Radiation Hazard (The Stasis Stories #3)

by Laurence Dahners

  “Motors and controllers.”

  “What’s this weird thing on top?”

  “Periscopic camera.”

  Gunnar frowned, “Why’s it mounted on the front?”

  “So she can look down at obstacles on the floor.”

  “What if she’s having to back her way out of there and needs to see if there are any obstacles behind her?”

  “Crap,” Lee said, rolling back and folding her arms in front of her again. “I’m gonna need another camera.”

  “I’m pretty sure cameras are cheap compared to the molds for the rest of your design,” Gunnar said. He started opening the box he’d carried in with him. “I think these are the molds for the thermos and mugs you designed us.”

  “Oh!” Lee said turning with a gleam in her eye. “Let’s see!”

  The box did contain mirrored acrylic molds like Lee’s team at Space-Gen had used to form their rocket engine. It didn’t take long to cast the temporary inner Stade that’d form the cavity to hold the coffee. Then they stuck plastic spacer beads inside the outer mold and laid the temporary inner Stade inside the outer mold. Before stazing the actual thermos bottle, they filled it half full of water to give the finished product a little weight. Empty thermoses and mugs made out of air-density Stade seemed like they’d be hard to store in a cabinet. With their tendency to float around, they’d come tumbling out of the cabinet with the draft of air that comes out every time you pull a door open. The bottle came out with the same nubby surface as the stazer boxes, making it something you could hold onto if you gripped it firmly. The same process made a lid, also nubby. The lid would be held on with an ordinary commercially-available spring-steel latch—which Lee had designed the thermos to fit—since screwing a Stade lid on wouldn’t hold.

  As soon as the temporary Stade vanished out of the thermos, Lee picked it up and ran out to the anteroom. Gunnar stood looking after her, wondering if she took it out to show it to Arya. Doesn’t seem like she talks to Arya much. He looked over at Kaem, wondering, Do we have a little love triangle going here?

  Lee came back in almost immediately. “Watch this!” she said excitedly. Pulling out a trash can she poured water into it from the thermos. She stopped pouring, then started again, then stopped again. “Do you see it?”

  Not sure what she was talking about, Gunnar glanced at Kaem. He looked puzzled too. “What?” he asked.

  “No dribbles!” She poured and righted the container, then held it out. “No drops running down the front!”

  Gunnar thought it looked dry, though it was hard to tell with all the reflections on the bumpy mirrored surface.

  Kaem said, “Ah. Because Stade’s not hydrophilic. You know you can butter the lip of any pitcher and get the same effect when you pour?”

  “Right, because butter’s hydrophobic. But this’ll always be that way! Better yet…” she turned the thermos upside down over the trashcan, then righted it. Looking inside she said, “Completely empty! Not a drop left.” She held it out for them to peer into. You won’t even have to wash these mugs or thermoses because nothing sticks to them. I suppose not even germs!” She studied the two men a moment, then—evidently deciding they didn’t properly appreciate the sublime beauty of a Stade thermos—exclaimed, “You guys are just a couple of curmudgeons!” She looked at the box, “Let’s try a mug!”

  Kaem looked a little dyspeptic, “Do you guys mind doing it? I’ve got some coding to finish for the new stazers Mr. X is building.”

  Lee cocked her head curiously, “If he’s building them, why’re you writing the code?”

  Kaem sighed, “Because I can code and he can’t.”

  Lee said, “Gunnar, will you help me start cranking out coffee-ware? I want to have some gifts for our next customers.”

  Gunnar nodded. Lee was digging in a box under her desk. She pulled out a couple of black rubber rings and tossed them to him. “The fat one goes on the bottom half of the thermos to keep it from sliding around on tables. The thin one goes around the middle to make it easier to hold onto.”

  As Gunnar worked the rubber grip shell onto the bumpy outer surface of the thermos, he reflected that, though he could get a grip, to do so he had to grasp the nubby yet slippery surface quite firmly. The rubber half sleeve made the thermos much easier to handle.

