Warp Speed

by Travis S. Taylor

  "Stop!" I yelled.

  Every person present looked on in awe. I said, "Hell yes! That was awesome." Jim applauded and whistled. Rebecca fell to the floor gasping for air, her mouthpiece falling to the floor as she threw her headgear off.

  "That was impressive! You rock!" Alisa cheered and clapped.

  I had never seen anything like that outside of a movie. I seriously doubted that I ever would again. I guess that I should mention that Rebecca did her undergraduate schooling on a cheerleading and gymnastics scholarship at Auburn University. She still tumbles every now and then at the karate studio, just to show off I think. Keri helped drag a gasping 'Becca to the side of the rings and Bob organized another fight. After about three more rounds it was all over. Everyone had passed.

  An hour later we were sitting around a table at one of our favorite sports bars just off of University Drive. We were on our second pitcher of beer, waiting for our food. Bob and I talked about when I would be back in class and if I thought I could compete next month. I wasn't quite sure about either, so I lied about both. Eventually the conversation turned to the various topics that are covered after three pitchers of beer.

  "Who sang that song?"

  "Just how tall is the Empire State Building and what would happen if you dropped a penny off of it?" I actually make my freshman physics students work that one out every semester.

  "Don't be silly," I say to them. "A raindrop weighs about the same as a penny and they fall from as much as forty thousand feet high during thunderstorms. You ever see a raindrop crack the sidewalk?" Terminal velocity is tough for some people to grasp.

  And so the conversations continued. "If you were driving along at the speed of light and you turned your headlights on, what would you see?"

  "Could Jackie Chan whup Bruce Lee?"

  "Which Heinlein book was the best?"

  "Was Kirk, Picard, Sisco, Janeway, or Archer the coolest captain?" I always voted for "Q" myself, but didn't he always make himself an admiral?

  "Who was the best guitarist of all times?" No contest there. Hendrix, period, exclamation point.

  "Second best?" Stevie Ray Vaughn. Of course you can't discount Robert Johnson, George Thorogood, Jimmy Page, Joe Perry, Slash, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Ron Wood, Kirk Hammett, and that new kid, what's his name, and of course our local great, Microwave Dave. But there is an order of magnitude problem between second and third best that I'm sure the other guitarists would point out.

  A pitcher later and Tabitha came through the door. Rebecca waved at her and she joined us.

  "Did you call her or something?" I asked.

  "None of your business," she replied.

  'Becca introduced her while I tried to figure out just how I was supposed to react. The group accepted her willingly and didn't quiz her too hard about being an astronaut. Alisa asked her a question that I never really thought about.

  "Did you have to take some sort of self-defense stuff in the Air Force?"

  "We had some training, yes. I'm sure it wasn't as involved as what I hear all of you do."

  I responded to that, "Well, none of us have ever flown a Space Shuttle, either." She seemed to like that remark. I seemed to recall having used it the first time I met her. Maybe I just thought I did. That day is still pretty fuzzy.

  Our food finally got to the table. Well, mine almost did. Some crazy drunk guy in the middle of a story made a big hand gesture and knocked my plate right out of our waitress's hand. I laughed at first, until I realized it was my food. It all went downhill from there.

  I slept in a little Monday morning and got to the lab about eleven. Tabitha was coming by after her Space Camp thing later that evening to see our experiments. I spent some time explaining it to her, but without seeing it, it's hard to explain. Rebecca and Jim were already in the warp bubble experiment lab setting it up. We had never figured out why the electrons had completely disappeared on us, although, the experiment is actually kind of simple. There's a one-and-a-half-meter-long glass tube with an electron gun attached at one end. The tube has huge electromagnets situated along it to steer, accelerate, and focus the electrons. The other end of the tube is a larger vacuum chamber in the shape of a cube about a half meter on a side. In the middle of the chamber is a misshapen toroidial superconductor with coils around the upper and lower half--the device looked kind of like a squished and twisted donut with thousands of wires wrapped around it in random looking fashion. A few centimeters away is a second misshapen toroidial superconductor with similar coils around it. A high current is set up moving counterclockwise in the first toroid and clockwise in the other and a rather complex alternating current function is set up in the coils. It's in the region between the two toroids that the spacetime metric should change to allow for the warp bubble--if the field strength is large enough, and if the theory is correct, that is. We based the field shapes on approximations to the Einstein equations and numerical solutions, but there still hasn't been any real closed solution discovered. If I could only have that dream again, maybe I'd figure it out.

