Discovery: Proton Field #1

by Laurence Dahners

  Since four watts seemed to Myr to be a tiny amount of power, she tried converting it into horsepower. It was about five thousandths of a horsepower, which by definition was enough power to lift 0.4 kilograms of mass one meter in one second. Or two kilos—the weight of two liters—of mass 0.4 meters in one second. She thought about it for a while and decided that the numbers sounded reasonable. In fact, lifting two kilos of mass a 0.4 meter in a second seemed like even more than they’d done yesterday. Then she thought about the fact that if she was to lift two kilos that fast she’d have to accelerate as well as lift them. Maybe it’s a reasonable figure, she thought.

  She’d have expected some inefficiencies in the device to result in a need for more electrical power than the four watts she’d calculated. The portable device consumed about forty watts just maintaining the proton field at rest. Unfortunately, to be able to wave it around she’d needed to provide 320 additional watts.

  Can it really be using eighty times as much power as my calculations say it needs? she wondered. Could I have made a mistake in my figures or is it really that inefficient?

  Myr sat staring at a diagram of her coil-plates, considering once again the possibility that their physical layout could be changed to improve their efficiency. She’d made many changes over the years she’d been working on static suppression. Those changes had been based on intuitive guesses she’d made about what might make the coil-plates work better or worse. Using such trial and error she had improved the static suppression efficiency somewhat, but realized that an architecture which made a good field for suppressing electrostatics might be very different from a setup that most efficiently created a high-strength proton field.

  Today her intuition wasn’t supplying her with any ideas, misguided or otherwise, on how to improve a proton field.

  The possibility that terrified her was that perhaps someone really good at math might be able to measure the effects of various changes in the shapes, sizes, and dispositions of the plates and coils and actually engineer a better architecture rather than simply making changes according to their intuition and then testing to see if improvements actually followed.

  Someone like Vinn.

  She really wanted to show Miller that Vinn wasn’t needed, but she wasn’t so sure it was true. Besides, she thought, thinking about some of the things she’d been learning about leadership, a good leader would ask him for help, then pat him on the back if he did a good job.

  There was a knock on her door. Myr looked around, immediately thinking of when Miller had come by to talk to her about her social skills. Although she actually felt grateful for the advice, receiving it had been a little humiliating. Looking around, she saw her lab’s door was locked, so she got up and opened it. Instead of Miller, Vinn stood there.

  She reacted to her first thought, saying, “Coming by to tell me the guys’ve decided to throw me off the team before we even play our first game?” Realizing that she was reacting in just the antagonistic fashion that Miller had been asking her to change, by the end of the sentence, she changed her tone from bitterly anticipatory, to joking with a smile.

  Vinn shrugged in an “aw shucks” fashion, “Naw, they just asked me to get you to promise not to show them up when their wives and girlfriends are around.”

  Myr found this funny enough to crack a real smile, “Tell them, ‘No-can-do.’ They’re just going to have to pick up their games and stop playing like toddlers.”

  Vinn grinned back at her, “I’ll pass the word that they need to put on their big boy pants.” Then his expression changed to serious, “I’ve been running some numbers…” he paused as if unhappy about what he was going to say.

  Attacking the problem head-on, Myr said, “It’s taking a lot more power than it should to move things around with the focal point, right?”

  “Yeah,” he shrugged. “According to the best figures I can come up with, it’s taking fifty to a hundred times as much power as it should for you to be able move a liter of water around without collapsing the field. Admittedly, we don’t have the best instrumentation for measuring this kind of thing, but I’m pretty sure our efficiency is really low.”

  Myr realized that last week, calling it “our efficiency” would have irritated her since she thought of it as her device. But now, since she was making an effort to think of the project as a team effort which she was leading, she actually liked the fact that he’d said, “our efficiency.” Besides, she was pretty excited that her numbers were in the same range as his. She let her shoulders slump a little and said, “Yeah, my rough estimate said I was feeding it eighty times the power needed. I’ll bet you’re going to tell me that it’s going to be hard to lift to orbit if we can’t improve the efficiency, right?”

  Vinn nodded. “Do you have any ideas for improving the design to make the numbers look a little better?” He gave her a shy smile, “I’d really like to be able to say I was part of the team that launched some new-fangled rockets into space.”

  Inwardly, Myr took a deep breath and gritted her teeth. Outwardly, she leaned a little closer and spoke sotto voce, “Yeah… I think we’re going to have to make that bitch who came up with the coil-plate assembly let us look at its internal structure and do some testing so we can engineer a better design.”

  Leaning back in surprise, and also so he could get a better look at Myr, Vinn said, “Really?”

  Keeping to the spirit of her little act, Myr said, “Yeah, shall I twist her arm while you pose the tough questions?”

  Vinn apparently couldn’t help snorting, but he came back with, “Just pull her hair. If you hurt her shoulder she might not be able to shoot in our first game.” He winked, “Gotta keep our focus on what’s really important, after all.”

  Myr frowned, “I think her hair might be too short…”

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  Joe settled himself nervously across the desk from the attorney. “Everything we say here is confidential, right Mr. Rauch?”

