Moon Dreams

by M.A. Harris

Breakthrough

  The next day Paul made use of the little exercise center in the hostel instead of running, he much preferred the open air but he needed to find out if there was a trail he could follow without being tackled by very large people in black outfits. He was late and wasn’t done with his shower until nine thirty. By then the breakfast buffet in the hostels atrium sitting area was stale but acceptable, and the coffee was quite good, if beginning to lose its heat in the pump carafe. He wasn’t too worried since he was all but certain that Cooper wouldn’t be up until ten or later. Paul and Cooper had done many late nights together in the past and the academic had never pushed himself out of bed the day after until he was good and ready.

  Paul was sitting alone reading the latest news on his tablet after having pulled down a feed from WNN via his satellite internet connection, Cliff Samson’s shadow was a bit of a shock, “Hey Cliff, how’s the morning?”

  “Not badly God be thanked. I left you and Dr. Paaly alone yesterday; I thought he could brief you on our status much better alone. Do you have any questions for me now?” The small sandy haired man seemed a little more relaxed today.

  “What does Aristide Industries get out of this research Cliff? I mean I looked you up, construction, shipping, oil exploration, not energy generation or any high tech stuff?”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Aristide would have to answer that one Mr. Richards, but it would seem obvious that transportation and the oil industry might both change rather radically if we are successful and Mr. Aristide’s always been on the leading edge of change.” The voice was very flat.

  Paul nodded, “I guess so. The other question is, is there somewhere I can run without getting jumped by Aristide Security? Because if there isn’t I’d like to request the use of a rental car so I can stay at the hotel in Primus Junction and run in the morning, the exercise room’s OK for a day or so but I need to stretch out more. I think better that way.”

  Sampson’s bushy reddish eyebrows rose, “I don’t know about either one of those options Mr. Richards. Could you give me today to work on it?”

  “Fine Cliff, call me Paul would you?” This Mr. Richards thing was getting old fast.

  The flash of teeth again, “As you wish Paul. Dr. Paaly probably won’t be up for a while, I can take you up to the top of the bluff for a walk around if you’d like? The view is rather good.”

  “Sounds great Cliff.” Paul stood up, slipped his slate away and flipped his leather satchel onto his back.

  The walk up the cliff made Paul’s legs ache; he figured this would be a good exercise in itself if he could do it a couple of times. Up on top it was, as Cliff had said, spectacular, he could look down into the canyon where the road and canal wound past. The concrete plant and the little town were both laid out like maps below. This bluff was higher than the edge of the valley and from here he could see to the horizon in that direction. Variations in red, brown and gray with hints of green though it looked pretty desolate. Turning the other way the mountains rose in purple gray majesty with white-capped peaks, spectacular and distant. The cool air, utterly clear blue sky, red rock and desert vegetation made this at once peaceful and lonely - but it was a loneliness that filled the soul, not emptied it.

  “Wow Cliff, this is absolutely spectacular, incredible! Up here I almost feel like I could be an artist, all sorts of thoughts bursting out!” Paul grinned at the shorter man.

  Cliff’s pale blue eyes looked back with a quizzical glint, “I like the view but it’s a bit desolate for me.” He smiled faintly, “Grew up in Akron, Ohio, lots of farmland, lots of green except during the middle of the summer, guess I miss the trees and the grass.”

  Paul smiled, “Another Midwesterner! I was born and grew up in Indiana, live in Indianapolis these days. It’s a nice city, fairly inexpensive and it’s actually pretty easy to get almost anywhere in the country from there.”

  Cliff nodded, “Been there, nice town, goodly percentage of God fearing folks.”

  Paul didn’t quite know how to respond to this, so he didn’t.

  They walked along a path in the rock that wound past four little bungalows set down in the rock. They were almost hard to see, except for the windows. Cliff pointed to the second one they passed, “Dr. Paaly lives there, or he does when he’s not in the labs or the shops. One of the others is occupied by our chief architect and the other two are empty right now. We had expected to have more people up here by now but the project’s behind schedule.”