  All the apparatus is inside a clear plastic sphere that has electron detectors deposited on the inner surface of the sphere. This way electrons scattered at any angle could be detected. The problem is that you can't see the experiment because of the detectors--there are so many of them and they're all in the way from an outside viewer's standpoint. So, we modified the sphere by drilling a few holes here and there between the electron detectors and placed tiny CCD cameras in them. We sealed the holes around the camera connections with epoxy and vacuum sealant--that was an ordeal within itself. Now we could rerun the experiment and actually see what was happening inside the sphere. Some of the cameras are for ultraviolet, some for infrared, and some for visible wavelengths. We hoped that would shed some, ahem, light on the problem.

  Jim and 'Becca had completed the modifications early and now had the chamber pulling down to a vacuum. That would take several hours. In the meantime we decided to have a bull session about the next step for the energy collectors.

  "There has to be a way to make them more efficient or smaller."

  "Well, smaller is really out, Anson. We're at state-of-the-art and then some right now!" Rebecca said.

  "Maybe there's a way to increase the surface area of the Casimir effect regions," was Jim's input.

  "That would increase the efficiency all right. Any ideas, 'Becca?" I asked.

  "I dunno?" She shrugged. "The most efficient use of surface area is a sphere, but how the heck can we use that?"

  "That's it! Why didn't I think of that?" I went to the whiteboard and started drawing.

  "What's it?" Jim asked.

  "Well, instead of plates for pistons we use hollow spheres. One inside the other. Like this." I drew a large circle, which is a two-dimensional sphere, then a smaller circle inside it. Then I erased a portion of the larger circle and drew a rod from the smaller circle through the hole in the larger one and extended the rod a little. I drew the same thing on the other end of the rod.

  "The question is, how do we support the rod and keep the inner spheres from touching the outer ones." I tugged at my lip for a second and realized that I was chewing on the end of the marker cap.

  "Maybe we can do it this way." Rebecca took another marker and drew squiggly lines to represent springs from the rod. She drew two springs on top and two on bottom of the rod at equal distances from its center.

  "But what about collecting the energy. How do we do that?" I asked.

  This time Jim figured it out. "Easy. Just make the rod a magnet and we put a coil around the rod. Voila, we have a generator!"

  "Could this work?" I thought aloud. I did some quick math on the board and showed that the surface area was an order of magnitude greater, hence making the energy collection that much greater. "The efficiency of this coil idea might even be better than the plates configuration. This might be win-win. Can you guys make it?" I looked at them hopefully.

  "We'll figure it out!
I don't think it's more complicated than that guitar we made you for Christmas," Rebecca said with excitement and confidence in her voice.

  They had made me a guitar that was about one micron long for Christmas the previous year. The darn thing actually played, but you had to have a microwave receiver to "hear" it. Of course, we could never figure out how to chord the thing. It was one of the neatest Christmas presents I had gotten since Sadie Jo Livingston kissed me at the fifth grade Christmas party at Priceville Elementary.

  Jim and 'Becca went off to the nanotech lab to work on the energy collector. I went to my office to catch up on some emails. My colleague Matt had sent me a note wanting to know why I hadn't called him since Goddard. I wrote a quick response back telling him that I was overwhelmed with work and that I would get with him in a week or so. After finishing up about a million emails, I decide to catch up with Mom. After all, I owed her a call or two.

