“Ah…well, I was going to consult with you first, before I painted it on the—”
“The name.”
“You’re taking all the fun out of this, you know,” he protested weakly, before taking a deep breath. “Very well. Sirius Effort. That’s the name.”
Capie blinked twice. “Spelled S-i-r-i-u-s, heh? Hmm, I suppose it could have been worse. Pretentious without being presumptuous. I like it. And you didn’t name it after another spaceship. I’m impressed. Sirius Effort it will be, then.”
“Oh, I get it,” Daneel said finally, blinking his eyes. “It’s a pun. A bad pun too.”
Capie took another look at the ship towering above her.
“Say, where are you going to put the fuel tanks?”
With another wave of his hand, Paul created a cartoon diagram in midair in front of them, providing them an interior view of the spacecraft. A cylindrical tank appeared inside the ship near the tail, just forward of the engines.
Capie blinked at it in confusion. “That can’t be the tank! It’s far too small!”
Paul looked more than a little smug. “7,100 gallons of fuel. Remember, this is a nuclear powered craft. It needs far less fuel.”
“Nuclear?” Capie echoed. “Yes, you did say that, I remember now. More of the deuterium fusion spell, right?”
Paul smiled and shook his head. “Ah, no. Deuterium fusion is not a good choice for our spacecraft.”
“Why not?” she asked with a blank expression.
“A couple of reasons,” Paul replied. “Primarily because the energy level is too low—”
“Too low?” she asked, doing a double take.
“It’s all relative, Mom,” Daneel said, in a matter of fact tone of voice. “Deuterium–deuterium reactions generate only 2.45 MeV per reaction. By comparison, the reaction Dad plans to use will be generating 17.2 MeV per reaction. Much stronger.”
Paul nodded at Daneel, impressed by his son’s knowledge of the nuclear reactions involved, before turning back to Capie.
“What he said,” Paul added, with a smile.
“Okay. So tell me about this super fusion reaction fuel of yours. What is it?” Capie asked.
Paul’s look was even more smug. “Lithium crystals.”
Capie blinked twice and raised an eyebrow. “Lithium?! Crystals?! You are teasing me again, Paul Armstead! Dilithium crystals are straight from Star Trek!”
Paul held up a hand. “Not dilithium crystals. Let me explain. Fusing a proton, which is essentially a hydrogen atom, with lithium-7 generates beryllium-8, which is highly unstable, immediately breaking down into two helium nuclei and a lot of energy.”
“Lithium does that?” she asked as she touched her throat.
“Wait, there’s more. The deuterium–deuterium fusion process generates free neutrons. Neutron radiation is a BAD thing, all the way around. Oh, sure, I have used deuterium fusion three times for propulsion: on the Broom, on the racer, and on the 737 from Alice Springs. In each case, the amount of fusion I was generating was reasonably low and the only people affected by the neutron radiation for any length of time were wizards or Oni. In other words, beings that can handle that sort of exposure without long lasting effects. And also, in all three cases, the locations involved were pretty remote. But for our spacecraft, the levels of propulsion will be much higher. Neutron radiation from that much deuterium fusion will damage the area for miles around the liftoff point. Secondly, the neutron radiation will also weaken the carbon nanotube nozzles on the ship. The magnetic shield on the nozzle won’t help since neutrons have no electric charge. On the other hand, the lithium fusion reaction is anuetronic, producing no neutrons. The two helium nuclei it produces will be positively charged. Moreover, the electrons stripped from the reaction will be useful for providing power to the superconductor shell of the magnetic nozzles.”
She strolled over to the ship, reaching out to touch one of the landing legs. “So how do you get the lithium from the tank to the engines? Is lithium a liquid?”
Paul shook his head. “No, pure lithium is a solid. To be exact, a solid silver-colored metal. My plan is to combine the lithium with chlorine and oxygen, to form lithium chlorate. It has the appearance of table salt. Now the nice thing about lithium chlorate is its very high solubility in water. Very high. Almost to the point that for every atom of water, there can be one atom of lithium and that is very very good.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Capie with an amused look. “I get it. For fusion, you can take a hydrogen atom from the water and fuse it to the lithium atom! Oh, and since lithium salt is dissolved in the water, it can be pumped to the engines in liquid form. That’s brilliant, my dear sir!”
