Barker darted a glance at Eisner, who swallowed uneasily as he realized that he didn’t really know the doping scheme, the wiring, or the exact current specifications. Even Weitzel, who’d bought a current generator and was planning his own experiments hadn’t actually recorded the specifications of the thruster yet. Eisner glanced back at Barker and knew that Barker could read the answer to the question in his eyes.
Singh, eyes sparkling, said, “Therefore, I would propose that there were three inventors, Dr. Eisner and the two Gettnors. Since Dr. Weitzel had nothing to do with this invention until after the fact, we’re not sure why he has been listed at all. Dr. Gettnor would take his one third and the University would get the other two thirds to divvy up as per its agreement with its employees.”
Barker threw down the pencil he’d been taking notes with. “That’s ridiculous! I’ll guarantee you don’t want to try to force us to swallow a deal like that! Your client can’t afford a court battle with an institution having the University’s resources and stature.”
Singh laughed delightedly. “Oh my goodness, you didn’t do your homework did you?!”
Barker looked mulish while Eisner wondered what the hell Singh was talking about in reference to “homework.”
Singh’s eyes twinkled as she said, “I do believe you think I’m just some young bimbo with a freshly printed law degree. Someone who’s hoping to scare up some money on a contingency fee. And even more amusing; you think my client, because he’s ‘unemployed,’ has no resources.” She smiled brightly at them, “Why don’t I give you a moment to have your AIs do a search for the patents held by Dr. Gettnor. That’s V-A-Z Gettnor.”
An uneasy feeling settled over Eisner again. He glanced at Barker, but Barker was murmuring to his AI, presumably doing the search specified. After a moment, Eisner started murmuring to his own AI. A few seconds later a surprisingly long list of patents under Gettnor’s name popped up on his HUD. He skimmed through them; most of them were things he’d never heard of, though some appeared interesting… Oh! he thought as he got to the bottom of the list and felt a little tingle in his scalp at the recognition.
Barker leaned to Weitzel and Eisner, “What the hell is she talking about?” he whispered.
“Third from the most recent,” Eisner whispered back. “He holds the patents for GE’s new fusion power plants! That’s on its way to being a multi-multibillion-dollar industry. The man’s worth a fortune!”
Recognition exploded over Barker’s face. He turned an appraising look on Gettnor, so Eisner did too. Gettnor still looked like he was in another world, totally focused on his HUD. Eisner had the distinct impression that, not only was the man uninterested in the proceedings, he was actively trying to keep his attention elsewhere.
Barker and Singh argued back and forth for a while, but finally settled for a deal in which Gettnor took thirty percent and the University got the other seventy. Since the University gave the inventors forty percent of its take, Eisner and Tiona each got fourteen percent. Weitzel didn’t get anything, which Eisner had to admit was fair since he really hadn’t contributed to the invention. As near as Eisner could understand he’d only been put on there because Barker hadn’t really understood his lack of contribution. Weitzel had accepted this fate with resigned grace.
During a boring part, Eisner had taken time to have his AI look up Anbala Singh. Turned out she was a real hot shot in intellectual property law. Barker had thought he was stomping kittens, but she had turned out to be the mama tiger.
They were all getting up. Gettnor had immediately bolted out the door as if desperate to be away from there. Tiona was right behind him.
Singh leaned out over the table and quietly said, “One more thing…”
Barker sighed, as if tremendously put upon. “Yes?” he said exasperatedly.
Singh grinned, “Dr. Gettnor asked me to tell you that he’ll be donating his share to a UNC scholarship in his daughter’s name.” She winked, “He doesn’t need the money, but he absolutely hates getting screwed.”
***
Tiona followed her dad out into what she still thought of as the Johnson’s garage. He flipped on the lights and the door started going up. Outside in the dark, she saw a flatbed semi with the big disc mounted on edge. It fit the width of the streets in that configuration, but they’d had to find a route without low hanging trees, wires or bridges over it. A second truck turned out to be some kind of crane. It lifted the disc down, let it pivot flat and then drove slowly up the driveway to slide it into the garage over the fusion power plant.
