Discovery: Proton Field #1 Read online

  Once she was satisfied, she carefully covered her setup with the tarp she’d gotten the maintenance people to bring her.

  Taking a deep breath, she reached in under the tarp and powered up her equipment. As she did, her eyes immediately shot up to the opening in the ceiling.

  Nothing happened up there.

  She lifted the tarp and peered at the peroxide. As before, she thought there might be more bubbles forming, but she couldn’t be sure.

  She was trying to exactly replicate the experiment from yesterday so, as desperately as she wanted to, she couldn’t flip the switch from the megahertz generator to bring in the terahertz chip yet. She thought she’d had it on megahertz for about ten minutes before Miller’d interrupted her to go to lunch. If she was going to replicate, she needed to run it at ten megahertz for ten minutes before she switched it to terahertz so things would have happened just like they had yesterday.

  She looked at the clock, told her AI to remind her in ten minutes, made some notes about the settings, then sat back to wait, her knee bouncing up and down impatiently.

  Her AI reminded her when the ten minutes were up. Myr rolled her chair over, lifted the edge of the tarp and put her finger on the terahertz switch. Turning her eyes up to the hole in the ceiling, she flipped the switch.

  Nothing happened.

  Of course, nothing was exactly what should have happened, but Myr’d convinced herself that something had sucked the water out of the air in the lab, frozen it, and somehow moved it up above the lab’s false ceiling. It only made sense that her apparatus had been the cause of those events. After all that was a simpler explanation than positing three unusual events: first, that something had dried out the air; second, that something different had put frozen water up in the ceiling; and, third, that Myr had a large set of sophisticated electronic equipment powered up and working when it happened.

  By Occam’s razor the three things must be related.

  How the hell her equipment might have done such a freakish thing, she had no idea, but she felt really disappointed that she hadn’t seen anything when she’d flipped the switch. Hoping that whatever had happened took a while to occur, Myr settled back to wait, keeping her eyes up on the ceiling area.

  After a few minutes she got bored, but started to worry that, because her attention was wandering, she’d miss seeing an important event up there. She got out the video camera she’d used to record some of her static electricity experiments and put it on a tripod. She pointed it at the opening in the ceiling tiles and turned it on.

  She rubbed at dry eyes. Dammit! she thought, I should be measuring the humidity in the room.

  Unfortunately she didn’t have a hygrometer to measure humidity and didn’t think anyone at Miller Tech would be likely to have one. Glancing up at the ceiling and seeing nothing happening, she turned back to her computer to figure out how much water could be in the air in the lab.

  If the humidity in the room was 50% and the temperature was 24 degrees C or 75oF there should be 9.4g of water per cubic meter of air. She looked at her room and estimated it to be seven by five meters with a ceiling that’d be two and a half to three meters, depending on whether you counted the air above the false ceiling or not. Call it a hundred cubic meters, so 940 grams of water or almost a liter. A little looking on the web suggested that wet snow had four times the volume of the water contained in it. Dry snow could have as much as twenty times the volume.

  Myr looked at the tiles, wishing she’d taken pictures of the snow when they’d first found it. At a guess, she thought there were about five to ten liters of dry snow in the ceiling. A reasonable range for her calculations, especially if not all the water had been extracted from the air.

  Still, how could her apparatus have pulled the humidity from the lab’s air and made it into snow up above the ceiling?

  Myr checked her phone for the time. She had ten more minutes before it’d be the right time to turn off her apparatus if she wanted to replicate the events from yesterday. She pushed a chair over beside the cart holding her equipment and climbed up onto it.

  She’d just intended to get a look up in and around the ceiling before she flipped off the switch. Instead as her head rose closer to the ceiling, she felt heat radiating against her forehead. Then she felt an odd tugging sensation in her face just before she noticed strands of her hair lifting up and pointing up toward the ceiling. Startled, she jerked back and nearly fell off the chair. Catching herself with a hand on the chair back, she quickly stepped down.

