A Pause in Space-Time Read online

  “He says he wants to know whether the specimens he brought are the right kind for testing. If they aren’t, he could be getting something different during the week he has to wait.”

  Well, that’s interesting, Raymond thought. People were always delivering untestable specimens and then wanting to know why the labs couldn’t magically define all their properties anyway. “Okay, bring the guy back.”

  Cathy returned with a skinny looking black kid in his early 20s. Obviously the delivery boy, not someone who’d understand testing. “What do they want us to test?”

  “Something new,” the kid said, pulling a couple of 5 x 7 manila envelopes out of a bigger envelope.

  “Nothing new under the sun, sonny,” Raymond quipped.

  The kid shrugged. Undoing the flap on an envelope, he tilted it and carefully caught what looked like a 3” x 6” mirror as it slid out into his other hand. He caught it so it sloped down into his hand, hooking on the middle three fingers and restrained on each side by the thumb and small finger.

  That’s a beautiful mirror, Raymond thought, reaching for it.

  “Careful,” the kid said, “it’s pretty much frictionless.”

  Raymond had grasped the end that was sticking up out of the kid’s hand, gripping it from edge to edge because he thought the kid was holding it gingerly to keep from getting the surface smudged. But when he tried to pull the mirror up out of the kid’s hand, his fingers just slipped off. He blinked, startled, then pushed his reading glasses up his nose and leaned down for a closer look. It’s pretty much a perfect mirror, he thought, realizing he couldn’t actually see the mirror, only the things reflected in it.

  Straightening up, he said, “I’ll be damned if it isn’t something new. What kind of tests do you want run on it?”

  “Coefficient of friction—”

  “Friction against what?” Raymond interrupted, “A coefficient’s meaningless unless you define what it’s sliding against.”

  “Against anything. We think its coefficient’s going to be zero against any substance, but if you find something that it gets traction on, we’d surely like to know that.”

  Raymond snorted, “No such thing as a coefficient of zero.”

  The kid shrugged, “Then please, measure it for us. We’d love to have a measured value… We’d also like to know its thermal resistance.”

  “You mean heat transmission?”

  The kid nodded. “And, we’d like to know how well it blocks radiation.”

  “What kind of radiation?”

  He shrugged, “Alpha, beta, gamma, neutrons, cosmic, x-rays; whatever you can test it against, we’d like the results.”

  Raymond grunted, surprised at the depth of the kid’s knowledge. Maybe he isn’t just the delivery boy? “We can test everything but cosmic.”

  “Great!” The kid said, sounding pleased. “And we’d also like mechanical properties testing.”

  Raymond looked at the little mirror. “Can I touch the face of it? Or is that going to mess up the mirrored surface?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Raymond grabbed it from flat surface to flat surface, intending to slide it off the kid’s hand, but his fingers slid right off again. He tried gripping it harder, but still couldn’t hold it well enough to pull it off the kid’s hand.

  The kid shrugged, “Pretty close to frictionless. If you’ll grab it again, I’ll try to tip my side up so gravity’ll push it into your hand, but it’s still going to try to slide out either side unless you trap it with your fingers like I’m doing.”

  Simply unable to believe what the kid said, Raymond nodded, pinched it from flat surface to flat surface and waited while the kid tipped his hand up so that gravity was pushing it through his pinching fingers and into his palm.

  The kid said, “Ready?”

  Raymond wanted to say, “Of course,” but with the kid having been proven right so many times already, he just nodded. The kid let go and for a second, Raymond thought he had it, but then it slipped to his left and vanished from his hand. Bizarrely, Raymond couldn’t even feel it sliding. It fell through the air, barely bounced off the concrete floor, slid over and bounced even less off the leg of their small hydraulic materials testing machine, then slowly slid under a cabinet. Raymond thought he was going to have to try to snag it out from under the cabinet with a wire. He picked up a spool of stiff wire and stepped that way, but when he arrived, the little mirror very slowly came sliding out on its own. An even weaker bounce back from under the bench, Raymond thought. He bent over to grab it.

