Comet!

by Laurence Dahners

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

  Ell grinned and raised her eyebrows, “You want to look at what I’m calling the ‘port evaluator’?”

  Emma frowned, “Port evaluator?”

  Ell waved her to come along. Inside Ell showed her a small zoomable telescope with a flange around the back and little tubes running down the sides to the tip. “This scope’s barrel is two centimeters so it will fit through the 2.5 centimeter ports Manuel’s been making even with the attitude tubes. You can see it’s a snug fit in this flange and once it’s all the way in the rubber gasket should stop the leak of air into the vacuum of space on the other end.”

  “Attitude tubes?”

  “Yeah, the ports will probably be tumbling after we put them through so when we put the tip of this little telescope through the port it’ll be waving wildly around. The ‘attitude tubes’ will release pressurized air like the attitude jets on our rockets to let us stabilize and then point the ‘scope’ where we want.”

  Emma’s eyes drifted up to the ceiling as she thought, “So we won’t be able to control the direction of the other end of the scope by pointing the end we still have in our hands here?”

  “Nope, it’ll be pointing whatever direction the port is pointing. But look at what Manuel set up! He’s mounted the screen displaying the image from the little telescope on sensors! If you try to point the screen to the right it depresses the switch for the attitude jet that turns the scope to the right!”

  Emma lifted an eyebrow, “That should make it a lot easier alright. How are you controlling rotation?”

  Ell’s eyes crossed and she said, “Damn. I can’t believe I missed that. The port will probably rotate too, we’ll need even more jets to control that.” She picked up the “scope,” turned and walked off toward the machine shop. “Manuel’s gonna kill me,” she muttered.

  Ell and Emma took Emma’s car out for pizza. There’d been a spike in reporters’ interest in her after videos of her dancing at the Lincoln had hit the net. Ell worried that it might result in some paparazzi trying to follow her car again. Back at Quantum Research after dinner they wheeled the power supply for the single ended port out to the telescope and hooked up the port which had already been ‘zeroed in’ using the antenna that afternoon.

  Ell wheeled the telescope around to point it generally at Mars. She told the low end AI on the scope to aim it at Mars and its mount wheeled it around to point it pretty close. Ell used the small directional scope mounted on its side to center the big reflector telescope on the planet. Mars was supposed to be 96 million kilometers away at present and so Emma had set the port for that distance. Since the port would be opening into a vacuum they had a glass cover over it. Emma reached for the switch but Ell put her hand up. “Let’s think a minute. Could we be doing something stupid?”

  “Yup!” Emma said cheerfully. “But where it’s pointed we shouldn’t hurt anything on the other end. This switch is momentary so if something goes wrong on this end I’ll be letting go right away. But keep your face turned away the first time I turn it on.”

  Ell stepped back and Emma depressed the switch. They both heard a thump as the vacuum of space sucked the glass tight up against the port. Ell leaned down to look through the port. “Damn, we must be misaligned.” She started to reach for the adjustment screws but then with a pop Mars appeared in the port. “Hah! The first opening must have been on the far side of Mars!”

  “Huh?”

  “You know how our distance is pretty inaccurate. If we set it to open right at Mars, then half of the time it will open on this side, and half of the time it will open on the far side. If it’s on the far side there won’t be anything to see in the port.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Emma grinned.

  There was another pop and the Mars Ell saw in the port moved suddenly farther away. The port was more stable than the first several they’d built but it still reopened at a different distance every three seconds or so.

  “Are you going to send through one of your rolled up ports?”

  “Hmm, I’m realizing we need a better mechanism to make that happen.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, let’s say you open the port, it’s going to stay open about three seconds, right?

  Emma nodded.

  “Now, say that—through that glass cover over the port—I see that the port has opened kinda close to Mars. I want to send a rolled up double ended port through but when I tug on the glass window the vacuum makes it hard to move. I have to pull so hard I misalign the port and then once it’s open I try to shove the rolled port in the hole but my three seconds is up and, damn, it cuts my rolled up port in half!”

