The Thunder of Engines Read online

  She nodded calmly. “That’s right. I hate you because you’re an asshole. But I need the best people I can get and you’re a really good engineer.” She leaned a bit closer, “Also, I don’t like being called April. Call me Lee.”

  “You’re gonna have to get someone else. Sanderson’s riding my ass on this project. He’ll never let me go.”

  “Already approved. Goran talked to Sanderson.”

  Stitt blinked, then looked around the room for whoever was setting him up. No one was even watching. “Will Goran doesn’t even know who I am!”

  “No, but he knows who I am and the priority Mr. Prakant gave my project.”

  He sighed, “What’re we doing?”

  “I’m flying to Virginia. Your job is to be part of a team that’s going to figure out how to make a glass mold that we can use to cast a small rocket engine’s combustion chamber and nozzle. The prototyping shop’s already thinking about how to do it, but, once you’re up to speed on what they’re doing, you need to figure out whether they’re doing it the best way or whether there’s somebody we should contract it out to instead.”

  “A glass mold? You mean one made out of glass? Or are you talking about some kind of glass process I’ve never heard of?”

  “A mold made out of glass.”

  “Oh, come on!” Stitt said, glancing around the room again. A few people had looked toward them at his exclamation, but curiously. Not as if they thought something funny was happening. He looked back at Lee, “A glass mold for a rocket engine?! That’s just ridiculous. You can’t cast high-temp alloys in a glass mold, it’d melt. Someone’s pulling your leg!”

  She said, “Come with me,” and started across the room toward one of the little conference rooms. When he didn’t start after her, she turned and preemptively beckoned him after her. She stopped at Teri Nunsen and Evan Ulrich’s desks, telling them to come with her as well.

  Teri got up, looking puzzled. Ulrich turned around, also looking for whoever was pranking him. He saw Stitt. He said, “You know what this is about?”

  Lee turned around and came back a few steps. She darted narrowed eyes over the three of them. “Mr. Prakant has given me a project that he’s assigned the highest priority in the entire company. I can requisition anyone I want. I’m requisitioning the three of you because I’ve seen your work and know you’re not only good, but that you’re capable of thinking for yourselves. Now, do I have to call Mr. Goran and tell him you’re giving me trouble, or are you going to get off your asses and come with me?”

  “I’m all for it,” Teri said. “But what do I do about the work I’m currently assigned to?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She turned toward the conference room again, “Just come with me and stop being a pain in the butt.”

  The three young engineers glanced at one another. Teri said, “All three of us are working on the new booster engine. If you take all of us from the same project it’s going to fall way behind.”

  Lee smiled knowingly and said, “Good thinking. Don’t worry about it. Let’s go.”

  They followed as ordered. Jerome Stitt admiring his view of Lee as she walked in front of him. She was good looking, spunky, and extremely bright. Why do I give her so much shit? he wondered. If he’d met her away from work, he’d have bought her a coffee and tried to move on from there.

  When they were all in the room, Lee closed the door and turned to study them without inviting them to sit down. She focused on Stitt and said, “I should thank you for sending Mr. Prakant’s assistant to me when she came down with those material samples.” She narrowed her eyes, “I know you only did it to crap on me, but it turned out to be the most amazing opportunity of my life.” She turned to the rest of them, pulling on a string dangling out of her pocket. A mirror slid out of the pocket and she grabbed it by the corner where the string was tied through a hole. “This is the sample she had.”

  They all stared. It, after all, just looked like a mirror. About three by six inches with little holes around its edges, one of which had the bit of string tied through it. Stitt leaned a little closer, noticing that it didn’t have a layer of glass like a normal mirror. It seemed very thin, though it was hard to judge its thickness because it was so reflective he wasn’t seeing anything but reflected images from around the room. Teri asked, “Is it some kind of silvered plate?”

  Stitt thought, Hmm, maybe? A thin layer of silver on glass was the best way to make a mirror because silver had the highest reflectance. Silver’s cost and tendency to tarnish resulted in most mirrors being coated with aluminum though.

  Then Lee let go of the little mirror.

