A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5) Read online

  Lee ran down at that point. Kaem said, “Whew!” and laughed. Then he asked, “What’s the bottom line?”

  She shrugged, “It’s going to make noise but our damping strategies should get them down into reasonable ranges. We’ve still got time for a few more design iterations before they give us final permission to start extruding the actual tower.”

  ***

  Wilson Delbet stepped into the big room at Staze, once again unimpressed. How can a supposedly shit-hot tech company be working out of a rented metal building that doesn’t even have the company’s name on it? he wondered. And mostly hire young, wet-behind-the-ears engineers and technicians. Or, be run by a shadowy boss no one knows, through a freaking clueless undergrad who only works part-time! Mentally he shrugged, It may be ridiculous, but all that’s just going to make my job easier, eh?

  Delbet’s mysterious primary employer had hired someone to hack into his college and former employers’ records. There they’d made insertions that supported Delbet’s recently inflated resume and got him the job at Staze. The HR people at Staze were very picky. They could be because they got to choose from a lot of applicants who were all trying to get in on the ground floor of this new technology.

  Delbet reminded himself that even without the two-million-dollar bonus he’d get for succeeding with the clandestine part of his mission at Staze, his improved resume was going to markedly improve his employability and salaries for the rest of his life.

  He stopped in at the corner of the building where the business people worked and asked his HR contact who he should report to. “Or, if you don’t have an assignment for me yet, could I ask to work in stazer design and construction?”

  The HR weenie studied him a moment, then shook his head, “No. Stazer construction’s carried out offsite. You’ve been assigned to Dez Lanis’s team. She’s the blonde lady over there,” he said, pointing.

  Delbet looked that way and resisted sighing. He’d been assigned to a team whose boss was at least fifteen years younger than he was. Buck up, he told himself as he started that way. You’ll probably be her boss in a few months. Besides, he noticed, she’s easy on the eyes.

  Arriving at her side, he waited a moment for a break in the conversation she was having with a young man who looked to be no older than she was. During a momentary pause, he stuck out his hand. “Ms. Lanis? I’m Wilson Delbet, electrical and electronics engineering.”

  She stared at him a moment, giving him the impression that she thought he should’ve waited until she’d acknowledged him. Then she shook his hand, said, “I’ll be with you in a minute,” and resumed the conversation she’d been having with the other newbie.

  Wilson studied the other guy a moment, then suddenly realized—from pictures on the website—that the guy was Kaem Seba, the undergrad who served as a conduit to the company’s real boss. His t-shirt didn’t hide the kind of hard musculature you got from spending too much time in the gym. Recognizing Seba’s overemphasis on physical fitness made Wilson lose even more respect for the guy.

  Their conversation concluded, Seba turned to Wilson. Putting out his hand, he said, “Mr. Delbet, I’m Kaem. Welcome aboard. You’re going to be helping Dez,” he nodded at Lanis, “with some of the most interesting stuff we’re doing here. Hope you like it.”

  When they shook, Seba didn’t try to crush Wilson’s hand like brawny idiots had a reputation for. Wilson said, “Thanks. I’m excited to learn more about stazing and Stade.”

  “Ah,” Seba said knowingly. “We already know how to do that. You’re going to be helping Dez figure out stuff we don’t know how to do.” He turned and walked away.

  Wilson turned to Lanis and decided to try to make amends. “Sorry about interrupting. I didn’t realize that was Kaem Seba.”

  She focused on him briefly, then said, “No problem. But I’m gonna throw you right at the main problem we hired you for.” She grinned, “From your resume, you should be a great help.” She turned back to a screen and murmured to her phone for a moment. An image of a thick, silvery disk appeared. To Wilson, she said, “The main reason we need someone with your skills is that we need to be able to deliver massive amounts of power in a short time period.”

  “How much, how fast?” Wilson asked.

  “About a thousand plus megawatts for two minutes, or thereabouts,” she said. “That’s assuming excellent efficiency, so we should probably add 25% and shoot for 1250 megawatts. Eventually, we’ll want even more than that.”

