Lifter: Proton Field #2 Read online

  Ellen got an appalled look on her face, “Mark! I thought you were doing better?”

  Mark got up and went over to sit beside her, giving her a hug. “I am, big sister, I am. That’s why I can make jokes about it. Besides, remember, it’s supposed to make me feel even better. When I get back, maybe I’ll apply for that job at Miller Tech you keep going on about.”

  To his dismay, he saw a tear forming in her eye. She quickly wiped it away. She sniffed, “You’d better come back.” She gave him a red-eyed grin, “If you don’t, I’m gonna insist your ghost stop by on the way to purgatory and explain all this crap to Mom and Dad. You know there’s going to be hell to pay if something bad happens over there and I helped you keep it a secret.”

  Mark gave her another hug, “You worry too much.”

  ******

  Arlan came back to his office from the Miller Tech labs. He’d been talking to Nelson Randall and Ellen Mitchell who were the gamma radiation experts. He’d had an idea that they might be able to use the gamma byproduct of the fusion plants that were being developed from the proton field technology. He’d been looking something else up and came across the fact that gamma radiation breaks water into hydrogen and oxygen as well as various radicals like peroxide and ozone. It wasn’t a very efficient separation because of the tendency for the hydrogen and oxygen to immediately recombine, but since the gamma radiation would just be a waste byproduct of the fusion plants, it seemed like it could be a cheap source of hydrogen for fuel cells. There were going to be fusion generators all over the world and water could serve as radiation shielding just as well as lead, it just took a lot more water. The gamma byproduct could be an especially great hydrogen source if they could somehow improve the efficiency of the hydrogen generation and separation.

  Obviously, they could also use electricity generated from fusion to carry out natural gas reforming—breaking down the methane in natural gas to produce carbon and hydrogen. However, Arlan was opposed to that method because it used up a natural resource. He’d prefer to use electrolysis to break water into hydrogen and oxygen. In the long run, you got the water back out of the fuel cell so you didn’t actually consume any natural resources. Electrolysis took a lot of electricity, but electricity was going to be cheap with fusion so the only real concern would be the waste heat on a hot planet. Still, Arlan was excited about the elegance of using the gamma byproducts of fusion to generate hydrogen. Having a plant that produced electricity for immediate use and hydrogen that you could store for later power generation in fuel cells had an attractive elegance.

  Neither Nelson nor Ellen felt confident that the hydrogen could be separated efficiently enough to be economically feasible, but they were both willing to explore it. Their enthusiasm put Arlan in an ebullient mood which wasn’t dampened by the presence of the serious-looking men in suits he found sitting in the waiting room of his office when he got back.

  His new assistant, Sally, looked concerned enough for both of them, leaning forward to say quietly, “They’re from the Defense Intelligence Agency, like the CIA but for the military.” She glanced reproachfully at the men, “They wouldn’t tell me what they want!”

  Arlan gave her a reassuring smile, saying, “I’ll take them in with me. Call John Arrington and ask him to come join us in case it’s something serious.” John was Miller Tech’s lawyer and could provide advice on what Arlan should and should not say. Arlan turned to the two men and extended his hand, “Arlan Miller, what can I do for you?”

  The two men stood and shook his hand, introducing themselves as David Lopez and Mahesh Jindal. They showed him their DIA IDs and asked if they could talk in the privacy of his office.

  Arlan didn’t feel terribly surprised to learn that they were interested in the trip to Hawaii and the detonation at sea. The explosion had apparently been picked up acoustically and they’d become concerned when they correlated the time and location of the explosion with a gamma flash detected by some of their satellite systems. “What do you know about what we do here at Miller Tech?” he asked them.

  Lopez shrugged his shoulders, “Not that much. The web tells us your company makes most of its money by licensing the products of its high-tech research, starting with the development of a high-efficiency power inverter. It looks like a lot of what your company does, from fuel cells, to solar cells, to thermo-electric generation has to do with electrical power, right?”