  Back on the floor, Myr stared up at the ceiling in astonishment, mind whirling. As if snow in the ceiling weren’t confusing enough, now I have a heater?! And something that… what…? Pulls?! Myr’d just begun to think about how the pulling sensation might correlate with an event that pulled water out of the air when the door opened and Arlan Miller said, “Hey Myr, we’ve got all the papers signed.”

  Horrified, Myr thought, I didn’t lock the damn door?! With a sense of despair she saw Vinn Saigler’s face behind Miller’s shoulder.

  At first Arlan just stared at Myr’s apparatus, wondering why it was covered by a tarp. Then he looked at Myr, wondering why the young woman looked so upset. He thought her face held a mixture of excitement, anger and despair. Her eyes weren’t on the papers Arlan held, the ones containing the non-disclosure agreement she’d insisted on. Instead she was glaring at Vinn over Arlan’s shoulder. Her eyes turned back to Arlan, “I’ve just had a major breakthrough. I don’t need him,” she said, her eyes on Vinn.

  Arlan opened his mouth to try to calm the waters but Vinn interjected derisively, “Oh yeah. Of course you’ve had a breakthrough. And just now… how convenient.”

  Arlan closed his eyes in an effort to calm himself. If he started shouting like he wanted to, things would deteriorate even more. Myr spoke before he could gather his thoughts, “No, not just now!” she said angrily, “Yesterday afternoon after…” she broke off. Arlan thought she’d decided not to say, “…after meeting Vinn,” and wondered if he should be grateful she’d stopped speaking.

  Vinn snorted, Myr’s eyes flashed and Arlan interrupted what looked to become a real knock down drag out. “Both of you! Shut it for a moment.” After receiving sullen looks from both of them, he took a deep breath and tried to speak soothingly. “You two may not realize it, but CEO’s don’t usually invest much time directly supervising new employees.” He sighed and focused on Myr first, “I’ve been doing it with you…” he turned to Vinn, “and I’ve been intending to do it with you because I’ve found that nurturing genius can pay off big time. However,” he said grimly, “nurturing does not mean babysitting you while you’re having temper tantrums like a couple of spoiled brats.”

  Arlan turned back to Myr, “I’m glad you’ve had a breakthrough, but I remain convinced you need someone with the math skills to help you analyze and describe what you’ve done so that we might better predict and plan out what else might be achieved.” Arlan saw Myr glance anxiously at a big clock icon counting down on her wall screen, but ignored her rudeness and turned back to Vinn. “I know you’re really good at math. But you’ve got to learn to get along with people who aren’t as good at math as you are. After all, if the rest of the world was as good as you, you wouldn’t be anything special, right?”

  Vinn shrugged, but Arlan thought his last point might have hit home. He turned back to Myr and saw her obviously getting a reminder from her AI in her earbud. She looked anxiously at the clock again. “Somewhere you have to be Myr?”

  “Something I have to do. I’m running an experiment and need to carry out the next step.”

  Happy because he’d wanted to watch Myr run one of her experiments, but she’d always managed to do them when he wasn’t around Arlan said, “Go ahead. We can put this discussion on hold for a minute.”

  Myr got a really torn look on her face, then it stilled, “Um, sure. If you guys could just step out…?”

  Arlan put on a mildly stern look while trying not
to look threatening, “Myr, we talked about this yesterday. No more secrets. We’re part of your team now and we can’t contribute if we…”

  Myr’s face took on a look of resolve. She suddenly reached under the tarp and put her hand on what Arlan thought might be the main power switch for her apparatus. For a moment Arlan feared she was shutting it down rather than include Arlan and Vinn in whatever she had going, but she turned to look up at the ceiling.

  A ceiling that Arlan suddenly realized was missing a bunch of its suspended acoustic tiles. Arlan heard the switch snick. His eyes were also pointed up at the ceiling so he saw the sudden puff of white blossom up there. A loud bass thump and a sudden pressurization of the air in the lab accompanied the puff. The air blew Myr’s hair and a couple of papers briefly lifted on her desk.