  Wilson shook his head. “That’s crazy. It’d be like instantly putting a city of half a million people on the grid, then taking it back off two minutes later. Power grids aren’t designed to suddenly ramp up and down at those levels of power.”

  “Correct,” she said calmly. “So, we’ll need to store it, then deliver it as needed.”

  “What are you trying to do with all this power?”

  Lanis launched into a description of a system intended to launch satellites and other craft weighing up to a hundred metric tons. They were to be driven up a 200-kilometer Stade rail by motors on the ground that needed to accelerate them at a minimum of three gravities. By calculation, the acceleration and lifting of a hundred-tonne craft that rapidly and that high would require 871 megawatts. Electric motors were about 85-90% efficient which got her into the thousand-megawatt range.

  “Of course, you could do it with batteries,” Wilson said, “but it’d require a huge and extremely expensive installation. Are you wanting me to work on that?”

  “We like to take advantage of Stade’s properties whenever we can. Since it’s frictionless and incredibly strong; and we can make it cheap, we’re thinking of flywheel storage.” She indicated the thick silvery disk on her screen, “This is a flywheel rotor we spun up to 10,000 rpm several weeks ago. It’s only lost down to,” she glanced at the screen “9,923 rpm at present, less than a one percent loss. So, pretty good storage.”

  “Oh,” Wilson said realizing that he was seeing a live video feed of the spinning disk, but that it was so smooth and well balanced he couldn’t see the motion and thought it was a 3D diagram. “I’m, uh, not that familiar with flywheels, but you’d still need a hell of a big generator for your flywheel to be able to crank out over a thousand megawatts of power.”

  Lanis nodded, “I’d assumed so. You have any suggestions?”

  “Uh, can I have some time to research some ideas?”

  “Sure.” She looked around, “Looks like this building’s full up, but you should be able to find a table to work at in the next building. You got your Staze laptop already?”

  Nodding, Wilson blinked, Next building? He decided to ask someone else. “I’ll check back with you in an hour or two then?”

