Tau Ceti

by Laurence Dahners

  ***

  Deltain looked up from the harness he’d been working on. The sun had set. Hie stood and walked over to the edge of the flat ledge that provided a work area in front of the great cave. Deltain looked out into the dimming sky. Where was Dex? Hie’d promised not to push it so close to dark like this! Worry fought with irritation in Deltain’s hearts.

  Dex was at a difficult age, young adult, angry with the low position in the tribe’s hierarchy that Genex had left himr. Shifting from the compliance of youth to the defiance of a young adult. Dex knew how Deltain worried when hie didn’t get home well before dark, yet hie frequently pushed it! Deltain’s wings rippled in frustration. Would Dex behave this way if it weren’t for hies low status? Hie wondered if Dex might be less rebellious if hies status rose, something Deltain hoped might happen as Dex’s ability to produce fine leatherwork became more and more apparent.

  Distantly Deltain realized that several other parents were standing on the ledge looking out into the dimming light, perhaps frustrated with the same issues?

  A dalin appeared against the sunset sky, winging its way toward the cave. Deltain’s hearts lifted, Dex? Hies hearts sank as the dalin approached and hie recognized the handsome Qes, an age mate of Dex, but of very high status. Qes landed beside hies parents and clasped them. Then Qes glanced at the other parents waiting on the ledge. Deltain recognized they were the parents of Syrdian, Qes’ romantic interest. Qes spoke quietly to hies own parents while repeatedly glancing over at Syrdian’s parents.

  Syrdian’s parents approached Qes. Deltain heard them ask, “… seen Syrdian?”

  Qes waved hies head in negation and the parents, wings drooping, returned to their vigil, looking out over the enormous valley below.

  As Qes and hies parents moved back into the cave Deltain approached. “Did you maybe see Dex out there today?” hie asked.

  Qes glanced at Deltain, appearing startled, then again waved hies head in negation.

  Deltain returned to hies vigil at the front of the cave thinking how unlikely it would have been that Dex and Qes would have encountered one another. Hie racked hies memories, trying to remember if Dex had told himr where hie was going when hie left that morning.

  ***

  Allan, Ell’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) said, “You have a call from Kant Fladwami PhD., President Flood’s science advisor.”

  Ell stood up from the table where she and Roger had been looking at some of the components for the next TC3 rocket, “I’ll be back in a sec Rog’.” To her Allan, her AI she said, “Put him on. Yes, Dr. Fladwami?”

  “Hello, Ms. Donsaii. Chip Horton, my predecessor here in the President’s Science Advisor’s office suggested that I get to know you. Something about, ‘not knowing what you were doing’ being a frequent source of embarrassment.”

  Ell laughed, “I don’t think that’s really true, Doctor.”

  “Nonetheless I thought I’d check in to see if you had any new technology that was about to turn our entire economy upside down?”

  “No sir.”

  “Nothing exciting happening at D5R anymore?”

  “Well, exciting things are happening, but they shouldn’t really impact the economy.”

  Fladwami chuckled “Are you telling me I don’t have a ‘need to know?’”

  Ell laughed again, liking Fladwami a lot already. “I guess you could say that, Doctor.”

  “OK, the President also asked me to find out why nothing seems to be happening with putting your ‘ports’ into action out there in the real world. Our understanding from Horton was that you were going to try to slow down the release of that tech some so that there wouldn’t be too many economic upheavals. But we’re surprised that we don’t seem to be hearing anything about it so far?”

  “Uh, yes sir. Outgoing Transportation Secretary Bayless was vehemently opposed to the release of that tech, so the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has been refusing us licenses except for space portals so far. We’re hoping that the new Secretary will get them to loosen up a little. We’ve made all the applications as required and they haven’t told us that anything is wrong with the applications that we need to fix, just that ‘approval is pending.’”