“I’m glad that you like it,” Paul replied with a self-satisfied smirk.
“Me too,” Daneel added, a prideful grin on his face as well.
“I hope all of this grows on me, but I doubt it,” she remarked, giving him a shake of her head and a shrug of her shoulders. “Okay, I appreciate the fact that you are really proud of your ship and your progress with it, but what I want to work on next is the, uh, chutzpah—as you’ve decided to call it. I want to concentrate on it and also on the MBE drug. Now, what needs to be done on the chutzpah? Where do I start?”
“That’s a great question,” he answered, with a thoughtful look. “On the emerald, of course. Would you like to grow a ten thousand carat emerald?”
“Silly question. You asked me that before. Of course I would,” was her reply.
“Great. Let’s start on that after you get back from Perth. I’ll show you how to get started then.” He gave her a measured look. “Any other questions?”
She smiled mysteriously. “As a matter of fact, yes, there is something else we need to talk about too.”
“Oh? My charms overwhelm you again? Did you have an irresistible urge for another kiss?” And he leaned toward her, puckering his lips.
“You can be such a silly sod sometimes, but I do love you.” She kissed him and then hit his arm. “But no, that’s not what I am talking about. I swung by the front desk, just before we portaled over here. I picked this up.” And a small portal snapped into existence in front of her. A large off-white envelope fell through it and onto her outstretched hand. The portal just as quickly disappeared and she held out the envelope to her husband.
Gingerly taking it, Paul studied the elegant lettering on the outside.
“What’s this?” he asked, puzzled by the envelope.
“Open it.”
He did so, withdrawing and unfolding the single sheet of cardstock. On it was a very elaborate border and even more elegant writing, all in gold trim.
“A dinner invitation?” Paul asked incredulously. “No, a formal dinner invitation! Who with? No! The Mayor of Kalgoorlie?!”
“Oh, a party!” cried Daneel. “I absolutely love parties.”
Capie briefly giggled and it was music to Paul’s ears. “A messenger delivered that yesterday to the desk clerk, who, I understand, practically had a conniption fit. Apparently, the mayor only does these dinner parties three or four times a year. It’s a very great honor to be invited to one. Only the rich and famous in town get to attend.”
But Paul kept studying the invitation and shaking his head. “This makes no sense! We’re just Yanks, in town for a couple of months. Why invite us?”
“I think we should go and find out,” Capie declared with a sly smile. “Maybe it’s all the money I’ve been spending. Maybe there’s something else afoot, as Sherlock would say. And besides, if we are going to be on Mars for six or more months, then a little socializing now would be welcome, don’t you think?”
Paul regarded this sudden change in his wife’s demeanor. Ever since their return from Romania, she was acting more and more like her old self. This party might be just the ticket for further recovery. So he chortled and rubbed the back of his neck. “You do have a good point. Fine. When is the party? On Saturday? Okay. That doesn’t give us much time. We will need formal
duds—”
“Leave that up to me. I may have to borrow your body for a fitting though,” she said with a leering grin.
He laughed. “Fine. I think that can be arranged. Oh, tonight, let’s go out to eat and do some dancing. Are you up for a trip to Perth again tonight?”
TWENTY-SIX
Room 208
York Hotel
Hannan Street
Kalgoorlie, Western Australia
October
Saturday 6:19 p.m. AWST
For the fourth time, Paul stopped struggling with the black bowtie around his collar, leaning back to examine the results in the bathroom mirror again. It was almost right, except that it now twisted to the left. Disgusted, he untied it to try again.
“You’re hopeless, Dad,” complained Daneel, the quantum computer parked on top of the small desk in the room. “See, my tie is on straight,” he bragged, pointing to his black and red virtual tie around his neck. “Piece of cake, Dad.”
“Gosh you look sexy in a black tux,” said his wife, leering at him from the bathroom door, leaning close enough to give him a gentle swat on his butt.
