Lifter: Proton Field #2 Page 7

  Carol reached out and grasped Nancy’s forearm as Connor said, “AI, set gravity at eighty percent.”

  Nancy’s stomach lurched as her upper body suddenly felt a little lighter. As if something was tugging it up into the air. Wide-eyed, she turned to stare at Carol, distantly observing that Carol’s hair had suddenly gotten fluffy. “Wha…” Nancy began.

  Carol patted her arm and said, “Don’t worry. It’s just Myr’s invention.” Leaning closer, she said in a low voice, “It isn’t really antigravity, Connor just likes to call it that.” Carol shrugged, “And, after all, it does kind of feel like antigravity.” She pointed up at the ceiling. “All those little cylinders are focal point generators from Miller Tech. They aren’t blocking gravity, they’re just pulling you upward.”

  Nancy turned to stare at Trevor who was looking around in wonderment. “This’s frikkin’ awesome!” he said.

  Connor said, “You ready to get a little lighter yet?”

  “Really?!” Trevor asked in a stunned tone.

  Connor just nodded slowly, then said, “AI set gravity at sixty percent.”

  As Nancy felt herself get even lighter, Trevor gave off an ecstatic little moan.

  Connor said, “AI, forty percent.”

  Nancy looked around, seeing that everyone’s hair looked lighter and fluffier now. She reached up and touched her own, finding it lifted up out away from her head quite a bit. As she focused on her body, she felt like her upper body was significantly lighter than her lower body and feet. Her spine felt like it was being stretched!

  Connor said, “AI, twenty percent.”

  Nancy looked at Trevor and found him staring at her with saucer eyes. “Mom! I can breathe better!”

  She stared back, realizing that his usual slumped posture had straightened quite a bit. Could this arrest the progression of his spinal curvature? she wondered. Aloud, she said with a grin, “I’m pretty glad we came over here today, how about you?”

  Trevor snorted. Rather than answering his mother, he turned to Connor and said, “How’s this happening?!”

  Connor grinned at him and said, “AI, set gravity at five percent.” Then he said, “Check this out.” Connor pushed the little table over his lap out of the way, then stood up! He didn’t stand normally by any means. He obviously had significant contractures of his knees and hips that kept him crouched over. But he weighed so little he was nonetheless able to stand. He stepped away from his wheelchair, walked around Trevor’s and returned to his own to sit back down.

  Nancy noticed that he was wearing some kind of special boots with waffle soles. She realized his ankles were probably contracted too, but the boots were constructed to give him large flat surfaces to stand on.

  To the goggle-eyed Trevor, Connor said, “I can’t set the gravity lower than this, but it is already at the point where it’s hard to get enough traction to walk around.”

  In a hushed tone, Trevor said, “If you could just set it at zero, then you could pull yourself around with your hands like an astronaut in the space station!”

  Connor said, “That’d be so cool. Unfortunately, it isn’t really antigravity. The way it actually works is that the generators pull you toward the ceiling. Things that’re close to the ceiling get pulled on harder than things down by the floor like your feet. That’s why you’re breathing easier. Your upper body’s getting pulled away from your lower body and taking the pressure off your diaphragm. If you were to set the ‘gravity’ at zero, you’d only actually float if your center of gravity were about four feet off the floor. If you got closer to the floor, you’d sink down to it; and if you got up near the ceiling, you’d get pulled upward and wind up lying against the ceiling like it was a floor.”

  Trevor shrugged, “So, just launch yourself off the ceiling. If you launch yourself hard enough, you’d go past the midway point and back down to the floor.”

  Connor sighed, “That’d work okay for normal people, but you and I’d have a hard time launching ourselves that fast. And, if we did get past the midway point, we’d probably fall the rest of the way to the floor fast enough to hurt ourselves.” He shrugged, “My sister says she might have a solution for that problem pretty soon, but she hasn’t told me what it is.”