Once the big disc was approximately in place, Vaz vaulted up on top of it. At first Tiona stopped, astonished by the ease with which he pulled himself up onto it. Then she remembered that the man did forty pull-ups in a row as if it were nothing. He was so focused on what he was doing that he was able to call out directions to the strangers running the crane with hardly a verbal stumble.
Eventually the big disc settled itself onto the bolts on top of the fusion plant. As the crane pulled away, Vaz pulled Tiona up onto the disk and they started putting nuts onto the bolts.
With the garage door closed they started hooking up the broad power cables that ran from the power plant to the disc’s massive current generators. The runs from the generators to the thrust membranes had already been hooked up at the fabricator.
Once the last cable had been fastened into place, Vaz said, “You ready to run some tests?”
She gave her dad the eye, “It’s well after midnight, how about if we save something for tomorrow?”
Vaz looked distressed, “but you’re going back to school the day after tomorrow! Aren’t you… anxious to, to get this going?”
Tiona laughed, “Yeah, but not enough to miss any more sleep tonight.”
The next morning, Vaz, obviously unable to sleep, knocked on Tiona’s door and apologetically asked if they could go do the testing.
“Sure,” Tiona called out to him, “you gonna make me some breakfast?”
She’d thought she was teasing him, but obviously he took it seriously, quickly saying “yes” and immediately thundering down the stairs to the kitchen.
By the time she got downstairs he’d already scrambled some eggs, cheese and salsa for a breakfast burrito. “Where’s yours,” she asked, picking hers up and taking a bite.
“Already ate,” he said, shifting back and forth from one foot to the other and watching her eat.
She laughed, “You can head out there and start setting up the test, you know. I’ll be out as soon as I finish eating.” When he looked doubtful, she continued, “My feelings won’t be hurt.”
He turned and headed for the stairs, somehow reminding her of an eager puppy.
When Tiona got over to the Johnson’s garage she found her dad standing beside the disc holding a controller. A soft, low-pitched rumble came from the big disc. “What’s that sound?” she asked.
“I’m testing each of the six big lifters in the hexagon, one at a time. That’s the one on the far side running at one percent. It should be producing about 150 pounds of thrust but we don’t have a way to measure it.”
Tiona frowned, “Why don’t you slowly run it up to twenty-five percent. That would be 3,750 pounds of thrust. Not enough to flip the saucer over, but you ought to see it shifting around. It’d give you some idea that the thruster was working.”
Vaz frowned, thinking. Slowly, he said, “How about if I test them all at one percent. Then I’ll test them in opposing pairs up close to twenty percent. That’d be about 6,000 pounds of lift, but since it would be balanced, we wouldn’t have to worry about rocking it off its base.”
Tiona, embarrassed, realized that the power plant made a narrow base that the big saucer was sitting on. Exerting a lot of lift way off-center might in fact tip it. “Um, yeah, good idea.”
Over the next hour or so, they tested each of the 2.66 meter discs of the hexagon one at a time, then in opposing pairs. The problem was that they couldn’t really tel
l if one of the thrusters was underperforming until they got the saucer light enough to almost lift off. Eventually they gradually increased the thrust of opposing pairs up to a little more than sixty percent. This was enough to make the disc very light and slight imbalances between pairs quickly became evident. Vaz was able to ask the saucer’s AI to adjust them until they were balanced and then very gradually increase the lift until the saucer floated without tilting. Once they had gotten it close, the AI’s accelerometers let it adjust them to prevent tilting rather than it having to be done by hand. They repeated the balancing using three of the discs at a time in equilateral triangles until they had all six pretty close and the AI could lift the saucer, keep it level, and even station keep in the center of the garage with tiny adjustments of the tilt.
They did put a few dings in the wall of the garage when they first lifted it off, but they were pretty minor.
Tiona laughed, “You realize that when we put the habitation module on top, it will be asymmetrical and the AI will have to compensate for that by increasing the thrust of the discs on the heavy side? We might have wanted to wait until we got it installed.”
