Disc Read online

  ***

  Liz Costa stood watching the big saucer. They’d been testing the fusion plants one at a time, running the power into the main lifting disc. As she’d heard with the first five plants they’d tested, a low pitched, almost subliminal, rumble gradually became noticeable. About the time she was really sure she was hearing it, the saucer lifted gently off the ground. It rose up to a couple of feet and then gradually settled back to the ground. Apparently, with the power from just one of the six 125 megawatt fusion plants, the saucer could lift 1.6 million pounds. Since the saucer itself only weighed a million pounds, it could easily lift itself out to orbit on just that one plant. The other fusion plants insured against failure since the saucer could return and land with only one plant still functioning. They also allowed the big workhorse saucer to lift much greater loads to orbit.

  They had already pressurized the living quarters and, separately, the entire saucer to ten atmospheres. They had, as Liz had expected, found a couple of small leaks, but they’d been quickly sealed. They’d tested the big manipulator arms on top of the saucer, having each of them lift and move a ten metric ton weight. Next was the test that made her the most nervous. They were going to fly the saucer down to Wilmington where they’d found a 2,700 ton displacement ship that was due to be scrapped. The owners had agreed to have it cabled up, floated out to sea a ways, and then let them try to lift it out of the water with the saucer. Even though their engineering formulas said the saucer could do it, 2,700 tons was a helluva load!

  They’d do it remotely, so nobody would be at risk if the saucer broke up, but if it did bust—that’d be an awful lot of work and money down the drain.

  ***

  Dan Rogers drove into the yard at Costa and Sons. He’d worked as a rigger most of his life and had rigged several big loads for crane suspension for the Costas in the past. He hadn’t brought any equipment with him today because they just asked him out for a “consultation.” The first thing he noticed as he pulled in was an enormous freaking circular structure sitting on some huge concrete pillars toward the back of the lot. People were walking around underneath it, and their size suggested it was about twenty feet off the ground. The damn thing had to be at least 150 feet in diameter.

  He parked his truck off to one side, still glancing frequently at the enormous object. Could that be what they’re wanting me to rig? There ain’t no damn cranes that’d lift that sucker! As he got out of the truck and started toward the offices, his AI said, “You have a call from Elizabeth Costa.”

  “I’ll take it… Hey Liz, I just pulled up. Where are you needing me for this ‘consultation’?”

  Liz said, “I thought that was your truck pulling up. We’re over here under the big saucer toward the back of the lot. Can you come over here and have a look around?”

  Dan’s head turned sharply to look at the enormous disc. Saucer?! Like the saucer that rescued the astronauts? He started that way thinking, That thing has to be way bigger than the one that went up to get the astronauts. Besides, that one had a set of windows up top and some kind of lump sticking out of the bottom. This is just one huge disc! As he neared the disc, Dan saw Liz standing underneath and turned her direction. “What the hell is this thing?!”

  “It’s the great granddaddy of the little saucer that went out to the asteroid.”

  Dan gaped up at it, “You’re not going to tell me this thing can fly?!”

  She nodded, “We built it in the big hangar over there,” she nodded toward the huge building. “It didn’t just walk out here.”

  “And you’re wanting me to help you what, rig it so you can move it somewhere else?”

  “No Dan, remember? It flies. We want you to rig so it can lift other things.”

  Looking up at the bottom of it, Dan suddenly noticed seven huge rings. One in the center with six around it. Each one sitting on one of the concrete pillars. The operative word was huge. “Those rings are your attachment points?”

  Costa nodded.

  “Why so enormous?”

  “Dan, this thing can lift 3200 metric tons.”

  “It can fly carrying that much?” Dan said doubtfully.

  “All the way out to space,” Costa said cheerfully.

  Dan blinked a couple of times, “What kind of cable are you planning to use to carry those kinds of loads?”

  “Well, we’ve got this two inch diameter Kevlar,” she said nodding towards a big drum of what looked like very heavy rope.

  Behind her someone said, “Shouldn’t you be using steel cable for those kinds of loads?”

