A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5) Page 3

  “4,241.15 metric tons,” Kaem replied.

  Prakant gave Kaem a look, “You’ve already been working on this?”

  “Um, no. It’s a pretty simple calculation though. Just take the radius—” Kaem broke off when his audience broke into laughter.

  Lee patted Prakant on the arm as if consoling him, “Kaem thinks everyone should be able to do math like that in their heads.”

  Kaem rolled his eyes.

  Dez said, “I cast a small 500kg disk to test out how frictionless the bearing and the aerodynamics would be. It works very well. It’s down in Gunnar’s first vacuum chamber at Staze East. Been spinning at 10,000 rpm for a couple of days.”

  “You evacuated the chamber?” Gunnar asked.

  Dez shook her head, “The outer surface is smooth and frictionless, so even in an atmosphere it’s not losing speed. Maybe a few rpm, but not enough to justify the energy expense of pumping out the chamber.” She shrugged, “We’re going to have to build some big flywheels to store the power for launches. We can’t instantly draw the kind of power we’re talking about off the grid. It’d take down a chunk of the eastern seaboard.”

  Prakant felt like things were getting away from him. “Can you send us your design and some numbers so we can check for anything you might’ve overlooked?”

  “Sure,” she said confidently. He could tell she felt certain no one would be able to find a problem.

  Arya said, “And costs please?”

  Dez frowned, “It’s Stade and water. Almost free.”

  This time Arya rolled her eyes. “You don’t need any expensive molds and some kind of massive motor/generator to spin it up and then extract the power from it when you need it?”

  Dez grinned like she’d got caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “Well, there is that. Um, I also need some more minions to help me get all this stuff done in a reasonable amount of time.”

  Prakant thought, She’s angling to move up from junior engineer to team leader! Then, disappointed in himself, he thought, And, the way she’s been producing, I should’ve suggested it myself. She shouldn’t have had to ask for it.

  Kaem turned back to Arya, “How are we doing for funding at present?”

  She frowned, “I’ve still got ulcers. We’ve got 161 million in the bank at present, but our burn rate’s averaged about a million dollars a day over the past couple of months. So, less than half a year if more money doesn’t come in pretty fast.” She glanced at Emmanuel, “Stazing casks is going to help, but unless they have us start stazing a lot more spent fuel, it isn’t going to last the way you guys are spending.”

  She looked at Kaem, “I understand the space tower should bring in a lot of money… someday. Meanwhile, it’s a huge expense. And now you’ve cut off our biggest source of funds, selling boosters. That source is going to be gone until the tower’s built, right?”

  Kaem winced, “I’m hoping they’ll have us build a few second stages and some capsu—”

  “Really?” Arya interrupted, “When they don’t know for sure the tower’s going to work?”

  “Sorry,” Kaem said, “I know I don’t think enough about the money end of things. But we have other things that’re going to be bringing in money pretty soon.”

  Arya rolled her eyes and turned to Gunnar, “You’ve only been charging a hundred dollars each for stazing patients at the hospital. It’s not paying for what you’re spending on development.”

  Gunnar snorted. He said, “As long as you’re picking on me, let me tell you guys what’s going on with medical stasis. Turns out they don’t want our big coffin makers. The coffins may stack, but they take up a lot of space. Besides, what they’re doing the most of right now is temporarily stazing critical people until they can take care of them. For that, they much prefer the body-bag model that we first used with Sophia. They can keep the patient on the bottom half of the bag while they’re going through scanners etcetera, then if something bad happens, they just zip it closed and staze, no moving them to a separate gurney with a stazer on it. KISS.”

  “What if there’s a pandemic or disaster? What are they going to do with the kind of lumpy Stades that come out of those bags?”

  “Our latest bag design forms a variety of handles on the ends and both sides. One of the hospital’s surprisingly durable patient ID wristbands goes around the handle near the head and the foot end. The handles let the staff sling the Stades around from place to place. And, they’re Stade. During a disaster the staff can throw them anywhere and figure it out later. It won’t hurt them or the patient.”

