Radiation Hazard (The Stasis Stories #3)

by Laurence Dahners

  Norm frowned, “You’d need to put enough water in the outer layer to float that temporary inner Stade up or you wouldn’t get Stade underneath.”

  Gunnar stared at him a moment, then said, “I’d say, ‘obviously,’ but I hadn’t figured that out yet.” He grinned, “I’m sure I would’ve though.” He waved Norm away, “Go. Call your people and tell ’em about welding before you pop.”

  When he called the team, they were just as exasperated as he was. Welding would make the construction of the rockets so much simpler, completely obviating some of the complex casting designs and steps they’d been trying to work out.

  They’re never going to let me come back to Texas, he thought despondently.

  When he returned to the big room he was feeling down. He went to Gunnar and Seba who were huddled over some Mylar. Norm saw an ultrasonic welder lying on the table next to them. Interested, he asked, “What should I do next? Help with whatever you’re doing?”

  Gunnar grunted. “We’re just fabricating the balloon for a test furnace. Go help Lee.”

  Norm wanted to learn about the Mylar technique. Frustrated, he thought of protesting. I’d better not. Schmidt already seems kinda pissed. I need to build up some goodwill before I make any more asks.

  He walked over to the big open area where Lee was working on some kind of Stade box. “Hey, Lee, Gunnar says I should help you. What can I do?”

  She smiled at him. Not at all as if she considered him a competitor. “Great! Help me stretch this rubber tread over the wheel.”

  She had a shiny Stade wheel and a rubber tread ring she was trying to slip onto it. The wheel had teeth that fit into notches in the tread ring. The notches would keep it from slipping once the tread was on the wheel, but getting the ring stretched big enough to fit over the teeth was proving difficult. With both of them pulling, they finally snapped it on.

  The next job was slipping the wheel’s axle into a Stade differential that delivered power from the gearbox of what Lee told him was a commercial, riding floor-scrubber machine. Essentially, they were replacing the driving and steering wheels of the heavyset machine with Stade wheels that had knobby rubber tread. The machine itself was covered with a thin shell of Stade including a box that went up high enough to enclose the operator.

  Essentially, they’d either covered or replaced every visible component of the floor scrubber with Stade. The rubber tread on the wheels was the only thing he could see that wasn’t made of Stade.

  Lee kept him busy enough that he didn’t get too much time to think. When he did, he looked at it and said, “What about the scrubber wheel?”

  “Hmm?” Lee said, on her knees peering into one of the openings in the Stade over the gearbox.

  “You know, the big scrubber disc I’ve seen hanging beneath these machines. I don’t see an opening in the Stade beneath the machine for you to attach it?”

  “Oh!” she said, pulling back to look at him. “This isn’t going to be a scrubber anymore. A scrubber was just a convenient machine. We needed something radiation proof to drive slowly around on building floors. Rather than start from scratch, we bought this used scrubber. All boxed in with Stade, it’ll be a powered riding platform that’ll let a worker ride around in high radiation environments to perform inspections.”

  “Really?” Norm said, “Shouldn’t the Stade be thicker?”

  She shook her head, “One millimeter of Stade blocks all radiation. Actually, it reflects the radiation.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Norm said, having forgotten Stade’s impermeability to radiation. As it was just one of the long list of unbelievable properties of Stade, it wasn’t surprising. “Wait,” he said, getting up and walking around to the front. “There’s no window. Your inspector won’t be able to see where he’s going!”

  “A window’d let the radiation in,” Lee said.

  “Use leaded glass.”

  “I thought that too. It only partially blocks radiation. We’re talking about a high radiation environment.” She went on to explain her plans for a periscope system that’d prevent the radiation from reaching and destroying the electronics in the camera.

  Opening a door on the side of the machine, she climbed in and sat on the seat. “I’m going to power it up to see if it still works after all our modifications. Let me know if I’m about to run into anything.”

  She drove it a little, just enough to be sure it would work and could be driven over small obstacles. It had a cow-catcher type skirt to push bigger junk out of the way. She was pretty excited that it ran, confessing her fear that the Stade differential wouldn’t work. Eventually, she said, “Ready to help me staze and install the periscope?”

