by M.A. Harris
Moon Dreams
By M.A. Harris
Copyright 2011 M.A. Harris
Table of Contents
1. Near Boston.................................2. Air Discontent
3. Isle of Discontent........................4. Washington D.C.
5. Primus Junction, Utah...............6. Breakthrough
7. Just Waiting................................8. October
9. Plots.............................................10. November
11.To the Moon.................................12. Build Up
13. Questions.....................................14. Incompatible Ideals
15. February......................................16. Transitions
17. Mars Intrudes.............................18. Town Warming
19. Weaponized.................................20. Crosswise
21. Future Options............................22. Desert Rat
23. End of Stage................................24. A Meeting
25. Recovery......................................26. Hot Shot
27. Death and Enigmas.....................28. Greetings
29. Purple Passion’s Surprise...........30. The Audit from Hell
31. Cut Off..........................................32. Blinding
33. Cutting Out..................................34. An Ending
35. Passages........................................36. Constitutional
37. Attacked.......................................38. Plots
39. Ambush........................................40. Gathering forces
41. Kick-In.........................................42. Battle of New Port
43. Epilogue.......................................After-Note
Near Boston, October, Third Decade of the Twenty First Century
Paul Richards pushed open the unlocked back door to Coopertek and yelled into the cluttered dimness, “Cooper, where the hell are you? We had an appointment twenty minutes ago!”
The tall, skinny figure crouched over a bench in the middle of the concrete floored industrial condo jerked erect. Dr. Cooper Paaly, president, resident genius, and currently the only employee of Coopertek, recovered quickly, “Hey Paul! Good to see you!”
Cooper was over six feet tall, at sixty six he was still ruggedly handsome, with brilliant blue eyes and white hair. As usual he was a bit scruffy, having selected his clothes by guess and grab off the floor in the dark.
But even from twenty feet his infectious smile was powerful and Paul felt his anger drain away, unable to resist smiling back. “Hello Doc, you should listen for the door bell you know, investors might not walk around the back.”
He knew it was pointless, it was infinitely too late for investors now, and they both knew it. He’d tried and tried with Cooper but it went in one ear and out the other.
While Paul’s relationship with Cooper was care of the US Navy’s Office of Research and Development, for whom Paul worked as a part time contract project monitor, part of his job was finding commercial venture money for the ideas that the Navy funded researchers came up with. At twenty two Paul had started his own technology company, and though he had lost it in a squeeze play it was still in existence and his name was still attached to its start, which gave him an in with a certain crowd. He had a phenomenal success rate in getting ‘his’ people investment funding after their ideas had been tried out on government programs, Cooper Paaly was a conspicuous failure.
“Ah, they’ll come begging once it’s all in the open, I won’t need to court them.” There was a great deal of easygoing arrogance in Cooper Paaly, a not uncommon failing of PhD’s Paul had found. He wasn’t sure if it came from the PhD training or if it was a trait of people who went on to get their PhD’s.
“Cooper, you said you had some things to show me and that you would have a report ready for this meeting, let’s get to it shall we?” Paul tried to keep his voice businesslike, he wanted this over as quickly as possible, he had spent a lot of time psyching himself up to cutting Cooper off and he was going to do it.
The big frizzy head shook energetically, the blue eyes danced. Except for the hair and hands with big age splotches it was hard to tell that Cooper was almost seventy years old. He was vigorous and positive and his voice didn’t have the slightest sign of aging vocal cords, he could easily have been fifty. The wide mouth smiled, “Paul, you told me that I would have some things to show and a report. I simply grunted acknowledgment of your orders.”
“Cooper!”
The smile faded, the eyes lost some of their sparkle, but there was no contrition, no give, “I know Paul, I think I know anyway.” A pause, a shrug, “Come and have a look at the most recent Stack.”
The ‘Stack’ was, on first inspection, a fairly nondescript stainless steel cylinder with domed caps top and bottom, a vacuum chamber with the requisite pipes, knobs, hoses and portholes marring its basic simplicity of form. Leaning down Paul glanced through the porthole to look at the actual Stack, a silver gray cylinder with masses of fine wires sprouting around the periphery every few inches. The majority of the silver gray cylinder was made of thin platters of silicon wafers, the basic starting material of computer chips, each one metalized and etched with a complex, though by chip industry standards crude, pattern. The thicker slices with wires sprouting from them were ceramic-coated matrices of extremely powerful electro-magnets. This Stack had four magnetic slices and twelve of the big silicon plates.