Vaz frowned, “I think it’s much better that we have them all balanced with the symmetrical load. Now we know they all produce the same amount of thrust per watt to within a few percent. If we had the unbalanced load on we might not recognize that one of them wasn’t up to spec on thrust.”
Tiona shrugged, acknowledging the truth of her dad’s statement, but thinking that he, as usual, was way too serious.
***
Christmas break was over and the first day of class was upon her. Tiona stepped into the lab and put down her backpack. She started looking over her equipment and began to consider the next steps in her superconduction research with Dr. Eisner. Suddenly, she felt Nolan’s eyes boring into the side of her head. She mentally winced as she considered the fact that her last encounter with Nolan was at Local 506 during the debacle with Ronnie.
She turned slowly to look at Nolan, further remembering that she’d been dressed up for New Year’s Eve. Nolan would never have seen her dressed nicely before. He stared at her, concern writ large in his eyes. At least he doesn’t have that hungry look that a lot of the guys at the bar did that night, she thought. “Hey Nolan, how was your Christmas?” she asked.
“Um, it was good. Uh are you okay? Last time I saw you it looked like you were having an… argument with Ronnie Winters.”
Tiona scowled, “Yeah, hopefully I won’t see that jerk again.”
“Oh, how do you know him?”
“Boyfriend,” she said with a disgusted tone in her voice. “Was my boyfriend I mean.” She arched an eyebrow, “I think you said your girlfriend liked him. She’s welcome to the SOB, but she’ll regret it.”
“Oh, she’s not my girlfriend,” Nolan protested. “She does think he’s a great musician though.” He shrugged, “She thinks he’s going to make it big someday.”
“Not if he keeps drinking,” Tiona said darkly.
Nolan didn’t say anything for a moment and Tiona started to turn away, but then he said, “Wanna go to the Cosmic Cantina for lunch again today?”
Tiona turned back to look at him, trying not to frown. Is this because he thought I looked sexy the other night? she wondered with some irritation. Then, Come on, don’t be so paranoid. He probably just wants to be friendly with his lab mate. “Okay. Noon?” But, he’d better not tell me that I should dress up more often.
Nolan smiled and nodded eagerly. “Yeah, that’d be great.”
Tiona had struggled all morning to rekindle her interest in superconduction. She’d begun repeating a lot of her experiments without the irregularities in her set up that her dad had discovered. However, she kept wondering whether, at their next lab meeting, Dr. Eisner would tell her that he had been expecting her to start working full-time on the thrust phenomenon rather than continuing on superconduction.
She had made little progress other than plotting out the experiments. In fact her mind was going around in circles when Nolan said, “You ready to head out to lunch?”
Tiona said, “Sure.” She stood up.
Nolan stood uneasily, looking like he was waiting for something. His eyes darted around her desk, then he said, “Don’t you need your…”
Tiona gave a little snort, “Purse? No, I don’t need a purse.” She tugged at her baggy pants. “Got plenty of room in my pockets.” She turned and went out the door, assuming that he would follow.
As they walked across campus Nolan said, “I’ve been realizing that I don’t really know you. What do you do for fun?”
“Well, I’ve always been a runner, and I like that. I like music too, that’s how I wound up down the rabbit hole with Ronnie Winters.” She pursed her lips, “And physics too. I’ve always liked math and physics.” She turned and eyed him, surprised once again by his good looks. Nerdy good looks. “What about you?”
He looked a little uncomfortable. “I like music too, but I don’t think I’m as much of a fan as you. I play some golf, but it takes so much time I don’t get out very often.” He looked a little embarrassed, “I like anime too.”
“The Japanese cartoons?”
He nodded, though Tiona had the impression he thought calling them “cartoons” was an insult. “I read quite a bit of science fiction.”
“Oh yeah, I read sci-fi too,” she rolled her eyes, “though I hate it when they get the physics wrong.”
“Um, well, it seems to me that for them to have an interesting story they’ve got to have some fake physics. If you can’t go faster than light, you can’t meet any interesting aliens.”