  Then, to Arlan’s utter astonishment, snow started falling in the lab! At first he’d thought it was just some kind of white powder blown out of a hole in the ceiling, but some flakes landed on him and quickly melted. A sniff showed that the liquid had no odor though he didn’t go so far as to taste it.

  When Arlan looked at Myr, he thought she looked surprised too, though perhaps not in the same way as he was. She’d immediately picked up a beaker and held it up into the densest concentration, catching some of the snow. Arlan looked back at Vinn and saw him gaping in astonishment. Arlan turned back to Myr, “What the hell was that?!”

  Myr quickly sealed the beaker, then stepped over to her setup, lifted the edge of the tarp and started spinning dials and flipping switches. “That was my new breakthrough,” she said.

  Arlan blinked a couple of times. “Um, and a field that suppresses static electricity makes it snow… how?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet,” Myr said. “But I will, and,” she focused a venomous look on Vinn, “I’ll do it without his help.”

  Arlan heard Vinn inhale for an angry retort, but Arlan stopped him with a calming hand on Vinn’s arm. To Myr, he said, “Come on Myr. We’ve gone over and over this. You’ve signed an agreement to cooperate and you said you understood the need for a team approach.” Arlan looked up at the ceiling where the small snowstorm had appeared, then said, “I’m really excited about what… whatever just happened up there. I don’t know what it was or what it means, but I’m ready to make major investments in understanding it.” He turned sad eyes on Myr, “But if you continue to insist on going it alone, you’re going to have to actually do it on your own.”

  Looking stricken, Myr said, “You’re threatening to fire me?”

  Arlan shook his head, “No, I’m desperately trying to keep you. I’m trying to give you every resource I have available. But if you’re going to continue to waste your time and our resources, I’ll have to cut you loose.”

  Myr’s eyes welled up and a moment later a tear ran down her cheek. Arlan had really come to like the young woman. It was breaking his heart, but he steeled his soul against the temptation to back down and give her another couple of months. After a moment her eyes dropped to the floor and she spoke in a small voice, “Okay. You’re right. After all, I already agreed and I did sign the papers yesterday.” She raised her eyes back up to Arlan’s, “But does it have to be him?”

  Arlan gave a playful shrug, “He’s the only math genius I have on hand right now, but,” Arlan turned to glare at Vinn, “he’s going to do his very best to stop being a jerk. Right Vinn?”

  Vinn nodded. Arlan had the impression the young man even looked abashed. Maybe he’d been impressed by the snowfall phenomenon. Perhaps even impressed enough to restrain his tongue.

  Dr. Miller had canceled his next three meetings so he could talk with Vinn and Myr about what’d just happened in her lab. Vinn thought Miller not only wanted to understand it himself, but to continue moderating Vinn and Myr’s interactions. Despite the fact that Myr appeared to despise him, Vinn had a hard time taking his eyes off her. Her light brown hair curled gently, bouncing when she turned quickly. Her eyes were a fascinating pale brown with reddish flecks. She looked surprisingly physically fit—muscular, but in a way that wasn’t massive or masculine. Despite her muscularity, she remained slender and caught his eye even though he recognized that she did little to enhance her appearance. No makeup, ordinary clothing, and short hair that she simply combed out rather than styling.

  Yet, even though it didn’t look like she worked at being beautiful, somehow she felt much more than merely pretty to Vinn.

  Her enthusiasm when she talked to them about her experiment and the field she claimed to have discovered—those made her magnetic. He knew she was older than he was, but all the women he’d found attractive so far in his life had been more mature than he was. Vinn’s friends constantly teased him that he’d be hard pressed to find a woman as immature as he was. To this point in his life, none of the women he’d pined after had returned his affections and more than a few had actively disliked him, much like Myr seemed to. Vinn had been told repeatedly that this was because his clumsy attempts at wit often hurt their feelings. Since he so seldom managed to say the right things, this time he decided to concentrate on simply saying as little as possible. At the least he wanted to control his impulses to address her so sarcastically.