  The people at the table looked thoughtful, but no one objected except Arya. She said, “That’s nice and all, but I was asking you about cost recovery?”

  Gunnar said, “Um, that was my roundabout way of saying we’re about done with development and ready to move on to production. We should start making money because we’ll sell the bags and stazers to the hospitals, then also charge a small fee per stazing.” He glanced at Arya, “Even less than the hundred dollars we’re charging now, but the income will be greater because they’re stazing and unstazing critical people multiple times in the process of caring for them.” His eyes went to Kaem, then back to Arya, “I’d suggest that medical stazers be set up so they staze even if we haven’t been paid; which would be a different model from the rest of our stazers. We don’t want someone to die because we refused to staze them until we got our money. We can ensure compliance by threatening to take the stazer away from a hospital if it runs up a big enough bill without paying.” He frowned, “I don’t know if you guys are aware a family is suing a hospital in Richmond after their patriarch died? They’re claiming that their hospital should’ve had a stazer since it would’ve saved the grand old man.”

  Everyone turned to look at Contreras. Kaem asked, “Could we get sued because we didn’t provide stazers to hospitals?”

  She gave a little chuckle, “You can get sued for anything. Whether it’s justifiable, or even whether it gets thrown out of court right away, it’ll still suck up some of your time and cause some angst. I’m pretty sure no one can win a suit against you for not producing a product fast enough, but perhaps you shouldn’t dawdle.” She grinned, “It seems it’d also make Arya happy if you got them out there faster.”

  Prakant interjected, “What if it turns out there is some bad effect of being stazed and we’ve turned out tens of thousands of them and they’ve stazed millions of people before we realize it?”

  Kaem said, “It’d have to be a pretty small effect if we haven’t noticed it yet.”

  “What if it takes years to show up? That happened with radiation in the early part of the twentieth century.”

  A sour look on his face, Kaem said, “We need them to do the animal testing ASAP. Before we roll stazers out to hospitals all over the world. What’s the holdup?”

  “Money,” Gunnar said. “They’ve got their approval; they just don’t have grant funding.”

  “How much do they need?”

  Gunnar shrugged. “Don’t know exactly. I heard Horton talking about it. I think it was more than a hundred thousand and less than two-hundred thousand.”

  Kaem looked at Arya, “Can we grant them that much? Maybe with,” he glanced at Contreras, “something in the contract about how we really do want to know if there’s something wrong and we definitely don’t want them to whitewash anything. Or maybe we could donate money to an agency with the understanding that they’d fund unbiased medical research on the effects of stazers?”

  Arya held his eye for a moment, “Didn’t this conversation start with how I thought we needed to be careful about how much we were spending?”

  Kaem sighed, “Arya—”

  “I know, I know. ‘We’ve got to spend money to make money. Lawsuits over this problem could destroy the company. We’re trying to do something good for humanity and I shouldn’t drag my feet. I’m the financial officer, I’m supposed to get the money we need to do the job, not whine about how much we�
��re spending. Yadda, yadda.”

  Kaem was grinning, “Yeah, something like that.”

  She sighed, “I’ll talk to Drs. Jonas and Horton about how to make it happen. And I’ll talk to the bank about extending our line of credit in case we run short in the future.”

  “Thanks!” Kaem said cheerfully, turning back to Contreras while Arya was still rolling her eyes.

  Sylvia Contreras jumped to her own assigned topic, “The governor’s big push to speed the space tower through the regulatory process seems to have been successful. The proposal got through the FAA’s committee a couple of days ago. We can expect clearance to begin construction soon.”

  Lee cleared her throat, “Dez Lanis has a construction company that’s been excavating for a while. She’ll be pouring foundations in a day or so.”

  “Yeah,” Contreras said. “That’s okay. The foundation and building doesn’t matter to the FAA, just the tower sticking up out of it.”

  Arya said, “The wasted money’s gonna matter if we don’t get approved!”

  “We’ll get it, Arya,” Contreras said. “Try to relax. We will get it.”

