactor with radiation shielding.
Herb hadn’t even wondered how the video had been obtained until someone else asked in an astonished tone of voice.

  “Ah, I was hoping for that question.” His next slide showed a boxy, mirrored vehicle. “Our friends at Staze cobbled this little runabout together. We call it a nuclear rover. It’s based on a floor scrubbing machine that’s had its exterior completely covered by Stade, the new material that reflects radiation. Because this was our first experience with this new technology, I drove the rover into the containment myself to take the images I just showed you. The machine performed perfectly until I was making my exit, at which point the manipulator that I used to open the doors broke. I was rescued by one of my friends at the plant, wearing a complete bodysuit, also made from Stade.” He showed a slide of someone covered head to toe in shiny scales. “All Jerry did was open the door, but that was enough to let me drive the rover out of there.”

  “How much radiation exposure did you guys get?”

  “Our detectors didn’t go off and our badges didn’t darken,” Turpin said. He put up a slide showing the digital display of a meter’s cumulative dosage register and of radiation badge film that looked completely unexposed. “The film didn’t darken at all.”

  “Come on!” the guy said, obviously disbelieving.

  Herb turned to Dan and whispered, “Sounds like bullshit.”

  Dan replied, “It’s not. The stuff’s amazing!”

  In a few minutes, Turpin had moved on to an analysis of energy storage in huge flywheels that used spent fuel casks for mass! Obviously, this was what Herb had been invited to hear, but he couldn’t keep from asking Dan, “Is this guy insane?!”

  Dan shook his head. “The flywheels will be made of Stade. It not only blocks all radiation but, get this, it’s at least 75,000 times stronger than steel.”

  “Have you lost your mind? That’s physically impossible.”

  Dan shook his head again. “This’s why I invited you to come. You DOE folks need to check this stuff out. We’ve tested it in our own labs. It’s not only that strong and completely blocks radiation, but it’s frictionless. So, if we build the flywheel so it’s completely smooth, and mount it on a Stade bearing, it’ll spin without losses until you need to draw power out of it.”

  “But spinning tons of radioactive waste at thousands of rpm?! You don’t think that’s psychotic?”

  “Not if it's imbedded in Stade.” Dan had been digging into his folder. Now he pulled out a properties sheet for the material and slid it over.

  While Herb was trying to come to grips with the strength and other properties listed for Stade, Turpin sat down and the young black guy, Seba, got up to talk. Herb glanced at him, decided a kid like that wouldn’t have anything important to say, and went back to thinking about all the reasons the property sheet couldn’t be correct.

  Dan nudged him. “You’d better listen to what this guy has to say.”

  Herb rolled his eyes but sat up and started paying attention. To his surprise, Seba was talking about fusion, not fission. He was saying, “…by theory, Stade will tolerate unlimited temperatures. If this is true, you wouldn’t need magnetic bottles or inertial confinement to attain fusion, you could achieve it in a simple chamber made of Stade …”

  Herb turned to Dan again, “He can’t believe this material will tolerate millions of degrees without melting!”

  Dan shook his head, “You missed him telling you that it’s not a material. I’ll explain it to you later. For now, we both need to listen to what Seba has to say. Someday we’re gonna want to tell our grandkids about how we were here and met this guy.”

  ***

  Giles Turnberry had had to move Seba’s talk four times now. What he’d initially thought would just be a classroom talk to some of the physics faculty had expanded to include all the physics grad students, then the physics undergrads, then the Materials Science and Engineering faculty and students, then the entire campus and finally the general public. It was going to be held in the school’s largest auditorium with video overflow into another auditorium and, of course, online. For a while Giles had been afraid someone would force it to be held in the stadium, but he’d managed to quash that idea.

  Somehow, Staze stayed under the radar for quite a while, but it seems to have reached a tipping point and gone viral, he thought. Seems like everybody’s heard about it now. From the calls we’ve gotten, the national media are here too.

  Seba had two young women helping him set up props on some tables they’d brought in and set up on the speaker’s platform. Turnberry recognized a rack of Stade samples and a bigger Stade that looked to be about a six-inch cube. There was also a big basket piled full of Stade samples.

  Seba came over to Turnberry, “I have to start on time. Some of my demonstrations are time-dependent.”

  Giles turned to look around the auditorium. People were still filing in and he’d been thinking that they’d start five minutes late to let everyone get settled. Which would piss off the TV people, he thought. Turning back to Seba, he said, “I’ll make an announcement.”

  He went to the podium and announced to the crowd that the talk would begin in three more minutes. Gratifyingly, people started making an effort to hustle to their seats.

