Radiation Hazard (The Stasis Stories #3)

by Laurence Dahners

  ***

  Emmanuel walked into the kitchen of Kaem’s apartment and felt startled when he found Kaem standing, looking in a cabinet. “Kaem! What’re you doing out of bed?”

  Kaem turned and produced a limp smile. “Feeling better. I can’t find my iron pills. Do you know where they are?”

  Emmanuel didn’t say anything about the fact that Kaem looked like an animated corpse. “Sit down! I’ll find them. What do you need iron pills for?”

  “My HSCs need iron to make blood. I’m supposed to be taking one every day, but I haven’t felt like coming out to get them. Now I’m wondering if that might be why I’m getting better so slowly.”

  Emmanuel started sorting through the cabinet. “Why didn’t you just ask me to get them for you?”

  “Didn’t want to seem lazy.”

  Emmanuel turned and stared at his son.

  Kaem was smiling. “Sorry, bad joke.”

  Rolling his eyes, Emmanuel stepped to the table and set down the bottle. What do you want to drink it with?”

  “One of those protein smoothies. Making blood requires a lot of protein too.”

  “I can do that,” Emmanuel said. He handed Kaem his mail. “Here’s something to entertain you while you wait.”

  “You can just toss that stuff. It’s bound to be junk. Everything that’s important comes electronically.”

  “I already tossed some flyers. But there’s a letter from the university in that stack. You should probably open that one.” Emmanuel busied himself with the blender.

  When he finished making the smoothie, he poured a tall glass for Kaem and dribbled the leftovers into a small glass to try himself. When he turned to give Kaem his glass, his son was staring at the letter, a tired grin on his face.

  “What is it?” Emmanuel asked.

  Kaem turned the letter to his father and said, “Here, have a look.”

  Emmanuel read the first line and looked up with horror. “The university’s expelling you?!”

  Kaem was drinking his smoothie. He waved dismissively, swallowed, and said, “Read the rest.” He lifted his glass to his mouth again.

  Finished, Emmanuel asked, “They’re accusing you of fraud?”

  “Yeah,” Kaem grinned. “For selling a ‘nonexistent product,’ to wit, Stade.”

  Emmanuel looked back down at the letter and parsed it again. That did seem to be what it said, though the language was convoluted. “What do they mean ‘nonexistent’?”

  Kaem actually laughed, though it was weak. “I’m sure someone looked over Staze’s website, decided the listed material properties were extreme, called an expert, and were informed the properties were impossible. They decided we were trying to defraud Space-Gen and didn’t want such a terrible person attending their university and besmirching their name. Would’ve been nice if they’d asked me about it before they tossed me out.”

  “Staze doesn’t have a website!” Emmanuel said. “I looked for one a few months ago. I, ah, thought you were pulling the wool over our eyes about there even being a company.”

  “Yeah,” Kaem said, “Sorry. Mr. X only recently had me put up the website. We were starting to have trouble getting people to believe we were really in business without one. And, about then, he decided we didn’t need to keep everything so secret anymore.”

  “So, what’re you going to do?” Emmanuel asked. He truly didn't want to have to tell Sophia her son had been expelled.

  “Try to convince them Stade’s real,” Kaem said tiredly. “I think I’ll move over to the couch. Sitting here at the table’s wearing me out.” He started to rise, then sank back into his seat. “Maybe I need some help.”

  Emmanuel hurried to Kaem’s side and helped him maneuver to the couch.

  Kaem asked for his laptop. After getting it, Emmanuel saw him flicking through webpages so fast Emmanuel didn’t think he could be getting anything out of them. What’s he doing? Emmanuel wondered.

  Kaem looked back over at his dad. “Would you mind handing me that letter?”

  After one glance, Kaem said, “Hah, I got expelled by the university president. There are all kinds of committees and offices that’re supposed to be involved in an expulsion.” He looked at the letter again, “Looks like most of them were copied on this letter, but I think I was denied due process.”

  “Does that mean you can fight it?”