  Kaem said, “For those of you wondering why Staze is pouring concrete instead of building out of Stade, let me explain. Dez’s using Stade forms for the concrete. Forms that’ll remain in place rather than being removed like concrete forms usually are. All those Stade forms will be welded together into one huge unit using Gunnar’s little hinged wire Stade welds that can be unwelded if we need them undone. Essentially, it’ll be a Stade building with concrete in it to make it more massive. The idea is that, because it’s so rigid, the sound generated by launches will have to vibrate the entire weight of the concrete building and the tower as one unit. Because it’s massive, any sound emitted from the exterior of the structure will be very low frequency. Infrasonic, so, inaudible.”

  Gunnar broke in, “If all you want is mass, why not just use rock aggregate and sand? Why waste the money on concrete when the Stade’s so strong there’s no reason for it?”

  “To be honest,” Dez Lanis said, “Because we’re in a hurry and we couldn’t get the county to approve a big building like that without using concrete. Maybe in a couple of months, we’d have gotten approval but we wanted to start now.”

  “Is there going to be that much sound? I mean, do we need to go to such lengths?”

  Kaem frowned, “There’s going to be a lot of sound. We’re expecting to have as many as 200 motors connecting to the main driveshaft for the sprocket. Those are 500-horsepower, 20,000-rpm electric-automotive motors. The motors themselves are going to be wailing when they get up to top speed. And remember when they get up to top speed near the end of a launch cycle, the chain and the outer rim of the sprocket will have velocities in the high Mach numbers. With them traveling far beyond the speed of sound we’re going to have sonic boom issues as well. Since the chain’ll be continuous and we’ve designed it to be very smooth, we’re not sure how much of an issue it’s going to be until we actually do it.”

  Kaem turned and asked, “Lee, how are you and the manufacturing engineers coming with the vacuum Stade production line?”

  “Pretty well, I think,” she said, casting diagrams up on the big screens. For those of you who aren’t aware, we’re planning for the tower to be a six-meter-diameter tube.” She glanced at Gunnar, “For the metric curmudgeons among us, that’s almost twenty feet. The tube will be built of hundred-meter segments joined with peg and socket connections and held together with Gunnar’s removable welds. The interior will have a toothed track that we can use to send up inspection and bulb replacement vehicles. A tube under that track system will house the return for the chain that launches vehicles. It’ll also house conduits for power to the aircraft warning lights that’re required by the FAA.”

  “Why so big?” someone asked. “Stade’s strong enough that it could be just a few inches, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” Lee agreed. “The lights will be set into the tube so their bulbs can be changed from the inside. Also, if we later decide we need to put something else inside the tube we’ll have room without building another tower. We do, however, have toothed rails on the outside of the tube where we could slide up secondary tubes or send up different vehicles in the future. The most important of the exterior rails, of course, will be the one on the upper surface that’ll fit the launched vehicles. That rail will have to have a one-millimeter slot in it for a wire from the launching chain to stick up through. That slot, unfortunately, is going to allow egress of some of the noise from the chain.”

  Prakant frowned, “What’s the wire for?”

  Lee gave him a surprised look. “It’s what pulls the launch vehicle.”

  “Oh! Crap,” Prakant said, embarrassed. “Of course. Even though I’ve had months to adjust to this I just can’t get my subconscious to adapt to the possibility of a one-millimeter wire pulling a 100-tonne spacecraft.”

  Lee glanced up at the diagram, then changed it. “We’re casting the tube segments around a temporary interior Stade like this. Then,” she changed the diagram, “we’ll cast the actual tube of vacuum-density Stade around it. That’ll result in a low-weight tube that we can make neutrally buoyant by loading weights into it. Then when we’ve installed the lights, we’ll remove some of the weights, to keep it at neutral buoyancy and let the assemblers handle it easily when they’re putting it in the extruder cage. We’re adjusting the vacuum so that without the weights or the temporary Stade, the tube’ll float at about fifty-thousand feet. Thus, if a disaster breaks the tower apart, the pieces will float up above commercial aviation, yet not so high it’ll be impossible to retrieve them.” She pointed to the diagram, “This interior tube will house fifty-five-thousand feet of small diameter Stade chain that we’ll be able to release remotely. Once the weight at its bottom end reaches the ground, we can use the chain to pull a segment,” she shrugged, “or many segments, back down to the ground for reassembly.”