Paul was impressed; this was a lot of progress considering that Cooper had been working essentially alone for almost three months now. The chamber and the electro magnets had been reused but assembling the big stacks took hundreds of man-hours and Cooper had no help.
For all his frustrations he still felt some awe when he saw the Stack. If the damned thing would only work like the early prototypes had appeared to they’d get a Nobel Prize, be ‘going to Stockholm’ for sure. The analytical models said that this should be a fusion reactor, a very efficient one operating at low temperature, generating electricity directly.
Conventional experimental fusion reactors essentially trapped a donut of intensely hot and dense hydrogen gas in a magnetic field. If you got the gas, or plasma, hot enough and dense enough the hydrogen nuclei would start to combine to create helium and a little bit of extra energy. This extra energy was extracted as heat, used to boil water, drive turbines and generate electricity.
Experimental reactors had been getting above the break-even point of energy in to energy out for more than a decade but the scientists and engineers still said that a practical reactor was still twenty years away. More really since research had all but stopped due to budget constraints.
Cooper had spent most of his career in various fusion programs and teaching plasma dynamics and astronomy at various universities. A decade ago he had been working on magneto-hydrodynamic generators. MHD systems generate electricity from hot gas flowing through electrodes.
He’d been working on tiny MHD generators for a military program trying to build a hand grenade that would fry anything electronic within a hundred feet when it went off. The program was successful, but rapidly bypassed by much simpler solutions, many of which were used today by terrorists and thugs the world over to make life difficult for ‘agents of the west.’
During the project one sub-scale model of an early approach had produced very odd results. Unlike Cooper, who’d been entranced by the erratic effect, his manager had seen nothing of interest and quickly shifted focus to another approach that had shown greater promise.
Cooper had never forgotten those odd results and he had spent years of spare time following them up. Eventually he had developed a theory about what had been happe
ning in those tiny plasma chambers, from which had evolved the Stack.
With the correct choice of pressure and field excitation a tiny cloud of ionized gas would start to spin, and at a specific point would collapse into a coherent ring of a precise number of stripped nuclei. The energy state of the ring was ‘quantized’ at one of several specific energy states. Add more energy and the ring spun faster and tighter. Add enough energy and the ring ‘tripped up’ and atom pairs fused. If all this happened quickly enough the resulting fusion event would emit a lot more energy than had been put in.
The trick then was to capture that energy. As a miniature MHD generator had been the starting point, this should have been simple. Each ring was created in the ‘throat’ of a micro MHD generator formed by an electrode-lined hole etched in the silicon discs. The microscopic thermonuclear blast would be ducted through the channel, which would capture the explosion’s energy, creating electricity and cooling the fusion products. Cooled hydrogen by-blow gas would dilute the still hot helium ‘ash’ and cool the Stack.
Paul had spent hundreds of hours in the first year, much of it late at night, helping Cooper’s design team. More recently he’d also spent many hours making friends with the engineers at the IBM experimental wafer fab. It had been no small trick to get them to let him use their facility almost free of charge without telling them what he was making.
That first, almost messianic, excitement had long ago burnt out but he still believed that the theory was right. It made sense to his engineering instincts and he had shown bits and pieces to various friends who had all said the bits made sense.
But they had hit a brick wall about eight months ago. After the small scale, and mid scale successes they had scaled up. This latest generation stack was designed to actually provide significant power. The damned things ought to work but stubbornly refused to do more than get hot. The percentage of helium in the chamber went up after a run, but they got no net power out.
Paul glanced up at the gangly scientist, “This the Gen III litho Cooper?”
“Not really Paul, it’s a modified Gen II, highly modified.”
“But we decided that the pinch inlet needed to be completely redone Cooper?” Paul was angry again, Cooper had said one thing and done something completely different, without keeping Paul informed and that was nearly enough to get him in legal trouble, “Another complete wafer run of the Gen II Cooper? When you know that the design won’t work?”