  Then it was time. He introduced Seba, who approached the mic without appearing the least bit nervous. Giles wondered how an undergrad did it. Even Turnberry—despite years of speaking experience—would’ve been nervous in front of a huge crowd like this one.

  Seba said, “Hello everyone. I’m Kaem Seba, an undergraduate physics student here at the University of Virginia. I’m also the Chief Technical Officer at Staze, a new company founded here in Charlottesville.

  “As most of you are probably aware, Staze has a product, called Stade, which has some surprising properties. I’ll spend a portion of this talk telling you about Stade and we thought it might be nice for those of you who are physically present to be able to handle a sample. Ms. Vaii and Ms. Lee are going to hand samples to the first person in each row. We’re hoping you’ll pass them down your row so everyone can see and feel what Stade’s like.” The two young women started climbing the stairs of the center aisle of the auditorium with the big baskets. They handed out what looked like the usual three by six-inch Stade samples. Seba continued, “Just so no one tries to hog the samples, be aware you won’t get to keep these samples anyway. But, when you leave the ushers will hand out more samples at the exits. You can take those home with you if you like.”

  Turnberry was wondering how Seba planned to keep some of the crowd from sneaking out with the samples being distributed now, but Seba kept talking, so he focused back on that. Seba was saying, “Some of the people who got the first samples are finding out first hand that Stade is frictionless.” Turnberry glanced around at the audience and saw some Stades that’d gotten away and been knocked up into the air. Kaem was holding a Stade over his head with his hands cupped around both ends of it. “If you’ll all look up here a moment. This is how you hold a Stade to keep it from getting away from you. This material’s so perfectly frictionless you simply cannot hold onto it the way you normally would. For those of you who’ve knocked yours up out of reach, please just let them float up there. We’ll pass out more samples to the rows who’ve lost theirs.

  “As you can all see from the floaters, Stade can be the same density as air. At that density, it’s buoyant in the air and simply floats. Some of you have received Stades that are heavier and don’t float. Those are the same density as water; because they’re made of water. The floaters are made of air. We can also make Stade out of vacuum…” he paused, apparently for dramatic effect, “like this one.” He released a Stade that shot up into the air until it reached the end of a string and stopped, bobbing above the podium.

  “Though we’ve discussed Stade as if it were a material and will continue to do so, it’s important that you understand that it is not a material. That’s why I just said it could be made of air, or water, or vacuum. To explain this, I
’d like to describe how Stade came to be. Before I matriculated at UVA, I’d been interested in time. Especially in the way time seems to flow at different rates in different locations, velocities, and circumstances. Some, but perhaps not all of you, may be aware that to an outside observer, time stops inside a black hole. I came up with my own crazy theory to fit these phenomena. One that suggested it might allow time to be stopped without you having to be tossed into a black hole. Instead, it seemed as if it might be stopped by surrounding a volume of space with highly modulated electromagnetic radiation. In fact, it appeared that time could be stopped within a volume defined by a set of reflective surfaces that were conducting such radiation.”

  Seba paused for a sip of water, then resumed, “Those of you who’ve been to our website have probably seen that our CEO prefers to remain anonymous, going by ‘Mr. X.’ He’s the one who heard my crazy theory and worked out how to physically make time stasis happen. He financed our startup and had us test the devices he’d built, making the first Stades. Subsequently, he paid to have the Stades’ properties tested.

  “So, here’s the mold, as we call it, that your samples were formed in.” The big screen at the front of the auditorium switched to an image of the table where all of Staze’s samples had been laid out. It zoomed in on a rectangular box. One of the young women opened it to show a mirrored interior, then closed it. Sitting in the front row, Turnberry heard a capacitor snap. The young woman opened the box again, then popped out another three by six-inch Stade. Seba said, “And now you’ve seen what we have to do to form an air-density Stade. To form a water-density one, we fill the mold with water before stazing it.

  “I like to think of it as if we’re sending the volume of space within the Stade to a certain point in the future. The Stade is only the trail that the time-traveling Stade leaves in our frame of reference. A bunch of proprietary methodology goes into determining how far into the future the Stade will travel. Or, you may prefer to say, ‘how long the Stade will stay in stasis.’ The important point is that the time point the Stade is going to arrive at is controllable. To demonstrate this, look at the Stades on this rack.” The big screen now showed an image of the rack on the table that was populated with the Stade samples. Suddenly the two on the bottom shelf of the rack disappeared. The one on the left simply vanished. The one on the right turned into water that cascaded off the shelf. The same thing happened a moment later to the pair on the next higher level of the rack, then the two on the top level disappeared as well.