Warp Speed

by Travis S. Taylor

  I wiped my hands off on my Kiss the Physicist Please apron and then planted my hands on each side of her face. "I love you," I told her, then kissed her again. Then the hamburgers flared up and I had to attend to the grill. I never did get a margarita.

  CHAPTER 21

  The wedding planning had gone off without a hitch. The girls had decided it would be best to have it in the big nondenominational church downtown. Tabitha somehow pulled some strings and managed to get us in on such short notice. She spread the rumor that the NASA Administrator, Secretary of Defense, and the Vice President were on the invitation list. Things started happening. Of course, I'm not sure that Tabitha hadn't really gotten an R.S.V.P. from any of their offices, but it was a good ploy one way or the other. Imagine my surprise when not only were they there, but they were seated next to the President himself.

  Jim was my best man and Al and Calvin and my brother stood up with me. The bridesmaids were Sara, 'Becca, and an old flight school buddy of Tabitha's, Colonel Margie Finest. Anne Marie stood beside her as her maid of honor. The men were wearing charcoal tuxedos with tails except for my brother, who wore his dress blues. The ladies all wore long slender sky blue gowns, except for Anne Marie and Colonel Finest, of course, who were both in their Air Force dress blues. Tabitha, not being General Ames at the moment, of course was wearing white. She sported a long white form-fitting backless gown with lace trim covering the chest and open cleavage and a train that had to be carried by two flower girls. Fortunately, a cousin of mine had two twin youngsters who fit the bill perfectly.

  I was a nervous disastrous mess! I fumbled over the words that the preacher had me follow and even put the ring on Tabitha's wrong hand. She changed it without anybody ever noticing. She was cool as a cucumber, her typical head-astronaut-what-be-in-charge self. I had never been more in love. Eewww God this is mushy. Sorry. Weddings are like that.

  The President and his entourage stayed just long enough to let Tabitha salute him. He saluted her back smartly, then shook my hand and whispered to me, "Good luck son!" Not real sure if he was talking about with Tabitha and marriage or about protecting the world and living on the Moon. Either one was a daunting task. I couldn't wait to get started on both, but the Moon was just going to have to wait tonight.

  "Thank you, Mr. President!" I should have swelled with pride but I didn't. But as he walked away and Tabitha hugged and kissed me, I sure enough did.

  The reception was at Tim's place. He shut down the place and catered to Tabitha's every whim. There were shrimp cocktails, raw oysters on the half shell, and crawfish in a cajun remoulade sauce as appetizers. We had a choice of blackened trout or chicken as the entre, each with appropriate sides. The wedding cake was typical in shape and three tiers high. The only unusual part was that somebody had the idea of putting two action figures in spacesuits on top of the cake instead of a bride and groom. Fortunately, they had the foresight to paint one of them the same color as my tuxedo. My guess was that they got the action figures from the Space and Rocket Center.

  The groom's cake was the shape of a Space Shuttle. The first layer looked like the External Tank with the two Solid Rocket Boosters attached. The second layer was the Orbiter itself. There were miniature beer cans on a string tied behind the Orbiter and "Just Married" was iced on the wings of the Orbiter and on each Solid Rocket Booster. It looked cool. I hated to have to cut it. We got plenty of pictures.

  Somehow, Tim or Tabitha or somebody, had managed to get my favorite local band to play the reception. We had a good crowd of forty or fifty people who partied on through until about two in the morning when the band finally quit. At one point, 'Becca, Sara, and Anne Marie got up and sang with the band. It was a hoot, an absolute hoot!

  Nobody ever asked who the gentlemen in the suits standing in the corner were. Those of us who knew they were security didn't let on. Everybody else just thought they were part of the other family that they hadn't met. After having the President's entourage in town, seriously, nobody paid any further attention. Besides, everybody was real drunk.

