Lifter: Proton Field #2 Read online

  Vinn glanced around the room. Evidently deciding that everyone had a feel for what he’d said so far, he pointed to a diagram on one of the wall screens, saying, “We’re expecting to build a disc-shaped ship because that way we can place a large number of passengers approximately the same distance from the focal points that we’d be generating just above the roof of the disc. That way the focal points that are lifting the ship are also pulling upward on the passengers and reducing the G forces that people would feel when the ship accelerates rapidly. If the passengers are all on the same floor of the ship, during rapid acceleration, the pull of the fields will be similarly distributed among all the passengers. On the other hand, if the ship were structured so that some passengers were on lower levels, or otherwise were positioned farther away from the focal point fields, they’d sustain large G forces which would limit how fast the ship could accelerate.”

  He spoke to his AI and had it put up another set of diagrams. “Now, on to the engineering choices. To lift our spacecraft, it’s pretty evident that we need something with a gentle slope to its linear field strength. That way it’ll attract the ship and its passengers over a substantial distance. Geometric fields would be a poor choice since they only pull, admittedly very hard, on hydrogen compounds that are really close to the focal point.

  “One of the engineering decisions we’ve been working on has been whether we should have a few, very-large, very-powerful focal point generators or many smaller ones. Large, powerful focal points don’t have as steep a gradient of attraction. If you’re standing under one of those you don’t notice so much that it’s pulling harder on the upper part of your body than on the lower part and trying to stretch you out. This would suggest large generators as the best solution, however, if there are only a few large and powerful focal points, and the one closest to you isn’t directly overhead, it’ll tend to pull on you at an angle. If you were standing up when a high acceleration was needed, and a powerful attraction was exerted by a proton field not directly above you, it might pull you over to the side hard enough to unbalance you.

  “Personally, I’m in favor of using large numbers of small focal points. Because they have a steeper gradient, for high accelerations, the passengers would need to be arranged horizontally,” he put up a diagram showing recumbent passengers, “perhaps in acceleration couches. That way the gradient of the pull would be over the shorter distance from your front to your back and not have such a tendency to stretch you longitudinally. When the acceleration wasn’t high, people could get up and walk around.”

  Myr lifted a hand to get his attention. When Vinn nodded at her, she said, “What about if we used a lot of the bigger more powerful ones? Couldn’t we get the best of both worlds—both a shallow gradient and less of a tendency to pull you over sideways?”

  “Sure,” Vinn shrugged, “but the increased cost wouldn’t be the only problem.” He pointed to the diagram showing the version of the ship with just a few of the large cylindrical focal point generators. The cylinders protruded down into the passenger space. “If you have a lot of large focal point generators sticking down amongst your passengers, there isn’t much room left for the passengers.”

  “Ah, but what if you used the short, fat cylinders that you said didn’t project their focal points very far away. Your diagrams of them showed some of them that almost looked like discs themselves. Couldn’t they be mounted in the ceiling of the passenger area, essentially so close together they were touching? If that didn’t put them close enough together, you could put them in two layers, with the voltage of the lower layer forming focal points farther from the generators and positioning them to fill in the gaps between the focal points of the upper layer.”

  Vinn closed his eyes for a moment as an expression of frustration ran over his face, “Of course you could.” He looked around his audience, “That’s why we have these meetings, so Insight Girl can point out the obvious to us ordinary mortals.”

  When the laughter’d passed, Arlan said, “Um, I’d point out that there’s no reason the focal point generators have to be below the focal points. You could also do it with generators of any size positioned in a layer of the ship that’s above the plane of the focal points. The passengers and whatever hydrogen containing materials that the focal points were using to pull the ship upward would all still be positioned beneath the focal points.”

  Vinn nodded.

  Arlan shrugged, “Even though I think we’re going to use high-powered focal point generators for our eventual spacecraft, it seems to me like we should start building a test craft with many small projectors since small projectors are a technology we already know how to make and use. We won’t expect to get high accelerations out of that first one, but we can start testing out other systems. Meantime, you could start building and testing some high-powered, short-fat projectors with an eye to designing a high acceleration version for later production.”

  ******

  Myr walked into MT-B, a big industrial building Miller had rented space in two blocks from Miller Tech’s main facility. It’d be more correct to say that Miller Tech had taken it over since they’d leased eighty-five percent of the space in the building. The building had lost several of its major tenants in the past year and Arlan had gotten a good deal on the lease.

  Her AI led her to Miller Tech’s new biology section which had been set up in MT-B. Before she even got there, Dr. George Watanabe came striding down the hall toward her. He was the M.D. Ph.D. researcher Miller had put in charge of determining whether there were any deleterious effects of proton fields on living creatures. “Ms. Sevii! It’s so good of you to come visit us. I would’ve been happy to bring a presentation to you in order to save you time!”

  Myr had been encountering a lot of obsequiousness from people since word had gotten out about the proton fields. It was mostly from people, like the ones at Miller Tech, who had reason to know of her role in the invention. Fortunately, the general populace, though it seemed somewhat excited about the possibilities that proton fields provided, seemed to be in no danger of idolizing the fields’ discoverer. However, Myr felt uncomfortable with the way an accomplished man like Watanabe was bending over backward for her. She said, “Oh, don’t worry. I wanted to come see some of the experiments you’ve been doing. It’s a lot easier to grasp them when you’ve seen them physically.”

