Kaem nodded. Gunnar pulled the hose out, shut the door, latched it, and said, “Now.”
Arya heard the capacitor snap.
Gunnar rolled the chamber on its back and opened the door. Arya saw the silvery surface of a stade in the opening. Gunnar was already sliding his blade in between the stade and the mirrored wall of the chamber. A moment later, the stade floated out and rose up to bob along against the ceiling. Gunnar turned to look at them with both a raised eyebrow and a grin.
“Helium?” Kaem asked.
Gunnar nodded, a big smile on his face. “We could make blimps! Blimps that don’t leak. You probably know helium atoms are so small that they leak out through the walls of balloons. I’ll bet helium doesn’t leak out of a stade though. How long can you make a stade last?”
Kaem tilted his hand back and forth. “Based on our first test, at least nine days. My theory says we could make them last millions of years, but there’s no way to prove that.”
Arya stared at Kaem. “Millions of years?! Talk about your non-biodegradable waste! We wouldn’t ever try to make one that lasts that long, would we?”
Kaem evenly looked back at her. “Who knows? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. A million-year stade isn’t likely, no, but someday there may be a reason to make a few that last nearly that long.” He looked at Gunnar. “I think we should get that thing down off the ceiling and restrain it somehow. I’d hate for it to get loose, float up into the atmosphere and get sucked into a jet engine. I have a feeling it’d be pretty destructive.”
Gunnar tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. “How would I restrain it?”
“Wrap an old towel around it and tie it in. The towel should be heavy enough to keep it from floating away.”
“How long’s that one going to last?”
Kaem turned to look at his set up, “One megasecond. Eleven and a half days.”
Gunnar looked back up at the ceiling where the stade rested. “I’m not sure how it’s going to escape from up there.”
Kaem said, “I agree it’s probably pretty safe up there… Unless another one of your customers sees it up there and decides to try to take it home with him.” He shook his head, “Even if you trust the other people you work with, I don’t. If you’d let me borrow a towel, I’ll take it with me.”
Gunnar shook his head, “No. You’ve got a point. I’ll get a towel and we’ll bind it up, but you should think about whether it’ll be safer in the closet in my house,” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at his attached home, “or in your dorm where some idiot roommate might decide to borrow your towel. Or even just unwrap it to see what you’ve got tied up.”
Kaem snorted, “Your closet it is.”
Gunnar headed off into the house to get a towel and some string. Kaem moved the shop’s stepladder over underneath the stade and climbed up after it. Arya watched as he carefully surrounded it with the fingers of both hands and used his nails to tilt one edge off the ceiling. Once it was tipped a little bit away, he got his fingers around it and descended the ladder holding it gingerly under a basket of his fingers.
Gunnar returned with a towel and draped it over the stazed cube in Kaem’s hands. Once Gunnar had it surrounded by the towel, Kaem slid his hands out. Gunnar pinched the towel in around the bottom of the stade and Kaem tied it with the string Gunnar’d brought. When they were done, it looked a little like a rag doll, but the towel was heavy enough it no longer floated.
Next, they turned their attention to the other chamber Gunnar’d built. This one was 7.5 x 15 cm, but it was only one mm thick. As they were hooking it up, Arya asked, “What’s this one for? It doesn’t seem like you’d be able to put anything inside it.”
Absently, Kaem said, “We wanted a specimen we could use to test the material properties of a stade.”
“Oh,” Arya said, thinking. “This stuff would make a great frying pan, wouldn’t it? Nothing would stick to it. It’d be like Teflon on steroids.”
“Um,” Kaem said, eyeing her with a suppressed grin, “couple problems with that. No friction, remember? Your pan would slide right off the burner unless you held it there.”
Arya shrugged, “Attach a frictiony ring around the bottom of it to give it a little traction.”
“Frictiony? Now you’re inventing words! The problem with that is that I don’t think we can ‘attach’ anything to it. Remember how nothing stuck to the first one. Well…” he stared off into the distance, “maybe you could trap your pan in a metal ring that had a rough under surface to provide traction. But then you’d come to problem number two.” He arched a questioning eyebrow at her.
