Suddenly, Ralph’s AI spoke up in his helmet. “Houston requests a direct connection to you here in your suit.”
Ralph said “Okay… Go ahead Houston.” While he waited for the message to go back and forth to Earth, he kept working, trying to get two power leads connected to a lug meant for one.
“Mr. Abbott, this is Dr. Dumars at the Houston Space Center.” There was a pause while the Dr., obviously not used to speaking over distances long enough for a time delay, awaited Ralph’s acknowledgment, but then he continued. “Um, about ten minutes ago we received notification from Bellerphon’s AI that the capsule’s medical drawer has been opened. We have tried to reach Astronaut White, but he has not responded to our contacts. We are concerned that, in view of his mood, he may be trying to use the medications in the drawer to harm himself. Would you be able to check on him?”
Ralph was already pulling himself along the cable that led to Bellerphon. “On my way,” he grunted. “If he has taken something, would we have an antidote?”
“It would depend on which medication he may have taken. Hopefully he hasn’t taken anything and we’re all worried about nothing.”
“Hopefully,” Ralph grunted. He’d arrived back at Bellerphon and a minute later he cycled through the airlock. Seeing Zack’s still form snugged up in his sleeping cocoon, he yelled, “Zack, you stupid son of a bitch!” He pushed himself across the capsule to Zack, “Houston, I think he’s done something, he’s not reacting. What do I do?”
He jerked the Velcro loose on Zack’s cocoon, spilling Zack out of it. Grabbing a hold of the front of Zack’s jumpsuit, he pushed himself across the capsule toward the open medical drawer.
“Does he have a pulse? Can you see what’s missing out of the medical drawer?”
Ralph grabbed Zack’s wrist to feel for a pulse while he looked in the drawer. The seal had been broken on the small chamber labeled morphine and it was no longer full of little ampoules. “I do feel a pulse. The only medication obviously missing is morphine.” Ralph looked at Zack. He looked a little blue. The pulse seemed very slow, though Ralph didn’t want to take time to count it. He didn’t think Zack was breathing.
Ralph had just grabbed Zack’s head and given him a breath mouth-to-mouth, when Houston came back, saying, “Are his pupils small? Is he breathing?” After a momentary pause, Dumars voice continued, “If he isn’t breathing, give him a breath.”
Ralph looked, “Pupils are very small. Wasn’t breathing, I gave him a breath” He gave Zack another breath.
Dumars said, “Keep giving him a breath every few seconds. Look in the medical drawer for a medication labeled naloxone.”
Ralph gave him another breath, then looked in the drawer. Over the next few minutes Dumars walked him through administering the narcotic antagonist and told him he’d need to re-administer it because it wouldn’t last as long as the morphine did. Shortly, Zack started breathing better on his own and pinked up.
Ralph eyed his partner warily; then looked around the capsule. He saw a note taped to the bulkhead next to Zack’s sleeping cocoon. Since Zack seemed to be stable, he pushed across the capsule and grabbed the note.
Ralph,
Realized that if I was gone, you’d have enough food to make it back to earth even at the low accelerations you’ll be able to get. I sent you the calculations in an email. Sorry I didn’t have the balls to just go out the airlock, but I always wanted to know what an OD felt like. Don’t waste any juice trying to bring my worthless carcass back home, just push it out the airlock and leave it here on Kadoma.
Good luck buddy,
Zack
Ralph’s eyes shot back across the capsule to Zack, widening slightly as he realized that by saving Zack, he may have killed himself. Shit! He pushed himself back across the capsule to Zack, wondering guiltily whether Zack might still not make it.
Suddenly Sophie’s voice came over the link, “Ralph! How is he?”
Ralph grabbed the front of Zack’s jumpsuit and pushed off to pull him back over to the sleeping cocoon. Zack’s eyes opened blearily and wavered around. “Too ornery to die,” Ralph responded to Sophie.
Zack blinked a couple of times; then said, “Aw crap. Shoulda had the balls to go out the airlock.”