  “The...ah...Paaly project?” Paul asked quietly.

  “Yes Paul, the Paaly project.”

  These folks had sunk some serious money into this effort, very early on. But then Paul realized he’d almost been ready for what he’d seen yesterday morning. Mr. Aristide had probably fallen over in a dead faint when he saw it the first time. That floating chamber might well have a very salutary effect on some industrialist’s purse strings - though this location was odd, very odd really.

  They continued past the apartments admiring the view and then back down a steep path and stairs to the back of the hostel, “Cliff, is that public enough? I could just do that loop a couple of times for my jogging, if it would be acceptable?”

  Cliff looked a little surprised but pleased, “I’ll let security know, but that would be fine Paul, as far as I’m concerned.”

  They walked through the office into the tunnels chatting about the weather, sports, which Paul followed mainly so he could have unobjectionable things to chat about. Paul waved at the tunnel, “Why drive this tunnel into the bluff? I’d have thought it would have been easier to add onto the buildings outside, it looks like you have enough space for a couple more two or three story buildings?”

  Cliff shrugged, “It’s quieter and easier to shield some things in here Paul, and it keeps the hollow from getting too cluttered. Mr. Aristide likes things to look good.”

  That sounded like a practiced half-truth to Paul, or the truth without the bite. It was also easier to hide things this way. Suddenly Paul wondered how many people worked here and what other kinds of projects were underway. It looked like most of the rooms at the hostel were full and that was at least sixty people, plus people from the village at the foot of the plateau. That could easily supply hundreds, though most probably worked on the Canal project.

  Cooper was in the lab when they got there. He looked tired, his shoulders drooped and his hair looked uncombed from his sleep, though he was wearing different clothes. He glanced up and smiled at them, a tired smile, “Good morning young men! Good morning; I hope you both had a good night’s sleep?”

  Paul nodded, excitement suddenly building in his chest as he let his thoughts about what to do today come to the fore, “Good morning Cooper, I think the question should be for you, I hope you got a good night’s sleep?”

  The tall man shrugged, “As well as can be expected Paul, as well as can be expected thank you. We talked a lot yesterday; do you want to talk some more today? Do you have any thoughts?”

  “Cooper, you said you had some other Stacks set up, some for thrust, some for power, can you show them to me and run down the setups with me?”

  The physicist eyed Paul calmly, “Yes, and then you tell me what you want to do?”

  “Maybe, Coop maybe.” Paul grinned.

  There was a small cross tunnel and then another long gallery, in this gallery were a line of identical chambers, Cliff had been leading the way, “We built all the systems identically even though the power Stacks shouldn’t need the coolant gas flow, it was easier and cheaper.”

  And indeed Paul could see they were all identical up to the hold down chains. The units at the far end had hydrogen sniffers and various pieces of safety equipment set up to make sure there was no disaster. Contrary to its reputation hydrogen was actually fairly safe to work with, if treated with respect; the safety equipment was part of that respect.

  Cliff pointed at the end chamber, “That has the latest Gen III S
tack we built up in it; we’ve run it at low power but never high enough to damage it,” he sighed, “all the others are at least degraded, one of them is scheduled for a complete strip down.”

  Paul walked to the end chamber, “Can I play Cooper?” He could see that the instrumentation interface was familiar, though it looked much cleaner and there was an Aristide Industries logo across the top of the screen, the Confidential Info flags on the side and bottom of the screen was a familiar Paaly touch.

  “Sure Paul, you know the drill, I think your old password is probably in the user base even.” Cooper said cheerfully, Cliff looked a little disturbed at that.

  Paul tapped the initiation button and scribbled his ID and password sigil on the screen with his finger. There was a brief pause and the grayed out instrument faces lit up. The control interface had a lot of options, many of them left over from the years of experimentation. He checked to see if some of it was still active, it was and the wiring to the chamber still enabled what he wanted to do.