  After some introductory chitchat, Watanabe led her around to examine his various setups. The first thing he showed her were rooms he called the control rooms. These had colonies of pigs, rats, mice, planarian worms, and bacteria. Then he took her to the experimental rooms which contained the same kinds of animals, this time maintained under the influence of proton fields. The first room he took her into had mice and Myr blinked when she realized they were apparently living on the ceilings of their cages. Astonished, she said, “I assume you’re keeping them upside down so that you can subject them to a very strong proton field. A field strong enough to not only lift them up to the roof of their cages but to hold them there with the equivalent of about one G?”

  Watanabe nodded, “Yes, yes. Though they aren’t really living on the roof of their cages. That’s the floor of the cage because we turn the cages upside down. The animals get somewhat excited when we first turn on the field and start rotating their cages upside down, but they quickly get used to it.”

  “And you’re projecting the field with a generator on the bottom side of the cage?”

  Myr got the impression that Watanabe wanted to clap his hands in excitement that she’d understood his set up so quickly. “Yes, that way the field focus is being projected through the cage. This lets us test whether projecting the field through the animals affects them. We also have some cages where the field focus is projected from the same side.”

  “Why so many different animals and, even bacteria?”

  “The bacteria have a very short lifespan, dividing as often as every twenty minutes. That way if the field induces mutations we will detect them very
quickly. The worms and mice each live a little bit longer than the other so it shouldn’t take us too long to see if they have increased rates of cancer or shortened lifespans. The rats live three years and the pigs much longer than that, so it’ll take us many years to determine whether the fields affect their longevity. However, we can do intelligence and physical testing on them to make sure that the fields don’t affect their brain function; or their muscle or bone strength. Of course, we’ll also be testing their organs to make sure they’re functioning normally.”

  Watanabe took her to a small meeting room where they sat down. He had his AI call up a number of charts and excitedly showed her that the bacteria appeared to be completely unaffected by the fields in the testing they’d done to this point. No changes in generation length, metabolism, or mutation rates had been detected. They hadn’t detected any decreased longevity in the planaria or increased rates of cancer in the mice either.

  She found all this a little overwhelming, but as he started to run down, she said, “I hope you’ve got some time to look into a few additional issues for me?”

  Watanabe nodded enthusiastically, “Sure, sure, what is it?”

  “Well,” she said digging in the backpack she brought with her, “I’ve had a crazy idea.” She pulled out a quart-sized Ziploc bag about a third full of water. She’d already squeezed all the air out of it, now she laid it out on the table. She also got out a linear focal point projector and plugged it in. “My brother, he’s in his early twenties but has Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy.”

  She glanced at Watanabe to be sure he understood the import of Duchenne’s.

  Watanabe had a grave look on his face. “I am very sorry,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do to help, of course, I will be happy to do it.”

  Myr pointed the cylinder of the proton field generator at the bag of water and depressed a switch. Watanabe watched interestedly as the bag of water shrank somewhat, then re-expanded when she let her finger off the switch. He watched as she turned the switch on and off several more times, then looked up into her eyes. “I am aware of this effect. We’re careful to open the focal points inside of glass or metal objects…” he paused and waved at one of the mouse cages which had a thick aluminum rod above it, “so that we don’t squeeze the animals, only pull them in one direction.” He looked back into her eyes, “I know that the geometric fields can be very destructive to tissue. Are you wanting us to see whether the animals can tolerate being squeezed by a linear field? Maybe only a little bit?” He shrugged, “I think it’ll be harmful to brittle tissues like bone because such tissues won’t tolerate being deformed without breaking… but maybe not?”

  Myr felt a little surprised. “Oh! No. I’m thinking about the cardiomyopathy that’s such a big problem in Duchenne’s. I don’t want to squeeze an entire animal, I think you’re right, that deforming the skeleton would probably be quite… harmful. What I’m hoping to do is just squeeze the heart… to, to help it contract when it’s weak.” She pressed the button several more times, with it still pointed at the bag of water.

  Watanabe’s eyes widened and he turned to watch the bag pulsate, much like a heart does. Abruptly, he stood back up, turned to face Myr and gave her a small bow, “This is an amazing idea! How can I help?”

  Feeling embarrassed by the almost reverent way he was treating her, Myr said, “Please, sit. I’m very worried that repeatedly squeezing the live cells in the blood, or the muscle of the heart, will damage them. I’m hoping that you can subject some blood to repeated squeezing, then examine it to see if the blood cells have been damaged. Perhaps there are other tests you can do to see if they’re affected. If they seem undamaged, perhaps you could try this on a living animal? Like a… like perhaps a pig?”

  “I can do it immediately on blood. I will have to apply for approval of an animal protocol before I can do it in a living pig.…” He hesitated, “How will you correctly point a field generator at the heart of an animal that’s moving around?”