  It floated in the air.

  The corner with the string attached slowly started sinking.

  An aerogel! Stitt thought. Aerogels were polymer foams that had so much air in them they weighed virtually nothing. They were amazing insulators, which Stitt could imagine being useful for keeping cryogenic liquids cold. But they weren’t strong enough for the rigors of rocketry. He’d gotten through this thought process when he realized the damn thing just wasn’t falling. Aerogels weren’t that light. Unless it’s filled with a lighter than air gas. Partially helium maybe?

  Teri reached out and took the mirror, or tried to. When she grabbed it, it slipped away, kind of squirting toward Stitt.

  Thinking disparagingly of Teri’s clumsiness, Stitt caught it. Or tried to. Thumb on one side and fingers on the other side, he got what seemed a good grip, but the damned thing just slid right out from between his digits.

  Lee said, “It’s called stade. Its coefficient of friction’s zero.”

  “Bullshit,” Stitt said. “Nothing has a coefficient…” His brain caught up with his mouth. It’d just slipped out of his fingers and he hadn’t felt any resistance to that motion. If its coefficient of friction wasn’t zero, it was damned close. “Sorry. Its coefficient is obviously very low. But I doubt it’s really zero.”

  Lee had captured the mirror in a basket of her fingers. “Okay,” she said. “You might be right. Let’s just say its coefficient of friction’s so low we can’t measure it.”

  Evan Ulrich muttered, “I’ll bet I could measure it.”

  Lee studied him a moment. “You can try. When you’re not doing any of the more important stuff for this project.”

  Jerome said, “Okay, so it’s some kind of slivered aerogel with lighter than air gas substituting for the air. I imagine it’s a great insulator and might help keep cryogenic fluids cold, but there’s no way it’s going to tolerate the stresses of a launch.”

  Lee turned her gaze back on Stitt, “It’s not an aerogel but you’re right about it helping with cryogenic fluids. Its thermal resistance is infinite. Before you also say that’s not possible either, I’ll grant that it might be that its thermal resistance is so close to infinite that we can’t measure any heat transmission. As to your thought that it won’t tolerate the stress of launch, that’s not a problem either.” She held out the mirror, still surrounded by her fingers, “Here, break it.”

  Stitt reached for it, then drew back frowning, feeling he was being condescended to. “What’s going to happen?” he asked suspiciously, thinking it’d be something embarrassing.

  She regarded him steadily, “You won’t be able to break it.”

  Giving her a chary look, he said, “And if I can break it, it’s going to hurt me?”

  Lee shook her head and spoke exasperatedly, “Stitt, for God’s sake! I’m not trying to jack you around the way you’ve been doing me for the past year. I promise you; you won’t be able to break it. Its flexural strength is at least 360,000 megapascals! Why do I say ‘at least?’ Because this specimen, the one in my hands, broke Space-Gen’s biggest testing machine when the machine hit fourteen metric tons-load. At that load, this very specimen hadn’t even started to bend. Hell, it hasn’t even been scratched!”

  Stitt stepped forward and—while she continued to restrain it—gingerly put his fingers under both ends of the little mirr
or with his thumbs pressing down in the middle. He slowly applied more and more pressure, trying to keep his fingers from skidding around on its surfaces. Then, without bending an iota, it suddenly shifted to one side and his fingers slipped off. It jumped out of Lee’s hands too, squirting off toward Evan Ulrich.

  Ulrich snared it in a basket of fingers the way Lee had, then turned to the table and placed the middle of the mirror on the edge. He leaned on it hard. For a moment Stitt thought it wasn’t going to slip on him, then as Ulrich got most of his weight on it, it shot out away from him along the edge of the table. Caught by surprise, he fell to one knee. In the process of catching himself, Ulrich let go of the stade specimen, which, after a few twists and turns slowed to a stop in midair as if taunting him. He started to go after it but Teri got there and snagged it before he took his second step.

  Lee spoke as if nothing remarkable had happened. “So, one of the reasons I picked the four of you, rather than some of the other really smart engineers…” she glanced at Stitt, “some of whom aren’t assholes… is specifically because you’re all working on the new launch engine.” She glanced from one to the other of them, “Which has just become obsolete.”