  “Really?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well that’s just the kind of government interference with private enterprise that President Flood campaigned on. I’ll bring that to the Secretary’s attention for you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’ll let me know if anything else world changing is about to pop out of your labs?”

  “Yes sir. I may be calling to tell you about something that won’t change the economy, but is still scientifically important?”

  Fladwami raised his eyebrows. He wondered what that could be. “You do that… Next item on my agenda, the President has asked me to invite you to the White House for a personal meeting next week. Would you be able to come up?”

  “He’s my Commander in Chief. Of course I can come. Is there something in particular on the agenda that I should prepare for?”

  “No preparation needed. Would Thursday evening, dinner at the White House, 6:30 PM be satisfactory?”

  “Yes sir. Just show up?”

  “Well,” he laughed, “Wear something nice, the dinners tend to be formal.”

  “Yes sir.”

  ***

  Disconnected, Fladwami leaned back in his chair. It was hard to reconcile the respectful young voice on the other end of that call with what Horton—and he had to agree—had called ‘the greatest scientific mind in of the century.’ Well, Horton, had said ‘of all time,’ but Fladwami wasn’t sure about that yet. He shrugged, that might well be true too…

  ***

  Ell turned to go back to her Quantum Tech group but found Wilson Daster standing between her and the rest of the group. She raised her eyebrows. He said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  Ell closed her eyes. “You’ve found someone diddling the books?” she sighed.

  “Yeah.”

  She laughed hollowly, “Well, I guess this isn’t as bad as when you called to tell me that a comet was going to wipe all of us out?”

  “Not quite that bad, no.”

  ***

  Dex woke in the night to find the fire out. Hie heard snarling and snapping from the direction of the talor’s carcass. When hie got up, Syrdian’s voice came out of the stygian darkness, “Where are you going?”

  “To restart the fire.” Dex got up and felt around for the firewood. A meteor fireball streaked over, starkly lighting the area for a moment. With the wood and the fire’s locations fixed in hies mind hie quickly found several sticks and stirred through the fire until the motion activated a few coals. The sticks caught and Dex moved some more wood close by. Hie looked out into the darkness and saw the eyes of some nocturnal creature looking back at himr. Hie shivered and lay down, closer to the fire this time. After all he would have to add wood frequently.

  ***

  “OK,” Ell said, looking around. “The test ports still functioned after we sterilized them with chlorine dioxide. So each of us need to look over the plans again to be sure there are no cavities inside the TC3 rocket that are closed off, we want the chlorine dioxide to be able to get into every area. Dr. Norris, your ethanol-peroxide rocket engines are working fine. I’m confident that we’ve protected TC3 from Earth microorganisms. I’m still worried about backflow from TC3 to Earth, especially through the attitude jets that we usually just blow gas through. Firing and killing ethanol-peroxide rockets doesn’t happen fast enough to give us the fine control we’re used to for attitude.”

  Roger said, “I’ve been worrying about that too, and I have a suggestion that I think is doable with port tech?”

  They all turned to him. “You put a long pipe out in space through a port. I’m talking hundreds of meters. It has a port at one end that we put compressed air into from down here. At the other end you put a series of ports that go to
the attitude jets. Then we wrap the Earth end of the pipe with heating elements that we use to keep the 20 meters closest to earth at about 5000C. That is far, far beyond the temperature that any earth spores can survive at. Presumably it would sterilize any TC3 organisms too. So air flows in one end, gets heat sterilized in that first 20 meters, then flows down to the cold end of the pipe where it cools back down. Anything back-flowing through the port at the TC3 end would have to pass through the hot end before it could get back here to earth. You put the pipe into a decaying orbit around the sun so that, after we’re done with it, if it were contaminated with something bad, no one could pick it up and accidentally encounter any TC3 microorganisms.”

  Roger said, “We could ‘black’ the hot end and ‘mirror’ the cold end so that the sun would help us keep one end hot and the other end cool. I’d also suggest that we make it so that we can heat 40 meters when we’re expecting to use the jets and only 10 meters between jet uses. Then we can be sure that nothing from this end might move through the hot section so fast that it doesn’t get killed.”

