The Orphan in Near-Space (The Space Orphan Book 2)
Page 20
Except with one difference. There was no longer any communication with the experiment site.
JANE relaxed back into her biological part.
Riku had switched the heavy-duty vear he was wearing and his data gloves to connect to his SuperSmart.
"Captain."
"Lieutenant."
"Looks like there was a solar flare strong enough to trip our satellite's surge protection. The comsat is waking back up now."
Klaus had also switched to his SuperSmart.
"That's what it looks like. But I just checked and there's been no such solar flare. The source of the problem was on the ground."
Nicole had also been busy.
"I've just sent a LookyLoo to inspect our site, sir. I'm afraid the site just, ahm, blew up."
LookLoo Inc. was a subsidiary of Google. It operated all over the world, renting drones which flew over any location and sent back images to the renter. The drones were piloted by robots managed by robot traffic controllers. At any one time the Grand Canyon, for instance, had several hundred drones above it. They were simple to operate; a customer said where and how long they wanted to look and paid by credit card.
This solved the problem of incompetent or criminal human drone flyers. Nowadays you had to have a license to fly a drone, just as you had to operate any vehicle, and there were penalties for mishandling a drone.
"Good move, Lieutenant," said Jane. "Let's see what it finds."
It was several long dragging minutes before "their" drone dropped down to a point a mile away and half a mile height and slowed to a low-speed approach.
There was a chorus of "Wows" and "Oh, shits."
It was immediately obvious that a catastrophe had happened. The crater appeared as it must have many thousands of years ago when it had just been created. It was now a smooth bowl shape.
Nicole had told it to circle the site at a couple hundred feet. They watched for a few minutes but there was no detail to see.
"Lieutenant," said Jane, "take it up to a mile and have it spiral out to a hundred miles, going up to ten miles height."
Nicole gave the necessary commands.
Within minutes Klaus was pointing out new features of the nearby landscape. "That's what remains of the target." And "That's the bathroom module from the habitat." And so on.
Nicole said, "All that's consistent with the shield exploding. It must have been pretty hot to melt the debris like that."
Klaus said, "But not so hot that it completely vaporized the furthest parts of the habitat," He'd put a big white arrow near one of the pieces of debris.
"Well," said Riku, "look on the bright side. We didn't create a shield. But we did create a bomb. Ow. Assault of a fellow officer!"
Nicole took on an angelic look as she leaned back away from Riku, rubbing his arm with a look of exaggerated pain.
Jane stood up.
"Kate, charter a medium-duty drone and get with Klaus to send it to the experiment site. Klaus, rent or buy every kind of radiation sensor available and send them in the drone. Deploy them outside the crater rim and inside where they'll get us the best data. I'm going to the Gardens to think about what just happened."
She received a couple of "Yes, sirs" and walked out.
The City had nearly a hundred levels inside the bowl-shaped crater. The lowest were devoted to various kinds of service machinery. The mid-levels were for residences and businesses and were only sparsely occupied. Someday they'd fill up, expanding outward in a circle. The city had been built for such growth. The top levels were for entertainment and public functions and government.
Many of those public functions were held in the centrally located Descanso Park modeled on a famous Los Angeles nature preserve. It was sixty acres of forest and botanical gardens with a stream meandering through it. It contributed to the psychological health of City inhabitants. It was also part of the environmental system, helping to recycle air and maintain humidity. There was a restaurant in it and a community center where weddings and other events could be held.
It took five minutes to walk to it. A few minutes within was the nearest branch of the stream. There was a twenty-foot long bridge over the stream. Jane leaned on a red railing and gazed down at the water, not really seeing it. Instead she was seeing a three-dimensional colored image which, if anyone else could see it, would seem like an abstract artwork.
It actually was a visual representation of all the data from the several thousand trials at the experimental site. Jane puzzled over it for nearly an hour.
Finally she came to a conclusion and ambled back toward the experiment control room.
She seated herself. Her crew swiveled their ergo chairs to face her.
"What's been happening? Klaus?"
"The cargo drone is about ten minutes out from the site. It will set down a hundred yards away from the crater rim."
Nicole was leaning forward in her chair. Her eyes were bright.
"Cap, something about the power curve generated at the shield nagged at me from the very beginning. While you were gone it came to me. It means we've been creating virtual matter that's an analog to real matter." She paused.
"Go on."
"The first kind was hydrogen. This is also what we virtualize in space jets. In the shield experiments we worked our way up into the transuranic elements. The last experiment would have created francium, with 97 protons in its nucleus. Instead it created, I think, antimatter hydrogen."
"And so, blooey," said Riku, "when a pellet of moon dust hit the shield."
Jane nodded. She'd already reached the same conclusion but the insight would be more useful if it came from someone else.
Kate said, "So what does that mean for us?"
Jane said, "We could always continue the shield experiments with the elements beyond 97 and hope 97 was an anomaly. But I'd rather be satisfied with what we've got. We already know we can create practical shields. I think we'll leave further research into the 97 plus realms to others. I want to explore this antimatter situation."
