Rocket! An Ell Donsaii story #4)

by Dahners, Laurence

  “Can they be traced back to us?” the man across the table rumbled in Mandarin.

  “Not a chance.”

  “There’d better not be.”

  ***

  Washington D.C.—NASA admitted today that they have had the astronauts at the space station go onto two thirds rations. They’ve also had them stop exercising or exerting themselves in order to decrease oxygen consumption — “as a precaution in case the Chinese mission to the station encounters problems…”

  Ell looked around the table at their 10 AM morning meeting. After talking to the police and cleaning up after the break in she hadn’t gotten back to the farm until 4AM. She’d slept in to 7 in order to get her customary 3 hours of sleep. Allan had brought her up to date during her drive to D5R. She cleared her throat, “The men inside the building had been paid a lot of money. But it had been put in offshore accounts and after they moved the money to their own accounts, those offshore accounts were closed. So far we can’t trace the money. They never met their handlers wearing their AIs so no records there either. They claim their handlers were disguised when they met them.

  “Though the gate guard claims he was attacked, the nervous twitches on the last few moments of his AI record suggest that he was trying to avoid looking behind him so that they could sneak up behind him. They held a gun to his head and made him say, ‘Open the door.’ Then they tied him up and carried his AI to the front door so that it could handshake with the AI inside. They opened the door using the recording of him saying to ‘open the door.’ The guard’s AI wasn’t a very sophisticated model so it didn’t detect the stress in his voice. In actuality however, there wasn’t all that much stress, suggesting that he expected the entire thing.

  “The gate guard hadn’t moved any large sums of money into any onshore accounts, so we don’t have proof that he was bribed too.” She sighed, “The police think it was a large corporation undertaking some industrial spying. On the other hand, it may have been the Chinese working with local assets, they’ve attempted to kidnap me several times in the past.”

  Stephen Black, one of Fred Marsden’s assistants, had been getting more and more wide eyed. He exclaimed, “My God! This is crazy! What the Hell would have happened if one of us had been here working late when those guys broke in?”

  Ell sighed, “I don’t know. Hopefully nothing since they were apparently here after the tech, not the people, but we can’t be sure.”

  Black said, “Why would they want our tech? We haven’t discovered anything new! All we have here is equipment you can buy from most scientific suppliers!”

  “You’re right of course. They may be hoping that we’ve had more luck than we have.” She looked around the group “D5R’s investors realize that most of you hired on with no intention of getting into anything that might be dangerous, so D5R has asked me to offer you all the opportunity to exit your contracts. With a half year’s salary bonus as thanks for your work so far. Of course I personally would like it if you stayed on but this wasn’t what you signed up for.”

  Black said, “A half year’s pay? For doing nothing? I’m taking that!” He got up and started for the admin offices. Carol got up too. “Sorry Ell, but I want out. I’ve got kids to worry about.” She got up and followed Stephen.

  Ell had begun to despair. Is everyone going to leave?! She looked around the rest of the group. They all looked pretty calm. “Anyone else want out?”

  They all shook their heads.

  She smiled, “Thanks team. I’m glad to still have you aboard. You’ll find a danger bonus of three month’s salary in your next deposit for staying around.”

  The team all looked at one another in surprise, then Viv led a small round of applause.

  “Now,” Ell raised her eyebrows, “what can you tell me about our progress while I was in Colorado. Have we successfully entangled tori? Can we assemble buckyballs at speed yet? Is Brian’s idea of spraying buckyballs all around the opening going to work?”

  Ben grimaced, “No joy on the buckyball assembler. It looks like we might, with further optimization, get the assembly of a 10mm port down to 3 months. Not very good.”

  Ell shrugged, “If that’s all the faster we can make them, then that’s how we’ll have to make them. It’ll just make them a lot more precious than I had hoped.” She looked at Marsden.

  Fred just shook his head disconsolately. “Can’t seem to get full tori of any size to stay entangled when we separate them, sorry. I’d say, ‘so far’ except I don’t have any other ideas to try. Maybe one will come to me.”

  Brian said “I’ve put together a micro-sprayer jet and Fred has provided an entangler that can supply entangled buckyballs at an extremely high rate for the jet. The jet uses turbulence to separate the entangled buckyball pairs and sprays the edges of two disks, intended to become the two ports while the discs rotate their edges together under it. We’ll have lots of entangled pairs landing with both members of the pair on one port instead of one member on each port like we want. Also Fred thinks the turbulence will break the entanglement of about seventy percent of the pairs. But, if you’re right that it might work as long as we have a lot of correctly separated pairs, it might work. We’ll be putting millions of entangled buckyballs per mm on the edges of the ports. We should be ready to attempt a test run this afternoon.”

  “Great! Think positive!”

  That afternoon Ell watched as the inkjet Brian had set up sprayed the buckyballs, looking for all the world like soot, onto the edges of two 5mm diameter metal disks as they rotated beneath it. Ell’s stabilizing field was already established on the disks so the pairs that were correctly entangled when they landed should stay entangled. Between pairs that both landed on one disc and pairs that lost entanglement they only expected about 10% total efficiency but they were spraying so many that Ell thought it might still work. There weren’t any calculations she’d been able to do to determine whether or not it would.

