Comet! Page 9

  “Sure! Thanks for asking! Let’s go fire it up!”

  Ell looked at the new port. From the front, the polyethylene ring wasn’t visible because it had been covered by the spray of buckyballs. Looking at the back side of it the polyethylene was barely visible, even with a hand loupe magnifier. “Wow, Manuel, you do nice work!”

  “I try.” He grinned, “Are you ready to try it? I’m dying to see if it works.”

  They set it on the table and plugged it in. Ell took a deep breath, held up her hand, elaborately crossed her fingers and finally nodded to Emma who touched the switch.

  The ring darkened to a deep fuzzy red and a buzzing sound emanated from it. Ell reached for it but hesitated when her hand felt heat coming from it. With a pop and a puff of smoke the central disk fell out of it onto the table. The wire electrode that had been soldered to the back of the disk had come loose. Ell reached out to it again. It was really hot! “Does that smoke smell of sulfur?”

  Emma sniffed, “I think so.”

  Ell looked at Emma, “How much power are you running through it? It’s really hot!”

  Emma glanced at her power supply, “553 watts. How hot is it?” She reached out toward it but pulled her hand back at the sensation of heat. “Hey, all 500 watts would have to go to heat for it to get that hot!” She sniffed, “It does smell like sulfur!” She turned to Manuel, “When you made it you didn’t use anything that has sulfur in it did you?”

  Wide eyed Manuel shook his head. “The plate is silver plated copper. The ring is polyethylene like you said. I can look up the solder flux but I can’t imagine why it would have any sulfur in it.”

  Ell’s shoulders sagged. She looked up at Emma who shrugged at her. She looked back at the port and reached out to it. It had cooled enough now to pick it up. The disk of metal that had been the metal of the port stayed on the table. She looked at the end of the wire that had been attached to it. The solder had obviously re-melted because it had formed into a smooth blob on the end of the wire! Why would it have gotten so hot?! She felt something around the edge of the hole. Looking at it with the loupe, it appeared to be clear material, presumably melted polyethylene. She sniffed, No more smell of sulfur. Ell turned to Emma and raised her eyebrows, “It seems to have melted the solder and polyethylene? I guess 500 watts is enough to get it that hot, but why? This circuit shouldn’t be resistive.”

  “I don’t know. I thought most of the power was supposed to go into forming the port. Maybe if it isn’t forming a port, it all goes to heat?” She frowned, “What do you suppose was making the buzzing sound? Maybe we had a bad connection.”

  Ell’s eyebrows shot up, “Wait! Let me look at your settings.”

  Manuel looked down, “My AI says the solder is supposed to be sulfur free.”

  Ell looked at the settings on the power supply Emma had designed to energize the port. “That should,” Ell looked up with a vacant expression, “create a port about 10-20 kilometers away.” She looked over at the melted port where it had been facing down, “Straight down into the earth! Allan, what’s the temperature 10-20 kilometers below the surface of the earth?”

  “The temperature inside the earth goes up about 22 degrees Centigrade per kilometer of depth. That would be 242 to 462 degrees C at 10-20 kilometers of depth.”

  “Hah!” Ell turned to Emma and Manuel, “Manuel, what’s the melting temp of your solder?”

  He looked up at his HUD, “187 degrees C.”

  Ell waggled her eyebrows. “And the temp that far below the earth’s surface should be at least 242 degrees C! We didn’t build the port wrong, we just pointed it the wrong direction and gave it too much juice! Lot of sulfur down there.”

  Emma’s eyebrows were high. “Really?!”

  Ell said, “Pretty sure.”

  “What was the buzzing sound?”

  Ell frowned, “I’m thinking that it was ‘port instability’ because the supplied current wasn’t steady enough.”

  “Not steady enough? This is a standard power supply. Why wouldn’t it be steady?”

  “Because even minute fluctuations will lead to large changes in the distance away that the port opens again into our universe. Since the location of the port in our universe can’t move around very fast, once the current fluctuates a little bit the port closes where it is and reopens a different distance away.” She looked up at the ceiling a moment, “At least that’s what I think is happening.” She turned brightly to Manuel and Emma, “Let’s build some more!”