  The mugs were also nubby with rubber rings for their bottom ends. The contours and bumps made the L-shaped handles easy to hold, even without the rubber sleeves Lee had for them. Gunnar thought the mirrored surfaces contrasted nicely with the black sleeves to make them look quite elegant. He was thinking, But the rubber rings will be a pain in the ass because they’ll have to be removed before it goes in the dishwasher… then he realized Lee was right, Stade wouldn’t need to be washed.

  Lee had formed the mugs with the Staze logo bumped out on the Stade surface but it was hard to see amongst all the reflections. He looked back at the thermos and realized it had a logo in the Stade as well. Thankfully, a red version of the logo was also worked into the black rubber sleeves. He thought that looked a lot more elegant.

  Lee had been brewing coffee while they worked so he poured himself a cup. It was disconcerting when he first put his lips to the slippery Stade surface, but he quickly got used to it.

  And, the coffee’s going to stay warm a lot longer. Heat’s still coming out the top of the mug, he thought, but none of it’s getting out the sides or bottom or heating the mug itself.

  They’d been working for a while, when Lee quietly said, “I’m going to take a thermos and a couple of mugs out to Arya.”

  When Gunnar looked up at her, she was already turning toward the anteroom. Gunnar thought she looked apprehensive.

  Lee hadn’t quite reached the door when it opened and Arya stepped inside. A handsome young man followed her through the door. She said, “Kaem, Gunnar, this is Norm Tibbets from GLI. He’s the aerospace engineer they’re assigning to work here, half time for us and half time for GLI.”

  Kaem shut down his laptop, got up, and walked over. He introduced himself and shook Norm’s hand. “You understand you’ll have an opportunity to change over to work full time with us once we get funding?”

  Norm nodded, “I’m keeping an open mind, but I’ll probably stick with GLI. Your new material’s fascinating and I can see it’s got a lot of potential, but I’ve always been interested in space. If I can’t get up there myself, I’d at least like to design the stuff that gets other people up there.”

  Gunnar thought, He hasn’t thought this through. I wonder whether he’ll be able to make the adjustment. He, Kaem, and Norm sat down for a chatty interview, Kaem opening the conversation by saying how he admired Tibbets’ C.V. and educational pedigree.

  “Where’d you go to school?” Tibbets asked.

  “I’m a rising senior here at UVA,” Kaem said. “Just off for the summer, then I’ll be back hitting the books again this fall.”

  Astonishment flashed over Tibbets’ face. He glanced at Gunnar as if for confirmation. Gunnar nodded and Tibbets turned back to Kaem, “But I thought you were the CEO?”

  “CTO,” Kaem said. “The CEO and majority owner’s reclusive. He prefers to remain anonymous.”

  “Oh…”

  They talked a while longer without hitting any landmines. Finally, Kaem got up. He said, “We’ve got to have a little meeting about you. If you’re interested,” he nodded at Lee, “you could help Lee staze some thermoses and coffee mugs. It’s a great way to learn how stazing works. Besides, then you could staze a thermos and a couple of mugs for yourself.”

  Kaem started for the anteroom.

  Gunnar followed, “You aren’t going to tell him that Lee works for Space-Gen?”

  Kaem turned with a slight smile, “I think Lee mostly works for Staze.” He glanced at Norm, “And I think Mr. Tibbets will decide to do the same, though we’ll have to see.”

  Gunnar glanced back and could tell Tibbets had heard. He thought Tibbets looked a little surprised to be working with
someone from the competition, but he did turn in Lee’s direction.

  Out in the anteroom, Kaem sat down on one of the chairs near Arya, asking, “What do you think?”

  “He’s fine,” she said without looking away from her screen.

  Kaem leaned back and studied her, “You’re upset.”

  She glanced at him, then back at her screen. “Wow,” she said sarcastically, “Are you telepathic?”

  “Not even close. I’m more on the obtusely mystified end of things. Is this still because I didn’t think you’d want to go on the trip down to Surbury?”

  “Hmm. Or is it because you want me to work up a bid for a stazing project when I wasn’t present for the discussion? One where I don’t understand the parameters or the risks? Or that you’re looking at land even though we can’t afford it? Or that you keep wanting to hire more people when you’re already trying to spend more money than we have available on said toxic land?”

