Radiation Hazard (The Stasis Stories #3)

by Laurence Dahners

  Gunnar laughed, “Not and be able to see. Well, not yet.” He patted Kaem’s shoulder, “You’ll have to give the genius a few more days to come up with that.”

  Kaem rolled his eyes. “That’s not gonna happen… Though…” he said thoughtfully, “maybe we could cover some AV goggles with Stade and send them imaging from a camera on your helmet.”

  Gunnar laughed again, “Didn’t take days. Didn’t even take minutes! What size hat do you wear?”

  ***

  Emmanuel and his son were sitting at the table in Kaem’s apartment. Having finished breakfast, they were checking their email on laptops. He saw the results of the assays from the furnaces were back. Skimming through them he exclaimed when he saw how clean the two-week results were. Looking up, he saw Kaem had a big smile on his face as well. “What’s happened?”

  Kaem said, “You first.”

  Trying to play it off as a small thing—despite how proud it made him—Emmanuel said, “You know that most of the toxic chemicals in the waste were organic compounds. The assay of the furnace at two-weeks shows that all the hydrocarbon compounds had completely broken down to H2O and CO2 by then. When we vent the furnace, the water will escape with the CO2 as steam. The heavy metals were bound into the carbon of the remaining ash so you’d still want to staze that, but the total volume needing to be stazed is greatly reduced.”

  “What if someone un-stazed it someday, thousands of years from now? How toxic would it be?”

  Emmanuel shrugged, “Not very, unless it was dumped into water so the metals could leach out of it into someone’s water supply.”

  Kaem frowned, “Could we leach the metals out now. Maybe sell them?”

  “Not economically. We’re talking tiny amounts of cadmium, chromium, lead, and mercury. Enough to be toxic if it got in your drinking water, but not enough to sell. Stazing’s the way to go.”

  Kaem sighed, “Okay. We’ll store the ash in a big Stade container and use it to make denser-than-water Stades.”

  “Um, some of the ash’ll be lighter than water.”

  “But if we pack it into a mold and staze it, the whole thing will be denser than water, right?”

  “Right. Um, to protect your postulated people in the future, you might mix it with water and cement so it sets into concrete. That’s one of the things that’s done with fly ash now. Makes it safer and makes good concrete.”

  Kaem frowned, “What’s fly ash?”

  “Ash left over from burning coal. It has heavy metals in it too.”

  “We’d need to put it in the mold and let it set before we stazed it right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Emmanuel said. “It won’t set up while it’s in stasis.”

  Kaem had a satisfied look on his face, “That’s great, Dad. Can you work with Gunnar to build a big furnace you can use to clean up that mess?”

  “Um, sure. Are you sure that’s gonna be okay with Mr. X?”

  Kaem blinked, “I’m pretty sure it is. I’ll flag our conversation for him to listen to and he’ll let me know if he wants us to do something different.”

  “Good, ’cause I can figure out how to leach the metals out of the ash if that’s what he wants, but it’ll be a money-losing proposition.”

  “I’ll let you know what he says.”

  “What was your email?” Emmanuel asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You know, why you were grinning when I looked up, excited about my assay.”

  “Oh,” Kaem said, waving as if it were no big deal, “they’ve decided to let me back into school.”

  “That’s great! Your mother’ll be so excited when I tell her.”

  Kaem tilted his head curiously, “Now that you’ve got a good job, have you guys talked about her moving down here too?”

  Emmanuel frowned, “We have… we’re nervous about it. She doesn’t want to give up her job back home until we’re sure my job here… has staying power.”

  Kaem looked frustrated for a moment, but then said, “That’s probably smart. I’m pretty sure the company’s stable and your job’s secure, but, of course, you never know.”

  “Now that you’re feeling better, do you want me to move out and get my own place?”

  “No, no. Don’t worry. I have no social life to be messed up by the fact I’m living with my dad.”

  Emmanuel lifted an eyebrow. “I was thinking that now that you’re feeling better, you might start having a social life.”

  Kaem smiled, “If that happens and I start getting home late after painting the town, don’t start criticizing, okay?”