  “We can staze things without Kaem?”

  “Yup. Come on. I’ll teach you how.”

  ***

  Eloise was opening President Morton’s snail mail. She slit an envelope, grabbed the papers inside, and pulled them out. When the papers came out, a mirror came with them. Expecting it to fall and break, Eloise grabbed for it. For a moment she was elated when she caught it, but it immediately slid out of her hand.

  She grabbed again but her hand shot below it. Because it’s not falling! she realized.

  Trying over and over to get a grip on it, she batted it farther and farther away, and higher and higher into the air, all the while completely failing to get any kind of grasp on it. A couple of other admins joined her, all laughing delightedly. “What the hell is that?!” one of them asked.

  “I don’t know,” Eloise said, hands on her hips as she stared up at it. “Leave it alone while I read the letter that came with it. Maybe it’ll tell me how to retrieve it. If not, well, ‘what goes up must come down,’ right?”

  Eloise read the letter from Kaem Seba with rising glee. He’s fighting back, saying the material’s just as amazing as the website says it is. And while I don’t know if it meets all the other parameters on their website, this sample he sent us is certainly low-friction as all hell.

  She was standing on a chair, trying to slide an inverted plastic trash bag over the sample of Stade when President Morton walked in. “What’re you doing up there?” he asked somewhat incredulously.

  “Um, Kaem Seba sent us a sample of his material. You may remember it’s frictionless. That makes it very hard to get a grip on it. It got away from me and I’m trying to recapture it.”

  “Kaem what?”

  “Kaem Seba, the student you expelled for fraud,” she said, getting the bag over it with a little cry of triumph. She stepped down off the chair and walked over to him. “You want to have a look?”

  “No. I don’t want to have anything to do with it or any of his claims. Just toss it.”

  Eloise cocked her head, “He’s sent it to people all over campus. All the people you cc’d on the letter of expulsion. I suspect some of them are going to be contacting you about it. You might want to have some idea what it’s like.”

  Morton opened his mouth, looking like he was about to bite her head off. Then his eyes swept the room, taking in all the witnesses. “Okay,” he said, ungraciously, “let’s see it.”

  Eloise approached, carefully opening the mouth of the trash bag while peering in, hoping to keep it from escaping again.

  When she reached him, he impatiently grabbed the opening of the bag and jerked it open. This pulled a little gust of air out of the deeper part of the bag, causing the Stade to come floating out.

  Morton grabbed it.

  To Eloise’s delight, his fingers slipped off. “Frictionless,” she said, trying not to grin as he grabbed at it several times without successfully getting a grip on it.

  “What the hell is this?!” Morton said, turning his hand to stare at his fingers.

  “Stade,” she said. “It’s not oily. Just extremely slippery. And so light it floats. ‘Air-density,’ he says in his letter.”

  Morton grabbed it with both hands, one on each end, immediately starting to twist it. Evidently, he’d intended to break it. Instead, it did its f
rictionless jujitsu, squirting out of his hands and tumbling a time or two before stopping shoulder-high as if taunting him.

  ***

  Cameron Phelps, Chairman of UVA’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering turned over another piece of paper mail. Where does all this stuff come from? he wondered. A decade ago, he’d thought paper mail would be extinct by now.

  This one was a letter from a physics student, complaining of his expulsion. It was addressed to the University President and Phelps was only copied. Why am I involved in this? This guy isn’t even an engineering student! He blinked, Besides, I thought there was an entire battalion of committees in charge of misbehaving and complaining students.

  Oh, he thought after reading a little farther. It’s the physics student from the company selling the imaginary material. He frowned, Shouldn’t this be the physics chair’s problem?

  For a moment Phelps thought of just tossing the letter in the trash. He had plenty of more important things to do. I’ll just skim on down, he thought, moving quickly down the page.