  Kaem let a silence stretch between them, then he said, “What’re you really mad about?”

  Arya glanced at Gunnar. For a second, Gunnar thought she was going to say he was the problem. Instead, she said, “I don’t want to talk about it in front of Gunnar.”

  Hormones! Gunnar thought, getting up and showing his palms. “I’m leaving. Hope you guys work this out.” As he was about to step back through the door into the big room, he said, “Um, Tibbets is fine with me.”

  As the door was closing behind him, he heard Kaem ask, “You want to go out to lunch…?

  If they don’t work it out, Gunnar thought, working here’s gonna suck…

  ***

  When Gunnar got to work the next day, something seemed weird. He felt very unsettled as he entered the building.

  Arya was working in the big room and seemed in a much better mood. Hallelujah for that, he thought.

  Kaem was signaling him for help.

  Gunnar started that way, then suddenly stopped and turned, looking toward the door. Taking a determined stride, he went to the anteroom, through it and out into the parking lot. The freaking blimp’s gone!

  He went out to have a look at the scene of the crime. How the hell? They’d sucked some air out of it the second day. Just enough to make it light and prove it held a vacuum, but then, not wanting it to get loose and float away, Gunnar’d released the vacuum.

  It was, however, an air Stade. If someone untied it, they could carry it away with one hand. Could a stiff wind break the ropes or pull up the anchors? he wondered.

  The ropes were intact though laying limply on the ground. The anchors were firmly imbedded. A look around didn’t show the blimp floating loose anywhere nearby.

  He headed back in. “Hey. Our blimp’s gone!” he said to the room as a whole. The mad rush he’d expected as everyone went to go see didn’t materialize.

  Kaem blinked, then waved Gunnar over. When Gunnar arrived, Kaem quietly said, “The stasis expired,” as if that were obvious.

  “It was a temporary Stade?”

  “Well, yeah, all Stade’s temporary, though when it’s set for billions of years it’s certainly permanent as far as we’re concerned. But the blimp was only set for a megasecond. It was so big we probably wouldn’t be able to break its stasis when we wanted to get rid of it. Certainly not until we build a lot bigger stazer than we have so far. So, we needed it to go away on its own sometime. Since it was only a test run, I figured it shouldn’t last very long.” Apparently feeling like he’d finished that conversation, he said, “I need some help with the next version stazer.”

  Gunnar exclaimed annoyedly, “I never got to fly my first blimp!”

  Looking surprised, Kaem asked, “Were you getting your certificate to fly lighter-than-air craft?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Did you just want to pump it down and tow it around with your truck?”

  “No!” Gunnar said, offended by the idea.

  “Then I don’t know what you’re upset about. If you want to fly one, do it with the next one.” Kaem pulled out a chair next to him. “Now. About the thermite in the next stazers.”

  Gunnar rolled his eyes and sat down.

  Kaem said, “I’m trying to figure out a way to set off the thermite if an unauthorized user takes possession of one of our stazers.”

  Gunnar frowned, “Seems like that’s something you’d put into the software. If someone without the right codes tries to staze something, the circuit board diverts power to one of the thermite initiators.”

  “What if it’s not hooked up to power?”

  Gunnar shrugged, “If you wanted to destroy it when it didn’t have power, you’d have to install a big battery. The battery might be dead by the time you sent the signal.”

  Kaem chewed his lip. “I’m wanting to be able to send it a signal that destroys it as soon as I know someone’s stolen it.”

  Gunnar snorted, “A wireless signal? You’re going to install cell service in every stazer?”

  Kaem winced, “Well, no.”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t want to destroy stazers just because someone stole them. What if you get them back? My plan would be to destroy them when the thief tried to use it to staze something. To do that they have to hook it up to power and then you’d have the juice to set off the thermite initiators.”

  “But how do I tell the stazer it needs to initiate the thermite?”

