Radiation Hazard (The Stasis Stories #3)

by Laurence Dahners

  Seba cleared his throat and the exclamations from the audience abruptly halted, suggesting just how enthralled he had them. “We’ve set the samples we passed around to you folks so they should expire in another minute. I would urge those of you currently holding water density Stades to lift them out of your laps because they’re just about to turn back into water. To those of you holding air-density Stades, they’ll only vanish. My vacuum Stade,” he pointed up at the Stade still straining at its string, “is about to drop its string.”

  With a tiny pop that even Turnberry in the front row could barely hear, the string suddenly fell, leaving Turnberry blinking, unable to believe the way the Stade had been there, but now was gone. The string fell as Seba had predicted. Exclamations burst out around the room as people holding air-Stades were suddenly holding nothing, and those with water Stades found themselves holding a couple of teaspoonfuls of water.

  Turnberry found his hand rubbing his brow as he tried to come to grips with what he was seeing.

  Seba had paused a moment for the shock to run through the crowd. Now he continued, “Understanding that a Stade is a specified volume of space, within which time is stopped for a specified period of time, may help you understand its material properties. I know, I’ve already told you that it isn’t a material, but it’s convenient to think of its properties as material properties. So, if we have a piece of space within which time is not progressing, perhaps you might be able to comprehend how it will interact with us in unusual ways. First of all, nothing can penetrate its surface and nothing can deform it. Deforming it would mean that time had resumed progressing within that space.

  “Therefore, if we treat it as a material, we find the following material properties.” The big screen displayed the properties Turnberry had become so familiar with, though he thought there were a few changes. Probably because someone reported results using better testing equipment.

  Seba continued, “Its density is the same as whatever was in that volume of space when it was stazed, our word for turning it into a Stade. Nothing can interact with its surface, so its coefficient of friction is zero. As those of you who’ve handled it have already found out, what this means practically is that it’s slippery as hell. Its thermal and electrical resistances are infinite because nothing can pass through an area of time-stopped space. Its reflectance is one hundred percent because all radiation must bounce off. It’s infinitely resistant to corrosion because molecules can’t interact with it. It will not melt. It’s been tested to five thousand degrees centigrade, but when you pull it back out of such a furnace you can immediately handle it with your bare hands because the heat hasn’t penetrated its surface. Those of you who handled the specimens we passed around will have noticed they felt warm. That’s because the Stade’s reflecting your body heat back to you, not because it’s physically warm.”

  Seba drew a breath, “And as you’ll see on the last line, its flexural strength has been tested to a hundred and fifty million megapascals. Fifty thousand times stronger than the strongest steels. Normally when you’re given a strength in megapascals, that’s how much force it took to break the material. In this case, Stade was tested to that degree without failing. In fact, without even bending. Not even bending a little bit. We suspect, though we have not proven, that there is no limit to its strength. That you cannot break a chunk of time-stopped space.

  “So, what does this all mean? If you call it a material, it’s a material strong enough to build skyscrapers miles high. Tall enough that you couldn’t breathe at the top, so no one’s likely to build them that high. For the discipline of physics, we now have a perfect mirror for all frequencies and particles, even neutrinos. One that can be used for telescopes and to bounce lasers around. For energy, we likely have a material strong enough to withstand the heat and pressures required to induce the holy grail of nuclear fusion. A material that won’t become radioactive when subjected to neutron bombardment by either fission reactors or fusion plants. For things that are already radioactive, we can entomb them in Stade where, because time is not passing, atoms are not splitting, and they will no longer be radioactive. For those of you worried that we’d just be putting off that radioactivity for the next generation to deal with, understand that by theory we can create Stades that last many, many billions of years. Beyond the life of our sun. Heck, whatever beings might be around that far in the future could be excited to get some radioactive material.

  “I see people with their hands up, but I’ve got a schedule to keep and there’s something else for you to consider. We’re talking about stopping time within a volume of space.” The big-screen shifted to a video of a fuzzy baby chick walking around. “Two weeks ago, we placed this hatchling chicken in a six-inch stade mold…” He paused as the video showed a hand lift the chick and put it in a mirrored box then close the door. “Then we stazed it.” The door was opened and a six-inch mirrored Stade was extracted. Suddenly the big screen shifted to a live shot of the auditorium again. It zoomed in on the six-inch Stade cube Turnberry had noticed on the table earlier. Kaem paused a moment, then the Stade vanished, leaving a fuzzy baby chick on the table where it’d been. It looked around, then ran to the edge of the table where the young Asian woman scooped it up. Seba resumed talking, “That’s the same chick. If it were now two weeks old, it’d be a fledgling and would’ve looked something like this.” A new slide showed a bigger chicken with feathers, still young, but nothing like the fuzzy hatchling that’d just come out of the Stade. “You’ll have to trust me that it’s the same chick. If you do, and you consider what this means to those of us who have a disease that isn’t treatable today, but might be curable in a decade or so, you’ll realize that stasis has a place in medicine as well.”