  He could feel Cooper and Cliff watching over his shoulder as he started setting up the run. The chamber was actually pumped down right now but the small amount of gas inside was Argon, he flushed that out and backfilled with hydrogen. If his suspicion was correct they might have to redesign so they could overpressure with hydrogen, but this was fine for now, he checked how quickly he could increase and decrease the hydrogen pressure.

  He checked to make sure he had control over the pinch magnets; the swirl magnets were not controllable. A quick check showed that he could also still control the big electromagnets that defined the ‘bread’ of the ‘sandwich’. They pulsed very powerfully to provide the pulse of energy that ignited the microscopic swirls into fusion. In some of the designs they had worked on the big magnets had been fixed to simplify the design, these were still controllable, which was good since he suspected that he was going to need that control.

  At last he nodded, “Ready?” He glanced around, Cooper’s eyes were hooded, typical of the tall man when he was deep in thought, but he nodded immediately.

  Paul tapped in a command that started the process. Deep in the Stack gas started flowing, in the outer chambers it lit off into plasma as an electron was stripped away, leaving the gas ionized. The Stack scavenged for five minutes and the sensors showed the flows stuttering as pockets of un-ionized gas were swept out. Then the flow stabilized. The tens of thousands of tiny reaction chambers were pulling in plasma swirling it and ejecting it out the MHD ports in the substrates but there was no fusion.

  With a tap Paul initiated the next phase and the reaction cell fields intensified by ten orders of magnitude over a fraction of a second and the plasma was pinched into tiny glowing donuts of gas, each made up of only a few hundred atoms of ionized hydrogen. The outflow quickened but this was by-blow now, gas that got into the reaction chamber and snapped up and out rather than getting into the reaction ring. The reaction rings had started out chaotic but in a tiny fraction of a second became coherent and stable. The blow-by plasma was powering the tens of thousands of microscopic MHD generators now but that was simply recovering the input power, or a fraction of it, as the tiny passageways the gas had to pass through were very inefficient.

  The tiny rings continued to contract as they spun faster and faster. The rings in the Gen III were a fourth the size of those in the Gen II and because of the quantized nature of the effect that contraction actually took longer in the smaller rings, something that Cooper and his technician helpers had missed. The data, at least some of it, indicated that the first ‘shot’ probably fused since it had had more time to settle, but the following pulses had simply dissipated their energy into rings that were still chaotic. The chaotic behavior of the gas inside the ring probably meant that some of the chambers did in fact ‘fire’ every once in a while, which was why the system had almost seemed to be working.

  Now it was time for the pinch magnets, Paul had slowed the rep rate on the pulse magnets to almost a fifth of the rate it had been set to. The pulse train showed on the screen as a series of peaks instead of a continuous saw tooth, and the output current meter suddenly showed a distinct output, it was still less than the input but it was more than should have been there.

  “Oh my god, Paul! So damned easy - and I missed it!” There was pain in Cooper’s voice.

  Paul shifted the pulse rate and the power slid down, he shifted it again and it swept up, up and up until it reached a peak and then began to shift down. The thermal monitors showed that the Stack was blazingly hot and Paul watched that for a moment. It was not getting any hotter, if anything it was trending down. The Stack was now actually putting out more power than it was taking in. His vision swam and his head pounded, they had it! They had the stars, this was an early prototype and it was more than certain that later designs would be better!

  But there was more even in this design, he increased the inlet pressure and after a delay the power began to creep up again then settled. The Stack temperature crept up a few degrees. He increased power to the little blower that flowed gas in the system, he was pretty sure they’d need to get a lot more aggressive, but this was a start. The Stack temperature dropped and he increased the pressure inside and the power again slid up the scale, they were now putting out several times the total input power. He glanced over at the load bank; the water in the cooling tank was beginning to steam gently in the cave’s cool dry air.

  Cliff was staring at the screen and the chamber, “Cooper told me about you Paul - but I thought he was fooling himself - may God forgive me,” he whispered.

  Paul laughed, “Well, he’ll forgive a lot I hear, so watch this.” He tapped several buttons on the screen. The power output dropped away precipitously and there was an earth-shaking thud. The chamber was straining against the chains, trying mightily to escape the bonds of earth.

