Radiation Hazard (The Stasis Stories #3) Read online

  Lee sat down with them, handing each of them a mug of coffee.

  Kaem stared at it, “Where’d this come from?”

  “Our new coffeemaker,” Lee said, jerking a thumb back over her shoulder. “Arya approved the expenditure.”

  “Great idea. Though,” he made a little grimace, “I don’t like coffee. But I should’ve thought of it for you guys.”

  “Yeah,” Gunnar said, “fully caffeinated, I’m friendly and cheerful.”

  Both Kaem and Lee snorted derisively at that. Lee said, “I heard you guys talking about moving to a bigger place. I think we should think about someplace closer to the coast. That way, if we want to launch rockets from high-altitude, lighter-than-air Stades we won’t have to worry so much about failed rockets landing on someone.”

  Gunnar said, “I found some abandoned farmland for sale an hour and some east of here. Five adjoining farms totaling seventeen hundred acres. The price is good, only a little over fourteen hundred dollars an acre.”

  “Why’re they abandoned?”

  “They’ve been contaminated by an adjacent toxic waste dump. That land’s for sale too.” He shrugged, “Well, it’s essentially free to anyone willing to do some remediation on the dump.”

  Lee leaned back in horror. “A toxic waste dump and contaminated land?! You can’t be serious!”

  Musingly, Kaem said, “That’d be about 2.4 million just to buy the land. Then we’d have to remediate and build and—”

  Aghast, Lee said, “Don’t tell me you’re considering this!”

  Kaem took up where he’d left off on being interrupted, “…and, right now we can’t afford to buy the land.”

  Gunnar nodded, “You do know new businesses get startup loans all the time, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, it just doesn’t seem like we should have to borrow.” Kaem got up. Saying, “Let me talk to the business expert,” he headed for the door to the anteroom.

  Behind him, he heard Lee say, “I’m not working at a hazardous waste dump!”

  When he came back from talking to Arya, he said, “She thinks taking a loan is kind of crazy. She says we should just wait until we’ve built a rocket for Space-Gen and have the cash on hand. It shouldn’t be much longer.”

  “How about if we go look at it.” Gunnar said, “If we think it has possibilities, we could make a low-ball bid. I know they’ve priced it to sell, but I’m betting they can’t get close to that asking price for toxic land.”

  “Okay,” Kaem said, “we need to go down to the coast the day after tomorrow to bid on another job. Maybe we can see the place on the way back.”

  “Hello?” Lee said, waving her hands in the air. “Toxic waste! Are you guys insane?!”

  Kaem grinned at Gunnar and he grinned back. Gunnar nodded at Lee, “I think you better explain it to her before her head explodes.”

  Kaem turned and studied her.

  “What?!” burst out of her.

  “You remember signing that NDA about Stade and stazing and all that?”

  She nodded.

  “And you’re still going to abide by it, especially regarding this conversation, right?”

  Lee nodded.

  “So,” Kaem said, “Gunnar’s saying we need to tell you what Stade truly is. He thinks you’re enough a member of the team that we should make you aware of what in reality is happening when we do it.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to tell anyone what Stade is?”

  “Well, no. Mr. X isn’t going to tell anyone how to make it. He wants that to stay a single-person secret on the principle that anything known by more than one person isn’t a secret anymore. What I want to explain to you is what Stade is.” Kaem glanced at Gunnar, “To tell the truth, I think we’re going to have to tell the people down at the coast what we’re doing to be able to win the bid. That means the secret of what Stade is will probably get away from us pretty soon anyway,” he turned back to Lee, “but I’d like you to promise it doesn’t get free because of your loose lips.”

  She nodded; her face backlit with curiosity. “I promise.”

  Gunnar got up, “I don’t need this explained to me again. I’m gonna call those people about having a look at the land.” He wandered off across the room to one of the other tables, grumbling, “And start looking for bigger air pumps,” in a low, disgusted tone.

  Kaem turned back to Lee. “You ever read much science fiction?”

  Her face brightened, “Oh, yeah!”