  Dan shook his head, “Kevlar’s stronger and easier to arrange around your load.”

  Costa turned to Dan and lifted an eyebrow, “You know, Nolan Marlowe, one of the guys who’s going to be going up in this monster’s first spaceflight, has invented a way to make graphene in quantity. A single half inch rope made outta that stuff could lift 3200 tons!”

  “Well, you’re going to need a hell of a lot more Kevlar than one half inch rope!”

  ***

  Nolan tightened the last screw on the backpack-harness he and Tiona had been working on. The backpack contained one of Dr. Gettnor’s thirty kilowatt fusion units, a cylinder of CO2 absorber and a tank of water. It had a hydrolyzer to break the water into oxygen, discarding the hydrogen. It also had a small condenser to remove excess water from the breathing circuit so the helmet wouldn’t fog up. Nolan’s contribution had been to install thruster discs judiciously on the backpack as well as here and there on the harness. A joystick let the person in the suit maneuver themselves. The discs were quite a bit smaller than the one on Tiona’s flying harness since they didn’t need to lift you against gravity. Nonetheless, there was a nine inch disc placed at the lower back, near the center of gravity of a person. It could generate eighty-five pounds of thrust short-term, or 170 lbs. for a brief burst. That was enough to significantly modify your orbit if you really needed to. The small discs were plenty to move you around an asteroid or spacecraft.

  When they’d decided to install a disc big enough to modify an orbit, they spoke to Tiona’s dad. He set them up with a small AI for the backpack which was capable of calculating the current orbit from GPS data and computing orbital changes if they were needed. In theory, the astronaut’s own AI could calculate such things, but Dr. Gettnor felt like a purpose built, space-hardened processor would be a good thing to have. At the very least it provided redundancy to the astronaut’s AI.

  Nolan picked up the backpack and slung it on his shoulders. Once he’d buckled it securely in place he had his AI activate the thrusters at ten percent and tried out the joystick. At that low-power, it was relatively easy to resist the gentle forces the harness applied to him as he moved the joyball around.

  He walked over to the wall and leaned against it then ran the nine inch disc up to its standard eighty-five pounds of force. He didn’t measure it, but it certainly gave him a good hard shove.

  He and Tiona grinned at one another; then she said, “Want to go out for lunch?”

  They were splitting a deep dish pizza when Tiona took a call through her AI. She paled and Nolan started to worry. She asked several questions that didn’t make much sense to him without knowing the context. When she broke the connection, he said, “What’s happened?”

  “Those two Asian guys, the ones who Tasered and drugged my dad?”

  Nolan nodded.

  “Somebody killed them last night. Another Asian guy, dressed like a nurse, stopped by their rooms and injected some kind of poison in their IVs.”

  “Holy shit! Did they catch the guy?” Nolan remembered now Tiona asking the same question during her call.

  Tiona shook her head. “The guy just vanished. The poison apparently took a few minutes to work and by the time anybody figured out they’d been poisoned he was probably most of the way out of the hospital.”

  “I thought those guys had guards?! I mean the guards were mostly there to keep them from escaping, but you’d think the gua
rds would keep someone from killing them!”

  Tiona shook her head again, “Nurses come and go in hospital rooms all the time, adjusting meds and doing stuff to the IVs. After a while you hardly even notice them… At least that’s the way it was when I was sitting with my dad.”

  Nolan stared, “Why would anyone kill them? I thought they had pretty severe head injuries and the doctors thought they might not even recover.”

  Tiona had kind of a haunted look on her face and Nolan noticed that she hadn’t eaten any more of her pizza. “One was definitely in a coma. The other one might have been pretending to have a head injury so that he wouldn’t have to talk… If they’re part of a bigger organization, not just two guys working alone… an organization that didn’t want to take a chance on them talking.” She stood up, “I don’t feel like eating any more pizza. I need to get home and tell my dad about this.”

  Nolan stood up too, resisting the temptation to take one last bite of pizza. “Surely they’ve called your dad already?”