  They added to the list of instruments they wanted on the rocket and finally included one of Ben Stavos’ mechanical arms and a port behind a glass window that they could shine light through at night or use to fire lasers through, ablating materials for spectroscopic analysis. That port was a double port with the intermediate section on the “space pipe” and filled with toxic gas.

  Wilson Daster suggested that every port to the TC3 rocket have an intermediary on the space pipe, if possible in the hot end.

  Eventually, happy with the design, they all divided up to order materials and design the machining of parts.

  Ell reluctantly headed back to the offices. Wilson caught up to her, “Do you want me to be the bad guy? I’ve done it before and I don’t know her like you do.”

  Ell looked at him, sorely tempted. “No. I actually don’t want people to know what your secondary task is. Don’t want them trying to ‘work around you.’ And, believe it or not, I might not fire her.”

  Daster’s eyebrows went up. “You’re kidding, she’s been stealing from you!”

  “She’s a great employee.” Ell shrugged, “I think she deserves a second chance.”

  “Okaaay.” Daster shrugged, “You’re the boss.”

  Ell knocked on Sheila’s doorframe and Sheila looked up saying brightly, “Come on in Bosslady.”

  Ell entered her office, closed the door and sat down, then she just stared at Sheila.

  A minute passed while the blood drained from Sheila’s face, then she crumpled, “I’m so sorry,” she gasped, “so sorry. I’ll be packed up in a minute.”

  Ell said, “What do you think I should do?”

  “You should call the police. I’m hoping against hope that you’ll settle for just firing me… I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I love working here. You’re paying me more than anyone else ever would. My shares…” She blinked rapidly, then grabbed for a Kleenex.

  Intently focused on Sheila Ell said, “I’ll bet this isn’t the first time?”

  Sheila blew her nose, “First time I’ve gotten caught.”

  “So if we fired you, you’d probably just wind up preying on your next employer.”

  “I hope not. Course, I probably,” she choked a little, “probably I wouldn’t be able to get another job.”

  “Sheila, you’ve been a great employee. Probably one of the most important people we’ve had to making all of D5R work. I don’t want to ruin your life. I don’t want to send you out there to prey on someone else. So I’m going to offer you a chance to stay here…”

  Sheila’s eyes widened and she stared at Ell.

  “But, I suspect you have a personality disorder that compels you to do these kinds of things. Will you seek treatment?”

  Sheila nodded spastically, gulping.

  “And you have to be aware now that we’ve got systems in place to catch you if you do it again?”

  Sheila nodded again.

  “And you need to return everything you took, plus 10%?”

  “I will, Thank you,” she whispered

  Ell nodded and got up. “I thought of you as a friend, and I still do. I hope you don’t make me regret this.”

  “No Ma’am.”

  When Ell got back to her office, Roger was waiting for her, “Hey, who shot your dog?”

  “Bein’ the boss shot my dog. Sometimes you have to make decisions that seem like they’re no win. Do you have another problem for me?”

  Roger grinned, “Nope, I’ve got an opportunity.”

  Ell closed her eyes momentarily, then opened them. “Power generation?”

  Roger narrowed his, “Yesss… What are you meaning by power generation?”

  “Your black pipes in close solar orbit. You want to squirt water in one end and harvest steam out the other end using ports, yes?”

  “Yeah! Did you have the same idea?”

  “Kinda. There are issues though. You know that there is a velocity limitation to how fast stuff can pass through a port right?”

  Roger smacked his forehead, “Damn! And the steam would be flowing too fast when it exited the pipe. Right?”

  “Right. Unless we have a really large diameter port for it to flow back through at a lower velocity, but then it’ll take a lot of power to energize the port.”