  Suddenly, the Sevii’s powered front door opened. Everyone turned to look and Connor said, “Speaking of the prodigal sister…”

  Nancy saw a pretty young woman with short, light-brown hair standing in the doorway with a backpack in one hand. The young woman said, “Hi, sorry I’m late.” She stepped through the door, tossed the backpack aside, and immediately approached Nancy, saying, “You must be Dr. Levinson. Mom’s told me about your research.”

  In awe, Nancy said, “You’re the one who invented the devices that lowered the gravity in here?!”

  The young woman nodded and put out her hand, “Myr Sevii. I’ve been working on these fields for almost 10 years now.” She grinned, “We’ve only just recently had some breakthroughs. But we’re not really lowering the gravity. Instead, we’re just pulling your tissue toward the field generators. The generators will actually pull any materials that contain hydrogen—like human tissue does—toward them.” She glanced toward the kitchen, “That’s why we had to take the doors off the cabinets in there. When the generators come on, they pull wooden cabinet doors open. We’ve ordered some metal doors that won’t be affected, but we’re probably going to redesign the entire kitchen.”

  “So, this thing where it pulls up on the upper parts of Trevor and Connor and makes it easier for them to breathe… That’s because the upper parts of their bodies are closer to the ceiling?”

  “Yeah,” she said, then gave an embarrassed little shrug. “A problem with the way it’s set up with the field generators on the ceiling is that with the gravity set really low, if you were to jump up in the air and try to do a flip, you could wind up hanging upside down. That’s because the field generators attract your legs more strongly than your chest because your chest is full of air and air doesn’t have much hydrogen in it. You’ll only stay upright if you start with your head and chest closer to the field generators and are careful not to get turned upside down.”

  “Yes, but what I’m interested in is whether it could help muscular dystrophy patients with their breathing. I know it helps just to have some traction lifting your upper body and taking pressure off your diaphragm, but would it be possible to intermittently increase and decrease the traction?”

  Myr’s eyes grew distant as she said, “Sure… Oh! So instead of using Connor’s CPAP machine to help him breathe at night, you’re saying a field generator could just pull his chest up intermittently?”

  “Yes! One of the early ways to help people breathe, back before mouth-to-mouth, was to pull up on their shoulders. Essentially you’d be doing the same thing.”

  “How would you know how often, or how hard it should pull?”

  Nancy got a thoughtful look, “I suppose the patient could set it for how hard they wanted it to pull, but ideally it’d use a sensor to detect contraction of the patient’s respiratory muscles, pulling when they try to pull. Or, when the muscles get too weak to detect their contractions maybe it could sense the nerve impulses instead?”

  “Oh, yeah, that shouldn’t be too difficult,” Sevii said. “I don’t know how to do it, but I know there are ways to sense muscle contraction electrically so it shouldn’t be hard to link that up to a field generator.”

  Connor had been listening. He said, “Yeah! That’d be awesome!”

  Nancy had been about to speak, though she’d paused for Connor’s exhortation. Now she said, “Every so many breaths, you could have it pull harder to give the patient a sigh. It’s good for the lungs to be really filled every so often.”

  Myr said, “That should be completely doable as well. What a great idea! I know Connor hates getting strapped into his CPAP every night.”

  Trevor lifted a hand slightly, “Me too! Don’t leave me out.”

  “And…” Nanc
y paused because her voice had gotten tremulous. When she thought she had it in control, she continued, “It can work without a mask or a tracheostomy. And presumably could work during the day as well, right?”

  “Um, sure,” Myr said. “We could try it right now, just at a normal breathing rate. Rather than it breathing with you, you’d have to breathe with it. Would you guys like to give it a shot?” She glanced over at Trevor and Connor who both nodded enthusiastically. Speaking to her AI, she asked what the average number of breaths per minute was and it reported an answer of 12 to 20. Then she instructed it to cycle the “gravity” in the room from 25 to 50 percent every four seconds. Since Connor had had the gravity set at five percent, when the gravity dropped to 50%, everyone immediately felt heavier.