Ralph pulled the Velcro of the sleeping cocoon over him and pressed it shut. “You should not, you dumb son of a bitch! I’ll never make it back home if I don’t have you around to be such an excruciating pain in my ass.”
After a few seconds for his words to reach earth and Sophie’s to return to Bellerphon, he heard Sophie say in a horrified tone, “Ralph!”
***
Tiona’s AI told her she had an email from her dad. She glanced up at her HUD. “Habitat module has arrived. Am bolting it into place. When can we test fly?”
Tiona frowned, typically cryptic. “Saturday?”
“Need to fly at night. Can you come home tonight?”
Tiona rolled her eyes. Her dad reminded her of Dante as a kid around Christmas. Excited and impatient. “Will you have finished pressure testing?” Part of their plan for being sure the saucer was ready for high altitude flight included pressurizing the cabin to two atmospheres and making sure it didn’t leak.
Vaz’s response was a simple, “Yes, by 7 PM.”
“Saucer has hovered in garage for an extended period?” Another part of their testing regimen involved having the saucer hover for a long time to make sure the fusion plant, cable runs, current generators, and membranes didn’t fail under load.
“Yes, times twenty-four hours. Have also run higher power opposition test times twenty-four hours.” This test involved running a triangle of three discs lifting, with the other triangle of three discs holding it down, running at a higher power to make sure everything would tolerate the bigger loads.
Tiona sat thinking for a minute, wondering whether there were any other tests that could be run in the garage to make sure the damn thing was safe. Control must be pretty good if the AI could keep it from bumping the walls of the garage while it was weightless and the discs were running high loads in opposition for twenty-four hours. Finally she replied, “Okay. Will be home by 11 PM.”
Though her father’s response was only, “Okay,” Tiona imagined she could feel his excitement anyway.
That afternoon, Nolan and Tiona had their lab meeting with Dr. Eisner. So far, Tiona had focused all of her work on the superconduction hypothesis and that was all they had discussed at the lab meetings. It was as if the whole phenomenon of thrust was being ignored by mutual consent. Tiona certainly felt uncomfortable about it, and she thought Dr. Eisner felt even worse despite the fact that the lawyers had reached an agreement. However, this day as Tiona presented even more failed redo experiments, Eisner shook his head unhappily. “So, it looks to me like you’ve revaluated all of the possible dopants whose properties fall close to our predicted values?”
Tiona nodded agreement.
Eisner continued, “And… now you’ve also reevaluated several of the dopants whose properties fall a little ways on either side of our predicted values, correct?”
Tiona nodded again.
Eisner sighed, “I think you should give up on superconduction and turn all of your attention to thrust. What do you think?”
Although she was looking at Eisner, Tiona could feel Nolan’s eyes widen and could practically hear his thoughts, thrust? She refrained from glancing at Nolan and shrugged back at Eisner. “Yeah, I don’t think superconduction is going to work, so it seems like it would be a lot more productive to work on thrust instead. Should I write up the results of our superconduction experiments?”
Eisner barked a despairing laugh. “You should, because otherwise all your time was wasted. It should be published, so no one else wastes their time trying to do the same experiments. However, we won’t be able to find a journal that will publish negative results like those, so it’ll be a waste of your time.”
Tiona pursed her lips, “I’ve heard that…” After a moment,
she said slowly, “There should at least be a website for posting negative results. That way, future researchers could do a search to make sure no one had tried and failed at an experiment before.”
Eisner snorted, “Sure, you should set that up. People will flock to it. Everybody will want to list a posting on the ‘website of negative results’ on their CV. Meanwhile, since we’d like you to get a PhD someday, why don’t you get started on the thrust phenomenon? Next week bring a plan to this meeting for a regimen of experimental study.” He tilted his head as he thought of something, “You were going to set up a self-contained experiment for Dr. Weitzel to send up in a high altitude balloon. How are you coming on that?”
“Um… I might have a way to do that experiment in the next couple of days,” she said enigmatically, not wanting to say anything about the saucer until she was sure it would work.