  Teri and Evan got surprised looks on their faces. Stitt tried to keep from looking surprised but thought he failed. Of course it has, he thought.

  Lee said, “We’ve been assigned to design and get built, molds for the casting of test cryotanks and rocket engines made out of stade. The company that’s going to cast them, Staze, is going to charge Space-Gen by pricing the finished samples as if they’re made of gold by volume. That’s going to make them very expensive, so we want our test engine and tanks to be small. Our objective is to be sure they can, in fact, cast shapes as complex as a rocket engine out of stade. Then to fire up that engine and make sure that, despite the astonishing properties of the material itself, it doesn’t fail for some other reason.”

  Teri looked up from the specimen she’d been fiddling with. “They make this stuff by casting?”

  “No. But they said we could think of it that way. This is in terms of the fact that we need to make molds as if they were casting the material.” Lee looked around at the others. “Here are the parameters I understand so far. I don’t understand the process well enough yet. That’s why I’m flying out to Virginia in a day or so. Just so I can get a better feel for what we’re doing. We do not want to make molds that don’t work.”

  “The company making this stuff’s in Virginia?”

  Lee nodded, “Charlottesville.”

  “What’s the company’s name again?”

  “Staze.” She spelled it for them but then gave them a distasteful look. “It’s privately held, so don’t waste time trying to figure out how you can invest.”

  Lee stepped over to the whiteboard and drew a cross-section of a generic rocket engine with a spherical combustion chamber and a bell-shaped nozzle. It had pipes entering the chamber to deliver fuel and oxidizer. “So, this is what we know so far. They can’t cast features smaller than one millimeter. This is important because if we want to use threads to attach the fuel and oxidizer feeds, they’ll have to be coarse. Also, realize that, because stade’s extremely rigid and completely frictionless, anything that’s screwed together will readily unscrew itself. If we go that way, we’ll need to design a mechanism that’ll keep it screwed and some kind of gasket to get a seal despite an imperfect fit of impossibly rigid components. The one-millimeter limit’s also important because it’ll let us build our mold in two parts and clamp them together. We won’t have to worry about stade leaking into cracks between the two segments.”

  “Wait?” Teri said, looking puzzled. “Why that limitation on the size of features? Is the stuff they cast it out of thick and pasty or something?”

  Lee snorted, “The guy said we could think of it as casting, but that it wasn’t actually casting at all.”

  “The guy?!” Stitt exclaimed. “The guy? Is that like ‘the guy’ that fixed your sink?”

  Lee nodded and gave a little laugh, “It kinda feels that way. Whenever I call with engineering questions, I wind up talking to a guy named Kaem Seba. If I call with business questions, I talk to Arya Vaii, a woman.”

  Stitt drew back, “Should Space-Gen even be dealing with a penny-ante place like that?”

  Lee took the piece of stade from Teri and waved it at Stitt, “If the people who made this stuff were deaf, dumb, blind, meth-addicted, psychotic orangutans from the depths of the jungle, we’d still want to buy it from them. It’s going to change the world and they’re the only ones who know how to make it. It isn’t just going to change the world of rocketry; it’s going to upend the entire world of engineering.” She stopped to stare at him, “If you want to be in on this from the start, you’d better shine over the next few days.” She looked at the three of them in turn, as if to be sure they’d gotten the message, then said, “Remember, I’m gonna leave tomorrow or the next day, whenever I can work it out. Your mission’s to find and adapt a design for a small engine and work out how to make molds for it. Also, molds for a cryotank. They may only be bench tested and never fly, but size and design them so they could be components of a flyable rocket in case our bosses decide they want to do it. The glass the castings are made out of will need to be silvered, so don’t use some glass formula that won’t take silver. Don’t decide you can save money by making the walls of the chamber or bell really thin. Yes, this stuff is strong enough, but it can’t be cast less than a millimeter thick. If you come up with a design, send it to me to approve before you have someone start building it. I might’ve learned something your design’ll need to take into account.”