  “I won’t. A young man should do some carousing. You’ve never even had the chance.”

  “Father!” Kaem exclaimed as if horrified, “Encouraging bad behavior by your son! What will Mother think?!”

  Emmanuel grinned, “You’d better not tell her. It’d be your word against mine.”

  ~~~

  That evening Emmanuel and Kaem went out to dinner to celebrate. After they’d ordered, Kaem leaned across the table and said, “Mr. X checked in. He said to tell you he thinks you’re doing an awesome job on the toxic waste project. Patted me on the back for suggesting you.”

  Emmanuel felt a smile stretching across his face. After so many years of crappy jobs and unhappy bosses, it felt wonderful to be doing challenging work in his own field and getting good results. It felt even better to have the compliment passed to him through his own son. He didn’t like people who bragged, but you didn’t have to brag when your son was the one who carried the message. He said, “Thanks. Your mother was ecstatic when I told her you’d be allowed back into school.” Then he frowned, unable to keep from asking about something that’d been worrying him. “Have you checked to be sure the expulsion isn’t going to affect your scholarship?”

  Kaem shook his head. “Didn’t have to check. The scholarship documents say that, in case of an expulsion, the scholarship will come back into effect if the student is returned to good standing.”

  Does he remember that from three years ago?! Emmanuel wondered.

  With his memory, he probably does, he decided.

  ***

  Giles Turnberry waited at the front of the room as the students for his nuclear physics class arrived in driblets. The senior-level class only had twenty-one students so he was using a composite picture to try to figure out who was who and learn their names.

  He blinked. Kaem Seba’d just walked in. Turnberry’d heard that Seba’d been expelled from the university and—Turnberry glanced down at the roster to be sure—he wasn’t listed on the class roster. He looked up again. Seba was heading to his usual place in the rear of the classroom. “Mr. Seba?”

  When Seba looked back at him, Turnberry motioned him forward to talk. When Seba arrived, Turnberry spoke in a low voice. “I heard you were expelled?”

  Seba nodded. “I was reinstated yesterday,” he said, setting his backpack up on the table and pulling out a printout of a letter.

  Turnberry glanced over it. It was signed by President Morton and did say Seba was reinstated.

  “Great! Glad to have you,” Giles said. “Um, one of the other faculty showed me a website listing you as the Chief Technical Officer for a company called Staze?”

  Seba nodded, “Yeah. I think I told you I was interested in a business startup?”

  “You did,” Turnberry said. “The website listed a new material and its properties, um…”

  Turnberry didn’t know how to go on from there, but Seba saved him by saying. “Yeah. That list of properties was what got me expelled.”

  Turnberry looked up at Seba and saw he was smiling. He doesn’t even look embarrassed! Wondering if the young man he’d thought had so much promise could be salvaged, Turnberry said, “Um, those property claims were… extreme.”

  As if he were speaking patiently to someone who just didn’t get it, Seba said, “I know.”

  “Why did you let them be listed then…?”

  “Because they’re true,” Seba said,
digging in his backpack. “That’s why I’ve been readmitted. I sent a sample of Stade to the people on my letter of expulsion.” He pulled out a piece of paper that’d been folded to about three by six inches. He held it out to Turnberry. “You’re welcome to have a sample yourself. It’s wrapped up in one of the material properties sheets.”

  Thunderstruck, Turnberry stared a moment at the paper in his hand, trying to think what to say. Fearing Seba’d had a schizophrenic break and lost all touch with reality, he looked up thinking he’d ask the young man to stay after class so they could have a serious talk—something long enough to let him evaluate Seba’s mental state.

  However, Seba’d walked away. He’d almost reached one of the chairs in the back of the room.

  Turnberry checked his watch. He had thirty seconds left. He unwrapped the paper, seeing a portion of the properties list as he laid back the first fold. “Density at STP = 1.225 kg/m3. Density of air at sea level, Turnberry thought. Coefficient of friction = 0. Come on! Turnberry began to think to himself, then the next fold in the paper came undone and a little mirror slipped out of the paper. Giles grabbed after it, trying to keep it from falling and breaking. He missed it low—he would later realize this was because the sample wasn’t falling—but his wrist struck it, bumping it out across the table toward the class. It shot forward like a paper airplane, but took a curve and slowed to hang in the air in front of the kid in the front row, not falling. Density of air, Turnberry thought.

  The kid grabbed it, but it got away from him. There followed a comic bit, with the student snatching repeatedly after it without managing to get a grip on it. He eventually did by using two hands, one surrounding each end.

  Coefficient of friction is zero, Turnberry thought, raising his eyes to focus on Seba at the back.

  Seba gave him a little nod, as if to say, You understand now, right?

  The student brought the little mirror up to Turnberry and, at Turnberry’s request, laid it on the piece of paper it’d arrived in. “What is this, Dr. Turnberry?!” the student asked, obviously filled with curiosity.

  Folding the paper around it and slipping it into his own backpack, Turnberry looked the student in the eye and grinned, “Mark, if I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

  Turnberry stood and called the class to attention.