She rolled her eyes, “Okay, what’s problem number two?”
“I don’t think stazed objects are going to transmit heat.”
“Oh,” Arya said, chagrined. “I can see that. If time isn’t passing inside, then there aren’t any molecules vibrating with the heat, right?”
He grinned at her, “That’s what I’d expect. But as soon as we have our test specimen, we can heat one side of it and see if the other side gets warm.” He glanced at Gunnar, “Ready?”
Gunnar nodded.
Arya saw that the door was shut on the compartment. A moment later she heard the snap of capacitor discharge from Kaem’s set up.
Gunnar looked at Kaem, “Open it up?”
Kaem nodded.
Gunnar undid the latch, then said, “Oh-oh.”
Sounding anxious, Kaem said, “What’s wrong?”
He and Arya converged on the thin chamber. It took Arya a moment to recognize there was an irregular hole in the middle of the 7.5 x 15 cm mirrored sheet. It was a little hard to see the hole because the mirror lining the chamber was right behind it.
Arya asked, “You think you need to give it more power?”
Kaem shook his head. “I don’t think it’s a power issue. I think it’s the same thing that makes a staze have rounded corners. We can’t staze a segment of space-time with a dimension smaller than about one mm, at least not with our current setup. This chamber’s supposed to be a millimeter thick, but I’ll bet the middle of it’s just a tiny bit thinner. Just barely thin enough that some areas weren’t thick enough to staze.”
While they’d been talking, Gunnar’d hooked a fingernail in the hole in the middle of the silvery plate and lifted it out of the chamber. He waved it at them, “Hey, if you’re done jawing, I’d like to point out that having a hole in this thing makes it a lot easier to handle.”
Kaem made a face, “Easy to handle, but its irregular shape makes it a little harder to use as a test sample.”
Gunnar shrugged, “I agree, it’s not the kind of specimen we’d want to send to the lab for definitive testing, but it’ll take me a few days to make a chamber that’s a tiny bit thicker. In the meantime, we can heat this one to see if it melts, breaks, or resists the transmission of heat. We can hit it with a hammer and see if it's strong. We can get some idea of what to expect.”
Kaem said, “I’ll bet if you put a tiny shim under the edges of the door, thus propping it open just a little, we’ll still form a staze, this time one that’s a tiny bit thicker and doesn’t have a hole in the middle of it.”
Gunnar got a thoughtful look and said, “Right, because if we prop the door open less than a millimeter, the field that forms the stade won’t leak out the gap. Or, something like that, right?”
Kaem nodded, “Something like that.”
“Let’s see if we can break this one then, okay?”
Kaem nodded. Then, when Gunnar turned and put the thin plate between the jaws of a heavy-duty vice, he grinned and said, “Ah, this should be interesting.”
For a moment Arya wondered what’d be interesting.
Gunnar finished tightening the vice on the thin plate, then turned and walked to the corner to get his torch.
Arya immediately saw what Kaem thought would be interesting. Though Gunnar’d cranked the vice down hard, the little plate just slipped out of its grip and floated away. A
ctually, she thought, it didn’t “slip” out. It’s more as if it got squirted out like a watermelon seed. Probably the jaws weren’t quite parallel because the stade was holding that end of the gap open. Then they squirted that frictionless plate right out of there. She grinned, looking at the plate slowly tumbling through the air. And, because its only weight comes from the stazed air that was in the chamber, the stade itself floats in the room’s atmosphere.
Gunnar returned, dragging a small cart with an oxy-acetylene torch. He blinked at the empty vice, then saw the plate, still rotating in midair a little way from the vice. He snorted and shook his head. “Damn, this’s hard to get used to.” Snatching the stade out of the air, he walked over to his trashcan and pulled out a used wad of steel wool. He stuffed the wool into the hole in the middle of the stade plate. This time when he closed the vice on it, the crushed wool in the irregular hole kept the plate from sliding around.