  Nothing new had happened. Dad had caught a nine-pound bass down by "the pump house" and my twelve-year-old nephew who was with him netted the thing. It was the highlight of their summer. They put up a picture at the local country store of my nephew holding the fish. Grandma was still claiming to be deathly ill. Oh and by the way her eighty-second birthday was coming up. My brother was probably going to be reactivated and sent back to the Middle East. He was in the Air Force Reserve. My first cousin's twin girls turn five next week. Don't forget to call them. And when am I going to come visit them again?

  Anybody who has parents has had that conversation, as Carl Sagan might have said, "billions upon billions" of times. I guess I had rather have the conversations than not have the parents. Small price to pay, don't you think?

  I hung the phone up finally after, "Yeah, uh huh, no I have to get back. No. Yep, uh, I don't know. Okay then, I will see you soon. Yeah. No. Maybe, soon. All right. We will see y'all later. Naw. I don't know. Yes. Okay then. All right then. Nope. Okay I gotta go. Yep. Uh, maybe. Uh huh. All right, we'll talk to you later. Okay I gotta go. Bye. Unh huh, love y'all too. Okay bye now."

  "Now back to work," I muttered to myself. I got my notes out and started looking over the tensors for the metric we were using in the current configuration. There are just too many equations so I ran the tensor math package on my computer. There were nearly too many for that thing, even at six hundred gigahertz. I tweaked a few equations here and there and set the calculations in motion. It would be an hour or so before they were through, so I decided to see how the kids were doing.

  I put my paper tux on and headed for the airlock. Jim was running some mechanical arms from the computer and 'Becca was looking through the eyepiece of a microscope giving Jim orders. This was funny because Jim could see everything she could from the computer monitor.

  "Damnit!" he said. "Do you want to drive?"

  "If you can't drive any better, I might need to."

  "Children, children, please be calm." I said. "Don't make me separate you two."

  "Boss," Rebecca began, "do you remember that thing you told me about too many chefs making the soup taste like crap?"

  "Point taken, 'Becca. I will just set over here and watch like a good televangelist." I sat down next to Jim and kept my mouth shut. Well, except when I was sniggering my ass off at the show.

  "Okay, 'Becca say when." What they were doing was loading various materials that would be vaporized and then deposited on a dielectric substrate. Jim could indeed see the objects as the materials began to deposit and adhere to the substrate but the contrast wasn't as good as through the phase contrast microscope 'Becca was using. He was waiting for her to tell him when the center portion of the wafer they were looking at had enough silicon--or germanium or gold or whatever they were depositing at the time--on it. Of course, 'Becca could probably eyeball it and get it right since she had done this so many times. But she also had a nanogram balance readout right in front of her to tell her when. The computer would do most of the etching and depositing once the design was drawn in the special CAD system they were using.

  "That's good Jim. When already!" She raised her voice to make the point.

  I sniggered again. Realizing the sensitive part was over; I figured that I could speak now.

  "Have you guys already drawn up the blueprints?"

  "Nah, we just thought we would load up the machine and get that out of the way. Here is what we have so far." Jim punched a few keys and a drawing not unlike the one on the whiteboard in the conference room popped up.

  Rebecca finished for him, "We still have to put in all the materials, thicknesses, and so forth, and so on, and so on."

  "And scooby dooby dooby," I sang. They just looked at me funny. I'm getting old. But I am still everyday people, by God!

  "Anybody ever told you just how weird you really are, Doc?" Rebecca asked.

  "My mom told me about thirty minutes ago." Of course I was lying. Mom may think it but she would never say it.

  "We're going to have to start having some sort of comic relief around here. Maybe like 'Punday' in those Spider Robinson stories. You guys are getting a little stiff," I said.

  "Stiff as that little super tool gadget," 'Becca said as she picked up a spider wrench sitting on the table. It was a cross-shaped tool like a miniature tire tool with a different size socket on each end of the cross. I'm sure she asked for it on purpose. She wielded it like a real cross. "Be gone, evil demon!" she said to me.