  Tiona gave Nolan a look, “Maybe, but did he understand what it meant?”

  “Your dad’s a genius! Surely—”

  Tiona interrupted, “He’s a genius about physics and programming,” she said irritatedly. “He’s an idiot about people.”

  That’s a pretty harsh thing to say about your own dad, Nolan thought.

  Nolan followed Tiona down the stairs into the basement of her parents’ house. Her dad wasn’t in the basement so they went through the door at the back into the extension of the basement under the neighboring house. There they found Vaz working on something under a microscope. “Hi Dad,” Tiona said. “What’cha working on?”

  Dr. Gettnor looked up from the microscope. He got a soft look on his face and seemed to smile. Nolan had the impression that, although the man had a great deal of difficulty with social interaction, he had a special emotional connection to his daughter. Maybe it’s to his whole family? Nolan wondered.

  Gettnor said, “I decided to try making a tiny fusor.” He glanced down at the microscope, “I don’t think it’s actually possible, but I thought I’d try anyway.”

  Tiona said, “How small?”

  Her dad shrugged, “Maybe the size of an AA battery?”

  “That’d be cool.” Tiona paused as if trying to think how best to phrase something, “Um, did the police call you about those two guys that attacked you?”

  He looked uncomfortable, “They called.”

  “What did you think?”

  Gettnor stared at his daughter for a moment that stretched pretty long, then said, “I didn’t talk to them.”

  A look of frustration flashed over Tiona’s face, but then her jaw wiggled and she relaxed. She didn’t ask him “why not” like Nolan expected. Instead she said, “Somebody killed them last night.”

  “Oh.”

  Tiona said, “I think that’s because they work for a big organization that was afraid they might talk.”

  “Oh.”

  “They might… try to get you again.”

  “Oh.” Nolan thought that a look of eager anticipation might have flashed over Gettnor’s face, but he had a hard time understanding Gettnor’s expressions. After a moment Gettnor said, “I’m sorry I hurt that guy so bad.” There wasn’t much emotion in his voice or expression on his face when he said it. Nolan wasn’t sure whether that was because Gettnor was back to his usual expressionless self, or whether he was simply saying something he thought he was supposed to say even though he didn’t actually feel sorry.

  In any case, he’d said nothing in response to Tiona’s concern. Tiona tried again, “Maybe you and Mom should go somewhere for a while until we’re sure those guys aren’t going to try to come after you again.”

  Her dad’s jaw tightened, “No.”

  “I know you don’t like to go places, but—”

  “No.”

  Tiona gave him an exasperated look, then said, “I’ll ask the police if they’ll provide some protection. If they won’t, we should hire some guards.”

  Without saying anything more, Tiona’s dad turned back to his microscope and settled his eyes onto the eyepieces.

  Tiona sighed, then took Nolan’s hand and started for the door. “He won’t talk to us any more. It’d just be a waste of our time to stay here trying to talk to him.”

  ***

  Art Mullins, Ford’s CEO, got out of his car at the Dearborn test track. A couple of the design engineers were there waiting for him. “Hi guys, have you learned anything more about this since I last talked to you?”

  They shook their heads. Rich Carter said, “The best idea we’ve come up with is that maybe they’re thinking we can use their thrusters to push cars. Problem is, it’s hard to imagine some kind of electric thruster being as efficient as an electric motor and drivetrain. I know the price of electricity is dropping with those new fusion plants and fuel-cell batteries are getting better. However, it’ll still be hard to store enough power in a car to go very far unless these things are a lot more efficient than you’d expect from something that’s essentially a dark matter fan.”

  “Well, it’s pretty astonishing new technology. We’ve got to listen to what these guys have to say. Are they here yet?”

  “No, they’re going to meet us right here, but we just got a call that they’re going to be five minutes late,” Rich said. Then he glanced to the side and said, “I hope that’s not them driving up in a Beemer.”

  The BMW pulled up next to the little group of four executives. The doors opened and two young people got out, a woman and a man. The young woman stepped directly to Art, “Hello Mr. Mullins. I’m Rachel Hammersmith from GSI and this is Dante Gettnor, our CEO.”