  “I shouldn’t have to fight it. The letter says the expulsion is based on a regulation saying ‘students are subject to discipline such as expulsion for prohibited conduct including violations of federal, state, or local law if it affects the university.’ In their eyes I’m guilty of committing fraud, which is a felony, and that my fraud affects the university by ‘besmirching its name.’ I think I could sue, but instead, I think I’ll just send some Stade to the president and all these offices the president copied the letter to. You’d think proof that there’s no fraud would make all this go away.”

  “You don’t think you need a lawyer?”

  “Nah. They’re for when you want things to get ugly. I prefer a friendly approach.”

  ***

  At Staze East, having achieved a seal on the new cylinder, Gunnar had pumped it down to vacuum, first with the high-speed blower, then the rest of the way with the pump from his first blimp. It’d taken forever, forcing him to realize he still needed a faster pump to draw the final vacuum on the big cylinders.

  The concrete they’d poured into the bottom of the cylinder to act as a floor had been sufficient to keep the cylinder from floating away when he evacuated it, and he was quite pleased with the walking surface it provided inside.

  Per Kaem’s request, he and Lee had used mirrored acrylic molds to cast a set of “links” as Kaem called them, while the vacuum was on. They were three-meter long, centimeter diameter rods with hooks at the end so they could be connected into chains. The hooks had been designed so commercially available carabiner gates would close them to keep them from accidentally unhooking. Gunnar stazed them when the vacuum was on the cylinder. Cast in a vacuum they were much lighter than air and the first one got away from him. It was still resting against the ceiling of the big cylinder.

  By taking great care, he’d managed to remove the rest of the links and lock them down. He’d coupled four of them together and hooked the bottom one to a stake. It made an impressive, twelve-meter flagpole, the whole damned thing waving in a breeze

  Unfortunately, each one provided less than a gram of lift, so it definitely wouldn’t hold up a flag. Kaem would’ve done the math before he wasted all that time putting up the flagpole, Gunnar thought disgustedly. Now I’m gonna have to put a vacuum sphere at the top of it. I’d better do the math on how big that has to be.

  Gunnar went back to Charlottesville to work with his new samples of nubby Mylar. Welding it ultrasonically proved difficult but possible. When he cast a Stade out of it, the Stade’s surface had little sockets in it where the nubs had intruded. To his relief, out in the sun, the reflections from its irregular surface were irritating, but not in danger of blinding anyone.

  He’d even folded a layer over without inflating it, letting him cast a flat piece of Stade on the floor. When he’d taken it over to a local asphalt company and gotten them to pour a dollop of asphalt onto it, he’d had a nice walkable surface, locked in place by the way the asphalt ran down into the sockets. However, when he’d tried turning it over, the asphalt fell off its frictionless surface and broke.

  So, surfacing Stade remained a problem. Attaching wire screen rebar to the Stade and pouring concrete on it the way he had in the bottom of the cylinder at Staze East would provide a surface you could drive or walk on, but he still hoped to get asphalt to work. Maybe if the nubs were shaped like mushrooms? We could still pull the Mylar out of the Stade, but something hard like asphalt should stay stuck? He paused for a moment’s thought, They can’t mold mushrooms though. Wait, maybe they could form the mushrooms separately and ultrasonically weld them to the sheet?

&nbs
p; He walked over to Lee, “Hey, can you help me design the cylinder that we’re going to set up down at Space-Gen’s Texas facility? It’s got to be big enough to pull a vacuum around one of their boosters.”

  Arya was nearby at the coffee station. She turned to them. “How much longer till that’s done Gunnar? We’re running out of money and need the cash.”

  “How can we be out of money?!”

  “The way you two have been spending it? Lee’s been ordering dozens of pieces of machined, mirrored acrylic. That stuff’s not cheap. You’ve been hiring crews and ordering blowers and buying Mylar like you think it’s toilet paper.”

  “You’re saying the line of credit’s used up?”

  “No, but we’ve had to start dipping into it. I don’t like running in the red. We need that three-million-dollar fee for Space-Gen’s vacuum chamber.”

  Gunnar opened his mouth to tell her to use the line of credit, but Lee interjected. “Sorry. I just got a call from Cary Lark’s office. They’ve decided to build their own vacuum chamber out of steel. They can do it cheaper than three million.”