  ~~~

  When Turnberry asked for questions at the end of his lecture, as usual, a couple of the students had questions about the tests, not the material. He always wished they cared more about the content of the class.

  Seba, as usual, had a bizarre question, this one about neutron emission from fission events. Turnberry tried to answer it, though it didn’t seem to fit into the ordinary framework of nuclear physics. At the end of his answer, he said, “Let’s you and I finish our little discussion after class is dismissed.”

  Turnberry dismissed the class and eyed Seba as the young man, apparently reluctantly, made his way to the front. Thinking about the flexural strength figures he’d seen on the website; he surreptitiously slid his fingers under the end of the paper folded around Seba’s sample. Placing a thumb in the middle, he bore down, intending to break the sample so he could use the broken specimen as a way to try to force Seba to deal with reality. He was wondering how he could get Seba into the campus mental health clinic, when his fingers jolted as his thumb slid to the side, ripping the paper and extruding the sample—which was not broken.

  Seba had reached the table and was staring down at the Stade. “Yes, Dr. Turnberry?”

  Feeling like reality was slipping sideways, Turnberry weakly asked, “What is this stuff?”

  “Ah… It’s not a material, Dr. Turnberry. It’s a one millimeter, by 7.5 centimeter, by fifteen-centimeter segment of space-time that’s in stasis. By that I mean that time has stopped progressing inside the Stade, which is what we call the stuff. This Stade was formed around air, that’s why it’s air density. Because time’s not progressing within the Stade, it’s completely impermeable, nonreactive, and non-deformable.” His eyes flicked down to the sample and he said, “I see you were trying to break it. You won’t be able to do that and could get hurt attempting it. A new lab, a different one than the one we based our first material properties sheet on, has tested its flexural strength to 150,000,000 MPa without deforming it, much less breaking it.”

  Turnberry felt himself gaping. “You know the best steel’s strength is under 3,000 MPa?!”

  Seba nodded, looking sympathetic, “As I said, this isn’t steel. It isn’t even a material.”

  “And what do you have to do with this company Staze? You… give technical advice, on…?”

  Seba shrugged, looking self-conscious. “I had a theory about time. Our CEO turned my theory into a practical method for actually stopping time within defined volumes. Stade’s the result, a time stopped volume.”

  “Could your CEO give a talk about this…” Turnberry halted because Seba was shaking his head.

  “Our CEO prefers to remain anonymous. So much so that no one, not even those of us working for him, knows who he is.”

  Dumbfounded by Seba’s assertion of such a preposterous situation, Turnberry stared a moment, then said, “Well, could you give a talk on your theory and on what’s happening when Stade’s formed?”

  Seba frowned, “To whom?”

  “To the physics department. I’ll have to work out the details.”

  Seba got a distant look. “Sure. I can give a talk, but I wouldn’t be able to explain the technical details of how Stade’s formed. It’s patent applied for, but we still have to protect the methods. However, it should be of interest even without learning how Stade’s formed. There’re a lot of ways Stade could be used in experimental physics, so I’d think some of the faculty would be interested.”

