Terraform (an Ell Donsaii story #15)

by Laurence Dahners

  “Try them on,” Ell said patiently. “If it gets too hot, ask Osprey to cool you down. They’re heavy because they’ve got thermal control built into them.”

  “I’d rather wear shorts,” Zage grumbled to himself, though secretly he felt excited to try out port-conditioned pants. He already had a jacket with heating and cooling built into it, but having conditioning in his regular clothes would make it available anytime.

  Shortly he was calling down the stairs again. “You got rid of all my short-sleeved shirts too?”

  “Same deal,” his mother replied.

  “Aren’t I going to look weird, going around in August wearing long sleeves and long pants? You’re always saying how you want me to blend in.”

  “Yeah, but that’s so people won’t know who you are and try to hurt you. These clothes are made with really tough fiber so they can protect you if somebody does try to hurt you. It’s a different tactic.” After a moment’s pause, she said, “Put some on and come down to breakfast. I’m tired of yelling up the stairs at you.”

  He had Osprey send her a message, “OK.” He knew that bugged her.

  By the time he got downstairs, Zage’d already had his clothes cool him down and then heat him back up. Osprey said he could thermostatically control the temperature of the clothing to keep Zage comfortable. When Zage went outside into the heat, Osprey would preemptively add extra cooling. Zage had wondered why the collar of the shirt seemed thicker than the rest, but when he asked for its strongest cooling, the collar started blowing cool air up his neck and around his head. Zage thought that’d be really nice outside on a hot day. Walking into the kitchen, he said, “These’re really amazing, but I still think I’m going to look like some kind of an ultra dweeb, going around in long sleeves.”

  His mother shrugged, “Tell the people you care about that your mom got you some experimental conditioned clothes through her job out at D5R. They’ll think it’s cool. Don’t worry what the rest of the world thinks.”

  Zage thought about it for a minute, then decided she was right. He didn’t care what the rest of the world thought. “Why do they have all these extra buttons? Is that some kind of style thing? None of them seem to hold anything together.”

  “Sensors,” his mother said, putting a spoonful of cereal in her mouth.

  Seems like they could’ve used thermistors small enough you wouldn’t even know they were there, Zage thought.

  ***

  In the morning, while Carley was brushing her teeth, her new roommate Diane leaned into the bathroom and said, “Your brother’s asleep in front of our door.” The tone of disgust in Diane’s voice wasn’t subtle.

  Carley closed her eyes in frustration, then bent down to rinse the toothpaste out of her mouth. “I’m so sorry,” she said. I’m having to say that a lot, she thought. “I’ll get him to move.”

  When she opened the door, Eli was still lying in front of it, his head on a cushion from one of the apartment complex’s pool recliners. The soft gut hanging out from under his T-shirt reminded her unhappily of her father. She gusted a sigh, “Eli, you can’t sleep in front of our door. My roommate can’t get in and out.”

  He sat up with a wince. Rubbing at an eye, he said, “Can I come in now? I’m sorry about last night.”

  “Sorry enough to stop drinking?”

  “Definitely. I’ve had my last drink.”

  Thinking, I doubt it, Carley stepped away from the door and resignedly said, “Come on in.”

  As soon as Eli stood up, Diane brushed past him on her way out the door.

  Looking after her, Eli said, “What’s got her undies in a twist?”

  “You woke her up last night, pounding on the door.”

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Not get drunk. Come home at a reasonable hour. Barring those two, politely ask the house AI if you could talk to me. If that didn’t work, rap gently on my window.” Carley sighed again, “Essentially, not act like an asshole.”

  Eli dropped into a chair, “Sorry. I guess I wasn’t thinking very well.”

  “No… You never think very well when you’ve been drinking.”

  “Sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  “You’ve said that over and over. I want you to seek treatment—”

  “I can’t afford treatment,” Eli interrupted.

  “Go to Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  “Those prissy bastards aren’t—”

  This time Carley interrupted him, “Those prissy bastards are your only hope. You contact them today and I’ll go to a meeting with you this evening.” She paused. When he didn’t say anything, she said, “Or, get the hell out of my life.”