  A week later, we were back in Roswell planning our massive Exodus to the Moon. We weren't in a big hurry this time. So, we decided to take a little better detailed care in designing the facility now that we had time to do so. Along with the trailer park, we had permanent homes constructed. We now had more power with the modifiable warp field and the flubell ECCs. So, we planned a much larger facility. The central dome would be seven hundred meters now instead of three hundred. There would be two other domes three hundred meters in diameter for the manufacturing plant and the lab. We would have much more space.

  The trailer park would be for temporary and short-term visitors as well as crew bunks for the noncommissioned military men and women. We decided to allow the main science and engineering core a twenty by twenty-five meter area for housing and yard. The houses could be as tall as desired up to three stories above the surface. Each of these residences were then allowed five meters on each side between houses and a ten meter by ten meter back yard and a five meter deep front yard. A small two-meter diameter window would be placed over each residence. Each of the windows would be tinted to act as the atmosphere on Earth does for filtering harmful sunlight. The windows would be cycled with the rest of the facility to allow night and day. Forty-eight, three story houses were built with privacy fences. Tabitha and I picked out our interior and house design and so did Jim and 'Becca. Our two houses were adjacent at the end of one of the cul-de-sacs. Those lots were twice as big. There were six cul-de-sacs off of Main Street. Main Street ran circumferentially about a hundred and twenty meters inside the dome. Each cul-de-sac had three houses on each side and two at the end or eight houses per street. Sara, Anne Marie, and Al were each given a house as well. They were on the same street. We named our street Warp Drive. Hey, if we were all going to be living on the Moon for the rest of our lives, it had better be comfortable. I soon found out that Colonel Finest would be living on our street also. Somebody had managed to get her transferred to the Special Group WW as we were now being called. The WW stood for Warp Weapons and I just wondered who got Margie transferred. There was a saying filtering around us that if you think that Group W was crazy, you ought to see Group W squared.

  We all visited the town site in Georgia at least once a week to make sure things were going as planned. Things were going well. At the same time, we were constructing new flubell based ECCs and new modifiable warp field generator coils. We contracted out to a small aerospace company to build several aerodynamic spaceframes from lightweight composite materials. The frames looked like miniature Orbiters but a little sleeker and a little more aerodynamic. The little spacecraft were designed to accommodate about eight people very comfortably. They even had a space-qualified standard restroom and shower facility. We had five of the vehicles constructed. Tabitha and Margie flew the first one during its drop test out at Dryden. It performed beautifully. Tabitha said it flew a lot easier than the Shuttle Orbiter during its glide path. Margie said it handled like a cargo jet. But I guess that is about how the Shuttle Orbiter feels. You'll have to ask Tabitha. I told them that it would for sure fly easier when we retrofitted it with a warp core and she could vertically take off and land. And oh by the way, fly faster than the speed of light. "After all," I told them, "it's bound to fly better than the Roswell facility and it flew pretty damn good!"

  Upon delivery of the last spaceframe, the first two warpships were completely retrofitted and ready to fly. Tabitha, Jim, 'Becca, Anne Marie, Margie, and myself test drove one of them to the far side of the Moon. We picked out a nice spot for Moon Base 1 and marked it by using the spacecraft to dig a big X in the lunar surface.

  Tabitha spent the trip back at a slower pace. It took a couple of hours. She used this pace to train each of us how to fly the little warpships. Then we each got a turn landing them at the Roswell facility. It turned out that Annie was a natural born pilot, go figure. That apple didn't fall far from the tree did it? By the end of the
day we were all checked out and Tabitha gave each of us the go ahead to pilot the ships by ourselves. However, all flight plans had to be approved by her or Margie first. After all, they were the two most experienced pilots we had available. Tabitha had thousands of hours including in space and Margie was a test pilot instructor from the National Test Pilot School.

