Sophia threw her arms around Bana, weeping. Behind her Kaem said, “You won’t quit your job until you get into school though, right?”
Bana swung an arm back and managed to hit her brother, though she wasn’t sure where. “Just let me be happy for a moment!” Then she pushed away from her mother and said, “Sorry. I shouldn’t hit you. I truly am grateful. It’s just that I’m so used to…” She paused, not knowing how to continue.
“You’re so used to being my bratty little sister,” Kaem said, “I know. But, remember what I said about grade school. I’ll always owe you.” He cleared his throat, “You and Mom stay here and be happy as long as you want. I’m gonna walk Dad back to the hotel.”
***
Sunday, Kaem and his dad took a tour of Monticello. It was abbreviated because his dad’s stamina was low. After Emmanuel took a nap, they watched a couple of movies on the hotel room’s TV, going out to eat at a café between shows.
All in all, it was a very pleasant opportunity to get reacquainted with his father. His dad asked what Staze did that was going to make so much money. After swearing him to secrecy, Kaem told him about stade and its astonishing properties. To Kaem’s delight, his dad immediately recognized some of the applications it might be used for, focusing mostly on how its frictionless surfaces might be used to improve machines.
~~~
Monday morning Kaem skipped classes and upset Arya by taking Emmanuel to his apheresis appointment without her protection. To prevent friction, he told his dad he didn’t have classes on Monday mornings. After the apheresis, he and his dad ate an early lunch together and, after Emmanuel repeatedly said he felt fine, Kaem reluctantly put his dad in an Uber back to Valen.
Before he left, Emmanuel broke down all of Kaem’s defenses by hugging him and thanking him for the chance to beat cancer.
As the Uber drove away, Kaem sat on the curb and wept. He felt like he’d been through a wringer over the last four days.
A lot of tears were shed this weekend, Kaem thought. But enough of them were tears of joy that I’ve got to call it a win.
Pulling himself together, Kaem called Arya and they took an Uber to Staze. There he opened the breadboard stazer and rearranged all the misplaced components. After testing it by stazing one of their little Mylar balloons, he bolted the lid back on and settled down to wait for Lee.
While he waited, he sat companionably next to Arya, watching his morning classes on his laptop while she studied for an exam.
They didn’t even argue.
***
A banging on the door made Kaem think Lee was early. Before he could get up, the door opened and Gunnar came in with a big box—it seemed the box was what’d been banging the door while he’d struggled to open it with one hand. “Lee here yet?” He looked around, “No? Great. Let me show you the new idea I’ve been messing with.”
Gunnar folded a sheet of the reflective Mylar around a six- by twelve-inch piece of lightweight waffle cloth, clamping the open edges of the Mylar together with a line of small binder clips. He inserted a small microwave emitter between two of the clips, then hooked it and the light guide up to the cables from Kaem’s new stazer. “Arya, lie down on the table here.”
She did, but when he came at her with the layers of Mylar and cloth, she sat back up. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked suspiciously.
Gunnar rolled his eyes. “Make stade.” He sighed, “Stay sitting and we’ll drape this on your arm.” However, he couldn’t get it to stay in position against her arm. With a grunt, he said, “Drape it over your thigh. With you sitting, gravity’ll help hold it in place.”
With Arya holding it draped over her thigh, Kaem stazed it. Once Gunnar pulled the Mylar off of it they had a piece of stade that fit the front of her thigh. It had a couple of puzzling holes in the stade that left some of the waffle cloth exposed. After a bit of thought, Kaem recognized the gaps were where Arya’s fingers had been holding it against her thigh. The pressure had thinned the waffle cloth to less than a millimeter so stade hadn’t formed.
Arya got it immediately. “It’s custom-fitted armor! We won’t be able to put it over joints, it’d block movement, but we can fit the thorax and abdomen pretty well with some sliding panels on the side to allow room for the expansion and contraction of breathing.”