  “Oh,” Gunnar said, turning his eyes to Arya, “We could do it a lot cheaper than three-million if we were spreading our Mylar costs over a bunch more vacuum chambers.”

  Arya rolled her eyes. “We could build it cheaper if we didn’t need a big profit margin to let us do all the other things you guys want to spend money on. The problem with saying we’re going to spread the Mylar costs over the next few is that it might be a long time until we need to build someone another chamber. During that time we’ll be in the red.”

  Gunnar said, “Let’s give them a bid to do this one at our cost. We’ll estimate it closer and make sure we’re designing it so we can use the cylinders it casts for other projects.”

  “Cost plus ten percent,” Arya practically growled. “We’ll still go in the red on it because you won’t have thought of all the expenses.”

  “Deal,” Gunnar said. He turned to Lee, “Can you find out how much Space-Gen’s steel chamber’s going to cost them?”

  She shrugged, “I already asked and they said it was going to be about 1.3 million. The steel alone’s about $700,000.”

  Gunnar said, “Ah yes. Steel’s expensive. Our Mylar supplier should be able to fabricate a nubby balloon for us for less than $250,000. Plus delivery, set up, and stazing, and our costs should still be below $400,000. We can bid a million and still make a good profit.”

  Arya chewed a lip. “What if they start wanting to know why we were charging so much before?”

  “We figured out how to do it cheaper.”

  Arya rolled her eyes.

  ***

  Norm was back in Charlottesville to put in some of the hours he owed Staze. When he entered the big room, he didn’t see Kaem, who’d always been there before. Arya Vaii, the financial person, was in the big room rather than the anteroom, but she didn’t seem like the right person to report to. April Lee, the engineer from Space-Gen was unpacking a mirrored Stade mold out of a cardboard box. He felt pretty sure he shouldn’t volunteer to help her since she worked for the competition. Not sure what to do, he went over to Gunnar Schmidt, who was sitting with a black man Norm thought was in his mid-fifties. “Hi, uh, Mr. Schmidt. Is Mr. Seba coming in today?”

  Schmidt looked up and said blithely, “Nope. Out sick. Well, actually,” he grinned, “this here’s Mr. Seba,” he said indicating the older man.

  Norm looked at the man and could see a resemblance to Kaem. “Are you Kaem’s…?”

  “I’m his father, yes,” the man said with a slight accent. He stood and extended his hand, “Emmanuel Seba.”

  Norm shook it, “Norm Tibbets. Are you just in for a tour?”

  Schmidt said, “Nope, Emmanuel’s working for us now. Chemist. He’s trying to figure out how to remediate toxic chemicals that’re contaminating the land Staze bought. I’m helping him figure out how to cast some test, um,” he glanced at Emmanuel. “‘retorts,’ right?”

  Emmanuel shrugged, “Maybe oven or furnace would be better terms. Retorts usually have a distillation function.”

  “Emmanuel here’s going to try incinerating the stuff to see if that gets rid of the toxins.”

  Seba volunteered, “Most of the contaminants are organic compounds. Since the major components are hydrocarbons, when they’re incinerated, they combine with oxygen to form carbon dioxide and water. However, some highly toxic substances such as dioxin and furans can be present or created. It requires extended times at high temperatures to break them down. Stade makes this easier because its thermal resistance can maintain high heat for extended periods without the addition of further heat.”

  Schmidt’s eyes went back to Norm, “You back to put in some time with us?”

  “Um, yeah. Do you need some help?”

  “Sure, sit down and we’ll see if you’ve got any good ideas.”

  It turned out that, rather than machining mirrored acrylics the way GLI was preparing to staze their rockets, the plan involved blowing up cylindrical Mylar balloons to create their furnaces. Schmidt had experience with huge blimp-sized balloons and, by blowing them up incompletely and creating a temporary Stade, then inflating a little more and creating a larger, longer-lasting Stade around the temporary one, he could create hollow cylinders. The plan was to partially fill a hollow cylinder with toxic sludge, blow in large quantities of oxygen—not air because they didn’t want nitrogen compounds to form—to create a high-pressure environment, ignite it, then roll the cylinder to agitate the materials inside. They were seeking temperatures over 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit which would break down almost anything, especially if the time period was long. Schmidt had some interesting methods for forming openings into the interior to allow sampling and the addition of more oxygen if needed.