  Emma said, “But, we won’t be able to send anything useful through them then! Those openings and re-closings had to be milliseconds apart. You couldn’t possibly put anything through them. Well anything solid anyway. And if you did send a gas or liquid it would be scattered here and there.”

  Ell grinned at her. “That’s why we hired an electronics genius! Someone that could build us an incredibly stable power supply.” She raised an eyebrow, then frowned, “Though I’m thinking that maybe a fuel cell would be the way to go? As long as we supply it very steadily with hydrogen and oxygen we should get a pretty stable current out of it?”

  Emma frowned and mused, “Maybe.” She tilted her head in consideration, a far away expression on her face, “Let me think about it and study some of the issues.”

  Ell said, “Before you get too focused, can I talk to you a minute?”

  Startled Emma fretted as they walked toward Ell’s office. Am I getting fired? She’d been worried about her inability to understand the physics of the ports and her lack of success with the circuit for the single ended ones.

  Before they got to her office Ell turned and said quietly, “I just wanted to invite you to dinner tonight?”

  “Hah! And you had to call me all the way over here for that? I thought I was getting laid off!”

  “Laid off?! No way. If the big bosses wanted to get rid of you they’d have to tell you themselves!” She grinned sheepishly, “I just didn’t want to invite you in front of Manuel. Sorry.”

  “Well, I haven’t been making much headway with these ports.” Emma frowned, “If you guys ever need to get rid of me, just let me know. I’ll go quietly.”

  “Hey, Em, this is science. Everything we do better not work perfectly the first time...if it does we aren’t pushing the envelope hard enough!”

  Chapter Six

  Emma arrived at Bin 54, a well known restaurant that she’d never been to herself, though she’d heard people talk about its excellent steaks. The hostess took her to a large table where Ell sat with Roger and a few other people. The others turned out to include Ell’s mother and grandmother. Emma’s eyebrows went up; Roger was wearing a nice shirt and had combed his hair instead of leaving it in its customary “shocked and wild” state. Wistfully she thought that he looked even better than usual.

  Once Emma’d been introduced around and seated, Roger raised his glass to Kristen, “To your little girl, Ms. Donsaii, and her Nobel Prize in Physics!”

  “Hear, hear,” the people at the table chorused.

  Kristen smiled big enough to split her face. “I’d like to say that I’ve always known she was destined for great things. But, that’d be a lie!” She grinned at Ell. “Changing diapers, tearing my hair out when she was having a tantrum, watching her roll her eyes when she was a teenager… Oh the woe I’ve seen.”

  Gram patted Kristen on the arm, “She was just helping me get even with you for all the suffering you brought me when you were a kid!”

  Duncan Miles leaned forward to stare at Gram, eyes twinkling, “My sweet Kristen, causing trouble? I don’t believe it!”

  Ell raised her glass, “To all of you, for putting up with my… idiosyncrasies.”

  Kristen lifted her glass and said, “To my daughter. Today she turns twenty.” Kristen’s eye’s twinkled, “Now that she’s no longer a teenager perhaps she won’t cause so much trouble?”

  Emma gasped and leaned forward, “It’s your birthday?! And you didn’t tell me!?”

  E
ll looked a little embarrassed, “Sorry, but I didn’t want you getting me a gift.” She grinned, “Your presence at my party is gift enough.”

  In the kitchen Gaye said, “Frank! Ell Donsaii is in the group at table twenty!”

  Frank’s eyebrows rose.

  “And… it’s her birthday!”

  “Hmmm, we’ll have to prepare a special dessert, huh!”

  The steaks were just as awesome as Ell had heard and the dinner filled with great fun as she, her little family and her friends got along famously. Gaye, their waitress treated them fantastically well and brought everyone a little chocolate cake with ice cream on the side at the conclusion. Ell’s cake had a candle on it to her delight. Not realizing that Gaye had heard them talking about it, Ell had no idea how they knew it was her birthday.