Gunnar turned on the acetylene and struck a spark in front of the torch. Without turning on the oxygen, he played the torch over the stade plate for about ten seconds, then holding the torch off to one side he licked a finger and touched the plate.
Arya listened for the slight pop and hiss of saliva boiling against something hot. She didn’t hear anything.
Gunnar shook his head and put his finger back on the plate. Turning to the other two, he gave a little laugh and said, “Feels warm… Body-temperature warm. Same as these damn things feel when you haven’t played a torch over them.”
He turned on some oxygen and adjusted the flame to a sharp blue point. Lifting his goggles up over his eyes, he played the point on the plate for about a minute. Arya noticed some of the steel wool that stuck up out of the vice was turning red and sparking a tiny bit, suggesting that he’d delivered some serious heat. Gunnar turned the torch away, dropped the goggles, then bent his knees so he could study the stade plate with the lower lenses of his bifocals. “Damn! That would’ve melted steel, but this little mirror still looks completely unblemished.” Again he wet a fingertip and touched the plate, then pinched it between his fingers. Shaking his head in amazement, he said, “And not a damned bit warmer.”
Kaem turned to grin at Arya, “I guess we won’t be making your frying pans.”
She gently slugged his shoulder, “Wise ass.”
Gunnar turned off the torch and said, “I want to hit it with a hammer. Any other rough and ready tests you want to do before I try to break it?”
“No,” Kaem said slowly.
“You sound like you’re thinking of something?”
Kaem shook his head, “Just trying to make sure we haven’t missed some reason why hitting it with a hammer might be dangerous. I can’t think of one, but why don’t you put a big crescent wrench on it and try to bend it first?”
“Good idea,” Gunnar said, pulling a large crescent wrench off a wall hook and adjusting it until it fit snugly over the 1 mm plate. Then he leaned on it, trying to bend the plate. Arya couldn’t see any deformation in the plate. A few moments later Gunnar grabbed the wrench with both hands and leaned his whole body into it.
The wrench slipped off.
Gunnar nearly fell, but caught himself. “Damned thing keeps catching me by surprise,” he said, shaking his head morosely, though he had a little grin. He picked a ball-peen hammer off his wall rack. “Maybe it’s brittle. Let’s see how it responds to a sudden shock.”
Kaem said, “Hit it gently the first time, okay?”
“Sure,” Gunnar said. He tapped one side of the plate, then slowly increased the velocity of his swings until he was hitting it hard. He shook his head. “The sound it makes is so weird. You might get that kind of dull click from soft metal, but it would’ve bent when I hit it. Metal hard enough to make the hammer bounce back like this should ring, sounding a little bit like a bell.” He glanced at them, “Though the hammer doesn’t bounce back like it should.”
Kaem said, “A stade isn’t springy. At all. Therefore, no ringing like a bell, no bouncing back other than the springiness of the hammer’s head and any recoil coming out of the vice.”
“Can I hit it harder?”
“Sure, but increase the force a little at a time so we don’t run into any weird surprises, okay?”
Gunnar hit it a solid blow with pretty much the same results they’d had before. A little louder click, a little stronger bounce back, a little shaking of items on the bench the vice was attached to. He took a big swing and hit it really hard with no more effect, other than on bench items shaken by the blow transmitted through the vice. He hung the ball peen hammer back up and grabbed a sledgehammer.
“Whoa,” Kaem said. “You should have on your safety glasses, shouldn’t you?”
Gunnar rolled his eyes, but pulled out a drawer that contained several sets of safety glasses. He put on a pair and handed sets to Kaem and Arya. This time he took a mighty swing with the sledge. He got the same result as when he hit it with the smaller hammer, just more shaking of the bench. He hung up the sledge, took off the safety glasses, and stared at the thin stade plate. “Wow!”
Kaem said, “I need to get back pretty soon to meet with some other students on a project. Can you try to shim the door open a tiny bit so we can see if we can make a few complete plates? I want to take some samples to a testing lab I found. You can keep this one with the hole in it and keep trying to break it if you want.”