  After a couple rotations under the sprayer the edges of the disks looked pretty black. Brian turned off the jet and popped them off the machine, handling them carefully so as not to break the circuits maintaining the fields. Ell shifted the field strength so that it would energize a port. In theory it should have taken about 60 watts to energize a 5mm port but due to inefficiencies Ell had to pump in about a hundred watts. As Brian moved one port around, Ell looked into the other one. With rising excitement she saw what appeared to be shifting light patterns in the stationary port she was watching. Brian turned his port down toward the floor and Ell put a drop of water onto the port she was holding. She held her breath.

  Water dripped out of Brian’s port and onto the floor! A cheer went up, then vehement applause and even a couple of shrieks. Ben was hopping up and down. Ell gave a couple of fist pumps then said, “Allan, ask Sheila to break out the champagne and invite everyone at D5R in for a celebration!” She turned to the group, “Hook it up to the piping and let’s pour some more stuff through it!”

  The disks were inserted into pipes that had been designed to fit them tightly so that liquids and gasses could be put through the ports under pressure. Before the pipes were pressurized Ben insisted on pouring a dollop of champagne through the port and drank it with great relish. Brian had inserted another set of disks in the “printer” and set them to being “inked” as the group was calling it now. They closed off the “pipes” and blew pressurized air and water through them, Fred managing to turn the jet of pressurized water onto some of the “ball busters.” Then Ell insisted on holding the hi-jinks a minute or two so she could try sending liquid oxygen and then liquid hydrogen through the port. She held her breath, worrying that the ultra-cold would destroy the port but it held up! The port was heated by the waste heat from generating the field and the gases boiled from the warmth. But they transited the port without damaging it. Seeing this made Ell’s heart pound. “Brian, can you bring out the components of the ‘side project’ I’ve had you working on?”

  Brian nodded
and headed to his machine shop. A minute later he returned with a box of components which he set on the table.

  Excitedly Ell started picking up the parts in the box and laying them out on the surface of the big table. The happy babble around her quieted as one by one the team members turned to watch her lay out a number of metal tubes. She heard them speculating,

  “What is it?”

  “All those tubes. Some kind of plumbing project?”

  Ell laid a pointed cap at the left end and a conical device at the other, “A rocket?” someone asked.

  Ell grinned up at them, “Yep, a rocket.”

  Ben said, “Why a rocket? I thought we were going to replace rockets with instantaneous transfer of materials through ports to satellites and to the space station?”

  Ell smiled even more broadly. “Well, first we have to get our ports up to orbit where we want to transfer those materials, right? And before you say we can just send them up on the rockets that already go up there, think about why those rockets are so huge?” She looked around the group. “Right? Because they have to carry so much fuel! For the first part of the mission they are mostly just launching fuel for the next part of the mission. It’s horribly inefficient!”

  The group stared at her as they pondered her words.

  Fred scratched his head, “Are you thinking this little rocket,” he waved at the parts on the table, “because we can port it fuel, could make it all the way up to orbit?”

  Ell waggled her eyebrows, “All the way to the International Space Station!”

  Eyes widened around the group, someone said, “Then we could ‘port’ them supplies!”

  Ell said, “Yeah! So full speed ahead! I want to prepare a rocket that can get to the Station and deliver ports that we can supply the astronauts with. If the Chinese fail their supply mission we need to be ready as their backup. I’m sure you guys know that if the Chinese fail to deliver supplies the folks on the station are going to be in some very, very serious trouble. All their other backups have already failed. Like Epaulding said, ‘they are having the perfect storm of problems.’”

  “This is one of the most important things we may ever do and D5R is prepared to pay you guys triple time for any overtime you put in trying to make this work.

  “Now, this motor that Brian machined from specs off the web for a model rocket is supposed to burn hydrogen-oxygen and you’ll note that I’ve already determined that liquid hydrogen and oxygen will go through our ports without destroying the ports. So far, my plan is for us to figure out how to install one port into the hydrogen chamber and one into the oxy chamber of the rocket. We need someone to figure out how to be sure the airspace above us is clear. We need someone to work on calculating when to launch so that we have a short track to reach the Space Station. We need someone to work on what kind of ports should be in the body of the rocket and how the astronauts could get to those ports. Also what adaptors those ports should have on them in order to deliver oxygen and water etc. to the station. Brian, we need you to build a test stand for our rocket’s motor so we can be sure it will produce the expected thrust and will withstand long enough burns to get into space. We need a power source built in to the rocket that can energize the ports. Anyone think of anything else we need to do?” She looked around.

  Fred said, “I can put the ports into the chambers.”

  In a mad scramble people enthusiastically signed up for the tasks Ell had outlined and thought of several others.

  Ell said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Braun, but I’m not ready to tell you why we want to hire a rocketry expert until and unless you take the job. For the moment it is very confidential, and in fact would be confidential for some time after you took the job. I’ve made a ‘good faith’ deposit to the account we agreed on so you can be confident of one year’s salary if you take the job.” She saw him glance up at his HUD to confirm the deposit.

