Lifter: Proton Field #2

by Laurence Dahners

  “That’s so obvious,” Vinn said, also staring up at the device. “Why didn’t we think of it before?”

  Myr grimaced, “Because we’re stupid?” She shrugged, “Actually, I think it’s because we’ve been so focused on the geometric gradient fields. Since they don’t pull very much until you get really close to them, at which point they suddenly start pulling so hard they crush your tissues, this use isn’t intuitively obvious. It seems like I would’ve thought of it when I first climbed up near the ceiling and felt the attraction of the focal point that second time we formed one. But it wasn’t very much attraction and then shortly after that things started getting sucked into focal points and getting destroyed. By the time we got around to testing the low terahertz fields we were doing everything at low power and evaluating outcomes using sensors. That way we didn’t feel the pull.”

  Vinn said, “Actually, because their fields extend further at a level we can sense, I did feel the pull sometimes while we were doing the testing.” He snorted, “My only response was to stand farther away!”

  Myr grinned, “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I installed linear focal point generators all over the ceiling of my mom’s condo. My brother can set them high enough that he’s been getting up and walking around for the first time in about ten years.”

  Everyone looked stunned. “That’s awesome!” Miller said, moving a chair closer to the table. “Why would you be embarrassed about that?” He looked up at Myr’s toy, “I’m gonna climb up and grab that thing. The way it’s rattling’s getting on my nerves.”

  Arlan put his foot up on a chair, but Myr said, “I’ve got a better way.” Having said that, her hair suddenly lifted up into the air. Myr grimaced just as she floated up into the air and over toward the device on the ceiling. Miller could see she was trailing a power cord from a wall outlet. It went to the cylinder of a larger field projector she was holding in her left hand. She was pointing the cylinder’s end mostly upward, but also slightly ahead in the direction she was going. Myr snatched the little device off the ceiling with her right hand, then tilted the bigger one in her left hand slightly backward, rolling a thumbwheel slowly downward. As she did it she began drifting back and down toward the floor.

  Vinn breathed, “Freakin’ A!” and sagged slack-jawed back in his chair. “That’s what’s embarrassing, right? You didn’t need to install a bunch of them on the ceiling, you could have installed just one, right on your brother.”

  “Yeah, though it sucks up hundreds of watts, so providing power to a mobile one that’s directly attached to him will be a bit of an issue.”

  Ellen cleared her throat, “I might be able to help there.” Everyone turned to look at her, so she continued, “I’ve been talking to Araujo and Mickelson. You know, they’re the guys who’ve been developing the TEG chips and the gamma collector plates?” Getting nods from the others, she continued, “Mickelson’s new thermo-electric chips tolerate extremely high temperatures so they can be right next to the fusion focus. Araujo’s been testing various nano materials, almost all of them carbon nanotubes with various metal atoms inside the tubes. When a gamma photon hits the metal atom, a shower of electrons gets blown out of the nanotube and they can be converted to electricity. Araujo’s latest version has copper and silver atoms in each nanotube. By stacking layers a centimeter deep he’s improved the absorption to almost 50 percent.”

  Myr gave her a doubtful look, “If you were going to carry that on your person it’d still have to have some lead around it to capture the remaining gammas. How small are you thinking you can make this thing?”

  Ellen shrugged, “The gamma plates absorb rads about as well as lead does, so five centimeters absorbs about ninety-seven percent of the radiation. At that point you could put lead around it to reduce the radiation on down to safe levels. It depends on how much power you want to generate and how much radiation you think’s safe. Um, we ran some numbers…” She spoke to her AI for a moment and one of the wall screens popped up an image and some figures. She winced a little before saying, “If you were going to generate 5400 watts, you’d be burning 80 nanograms of hydrogen per second. If the fusion and thermo-electric generation were occurring in an inner six-centimeter sphere and then you added a five-centimeter layer of the nano material for electrical conversion and a ten-centimeter layer of lead for absorption, you could cut the gamma flux down to a hundredth of a Roentgen per second.” She shrugged, “That’s pretty safe, but you still wouldn’t want to sit on it all day.”