  Lanis nodded distractedly, obviously already thinking about something else.

  ~~~

  Wilson left Staze’s secondary, less crowded building and headed back to the primary one. The second building probably had about a third as many people in it, but their projects tended more toward assembling prototypes and thus were spread out over more space. It felt almost as full. Nonetheless, he’d been able to find a table where he could set up his computer and study the problem. The noise in the facility had bothered him enough that he’d considered asking if he could work from home, but decided it’d be pointless since he’d said he’d report back in one to two hours.

  Arriving back in the primary building, he found Lanis talking to Seba again. This time he’d intended to wait until he’d been acknowledged, but moments after he arrived, Lanis looked up and said, “Pull up a chair and tell us what you’ve found?”

  Snagging an empty chair from a nearby table, Wilson pulled it over while wondering whether the mysterious Mr. X would be watching him through Seba’s cameras. It seems as if it’d be crazy for him to be present electronically for everything Seba does…

  Lanis snapped him out of his reverie, asking, “So what’d you figure out?”

  “Um, there are several manufacturers that prod
uce thousand-megawatt generators for use in power plants. They don’t exactly have them on the shelf, but they can turn them out pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you want something that’ll act as a motor to spin your flywheel up, and then also generate the power you want while spinning it down, that’d have to be designed from scratch in these power ranges. As you might expect, that’ll take quite a bit longer. Especially if they have to make modifications to it because it didn’t meet your requirements.”

  Seba said, “You’re using the flywheel to store and then generate electrical power?”

  Wilson nodded.

  Seba glanced at Lanis, “Are there any alternatives?”

  Feeling proud of himself for thinking ahead, Wilson said, “You could buy a large number of smaller flywheel-energy-storage systems, known as FES units, and run them in parallel. There are quite a few companies that have them in stock and could build more fairly quickly, since the designs are already worked out. That solution would be expensive and doesn’t take advantage of Stade’s unusual properties as Ms. Lanis urged me to do… Or, you could use the aforementioned thousand-megawatt generator along with a smaller motor that you used to spin up your platter whenever the grid had a surplus of power.”

  Seba had been looking attentively at Wilson, now he glanced questioningly at Lanis.

  She rolled her eyes and sighed, “I suppose you have a better idea.”

  “Um, well,” he said, looking embarrassed. “It’s just that… Sorry, I should’ve given this more thought a while ago. It seems to me that if what we’re wanting to do is spin the sprocket that drives our chain and we’re going to have a huge spinning flywheel store the energy for it, that what we need is a fluid or magnetic coupling, or maybe even a torque converter. That way we can directly use the rotational energy of the flywheel to turn the sprocket without interposing a generator to first make electricity that then powers a motor that spins the sprocket.” He looked up and off into the distance, “I’ll admit that using electric motors to turn the sprocket is appealing because we’d have finer high-speed control of the acceleration, but I’d think we could almost get that with fine control of the distance between the plates of a magnetic coupling.”

  Lanis sighed again, “I’m just a civil engineer. I’ve heard of magnetic couplings but don’t know how they work?”

  Seba shrugged, “It’s a lot like a clutch. In our case the flywheel would act as the motor, spinning one big plate. Another big, coaxial plate would drive the sprocket. Instead of pushing the plates together so friction spins up the sprocket plate the way a clutch works, the plates would have magnets on them. As they approach one another, the magnetic fields on the flywheel plate start to pull at the magnets on the sprocket plate, gradually spinning it up. You’d just need to finely control the distance between the plates as your means of controlling acceleration.” He frowned, “Maybe we’re asking the coupling to make too great a change in sprocket speed and would have to have a transmission…”

  Seba was looking off into the distance again. Wilson opened his mouth to ask a question but Lanis put a hand on his arm and mouthed, “Wait,” at him.

  A moment later, Seba said, “Ah! You could have a series of smaller flywheels, each attaching to the same sprocket driveshaft through magnetic couplings.” He turned to them; eyes bright. “A big problem is that as you use a flywheel to speed up the sprocket, the flywheel slows down, right? Once the first flywheel has almost slowed to the speed of the sprocket shaft and can no longer speed up the shaft, we start closing the coupler plates of a second flywheel. That second full-speed flywheel’s connected through gears that spin its coupler plate faster. Now that magnetic coupler plate approaches its corresponding plate and starts to transfer torque just as the first flywheel plate is backing off. That way we get a smooth transition to higher speeds instead of the jerks of a clutch disconnecting and reconnecting the transmission the way old combustion engine cars did. We can have as many couplers attached to flywheels as we need to get the speeds we want.”

  Lanis looked excited. “We’ll need to do some experiments to see how much of a change in rpm we can achieve per coupler and still maintain good control…”