  Jim, Al, and Margie spent the next couple of days digging holes and tunnels in the far side of the lunar surface. About six months later, the town was completed. All the construction was kept to simple slab and sticks with very comfortable interiors. The town had its own power plant of flubell ECCs, a power grid, and modifiable warp field generators. When it was complete, we simply ripped it out of the ground: houses, trailers, streets, trees, vegetable garden, lake and beach equipped with volleyball net, birds, bees, cats, post office, water tower and purification plant, waste recycling plant, air handlers and scrubbers, electric buggies, mountain bikes, food storage facility and country store (although Tabitha called it the PX), one beach bar and grill, and a shitload of other stuff. At the last minute we added a full court concrete slab with poured rubber surface basketball court. The court was flanked on each side with outdoor aluminum bleachers. We also added a martial arts school and fitness training center equipped with a full complement of machines and weights. There were picnic areas in the trees and near the beach. And we added a gazebo here and there for aesthetics. We also made certain that there was enough room for a school building and football field. Sara named it "Force Field." With about a hundred employees planned, it is possible that we would have enough for two or three intramural teams. All of these people might have kids or need to do distance training. We added a library to the school and filled it with books, periodicals, and technical journals. It was one of the best technical libraries ever assembled. We would definitely use that. The library also had a full print shop and electronic database. Our goal was to do most stuff electronically so we wouldn't need much paper. But, I still like to print documents out to read them, though.

  We were thinking way into the future when one day we might have a complete society living there. Nobody questioned our budget line so we spent as much money as we could on anything we could think of.

  Then we warped all of it to the Moon. I flew the town while Jim and Al came in over the top and covered it up with lunar soil. I then oscillated the Town's outer warp field and hardened the dome around it. It took several more weeks to install all of the windows. We had to run flame pots and heaters and oscillate the warp field some to maintain temperature until the windows were in place. The next week or two involved moving the manufacturing facility and lab that had been constructed at other secret locations. They took a week or two to completely install at Moon Base 1 also. Then we installed the landing strip and docking facility. With all construction complete we did a lights-off lights-on maneuver to encompass the complete Moon Base in one warp bubble. Then we turned the periphery bubbles off.

  Everything was finally complete and people began moving in. Jim and I had the idea of building a mountain bike trail around the Town, Lab, and Plant. We cut trails inside the domes on the outer circumference and then used a small warp bubble to cut switch back trails alongside and up and over (or down and under in some cases) the tunnels that connected the various domes. We added a couple of whoops and a few doos. We even stuck in a "hellacious up hill" and a "screaming elevator shaft down to hell." We put up historical markers explaining that this was "the first mountain bike trail in space don't ride when raining." The trail was wide enough to ride two-up and was roughly two and three-quarter miles long. We put fluorescent lighting all through the trails that were in tunnels and we planted grass, weeds, and flowers. Since the trails were within the Moon Base warp field they were at one gee everywhere. We worked on the trail during our spare time and it only took us about a month to complete it.

  We spent a month or two moving in and slowly developed a routine. Occasionally we would slip back to Earth to pick up more supplies and beer. But for the most part, we lived and worked at Moon Base 1 and seemed to always have to send someone back to Earth for beer and pretzels.

  Our first technical priorities were to improve detection capabilities, invent new warp technologies that would enable new methods of warfare, develop new intelligence gathering abilities, and to develop transportation capabilities. It was a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time brainstorming and testing these new ideas. One of the ideas that I had was a bulletproof force field. If we could design an ECC and Van Den Broeck bubble generator that was light enough, foot soldiers could wear them as armor. Tabitha suggested that they could replace spacesuits also. We just needed to figure out how to replenish oxygen.

  After brainstorming the personal warp field concept a while, I began to see many possibilities for it. A personal warp field could be used to enhance strength if the control system for the bubble was designed to react to movements inside the field. The personal warp system would also enable the individual to warp himself around or fly. This could be the first possible design for a Supersuit. We put this concept on the to-do list, even if it was five or more years off.

  We had already developed warp cranes and float tables to enable us to move heavy stuff around. These would have been useful for the disaster relief if the public could have been told about them.