  Myr barked a little laugh, “So what, that’s a more than fourteen-inch ball that’s mostly lead? How much would that weigh?”

  Ellen gave Myr a wry look and spoke to her AI. When the result popped up, she barked a little laugh and looked at Myr again, “That particular ball would weigh in at about 260 kilos.”

  “Five-hundred and seventy pounds?! I can’t strap that to my brother!”

  Ellen sighed, “Nope. Sorry. I’d gotten excited about extracting the energy directly and I'd worked out how many centimeters of lead we needed for protection—I thought it didn’t sound like all that much. But I hadn’t actually run the numbers to figure out what that much lead would weigh.” She looked back up at the screen, “We may have a way to make the power, but we’ll need a better way to store the energy if we want your brother to be able to fly around with it for very long.”

  “I don’t want him to fly around. Just be light enough on his feet that he can get around with his weak muscles.”

  Ellen looked back at Myr, “Well then, so I can fly around.”

  “Me too!” Vinn said.

  “Wait a minute,” Arlan said in a worried tone, “it’s going to take 260 kilos of lead to surround a plant that’s only generating 5,000 watts?! What about industrial sized plants? Are you about to tell me we can’t even feasibly generate power?”

  “Well no,” Ellen said, speaking to her AI briefly, then returning her gaze to him. “Every centimeter of lead shielding halves the gamma radiation dose. So, thirty centimeters, or twelve inches, of lead will give you about a billion fold-reduction in radiation…” her eyes went up to the screen projecting the results of the calculation she’d asked her AI to do. “A 500-megawatt industrial power plant with a twelve-inch lead barrier would only be putting out about a hundredth of a Roentgen per second even right at the surface of the lead. And that’d quickly go down with distance to even lower levels.” She shrugged, “Sixteen-inches of lead would get you a trillion-fold reduction. For a ground-based industrial power plant, that’s no problem. Besides for an industrial plant you could use concrete. You’d need a much greater thickness, but you wouldn’t have to file all kinds of permits for using a toxic substance like lead.”

  “What about our dream of powering cars?”

  Ellen put her finger up for him to wait while she talked to her AI, then looked up at the screen. “You could generate a quarter megawatt—that’s about 335 horsepower— behind about twenty centimeters—or eight inches—of lead shielding and keep your radiation down to less than a thousandth of a Roentgen per second right at the surface.” She turned to look at Arlan, “That much shielding’s going to weigh about 500 kilos, but the big lithium-ion battery packs in some of the hot rod electric cars weigh more than that.” She grinned, “And remember, the car won’t need to put out large amounts of power except during high acceleration, so the radiation will actually be a lot lower on average, and… you wouldn’t have to plug it in!”

  “Okay,” Arlan said, relief evident in his voice. “To summarize, it doesn’t look like there’ll be any problems with fusion for power generation except we can’t make really small fusactors like I’d hoped. Launch to orbit’s still on the table, but not with nuclear rockets,” he swept them with an excited smile, “because we’ve got something better. It seems to me like that’s where we ought to be focusing a lot of effort at present.” He broke out a big grin, “And, personal flight’s finally within grasp. We just need a way to provide power for it.” He s
hrugged, “I guess we can provide the power with a big lithium power-pack or even a fusactor. It’s just that with a fusactor you’d have to have a big heavy flyer, probably as big as a car or small plane to fly around in, instead of a small backpack like I was hoping for.”

  Myr lifted a finger, “Lithium battery packs are really heavy for flying something big like a person. They work for little drones and model planes because of the square-cube law, but they’re underpowered for real aircraft. Look at lithium-powered cars—they’re really heavy. However, I’ve been thinking about Dr. Randall’s fuel cells.” She glanced at Vinn and Ellen, “I used to help him with his research. If we could provide his cells with hydrogen…”

  Vinn shook his head as he interrupted, “Hydrogen tanks are heavy too…”

  Myr turned and interrupted him, “But, what if we can hold hydrogen in a linear focal point?”