  “We have some new generators that are shaped more like a disc than a cylinder. I thought maybe they could be attached over the heart in a pocket on some kind of a jacket?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately, some of the animals will chew at the jacket, but we’ll be able to select ones that don’t. I will start the application process immediately, and begin testing some blood by tomorrow.” He turned to look back at the bag with the water in it. After a moment, he looked back at Myr and said, “I’m afraid that perhaps I see a problem.”

  Myr realized he was waiting for her to give him permission to describe the issue he’d recognized. “Go ahead,” she said, worried that he’d recognized something that would render her idea non-feasible.

  “When the field squeezes the heart, it’ll also be shrinking the blood inside the chambers.” He gave her a hesitant look as if not wanting to bring bad news, “So, if the heart becomes smaller, but so does the fluid inside of it, the fluid in the chamber will not be squeezed out of it.” He shrugged, “So, no pumping action.”

  “Ah, yes,” Myr said. “You’re absolutely correct, it won’t work if the field squeezes at the same time as the heart muscle. Instead, we want a pretty small field that mostly squeezes the fluid in the heart when the muscle’s relaxed. Squeezing the fluid in the ventricle will pull more blood in from the venous system through the mitral valve. Then, we’ll relax the field when the heart muscle itself is contracting. This will allow the blood in the left ventricle to re-expand, raising the pressure in the ventricle and forcing more blood out through the aortic valve into the arterial system.”

  Watanabe gave her a surprised look, “You can control the size of the field?”

  Myr gave a little shrug, “Not completely. Well, actually, we can electronically create a smaller field with a steeper gradient. Unfortunately, that means that the blood cells near the center of the field will be squeezed more and makes me concerned that they’re more likely to be damaged. But instead, if we just use a smaller focal point generator, it tends to make a smaller field.”

  “It seems that you will need to aim the proton field generator very precisely, moving it to keep up with the heart during its motions.”

  “I’m thinking we can attach a small ultrasound probe underneath the field generator. It should be able to tell the AI controller when the ventricle’s centered under the focal point during the relaxation phase. Then the field generator can activate to squeeze the blood and pull more blood into the ventricle while the chamber’s expanded. The field generator would turn itself off as soon as the ventricle begins to contract and move away from the focus point.” She shrugged again, “I know it’ll be difficult, but I think it’ll be worth the effort if we can get it to work.”

  Watanabe stood again and gave Myr another little bow. “A worthy endeavor indeed.”

  Uncomfortable with Watanabe’s deferential attitude, Myr scrambled to her feet so she could give him a bow in return. “I agree. For my brother’s sake, I hope we succeed.”

  Watanabe bowed again, “And, for all the other people with heart failure.”

  ******

  Omar Naderi walked unhappily behind Massoud. Sometimes Omar thought he himself was the only real Muslim in the local chapter of Abu Sayyaf. He felt certain that he was the only one who’d actually read the Quran. Massoud might have the mantle of leadership, but he picked among the prophet’s teachings, following only those he chose. More and more, Massoud chose to follow supposed—but often imaginary—Islamic beliefs that Omar thought of as desecrating the faith.

  Take their current mission to kidnap some of the American missionaries and hold them for ransom. Certainly, the missionaries were infidels. Certainly, Abu Sayyaf could use additional funding. But, like many others, Omar had heard that there was a beautiful young woman amongst the missionaries. Omar had a sick suspicion that Massoud would be trying to claim her as a slave.

  As they neared the edge of Lopana, Massoud lifted a hand for a halt. As the team gathered around, Omar saw
with disgust that many of them were practically panting with anticipation. Massoud said, “We’ll wait here until they’re asleep. If you’re carrying a bolo knife, sharpen it. If you have a gun, clean it.” He exhorted them to their duty, preaching violence and claiming to quote things from the Quran that Omar had never seen in the reading he’d done. “It’ll show them we mean business and make them easier to handle if we kill one of them right away. They have a Christian who’s been trying to convert people. He’ll be a big problem if we capture him, but an excellent motivation if we immediately sacrifice him.” Massoud had the men gather round while he showed them the man’s picture on his phone. Once everyone had seen him, Massoud said, “As soon as we find him, kill him. Use a bolo so that it won’t wake the whole town to their defense. Now, rest.”

  Omar settled down to rest, his blood seething. He wanted to protest, but he’d pledged on his honor to follow Massoud Totioni.

  Massoud woke them an hour after midnight. Before they started into the town, he said, “We’ll only take five or six hostages. Mostly women. We don’t want an unmanageable group so choose ones who seem submissive.”

  Omar was startled by how quickly events went from there. From where they’d been resting it was only a short walk to the edge of town where the missionaries were staying in two large tents. Shortly, the men of Abu Sayyaf had all of the missionaries gathered at gunpoint in the women’s tent. Massoud had been the one to find the Christian he said had been trying to convert Muslims. Rather than killing him immediately like he’d told the others, he brought the man and made him kneel in front of the rest of the group. Then Massoud stood behind him, saying, “Do as I say and remain quiet at all times. Otherwise, you will be punished, like this man who’s been trying to convert good Muslims to your heathen Christian faith.”