Radiation Hazard (The Stasis Stories #3)

by Laurence Dahners

  As Kaem had directed, Lee explained the obfuscation Kaem had been engaging in and why. Then she said, “So, as you’ve probably heard before, Stade isn’t a material. But, until now, Staze hasn’t wanted everyone to know what it actually is. Mr. Seba says the best way to describe it is that it’s a segment of space-time within which time is not passing.”

  People in her audience started looking at one another. Exclamations such as “What the hell?” started bursting out of people. She heard a few call bullshit.

  One person laughed outright.

  Lee didn’t stop for questions. “Seba came up with a theory that he thought would allow forward travel through time, expecting that an object could be made to disappear from our current time and reappear at a designated point in the future, kind of like a wormhole through time rather than space. Instead, when Mr. X developed the working model of the stazer, it turned out that, as far as the matter within that segment is concerned, it does disappear from our current time and reappear at some point in the future. However, what happens from our perspective is that time stops passing within that certain segment of space. We see it become a shiny mirrorlike object, or in our current vernacular, ‘Stade.’ It passes from the past into the future, through our present, as a Stade within which time’s not progressing. At the designated point in the future, it was sent to, it resumes normal progress through time and reverts to the original properties of the matter inside it.”

  Several people had their hands up to ask questions and a few just called out questions. The tone of the questions expressed incredulity.

  Lee shook her head at them. She continued in a firm tone, determined to keep control of the session. “I’ll answer questions after I’ve finished. Here are some things you should consider and try to understand. First, the only properties of the material inside the Stade that are evident outside of it, are its mass… and therefore its weight and inertia. The properties of the material within the Stade have no bearing on the Stade’s mechanical properties. Those properties, such as its incredible strength, depend on the fact that if time isn’t passing inside that segment of space, then its shape cannot be changed. It doesn’t bend, stretch, or break because of this. Nothing can penetrate the surface of the time-frozen volume, so everything bounces off, including bullets, elementary particles, and anything in the electromagnetic spectrum. This includes the EM spectrums of heat and light, making it a perfect insulator and mirror. None of Stade’s other amazing properties, not its frictionless surface, not its resistance to corrosion, not its resistance to heat; none of them depend at all on what’s inside it.”

  Lee looked around at the people listening. No one looked confused about what she was saying. Many looked incredulous, but they all seemed to understand her.

  “So,” she continued, “all this is leading up to the answer to a question posed by Mr. Goran. ‘Where’s the base liquid?’ In fact, no base liquid is necessary. If you want a water-density Stade, you staze water. If you want an air-density Stade, you staze air. If you want a dense Stade you staze lead or depleted uranium. If you want a lighter-than-air-density Stade you staze something lighter-than-air. You could of course staze helium. However, the usual reason to use helium for its lighter-than-air properties is that helium isn’t flammable. Therefore, you could also safely, and more cheaply, staze hydrogen. It won’t burn once it’s inside a stazed segment of space-time. Or… you could make a lighter-than-hydrogen Stade by stazing a vacuum.”

  “You gotta be shittin’ me!” exploded out of someone in the back. Similar expostulations and expressions of disbelief were shouted all around the room.

  Lee waited until they died down. Then she said, “Now I’m ready for questions.”

  Goran asked, “Our understanding was that Staze would provide lighter-than-air-density Stade for our rocket components so we could increase launch efficiency. Are they going back on that promise?”