  Emma said, “Maybe we could mount the glass window on a slippery surface with an angled mirror on it and the rolled port right behind it? Then when we see Mars through the mirror, we pull the mirror-window apparatus back and the vacuum sucks the port through?”

  “Yeah! Good. We’ll need Manuel’s help with that tomorrow though. It should be mechanical so we aren’t pulling on it with our hands and moving the scope around. For now, let’s try sending a rolled port through just to make sure that part of the concept works.”

  After checking their alignment one more time to be sure they were still zeroed in on Mars, they closed the port and removed the glass window. They put a rolled port right behind the port opening and opened it again. As expected, the vacuum sucked the rolled port right through.

  Back inside the building they mounted the other member of the paired port onto the front of the “port evaluator” flange and turned it on. With a “bang,” the little port evaluator telescope was sucked into the port until the flange on it met the flange holding the port.

  Ell closed her eyes. “Damn! I’ll bet we aren’t going to be able to pull the telescope back out of the port against the suction.”

  Emma grinned, “You’re probably right, we’ll have to have Manuel make us a ‘telescope extractor’ too.”

  “Oh well, let’s see what there is to see.” Ell powered up the camera mounted on the back of the little telescope and they saw a wildly spinning and tumbling starfield. Before they could hope to control direction with the attitude jets Ell had to spend quite a bit of time stopping the rotation. It was problematic because the jets were strong enough that it was easy to overshoot and start rotating the other direction. “We need a vernier adjustment on the pressure so we can decrease it when we’re getting close.”

  “Manuel again.”

  Finally, somewhat by accident, Ell hit a point at which the rotation was very slow. Then Ell worked on stopping the tumble and bringing Mars into alignment. “There it is!” she said as it swam slowly across the field of the scope.

  Emma said, “Now you know that once we pull the scope back out of the port, the port’s going to be tumbling again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, isn’t that a problem?”

  “Now I’m thinking that we can calculate how close the port is by how many degrees Mars covers in our video field. Allan says this port is about 90,000 kilometers from Mars. I think that’s close enough. Now that we know we’re close enough, we can just pop a rocket through, even if the port’s tumbling and use the cameras and attitude jets on the rocket to stop its tumble and send it the rest of the way.”

  Emma narrowed her eyes. “Why not…”

  “What?”

  “Just film some video through a glass window on the port. Then play it back until you catch Mars passing by on the tumbling image, stop motion, measure how many degrees and decide whether you’re close enough based on that. No need to stick a scope through and stabilize it.”

  “Hah!” Ell hugged her. “You’re a genius!” she held Emma at arm’s length and tilted her head to muse, “Though Manuel’s gonna be pissed about all the time I had him waste putting attitude jets on my ‘port evaluator’ telescope.”

  Emma cocked an eyebrow, “You know, you really should ask me,” she pointed at herself w
ith both thumbs, “your ‘resident equipment genius,’ how to do this stuff before you go haring off on your own.”

  “Yes Ma’am.” Ell said abashedly. “I will in the future Ma’am. Anything you say Ma’am.”

  “Oh shut up. Are we going to send a rocket through it?”

  Ell tilted her head, considering, “I don’t think so, we don’t really have a need to send a rocket to Mars right now. After all, Collins, the rocket that Ben sent to Mars a while ago is already there. I feel like we’ve just been using Mars to test the principles of the single ended transfer ports. Do you know of a reason we should actually send a rocket to Mars?”

  “No. What are we going to do with this port then?”

  “Leave that 2.5 centimeter port near Mars. Tomorrow we’ll put a rolled five centimeter nitinol port through it. Then tell Ben and Rob that they can use the five centimeter port to transfer rockets to ‘near Mars’ orbits so they’ll be ready to send devices there without waiting for the rocket to make the 50 day trip to Mars. I think that ideally they’ll send a rocket through the five centimeter port that has a 7.5 centimeter nitinol port attached to it. Then they put that rocket into a stable orbit around Mars so they can put other rockets through into Mars orbit whenever they want to. Once we’re sure that that system works we can pop out some ‘transfer’ ports for each of the planets and Ceres and Pluto so that they can reach them quickly too.”