“It’ll fit the skull too,” Gunnar said. He quickly started laying out his ideas for producing a material made of a nylon material—less than a millimeter thick—that had Mylar-covered panels of waffle cloth stuck onto it. “There’d be small gaps between the waffle cloth panels. That way if you stazed it, only the waffle cloth areas would turn into stade, but they’d be held together by the nylon cloth between them.”
Arya said, “It’d be awesome armor, unless the bullet went through the nylon between the stade panels.”
“That wouldn’t happen because we’d have another layer of the same stuff, this time with waffle cloth panels offset so the panels in the second one covered the gaps in the first one. All the layers would be molded to your body by wrapping you up with an elastic wrap, then the two layers stazed. When the Mylar was removed, you’d have overlapping panels of stade held together by the two nylon cloth layers.” He tilted his head, “You could even put smaller panels in areas that needed more movement. They wouldn’t be as protective as the bigger panels, but it’d still be better than ordinary cloth.”
Arya stared at him. “You probably don’t need to custom fit most people. You could just make jackets in small, medium, large, and XL sizes, molding them to a mannequin.”
Gunnar shrugged, then grinned, “I want one that’s custom-molded. Pants too.”
Arya snorted. “Men! Probably all you care about’s the crotch protection, right?”
Gunnar didn’t have to answer because a knock on the door announced Lee’s arrival.
~~~
When Lee entered, she asked for help getting molds out of her Uber. It turned out she had two Ubers, one with its seats folded down to accommodate big boxes. There were a lot of small boxes too.
Gunnar looked at the biggest box in the Uber he was next to, asking, “Is that a mold for a cryotank?”
“Uh-huh,” Lee said, working to pull out some of the smaller boxes that were blocking the removal of the big one.
She handed one of the little ones to Gunnar and he was surprised by how light it was. His eyes still on the big box he asked worriedly, “Are the molds made of glass?” If they were, a hand truck might be needed to get the big one into the building.
“Nope,” Lee said, “it’s aluminized acrylic. We found a company that can make acrylic molds with CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacturing). They were able to make the molds a lot thinner than some of the other people we talked to. Good tolerances too.”
Thinner, and lighter, Gunnar thought as she handed him one of the big boxes that’d filled two-thirds of the back end of the Uber. He found it clumsy but otherwise easy to carry—though he had to set down the smaller box she’d given him earlier. He started into the building, eager to see what the mold looked like.
Inside, Lee stopped Gunnar from breaking down the boxes, since she hoped to use them to take the stade parts back to Space-Gen in California. He was very impressed by their contents. The box he’d carried held a rough-surfaced reflective cylinder intended to be the mold for the inside of the cryotank. “Why doesn’t it look like a mirror?” he asked.
Lee shrugged, “The CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) process they used produced a slightly-rough machined surface rather than a polished surface like you’d want for a mirror. I didn’t think it’d matter whether it was rough or not.”
Gunnar hoped a smooth mirrored surface wasn’t necessary to form stade.
At first, he was surprised the tank had square ends. He was used to tanks having rounded ends. Then he realized that such a rounded design characteristic was likely intended to improve the bursting strength of a pressure tank—it was hard to remember that worryin
g about strength was simply unnecessary when you were working with stade.
The mold came in two bivalved pieces that fit together to form a mold for the temporary stade. They were fitted together inside the box and held that way with tape. Because Gunnar had the mold out and was playing with it before the others finished bringing in the other boxes, they stazed that mold first. It’d been formed—per Kaem’s suggestion—with attachment points for a microwave emitter head and for one of the fiberoptic laser light conduits. After undoing the tape and opening it briefly to make sure it was empty, they hooked it up and stazed it.
When they pulled off the tape and opened the mold, a perfect looking, air-density stade practically floated out. It gleamed reflectively like the mold, but the rougher mold gave it a rippled finish rather than a mirror surface like the previous stades they’d cast. Gunnar’s eyes caught on Lee staring at it with a stunned expression on her face. “What?” he asked.