  Eli raised his hands in surrender, “Okay. Okay, I’ll figure it out.”

  ~~~

  Eli toasted them some pop tarts while she finished getting ready. After they ate, he got up and went into the bathroom. She picked up the dishes, thinking, It was nice of him to make breakfast, even if it was only pop tarts. But it’d have been even better if he’d put his own dishes in the dishwasher.

  Then she noticed his lip print on the glass. She stared at it for a moment, then put the glass in a baggie and dropped it in her purse. Could he actually have one of the genes for alcoholism? she wondered.

  Chapter Two

  AJ’d been out to D5R’s private Caribbean island before, but it’d always just been a way station on a trip up to one of ETR’s habitats for a project.

  This was his first time on the island for something resembling leisure time, though he wasn’t sure being there for his wedding to Morgan really qualified as leisure. Morgan hadn’t completely turned into a bridezilla, but she still had a lot of expectations AJ’d had a hard time keeping ahead of.

  Right now he had a couple of hours of his own, so he’d decided to go down and try a swim. He had a mask and a ported “snorkel”—which wasn’t actually an old style snorkel, though everyone still called them that. Everyone had told him about the beauty visible under the Caribbean water and he wanted to see it for himself. He told his AI to activate the port in the snorkel and popped it into his mouth, biting down on the little flanges. Since he was getting air through the port, not a tube, the snorkel was completely inside his mouth with his lips closed over it. As he’d been told to expect, it immediately began blowing some air into his mouth. He felt his ears pop a little. It generated about a quarter PSI above ambient. It’d keep up that slight excess pressure until he reached a depth of four and a half meters, or 15 feet. If he tried to go deeper than that, the air pressure wouldn’t go up any further and he wouldn’t be able to suck air in against the water pressure on his chest. He’d been surprised to realize that old style snorkel tubes were limited to a length of about twelve inches because people’s lungs weren’t strong enough to pull in air against the water pressure deeper than that. So this snorkel would increase the pressure enough to let him go down to fifteen feet, but not any farther. It was a safety limit to keep novices from going deep enough to endanger themselves.

  They made “scuba snorkels” that fed you a different mix of gases and ran higher pressures, thus letting people go down to greater depths. However, you needed special training before you were allowed to use one.

  AJ walked into the water and waded in the direction he’d been told he’d find the best coral and fish. He didn’t wade far before it was deep enough to start swimming. Because he’d have to actively swim downward if he wanted to go deeper—in order to compensate for his body’s tendency to float—he stayed near the surface and swam further out, looking for something he’d like to swim down and look at.

  Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed something large moving off to one side. He momentarily panicked at the thought it might be a shark. However, when he turned he saw it was a girl in a sky blue bikini, swimming deeper than he was. Presumably she had her own port snorkel. What a body, he thought, admiring her languid strokes.

  AJ tore his eyes away, I’m getting married. I shouldn’t be o
gling pretty girls in bikinis today.

  He turned his eyes elsewhere and swam deeper, aiming for a cluster of brightly colored fish. They didn’t seem disturbed by his presence, but he stopped about ten-feet away anyway. After watching them for a while, he continued moving over the reef, looking at the coral and admiring the fish.

  He didn’t swim long before he started to worry that Morgan might be wondering where he was. He turned back for shore. As the water got shallow, he turned for one last look back over his shoulder and saw the girl in the bikini not far behind him. As he started wading out of the surf, he resolutely avoided turning back for a look at her.

  But then he heard a familiar voice call out behind him, “AJ, how’d you like those fish?”

  He turned and saw it was Ell, done up as Raquel. Trying not to gawk, he looked away, “Hey, Raquel. They’re amazing. Do you ever get bored with them?”

  “No, but I don’t get out in the water as often as I’d like.” She hesitated, then said, “Do you have a minute? Or do you need to get back to wedding central?”