"Me, too, Boss," said Riku. "New ways to make things go blooey, yay. And don’t you dare," he said to Nicole, sitting one seat over from him. She widened her eyes in fake innocence, putting a hand to her chest in a "Who me?" gesture.
Jane said, "Klaus, Riku, deploy the radiation sensors to test the region near and in the crater. We'll leave them to do their job overnight and come at this fresh in the morning."
<>
No residual radiation was found in or near the crater which had housed the shield experiments. What seemed to have happened was that a ball of compressed moon dust had been converted to high energy photons. They had expanded outward in all directions, vaporizing everything in their path nearby and melting everything further away.
Dust and rocks which had filled the bottom of the crater had been thrown up and out of the crater, raining down up to fifty miles away.
The near parts of the experiments had been vaporized. The middle parts of the garage and habitat had melted. The heat in the farther parts of the habitat had caused a raging fire which quickly died as the habitat opened to space.
All of this was enough to explode the surviving parts of the habitat in all directions, some of them straight up, some thrown at such low angles that they struck the rim of the craters. The nearby rim had collapsed in several places.
Some of the radiation sensors were not one-purpose sensors. Besides their negative findings they had relayed images. Drones launched shortly after the crew got to work further improved the information about what had happened.
Overnight the Gang had received numerous "What the Hell happened?" messages. Through Kate Jane issued a statement saying that a warm-fusion generator had proved more successful than anticipated. This was bad news and good news. With a better model of the specific warm-fusion process now understood, a much more robust generator could be designed and tested. This would be a hundred times smaller than the original, and far better protected from producing uncontrolled
energy production.
Jane also wrote, with Kate's help, a report to her bosses in the Space Force, detailing her plans to conduct a series of experiments in energy generation. At Kate's advice, she had included a long and boring description of all the safety methods she planned to employ.
Within two days she received back a reply from her bosses, approving her plan along with a combination of congratulations and cautions.
Meanwhile Jane had Nicole draft a report that was sent out under the title "Details of experiments in periodicity in production of virtual matter." It included a copy of the standard form of the chemical periodic table of elements.
With it was a list of the energies input into the shield (which she, under Jane's instructions, called the "warm-fusion generator") and got out of it. The format of the list mirrored the periodic table.
<>
"As you can see the output exactly matches each of the fundamental elements. Note that the 'improvement' in energy output increases as we move from left to right along each row of the table. But at a diminishing rate.
"Then, at the beginning of each lower row of the periodic table there is a big jump in energy output. You can see this in row 4, which begins with potassium with 19 protons in its nucleus. We also see this in row 5 (rubidium, 37 protons), row 6 (cesium, 55), and row 7 (francium, 87).
"Noticing this increase, we built in a safeguard for each series of experiments. We failed to add a large enough safeguard at the beginning of row 7. This caused a meltdown of the experimental setup.
"Our caution about the untended consequences of our warm-fusion experiments proved to be lucky. Done on Earth this meltdown might have hurt or killed many. Thus we suggest that each warm-fusion experiment be overseen by the Department of Nuclear Safety, and done at a remote site using remotely controlled telerobots.
"Happily, economical warm-fusion generators can be constructed with much lighter virtual elements. In particular, Row 4 virtual-matter experiments should yield generators small enough to power automobiles, ships, and airplanes."
<>
Experiments in creating virtual matter were already being done. This was the best Jane could do to limit such experiments without also telling everyone that proton weights of 97 and above were very dangerous. And thus able to produce weapons.
Within six months Jane and her crew had explored antimatter creation enough to be sure what was and was not dangerous about such creation. All of this was classified. What was not classified was the fact that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, working with Jane, had created an electrical generator using row 5 capable of producing enough electricity to power a medium-sized city.
This spawned numerous newsblog and newszine stories with titles such as "Pasadena Prodigy Does it Again!" Another popular set of stories had titles such as "Multi-millionaire Marvel Soon to be a Billionaire." That last ignored the fact Jane and her group were government employees and so would only receive tiny percentages of profits from their work on such projects as warm-fusion generators.
As Christmas neared Jane declared their work on the Moon done and they left Luna City.
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Landing at Edwards Jane was met with a happy surprise: her boyfriend, Phil Newman. He was at the passenger debarking reception area holding up a big white cardboard sign labeled JANE!!! With him was another surprise, Mairu, Riku's girlfriend.
Jane's heart leaped. She hurried forward and leaped on him, grabbing him around the waist with her legs. She rained kisses on his face.
Laughing, he responded enthusiastically, then said, "Can I set you down now? You're killing my back."
Robot gave him a quick probe of his insides and reported this was a lie. A tad reluctantly Jane let herself down onto her feet.
Beside them Mairu and Riku were giving each other a similar treatment. Seeing this Jane thanked Phil for bringing along the young woman.
"You've got it backward, Honey. SHE brought ME."
He began to walk out of the reception area. Riku and Mairu followed, as did the three others of Jane's crew.