  “Call me Marvin,” Rauch said, “and, yes, anything we say is confidential under the attorney-client privilege.” He lifted a warning finger, “As long as it’s to do with something that’s happened in the past. If you’re about to ask my advice on how to commit a crime or how to cover up one you’ve already committed, that’s not privileged.”

  “Um, no… What if… if I wanted to ask you to negotiate with the police regarding a crime I’d already committed, uh… but I’m suspecting that they might want me to keep committing that crime so they can catch somebody else?”

  Marvin squinted a little bit at the convoluted logic, but said, “If they tell you to do it, you shouldn’t have a problem.”

  Joe thought for a moment, then said, “Well, here’s the deal. I work for a hot high-tech company and this… fellow’s been paying me to tell him what’s going on over there.”

  “Industrial espionage,” Rauch said.

  Joe nodded, “I told him I wanted to call it off. I like the place and the people I work for and I’ve been feeling guilty about the spying… even though I could really use the money.” Rauch didn’t say anything, so Joe shrugged and continued, “I’ve seldom fed him anything I didn’t think was pretty much useless. Stuff like, ‘They’re really excited about their new project making such and such.’ But I don’t really tell the guy how to make anything—partly because I don’t really understand it anyway, and partly because I don’t have access to those details. He’s been insisting that I tell him more, and when I told him I wanted to call off our… relationship, he intimated that he’s been recording all our conversations so that, you know, he could blackmail me if he wanted.”

  “Ah, and you’d like to turn him in first.”

  “Yeah. If I can get immunity. It seems like a win-win ‘cause the police could catch him—maybe roll up his whole organization.”

  Rauch looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “I could try to negotiate that for you Mr. Barker. But, I’d need the actual details so the police would be able t
o decide whether it was important enough information that they’d be willing to grant you immunity.” He gave Joe a discerning glance, “You understand that there’s no potential payoff here for me, right? So I can’t undertake this on a contingency? You’d need to pay me by the hour.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said, disconsolately, “and I know your fee schedule. Hopefully it won’t break me.”

  “Okay, let’s get your whole story then.”

  ***֎֎֍֍***

  Having reached the twelfth level, Connor told his AI to turn off the videogame he’d been playing. It wasn’t much fun anyway. Turning to Myr, he said, “What’s going on with your proton field?”

  She shrugged, “I built a smaller one.”

  “You made that huge cylinder smaller?”

  Myr nodded, seeming a little distracted.

  “What good is that? Even if the cylinder’s smaller you’d still have to carry around all that equipment to power it up.”

  “No, all the stacks of equipment were just so that I could feed the cylinder with almost any signal I could dream up. Now that I know what signal I want to give it, I built a much smaller circuit that just generates the signal I want.”

  “How small?”

  Myr held up her hands about fifteen inches apart, then made a circle with her fingers about three inches in diameter.

  “Whoa!” Connor said, “That’s a whole lot smaller.” Curiously, he said, “What are you gonna do with it?”

  Myr shrugged again, “Mostly I was just trying to prove it could be done. It’s not actually terribly useful. It turns out…” she ran down.

  “Turns out what?” Connor asked. Sometimes he felt like Myr only talked to him because he was so sick and probably wouldn’t live all that much longer. But it wasn’t like Connor had a job or was dating a lot of pretty girls.

  Or had a lot to look forward to…

  He wrenched his mind out of its descending spiral. Myr and Connor’s mom were by far the biggest part of Connor’s social life. He did have a couple of friends that he hung out with occasionally. They also had muscular dystrophy, but, other than their disease, they and Connor didn’t actually have all that much in common. Connor spent far too much time watching television and playing video games. Connor’s mom had pointed out that when Myr was visiting, he couldn’t afford to be depressed or crotchety and drive her away. He needed his sister to also be his friend.

  Myr blinked away her distraction and said, “It turns out that the field,” she looked at Connor to make sure he was following, “you remember me telling you that the focal point will suck up a lot of water?”

  Connor nodded.

  Myr frowned, “And you also remember I’m not supposed to be telling you this stuff, right? So, you absolutely can’t tell anyone else.”

  Connor rolled his eyes, “Of course.”

  “So, this new smaller device, you can carry it around in your hand,” Myr said, glancing at Connor to see if he was following. Apparently reassured that he was, she said, “And if you suck a couple of liters of water up into the focal point and carry the device around with the water in the focus…” She looked at Connor again, “it doesn’t feel any heavier!”

  “Whaaat?!” Connor said, drawing out the word. “What’s it do, put the water in another dimension or something?”

  Myr tilted her head as if pondering a new idea and Connor wondered if he might have contributed something important. But then she said slowly, “I don’t think so… because when you move the device around it needs more power, as if it needs that power to move the water from one place to the other and that’s why you don’t feel it.” She paused, frowning, “I guess that’s not the right way to say it, at least for how we think it works. We think the focus pulls protons to its center. But it sucks up more power when it’s pulling them along from one place to another and if you move it faster than it can pull the protons along, the field just collapses and releases them.” She exploded her fingers away from one another and said, “Poof, instant snowstorm.”

  “So… what? You could use it to transport oil with a smaller truck or something?”