  Lee turned to Teri but pointed at Stitt, “He’s an asshole, but a really smart one who has more experience than we do. If smarts and experience were all it took to run this, he’d be in charge while I’m gone. But we need an actual team, so, you’re in charge. Make assignments. Make things happen.” She glanced around the group, “Staze says they don’t want to cast any test components bigger than one-meter in their greatest dimension. Space-Gen doesn’t want to pay for any big components when they’re paying for them as if they’re made out of gold. So, think small. But not tiny. Chamber and nozzle in the ten- to fifteen-centimeter range so we’ll have something we can fire up. Something that’ll burn hot and hard and put out significant thrust. We want to stress the stade as much as we can. Made out of stade, it shouldn’t need cryocooling, so follow the KISS principle.”

  Lee turned to Teri again, “If Stitt gives you one iota of trouble, call me and we’ll dump him. I’ve already picked out someone to replace him.”

  She turned to Stitt. “By ‘trouble’ I mean any of your asinine practical jokes, general disrespect, or trying to boss Teri around instead of letting her succeed as your leader, got it?”

  Stitt nodded, feeling a little dazed by the change in the woman.

  She turned and strode to the door, opened it, and then turned back. “Space-Gen’s paying a million dollars a week until we get this test done, so we need to get it done as, soon, as, possible!” She left without saying goodbye.

  When did she turn into such a hardass? Stitt wondered, about to say something snide to the other two. No. I’d better not. I’m not going to buck Apr…Lee, ’cause I badly want to be part of this project. Bad enough I’ll gladly put up with her crap.

  ***

  While they waited for the faculty meeting to start, Giles Turnberry turned to one of his friends, Arthur Mandel. “Have you ever had a kid named Seba in one of your classes?”

  Mandel nodded. “Yeah. Odd kid. African-American. Does great on tests. Scores so well I thought he might be cheating. Is that what’s got you worried?”

  Turnberry chewed his lip, “I’ve worried about that, yeah. Um, do you have any evidence of it?”

  “Other than never missing a question?” Mandel chuckled. “No. I watched him like a hawk during a couple of tests. If he’s cheating, I can’t see how he’s doing it. I
don’t let them have their phones or earbuds during the tests. If he’s got the answers written somewhere, I can’t see him looking at them. In fact, he never looks away from the screen his test’s displayed on. Doesn’t make notes. Doesn’t write formulas. Doesn’t use a calculator function. Unless, somehow, he’s got the University system subverted so it displays the answers for him…” Mandel shook his head, “I just can’t see how he could’ve been cheating. Did you figure it out?”

  Turnberry shook his head, then snorted a little laugh, “I’m thinking he might actually be that smart.”

  “No!” Mandel said, with overly wide eyes as if confronted by an impossibility. “What would make you express such a revolutionary thought?!”

  Turnberry laughed at his friend’s performance. Then leaned closer and confided quietly, “I did the unthinkable.”

  “What’s that?!” Mandel said, wide-eyed again.

  Turnberry lifted an eyebrow, “I caught him not paying attention in class so I called on him.”

  Obviously, having been listening, John Stavros, turned from the seat in front of them, “Bet he knew the answer, didn’t he?”

  “You’ve had the same experience?” Turnberry asked Stavros.

  “Yeah,” Stavros laughed. “Thought it was just a fluke the first two times. It’s not. He always knows the answers. And asks questions that make me wonder if I truly understand physics.”

  “Oh, come now Joe,” Mandel said. “Never admit to having a student who asks questions you can’t answer!”

  Thinking back to that day, Turnberry said, “He answered my question so well, I thought he’d just happened to read the chapter and had that one fact on the tip of his tongue. So, I called him up to the front and challenged him to take the class through the WKB approximation.”

  Mandel said, “Oh, that was a low blow.”

  Turnberry shook his head. “Not for him. Not at all. He had a moment’s trouble with the e-whiteboard, then explained WKB better than I ever had. I… um,” Turnberry found he didn’t want to admit to it, but then plunged ahead, “I saved the record so I could teach it that way in the future.”