  I was also thinking about a technique of using the warp field to create a giant gravitational lens that could be used as the primary objective for a telescope. If we could warp spacetime hard enough to create a short focal length lens that was kilometers in aperture diameter, we could see freckles on an ant's ass from the moon. Or we could image planets around other stars. This gave me an idea about the Solar Focus, but we can talk about it later.

  And of course, there was always the original reason for my designing the warp drive. Interstellar space travel! I indeed planned to do this soon. In fact, Tabitha and I were planning a trip to Mars real soon to test out the speed of our little warpships. We had yet to prove that we could go superluminal. But there was no doubt in my mind it would soon be done.

  By the way, I never really talked about the effect our Secret War had on Earth. With the wedding, our one-week honeymoon that we spent on my couch in Huntsville, and building and moving into Moon Base 1, I tried not to dwell on it. The last estimate of dead was somewhere around sixty-five million Americans, one hundred million Chinese, forty-seven million Russians, and two hundred thousand North Koreans. There were countless acres of forests and wildlife destroyed. Last count was three hundred or more species of animals and insects were now extinct. It was estimated that the damage was in the trillions of U.S. dollars. The three hypercanes caused by the Warp Weapon impacts pumped a tremendous amount of dust and moisture into the upper atmosphere. And there was talk of the subsequent moderate greenhouse effect causing higher coastal waters and much larger tropical regions for the next hundred or more years. Like Huntsville wasn't hot and humid enough already. Now it would be like beach weather without the beach. Oh, there was some talk about "nuclear winter" kinds of nonsense and ice ages and other things, but none of that really panned out scientifically. Just our weather was a little more erratic is all.

  But don't worry. Humans are quite resourceful. We will survive this and in fact thrive again in no time. I feel bad about all the damage and especially about the lost lives. However, and I'm not just trying to justify myself here, the Earth is becoming a better place now. China finally had to really open its borders to Western business or it was going to starve to death. The destruction of most of the Russian government destroyed a lot of their organized crime problem since most of the crime bosses were government officials. The Russian people asked us for help. So we moved in and helped them prop themselves up and clean up their act a little. Europe joined in to help since they were least affected. Although there was no longer a Germany, the rest of Europe was trying to help. Interestingly enough, no governments tried to take advantage of the situation. Also, the stock exchan
ge was unfrozen a few weeks ago. World trade is back to normal or much better. Again there was some initial concern about global climate changes causing mass crop failures and global starvation. And once again this was mostly junk scientists making noise to get themselves on television. All of that original Carl Sagan nuclear winter nonsense continued to rear its ugly head--idiots. I wanted to strangle some of the fools I saw on TV bitching about the coming ice age and the end of the world. Tabitha eventually convinced me that I just had to let it go.

  One thing that really bites me in the butt is that not long after the Secret War a damned group of Islamic Jihad fools car-bombed the American Embassy in Kuwait. Then they claimed that the meteors were due to us being the infidel and some other nonsense. About fifteen Americans were killed and a few from other countries. And we didn't do a damned thing! For now the world still depended on oil so we had to let those fools act as they had for thousands of years. Like fools.

  I vowed that day that I was going to design a less efficient and less explosive energy collection dumbbell that we could leak into mainstream technology. If these weaker dumbbells generated only a millionth of the energy that the flubells do, the Middle East would be out of business in no time. Then we wouldn't have to put up with the bastards. I put Sara to work on the new dumbbell design. Jim was more than happy to volunteer to help her. Tabitha and I went to work on a plan to leak the technology.

  The American way of life barely made it through the Secret War. We got lucky in a lot of respects. Tabitha and I talk about it every now and then. We both agree that neither of us would have thought of another way to defend against the final Chinese/Russian assault in time. If 'Becca hadn't been infected by that damn flubell virus, the outcome could have been a lot different. We might could have escaped with the partial Clemons Dumbbell ECC we had but who knows? I don't like thinking about how lucky we really were. Tabitha tells me that I think about "what-ifs?" way too much. I think she is right. We survived, America prevailed, the human race will continue.