  Brow furrowing, Roger tilted his head back to stare up at the ceiling. “Wait! We could use a heat transfer fluid, like Therminol.” He brought his eyes back down to look at Ell.

  “Heat transfer fluid?”

  “Yeah, a fluid that wouldn’t boil at the temps we’re shooting for, say 340 degrees centigrade. Therminol is just one brand. We pump it through our black pipe in near solar orbit and back here to earth. The transfer fluid doesn’t boil at those temps so it doesn’t expand into steam and there’s no increase in velocity. Once it comes back here hot, we run the transfer fluid through a pipe in a water tank. The water boils into steam and powers our electric generator.” He sat back up and lifted a finger, frowning, then smiling, “Then, instead of just exhausting the steam into the atmosphere and heating the earth, we cool it against a second heat transfer fluid loop that we’ve cooled by running it through a pipe way out in deep space. That pipe radiates the heat away. We condense our steam, don’t heat the planet and save ourselves the cost of buying more water!”

  “Roger, that’s brilliant!”

  “Oh! And… we don’t just sell steam for power generation; we can use it for heat! And we can use the deep space pipes for air conditioning! Holy cripes! Talk about energy conservation! My God, this could solve a lot of problems!”

  Ell jumped up and gave him a hug. “Way to go Rog’!” She held him back out at arm’s length. “Way to go,” she whispered, her eyes getting a little misty as she looked up at Roger. Roger, her handsome, smart, “friendly boy.” The boy she loved but couldn’t seem to love. The boy she wanted Emma to have, but didn’t want to let go of, especially when he was having this moment of brilliance.

  Roger, not recognizing the tumultuous thoughts pouring through Ell’s mind, waggled his eyebrows, “Want to spin another company off D5R with me? We’ll be rich!”

  Ell looked wistfully at him another moment, then let go and sat down. “Yes, you will. I’d rather keep doing research rather than trying to be a commercial success. But I’ll wish you the best of luck and help you get started.”

  Roger looked like he’d been poleaxed, “No! I want to do it with you Ell!” He quirked the corner of his mouth, “I want us to be rich together. If this is an invention, it’s partly yours.”

  She looked wistfully at him then said, “I’d rather license my share to someone else so I can keep doing research.”

  Roger brightened, “OK, who?”

  “ET Resources for one, this is right up their alley.”

  “OK! Let’s go talk to them.”

  “First let’s get you some patent protection. And you should build a working model.”

/>   Chapter Three

  Morning found Dex huddled next to the fire with Syrdian crowded next to himr. Dex’s thoughts stumbled, remembering hies old fantasies of sleeping next to Syrdian. Hie thought about trying to snuggle even closer to Syrdian to “ward off the cold” but, fearing rejection, instead hie got up to put wood on the fire.

  A little later Syrdian tore into the pieces of talor hie’d rejected the evening before. Hies eyes widened, “This tastes better today.”

  “You’re hungrier today.”

  “No, really, I think something happened to it to make it better.”

  Dex shrugged hies wings in doubt and started taking the strips of dried meat off hies green withe frame over the fire and stuffing them in hies carry harness. When hies harness was full hie passed some to Syrdian.

  Syrdian frowned without taking it, “I don’t think I’m going to want to eat any of that. I’m pretty sure it’ll be too tough to be any good.”

  Dex stared at Syrdian disgustedly for a moment, then turned and thundered into the air, turning to head back to the cave. Hie couldn’t believe that hie’d ever found Syrdian desirable! Hie certainly wasn’t going to stay, at considerable risk to himrself, to help someone so incapable of recognizing hies dire situation or undertaking to try to save himrself. Dex assuaged hies guilt at leaving by thinking that hie could just turn this problem over to Syrdian’s parents. A niggling doubt told himr that hies parents couldn’t save Syrdian either. Dex had had crazy ideas about how to do it but hie doubted that anyone else would consider them.

  So, essentially hie was leaving Syrdian to hies death. Even if Syrdian couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize that.