Phil had been introduced to her crew long ago and got along well with them, so he had their phone numbers and vice versa. He'd also been introduced to their dates. Of them only Mairu ("call me Mary") had lasted long enough to have his phone number.
"Riku told her when he was arriving and she called me. She said she was going to show up here and suggested we go together. So thank her."
"I do. Thank you, Mary." Jane gave the woman, walking beside her, a half-hug around her shoulders. She did not have to reach up. "Mary" was not a tall woman.
"You're welcome. But you should also thank Phil. I was going to take the economy seats on the shuttle. He got me into the business class seats."
"Thank you, Phil," said Riku. He held out a hand across Mary and Jane and the billionaire reached across for a quick shake.
"I'm not sure if I deserve much credit. There was an open seat right next to me."
"Now that," said the young woman, "is a bare-faced lie. He bribed his seat mate to swap places with me."
"Only with a business card."
"If everyone," said Klaus, "is done being thankful and self-deprecating--Hi, Phil, good to see you--maybe we should let Jane's executive officer direct us to where we should go and how."
Klaus, Kate, and Nicole were walking behind Jane, Phil, and the happy Japanese Americans. Jane veered off to the side of the concourse out of the main flow of the arriving and departing passengers.
The resulting small half-circle near the wall focused their attention on Kate. She put away her SuperSmart and addressed them.
"Princess is all prepped and waiting at NASA hangar #3. Our baggage is on its way there in a robobus. And there's a limo waiting for us outside. We can be on our way inside of a half hour."
"Thanks, Kate," said Jane. "Now who--?"
"Dibs on left seat!" said Nicole. The left seat in American cockpits was the pilot's seat.
"Aw," said Riku, not looking sorry as his voice sounded. He was practically glued to Mairu's side and obviously not ready to forsake it for the pilot's seat.
A devilish part of Jane prompted her. She grinned.
"Done. And Mary, how would you like to sit in the copilot's seat? Have you ever done that?"
"Oh, really? Really?" She practically jumped up and down at the idea.
Riku looked sour. "Someday, Cap, I'll get you for this."
Then he grinned and turned to his lady friend. "You'll love it, luv. Just don't let this jet jockey do acrobatics. She likes to scare the pee out of poor unsuspecting passengers."
"Don't listen to him, dear," said Nicole. "We'll have fun."
Thus it was that the rest of the way to the taxi and into Princess. Nicole and Mary walked and sat and walked again side by side. It was Klaus who walked beside the fake-downcast Riku and gave him bracing commentary on what HE was going to do in the next few days. With his most recent lady friend.
In the bizjet Jane seated herself in one of the two seats just behind the cockpit and sat Phil beside her. Thus she was able to hear what Nicole said to Mary.
The two women's first act was to cinch up the seat belts and plug their earphones into the plane.
"Next we have a checklist to go through. There, see that virtual button on the console? Tap it. Good. Notice this list. As it scrolls down pause it until I say Go. Good. First we wake up all the electrical systems on the plane...."
Briefly Jane became Jane+Robot+Princess and ensured that everything was right with HER innards. Princess was in top shape, not surprisingly, given the excellence of the NASA technical people who'd been doing studies with the aircraft while Jane was gone. SHE became Jane within a few seconds, her preoccupation masked from Phil as SHE adjusted HER biological part's seat and donned and adjusted its seatbelts.
Phil had noticed her brief preoccupation, however. He waited till she turned her head toward him.
"She's good at faking sincerity. But in this case it's real. She thinks you're a good influence on me. I don't take care of 'me' enough, always working, working."
He chuckled. "We're of one mind on that. What are your plans for the next few days?"
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They discussed those plans while Nicole got them into the air, over the mountains to the south and into the El Monte airport. They took a Flyt van to Jane's home, where the Kuznetsovs greeted Jane and her friends enthusiastically.
Her mother insisted Jane's friends stay for dinner. Only Riku refused, saying he needed time with Mairu.
At 10:00 Phil "kidnapped" Jane, though it was a strange kidnapping, Jane first throwing a few things in a suitcase and driving them in her Porsche to his home. There their first order of business was to catch up on their lovemaking.
The remainder of the week Jane and her crew worked at JPL, mostly catching up on long-deferred cooperative work with several NASA projects, mostly ones with a JPL connection.
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In the middle of their second week back at JPL there was a special event: the Surveyor mother ship would arrive at the first asteroid the Surveyor Project wanted to investigate. Jane very much wanted to be in the JPL mission control room when that happened and had timed her return to Earth to coincide with the event.
Chapter 15 - Surveyor
The day for the asteroid-investigation mothership to arrive near its first objective was a Tuesday. Jane and her crew donned their dress uniforms with all their ribbons and the blue berets the Air Force's Space Force personnel were allowed.
At just before 9:00 they walked the two blocks up the hill to the reception center. There they turned right and walked three more blocks to the building housing the Mission Control center that all JPL space-flight projects used. They were a block from the three-story black-glass surfaced building when a news man intercepted them.