  Lee noticed that Goran was treating her as a Space-Gen employee, on their side in this deal rather than on Staze’s side. Her eyes flashed to Aaron Marks who’d come in and was standing in the back of the room. Someone was earnestly talking to him and she hoped that meant she wouldn’t have to explain everything again. Refocusing on Goran, Lee said, “No, it just means that the rockets’ components will need to be cast from hydrogen or in a vacuum environment. Staze will be able to create large vacuum environments soon. We’re buying land and planning to cast some large chambers that can be evacuated and used to cast vacuum Stade.” She saw Marks had put his conversation on pause and was listening intently. “Of course, Space-Gen’s welcome to make its own vacuum chamber and we’ll come here to cast your components for you. Or you can send us your molds and we’ll cast them in our facility. Or, we can cast you a vacuum facility near your launch site in south Texas. With it in place, we could cast your components close to where you plan to launch your rockets. That would save on transportation costs. I’m thinking you’d like to have ordinary air-density engines cast for you here, where you’ll be doing your testing and design work. Their weight shouldn’t matter for that. Then you’d have us cast the rockets you’re going to send up down in Texas where they’d be launched. Of course, that’s all up to Space-Gen.”

  She ignored some shouted questions and called on someone with their hand up. She asked, “Does a Stade have some kind of timer inside of it that tells it when to go back to normal?”

  She said, “I don’t think of it that way. “Here’s how I like to think of it. It’s as if the engine we’re going to staze today is a carefully defined volume of air that’s being specifically sent to a point one month into the future. From its viewpoint, it’s leaving now and going to then. However, from our viewpoint, like a slug, that air’s leaving a trail as it goes. It just so happens that the trail of time-locked air will be very useful to us during its transit to the future. To keep with my clumsy analogy, it’s as if the slug’s slime trail was made of gold. Before and after the trip it’s just air. There’s no timer, it’s just been sent to a specific time and date. What we actually do is send it a specified number of seconds into the future. Since we’re shooting for this engine to be tested for a month, we’ll send it 2.6 megaseconds into our future. That’s a little more than thirty days. While it’s in transit from now to then, you can test its properties as a rocket engine.”

  She paused, then said, “Please note that in the past we’ve talked about ‘dissolving’ the temporary Stade out of the interior of the combustion chamber and nozzle of the rocket. In truth, we don’t dissolve such a Stade. What we do is send it a shorter distance into the future. My current plan is to send it four kiloseconds into the future, a little more than an hour. Before that hour’s up, hopefully, you’ll have set up the mold that forms the month-long test-engine Stade around it. That outer Stade will become your test engine as soon as the inner Stade, from our point of view, disappears when it rejoins the normal time continuum. If you think those times need to be adjusted, we can do it.”

  A susurrus of conversation swelled up out in the crowd and quickly filled the room. Marks started moving her way through the crowd. When he arrived, he smiled, “I was coming down here in hopes of badgering you into giving me a few tidbits of information regarding the actual nature of Stade. When I arrived, I learned I was late enough you’d already explained it to everyone except me!”

  She smiled back, no longer intimidated, since she no longer thought of him as her boss. “Did someone explain it to you, or do you have some questions?”

  “Questions? Sure.” He lifted an eyebrow, “What’s to keep you from stazing us twenty, ten-year engines instead of one, thirty-day one while you’re here?”

  “Nothing.” She grinned, “But the stazer tells Staze exactly what it did each time it performs a stazing event. Right down to the volume stazed and the time it’s sent forward. So, you’d owe the company eighty-million-dollars for those twenty engines.”

  “Oh, sneaky… What if we make a mistake stazing something and have to
do it over?”

  “No problem, I’d just tell them what happened and you’d get a free do-over.”

  He tilted his head and grinned, “Could I pay you enough to tell them we made nineteen mistakes before we finally turned out a good engine?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You couldn’t, no. And even if you could, you’d need videos of each stazing event going wrong for proof.”

  He went on without a pause, “Next issue. It turns out the volume of Stade in this new engine design you’re getting ready to staze for us is about twenty-five liters.”

  “Okaay,” she said, not sure what he was getting at.

  “That’s 25,000 ccs.”

  She nodded.

  “At the hundred dollars per cc price you’re charging for stazing a temporary test engine, that’d be two and a half million dollars. A big part of the four million dollars you’re charging us for a permanent engine.”

  Lee couldn’t help laughing.