  They all looked at one another in some surprise. Arlan said, “What if you still got a little fusion?”

  Ellen said, “I don’t think a linear field would hold very much…”

  Myr shrugged, “Yeah, I don’t know either. But I think it’s time for us to do some research on the topic. There might be some level of mildly geometric or even linear field that can’t produce fusion but that might still hold a lot of hydrogen without pulling in everything else around it…”

  “Oh yeah!” Arlan said excitedly. “If we can store hydrogen in a focal point, and then combine that technology with Randall’s fuel cell membranes… that could be awesome!”

  As if Arlan’s head wasn’t spinning fast enough, Myr cleared her throat and spoke to her AI popping some diagrams up on the wall screens. “I’ve also roughed out a tentative plan for a spacecraft,” she said.

  Their eyes all widened and turned to the screens. Vinn said, “Why’s it look like a flying tuna can?”

  Myr frowned, “Maybe it could be done a different way, but… This shape lets us put all the passengers the same distance from the fields that are lifting the ship. I was planning that we’d project a hexagon of fields above it.”

  Vinn said, “Oh,” but Arlan looked puzzled. Ellen said, “Why’s that important?”

  “Um, if we put water in these tanks,” she pointed to some spaces in the saucer that were at the same level of the diagrammed passengers, “then when we activate the proton fields, they’ll accelerate the passengers and the craft simultaneously.”

  “Oh!” Arlan said excitedly, “So there wouldn’t be any G forces! You could accelerate at really high rates, right?”

  Myr nodded. “Also, one of my selfish hopes is to get my brother out into space. However, he has enough trouble breathing at one G, so I need to take him up there without subjecting him to a high G liftoff. And, yes, it would let the rest of us accelerate at very high rates without feeling the Gs, assuming a proton field can pull that hard.”

  Vinn had been studying the diagrams, “What’s in the layer down beneath the main section?”

  “The fusion reactor,” Myr snorted, “with its thick layer of lead. Turbines to generate power, storage for food, gases, and,” she grinned, “spacesuits.”

  Ellen said, “We might want to use tungsten radiation shielding for the reactor on a spaceship. It isn’t toxic like lead so there wouldn’t be issues if we crashed our ship and spread it all around.”

  After some further discussion, Arlan suggested they get Myr’s rough plan over to Miller Tech’s engineers so they could start working on a more definitive design that could actually be built.

  As they all got up to leave, Myr cleared her throat and said, “There’s one more problem I should mention…” When everyone had turned to look at her, she stretched out the arm holding her bigger field projector that was plugged into the wall. She pointed it a couple of feet to Vinn’s left and briefly touched its button.

  Vinn suddenly staggered, nearly falling over to his left. Lunging a foot out on that side he successfully caught himself. “What the…!” He began, then his eyes focused on the cylinder in Myr’s hands. He said, “Aw crap!” as he recognized that she’d used the attraction of the field to pull him sideways rather than up. “There’s no tech that’s completely benign, huh?”

  Myr slowly shook her head. “Of course, it’s ridiculous to assume that something strong enough to lift people into the air couldn’t also be used to knock them over or cause other kinds of mischief. But we need to be aware of the problem and try to think of ways to mitigate it. An obvious partial technological fix would be to put accelerometers in devices we’re selling to lift people. An accelerometer could turn off the power if the device were tilted very far from vertical like I had to tilt it to knock Vinn over.” She shrugged, “Of course, if you’re using one to fly and trying to reach a high-speed by tilting it pretty far out in front of you, we don’t want it to power down and thus drop you. We’ll need to give this a lot of thought.”

  Arlan shook his head, “You’d think we’d have to actually develop a personal flyer device before people started getting hurt. But, I guess we’ve got to recognize that some idiots are gonna use them for practical jokes or with intent to cause harm. They might even start doing it before we get around to selling a flyer.”