“I was going to laugh at you guys because you forgot to put the liquid in… but, you don’t actually need liquid to make stade, do you?”
Kaem said, “We don’t need a liquid. Don’t forget you work for us now. This is one of our secrets.”
Pointing at the shiny cylinder, she turned wide eyes on him and said, “That’s an air density stade because you stazed the air inside the mold, isn’t it?”
Kaem said, “Are you remembering that you work for us and this is a secret?”
She nodded.
“Then, yes.”
“Holy crap!” she looked over at the tables. “But, when I was here last, you poured what you called “base liquid” into the mold before you made an air-density stade, same as you did for the water density stade.”
“Yeah, sorry. I just pretended to pour water in it.”
“That was water?! Not some fancy…” She paused as she grasped it, looking thoughtfully at the big stade they’d just made. “Of course it was. That’s why some are water-density.” Her eyes turned back to Kaem, “But you said you could make stade that’s lighter than hydrogen. How?!”
He shrugged, “We staze a vacuum. I should admit we haven’t done it yet, but we’re sure it’ll work.”
“Holy mother!” Lee said, blinking in surprise. “You don’t have to have anything in the mold when you staze…?” Then as if speaking to herself, she said, “No, of course not. You just said you could staze a vacuum.” She looked at Kaem again. “And you said stade isn’t a material. You’re doing something to a volume of space, aren’t you?”
Kaem nodded.
Gunnar thought, That didn’t take her long. She’s uncomfortably smart… I guess that’s okay since she’s on our side. Actually, since she’s on our side, it’s better than okay.
Lee said, “And you’re not going to explain it to me, are you?
Kaem shook his head. “Not yet anyway. Besides, I don’t fully understand it myself.”
“What?!”
“Um,” Kaem said, “another guy came up with stade based on an ivory tower theory of mine. He’s the one who knows how it all works. I’m just an employee like you are.”
“What?! Who?!”
Gunnar was almost apoplectic at this news, but Arya quickly stepped between Gunnar and Kaem, put a finger to her lips and took Gunnar’s arm. She steered him out into the anteroom. As soon as they got out there, Gunnar exploded, “What the hell is he talking about?”
Arya quickly ran through Kaem’s desire to attribute all the intellectual property of Staze to a rich Mr. X.
At first, Gunnar thought the whole thing was insane, but he slowly came around after she reminded him of the trouble they’d had with Harris and Caron.
“…So, Kaem decided he doesn’t want to live his life looking over his shoulder,” Arya finished.
Gunnar could see how that could be. Then he was pissed because he hadn’t been told. He settled down when Arya said Kaem had just decided on this insane strategy.
When Gunnar and Arya reentered the big room, Lee was starting to open the other big box, “Okay,” she was saying, “we’ll get out the outer molds and see if we can make a tank.”
The outer mold bivalved open and they put the temporary stade inner mold, the one they’d just made, inside of it. Lee asked, “How are we going to position this thing so it stays at least a millimeter from the outer shell on all sides?”
Kaem shrugged and got a sheet of paper and some Scotch tape. They folded little bits of paper and taped them to the interior of the outer mold in several locations to keep the stade inner mold away from the walls of the outer mold.
They had to pause when Lee started worrying the bits of paper were going to weaken the stade that formed.
Kaem gently disabused her of that notion by pointing out that, other than mass, the properties of stade were always the same, no matter what it contained.
They finished the discussion with Lee raising Gunnar’s eyebrows by saying, “We need to have someone make us a dispenser that puts out little one-millimeter plastic sticky-balls. This’d go faster if we could just pop a bunch of them in.”
Similarly, they formed temporary stades that would hold open the channels the fuel would flow out through and inserted them in through the outflow fittings on the outer mold. They closed up the outer mold and Kaem stazed the space between the temporary inner stade and the outer mold.
They opened the bivalved outer mold to expose the rippled, shiny cryotank. Lee looked up with a frown and said, “How do we dissolve the stade inner mold?”