He smiled before turning back to her and leering in return. “Wow! That strapless red dress is so…well now I know what Chris de Burgh was thinking when he wrote that song, “Lady in Red.”
“Wow, Mom! You look great,” Daneel crowed.
Capie giggled and curtsied. “Thank you kind sirs. Here, Paul, you need help with that tie. It’s twisted to the right. I can fix that for you.” And she moved behind him, reaching up and gripping the ends of the garment.
Only two days had gone by since they had received the invitation. But even though they had promptly replied with a RSVP acceptance, there had been two phone calls from the city CEO’s secretary to confirm that they were indeed going to attend the event.
All the abrupt unwarranted attention was making Paul nervous.
In the meantime, the three of them had made substantial progress in their preparations to leave Earth. Paul had welded on more of the hull plating on the ship. And he had stored the oxygen cylinders Capie had ordered in the mine pit for their use later on.
While Paul had been bending his efforts to finish the ship, Daneel researched the error codes that Paul had briefly seen when the first version of Daneel had died. He progress was minimal, so far but the research was continuing.
In contrast, Capie was experiencing considerable success in growing the 10,000 carat emerald. And too, she claimed to be moving slowly forward on the MBE Project.
Paul was both simultaneously impressed and concerned on the progress his wife was making with the emerald. True, she was only growing the crystal so far, not performing any of the isotopic conversions yet. Still, if she kept up the pace, she might well be prepared for the chutzpah ceremony before he was ready to leave for Mars. That would not be good, from his stand point. As a result, Paul was feeling the pressure to finish the ship as quickly as possible, taking some short-cuts along the way.
Capie took her hands off the bowtie. “There!” she declared, examining the results with a critical eye. “Ready to go?”
“Bad not,” declared Ariel-Leira from the desktop. “Fun have!”
Paul grinned at Capie, the mirror woman, and Daneel. “Let’s see what the Australians have in mind for us, shall we?”
• • • •
The dinner party was being held in the Function Room of the Goldfields Arts Centre. The Neumanns parked their rental SUV in the lot north of the building and sauntered under the street lights in the cool evening air, Daneel floating along behind them. At the Arts Centre, they ascended the red-tiled front steps to the main entrance.
A petite and pretty brunette in a green evening dress met them just inside the glass doors, her face lighting up like a candelabra when she saw them.
“Mr. and Mrs. Neumann!” she beamed, stepping forward to pin name tags on Paul’s jacket and Capie’s red dress. “Welcome to the mayor’s evening social! May I call you Peter and Catlin? It is so nice to meet you. We’re delighted you could come! I am Claire Worthington, a member of the city council and also head of the Chamber of Commerce. Just call me Claire. If you would come this way, there are some people that would just love to meet you!”
• • • •
“Would you mind unzipping my dress, dear?” Capie asked hours later, as they prepared for bed. Daneel was on the small desk, already in sleep mode.
“No problem,” Paul replied, now shed of his tuxedo and that twice accursed bowtie. Using both hands, he quickly unzipped her zipper. “Did you enjoy yourself tonight?”
“Oh, yes. I truly did,” she quietly said with a dreamy smile on her face as she dropped the dress on the floor. “I’ve always loved parties. Dressing up for them, the socializing, even the little appetizers and drinks. And I loved dancing with you too. How about you, did you enjoy it?”
“The dancing part, most certainly yes. But the rest of it, I don’t know. I haven’t figured any of it out yet,” he complained as he took off his shirt.
“I saw you talking to Claire and then later to that distinguished looking man, what was his name?”
“Lachlan Harris,” mused Paul, hanging up the shirt in the closet. “He’s the city’s Chief Executive Officer.”
Capie shook her head and chuckled as she stabbed the dress on the floor with a hanger. “I must have met a hundred people tonight. I can’t remember everyone. What did the two of them talk to you about?”