  Marks gave her a frustrated yet knowing grin, “You think Seba had figured that out before he came up with what sounded like a good price for test engines, don’t you?”

  She snorted. “No doubt about it. The man’s got the world’s fastest calculator built into his skull. You ask him a math question and he gives you the answer immediately. It’s as if he doesn’t even have to think about it.”

  Marks grinned. “That bastard! I can see I’m gonna have to keep a calculator by my side whenever I’m talking to him.”

  Lee nodded, “He might still think circles around you.”

  “Hey!” Marks said, his hand on his chest and a wounded expression on his face. “I’m supposed to be pretty smart.”

  “No doubt you are… I don’t think anybody’s in Seba’s class though.”

  “Humph. What about this secretive Mr. X that’s supposed to be the real brains behind Staze?”

  Lee chewed a lip. “You know Seba came up with the theory? That X just figured out a way to implement Seba’s conjecture, then funded the first stazer and set up the company?”

  “So, you think the science geek who came up with the theory it’s based on is smarter than the engineer who built it?”

  “Einstein never built anything. People think he’s pretty smart.”

  “Could you staze us a permanent engine for four million instead of a temporary one for two and a half?”

  Lee grinned, “Mr. Seba said that’d be fine sir. It’s up to you.”

  “Dang,” he said, grinning again. “It’s good to see you again. Can I talk you into coming back to Space-Gen?”

  She felt the tug of his charisma, but it didn’t affect her the way it had before. “It’s fun to be back,” she responded, “but it’s only temporary.”

  “Are they gonna let us do our own stazing someday?”

  She nodded. “Once all the details are worked out. Lots of companies are going to be wanting to use Stade for millions of different uses. We won’t be able to have someone babysit every stazing event in the world.”

  He didn’t say anything for several long moments, then his look turned serious, “From what I heard, it sounds like I could launch myself toward Alpha Centauri, put myself in stasis and pop out when I get there?”

  She arched an eyebrow. “You could. I’d be worried that when you got there, which would be several hundred years from now at current rocket accelerations, you’d find the entire system populated with people who beat you there.”

  He snorted, “How do you think they’re going to get there before I do?”

  “Even if they don’t invent some new technology?”

  He nodded.

  “Off the top of my head, supposing a big laser from here pushed their Stades all the way there?”

  He grinned, “And how are they going to decelerate?”

  “Maybe they could crash into the star. It’d cough them back up after a bit. They could come out of stasis then.”

  His eyes widened, “Damn! I can see I’m going to have to give this a lot more thought.”

  ***

  Art Turpin scanned his emails. His eye caught on one from Kaem Seba and he opened it. It was the promised proposal for stazing spent fuel and fuel casks. It also had a bid for building a Stade armored vehicle to go into the reactor’s containment structure for inspections and a discussion of modifications it might need to engage in remediation activities.

  When he looked at the prices, Turpin was pleasantly surprised to see that stazing the existing casks on the cask farm would be much less expensive than Kaem had initially suggested it might be. With the caveat that Surbury would be responsible for lifting the casks and placing them on Stade plates, Kaem expected to staze them for fifty-thousand dollars each. This would, however, depend on how the first test stazing went and he still wanted a hundred thousand upfront for the test run.

  For stazing the rods in the spent-fuel pool, Seba had changed the parameters of the undertaking. He strongly suggested that they continue to purchase steel cans to put the fuel assemblies in rather than just putting them in Stade cans as he’d suggested. The steel cans would be stazed before they were loaded, then, once full, closed and stazed into one big Stade containing the fuel rods.

  The reason he insisted on the steel cans was in case, someday in the distant future, someone managed to un-staze the wet casks without knowing what they were. He hoped the steel can would prevent the water in the Stade from flooding out and possibly drowning someone. It would also diminish the radiation emissions to allow those future people a few moments to flee the area. “Or,” he wrote, “you could continue to put the assemblies into dry casks and have us staze those. This would better protect any hypothetical beings who might take it on themselves to de-staze the casks.”