  Myr blinked, “Well, I guess.” She grinned, “How about for moving water up to outer space?” She gave him a wink, “It costs five to ten thousand dollars or something like that to lift a pound of stuff into orbit.”

  “Cool! Wait ‘til we tell Mom.”

  Myr shook her head, saying grimly, “Let’s not.”

  Wide eyed, Connor said, “Why not?”

  “Um, first of all I’m not even supposed to tell you. And, have you noticed how she almost gets mad when I bring up my field research?”

  Connor frowned thinking about it.

  Myr continued, “And she’s always trying to suggest I should stop working on it too. I just think she doesn’t believe her daughter could be the one to discover something truly important. Have you ever heard the saying that no one can ever be famous in their own home town? I think it’s the same kind of thing.”

  Connor tilted his head curiously, “Why can’t you be famous in your own home town?”

  Myr shrugged, “ ‘Cause everyone knows you so well they’re sure you can’t be special, I guess. The idea’s been around so long there’s a version of it in the Bible.”

  “Oh,” Connor said, not at all sure he understood.

  “So, don’t say anything about it to mom, OK?”

  “Sure.”

  Chapter 4

  Arlan got to the little conference room for his meeting with Myr and Vinn but they weren’t there. A little irritated that they weren’t there before their boss, he queried his AI and snorted. He was so excited to hear about what they were doing that he’d actually arrived a bit early. Doesn’t reflect well on my pompous image, he thought wryly.

  Myr and Vinn showed up together which Arlan took as a positive sign. Myr even gave him a smile, saying, “Hi Dr. Miller.”

  Mentally rubbing his hands together, Miller said, “What’ve you guys got to tell me?”

  “Vinn and I both ran calculations showing that the energy efficiency of the focal point at pulling mass from one location to another is pretty low,” Myr said.

  Vinn had been speaking to his AI, lighting up the screens on the wall of the conference room and Miller’s eyes had been on him. His eyes jumped back to Myr when he realized that she’d just delivered what sounded like some unhappy news, without sounding angry or disheartened. In the past, when she’d had less than stellar news to deliver, she’d been sullen and defensive about it. Miller didn’t know whether to be unhappy about the lack of efficiency or upbeat about Myr’s new attitude. “How… inefficient are we talking?”

  “When it’s moving the water from one place to another, the device needs fifty to a hundred times more power than it does just to form the field. As you would anticipate and hope, it doesn’t keep drawing a lot of power once it’s accelerated the mass. After all, once the mass is compressed down to a point there’s really no frictional resistance to its movement.” She waited for Arlan to nod his understanding, then continued, “It takes just as much power to decelerate it at the other end. Still, the figures augur well for using focal points in the transportation of water, oil and other hydrogen containing liquids.” She shrugged, “On the other hand, lifting a mass, like we’d want to do if we’re boosting stuff out to orbit, would need more power the whole time you’re lifting, just like you’d expect.” She quirked a grimace, “And it needs way too much power when it’s lifting, just like it does when it’s accelerating.”

  Miller found his eyes involuntarily going to Vinn, wondering whether Myr’d gotten her numbers right. Myr gave a little laugh, “Yes, numbers boy there got essentially the same results as I did. Either I’m getting better… or maybe he’s slipping a little.” It pleased Miller no end to see Myr wearing what appeared to be a genuine smile as she said it.

  Miller tried to act matter-of-fact about it, saying, “So, what’s this mean for our plans to become the preeminent power in the space in
dustry?”

  Glancing at Vinn, Myr calmly said, “We’ve decided we’re going to have to study the effects of the arrangement of the coils and plates in the field generator to see if we can improve its efficiency.”

  Startled to hear Myr say she was going to let anyone else, much less Vinn, examine the innards of her field generator, Miller glanced a little wide-eyed at Vinn who gave a tiny nod. He looked back at Myr and found her grinning. She shrugged and said, “Someone convinced me that we’re going to have to work as a team.”

  “Hot damn!” Miller said, “That’s great, have you made any progress?”

  They both shook their heads. Vinn said, “I’ve looked at it with the cover off, but that didn’t give me any great ideas on how to modify it. I’ve got the machine shop making some coils and plates with different physical dimensions, as well as getting plates made out of a bunch of different materials. The coils need to be made out of conductors, so for now I’m only trying silver and a small one made out of graphene in addition to the copper ones we already have.” Vinn glanced nervously at Miller, probably concerned because good graphene conductors were still pretty expensive. Miller did his best not to wince or otherwise react. Vinn continued, “While we’re waiting for the new coils and plates, I’ve got Nick and Randy doing measurements on the field after I physically rearrange the relative positions of the various coils and plates and...”

  Vinn continued detailing his plans for a bit. When Vinn ran down, Myr said, “We’re hoping that if Vinn can come up with some mathematical expressions that predict the effects of some of the changes, he’ll also be able to suggest ways to optimize the field generator and improve its efficiency.” She shrugged, “Of course, it might be that we’ll only be able to decrease the amount of power required to establish the field, but not be able to diminish the amount of power required to accelerate or lift masses contained within it.”