“Paul there were some interesting results in the Gen II that I wanted to investigate and I replicated them, made them stronger. And by the way, the amount of helium we get after a run is significantly greater now for no increase in temperature or input power.”
Paul’s heart skipped a beat, that was almost the proof they needed, almost. “Do you have the data Cooper, and have you wrapped it up in a report? That plus the hardware would be enough to keep the funding going for another three months. But that would be about it, we have to go before at least a rump review panel to go beyond the current funding level.”
Cooper shook his big head sadly, “Paul, I don’t have the time, I hardly have the time to eat and pay the bills. You will have to trust me on this; it is good work you know it is! As for the panel, no, as in the past, I got the Admiral to accept this as a dual use program with limited data rights, you are it Paul. One word leaks beyond you and the Navy is getting sued.”
Paul’s head was pounding with rage, why had he put up with the arrogant son of a bitch for two and a half years, slaved hundreds of hours on his own time? He’d also spent some personal capital with IBM and others to support the unmitigated, pig headed bastard. But he couldn’t let his temper get away from him, he counted to ten, “Cooper, is that your last word?”
“I am sorry, but yes Paul.”
“Then this program is terminated for cause, prepare a program termination plan. I will send you an e-mail confirming that in the morning,” Paul spun on his heel and stalked for the door.
“Paul.”
The big clear blue eyes were sad, “Paul, thank you for putting up with me as long as you have. And thank you for all the work and support, you know you were more help than anyone, and I appreciate it, little though you think I do.” Cooper sighed, “I hope we can meet on better terms sometime,” he looked tired and old.
Paul’s rage faltered and died, damn the man, “Cooper so do I, you’re on the edge of something great. I’d hoped it would be you and me making the leap, not some other team. Someone else has got to be working on something like this?”
The big head shook, “I don’t think so Paul, I think the cold fusion fiasco destroyed so many reputations it’s poisoned this sort of approach for a half century, we have time. I need time, there’s more here than I ever suspected, we are on the edge of something even more remarkable.”
“More remarkable than the stars Cooper?” Paul waved at the stainless steel chamber. “That could give us the solar system as well as remove our worries about power forever, more remarkable than that?”
Cooper smiled, a flare of warmth, “Ever the dreamer Paul! Yes more remarkable, remarkable enough to give you and me Mars.” The eyes were level.
Paul lifted his hands in supplication, “Cooper, something, anything?”
A shake of the head, “I’m too close Paul, too damned close.”
Paul nodded, “Fine Cooper,” he sighed, “good luck Cooper, keep me in mind for that first ride, OK?” He turned and trudged for the door.
“I will Paul, I will.” The door closed and Paul walked out into the cool New England fall day, the brightness hurt his eyes, made them water.
Outside he walked through the trash strewn mud at the side of the building towards the rental hybrid he’d driven here. When he got to the car he slung his leather satchel inside and grabbed the insulated cup out of the warmer between the seats and took a swig of the lukewarm latte he’d picked up after breakfast. His head pounded a little, he’d had a bad night, the flight out of Dulles had been early and now this.
Like many engineers these days he was a technological gypsy, moving from job to job. He was lucky in several ways, he’d actually salvaged something from the tech bust that had ruined this industrial park and had enough money to be able to ride out dry patches. He also had a steady part time job, the job that had brought him to this depressing patch of real-estate today.
The air was crisp with Fall but still had a faint tang of decay. Back here, behind the still impressive granite front entrance just off Boston’s I-495 beltway there were no signs of caretaking. Several half completed shells sagged and rotted nearby and the brown grass was waist high even in the medians and planters. The mild tech boom at the end of the last decade had died before this place was finished, leaving it a ghoulish half-life because the town couldn’t allow it to default. The few tenants stayed because the leases were ridiculously cheap and no one bothered them.
His latte finished he pulled his magnesium shelled tablet out of his satchel and applied his thumb to the corner to bring it to life. The glass turned paper white with crisp print like letters. He brought up the contract docket for Coopertek and quickly dictated a note to the iSec. He then had the system prep a couple of memos for him, changed his flight to an earlier one and put the tab away.
Just before he got in the little car he glanced around sadly, he was pretty sure he’d never see this sad place again. Sighing he got in, he had a stress headache now, and no aspirins, he’d have to pick up an overpriced package at the airport.