  Then the gravity started to fluctuate up and down. Nancy could feel it stretching her chest, then allowing it to compress. It was out of sync with the way she’d been breathing, but rather than trying to breathe at her own rhythm, she found herself breathing along with it because it was so much easier. She said, “This’s incredible! However, people without dystrophy probably shouldn’t spend too much time in rooms like this or their own respiratory muscles will waste away.”

  Myr said, “AI, stop applying lift at Dr. Levinson’s location.”

  Nancy’s full weight immediately came back. She turned to stare, “The generators aren’t lifting the entire room? Just the spots where people are?”

  Myr nodded. “Saves electricity. The ceiling has infrared sensors to know where we are and your AI has enough of a handshake with the house AI for it to know which infrared hot spot’s you.”

  “This is…” Nancy shook her head, “This could make such a huge difference for patients with dystrophy. They wouldn’t have to have tracheostomies and use ventilators when their weakness gets severe. If only you could do something about their cardiomyopathy.”

  Myr’s eyes narrowed, “That’s the weakness of their hearts, right?”

  Nancy nodded, thinking it odd that a brilliant young woman like Myr, someone who had a brother with Duchenne’s, wouldn’t know about cardiomyopathy, but then realized Myr was only confirming that her understanding was correct. “The muscles of the heart are weak, the same way the muscles of the body are.”

  Myr turned to look at the two young men, “And in the heart, the muscles’ job’s to squeeze the blood out of the chambers, right?”

  “Uh-huh. Mechanically, the heart’s fairly simple. There are two one-way valves at the top of each chamber, one that only lets blood in, the other that only lets blood out. The first one lets blood pour into the heart from the venous system when the muscle of the big chamber relaxes and lets the chamber expands. Then, when the chamber contracts and squeezes the blood, that first valve closes, keeping the blood from going back out into the veins. At the same time, the second valve opens, letting the blood from the chamber be squeezed out into the arterial system. The muscle contracts about once every second for your entire life—because if it doesn’t perform, you die. The weak muscle in a dystrophy heart does squeeze, just not hard enough to generate a good blood pressure and flow.”

  “So…” Myr said cryptically, evidently lost in thought, “if we had a way to squeeze the chamber, or at least squeeze the blood in the heart, the valves could still do their job, right?”

  “Um, yeah…” Nancy said, wondering where Myr was going with this. Myr’s antigravity couldn’t pump blood out of the heart.

  After sitting thoughtfully for another minute, Myr shook her head, smiled and said, “Well, you’ve presented some interesting challenges. It seems like we should at least be able to do something to help these guys breathe better.”

  Connor said, “If you guys are done talking about boring stuff like how to keep us alive, what’s the story on the idea you said you had for making the antigravity more like real antigravity? Something that’d let us float around without the danger that we’d fall up to the ceiling?”

  Myr said, “Still working on that one monkey boy. But I did…” she stepped over and picked up her backpack, “bring you something to try out.” She pulled out a device that was trailing some wires and brought it over to his wheelchair. It didn’t take her long to hook it up to one of the spare power jacks on the wheelchair’s lithium battery pack. Next she hung the device itself on the back of the seat of Connor’s chair with a simple wire hook that she hung on the post for the head rest. “Okay,” she said, “let’s try this out.” She spoke to her AI, asking it to turn off the ceiling antigravity above Connor. Then she turned a knob on the device hanging on the back of his chair.

  Connor said, “The antigravity only went off for a minute, but it came back. Should I tell the AI to turn off my gravity?”

  “Nope,” Myr said triumphantly. “You’re being held up by a proton field being projected off your wheelchair. You can go wherever you want and still have antigravity in your chair!”

  “Awesome!” Connor said. “Even outside?!”

  Myr said, “Yeah, and it’s cool, but there’s still a problem. The field focus is projected about two feet above your head. You’ll need to remember that other people are tall enough that if they walk up close to you, the field focus will try to pull them over sideways. You might actually knock some people over and that would not be cool. The next thing I need to do is to try to figure out a way to automatically turn it off, or at least turn it down if somebody gets too close to you. So far I haven’t got any great ideas for that function. For now, you’re going to need to tell your AI to turn it off if you even think someone’s about to get too close to you.”