  When they were ready to leave Ell had Allan try to pay the bill but found that her mother had already paid. The bill for their large group was big at eight hundred plus dollars. At first she considered protesting but realized that, even if it were crazy for anyone to buy someone as wealthy as herself a dinner, that her mother certainly had enough money to do it nowadays. After all, Ell had put millions of dollars in her mother’s account when she’d received her first disbursement from the PGR chips.

  However, this had been the best service Ell had ever had in a restaurant. She’d always wanted to give a great waiter or waitress a really great tip so instead of protesting her mother’s paying the bill Ell instructed Allan to add to the tip.

  After ushering the “Donsaii party” as Gaye thought of them out of the restaurant, Gaye walked back into the kitchen, glancing up at her HUD to see what kind of tippers they’d been. She staggered a moment in the door. The tip was $1,700! Dazedly she realized that this was a 200% tip! Maybe they’d intended a 20% tip and misplaced a decimal?

  Frank interrupted her thoughts, “Hey, do you know that the Donsaii table left a $1,700 tip for the ‘back of the house?’ Man, nobody else has ever left even a tiny tip for us slaves back here in the kitchen before!”

  ***

  Ed Candela looked around the table at the people assembled. They had been selected for their complete discretion. He’d just briefed them on Hearth-Daster’s trajectory and what it meant. Their faces were pale but set. He felt proud to be working with a group that could receive this kind of horrific news and not dissolve into hysterics. Instead they all looked ready to attack and solve the problem. “OK,” he said, “We have a couple of things going for us. First, we can use some of the D5R ports to fuel a vehicle to reach the comet. Second, DOD will provide us with nuclear weapons.” A hand went up, “Yes?”

  “Ed, you aren’t going to try to blow it up are you? You could just convert it into a bunch of smaller fragments that would still cause huge amounts of destruction!”

  “No, Harvey. The plan I’ve been contemplating involves landing the weapon on the surface of the comet, then blowing it at the correct moment to ‘push’ the comet to one side. But, that’s why we’ve gathered all you bright people in one place. To see if there are better ideas.”

  Victoria Ullen put her hand up, “If we’re deflecting, the sooner we do it the better. We need to get this thing launched yesterday!”

  The discussion went on and they all adjourned for a couple of hours to brainstorm and run calculations. Candela scheduled them to meet again in four hours to begin firming a rough plan.

  ***

  Emma looked up at Ell, “Hey, when are we gonna go out on the town again, girlfriend?”

  Ell tilted her head, “A local band I like is playing at the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh Saturday night. You up for a listen?”

  “Sure. Are you ready to supply some current out of that fuel cell yet?”

  Ell chewed her lip as she tried to adjust the flow from the hydrogen port to the fuel cell. Emma came around to watch the voltage display on the monitor of the extremely sensitive meter they had purchased. Ell lifted her hands away and they watched the voltage settle to a relatively steady state.

  Roger arrived and looked at it with them, “Looks pretty good.”

  Though the meter still showed some drift it was much slower than they had achieved with any of the expensive power supplies they had tested so far. “OK,” Ell said, “shall we try it?”

  Emma said, “Yep,” and reached for the switch that would shunt the power to their new single ended port.

  “Stop!” Ell said, sounding a little panicked.

  “What?”

  “It’s pointing at…” she waved a hand weakly.

  Roger and Emma frowned and turned. The port was facing across the big room there at D5R. “What?” they said together.

  Ell said, “…the ET Resource group.” She waved again at Rob and Ben who were gathered with their team, using the big screens on the wall to watch the video from one of their rockets that was landing on an asteroid.

  Roger’s eyes widened but Emma said, “So?”

  “So,” Ell whispered, “If we open a port inside one of them…”

  Roger said, “Bacteria from the air could float into their body and cause an infection!”