  Kaem frowned, “I never have, but sometimes I think I should’ve. Gunnar reads it and says Stade’s a common enough device in SF stories. There it’s known as ‘stasis.’”

  Lee gave him a puzzled look. “I’ve read stories where they use stasis to preserve food and sometimes they put people in stasis during star travel, but…” she frowned, “None of those stories talk about stuff that’s incredibly strong.”

  “Gunnar says that Niven and Vinge both wrote stories where characters were put in stasis in spheres that were immune to anything, all the way up to nuclear weapons. He says what we’re doing is the same, it’s just that we’re creating non-spherical shapes.”

  She frowned, “Wait, what’re you doing?”

  “Stopping time inside the mirrored space.”

  “Stopping time…” Lee stared at him. She gave her head a little shake, “What?!”

  “So, time’s stopped in the segment of space-time defined by the Stade. Therefore, nothing inside it can move. This means it’s completely unbreakable. It can’t be deformed. Nothing can penetrate it. You know its properties as far as you measured them in Space-Gen’s lab, but it’s probably far, far stronger than the limits to which you tested it.”

  “Wait, time’s stopped? So, you could travel to another star without aging?”

  “Presumably. The only animal we’ve put in stasis so far was a young cricket, but it wasn’t fazed by being in stasis. When it came out it was still the same size it had been when it went in and it resumed growing afterward. It lived about as long as crickets do if you subtract the time in stasis, much longer if you add that time on.”

  “My God! That could be just as important as the structural properties!”

  Kaem shrugged, “If you had cancer and could go in stasis for twenty years, hoping for a cure, you might think it was more important than the structural properties. But Gunnar wanted me to explain Stade to you so you could understand that if we stazed that hazardous waste, we’d render it harmless as long as it remained in stasis. Therefore, buying toxic land is not only a good deal for us, but it’s a way we can help the planet.”

  Lee sagged back in her chair. “What if a Stade full of hazardous stuff dissolves?” She shook her head, “I imagine you’re going to point out that a segment of space-time that’s in stasis doesn’t actually,” she made finger quotes, “‘dissolve?’”

  “No. It can only come out of stasis.”

  “So, when we were stazing that cryotank and you said the Stade inner mold would ‘dissolve’ in so many minutes, that was because…?”

  “Because that’s how long we’d stopped time inside it. When I first had the theory, Mr. X based the stazer on, I thought it might let us send an object forward in time. It turns out that it does, however, from our perspective it does so by stopping time in the space in the chamber while that space is still occupied in our world by the Stade. I thought it’d disappear in our reality and reappear in the future, which, by the way, would’ve caused quite an explosion when it suddenly reappeared and instantly occupied the same space as the air where it arrived.” He shrugged, “But from the perspective of something inside the Stade, it did just travel forward in time.”

  Lee closed her eyes, evidently deep in thought for a few seconds. “But you said you weren’t littering the planet with Stade trash because you could dissolve it after it’d served its purpose, right? You said you’d essentially be recycling it.”

  Kaem nodded, “Yeah, we can intervene to break a Stade out of stasis before it arrive
s at its destination in the future.”

  “So, what if someone decides to dissolve a Stade full of toxic waste?”

  Kaem shrugged, “Haven’t figured that out yet. I think we need a way to mark Stades with symbols denoting what they contain so people won’t de-staze them unless they’re prepared to deal with what’s inside.”

  Lee frowned, “Symbols? Why not just text in several languages?”

  Kaem nodded, “That too. But I think we need symbols that’ll be recognized ten thousand years from now… By people who no longer speak our current languages.”

  “Oh,” Lee said, her eyes widening. “How long can Stades last?”

  “Obviously, we can’t test the limits, but theory says many multiples of the current lifespan of the Universe.”

  “Oh…” After a few moments of thought, Lee asked, “Where would you put the toxic waste after you stazed it?”

  “I’ve been thinking that we’ll need some Stades that’re heavy. We could staze the waste and use the Stade for weights.”

  “Weights?”