  ***

  Epaulding leaned back in his chair. He thought Candela looked a pretty frayed around the edges, “How are things going Ed?”

  A muscle worked in Candela’s jaw, “OK. I’m having to deal with a lot of petty ass rivalries and children who won’t talk to one another. My dream that we’d all ‘pull together’ to save the human race has been crushed under the sharp rocks of human nature. But, I’m kicking ass, taking names and beating them into shape.

  “Tell me what the plan is?”

  “The plan was, to build two vehicles, each to carry a nuclear weapon. They would then fly to meet the comet using constant acceleration trajectories, fueling through those ‘ports’ from D5R. Constant acceleration and deceleration would allow us to get there in less than a week. Once there the first one would land on the comet on the opposite side of where we wanted to push it and set off the weapon. If it didn’t work, we’d have plenty of time to use the second one. If that didn’t work we’d still have time for plan C.

  “First big snag is that the ports don’t work if the rocket is going faster than 22 kilometers per second relative to Earth. Now that’s pretty fast but we’re still talking hundreds of days to get to where the comet is now.

  “So… our current plan. By the time we get out there at this slower speed, the comet will be a lot closer so it won’t take us so long. However it will be harder to deflect the comet because we’ll need a bigger impulse to move it far enough. Nonetheless, a nuclear weapon should have plenty of punch to deflect it even if it’s a lot closer than it will be at our worst estimates. If it isn’t enough, we’ll just use the second weapon.”

  “So, I can tell the President we’ve got it under control?”

  Candela grimaced, “Yeah. At least I think we do.”

  ***

  Ell got an e-mail from “Vic Galtieri” and had to have Allan remind her that he was the Vic of the brawl at Gordon’s party and the sound engineering for Gordon’s show at the Lincoln Theater.

  “Dear Belle, I am hoping that your aunt will consider partnering financially with me on the following enterprise…”

  He’d actually laid out a fairly interesting idea. It involved taking over the lease on a bar in Carrboro. The bar occupied one part of a bigger building and had an adjoining large room which had been for rent for some time. He hoped to remodel the large adjoining room with extensive acoustic absorption material so that there would be little natural echo-reverberation. Then the sound engineer could add reverb to this “dead” room as desired using electronic reverberation and an extensive speaker system. Thus the engineer could produce anything from a very clean, non reverberant sound to a lush heavy reverberation that didn’t clash with the room’s natural reverb to become “muddy.” Much of the financing would be for remodeling the big room with seating, a stage, the acoustic dampening materials and the speakers. The wall between the big room and the existing bar would be mostly removed, and the original bar would function only as a place to get drinks. Well and to serve as a location where patrons could be in a somewhat quieter area. He hoped to not only charge patrons for drinks and admission to the shows but to charge bands for “live recordings” of their shows in his improved acoustics.

  Ell worried a few moments over her lack of expertise to judge the merits of the business plan but then decided what the heck, she liked it and she could afford it. She crafted an acceptance to go out tomorrow so it would seem like she’d taken time to consult with her mysterious “Aunt.”

  There was a knock on the door and she looked up to see Emma who said, “You ready ‘star’ girl?”

  Emma and Ell put on their coats, then Ell picked up the telescope and Emma the little cart with the power supply. They opened the door and carried the equipment out to the parking lot. Emma said, “Are you excited?”

  “Oh yeah! This shivering I’m doing is only partly because of it being November! The clouds these last three nights have just been killing me.”

  Ell set the telescope down and extended the legs of its tripod. Then she plugged in the power for Manuel’s mirrored port window. She peered at it with a flashlight and depressed the switch that powered the linear motor Manuel had installed to pull the mirror back from the port. With a “zip” sound it pulled the mirror back. Ell closed it again and inserted a rolled up piece of paper in the chamber behind the port. She nodded to Emma. “Let’s power it up for a 1 light second distance.”