  “Wait,” Nancy said, “can’t you just shield the antigravity generator so the field doesn’t project out to the sides?”

  Myr shook her head, “No, so far we haven’t been able to find a way to block or change the shape of the field. No matter what we do, it always extends spherically from its focal point. We’re still hoping that we’ll find a way to modify its shape, but so far…” she shrugged expressively.

  Connor said, “Do you think this chair generator would work on Trevor’s wheelchair?”

  Myr turned to look at Trevor’s chair. “I assume so. All it needs is DC power from the battery.” She looked up at Trevor, “Would you like to try having it on your chair?”

  Trevor looked a little torn, Nancy thought because he hated accepting charity, but after a moment’s pause he said wistfully, “It’s so much easier to breathe. Do you think I’d eventually be able to get one permanently? I wouldn’t want to get dependent on something I couldn’t have long term.”

  “Sure,” Myr said, “let’s see if it’ll hook up to your battery pack.” She un-jacked it from Connor’s chair and hooked it up to Trevor’s, then turned off the ceiling lifters over him.

  After a minute she tested it and Trevor confirmed it worked, saying, “One of those’d be awesome to have.”

  Nancy studied her son, thinking how much better his posture looked with the lifter pulling the weight off his spine. She said, “Having one of those really would be terrific. How much would it cost?”

  Flippantly, Connor said, “Keep that one. I’m pretty sure I can get another.”

  ******

  Massoud Totioni slowly walked past the building site where the Americans were working on Lopana’s new community center. He’d been hearing a lot about the beautiful American girl working there and had decided he should come see for himself. Lopana’s idiot of a mayor, Roberto Salazar, was making a fool of himself over the girl. Everyone, even Salazar’s wife, knew about it. Massoud saw several pretty girls working at the site, but none that struck him as having the kind of beauty that’d been described.

  Massoud stopped and leaned up against the bole of a tree, fishing in a pocket for his cigarettes. He made a production of tapping the pack, getting out a cigarette and dangling it from his lip. After he’d put away the pack, he dipped into another pocket for his lighter. He took his time lighting the smoke, then leaned back against the tree. He only took an
occasional puff so the butt would last longer.

  Just when Massoud thought he was going to have to light another cigarette, a girl—much prettier than the others—came around the corner, walked past and disappeared out of view again. Ah, he thought, that one. After a few minutes he moved to a new location so he’d be able to watch the area of the construction site where she’d started working.

  He lit another cigarette. I think this is where our branch of Abu Sayyaf should carry out its mission, he thought with some anticipation.

  ******

  Vinn had his AI distribute various diagrams and graphs on the wall screens in the small conference room. He turned to his audience, which included Dr. Miller, Myr, Ellen, and quite a few of the technical and engineering staff who’d joined their team. He cleared his throat, “Before we start talking about which design parameters we want for the lifters we’ll use on the spacecraft, let me remind everyone of a few general principles we’ve learned in our testing. This especially relates to the more recent testing of heavy-duty focal point generators. First of all, the voltage fed to a set of coil-plates correlates on a geometric progression to how far away from the coil-plates the focus of the proton field is formed. We’ve recently learned that we can also change this distance to some extent by the way the coil-plate assemblies are constructed.”

  Arlan interrupted, frowning, “Explain that more please.”

  Vinn shrugged and brought up a couple more diagrams, “Essentially, a long-skinny coil-plate assembly lets you form the focal point farther away, and a short-wide coil-plate stack lets you form it closer.” Getting a nod from Arlan, he continued, “We’ve known for some time that the amount of current powering the coil-plate determines the size and strength of the proton field. Thinking ahead to flying a spaceship, which would need some really high-powered coil-plate systems, we realized they’d need heavier coil wiring and stouter plates to run at those energies. When we built our test models, we found that they had a shallow linear gradient, even when they were running at lower power.” He took a breath, “Finally, the frequency determines whether the strength of the field increases geometrically or linearly as you approach the focus.”