As soon as the lab meeting was over and she and Nolan stepped out into the hall, he turned to her, “Thrust?! What are you guys talking about?”
“Um, it’s an interesting side effect of some of my doped membranes. They seem to produce a thrust perpendicular to their surface.”
“Electromagnetic? Electrostatic? What are you talking about?”
“Neither. We’re still trying to figure it out. We think it might, um, involve accelerating dark matter.”
“What?! Come on! You’ve got to tell me more than that.”
Back in the lab, Tiona spent time bringing Nolan up to speed on the discs, though she carefully limited her discussion to very low power effects. In view of his interest in space, she didn’t find it surprising that he immediately thought of the discs as possible means for satellite station keeping. “Oh! And maybe for interplanetary robotic missions. It doesn’t take very long for even low levels of constant thrust to add up to major amounts of delta V!”
Tiona smiled, “Yeah, that could be pretty cool.” And he doesn’t know the half of it!
***
When Tiona got home that night, she found her dad fidgeting in the family room. “Are you ready?” he asked excitedly.
“Yeah,” she said, “just let me go up and slip into my spacesuit.”
Vaz blinked at her for several seconds, and then said “Spacesuit?”
“Just kidding Dad, though it would be nice if we had suits, wouldn’t it?”
“Um, do you want me to see if I can order some?”
Tiona laughed, “I don’t think you can get them on Amazon. Last I heard they were millions of dollars and had to be custom fit.”
Vaz stared at her for a second; then said, “We could afford that. Do you know where we could get them?”
Tiona smiled at her ever so serious father, wondering if she would ever be able to say something he would laugh at. Or maybe just grin? “No, first let’s take the saucer up for a test run. It’s not like we need to get outside the saucer and walk around in the stratosphere. If it won’t actually fly higher than a few hundred feet we won’t need to waste any money on spacesuits.”
Vaz blinked a couple of times, “Oh… Okay. Let’s go.”
In short order they were climbing through the airlock into the habitat her dad had installed on top of the saucer’s main disk. It had panoramic sloping windows and a set of captain’s chairs that could lean back to be acceleration couches. The seats were spaced widely, but otherwise arranged like they might be in a large SUV. The windows were blocked in back by the airlock and the little cubicle for the modified camping toilet, but there was a video camera to let you look out the back using some of the monitors. Before she got in her seat, she pulled open the little refrigerator and saw that, sure enough, her dad had stocked it with food already. She knew it already had a month of nonperishable food in lockers.
Looking up, Tiona noticed that her dad had modified the rails for the garage door in Johnson’s house so that the door lifted even higher. Even though the Johnsons had had an especially high and wide garage to accommodate their cars and a mobile home, the fully assembled saucer would barely go in and out of the twelve foot high door.
Her dad spoke to his AI and the lights inside the garage went out. A moment later the garage door started to go up. Tiona saw that there was a substantial joystick between the front two seats. “We can fly this by hand?”
Vaz nodded, “Pull up, it lifts. Push down, it sinks. Twist right and left to turn, lean it right and left, or forward or back to tilt. Push forward or back without tilting for thrust and reverse. Push sideways without tilting for lateral thrust.” He glanced at his daughter, “I suggest you let the AI take it out of the garage though. There’s only an inch or two of clearance top, bottom, and either side. The AI’s accuracy with its infrared lasers and low-power radars will be much better than you can be.”
Tiona laughed, “Yeah, no, I wasn’t planning on trying to fly it out by hand!”
“Okay,” Vaz said. He began mumbling to his AI and a few seconds later, with a low rumbling sound from the thrusters, the saucer lifted a fraction of an inch. After a short pause it began sliding forward out of the garage.
Tiona found she expected the saucer to start sliding down the sloping driveway, and because of its essentially frictionless interaction, to go faster and faster until it shot out across the street. She gripped the armrests of the seat as she expected that to happen. One hand darted toward the joystick, but paused before she gripped it. Instead, the saucer maintained the same altitude as it came out, the sloping driveway falling away beneath it. She laughed at herself, Of course, dammit! There’s no reason for the saucer to descend just because the driveway does!