  The kid said, “Put your fingers on all four sides of it or it’ll get away. Then work a fingernail under it on one side to lift that edge enough to pick it up.”

  Raymond wanted to tell the kid he was smart enough to figure that out, but in fact, he’d been wondering how to do it. Rather than embarrass himself further, he picked up the reflective plate as he’d been instructed. He turned and said, “If we can’t grip it, we can’t do tensile testing.”

  “Yeah, it seems like we’d have to get you a massively narrowed dog-bone specimen with really big shoulders you could hook around. When the time comes to do that test perhaps you could advise us on the best shape?”

  “Or a specimen with threaded ends.”

  The kid looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “I think we should start with a three-point bending test on the plate you’ve got. We could infer tensile strength from that.”

  “Or, if you like, we could cut sections out of either side of the plate you’ve given us. Make our own dog-bone testing specimen to hook onto.”

  The kid said, “After you’ve done everything else, you’re welcome to try. I’m afraid it might be really hard to cut.”

  “Laser cutter, plasma torch. We’ll find something that’ll cut it.”

  “If you try it, be careful. I think it’ll reflect the beam back onto your cutter.”

  Raymond’s eyes went back to the perfect mirrored surface of the specimen. He noticed it didn’t even have fingerprints from when he’d grabbed it. Can it possibly reflect so much of the beam it won’t be damaged itself? he wondered. “Okay, a three-point bending test it is. Any other tests you want done?”

  “We’d like it if you could find a way to break, cut, or otherwise damage or destroy it.”

  “That should be easy,” Raymond said. “Since we don’t have a charge for just trying to break something, we’ll just continue the bending test until failure. Any other testing?”

  The kid shook his head.

  “We won’t be getting to it for a week or so,” Raymond lied. “Stop off at Cathy’s desk and fill out the paperwork. Tick the checkboxes for all the tests we’ve just discussed. She’ll give you a price. I’m afraid you’ll have to prepay; we’ve had a few deadbeats.”

  “No problem,” the kid said and turned for the door.

  As he left Raymond heard him telling his phone to call for an Uber. A messenger that doesn’t even have a car? Raymond tipped the specimen back into its envelope, then turned to finish the test he’d been working on when he’d been interrupted. He wanted to be sure the kid was out of the building before he actually started testing the specimen. But I’ve got to see what the deal is with this thing!

  Everyone else’s tests can wait.

  ***

  James Harris looked up on hearing someone clear their throat. Raymond Weldon stood in his doorway. “What’s up?” Harris asked.

  Weldon said, “You said you wanted to know if anybody brought truly unusual specimens in for testing?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, a few days ago we got two of the weirdest damned specimens I’ve ever seen.”

  Harris looked down at what he’d been working on. It could wait. Feeling a surge of anticipation, he stood and said, “Let’s go look at it.”

  As he followed Weldon back to the testing lab Harris wondered whether the specimen might represent some new and exotic material. It’d be especially great if it was some new material tha
t might have significant commercial value. Though his company was doubtlessly restrained from telling anyone about the material—by its own nondisclosure rule if nothing else—that didn’t mean Harris’s shell company couldn’t quietly buy some stock in the company of whoever invented it.

  A minute or so later, he was carefully holding a 7.5 x 15 cm mirror. It was very thin; Harris would’ve estimated about a millimeter. Raymond confirmed that, measured with a caliper, it was 1.1 mm. It was weird to look at because it was such a perfect mirror. You never really saw it, only the things it reflected. The most visible parts of it were the rounded edges where the reflected objects were so markedly reduced in size that it gave the impression of a line.

  Just the way it slid around on his fingers made Harris believe Raymond’s assertion that he couldn’t measure any static friction. Raymond said, “Hell, I can’t get our test platform level enough to keep it from sliding away in one direction or another. And, putting weight on it to increase the friction doesn’t slow it down either.