“I’ll grant you FTL, but protagonists that land their FTL spaceship on an alien world and then pull out their sword to do battle drive me crazy!”
“Oh, yeah. And he dodges a laser beam too, right?”
She snickered, “She’s one fast woman!”
They’d arrived at Cosmic Cantina, so their conversation took a break to place their orders. To her embarrassment, he managed to pay for her lunch again while she wasn’t paying attention. Then she remembered that Dr. Eisner had said that Nolan thought she had financial problems because her dad was unemployed. It wouldn’t be too surprising if Dr. Eisner hadn’t talked to Nolan about what he’d learned of the Gettnors’ financial situation during the patent discussion. That was the kind of embarrassing incident Eisner probably didn’t want to talk about.
She decided that Nolan worrying about whether she had enough money to buy lunch was kind of sweet. Probably that was why he’d offered her part of his lunch so many times last semester. She frowned at a new realization, He was offering me lunch before he knew that my dad didn’t “have a job”! And… he was trying to be nice to me before he’d seen me dressed up at New Year’s too… The realization that he was trying to be nice to her before he’d seen her looking sexy made her glance warmly at him. He’s not like a lot of other guys…
They talked for quite a while after they’d finished their lunch and during their walk back to the lab. Tiona was surprised to realize that despite the fact she’d been thinking of Nolan as a complete nerd, he was actually pretty funny and… interesting to talk to.
They were almost back to the lab, when Tiona said, “So what are you planning to do after you finish your PhD? Teach and research at a university? Work for industry?”
Nolan got an embarrassed look, “Can you keep a secret?”
Surprised that Nolan had an ambition he might want to hide, she shrugged and said, “Sure.” She had a sudden and uneasy feeling that he was going to tell her that he was going to go to Hollywood and try to become an actor.
Without looking at her, he quietly said, “I’m going to make an application to NASA. My lifelong dream has been to be an astronaut.” He shrugged, “Embarrassingly enough, I’ve never even tried to figure out how you apply. I guess I’m afraid I’ll figure out I don’t qualify for a whole list of reasons.”
Tiona glanced at h
im in surprise. Thinking about how she and her father were building the proverbial “spaceship in a garage,” she suddenly giggled. If it works, I’ll have to take him for a ride!
Nolan snorted, “I should’ve made you promise not to laugh!”
“Sorry! I wasn’t laughing at you, I was laughing at myself.”
“Sure,” Nolan said, rolling his eyes.
She bumped a fist on his shoulder, “I think you’d make a great astronaut. Besides, inventing this graphene precipitation method should make you kind of famous. They’ll probably fall all over themselves to have you on the team.”
***
Ralph swore as he struggled with a set of the power cables on the big ion engine. They were the cables that went to the unit he had dismounted. Houston had suggested that if he doubled the power input to one of the units, by connecting both of the power runs intended for two units to a single unit, that it might run hot enough to burn off whatever impurity was depositing on the electrodes. It might also destroy the engine, but at this point that would be a small loss.
He could really have used Zack’s help on this hot wiring project, but Zack had declared the entire scheme to be, “A horse-shit attempt to keep dying minds busy.” Since he and Zack had finished filling the big bladder with icy gases for the ion engine there hadn’t been that much to do. Zack had become more and more depressed. His black moods had overtaken the living capsule. Ralph had gotten advice from Houston to increase the lighting in the capsule in case seasonal affective disorder was contributing to Zack’s funk.
Unfortunately, despite Ralph’s efforts to keep more lights turned on in the capsule, Zack kept turning them off. Ralph felt like most of the time the capsule was dimmer than it had ever been.
Ralph had actually been relieved to have this assignment in hopes that it actually would keep Zack’s mind busy. When Zack had refused to go, Ralph had been relieved to get the hell away from him. He felt somewhat guilty, as if he had deserted his compatriot, but nothing he had been doing to try to cheer Zack up had had any noticeable effect.
Tiona_a sequel to Vaz Page 17