  “Um,” Arlan said, somewhat perplexed to hear them talking mostly about the company’s pre-existing technology and not about the new stuff that had just been publicized about proton fields, especially fusion. “Did you watch the video of our announcement of our new proton field technology?” He looked from Lopez to Jindal, “Or see some of the announcements in the news about proton fields and fusion?”

  “Well,” Lopez said, glancing at Jindal, “we’ve seen some stuff about your claims of cold fusion, including a lot of disbelief. But what we’re here about is the possibility that you were near, or perhaps actually set off, a nuclear detonation north of Hawaii. If you’re really getting cold fusion to work, that may be interesting to the world, but not to us. We’re worried about bombs.”

  Arrington knocked on the door and leaned in, “Arlan? You wanted me?”

  “Come in John,” Arlan said, then brought the lawyer up to date on the DIA’s concerns.

  Arrington shook his head, “I’ll have to advise you not to answer any more questions until I can get up to date on the legal issues involved.”

  Arlan sat silently for several minutes, pondering the situation. It wasn’t lost on him that the two men from DIA looked very unhappy. Finally, he turned to them and said, “I guess I shouldn’t really answer any more of your questions until my counselor here feels more comfortable about it. However, I would like to urge you to look at the videos and other information the company has put out about proton fields and their ability to produce nuclear fusion. What I will say about Hawaii is that we were there to make sure that our fusion technology couldn’t generate the size of explosions that are normally associated with atomic weapons. We believe that the largest explosion that could possibly be generated with our technology would be less than the equivalent of a half a ton of TNT. While that’s a large explosion, conventional wartime explosives and the blasting done in mines and building implosions are often much bigger.”

  Lopez and Jindal looked dubiously at one another, then back at Miller. Lopez shook his head, “But such conventional chemical explosions are clean. We know your tests are producing radiation.”

  Miller said, “Read up on it. Come back and talk to me when Mr. Arrington’s up to speed, but I will say that the amounts and types of radiation are probably less dangerous than you’re thinking.”

  ******

  Mark MacGregor woke in a muddle of jet lag when the plane thumped down on the runway at Davao International Airport. “Rise and shine Mac,” the constantly cheerful Steve said from the seat next to him. Steve was the nominal leader of their mission group.

  “I’m rising,” Mark said grumpily, “but I ain’t shining. I’m gonna need a couple days’ sleep before that happens.”

  “Now, now,” Steve said in an irritatingly cheerful tone, “how are we missionaries going to bring enlightenment to the people of the Philippines if our own thoughts are so dour?”

  “Not bringing enlightenment,” Mark mumbled. Steve was pretty religious though only mildly in your face about it. Still, Mark was agnostic and didn’t like being proselytized. “I’m only bringing help.”

  “Ah yes,” Steve said, jauntily, “I’m bringing enlightenment, you’re bringing plumbing.”

  Rubbing at his eyes, Mark sighed, “Plumbing saves more lives than enlightenment.”

  As their engineer, Mark was the leader on the technical aspects of the mission. Wendy was in charge of organization and relationships with the Filipinos in the local area. It seemed like a people-person kind of job and Mark wasn’t sure she was much of a people-person. Nonetheless, the th
ree of them were the leaders of the group and would be there on site for the entire six weeks of the project. Many of the other volunteers would come and go.

  From the seat on the other side of Steve, Wendy chose that moment to say, “I’d appreciate it if you guys would stop arguing religion, or in Mark’s case, your lack of it, and start focusing on how we can do our jobs while staying safe.”

  Mark shook his head, as if to try to clear any remaining muzziness, but actually in the hope that he could think of a non-escalatory way to respond to Wendy. She’d spent a lot of time talking about her fears—on a mission to a violent country where many missionaries had been kidnapped, raped, and murdered over the past six decades. As a woman, she was certainly at higher risk and to be honest, Mark couldn’t believe a woman as anxious as Wendy had joined the mission in the first place. If he’d been a woman, he wouldn’t have come. He could hardly reassure her when he also thought the project was dangerous. When he’d signed up for the mission in the midst of his depression and suicidal thoughts, he’d been hoping for redemption and a reason to live, not freedom from risk.