  Emma nodded and adjusted the port energizer on the little rolling cart. “Ready.”

  “Go ahead.” They both heard the “pop” as the port opened. It popped again in about three seconds and Ell pushed the button to move the mirror and open the port. They heard the “zip” sound followed by a “whoosh” as the port opened up into the vacuum of space. The little roll of paper vanished out the port into the reaches of space.

  “OK,” Ell said. “Let’s try to line it up.” She pressed the button on the telescope’s AI and said, “Tau Ceti.”

  “Tau Ceti? Why not Alpha Centauri? It’s the closest. Only 4.4 Light years.”

  “Not really. Proxima Centauri is the closest at 4.2 light years though it’s only a little ‘M’ type star. But anyway, the Alpha Centauri stars are way down low in the Southern Hemisphere and we can’t see them from North Carolina. If we can’t see them with the telescope it’ll be pretty hard to be sure we’ve aligned the port at them. So, Tau Ceti. It’s in the Southern Hemisphere too, but barely, so we can see it from here. Better yet,” Ell winked, “it’s up at night in November.” The telescope had rotated around and chirped to indicate that it was aligned. Ell looked through the finder scope and saw the constellation Cetus. She made some fine adjustments to center it on Tau Ceti then looked through the eyepiece for the big reflector scope. A couple more fine adjustments and she had the high powered image centered in the big scope. She put a rolled up double ended port into the feed tube for the single ended port on the scope.

  “How far is Tau Ceti?”

  “11.9 light years.”

  Emma bent to her port energizer, adjusting until she was happy. “OK, shall I fire it up?”

  Ell put a hand up, “Wait, could we be doing something stupid?”

  They looked at each other for a moment, then Ell suddenly sat down. “Holy crap!”

  “What?”

  “Well, the chances are pretty remote, but what if the other end of the port actually did open inside the star?”

  Emma barked a laugh, “‘Pretty remote’ doesn’t even come close to describing it. If we miss by one angular degree at this distance of about 12 light years w
e’d miss by…” she looked up musingly, “a tenth of a light year which is pretty close to 90 billion kilometers. That doesn’t even address the fact that our accuracy for distance opening a port that far away has only a 67% chance of opening within 5% of the correct distance or 0.6 light years. We have a lot better chance of getting hit by lightning on this clear cloudless night!”

  “OK, you’re right. Still…let’s stand back from the scope. We don’t need to be right next to it.”

  Emma snorted but pulled the little cart with her energizer back to the end of the cord that stretched to the port. Ell uncoiled the wire for the switch that moved the mirror and opened the port. She had Allan, her AI, display the images from the port on their HUDs. “OK, open the port.”

  They both heard the “pop” as the port opened but only faint stars appeared on their HUDs. Another pop, still nothing. On the third pop a much brighter star appeared near the center of the image. Ell almost hit the button but then said, “Hold it. Allan, what was the angular diameter of Tau Ceti on that image? Belay that question. Instead...how far away was Tau Ceti, based on its angular diameter on that image?”

  “One tenth of a light year.”

  Ell quickly calculated how long one of her rockets would take to go a tenth of a light year at their maximum velocity of 150 kilometers per second. To her dismay it would take 20 years! “OK” she said, “let me know when it opens within a hundred light minutes of Tau Ceti.”

  Ell nodded to Emma and she depressed her switch. They stood listening to the popping sound of the port opening over and over again. Half the openings didn’t show Tau Ceti because they opened on the far side. Fearing that it might open very close to Tau Ceti but that they wouldn’t see the star because it was off to one side of the view through the port, Ell refined the angle of the telescope so that the star was centered in the port when it opened.

  They stood anxiously waiting as the port popped monotonously every three seconds. Eventually they got bored. Ell asked, “What’s the closest it’s opened so far?