  Vinn was finding it hard to keep his mouth shut though. Myr had described her coils in general terms, but the measurements she reported making of their physical properties were rudimentary at best. The same was true of the energized plates that seemed to be necessary for the coils to generate electrostatic suppression. And, she still hadn’t opened up the cylindrical cover over the coils and plates to let them see their arrangement.

  When she paused, Dr. Miller said, “Okay, thanks for explaining how your setup works. I understand that you believe the field created somehow seems to suppress electric repulsion or attraction between like or unlike charges. But, how does that explain what we just saw happen up in the ceiling?”

  Myr shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. “I really have no idea,” she admitted. With a sigh, she said, “This is what we do know.” She held up one finger, “I’ve replicated the experiment at least once, suggesting it’s not just a freak accident.” She lifted another finger, “Since the snow event happens instantaneously when I power the equipment down, it must have to have something to do with my setup.” A third finger went up, “The event is happening about two meters higher above the field generator than where I believed the field was focused when I was energizing in megahertz ranges.” She glanced at them as if unsure they were following, “the event first happened when I accidentally switched in the terahertz chip.”

  Miller nodded.

  Myr put up a fourth finger, “It seems to generate heat and reduce humidity while the power’s on.” She put up a fifth finger, “It extracts heat and produces snow when I turn off the power.” She glanced quickly at Vinn, but returned her attention immediately to Miller, “My theory is that somehow the field pulled the water out of the air and concentrated it invisibly up there,” she waved at the ceiling. “The generated heat and the fact we can’t see it suggests that it’s compressing the water to a very small area. When the power’s turned off, the water rapidly re-expands and that expansion absorbs heat, turning the water into snow.”

  Vinn wanted to bark out an objection since water and other liquids were known to be incompressible, but he bit his tongue. Fortunately, Miller narrowed his eyes and shook his head, “That doesn’t make sense, water’s essentially incompressible.”

  Myr shrugged her shoulders, “Agreed. But by my rough calculations the lab holds close to a liter of water suspended in the air as humidity. That should generate five to twenty liters of snow which,” she again waved up toward the ceiling, “is in the range I estimate appeared up there.” She shrugged again, “Obviously, we should’ve been able to see a liter of water and we didn’t, which is why I think it was compressed even if it seems impossible. But,” she turned an intense gaze back and forth between the two men, “remember that the field’s always seemed to supp
ress electrostatic effects. Remember, the reason water’s incompressible is because electrostatic repulsion between the water molecules keeps them apart.”

  There was a moment of silence while Miller apparently tried to wrap his mind around what Myr’d said. Doing his very best not to sound critical, Vinn said, “If that’s the case, why does it compress the water in the air, but not the oxygen or nitrogen?”

  Myr shrugged again, “I don’t know. Maybe the snow does contain oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide but they all sublimate to gas so quickly we don’t even see it?” She turned back to Miller and said with a tone of frustration, “There are so many experiments we need to do before we can expect to understand it.”

  Vinn wanted to object that frozen nitrogen or oxygen would have produced visible clouds of vapor—but he successfully restrained himself.

  “Oh,” Myr said, “we should watch the video!”

  It turned out that Myr had recorded a video of the ceiling. When they played it back, they couldn’t see anything but the frame and floor of the upstairs lab in the frames right before the sudden puff of white appeared. The white expanded across the screen from an apparent point to its full size in a mere ten frames. Since the video was being shot at sixty frames per second, that meant the expansion had only taken about a sixth of a second. No wonder it made a loud thump and generated a puff of air that blew stuff around! Vinn thought.

  They went back and forth across the frame right before and the frame right after the appearance of the white, agreeing that there really didn’t seem to be anything visible in the frame before the white stuff appeared. The whiteness appeared as a smear an inch or two in diameter in the frame after. The resolution of the video wasn’t good enough to tell exactly what they were seeing, but Vinn thought that it looked like vapor when it first materialized and seemed to turn into discrete snow crystals around 40 to 60 frames after it appeared.