  He couldn’t think of a suitable response for Wendy this time either, so after a moment he simply started gathering his belongings.

  ******

  Arlan Miller entered the small meeting room where he, Myr, and Vinn had had so many momentous meetings. Miller Tech was deep into discussions to license proton-proton fusion technology to a number of large companies. Each of those companies was going to try to develop their own power structure based on the rights they were purchasing.

  Meanwhile, Arlan was excited to begin developing other proton field technologies. He’d always dreamed of being at the forefront of a true technological revolution.

  Now he was living the dream.

  The first thing he wanted to discuss with the team was space launch. So far, they hadn’t reached an agreement with anyone to develop the nuclear rockets they’d talked about. Neither Boeing nor Lockheed had chosen to send a representative to Miller Tech’s technology announcement conference. Miller Tech had forwarded video of the conference to the big space industry players who hadn’t attended, drawing their attention to the segment of video that applied to nuclear rockets. So far they hadn’t attracted any interest. It wasn’t clear to Arlan whether anyone at either of those companies had actually viewed the video or not. Even though the conference about the new technology hadn’t made as much of a splash in the news as he’d anticipated, he’d have expected someone to show some interest. He wondered if the people with the power to make decisions at Lockheed and Boeing just thought it had to be someone’s pipe dream. Or, perhaps they’d looked up information for nuclear rockets from the nineteen sixties and had decided that they weren’t feasible based on that information? Space X and Blue Origin had been at the meeting and had both made bids, but the bids had been ridiculously low. Orbital ATK hadn’t been at the meeting but had sent a representative as soon as various news reports had appeared. However, their representative had seemed dubious of the technology and the company hadn’t made any further contact.

  At first, Arlan had felt angry about the lack of interest from the giants of space industry. If anyone should have seen the possibilities of this technology, he’d have thought that people who were currently trying to push the limits of space technology would’ve been all over it. However, after a period of disappointment, he’d actually become excited about the possibility that Miller technologies might just build their own rockets and stun the world with their unexpected orbital capability.

  On the face of it, it was crazy for a company like Miller Tech to try to develop launch capable rockets. It seemed much more reasonable to license the technology to companies that already knew how to build rockets, calculate orbits, and deal with all the other highly technical difficulties inherent in space launch. Now, he kept thinking about how launching a rocket from Earth to orbit with current chemical technology was so close to the bleeding edge of technical possibility that it required a company with all-encompassing expertise to be able to negotiate the line between success and failure. But fusion provided a tremendous surplus of power for a rocket that could be quite small because it carried its propellant in a microscopic field focus. A field focus that, if provided sufficient power, would render that propellant weightless and inertialess. With those kinds of technologies, the margins of error were much larger. Therefore, there wasn’t nearly as much need for extremely tight tolerances, or super-alloy construction, or high precision orbital dynamics. This made it seem like something a company like Miller Tech could do with its current capitalization. Sure, they’d have to hire some expertise, but it’d be fun!

  Arlan had requested this meeting specifically to talk about nuclear rocket technology and had been looking forward to it with greater and greater anticipation since yesterday. His mood immediately began to spiral downward when he entered the room and found Vinn looking depressed. Myr was down at one end of the table, balancing a plastic disc on top of a small flashlight shaped cylinder—presumably one of her focal point projectors. Ellen merely looked puzzled. He glanced at the walls and saw that all the screens were blank, not loaded with diagrams and graphs the way Vinn usually set up for a conference. Arlan looked back and forth from one to the other, then said, “What?”