  Ell said, “I was thinking more of what might happen if we opened it inside someone’s heart and let a lot of blood pour out, but yeah, an infection could be pretty bad too.” Her eyes widened, “My God,” she breathed, “remember how when one of the Space Station ports switched off with a hose going through it? It sheared off the hose! If opening or closing a port inside the body shears through the tissue the port appears inside of…”

  Roger sat down suddenly, “If that had opened inside someone’s brain,” he glanced at Emma, “it probably would have sheared all the neurons that crossed the area of the port!”

  Ell found herself desperately tamping down her “zone” which was responding to the sense of panic that had just flooded through her. Moving at what seemed to be a glacial pace to her enhanced state she reached over and turned the port to face upwards. Then she sat and lowered her head into her hands. “Shitshitshitshit…” she whispered.

  Feeling a little lightheaded Emma suddenly sat down as well.

  After a while Ell said, “We need to open a port inside of something and find out if it does shear the material in the opening like we think. I’m thinking a piece of wood?”

  Roger said wonderingly, “This might not be all bad. Supposing we opened a port into someone and shoved in the insulin dispensing port...surgery without incisions!?”

  Ell frowned, “What if we never get better control of how far away the port opens? If we were using this for surgery we’d need to know exactly how deep in the body it was going to be!”

  Roger shrugged, “If we can’t control depth, we can’t use it for surgery. But,” his eyebrows bobbed up and down, “if we can…”

  Emma looked back and forth from one to the other. “All this ‘pie in the sky’ talk is making me hungry. Let’s try this thing out, then go for lunch!”

  Ell grinned at her, “OK, but first let’s think our way through this to make sure we’re not about to do something else really stupid?” She looked down at the meter, “OK at this voltage we’re shooting for an opening about 10 meters away. Plus 50% shouldn’t be a problem, 15 meters up is nothing but atmosphere. But, if we’re minus 50%, 5 meters up is still inside the building and if we opened the port inside a 220 volt power run, it would at the very least burn out our port?” Ell looked at them and raised an eyebrow. “I think we should go outside.”

  Emma’s eyes had widened. “OK,” she said quietly.

  Manuel had walked in so he helped them load everything on a cart. “Where are you taking it?”

  “Outside.”

  “Outside?”

  Roger explained the issues to Manuel whose eyebrows went up.

  Ell said. “Guys? We really should keep these issues a secret until we’ve given this a lot more thought.” She looked each of them in the eye. “This might be one of those scientific discoveries that should be suppressed.”

&nb
sp; Roger looked at Ell like she’d grown a horn, “You can’t be serious! Suppress scientific discoveries?!”

  Ell looked down, then back up into his eyes. “I don’t think we should either Roger. I’m just saying we should think a lot about it before we turn this loose on the world. What if there’s something even worse that it could be used for than we’ve thought of so far?”

  Roger shrugged and started pushing the cart outside. “OK, I’ll agree we should think about it, but everything science discovers is a ‘double edged’ sword. I’ll bet the benefits outweigh the risks.”

  Once they were outside Ell insisted on checking to be sure the port was facing up and double checking the voltage. Then she ran the calculation again in her head and had Allan check her on it. Finally, she nodded at Emma who pressed the switch. Ell was looking up and saw a little flash of light about 50 feet up. There was a “pop” and then another one but nothing else happened. Emma took her finger off the switch a disgusted look on her face.

  Ell brought her eyes back down and grinned at her, “Disappointed?”

  “Yes!”

  “A port into the air 40-50 feet over our head isn’t going to do much.” Ell raised an eyebrow.

  Emma wrinkled her nose, “Damn, it seems there’s always something I haven’t thought of! How are we even going to tell if it’s working?”

  Roger said, “I thought I saw little flashes up there in the air?”

  Ell shrugged, “Yeah, they were little sparks when I first did microscopic one ended ports in Nevada. I think it’s waste energy from forming the port.”

  Ell looked down and adjusted the power supply, “OK, try it now?”

  Emma pressed the button. This time there was a pop and a hiss another pop and continued hissing. Emma reached curiously for the port.

  Ell said, “No!”

  Emma pulled her hand back and let her finger off the button.