  “Beings,” Turpin thought. He’s thinking of the successors to the human race on this planet, millions of years from now. His initial reaction was that the suggestion was crazy, but as he thought about it longer, he found the proposal was giving him more and more respect for Seba.

  At the end of the letter was a note from Seba asking Art to call him, “…about a suggestion for what might be done with the casks once they were stazed.” Thinking, This’ll probably be crazier than his suggestion that we drop them into crustal subduction zones, he placed the call.

  “Hi, Mr. Turpin,” Kaem said when he picked up the call. “Did you get the timed Stade samples already?”

  Art had forgotten about them while reading the proposal. He glanced around his desk. “Sorry, no. If they’ve arrived, I haven’t seen them.”

  “I think FedEx said you should get them tomorrow. Each one has the exact date and time it was stazed attached to it, as well as the date and time it should dissolve. I’m hoping you’ll let us know how close to the expected time they come out of stasis. I know we’ve been at least approximately correct on the timing of the ones we’ve done, but I haven’t timed any of them with precision yet.”

  “Can do. We’ll have to figure out an automatic way to detect the loss of stasis and record the time it happened in case it happens when no one’s around.”

  “Sure, though I took care to be sure they’d only be coming out during the middle of the day on workdays.”

  Surprised, Art said, “It’ll be great if you’re that accurate… Um, you put in a note about a proposal for something to do with the casks once they’re stazed?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Seba sounded excited. “I know they’re up to a hundred fifty metric tons. It seems to me they’d be perfect masses for flywheel energy storage.”

  Art blinked, “Um, nuclear power plants do best when they put out their power steadily. “Surbury’s been able to adjust its output somewhat, but generally, it’s the non-nuclear plants that adjust to fluctuations in the needs of the grid.

  “I’m aware. But wouldn’t your parent company, Vinargy Power, like to have a few massive flywheel generators for load balancing? Surbury could run full tilt all the time, storing excess power in the wheels. It could use wheels to store daytime energy
from its solar fields to meet the higher demands at night. Imagine a fifteen-meter Stade wheel with four casks balanced around its periphery. We staze a smooth form over it to eliminate wind resistance, then mount it on a big frictionless Stade bearing. Because of Stade’s frictionless nature, if the outer surface was smooth enough, you might not even need to keep the flywheel in a vacuum. By my calculations, if you spun it up to a thousand rpm it’d contain over sixteen-gigawatt-hours of energy that Vinargy could use to balance large electrical loads over long periods. The public data says Surbury put out 1.6 gigawatts when both reactors were working, so that’d be enough to replace the original Surbury for ten hours. If you spun it to two thousand rpm, it’d have enough energy for twenty hours.” When Art was too dumbfounded to respond immediately, Seba continued. “It’s even occurred to me that you have a large generator that’s completely offline after the event in reactor number two. I don’t know if it could be converted to act as a motor, spinning up the flywheel, as well as a generator to extract power from the rotation when needed, but if it could, that’d be another big cost savings.”

  Art’s first reaction was to think of the disaster it would create if that size flywheel came apart at a thousand rpm. Then he remembered how strong Stade was and reasoned that you’d also certainly build a Stade containment around the flywheel to keep people away from it. It’d catch the fragments if, against all expectations, the rotor came apart.

  He’d been somewhat worried about his job in the face of a corporate structure that was thrashing around, looking for someone to blame. He thought, This boy genius might’ve just saved my livelihood. Aloud, he said, “Thanks for the suggestions. Let me think about them and do some research. Um, can I ask for another test specimen?”

  “Sure. The same kind?”

  “Well, no. The people who’ve been doing our mechanical testing agree Stade’s astonishingly strong. It’s just that they haven’t been able to reach its limits and they’re convinced that they could if they had a properly designed dog-bone specimen. Do you know what that is?”