  His immediate reaction was that he always had time for Ell, however, he played it safe. “Just a minute,” he said, then queried his AI to make sure none of the people planning the wedding were looking for him. Turning his eyes back to Ell, he said, “Looks like I’m free and clear for a moment, what’s up?”

  They’d reached the patio in front of the big house. She pulled up a chair in the shade, asking the staff person who came over for a virgin piña colada. AJ’d been thinking about a beer but decided he should have a virgin margarita himself. When in Rome with the boss, do as the boss does, he thought to himself. When he’d settled next to her, she gave him an intense look and said, “I wanted to tell you what a terrific job I think you’re doing for D5R.” She grinned at him, “I wouldn’t want you to think I was just saying that ‘cause you’re my brother-in-law, so I thought I’d better tell you today, not tomorrow. I really think you’re a star.”

  “Thanks,” AJ said, feeling overwhelmed.

  “I really wanted to tell you how much I appreciated you bumping me out of my rut about terraforming Mars too.”

  AJ winced, “I’ve realized there’s another problem. And it’s huge…”

  “What’s that?”

  “Um, we’ve forgotten about the speed limitation on materials passing through the ports. We’ve been basing our calculations on how fast a gas’ll flow through a ten-meter opening, but we’ve overlooked the fact that movement through ports is limited to twenty-two meters per second. At twenty-two meters per second, it wouldn’t take thousands of years for a ten-meter port to move an atmosphere to Mars, it’d take millions of years.”

  Ell lowered an eyebrow as if she were about to chastise him, but then broke out in one of her crooked grins. “Good thinking. However, when I looked into the math a little further, it turned out that the twenty-two MPS limit only applies close to the rim of a port. So, it doesn’t affect big ports like we’d be using very much.” When AJ looked startled and a little doubtful, she said, “Back when it first became an issue it was due to concerns about terrorists shooting guns through small ports, and then also because it limited rates of fuel delivery to rockets—again through small ports. When you’re talking about a port a few centimeters in diameter it’s a big problem, but even in a four-centimeter port you’ve already got higher flow rates near the center. In a port that’s a meter in diameter it only effects flow near the edge, which decreases the flow in a meter port about 6%. As port size goes up, the effect goes down. For a five-meter port flow rates are down 1.2% and for a ten-meter port they’d only be down 0.6%.”

  AJ got a stunned look on his face, quickly followed by a frown as he tried to work out the implications.

  Ell took pity on him and said, “Obviously, that makes it a lot better than you’d been thinking, but I found an error in my previous calculations. It’d actually take 1.12 million, rather than the 650,000 thousand years I originally thought it’d take to transfer enough material to get Mars’s atmosphere up to Earth density through a single ten-meter port.” She shrugged, “That means 84,000 years to get to the Armstrong limit where you could live on Mars with just oxygen supplementation. Or, 843,000 thousand years to get to the same air pressure as we have at 8,000 feet altitude here on Earth.”

  “Wow,” AJ said, looking dismayed, “that means that even if we build 10,000 ten-meter ports, it’d still take 84 years to get to shirtsleeve pressures?”

  Ell shrugged, “Yeah. I’ve also thought of another bit of good news you might not’ve considered. When that CO2 arrives on Mars at 1350 psi, the pressure alone’ll be enough to turn a turbine, even before you mix it with water and create your steam.” Ell shrugged, “So, you’ll get more power from that. Maybe you’ll even be able to help run the turbines that bring nitrogen from Titan?”

  AJ grimaced, “I haven’t got very good numbers on how much power we’ll be able to generate yet. Probably won’t have great numbers until we’ve got a turbine on Mars that’s running on Venusian CO2 and Europan water.”

  Ell grinned at him, “Well, we may never build 10,000 ports, but we should build a few and see what happens.”

  AJ produced a huge smile. “Yeah! Thanks! It’s going to take a whole lot of building and refining before we get decent efficiency. We’d just as well get started.” Then he frowned, “But, aren’t you… are you worried about the protests? You know, at Berkeley, about us plundering Mars?”

