Rocket! An Ell Donsaii story 4 Read online

  Brian, waved his hands in protest, laughing, “Almost anything.”

  Ell grinned at him, “I’m counting on ‘anything’ we need.” She pointed, “Vivian Varka there,” she indicated a heavyset woman, “is an electrical engineer who’s going to help me build circuits to generate the specialized fields we need. Hopefully, between the two of us we’ll be able to energize any ports the assembly teams are able to build.” Ell went on around the table, introducing assistants and minor players in each of the groups that she’d already introduced the heads of.

  Ell looked around, “I know that none of you know each other very well yet but I hope that we gel into a real team. Although D5R has backstopped each of you with a relatively generous minimum salary, remember that if we’re successful in making the ports work on a larger scale, we have a profit sharing system.”

  As the meeting broke up Ben Stavos rubbed his chin and wondered what he’d gotten himself into. He’d interviewed and taken this job over the net from Texas. Yes his minimum guaranteed salary was significantly better than HP had been paying him. But when interviewing over the net he’d thought that Donsaii just “looked” young. He also hadn’t realized that she was running the place; he’d thought she was just doing the hiring. When he’d arrived and found out that this girl child was in charge he’d been completely flummoxed. Then he’d done the research that he should have done before giving up his job at HP. She was just as young as she looked. Not even twenty yet! Yes, she had had a moment of brilliance that had set the physics world on its ear when she’d worked out the math for this 5th dimension and explained entanglement. However, even though Ben didn’t understand that math himself, he got the distinct impression that it was really just a bit of luck that had let her stumble across it. If this harebrained entangled port idea didn’t work quickly, he suspected that whoever was financing D5R would drop it like a hot potato—then what?

  He admired her as she walked with Roger and Vivian over to the electronics table. She was wearing faded jeans, running shoes and an old t-shirt. No makeup. She should have looked plain but instead he could feel her drawing every eye in the room. In a simple clean cut wholesome way she was beautiful yet seemed completely unaware of it! If she was aware of it, surely she’d take the easy way out and work as a model, wouldn’t she? Oh well, maybe he’d just stick with this job until the investors gave up on it, then move on. Enjoy the moment. He turned back to the micro assembler setup, “OK, John,” he said to his assistant, “let’s see if we can persuade this monster to line up individual molecules in circles.”

  ***

  Steve and Mary got out of their car and slung their backpacks. He watched a moment to be sure the car had begun to drive itself away to the parking lot. Then he turned and looked for Ell who had been dropped off by her car a few minutes earlier. She was about a hundred yards away, walking one of the campus’ brick paths on her way to her Astronomy class. The platinum blond wig she’d chosen to disguise herself with for her stint as UNC student Belle Donovan made her easy to pick out, even this far away. He and Mary began walking along the same path, Steve’s eyes darting around as he checked for threats. Once they reached the building Mary stayed in the lobby on a bench there. Steve entered the classroom and sat up near the back. He looked over the class. “Belle” was sitting down near the front and had started talking to the young man next to her.

  Gordon looked up as someone sat in the seat next to his. Hmm, a pretty blond. Too much makeup for his taste. It looked like she was trying to hide a bad complexion. However, she was cute in a pale sort of way. He turned to her, “Hi, haven’t seen you around. You new?”

  Ell grinned at him. He had freckles and curly reddish hair. “Yup. Just taking this one class ‘cause I’m interested in ET’s.” She raised her eyebrows at him.

  Gordon gave her a look that combined a grimace and a query, “This is a pretty tough class to be taking just because you’re curious! You can read about ET’s on the net.”

  She tilted her head. “Maybe so, but I’d like to get a deeper understanding than that.”

  “Why not just audit the class over the net then?”

  “’cause then I wouldn’t get to have scintillating conversations with fascinating people like you. My name’s Belle. What’s yours?”

  He put out his hand, “I’m Gordon. A real Southern Belle ‘eh? I never thought I’d actually meet one.”

  “Hah, ha. Didn’t yo momma nevah tell you not to make jokes about a person’s name? I’m sure I’ve already heard all the ‘Belle’ jokes you can possibly think of!”

  “Oh ho! Did you just ring the starting ‘bell’ on a challenge?”

  Ell rolled her eyes but was saved from having to respond by the arrival of Professor Norris. The Professor introduced himself and outlined the class on planetary systems before starting his first lecture. His speaking style kind of droned on but Ell found the topic fascinating. He was assigning some reading to be done for the next class as the bell rang.

  Gordon looked wide eyed at Ell, “There’s the ‘bell!’”

  She grinned and lightly punched his shoulder, saying, “I can see I’ll have to watch who I sit next to from now on.”

  As she left the building she had her AI contact her car and send it to pick her up. She saw Mary getting up from a bench in the lobby to leave when she did.