  Harris said its density was 1 gram per cc, same as water. Getting its weight was difficult because of its tendency to slide off the scale, but Harris had fixed that by putting it in a large tare dish. Measuring its volume wasn’t simple because of its rounded edges. When Harris had tried to measure volume by water displacement, he’d found that the little mirror didn’t float or sink—also suggesting its density was the same as the water it was displacing.

  “So,” Harris said, “if its coefficient of friction is so close to zero we can’t measure it, it’d make a great bearing material. Well, that’s if it's strong enough. Hell, if it’s strong enough, railroad cars could be mounted on sliders instead of wheels.”

  “That’d be fine until you needed to put on the brakes,” Raymond said.

  Harris laughed, “I guess you’re right. They’d have to have a second set of skids they lowered when they wanted to stop. For a second there I’d been thinking we could mount cars and airplanes on skids as well, but I suppose they’d slide sideways just as well as they did forward.” He snorted, “That’d be a problem.” He lifted his eyes back to Raymond, “Is it strong enough to make a bearing material out of it?”

  “Boss, this part’s even harder to believe. I loaded that little plate in your hand in three-point bending. If there was any deflection, it was within the measurement error of the machine. I don’t think it deformed at all.”

  “Wait a minute,” Harris said feeling a little irritated, “There must have been a problem with the measurement of displacement. Did it look deformed?”

  Raymond slowly shook his head.

  “So, you’re saying that even at max load…” He looked over at their medium material tester. “What’s the maximum load the machine can produce, 500 pounds?”

  Raymond nodded, “Close. The medium-sized machine you’re looking at goes up to 2000 N which is pretty close to 450 pounds. But boss, when I didn’t get any inflection on that one, I went to the big one. It goes to ten metric tons. That damned little plate still didn’t fail! That means it has a flexural strength of at least 260,000 megapascals, hundreds of times stronger than structural steel. Graphene’s supposed to be the world’s strongest material and they think it has a tensile strength half that. Unfortunately, nobody’s ever been able to make a big enough piece of graphene to test. This is at least that strong, probably a lot stronger since there wasn’t any displacement.”

  “You didn’t get deformation at ten metric tons?!”

  Raymond slowly shook his head. “At those kinds of loads the machine’s straining so hard there’s some jitter in the data so we can’t be sure it didn’t deform a little,” Raymond’s eyes went to the thin mirror in Harris’s hand, “but I’d swear it didn’t.”

  “Holy shit!” Harris said slowly, “So, if it can be formed into a reasonable shape, it’s essentially the ultimate bearing material, huh?” He looked at Raymond, “You think they can make bigger pieces of it? Structural members for, say, a building?”

  “I have no idea. They brought us two plates that seem like they’re exactly alike. Maybe this is the only shape they can make. Maybe they just found these two plates somewhere and brought them in, hoping testing would tell them what they were.”

  “What’re they made of?”

  Raymond produced a caricature-like shrug of his shoulders. “Lord only knows! The guy that brought the specimens didn’t say.”

  “Have you tried spectroscopy?”

  “Yeah, that’s another thing. Anything you beam at it gets reflected. Perfectly. 100% reflected. The beam from the spectroscope comes back absolutely unchanged.”

  “‘Anything’ reflects?”

  “Alpha, beta, and gamma particles. Neutrons. X-rays, UV, visible light, radar on down through radio… Everything just bounces off, including the electron gun we used to determine the melting and vaporization temperatures of refractory materials.”

  “So we couldn’t determine the melting temperature either?!”

  Raymond shook his head, “I’m sure you know we normally use the electron gun or induction heating of tiny specimens to determine the heat tolerance of a material. Since I couldn’t cut a tiny specimen off, I put the whole thing in our research furnace for four hours, but it only goes up to 3,000°C. That’s 5,430°F, not even hot enough to melt tungsten.”

  “Did it even get red-hot?”

  “No,” Raymond said, staring at the little mirror as if he still didn’t believe the results. “You probably won’t believe this, but when I got it out of the furnace it wasn’t even hot.”