Kaem looked at his watch, “We just wait another eighteen minutes and it’ll dissolve itself.”
Lee stared at him warily. Gunnar had a feeling she was suffering from “revelation-exhaustion.” She said, “I know you said that some stade doesn’t last as long as others, but are you saying that you can program in when it… dissolves… or fails?”
Kaem shrugged and gave another nod.
“How long will this cryotank last?” she asked, as if dreading the answer.
“About a quarter of a petasecond.”
She frowned as if starting to try to figure it out, then apparently just decided to ask, “And, how long is that?”
“About eight million years.”
“Holy crap! Talk about your non-biodegradable waste!”
He shrugged again, “We can break it down whenever we’re done with it.”
“And the breakdown products are just… air?”
“They’re whatever we started with. Air in this case.” He grinned, “Plus a few bits of paper and Scotch tape.”
While they waited, they started stazing some of the other test molds Lee had brought with her. These included some nut and bolt combinations. These in fact would not stay screwed tightly, even after they stazed a set of long-handled wrenches and used them to apply extremely high torques to the stade nuts. Having expected that, the Space-Gen engineers had sent molds for stade ratcheting mechanisms that would lock the nuts in their tightened positions. This required a spring—which couldn’t be made of stade—to hold the ratchet mechanism locked. Unfortunately—as expected—trial ratchet teeth smaller than one millimeter wouldn’t form, so the ratchets they could make were coarse. Bolting a couple of pieces of stade together—since nothing had any give in it—tended to leave everything slightly loose since the ratchet just would not click one more tooth.
Looking disappointed, Lee contemplated the cryotank. “I was worried about this. If we want to use stade pipes to carry fuel to the engine, we’re going to have to connect them with some kind of non-stade alloy-steel connectors. That’ll lose us much of the advantage of the amazing strength of stade because of the old problem that the weakest link determines the strength of the chain. I’m not sure we’ll be able to hold the pressures generated by your idea of combusting some fuel inside the tanks to save having to pump it. And, we’ll be adding some weight.”
“Or,” Kaem said, “you could put a steel washer in the junction. The bolts and nuts would crush the washer until the ratchet did clic
k tight.”
“Indium,” Lee said.
“Indium what?” Kaem asked.
“Indium washers would tolerate cryogenic temperatures.”
“Oh,” Kaem said thoughtfully. He looked up, “Or, we should also be able to do something like welding.”
“What?! Welding…?” Lee stared, “Why’s this the first time I’m hearing about that possibility?”
“Don’t get all grumpy,” Kaem said with a laugh. “We’re all just figuring this out as we go. If we form stade over the junction of the pipes, it’ll stick the pipes together.” He shrugged, “We’re pretty sure anyhow.”
“Does this mean we’ll need to make molds to fit over the junctions?”
“No, we should be able to wrap them in Mylar.”
Gunnar carefully kept his eyes from straying up to the high ceiling where what he thought of as his “holey blimp” still rested. Unlike balloons, it wouldn’t gradually lose its helium and eventually come down. He’d brought a ladder on his truck that day, planning to could climb up and get it down after Lee was gone.
Lee was staring at Kaem, uncomprehending.
He said, “Mylar that’s aluminized on both sides. Think of it as a flexible mirror we can staze beneath. We’ve checked and it works.”
Looking frustrated, Lee closed her eyes. “Just wrap them in Mylar,” she echoed, a sarcastic tone in her voice.
“Hey!” Kaem said. “Why didn’t you think of Mylar? Aren’t you supposed to be the hot-shot engineer in this group?” He paused a moment as a shocked expression appeared on her face, then grinned, “I figured if you weren’t going to stop jumping my shit for not figuring everything out already, I’d have to start jumping yours for not figuring it out yourself.”
Lee studied him a moment, then cracked a smile. “You’ve got a point. I’d better get my ass in gear.” She frowned, “Though I think it’s unfair to expect much of me when you’re not even telling me how it works.”
The Thunder of Engines Page 25