  ******

  Mark sat on a concrete block and sipped his Fat Pauly, a beer local to Mindanao. He didn’t like beer very much and had no particular affinity for Fat Pauly, but it was cold. He’d expected to be roughing it here in the Philippines, especially out in a small town like Lopana. What he hadn’t counted on was how difficult he’d find it to adjust to the constant heat and humidity of the tropics. He’d been in places like Arizona where it was much hotter during the day. He’d heard that dry heat in the hundreds was easier to tolerate than the steamy low nineties it reached in Mindanao every afternoon, he just hadn’t believed it. He hated always being wet with sweat, but the thing that bothered Mark the most was the fact that it barely got into the tolerable high seventies until the wee hours of the morning. Mark, never a good sleeper, found himself tossing and turning in the sweltering heat of the early evening. I’m such a modern-day wussy, he thought, rolling the beer bottle across to his forehead, can’t survive without my air-conditioning.

  Nina started playing guitar. Mark couldn’t help but think that the team might have been gathered around a fire back home. Gathering around a heat source was unthinkable in Mindanao. Nina was accomplished on the guitar and sang with a pleasant alto. When they’d first arrived, she’d come outside in the evenings to quietly practice by herself, but soon the team began gathering to listen and it’d quickly become a nightly ritual. Mark admired her playing, and couldn’t help marveling at her simple beauty. He especially liked her stolid confidence that she could do anything. He wished he had the self-assurance to talk to her about something other than the technical details of their mission.

  As the only engineer on the team, Mark found himself more and more in charge of directing their project to build the community center. Certainly, he was the most qualified for designing and supervising a building project. Most of the people who’d come on the mission were barely more than unskilled labor. He could swear some of them weren’t really sure which end of a nail to drive. Nina wasn’t particularly skilled with tools, but she had the basic concepts and figured out how to use them much faster than the rest of the team. It seemed that some of the people on the team would never learn enough to be more help than hindrance.

  The general level of construction incompetence of the enthusiastic and well-meaning group meant that Mark spent much of his time just teaching them the skills they needed to be useful. This meant that far less got done on the actual building than Mark had expected. Steve Hansen, their nominal leader, was more of a cheerleader in Mark’s opinion. Steve’s organizational skills were sufficiently lacking that Mark could pretty much count on Steve to turn Mark’s requests for help into more problems. Yet Steve was good at cajoling people into better moods and motivating them to work.

  Mark tilted his head back and
took a long pull on the beer. He’d always let jobs get him down, but had hoped that taking on a job for charity where he worked with enthusiastic volunteers would be less stressful… not more. He’d hoped to find meaning for his life rather than just another task he hated…

  Steve sat down next to him, “Hey bud, you’re looking kinda down. Can I help somehow?”

  Mark shook his head and didn’t look up. He just kept his eyes down and hoped Steve wouldn’t launch into another sermon about giving himself over to the Lord. Mark could respect Steve’s beliefs, but though he’d tried, he’d never found any of the solace he so sorely needed in the word of God. At least Steve’s decent with a hammer, he thought.

  With a quiet chuckle, Steve said, “Hey, don’t worry. I’ve given up on trying to save your soul. Nonetheless, I’d still be happy to help your mortal self here in the Philippines. For instance, I notice that beer’s getting pretty low…”

  Without lifting his head, Mark looked at Steve out of the corner of his eye and found him grinning. “Could have sworn you thought I drank too much.”

  Steve shrugged, “Of course you do. You’re trying to lead this gaggle of incompetents and bumblers, while doing half the work yourself and getting damn all sleep because the heat’s driving you crazy. On top of all that,” he winked, “you lack the hope of joy in the eternal afterlife.” Steve braced a hand in preparation for getting up, “Therefore, I believe I should get you another beer to provide you what joy I might while you’re still here on this rusty mortal coil.”

  Steve got up and headed toward the drink cooler. Mark sat looking after him and wondering whether he should put more effort into finding God. Seems to have worked for Steve, he thought, the man’s almost insufferably happy. He tipped his beer back and found that only one last lukewarm swallow remained.