  He snorted; the kid was claiming the listed material properties weren’t fraudulent. Maybe not. Perhaps they just “accidentally” misplaced a few decimal points. Misplaced them so far, they’re in a different zip code. His eyes widened. The letter claimed they’d included a sample of the material.

  It said, “Even if you don’t have testing equipment, you can easily verify that the material, Stade, is, as claimed, the same density as air. It will float in the air in front of you. Also, when you handle it, Stade’s extremely low coefficient of friction will be obvious as it is quite difficult to hold onto. Its other material properties are also correct, as noted on the datasheet. However, confirming those will require sophisticated testing equipment. You will note that the flexural strength figure has been revised upward after further three-point bending tests were done by another company. It’s important to realize that they are still reporting a minimum figure as they were unable to break the specimen we provided them.”

  What a bunch of crap! Phelps thought as he lifted the letter looking for a specimen. The next page was a copy of the expulsion letter from UVA president Morton who’d copied Phelps and a lot of other people. Then a copy of the datasheet. Then a sealed departmental envelope.

  Phelps’ assistant had handwritten on the front of the envelope. “Sorry, the specimen was loose in the envelope from Mr. Seba. It got away from us and we had such a hard time recapturing it, I decided to seal it in this envelope so it wouldn’t give you the same kind of trouble.”

  What? Phelps thought as he picked up his letter opener and slit the envelope. Opening it a little, he peered inside. It’s a little mirror, he thought, sliding his thumb and forefinger gingerly in to take it. His eye was momentarily distracted back to the letter on his desk and he didn’t see his fingers slipping off the Stade. He didn’t feel them slipping either, until they’d slipped off the edge and come into contact with one another. Looking back at what he’d been doing, he saw the Stade hadn’t moved. It is pretty slippery, he thought.

  He reached deeper into the envelope and hooked a fingertip around the bottom edge of it. Upon which it shot out of the envelope, turned a few times and came to a halt about a foot above the surface of his desk. It didn’t fall. What the hell! He reached out and grabbed it, but when he brought his hand back, the sample didn’t come with it.

  Phelps got a sinking feeling, but then thought, Just because it’s got a very low coefficient of friction and does seem to have about the same density as air doesn’t make the rest of those properties believable.

  By then he’d captured the specimen with both hands. Thinking, If it’s this light, it can’t be very strong, he held it with his fingers hooked underneath the ends and pushed down in the middle with his thumbs. Despite his certain expectation that it was going to break, instead, it seemed to twist out of his grip.

  It shot back and hit him in the stomach.

  Expecting that its slippery surface must indicate some oil, he looked at his shirt, expecting to see a stain.

  It was clean.

  He rubbed his fingers together.

  They were clean.

  The sinking feeling was back. That material properties datasheet can’t be correct, can it? Did I get this kid expelled because I asserted something without evidence? Am I going to have to call President Martin and apologize? He shook his head, Those properties… they just can not be right! It’d be just as irresponsible to apologize now without actually testing the material as it was to tell Martin they were wrong without testing a sample in the first place.

  He got up, slid the specimen carefully back into the envelope, and left his office for the materials testing lab. He grinned, imagining their consternation when confronted with the specimen. Even though they’ll find some places where that data sheet’s way wrong, they’re still gonna be surprised by this thing.

  “Harry,” he said to the technician that ran the testing lab, “I need you to run some quick tests on a specimen.”

  Harry gave him a dismayed look, “Boss, we’re weeks behind.”

  “This’s important,” Phelps said. Gently opening the envelope, he lifted it and pulled it back down, leaving the Stade tumbling in the air.

  “Ooh, shiny,” Harry said. “What do you have to know?”

  Leaving the Stade floating in the air, Phelps laid the datasheet on Harry’s cluttered desk. “I need you to figure out if any of these ridiculous claims are true.”

  “Come on, Dr. Phelps! Doing all those tests is gonna take days. Your junior faculty are gonna be pissed that their projects aren’t getting done.”

  “Look at those numbers Harry. They’re ridiculous. But then look at the specimen floating in the air and realize its density is the same as air, just like the sheet says. Then reach up and grab that specimen. You’ll see it’s coefficient of friction’s surprisingly low too.”