  Seba arched an eyebrow at her, “But, other than the magnets themselves, we can build almost all of it out of Stade!” He and Lanis talked excitedly for several more minutes, then Seba got up and wandered off.

  Wilson looked at Lanis who was watching Seba walk away.

  She turned and looked at him. “What do you think?”

  “Think?” he said, wide-eyed. “I don’t know what to think! Do you think any of that’ll work?”

  She nodded slowly, “His ideas almost always do.” She glanced after him, “He’s freaking incredible.”

  “So, you think Mr. X fed that whole coupler thing to him?” Wilson asked.

  Lanis gave him a Cheshire grin. “That’s what a lot of people think… You up to finding one of our new mechanical engineers and talking this whole thing over? See if you can figure out how to make it happen?”

  “Jeez, I don’t think I remember half the stuff Seba said.”

  Lanis spoke briefly to her phone, then looked up at him. “I just sent you a recording of the conversation.” She shook her head, “I record everything he says to me so I won’t be embarrassed by having to get him to explain something twice. I’d recommend you do the same.” She looked around the room, “I’d suggest Chris Chambers.” She pointed, “He just hired on last week and he’s mostly been tagging along with Felipe Torreo, one of the manufacturing engineers. He’d probably love having a project he could share with you.”

  Wilson stood, thinking, Why does this project even need an electrical engineer anymore? But I won’t complain, this’ll give me more time to focus on figuring out how the damned stazers work.

  ***

  Charlie Stroud stepped out on his porch, set down his coffee, and stretched till his back popped. I’m getting too old for farming, he thought. He was dreading spring field prep and planting rather than looking forward to it as he had in years past. None of his kids were interested in taking over the farm either. In a few more years, I’m gonna have to see if I can sell this place for enough to retire on. Maybe I just won’t plant all the fields this year. Cut myself some slack. See if I can enjoy life with a little less to do.

  With some surprise, he noticed a car bumping down the dirt drive of his farm. It pulled up in front of the house. A moment later a woman in her thirties got out. “Mr. Stroud?” she asked.

  He nodded, already suspicious.

  She was nicely dressed, he noticed as she walked up the path to his porch. Some kind of snooty big city woman, he thought dismissively. Probably selling something nobody needs.

  “Elaine Mackie,” she said, handing him a card. “Real estate. I’m representing a buyer that’s interested in your farm.”

  Knee-jerk, Charlie said, “Not for sale.”

  Undeterred, Mackie smiled and said, “Okay. Then they’d like to lease a small part of your farm with an agreement that they get to buy the rest of it when you are ready to sell.”

  Charlie frowned, “When I’m ready to sell?”

  She shrugged, “None of us are getting younger. I meant when you’re ready to retire. Or if you pass on, that your heirs would be bound to sell it to the interested party. I understand your kids aren’t interested in farming it themselves?”

  Charlie started shaking his head, “No, no, I’m not interested in—”

  Mackie brought him to a sudden halt by quietly saying, “Eighty thousand a year to rent five acres somewhere in the middle and then 2.3 million dollars to buy the entire farm when you’re ready to sell.”

  Charlie’s farm was 832 acres, so five acres wasn’t much. The last time he looked it was valued at 1.3 million dollars so the offer was ridiculously high. He narrowed his eyes. “What’re they thinking? That there’s oil under here?”

  The woman shook her head. “No, they want to put up a tower. During construction, they’
d need an easement to put in a road suitable for them to get heavy trucks out to those five acres in the middle.”

  Suspiciously, “What kind of tower?”

  “Not like a building. More like a radio tower. It’d—”

  He interrupted. “Is it gonna have guy wires coming down all around it?”

  “No,” she said. “As I was going to say, it’d slant up off to the northeast where it’d meet a couple of other towers in a big tripod.”

  Charlie's gaze went north, then east. “You offering the same deal to the Jenkins and the Thompsons?” he asked, naming the farm directly north and the one just east of his own.

  “Oh…” Mackie said, looking in those two directions herself. “No. The apex of this tripod’s going to be at about 53,000 feet. That’s ten miles up. The other bases of the tripod are going to be about fifteen to twenty miles from here. If you’d like, I can show you some design mockups of what your part of the tower would look like?”

  Stunned, Charlie said, “Ten miles high?”

  She nodded.

  A few minutes later Mackie was showing Charlie and his wife Marnie the design mockups on the large screen he watched sports on. She started by explaining how it’d be made of Stade, a new material Charlie had heard about but dismissed as unimportant. Astonishingly, the stuff was so strong that the part of the tower that would rise from their land could conceivably be less than an inch in diameter. Because it had to have lights and mechanicals inside of it, it would in reality be about five feet wide. From the edge of the farm, the upper parts of it’d be hard to see because of its mirrored surface. When you looked up at it, you’d see a reflection of the sky on your side which would tend to be similar enough to the sky on the other side, that—narrow as it was—it’d fade into the background and be nearly invisible. It’s airplane-warning flashing lights would have their reflectors tuned so you couldn’t see them from the ground, only when you were up in the air.