“That’s the mysterious part,” Paul bellyached, folding his pants and inserting them in a hanger. “Claire kept talking about the community, how much is invested in arts and all the facilities and organizations around town. Oh, and how friendly everyone in town is. Then she went on at length about the opportunities involved. And then Lachlan—he insisted that I call him by his first name—talked about all the professional craft people that live and work here and how diverse and skilled they are. And he talked about how, in certain cases, how various legal circumstances could be ‘configured’—and that’s the exact word that he used—configured to ‘allow companies to achieve business goals that benefitted the community.’ And he seemed real disappointed by my responses after he told me that.”
“And he never told you what he was talking about?” Capie asked, slipping on a nightgown.
“Nope. He did not,” Paul replied, shrugging his shoulders before grabbing his pajamas out of a bureau drawer. “Ah, but then there was the drama professor!”
“Who?” Capie asked, as she waltzed past him and into the bathroom.
“What was his name? Oh, yeah, Professor Darren Fergerson. He teaches at the Eastern Goldfields College. Anyway, he buttonholed me right after Lachlan did. Talked about how great a drama program that they have here and what wonderful talented actors are in the program. Went on and on about it too. And he was even more disappointed by my responses.” Paul sighed as he joined his wife in the bathroom, picked up toothbrush and toothpaste, and watched her as she brushed her teeth. “There’s going to be a play next Saturday night. Not only are we invited to the play, but he insisted we come to the dress rehearsal this Tuesday night as well.”
He sighed as he squeezed toothpaste on his toothbrush. “I felt like I was Jed Clampett in the middle of a Beverly Hillbillies episode. It might have helped an awful lot,” he said as he prepared to stick the brush in his mouth, “if I had only known what they were talking about.”
• • • •
“It’s not very pretty,” Capie said with disdain on Monday morning, arms crossed as she strolled slowly up the east bank of the small lake. “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it is, in a savage, primitive way. But not to me.”
“Ugh,” was Daneel’s only comment.
Paul glowered, surveying the lake and terrain around them. “I totally agree with both of you.”
They were only a few miles from the Staging Area at a place known as Bullock Hole. Essentially, this was more of a cave than a lake, one partially filled w
ith water. But it was nearly thirty acres in size and was one of the largest bodies of open water anywhere near Kalgoorlie. Such as it was.
The bank on the east side, where they were standing, sloped gently down to the black water. The west bank was practically a bluff. All of the surrounding terrain was sand, scrub brush, and rock.
“You are free, of course, to find other bodies of water for the conversion of the emerald process,” Paul informed her gently. “This is just the closest place to us.”
Their somber mood was not helped any by the shocking evening news the previous day on every media channel. A very large bomb had detonated under a train in Tel Aviv, derailing several cars. Worse, the timing had been such that a second train, traveling the opposite direction on an adjacent track, was also derailed by cars from the first train. So far the death toll was three hundred twenty-one people with fifty-six injured. The butcher’s bill would likely go higher.
Israel’s response was expected to be both quick and deadly brutal.
All the terrorist acts and the deaths had to be Errabêlu’s responsibility, Paul knew. There would be many more such sick exploits. War was coming. It was in the air everywhere. The news media was practically ecstatic about it.
Capie nodded briskly, her expression once again gloomy. “So, you are going to show me how to convert the beryllium-9 in the emerald here to beryllium-10,” she said, holding the nearly colorless stone between them.
“Isn’t beryllium-10 radioactive?” Daneel asked.
“Yes, Daneel, you are correct. Yes, it is slightly radioactive, to a degree, but the half-life is in the millions of years. And since we can use a magic spell to physically resist the damage to ourselves due to radiation, especially in such small doses like that, it won’t be a problem. Okay, now, this is how it is done…” And he created a display in midair in front of them. On it was a sort of an artistic representation of an emerald molecule with three atoms of beryllium, two of aluminum, six of silicon, and eighteen of oxygen.
“Now, to increase the magical quotient of the beryllium, we need to add a neutron to the nucleus of the beryllium atoms. So, where do we get the neutrons? Not from the aluminum, which is aluminum-27. There are no stable isotopes of aluminum with fewer neutrons. The same is true for the silicon and oxygen atoms. Indeed, we want to increase their magical quotients by increasing the number of neutrons in their atoms too.”
Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) Page 33