  Chapter Four

  Cape Canaveral—NASA and ILX Corporation today announced that the latest Vulcan 5 rocket, carrying supplies for the International Space Station, has also failed to launch successfully. Once again, one of the new, super efficient motors trumpeted by ILX apparently exploded, driving the rocket off course and requiring it to be destroyed by internal charges. More and more concern is being expressed about the supply situation at the Station…

  Roger and Ell walked into West 87 together and started toward the booth where the physics grads customarily hung out. Emma looked up. “Hey you two!” She bounced up out of the booth to give Ell a hug. “Am I ever gonna see one of you without the other again?” She was amused to see they both looked a little embarrassed.

  Ell said, “Well, you know we work together now, so if we’re gonna go slumming at West 87 with our degenerate friends, it only makes sense to ride together.”

  “Besides,” Roger said, “I’m buying her dinner in a transparent attempt to influence my new boss and the only restaurants I know anything about are here in Raleigh.” He shrugged, “If we’re gonna be in Raleigh on a Friday night, of course we’ve gotta drop by West 87 and visit you guys.”

  They sat down and caught up with their old friends from NCSU. They were introduced to a couple of new grad students.

  Cody, one of the new students wound up sitting next to Ell. He felt like there was something familiar about her but in the flurry of introductions he hadn’t really caught her name. She was hot! He wondered if she and this ‘Roger’ guy were in a committed relationship. He asked her, “When did Roger graduate?”

  “Last December.”

  “And you two work for the same company?”

  Ell grinned at him. The grin lit up her face and he found her even more attractive, “Yep.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “Well,” she considered, “we’re very good friends.” She tilted her head, “and I’m pretty sure he’s a boy…”

  Cody, happy to hear that she didn’t sound committed to Roger, glanced around the table. The others were all lost in their own little conversations. He turned back to Ell, “You seem familiar to me. Do we know each other from somewhere?”

  She smiled enigmatically, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  He tilted his head, considering. She looked about eighteen to twenty, younger than he was by a couple of years. “Are you sure? Where did you go to high school?”

  “Morehead City.”

  He grinned, “My parents have a vacation home on Emerald Isle and my dad loves to go fishing on Jim Slip’s charter boat out of Morehead. I’ll bet we’ve run into each
other somewhere down there one summer.”

  Ell tilted her head, considering. “Maybe we did.”

  “Did you go to college?”

  She grinned again, “A couple of years.”

  Cody was a little disappointed, thinking she’d gone to a community college somewhere. But who cares how far she went in school when she looks this good? He glanced at Roger. Roger was deep in a conversation with Jerry. “Do you mind if our AIs exchange contact info? I’d love to see you again sometime.”

  Ell shrugged, “No problem.”

  Emma, sitting on Cody’s left, dug an elbow into his side.

  He turned to her and saw her grinning at him. He raised an eyebrow in question.

  “Have you figured out who you’re putting the moves on yet, ‘Casanova’?”

  Cody glanced up at his HUD. It said, “Contact—Ell Donsaii.” He closed his eyes and felt his cheeks flush. He opened them to see Ell grinning at him. “I guess now I know why you seem familiar?”

  She quirked her lip, “Maybe?” She tilted her head in consideration, then frowned a little, “But we might have met in Morehead too.”

  A little later Roger and Ell got up to leave for their dinner at the Mellow Mushroom. James said, “You’re not taking her someplace fancy now that you have a job? My God man, you’re not gonna impress the girl that way!”

  Ell patted James lightly on the shoulder. “Turns out ‘the girl’ likes pizza better than she does those fancy restaurants.”

  ***

  Ell stared up at her HUD, watching the results of a computation she had Allan, her AI, running to calculate the orbits of the planets of Epsilon Eridani. It held interest for her because E. Eridani was only 10.5 light years away and had a planet in the “habitable zone.” However, it also had a large planet with a highly elliptical orbit that likely made the habitable zone planet’s orbit unstable. Ell was trying to calculate from the known orbits and masses of the various E. Eridani planets just how long the planet had likely been in the habitable zone.

  Someone thumped down in the seat next to her. “Whew, got here before the ‘bell.’”

  Ell looked over, “Hey Gordon. You know, the way you keep arriving to class barely before it rings, you make it very difficult to avoid sitting next to you and hearing these awful name puns?”

  He grinned at her, “My plan exactly.”

  Ell rolled her eyes and checked her HUD.

  “Hey my roomies and I are having a pre finals party Saturday night, you wanna come? You could be the ‘belle of the ball.’”

  Ell glared balefully at him for a moment but then a grin broke out. “OK. Where and when?”

  ***

  Ell arrived back at D5R after her class and headed immediately into the research area for the team’s Wednesday morning update meeting. No one looked happy. In fact their dejected expressions matched her own feelings. They’d been at this for weeks now with little success. For a moment she wondered if they had taken on an impossible task. Or had she assembled the wrong team? Maybe she was the wrong person to lead them? She turned to Stavos, “Ben, let’s start with you. Can you tell us something positive?”