  She shrugged, “Sure… I’m sorry they’re upset, and I can see their viewpoint. A little, anyway. But, weighing their concerns against the need for humanity to be more than a single planet species…” She looked at him again, “You’ve got to realize that there’re always people protesting something. You might not be aware that people protested when we first started shipping radioactive waste to Juno. They had the same kind of complaints. You know, that we were ‘contaminating a pristine asteroid.’ But, cross-correlation showed a lot of them had previously been active complaining about radioactive waste. So, first they complained about the problem; then they complained about the solution. I’m pretty sure those kinds of people would’ve complained about any solution we could have come up with.”

  Ell shook her head, “When ports were new, we had a lot of protests about the economic disruptions they caused. Now, most people have adjusted to the fact that their world’s been markedly improved by ports, but there’re some people who’re still mad about them. They don’t offer their own solutions, just complain about ours.”

  She gave a little shudder, then grinned, “But, let’s talk about fun stuff instead. Has Roger gotten up with you about his idea for graphene balloons?”

  Puzzled, AJ shook his head, “Graphene balloons?”

  Ell lifted an eyebrow, “Graphene balloons with ports sprayed onto their surface?”

  “No. Um, why?”

  “A ten-meter diameter graphene balloon with a port around its circumference could be evacuated down to be smaller than your fist. In fact, the biggest limitation on how small you could make such a port would be the little ports inside it that inflate it and connect it up to power. So, you could send ports like that to Mars through little ports.” She shrugged, “Admittedly, if we’re talking about building ten-meter ports, we shouldn’t be too worried about sending them to Mars through little ports, but still, it’s an appealing trick.”

  “Wait. If you open a port on the circumference of a balloon, it’s going to cut through the balloon and destroy it.”

  Ell shook her head, “No, that’s the really cool part. We’ll open hemispherical ports on both sides of the circumference of the graphene balloon. They’ll be curved just like the ones in your contacts. The two of them together will have four times the surface area of a flat circular port. My calculations suggest that they’ll only use a little bit more power, though we haven’t tested that yet. But, if I’m right, you’ll be able to send the same amount of CO2 through a five-meter sphere as a ten-meter disk—for just a lit
tle more than 150-megawatts.”

  AJ’s eyes widened, “Oh! That’d really make a difference.” He frowned, “But the port generates a lot of waste heat. If you build a port on the surface of a thin membrane like that, isn’t the membrane going to melt, or burn-up, or something like that?”

  “Well, that could be a problem. We’re going to need some empirical testing. But, you do remember that carbon—the element graphene’s made of—has the highest melting point of any element? Graphene’s melting point’s about 1300 degrees higher than tungsten, which has the second highest melting point. Graphene also has by far the best heat conductivity, about five times better than silver, silver being the best heat conductor among the metals. And graphene has the best electrical conductivity too, by a long shot. So, graphene’s kind of the ideal material for a high-powered port like you want to make.”

  “That sounds pretty awesome. When can we try it out?”

  “I’ve already ordered some one-meter graphene balloons from Allosci. We’ll need to get the Portal Tech people to spray ports around their circumference. Then you can do some testing.”

  AJ said slowly, “I’ve kind of been worried about this heating issue. What if we can’t find a way to beat it? We won’t be able to build really big ports if we can’t.”

  Ell shrugged, “We could just build lots of small ports. They’ll move the same amount of gas or water for the same amount of power. But I really like your idea that we need industrial size ports to move big machines from one place to another. So, we need to work hard to figure that out.” Ell’s eyes glazed over and she held up a halting finger to pause their conversation. Then she blinked and looked at AJ enthusiastically. “The ports don’t have to be sprayed onto the surface of a spherical balloon. We could put them on the inner surface of a graphene balloon that’s shaped like a hula hoop. Then, the first stop for some of the nitrogen you’re importing from Titan could be a trip around the inside of the hula hoop. Since the nitrogen’s temperature will be minus 180 degrees centigrade, that should help keep the graphene of the port cool. The pressure on Titan’s about one and a half times Earth’s, or about 240 times the pressure on Mars so that should rigidly inflate the hula hoop. You’ll just need to work out how fast you can exhaust the nitrogen onto Mars without letting the hula hoop go soft.”