  “You know how, when I mentioned making chain out of vacuum Stade, you immediately thought of a space elevator?”

  Lee slowly nodded, her eyes looking like thoughts were exploding behind them.

  “I want you to consider that we usually think of a space elevator as a cable loaded in tension because materials with high tensile strength are much more common and it would require a lot less material than a column standing up from the earth.” Kaem paused to get a nod from her, then said, “Imagine instead that we did build a tower… That would be possible with Stade.

  Lee stared at him, “Just how the hell tall are you thinking this tower would be?!”

  Kaem blinked at her. “That’s a better question for our aerospace engineer, isn’t it?”

  “You mean me?!” Lee asked, consternation on her face.

  “You’re the only one we’ve got at present. We’re going to need to hire a lot more people as soon as we have some more money.” He rolled his eyes and started ticking off on his fingers, “Buy land, hire legal people, and accountants, and business expertise. Hire people to make coffee, hire teams to do grunt work, rent consultants on toxic waste. I felt like we had a lot of money from Space-Gen and GLI’s advances, but it’s a pittance compared to what we’re gonna need to do the stuff I have in mind.”

  “Wait, wait, wait! I can’t think about all that stuff yet. Tell me what you’re thinking about a space tower. I’m trying to imagine the foundation for such a thing. I don’t think we can dig deep enough to make it stable.”

  “Ah, that kind of foundation does sound daunting. What I’d been imagining is something that starts at the Earth end as a big tripod. Each of the bases of the tripod has a big foundation, but nothing that’s sunk deep into the Earth’s crust. Each of the bases is dug down to bedrock and then filled with Stade, some of which might be hazardous waste. We use a piledriver to send in some angled Stade stakes that stabilize the base to the bedrock, but we’re mostly counting on the weight of the base to resist liftoff if the tripod experiences transverse forces that try to tilt it.”

  “And how tall are you thinking this tower’s going to be?!”

  Kaem shrugged, “I don’t know how tall it should be. I was thinking sixty-two miles or a hundred kilometers. You know, what they call the ‘edge of space.’ At least out where the air’s thin—”

  “Sixty miles! You’re talking the biggest engineering project in history!”

  Kaem frowned, “The road to Richmond’s a seventy-mile-long engineering project.”

  “Oh,” she gave him an embarrassed grin. “But they build roads a little at a time and the Earth holds them up.”

  He shrugged, “We can’t build this all at one time either. I picture it working like those cranes that build themselves. We’ll make a bunch of vacuum Stade segments and just keep pushing them out and welding onto the next one until it’s done. If we decide it needs to be taller, we’ll just add on. Since it won’t weigh much, the biggest stresses will come when storms try to push it around. Thus, our tripod probably ought to be five to ten miles high so we’ll have stabilized the section that’s down in the part of the atmosphere where there are high winds and severe weather.”

  “My God…! Can’t accuse you of thinking small.”

  “Then we could tilt the top and launch rockets off of it with an electromagnetic driver. Or, maybe it’d be better to have something spinning at the top that flings spacecraft off in their choice of directions. Another interesting possibility would be to not have a vertical section of tower at all. We could have one leg of the tripod just keep going up to the east after being braced by the other two limbs. That way we could have an electromagnetic rail go straight up that slanted rail and fire a rocket off the end at near orbital speeds.”

  “You’re talking a… massive structure. I’d be worried your foundations would sink.”

  Kaem shook his head, “Built out of vacuum Stade it wouldn’t weigh more than the power cables that ran up it. Substantial but not ginormous. Using vacuum Stade would save us on material costs and, in case a disaster of some kind did knock down the tower, we might be able to work out an emergency explosive bolt type of system to break it loose so it’d float up into the atmosphere rather than crashing down on people.”

  Lee put her head down on the table. She spoke quietly, like someone with a migraine, “It’s going to take a while to get my head around this. Can I just sit here and think?”

  “No problem,” Kaem said, getting up and heading out to try to convince Arya to hire some more people, despite the fact that they didn’t have the kind of financial cushion she wanted.