  Stavos twisted his lips a moment, then shook his head. “The good news is that we’ve got the micro assembler set up so that it can build a pair of rings made from entangled buckyballs.”

  Ell’s eyebrows shot up in excitement. “That sounds great!” She frowned, “Why are you so down?”

  “You know the entanglement isn’t terribly stable until we get them placed in your stabilization field. We actually have the entangled buckyballs moving into the assembler stabilized by such a field. But when we take them from the stabilization field that they’re in and move them to the field for the port’s ring, they are out of the stabilization field and the action of moving them un-entangles them if we move them very fast. When we try to ‘up the speed’ of placement of the buckyballs into the ring, they start losing their entanglement in transit.”

  “Ouch, that is a problem. How fast can you place them reliably without breaking their entanglement?”

  “About two per second. Since the buckyballs have a diameter of about one nanometer, that means about 5.5 days per millimeter of ring. To make a pair of one centimeter diameter rings like you want will take somewhere around half a year!” He paused and shrugged, “We’re still working on it though.”

  Everyone at the table could see that he didn’t have any ideas for a solution at present.

  “Dang! I’ll come look at your set up after the meeting. Maybe I’ll have some ideas on how to stabilize the entanglement sooner.” She looked up at the ceiling, “Or maybe during the placement?” After a moment she turned to Fred Marsden, “Is your team having any luck entangling tori?”

  Marsden rolled his eyes, “Oh yeah, we can entangle them alright. But we have a problem similar to Ben’s. Once we’ve entangled them, we can’t separate them to put the tori into your stabilization field without breaking the entanglement. Molecules this big will only stay entangled for microseconds unless they’re stabilized.”

  “Any ideas on how to solve it?”

  He shrugged, “We’re going to try to position each torus on a stabilization field plate, then bring the two tori into contact while they’re on the plates and see if we can get them to entangle with the field all ready to turn on.” With a sigh he said, “The entanglement field and the stabilization field are pretty different though.”

  “Vivian?” Ell turned to Vivian Varka the electrical engineer. “Let’s look at their setup together and see whether we can help them work on the transition from one field to the other, maybe a gradual transition.” She looked up at the ceiling again, “Or would an abrupt transition be better?” She brought her eyes back down and shrugged, “I guess we can try both.”

  Ell looked around the table, “Any other news or ideas?”

  They all looked back without response, as if hopeless or depressed or something. Ell despondently wondered what she could do to buck them up. Maybe she should just give up and disband D5R?

  Roger felt nervous speaking up in this group because he was the most junior. Well except for Ell! Nonetheless, he cleared his throat, “Uh.”

  Everyone turned to look at him. “I’m wondering if an intermediate approach might work?”

  The group looked at him with puzzled expressions. “For instance if we entangled nanotubes say a hundred microns long instead of the much larger nanotori. Then used Ben’s micromanipulators to move them into a ring shape at a relatively slow pace…”

  Ell’s eyebrows went up and she looked around at the group. They all looked somewhat dubious but no one was saying it couldn’t be done. “It’s an idea. Roger why don’t you do some tests and calculations. How fast can Fred entangle them and how fast can Ben move them without breaking entanglement? Then determine whether it will actually be faster than ‘one at a time’ buckyballs?”

  Roger nodded.

  Ben put a hand up and Ell nodded. “I’m just wondering,” he said, “exactly how long the investors will put up with our lack of progress? Should we be taking offers we may be getting for other jobs?”

  For a moment Ell considered telling them that she was the only investor. Then she thought about telling them they did have a deadline after which they would be disbanded. That would be the way it would work in the real world. Mentally she shrugged, after all, there wasn’t really any reason to stop working on it until Ell herself was ready to give up. With PGR Comm paying her a minimum royalty of 2.1 billion dollars a year, minus the 230 million a year she was funding NCSU and UNC with and about 800 million in taxes she had about a billion dollars a year in disposable income. Financing D5R hardly put a dent in that kind of cash flow. She didn’t want to tell them that because she really didn’t want people to know how wealthy she was. She looked at Ben a moment, then around at the others. “Our investors,” she said, “have personally guaranteed me six months of salary for each of you should they abandon our efforts here at D5R. I hope th
at that’s enough cushion that all of you will be able continue to focus all your energies on achieving success, rather than on backup plans?”

  There were surprised nods all around the table and the meeting broke up shortly thereafter.

  ***

  It turned out that Gordon and his roommates lived south of campus in a small rented house. Ell’s car dropped her off and headed out to find a place to park as she walked down a gravel driveway. She could already hear the heavy thump of music. She had arrived very late to her first ever “college party” so she wouldn’t feel too awkward arriving where she didn’t know anyone. It looked like she’d been successful; the front porch was crowded with people swaying to the music. People spilled out into the yard most of them holding a cup in one hand. Ell slowly worked her way into the crowd.