Gunnar put some thin flat pieces of metal he called “feeler gauges” between the chamber and the door then latched it. Kaem fired off his electronics and Gunnar levered a complete plate out with his knife.
When Gunnar was passing it to Kaem it slipped loose and floated off through the air. Kaem stared at it for a moment, then said, “Can you put something heavy in the next one so our test versions won’t be so light? I don’t want to weird out the test lab when we take them in for testing. Their properties are going to be hard enough to believe without the test people wondering how they can be as light as air.”
Gunnar scratched his head. “You want me to cut a piece of sheet metal almost big enough to fill the cavity?”
“No…” Kaem said, pausing to think. “A big piece of metal might cause problems with reflections of the radar waves.” He blinked, “Oh, hell, we need to find out whether that’s true. It’d just as well be now.”
Gunnar used his tin snips to cut a piece of aluminum flashing 7 cm x 14.5 cm. As he started to lay it in the chamber, he said, “Obviously it’s going to be touching on the bottom. There’ll be some places where it’ll stick out of the surface of the stasis field.”
“Shouldn’t matter,” Kaem said. Everything inside the field goes into stasis. Once it’s stazed it should look and act the same as the air in the chamber.” He tilted his head curiously, “Well, except for the way it reacts to gravity.”
“You’re probably right,” Gunnar said, carefully positioning the plate so it was centered. He closed the lid and latched it. Once Kaem fired off his electronics, Gunnar tipped the chamber over and opened the lid. This stade fell out under its own weight. It skidded across the bench and fell to the floor, skittering under the base of an arc welder. When Kaem managed to trap and pick it up, he said, “This feels a lot better.” He turned it over. “There’s no evidence of the spots where the plate was touching the bottom of the chamber. Looks like, except for mass, one thing in stasis is just like another, all mirror.”
“I think they’re going to be freaked out enough by its frictionless surfaces, infinite insulation value, and impossible strength.” Gunnar laughed, “‘Light as air wouldn’t have been a major issue.”
Kaem had developed a frown.
Gunnar laughed, “What now?”
“I’ve started wondering… They’re going to be doing all these precision measurements. What if they detect differential density across the stade?”
“Differential density?”
“Yeah, because the metal plate might have wound up a tiny bit off-center. I don’t know if they’ll be doing any
tests that notice it’s a little heavier on one side than another, but that could confuse the whole issue of its properties. Is there a way we could distribute the weight more precisely?”
“I could try to cut a plate that fills the cavity?”
“Cutting it by hand might be a problem all by itself, don’t you think?”
“Put matching washers in each corner?”
Arya said, “Level up the chamber and pour water in it.”
Kaem shook his head, “We’d wind up with an air bubble on the top surface. It’d tend to always float with that side up.”
Gunnar laughed, “They’d have a hard time telling that, since they can’t mark one side to tell which one’s up. But, if we fill the chamber carefully, surface tension will make it bulge up. When we close the door on top of it, the extra water’ll squeeze out and we should get a stade that’s completely filled with water.”
They tried it and it appeared to work. To confirm there weren’t any bubbles inside the stade, they dropped it in a bucket of water. Once it plunged in, it stayed underwater and didn’t seem to prefer floating with any side or corner up. “It’s got to be completely full of water,” Gunnar concluded.
“Damn, I’m going to be late for my meeting!” Kaem said.
Arya called an Uber while they were making a couple more water-filled stades.
As they opened the door to head out to the car, Gunnar shook Kaem’s hand. “I’m not sure exactly what you’ve got here, but, damn!”
They rode back to the University in silence. Arya thought they were both trying to come to grips with what it all meant.
Chapter Five
At Harris Laboratories
Raymond looked up when Cathy knocked on the door frame. She said, “I’ve got a guy here who wants to hand-deliver some test specimens.”
“We’re not going to get to them for at least a week.”
“I told him that. He wants to talk to someone about what kind of tests he’d like run.”
“Just tell him to pick his tests from the list,” Raymond said, irritated.
A Pause in Space-Time Page 5