  “OK, Ms. Donsaii,” he said with a little exasperation, “I’ll take the job and I’ll agree to the confidentiality clause. Now do I get to talk to your boss?”

  She grinned at him, “You are talking to the boss.”

  He looked askance at her, “Come on! I mean someone who understands your rocketry needs.”

  “That’d be me.”

  “Okaaay, when do you want me to start?”

  “Right now. I want you to assume that we have a rocket motor capable of producing essentially the same thrust as a hydrogen-oxygen motor but not needing to carry propellant.” She paused a moment for him to digest this. “We want to launch…”

  He interrupted. “I’m sorry Ms. Donsaii, but that just isn’t possible…” he stopped when he saw her smiling enigmatically at him.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to find us doing several impossible things, Mr. Braun. For now, just make the assumption. I’m sure you’ll immediately realize that this means we can launch small rockets to orbit because we don’t have to carry huge quantities of fuel. While you’re on your flight here we’d like you to be thinking about how to best put this capability to use.”

  His eyes widened, “You want me to fly out for an interview? I thought that was what we had just completed?”

  “No, we want you to fly out here to work. Today. D5R is paying you starting right now. Therefore, we want you to immediately begin thinking about how to use these rocket engines.”

  “But then I’d just need to fly back to get my stuff packed up!”

  “We’ll have someone pack and move everything in your house, after you’ve arranged housing here. They’ll also sell your house in Florida for you, should you so desire. You just pack what you need for a couple of weeks into some suitcases and start your trip here.”

  “But, but, I can’t…”

  “Don’t tell me you can’t. If you can’t, you aren’t the man we want to hire. We’ll pay you double time, 24 hours a day until your stuff arrives from Florida but we want you here this afternoon and working on the project this evening. We’re under huge time pressures. My AI has found you a flight that leaves in three hours and has made you reservations.”

  He looked stunned, then apparently gathering resolve he said, “OK. I’ll be there.” He signed off.

  Ell looked up. Roger and Brian Short stood in her door. “We’re ready to run the rocket in the test stand if you want to watch.”

  She jumped up, “Wouldn’t miss it!”

  As they walked out Roger said, “I’ve been looking into small rocket design. The engine you have on this thing is bigger than it needs to be?”

  Ell said, “Yeah, but it’s going to be running a lot longer than model sized rockets normally run. A rocket this size usually runs out of fuel in a minute or less. If you run them for very long the heat can melt or burn the nozzle, which is sometimes facetiously called an ‘engine rich exhaust.’” she grinned. Our nozzle has ducts in it. The liquid hydrogen is supposed to run through the ducts to cool the nozzle before the hydrogen gets burned. Also, Brian made this nozzle from a tungsten alloy that should hold up to the heat for quite a while—but I figure we need to be sure. So we’re going to run it a little below max efficiency which will keep it cooler. We have temp sensors in it so we can turn it down or off for a while if it gets too hot but I want to run this test right now using a long enough burn to reach orbit to see if it can do it.”

  Brian had set up the test stand in the building’s chemical reaction safety room. This was a preexisting room from the building’s QemZ owners. It had thick concrete walls and excessive ventilation in case a dangerous chemical reaction went bad. The group stood outside the heavy glass windows as Brian fired up the motor. Even through the thick concrete they could hear the motor howling. Ell ran it up to 100% then backed off to 80% and let it run. The thrust was about 3% less than expected for the design they had modified from the net but the nozzle cooling appeared to be working. The thermal probe read within acceptable limits but the infrared cameras showed a few hot spots on the nozzle. After a couple of minutes everyone became bored. Some
wandered away and others began chatting.

  The sound of the rocket engine had faded to a distant irritation when it ceased with a bang. Ell looked back through the window into the room and saw that the rocket nozzle had pretty much disappeared. Flames from the tubing stopped as Allan shut off the ports. The small tanks containing the ports and the remainder of the tubing appeared to be intact. In a minute Brian had the video of the rocket’s last seconds playing on the screen outside the room. On the screen the video showed the nozzle was white hot in many areas just before it disappeared between one frame and the next. Brian looked up at her. “It lasted 3 minutes, which my AI has calculated wouldn’t be enough to get it to orbit. It sure isn’t as long as I’d hoped for.”

  Ell clapped him on the shoulder. “Probably pretty good for rocket amateurs, I’d say! But you’re right, we’ve got to do better.” She turned to the group, “And soon, any ideas?”

  Roger said, “Instead of using the liquid hydrogen fuel as a coolant, why not just add a separate port to send coolant through, that way you could send a lot more…”

  Ell clapped a hand to her forehead, “My God, of course! We have to break old thought patterns. The ports change everything! We can put a water jacket around the engine and feed water into it. It could be blown out as steam and even add to the thrust! Or we could burn something that doesn’t generate as much thrust and therefore as much heat because we can use more of it!” She looked up at the ceiling a moment, “I vote for burning hydrogen-oxygen that converts to steam and cooling with water which converts to steam. That way our exhaust will only contain water and there won’t be any concern about toxic products.” She looked around the group, many of whom were nodding.