  “Each stazing event should require an internet connection that the stazer uses to query a web address for permission,” Gunnar said. “When the stazer sends the query it also sends its location so you know whether it’s where it’s supposed to be and if not, where it actually is. If you determine, or already knew, that the stazer’s in the hands of a bad actor, it gets instructed to fire off the thermite instead.” Gunnar cocked his head, “That connection would also let you charge the guy’s account for each stazing he carries out.”

  Gunnar saw Kaem’s eyes glaze over the way they did when he was thinking hard.

  Gunnar waited a minute, then when Kaem hadn’t said anything further, he got up to go look for ideas on how to deal with the toxic waste dump. As he did so he thought back on Kaem’s query, That wasn’t all that complex a problem. And it was more up his alley than mine. Why in the world did someone as smart as he is need my help?

  ***

  Lee arrived in the Space-Gen deliveries area and looked around for the boxes containing the stazer and its accessory module. She’d flown out yesterday and the delivery service said it’d just arrived. She’d wasted a lot of time trying to get the stazer authorized to fly on the plane with her. But they couldn’t see anything when they ran it through their x-ray machines, so they’d given that a definite no. She’d finally had to have it shipped, wondering all the while whether the shipping company might x-ray it too.

  Apparently, they didn’t x-ray shipments.

  Spotting two boxes with the Staze logo on them, she headed that way. She saw a familiar figure. What the hell? Did they send Jerome Stitt down here to get it? The man turned a little. It is Stitt! I’ll bet it’s another of his pranks.

  When she came up next to him, he turned and smiled. “Hi, Lee. I heard you were going to have to haul some heavy stuff upstairs. I thought I’d come down and give you a hand.”

  Will miracles never cease? Or, could it just be one more of his asinine pranks? she wondered. Though I really could use some help. She smiled at him, “You got a hand truck?”

  He nodded, surprising her. “It’s over there. I assume this stuff’s the stazer?”

  She nodded in return.

  Saying, “Be right back,” he headed for the hand truck.

  They loaded it on, Lee grateful the stazer was in a box, so it didn’t constantly try to slide off the hand truck.

  As they started for the testing lab, Stitt frowned, “What about base liquid? Surely these boxes aren’t heavy enough to contain adequate liquid to staze an engine.”

  “Yeah…” Lee said, “Turns out you don’t need any ‘base liquid’
to staze stuff.”

  “What?!”

  “Back then, Kaem was trying to muddy the waters and confuse people that might try to steal the tech. Now he’s decided that with the patent app in place, and, in view of a bunch of other strategies he and the CEO put in place to prevent theft, it’s okay to explain some things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as things I’m gonna explain when everyone else is with us so I don’t have to do the same song and dance over and over.”

  Stitt rolled his eyes but accepted it. “How do you like working for those guys?”

  “It’s absolutely amazing.”

  “You aren’t going to miss launching rockets?”

  “You aren’t going to believe this,” Lee said, suddenly realizing how true it was, “but we’re going to be doing far cooler stuff than launching rockets. Besides, at Space-Gen I was a tiny, tiny cog in a huge machine. There I’m a big part of the bleeding edge.”

  Stitt shrugged, “I can see Stade’s gonna be good for a lot of things. But I don’t think any of them can compare to lighting the big candles, can they?”

  She gave him a grin. “You’ll see. Someday…” she trailed off, then gave a firm nod, “someday, you’ll see.”

  They got to the industrial room that’d been set aside for stazing the engine. Terry Nunsen, Will Goran, and a couple of the other engineers were there, assembling the mold for the inside of the rocket’s combustion chamber and nozzle. Lee briefly wondered where Evan Ulrich was, but then they were on to other things.

  She and Stitt unpacked the power supply and then the stazer.

  Stitt exclaimed over the nubby, mirrored surface of the stazer which he thought looked quite cool.

  She plugged it in, hooked her laptop to it, and used the software Kaem had installed to power everything up. She breathed a sigh of relief when the self-testing protocol said everything was good.

  From behind her, Will Goran said, “Where’s the base liquid?”

  She took a deep breath and said, “If you guys are ready now, maybe I could explain a few things to the whole team?”

  He drew back as it obviously wasn’t the answer he’d expected, but he only said, “Sure,” then called to the others for their attention.