  ***

  That evening Gunnar’s blimp was going to be full, so he and Kaem made plans to return and staze it after dinner. The sun was getting low when Kaem got there. He was surprised to find Lee and Arya there with Gunnar. “What are you guys doing here?”

  Lee said, “I’ve got to be here to make sure you boys don’t screw up our first blimp. I’ve been doing all kinds of planning for our vacuum Stade fabrication center and it counts on the blimp technology.”

  Kaem rolled his eyes and looked at Arya, “What’s your excuse?”

  “Just here to protect our investment,” she said, a sparkle in her eyes. “Besides, if this doesn’t work, I’ll have to start reworking all our business plans.”

  They carried out the new stazer and hooked it up to power. Gunnar’d already shut down the air pump and poked the Mylar blimp a few times. He’d decided it wasn’t so tightly inflated that he wouldn’t be able to put in more air in it to stretch it a little bigger after they stazed the short-term temporary Stade that’d vanish to leave an interior space.

  Kaem handed Gunnar the leads for the microwave emitters and the light conduits to the laser fittings. They had three sets of microwave emitters and laser fittings in the big balloon so they could staze it in sections if the first one didn’t do the whole thing at once. Gunnar hooked up the fittings to the middle of the blimp first, per Kaem’s hope that one stazing event would do the entire blimp.

  Kaem worried that even three stazing events wouldn’t do the whole thing and he’d have to build an even more powerful stazer.

  The actual stazing took a little longer because they had to wait for the ultracapacitors—capacitors Kaem hoped would hold enough power to staze the whole thing—to charge. When it finally stazed, the only evidence of the event was the loud snap of the big capacitor bank. Kaem said, “That was pretty anticlimactic. At least it didn’t blow up, eh?”

  The four of them stood staring at it. Lee said, “Did it work?”

  “Let’s go have a poke and find out,” Kaem said, dreading the answer.

  In fact, the middle of the blimp proved to be rock hard like Stade should be. The two ends, however, still felt soft. They couldn’t feel the top of the blimp where Kaem worried there might be more areas that hadn’t fully stazed. He projected cheer, saying, “Looks like we’re
going to need to staze through the other two fixtures as well. Good on us for thinking to add the fixtures to let us do it.”

  Fifteen minutes later they’d stazed through the other two fixtures and every part of the blimp that they could reach felt hard.

  Gunnar stepped over to the air pump, getting ready to inflate the blimp a little more so they could make the longer-lasting outer layer that would allow them to pump out the interior and have a vacuum blimp.

  Kaem called after him. “Wait. I’m worried the top of the blimp might not be stazed.”

  “Well,” Gunnar said, “the only way we’re going to find out is to staze an outer layer, then walk around inside it and have a look.”

  “We could climb up there with your ladder and poke around.”

  “There’s no point. Say it’s not fully stazed. We couldn’t do anything about it because those areas aren’t even close to the stazing fittings. If we tried to staze it a little more, the microwaves would get reflected without reaching the defects on the far side of the blimp.”

  Disappointed, Kaem said, “I guess you’re right.”

  Arya said, “You could reach through a window and roll the Stade.” She was speaking of a pair of substantial zippered windows in the Mylar envelope.

  “No, we couldn’t. It’s frictionless. We wouldn’t have any way to turn it.”

  Lee said, “Weld some knobs on it and use them to turn it.”

  “Damn,” Gunnar said grumpily, “Glad you ladies showed up. Our resident genius is failing us big time.”

  “Oh, Gunnar, that cuts deep!” Kaem exclaimed, secretly pleased that everyone on the team was contributing. Using a morose tone, he said, “Let’s get the ladder.”

  “That won’t work either,” Gunnar said. “Full extension on the ladder is thirty-two feet and the blimp’s fifty feet in diameter.”

  “What about the rope in your truck’s bed box?” Kaem asked. “We could throw it over and then pull on the two ends, looking for it to indent any soft spots.”

  “It’s a hundred-foot rope. Is that long enough?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” Lee said, frowning up at the blimp.