  Lee looked around the group. “We’re casting a couple of segments of tube as well as the beginning and ending segments right now. We’ll install chain and sprockets and hook them up to a motor so we can run the chain through it at full speed and see how bad the sound problem’s going to be.”

  Gunnar Schmidt, who Prakant had learned was one of the—apparently very few—stockholders as well as an employee, said, “What’s the excavation for? I thought you were going to use Stade screws for your foundation?”

  “That’s correct,” Lee said. “We were initially planning to put a platform up at about 7,000 feet where we’d house the motors to drive the launch chain. We were thinking that’d put them up where the noise they generate wouldn’t bother people much.” She shrugged again, “But that’d make them kind of a pain in the ass to work on and it wouldn’t help with the noise from the supersonic chain which, after all, will be supersonic along its entire length, including right down to the ground. Kaem suggested we put the motors in a big underground chamber instead. It’ll still be screwed down with huge Stade screws. We’ll use that big basement as a foundation for a Stade building above ground that’ll act as a kind of terminal for the launches.”

  Prakant said, “It seems to me that creating a rigid Stade connection between your motors and chain, where the noise is generated, and your terminal building containing passengers, isn’t a good idea. If it turns out the launches do generate a lot of noise, that connection could transmit the sound and make the terminal unpleasant. I’d put up a separate terminal building with a retractable bridge that’s only in contact with the space-tower when it’s loading a launch payload onto it.”

  Kaem laughed, “Damned good point. I saw one of the early plans for the terminal and I’m pretty sure it could be sited separately without much trouble.”

  “Wait,” Dez said. “I want to point out that if the noise is a huge and uncontrollable problem, you could have a separate low-velocity chain from the ground up to a platform at 7,000 feet. There you’d have your motors and the
start of the supersonic chain like you originally planned. Your spacecraft would take a leisurely trip up to the platform, then switch off to the high-velocity system there.”

  Prakant said, “That’s a good solution for a tough problem. You’d only lose a few kilometers of acceleration.”

  Kaem said, “You might not even lose that if you could accelerate some with the lower chain and then coordinate the transfer of the craft from the lower chain to the high-velocity chain’s hook and accelerate more from there up.” He frowned, “Might be easier said than done though.” He turned back to Lee, “How fast are you guys thinking you can put the tower up once you get started?”

  Lee spoke thoughtfully, “You could synchronize the two chains with a gear system at the platform to ensure that the craft transferred from the hook on the lower chain to the hook on the upper chain. Then you’d disengage the gears so the lower chain didn’t go supersonic…” She blinked and shook her head, “Sorry, back to your question about how fast we can put up the tower. We’ve already got our side-loading self-builder or extruder assembled and attached to the foundation chamber. Gunnar cast us a huge vacuum chamber and a separate chamber where we can cast parts that don’t need to be in a vacuum. The manufacturing gurus set us up with a system they think will let us cast three or four tube segments per hour. If we run three shifts that’d mean sixty to eighty segments a day, counting a daily period where we load the vacuum chamber with temporary Stades to cast around. Ten segments would be a kilometer of tower, so that’s six kilometers a day or 34 days to put up 200 kilometers.” She laughed, “Not that there’s any chance we’ll be able to build it that fast. Something always goes wrong. I’m figuring more like two to three months even if things go pretty well.”

  Prakant spoke, letting dubiousness seep into his tone. “If you can put this thing up in three months, I think that’ll be amazing. I have a question though.” He glanced at Kaem, but then addressed the room, “Lee and I have talked about our concern that Staze may be perceived as running a bait and switch on Space-Gen and GLI. The companies each contracted to buy a minimum of ten rockets from Staze, whereas, as Arya mentioned, the space tower is going to make the booster stages of those ten rockets obsolete. This seems unfair to me.”