  Jim followed suit by singing just in time, "Here's to you, Mr. Robinson Anson thinks he's cool but he don't know. Woah, woah, woah."

  "Huh," I grunted.

  We were quiet for a few minutes as Jim spun up the centrifuge for a test. Then 'Becca asked, "Hey did you guys see the news last night? There was the strangest thing on about this murder."

  "No. I missed it. What about it," I asked.

  "Well, apparently some local materials engineer guy was working on this new fiberglasslike alloy that would be used for aircraft and spacecraft. He was working on it in his basement lab. The material was supposed to be like Kevlar but more modern, stronger and lighter. So anyway, this guy was mixing some of this stuff up in a big tub in his basement when he was attacked. There must have been a scuffle and the police said that at one point it looked like the engineer pushed his attacker's head into the tub of the not-yet-dry resin and fiber material. Unfortunately for the engineer, the attacker did get free of his hold and shot him. His wife came home from work and found him dead in the basement floor." She paused for a breath.

  Jim chimed in on cue, "Did they have any leads?"

  'Becca continued, "Well, the sketch artist and the forensic specialists examined the material in the tub once it hardened."

  "Hey, that is pretty cool and lucky." I was awed by our local police.

  "Yeah." 'Becca laughed. "They were able to make a really good composite drawing!"

  Jim added, "Yeah, he had made quite an impression!" She and Jim guffawed.

  "Okay, okay." I shook my head. "You got me. And I'm sure they will find out that the attacker was an out-of-work impressionist, and that forensics got all the evidence they needed from fibers found at the crime scene. And the analysis from the material stuck to the dead guy's hands led the coroner to believe that he had 'resin' from the dead." They simultaneously rolled their eyes and groaned in pain.

  "I'll let you guys get back to work." I laughed smugly. I left before they could top me. As I closed the airlock I thought about how proud I was for finding those two.

  My computer had finished its calculation by the time I had gotten back to my office. Three of the equations in the stress-energy tensor didn't converge to a solution.

  "Dangnabit! @$$%%&?!" Oh, well. I changed a few other things here and there and started it up again. It was about four-thirty in the afternoon--Tabitha would be here soon. I checked on the vacuum chamber and it was ready to go. I brought the warp experiment online and so I was ready whenever she was.

  She arrived at the lab about an hour later. By that time Jim and 'Becca were ab
out finished with the new energy collector. They left the computer running the manufacture of the prototype and joined us in the warp experiment lab.

  "Nice of you two to join us. How is the collector coming?" I asked.

  "It should be done in an hour or so," Rebecca guessed.

  "Good. Let's get to work here shall we? I already brought the system up. The electron gun is ready to go. All of the detectors are ready and the cameras are online," I assured everyone.

  Jim sat down at a computer and started firing up the warp field generators. In other words, he started increasing the current in the toroids and he turned the function generators on that are connected to the field coils.

  "Everything is ready. The fields are on," he said.

  "Rebecca, fire the electron beam."

  We all watched the detector monitors and the camera monitors with anticipation. A very bright blue light flashed on all of the camera monitors and nothing happened on the electron detectors.

  "What the heck was that?" Jim exclaimed.

  "Blue photons," 'Becca said smartly.

  "Why were there blue photons?" I rubbed my chin and thought out loud. "There's nothing in there for the electrons to react with. If they ablated some of the toroids away, the particle detectors would've measured that. What the heck is going on?" I scratched my head.

  Tabitha looked concerned.

  "It couldn't be Cerenkov radiation could it?" she asked.

  My brain did a double backflip. Of course! Cerenkov radiation!

  "'Becca hit the e-beam again!" I almost shouted. She flipped a couple of interlock switches and pressed the fire button. Again the blue flash! "Oh my God!" I grabbed Tabitha and kissed her right on the mouth. I turned and ran to the whiteboard and never looked back.

  It was so obvious! How could I not have thought of it before? Jim, Rebecca, and a slightly red astronaut filtered into the room. I hoped she was just blushing and not mad.