  Myr didn’t look at him, so Arlan focused on Vinn and Ellen. Vinn turned to look at Myr. Arlan looked back at Myr. She was still just fiddling with the cylinder-projector. She’d tilted it now so she could look at the projector from the bottom. The plastic disc on the front of it didn’t fall off, so Arlan realized she hadn’t been balancing the disc on it. Rather the disc was glued or otherwise fastened to the end of the cylinder. Arlan turned an intensely questioning look back onto Vinn and Ellen. This time Vinn shrugged, “She says she’s found a major technological problem with using fusion rockets to launch to orbit.” He rolled his eyes and spoke with frustrated irritation, “No, she hasn’t told us what it is.”

  “Myr?” Arlan said.

  “Just a minute,” she said, turning her disc-projector assembly back over so the disc was on top and once again looked like the disc was simply balanced on top of the projector. She was fiddling with a knob at the bottom end of the cylinder.

  Just as Miller opened his mouth to tell her to stop wasting their time, she let go of the device and it floated gently there in the air, drifting slightly upward. After a moment—apparently under the influence of some random puff of air—it started to float slowly across the table away from her. She reached out and touched the far side of the disc to move it back toward her.

  Miller glanced at Vinn and Ellen. They were just as wide-eyed as he was. “That’s really cool!” Arlan said. He still felt frustrated that she was demoing a toy rather than telling them about whatever the issue was with fusion-powered rockets. His mind couldn’t help slipping back to the conversation he’d had with some of the people at Blue Origin and Space X. He’d told them that they were going to regret their lowball bids. Even though he was fascinated by Myr’s floating device, however it worked, Arlan wanted to know whether he was really going to have to eat crow the next time he saw the space industries people. “Um…” he said, trying to decide whether to ask her how the toy suspended itself or to demand she explain the fusion rocket problem. Finally, his frustration won out over his curiosity. “I’m dying to know how that thing works, but first I’d like to know what problem you found with the fusion rockets?”

  Myr gave Arlan a disbelieving look, then glanced at Vinn and Ellen. Her eyes widened and she shook her head in dismay. Frowning, she said, “You get it, don’t you Ellen?”

  Ellen still had her eyes on the floating toy. “Um, if it’s projecting a focal point above the disc, and that focal point’s pulling the plastic in the disc upward, then, yes, I get how it works. But aren’t you a little nervous that the focal point isn’t protected? Couldn’t someone lose a finger?”

  Myr said, “No. It’s generating with 1.1 terahertz, so its proto
n field has a linear, not a geometric gradient. If you stick your finger into its focus, you’ll have a hard time pulling it out, but it won’t do you serious harm.” Her eyes jumped to Vinn, then back to Miller. She snorted disbelievingly, “Come on guys!” She reached out and grabbed the cylinder, turning it so she could reach the little knob at the bottom. Twisting the knob, she let go of the cylinder and the device shot up to stick against the ceiling tiles where it quivered and rattled. It looked like it was trying to bore its way through the tiles into the room above.

  Fascinated, Miller stared up at Myr’s toy, but then looked back at Myr. “As I said, that’s really cool. I do want you to tell me all about it, but I’m still concerned about the issue with fusion-powered rockets. We’ve made a lot of claims regarding them and I’m going to be very unhappy if I have to tell people they won’t actually work.” He dropped his eyes to focus on her, “Can you tell me what the rocket problem is so I can stop worrying about that and then focus my attention on the toy that’s trying to burrow its way through the ceiling?”

  Myr pointed up at her little device, then said, “That is the problem.”

  Miller glanced up at her toy and mentally asked for patience. “How’s that a problem with fusion-powered rockets?”

  Vinn, his eyes still focused up on the toy, said, “I think she’s saying we don’t need rockets anymore.”

  Arlan looked at Myr. She looked around at the three of them and began slowly clapping. “Bravo.”

  A chill ran up Arlan’s spine as he looked back up at the device rattling against the ceiling.

  Myr stopped clapping and said, “I don’t actually see any reason why fusion-powered rockets wouldn’t work. But I’ll bet those people would be really pissed if you licensed the tech to them, let them spend a butt-load of money developing it—and then you told ‘em you actually had something a whole lot better.”