The AI had stopped them just outside the garage, hovering about six inches above the sloping concrete driveway. The evening was cloudy and their neighborhood didn’t have streetlights, so it was quite dark as Tiona looked around out the saucer’s windows, wondering if any of the neighbors saw them. Her dad said, “Shall we go up?”
Tiona nodded, expecting her dad to speak to his AI again. Instead, he said uncertainly, “Can you fly it? I’m… uncomfortable trying to do it.”
Tiona turned to look at him, surprised. He had been an adult before they had self-driving cars, so Tiona tended to think of him as someone who would be comfortable driving manually. As she thought back on it though, she thought she remembered her mother saying that he’d never obtained a driver’s license and had been extremely happy when self-driving cars became available. Of course, Tiona had never driven either, at least on the streets. However, she’d driven go-carts in amusement parks and a plethora of vehicles in various video games so she felt comfortable with the idea. She started to reach for the joystick, but Vaz interrupted. “I think you should let the AI take it up above the clouds. If you accidentally backed it into the house, it could do a lot of damage.”
Tiona pulled her hand back and said, “AI, take us up 100 feet, then keep us at least fifty feet above the ground, trees, houses, and etcetera, so we can’t run into anything.”
Sounding very nervous, Vaz said, “Why don’t you have it take us up to a couple of thousand feet. Then there won’t be anything to run into for sure.”
“Might hit an airplane…” Tiona said; then paused for a moment’s thought. “And, if something happens, I’d like to be at an altitude where we might survive a crash.” She gripped the joystick and pushed it gently forward without tilting it. They were pushed gently back in their seats. It felt to her like when a car starts moving. They started sliding forward over the houses.
Tiona decided to head for a golf course about a half a mile from their house. The saucer was going west and the golf course lay a little to the southwest so she twisted the joystick a bit. The saucer rotated in response to her twist so that she was facing southwest, but it continued sliding directly south. Ah, I need to bank it a little bit like a helicopter does when it turns. She tilted the joystick gently until she had the saucer sliding along generally southwest. Moments later, the saucer slid out over a fairway.
Tiona had a delightful time flying over
the course, using the joystick to tilt the saucer back until it slid backwards; forward until it slid forward; and tilting it to bank to either side. She practiced making some banked turns until she was fairly good at it. A few times she banked enough that she lost some altitude, but the AI came in and boosted the saucer back up when she dropped down below fifty feet.
Suddenly she realized that her dad was sitting rigidly, gripping the armrests and generally looking uncomfortable. He looked frightened and she thought of asking him about it, but instead simply said, “You ready to go up?”
Vaz nodded jerkily.
Tiona leaned her seat back until she was looking pretty much straight up through the dome and said, “AI, take us up at a quarter gravity acceleration.” The low rumbling of the thrusters became a slightly more insistent throbbing and they started lifting. Tiona suddenly said, “Stop!” The AI paused them at the hundred and fifty foot altitude they had reached in those few seconds. She turned to her dad, “How do we know we’re not going to run into a plane up there?”
Vaz indicated the instrument panel, “The AI takes a feed from the AI at RDU Airport’s control tower. It gets data from RDU’s radar, but more importantly RDU feeds it GPS data from the transponders of all aircraft in the area.” He shrugged, “The AI knows where all aircraft within a 100 mile radius are located as well as their altitudes. It will warn you if you try any maneuver that will bring you within a mile of another aircraft.”
“Okay,” Tiona said, “AI please resume our ascent. Go to a half gravity now.” She turned to her dad as the thruster’s rumbling throb deepened and a substantial force started pushing her down in the seat, “Do we have a transponder that’s feeding GPS data to RDU?
Vaz merely nodded. “As soon as we went beyond 200 feet above ground level. You can’t get data without giving data.”
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