  “That’d be great. Um, is it okay if I get this sample you gave me tested to confirm those properties?”

  Seba shrugged. “Sure, but you might want to just talk to Dr. Phelps in Materials Science. He was one of the people copied on my letter of expulsion so I sent him a sample. I got some calls about it from Harry in the Materials Science testing lab. Um, they couldn’t reach the lower limits on our sheet, so if you have access to better equipment you may want to do your own testing.”

  “Couldn’t reach the lower limits?” Turnberry asked, not understanding.

  “Um, the strength figures. The Materials Science lab’s testing setup wasn’t powerful enough to test up to the strengths reported by other labs. Harry wanted smaller specimens that he could try to break but we can’t make Stades smaller than a millimeter square.”

  “And,” Turnberry said slowly, “a one-millimeter square rod’s so strong they couldn’t break it?”

  “Uh-huh. Um, I need to get to my next class?”

  “Sure, go, go,” Turnberry said, waving him on.

  Turnberry sat back down where he was. Pondering.

  Eventually, he got up and went to lunch. While he ate, he wondered whether he should bring this up at the faculty meeting that afternoon. I’d better call Harry. See what he says about those material properties, he decided.

  ~~~

  At the faculty meeting, Turnberry sat next to Art Mandel again. “Seba was in my Physics 3250 class today.”

  Mandel looked surprised, “Really? I thought he’d been expelled.”

  “He’s been reinstated.”

  Mandel frowned, “How? I heard he’d been expelled for fraud. For his role in that company that’s making fraudulent claims.”

  “Occam’s razor,” Turnberry said.

  Mandel blinked, “What?”

  “The simplest explanation. Which is that the claims for the material properties aren’t fraudulent.”

  Mandel expressed his opinion with a long raspberry.

  Turnberry slid an envelope containing the sample out of his backpack and, keeping the Stade trapped in the envelope with a couple of fingers, opened part of the flap and said, “This is a sample. Feel its surface.”

 
Mandel frowned, “What am I feeling for?”

  “It’s coefficient of friction is zero. It’s frictionless.”

  “Come on Giles. That’s ridiculous…” Mandel paused as his finger slid over the surface. “Well, it is awfully slippery, but…”

  “Four labs have evaluated it. None have been able to measure any friction.”

  “So the company says.”

  “One of them was the lab here in Materials Science.”

  Mandel stared, “Surely they didn’t agree on the strength properties.”

  “Not exactly—"

  Mandel cut him off with a snort, “Of course not.”

  “The lab’s material testing system couldn’t load it as high as some of the other labs that’ve tested it.”

  Mandel frowned, “What’d they get for tensile strength?”

  “Their sample was like this one, so they couldn’t test it in tension.”

  “What do you mean, ‘couldn’t test it’?!”

  “It’s a frictionless rectangle a millimeter thick. They couldn’t grip it to apply tension.”

  “Come on! Nothing’s frictionless if you apply enough pressure to the grip.”

  “This is.” Turnberry shrugged, “They did test its flexural strength in three-point bending. Their servo-hydraulic machine could only load the center point to five metric tons. That’d still be a strength of 65,000 MPa. But the specimen didn’t fail, so all they can say is that it’s stronger than that. Another lab had a meter long, one square millimeter rod they loaded in three-point bending to ten tons. That’d give a figure of 150,000,000 MPa.”

  Mandel had closed his eyes. “I hope you know how ridiculous you sound?”

  Their department chair arrived and started the meeting then. After it had droned to its predictable and boring conclusion, the chair asked if there was any new business, Turnberry put up his hand.

  Mandel hissed, “For God’s sake, don’t!”

  When the chair called on him, Turnberry stood and tossed the Stade up into the middle of the room. “One of our physics undergrads is working with a new company, Staze, here in Charlottesville. They’re producing a new material”—Turnberry had decided not to repeat Seba’s claim that time was stopped inside it—“they call Stade.” Gratifyingly, the gleaming Stade sample twisted and turned a couple of times, then halted in the air just out of anyone’s reach, unless they stood up.