  “How are you going to form vanes inside the cylinder?” Norm asked.

  “Vanes?”

  “Yeah, you know, like the spiral blade in a concrete mixer. Something to agitate the contents as the drum turns.”

  “You don’t think just turning it over by rolling the cylinder…” Schmidt halted, smacking his own forehead, “Of course not. With frictionless Stade making up the walls, the load would just stay on the bottom as the cylinder turned around it.” He frowned, “We’ll have to have a way to open it up and weld a blade or paddles inside it.”

  “Weld?” Norm said exasperatedly, “You can’t weld Stade…” then apprehensively, “can you?”

  “Yeah,” Schmidt said, as if it were unimportant. “We have these little Mylar shrouds hooked up to a stazer. You squeeze the shroud up against or around the pieces you want to weld together and fire it off. It welds them together with another little Stade. The shroud has to be in pretty good contact everywhere, but as long as you achieve that, the weld works great.”

  “Is there a way to test whether it formed a faulty weld?”

  “Ain’t no such thing, my boy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of our customers tested a meter long, millimeter thick Stade rod. Well, wire would be a better description. Loaded it in three-point-bending to ten metric tons. Didn’t break. Didn’t even bend.”

  “OMG!” Norm said, frustrated. “Why haven’t you told us about this welding?! I’m gonna have to call GLI and tell them they need to revise some of their plans. Again.”

  Schmidt snorted, “You ain’t been around to tell. That’d be one of the main benefits of spending fifty percent of your time here; seeing how we do things and figuring out how GLI could use those techniques.” He gave a sly smile, “See, you’ve only been here about thirty minutes and you’ve already learned something really important.” He patted the older Seba on the shoulder and said, “And if you’re around when this man’s son is here, you’ll learn even more. The kid’s a veritable idea-generating machine.”

  Norm glanced at the older Seba and thought he looked embarrassed, though hugely proud of the praise for his son. Seba frowned a little, then turne
d to Schmidt. “Gunnar, it’s nine o’clock, where are the rest of your employees?”

  Gunnar grinned, “Home, sick.”

  Seba blinked uncomprehendingly. “I don’t understand. I know Kaem’s sick, but… where’re the others?”

  “You’re lookin’ at ’em. Staze’s a very lean organization. We only have four full-time employees. Me, Kaem, Arya, and now you. Oops, and Mr. X, of course, though it’s hard to think of him as an employee. Then we have a couple of half-time employees, Lee and Norm, and some legal consultants. That’s it. I’ve been hiring some help for my balloons and we contract out a lot of stuff, but we’re it.”

  Seba frowned, “So… You and this Mr. X are Kaem’s bosses? He doesn’t have anyone else over him but you two?”

  Schmidt gave Seba a wide-eyed look of astonishment. “Emmanuel, your son’s my boss, not the other way around. He’s the big kahuna here, excepting for Mr. X, of course. But none of us have even seen X. He only talks to Kaem, and even then he uses some kind of encrypted internet connection and a voice synthesizer. Nobody has any idea who X is.”

  If Schmidt had looked astonished, Seba appeared positively dumbfounded.

  Norm thought, Looks like his own dad doesn’t understand just who Kaem is. He said, “Let me call the team at GLI and tell them about welding, then I’ll be back to help with these chambers. How much does a weld cost?”

  “Son,” Schmidt said tiredly, “if you run off now, by the time you get back we’ll be done planning these chambers and we’ll have completely missed out on any more of your brilliant ideas like the spiral blade in the drum.”

  Norm stayed and did have another good suggestion. He pointed out that inflating the Mylar while the balloon was laying on its side would result in the cylinder being slightly out of round from its own weight squeezing it slightly flat. “But, if you inflated it with just enough helium in the mix to make it float, then tied it down on one end, it’d float vertically and be round.”

  “See there,” Schmidt said with a grin, “you contributed.” He got a thoughtful look. “We’re also using this method to create buildings to work in. Ones where we can pull a vacuum and create vacuum Stades. If we put some water in them, they’ll be flat on the bottom. That’d give us more usable space!”