  Seba paused a moment, then finished by saying, “Time stasis alone, not counting the product Stade, has so many uses it beggars the imagination. I could go on for twice as long as I already have, but my time’s up. I’d like to thank you for your patience and attention… And for any ideas you send us for the use of this new technology.”

  The thunderous standing ovation that followed was not something Turnberry had ever experienced at a scientific talk. He turned to stare at the crowd. Their reaction reminded him of people at a rock concert, begging for an encore.

  Turning back to the front, he started toward the podium hoping to get Kaem to answer a few questions.

  But Seba and his two assistants were already gone.

  It wasn’t until he got home that Turnberry started thinking about how hard it must have been to time his talk so precisely that he was at the right point when the various Stades came out of stasis.

  The End

  Hope you liked the book!

  To find other books by the author try Laury.Dahners.com.

  Or his Amazon Author page

  Author’s Afterword

  This is a comment on the “science” in this science fiction novel. I’ve always been partial to science fiction that poses a “what if” question. Not everything in the story has to be scientifically plausible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Essentially you ask, “what if” something (such as faster than light travel) were possible, how might that change our world?

  I think the rest of the science in a science fiction story should be as real as possible.

  Therefore, in this story, the central question continues to be what if someone invented a way to stop time in a certain volume of space-time, thus creating something that’s—in the tropes of science fiction—often called stasis.

  Stasis is not a new idea. Niven’s “slavers” used it to escape from bad situations into the future. In Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War, people who threaten the authoritarian government were “bobbled” in stasis fields to get them out of the way. In both of these SF universes, the stasis fields are indestructible but—to the best of my recollection—they are only used to protect oneself from destruction (Niven) or also to punish offender
s by sending them forward in time (Vinge) and are always spherical. Sometimes stories by other authors offhandedly use stasis for the preservation of food or people, but they usually ignore the presumed mechanical properties. Those stories seldom delve into other changes that would derive from an ability to stop time within a space.

  The question in this third book of the “Stasis” series: What if indestructible segments of space-time could be induced in non-spherical shapes? At present one of the most exotic engineering projects people hope may someday be possible is the building of a space elevator or skyhook, using the astonishing tensile properties of graphene or carbon nanotubes. Such a structure could allow us to place satellites and astronauts in space much more cheaply than is possible using rockets. They would simply climb up a carbon cable to Earth orbit. A graphene space elevator would be dropped from orbit and loaded in tension by a counterweight orbiting the planet. It would be an extremely expensive undertaking to send all that material up to orbit on rockets. It would solve a lot of problems if we had a material strong enough to build from the ground up. Future books in this series will consider some of them.

  The medical applications of stopping time, even briefly, are mind-boggling. They will be major features of the upcoming books.

  For those of you who are interested, the gene therapy featured in this novel is a real treatment in early trials for sickle cell anemia and for thalassemia. The thought that these crippling diseases might be treatable in the future is very exciting.

  For those interested in the dangers of nuclear power, they appear to be tremendously overblown in the news. A nuclear power plant cannot be turned into a bomb. They can, however, melt down. Chernobyl killed 78 people. Three Mile Island didn’t kill anyone. Fukushima has paid reparations for one cancer death, but that person’s cancer may have been unrelated to the accident.

  Meanwhile, collapses of hydroelectric dams have killed hundreds of thousands of people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

  And some have estimated that burning fossil fuels for power is responsible for millions of deaths secondary to air pollution. https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/04/Nuclear-Power-Prevents-Deaths-Causes.html

  Wind power uses huge tracts of land and the turbines kill birds and bats.

  Solar farms also use huge tracts of land and nothing grows where they are placed (excepting solar rooftop installations). They have been made from toxic materials (though they’re improving). They lose efficiency with time, so they must be replaced and the ones taken out of service are not getting recycled.

  This quote from an article in Forbes gives some perspective:

  “The global averages in energy-related deaths are significantly higher than in America (alone), with coal at 100,000 (pollution) deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours (China is the worst), natural gas at 4,000 deaths, biomass at 24,000, solar at 440, and wind at 150. Using the worst-case scenarios from Chernobyl and Fukushima brings nuclear up to a whopping 90 deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours produced, still the lowest of any energy source.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-eagle-deaths-wind-turbines-kill-humans/#6f5862585467

  None of the ways we generate power are perfect. Burning wood or other biomass, something many well-meaning people encourage the people of the third world to use for cooking because it’s “renewable,” makes smoke that’s quite toxic.

  Despite our fears, nuclear power seems to be the cleanest, least damaging method we have.

  But, we should always strive for better.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the editing and advice of Gail Gilman, Nora Dahners, Mike Alsobrook, Clay Boyd, Jack Hudler, Scott McNay, Kenneth Pence, Abiola Streete, and Stephen Wiley, each of whom significantly improved this story.

  Other Books and Series

  by Laurence E Dahners

  Series

  The Ell Donsaii series

  The Vaz series

  The Bonesetter series

  The Blindspot series

  The Proton Field series

  The Hyllis family series

  Single books (not in series)

  The Transmuter’s Daughter

  Six Bits

  Shy Kids Can Make Friends Too

  For the most up to date information go to

  Laurence E Dahners website

  Or the Amazon Author page