  Art blinked, This guy’s too young to be the CEO of a company with any more than thirty people in it! Nonetheless, he smiled, shook hands and said, “GSI?”

  Gettnor said, “Gettnor Space Industries. GSI itself will be mostly working on space applications of the thruster technology. However, there are a lot of potential Earth side uses that we’d like to license to other companies,” he smiled, “like Ford.”

  Mullins winked at him, “If you want to get off on a good foot around here, you rent a Ford when you come to visit us.” He waved a hand toward the building, “There’s a room with some big screens right in here if you’d like to make your presentation.”

  The young woman said, “Um, our presentation mostly consists of letting you look at this car. Sorry about it being a BMW, but this is the only vehicle we’ve modified to use thruster technology so far.”

  Art’s eyes jerked back to the BMW. It looked completely ordinary! “Well, okay. What can you show us?”

  The young woman said, “If you’ll step this way, we’ll look in the trunk where a couple of thrusters have been mounted right behind the back seat.” The lid of the trunk popped up and she lifted it the rest of the way. They all crowded around to look in, seeing a couple of flat circular objects mounted vertically behind the back seats. They looked like they were about two and a half to three feet in diameter.

  Mullins hadn’t looked over a BMW recently, but he was impressed that the trunk seemed very deep and spacious.

  His sudden suspicion was confirmed when the young woman said, “You’ll note the trunk has a lot of extra room because we took out the gas tank.”

  Mullins eyebrows rose as he wondered why in the world they’d modified a gas powered car rather than an electric car. An electric car would have already had battery packs to run their thrusters. He turned to the two people from GSI, “Where did you put the battery pack?”

  “Um, no battery pack. Let’s go look under the hood.” Everyone walked around to the front of the car and the hood popped up. The young woman lifted it and they all crowded around to look in.

  Though he should have expected it, Mullins was still surprised to see that the motor had been removed. A curved tube extended around the periphery of the compartment and a couple of electric motors sat in the corners. One of the
motors was hooked up to the condenser for an air conditioner and the other one looked like it was pumping the hydraulics for a set of brakes.

  The woman, Hammersmith, said, “As you can see, we’ve distributed our mechanicals around the periphery of the compartment and placed them toward the bottom so that a second trunk or storage space could be inserted here.”

  “Where’s the battery pack,” Mullins asked again, trying not to sound irritated.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. It doesn’t have a battery. This curved tube around the periphery of the compartment here is an inductance coil to harvest electrical current from the alpha particles of a small fusor,” she tapped a finger on an object about the size of a toaster.

  Mullins lifted up from where he’d been leaning into the compartment and stepped back a little. “Come on! I looked at fusor technology when it first came out. It needs a meter or so of water for shielding!”

  “Uh, yes sir. And that’s still true of high-powered ones. Dr. Gettnor has been able to design this low powered one so that the neutron producing side chain reactions are almost nonexistent. Never say never, but it really doesn’t emit enough neutrons to be a concern.”

  Staring at it, Mullins asked quietly, “How much power does that thing generate?”

  “A quarter megawatt. To translate that to something car enthusiasts are more familiar with, that’s about 335 horsepower.”

  Even without looking up, Mullins could tell his team’s heads were turning back and forth as they gave one another startled glances. He assumed they were as disconcerted as he was. He cleared his throat, “And… how efficient are these thrusters at converting electricity to thrust… or acceleration?”

  Hammersmith said, “Very efficient sir. Those two thrusters in the back, running on the full quarter megawatt can generate about 3000 pounds of thrust. Again, to use terms that car enthusiasts are familiar with, that’s enough to accelerate this 4,400 pound car to sixty miles an hour in six to seven seconds. I’d like to point out that if you wanted more performance, there’s plenty of room to put another quarter megawatt fusor in. The thruster discs are less efficient if you run that much power through them, but you could put two more discs here in the front of the car if you wanted. That’d get you a zero to sixty time in the three second range.”