  “The density’s low because it’s got some hydrogen or helium in it,” Harry said as he reached out and grabbed the Stade. When his fingers slipped off of it, his eyes got wide. “What the hell is this stuff?” He looked down at the datasheet, then laughed. He said, “I gotta admit that it’s light and it’s slippery, but there’s no way it’s got a flexural strength of a hundred and fifty million megapascals! Aren’t the strongest steels around three thousand MPa?”

  Phelps nodded.

  Harry said, “And graphene might be about a hundred thousand MPa. Nothing’s in the millions and nothing ever will be.”

  Phelps felt disturbed to realize that he was of two minds. One that agreed with Harry. Another that said Harry was going to be proved wrong on some of those properties. But surely Harry’s right about the strength! He said, “Find one of those figures that’re wrong for me Harry. Depending on which one it is, you’ll probably be able to stop testing.”

  Harry snorted. “Okay. That shouldn’t take long.”

  Chapter Eight

  His first day back to work, Kaem took an Uber with his dad, arriving a little early so he could go in and look like he was already hard at work when the others got there.

  Lee arrived next. When she saw Kaem, she gave a delighted shout. Running around the table, she bent and gave him a joyous hug.

  Well, at least someone’s glad to see me, he thought. Clearing his throat, he said, “Careful, you’re going to get this invalid overexcited.”

  She pushed away, then held him at arm’s length grinning. “You’re feeling better?”

  He nodded. “Not quite as good as I felt before, but on my way to feeling better than I’ve ever felt in my life.”

  “Awesome!” She frowned, “They can tell it worked well enough to make you better than you were?”

  Nodding again, Kaem said, “My reticulocyte count, those are the new, immature red blood cells, is way up. As soon as they catch up with my deficit, I should feel great. For the first time.”

  She studied his face a moment, then exclaimed, “We’ve missed you!”


  “Thanks,” Kaem said, relieved. He’d worried that, even though he didn’t know it, he was one of those hated bosses. He didn’t think Lee was putting on a show. She did seem thrilled to have him back.

  Lee opened her mouth to say something else, but then the door behind her opened and Arya, Gunnar, and Norm came in. Another round of excited and happy greetings made him feel even better.

  Gunnar gruffly asked, “You accomplish anything during all that time you spent laying around on your butt?”

  Kaem snorted and shook his head, “The only thing I managed to do was get thrown out of school.”

  After expressing disbelief, they demanded to know what’d happened. When he explained, then told them how he’d sent Stade samples to everyone copied on his expulsion letter, they were delighted.

  Gunnar said, “But I think getting kicked out of school’s great. It’ll give you more time to tend to business this fall.”

  Emmanuel was horrified, “No! He must graduate.”

  Gunnar waved it off, “So he graduates a little late. That’s no biggy. He can finish school when we’ve got the company running on autopilot.”

  “We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Kaem said. “What about you guys? Did you get any work done without me here cracking the whip?”

  Gunnar described how he and the hired crew had set up the chamber at Staze East. Kaem was most interested in how well the lighter than air chain worked. Especially gratifying to him was the fact that the links fit the steel snap link gates he’d designed them for. “No problems with links coming disengaged once you snapped them together?”

  “Nope.”

  Norm had been helping Gunnar, Emmanuel, or Lee, whoever needed it. Kaem already knew about Emmanuel’s progress from discussions in their apartment. Understanding his dad’s reticence, he spoke for him, bringing the others up to date. He explained that the small test furnaces Gunnar’d built were working well. Emmanuel had filled them with sludge from the toxic waste pool, pressurized them with oxygen, and ignited them. He’d calculated the oxygen injection so it would be more than sufficient to oxidize all the hydrocarbons in the chamber. He’d monitored long enough to be sure the temperature got up to 2,500 Fahrenheit, then closed the Stade valves so the temperature would stay there—since the heat couldn’t escape the Stade chamber. “He’s going to open the various furnaces at intervals and assay the contents to see if there’s any toxic stuff left.”