  “What do you mean?! Are you saying it didn’t get up to—?”

  “I mean I could handle it with my bare fingers as soon as I took it out of the furnace. Have you noticed how it feels warm?”

  Harris looked down at where it rested in his hand, “It does, doesn’t it?”

  “It always feels that temperature. No matter what I’ve been doing to it. But if you shoot it with an infrared thermometer? The thermal gun thinks it’s at room temperature. I get the same thing with a thermocouple thermometer and the same thing with mercury or alcohol thermometers.” Raymond snorted, “The damned thermometers feel cool to my fingers. I just don’t get it!”

  “My God!” Harris said racking his brain for how Raymond could be getting such bizarre answers. It made him want to repeat the tests himself, but he was honest enough to know he might own the company but Raymond was better at the testing than he was. “Thanks for bringing this to my attention.”

  Raymond shrugged. “You wanted to know about any crazy specimens.”

  “You bet I did, and there’ll be a bonus in your check for calling me about this one.” Harris looked Raymond in the eye, “For God’s sake, don’t tell anyone else about this, okay?”

  Raymond nodded again.

  “What company did these things come from?”

  “The kid that delivered it didn’t say. Hopefully, Cathy’s got it on the intake form. At a minimum, she should have some kind of contact info so we can send them their results.”

  “I’ll check. You’ve finished your testing?”

  Curtis tilted his head. “Pretty much. He said I could cut it into a dog bone shape for tensile testing and that they’d like it if we could test it to destruction. The problem is I can’t find anything that’ll cut it, or break it, or damage it in any way, much less destroy it.”

  Harris racked his brain. “How about if you loaded it in axial compression?”

  Raymond said, “I thought of that. Here’s the problem. The compressive strength of steel’s only about 150 megapascals.” He shook his head, “Hard to believe I’m saying ‘only…’ Ten metric tons of pressure on a 7.5 square millimeter surface would be 13,400 megapascals. Remember, we measured the bending strength of that plate and it’s at least 260,000 megapascals.” He nodded at the plate in Harris’s hand, “Bending puts compression on the material on one side and tension on the other, so, that thing can’t be much weaker in compression than it is
in bending. It’s just going to slice into whatever fixture we use to apply the compression…

  “Like a hot knife into butter.”

  Harris stared at the little mirror for about thirty seconds, then said, “Damn!” He shook his head, “If I think of something to try, I’ll let you know.” He headed down the hall.

  Stepping into Cathy’s office he said, “I need the contact info for the company that delivered the specimens Raymond’s been working on.”

  Before Cathy could find the correct intake paperwork they had to check with Raymond to get the date the specimens had been delivered.

  When she handed the sheet over, Harris felt a twinge of dismay. The blank for “company” hadn’t been filled in. He looked at Cathy “Um, the company name’s not filled in?”

  Cathy looked up and saw the empty blank Harris had his finger on. “Um, right. That’s not one of our required pieces of data.”

  Harris said, “I’d really like to know who’s manufacturing those specimens. Can you call and ask politely? You know, say we’re just finishing up our paperwork?”

  “Sure, Mr. Harris.”

  ***

  When Kaem got the call, he was pleased to hear from his AI, Odin, that it was coming from Harris Laboratories. Maybe they’ve finished their testing early? he hoped. But he was in class and didn’t want to step out to answer during the lecture.

  He called back when his class was over. “Cathy? This is Kaem Seba. You called?” He had his fingers crossed, hoping for results.

  “Um, yes. I’ve been, uh, trying to complete our paperwork. You forgot to fill in the blank for “company” on our intake form? If you’ll just tell me who manufactured the specimens, I can fill that in for you.”

  Damn! Kaem thought, disappointed. To Cathy, he said, “It’s a private source, not a company. Your website doesn’t say you have any rules against performing testing for individuals.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Cathy said, “Oh no, that’s fine. It’s just that… Almost all our testing’s done for small to medium companies. I just thought you must’ve forgotten to fill that blank. Sorry to have bothered you.”