  Both Cooper and Cliff jumped back with inarticulate yells, it had been a much more powerful surge than the chamber yesterday and something had given way. Paul saw the pressure in the chamber begin to fluctuate and the power started to fall away again, he tapped a couple of buttons and the chamber dropped to the floor with a relatively gentle thump. One of the hydrogen gas sensors began to hoot and a red warning light flashed. Paul shut all hydrogen supply down and hit the button to scavenge and backfill the chamber.

  -o-

  Ten hours later Cooper and Paul were leaning over a hastily set up table arguing about a new generation Stack design. Cliff was running the repaired chamber through a series of tests. The output from the unit no longer heated water but was run into an open frame power converter that fed the electricity back to the chamber and put the excess back on the lab’s power grid.

  Four hours earlier when they had first brought that on line the three of them had stood and stared at it in awe. For the first time mankind was generating useable energy from the power source of the stars, and they had done it in a tiny lab under a plateau in southern Utah! There had been little any of them could say. Paul had noted that the other two men’s eyes had been very bright as they turned to go about other work.

  Now Paul was tapping the diagram, “Cooper it’s just not practical now, in the future I think you will be able to make a self powered Stack. It’s just too damned hot in there, the core’s near four hundred C, much hotter and the magnetic material will lose it, but we’re at least two hundred C over anything that silicon based electronics can take. If they ever solve the problems they’re having with silicon carbide wafers that might work but until then it’s not going to work.”

  Cooper shook his big shaggy head, “There’s no reason the Gen IV can’t be self powered, fine we have to cut back the power and up blow-by gas flow but think of it. We can get rid of that stack of crap and the thing will be infinitely simpler.” He waved his hand at all the auxiliary equipment that was required to operate the existing Stacks.

  “Cooper, we need to keep the system as simple as possible fo
r now and the equipment for the thrust generator is pretty cheap all things considered. If you try and get too fancy I think we will be struggling with too many variables”

  “What’s going on here?” Asked a very cultured, though faintly foreign, voice from the entrance to the lab.

  Paul looked up, there were two men in the entrance to the room, both were big men but one was very obviously another security, bodyguard type. The other man was in an exquisitely tailored gray business suit. He was oddly like the Cooper Paaly of a few years before, an ageless man, who could be anything between forty and seventy, but instead of tall, thin and rumpled this man was big, broad, meaty with a big face and piercing black eyes. His iron gray hair was immaculate, his skin tanned with the look of someone who made sure they saw a lot of sun or the tanning booth regularly.

  “Richard, Richard we’ve done it, I told you Paul would pull my chestnuts out of the fire and he did!” Cooper Paaly was advancing on the man who must be Richard Aristide with his hand out.

  Paul saw a flash of some strong emotion on Aristide’s face before he schooled it to a cool and conventional smile. There was an element of joy there - but there had been something darker there as well, “Incredible Dr. Paaly, I knew you would do it!” The black eyes switched to Paul, “I was coming to meet you Mr. Richards, I appear to have come at a very opportune time. I don’t know how to thank you for what you’ve done here.” He jerked the big square chin at the straining chamber. “I expected success once Cooper showed me his initial results, but it’s been a longer struggle than I had anticipated.” He walked past Cooper with his hand outstretched; “I’m Richard Aristide by the way Mr. Richards.” The two of them exchanged a faint smile at the conjunction in their names.

  “Hello sir and you’re very welcome; you probably know I’ve been on the periphery for some time. It looked like we could change the world with just the original idea, now we’ve done it twice.” Paul smiled though he was a little uncertain; Aristide exuded a sophistication and power that was unnerving.

  “Yes we have Mr. Richards, and I want to make that change very rapidly. I had not intended to burden you yet but I’d like to show you something. Cooper said you’re a dreamer with the ability to make dreams real and I see he was right; I’d like to show you part of my dream - the dream that you just made real.” The big man’s bushy eyebrows had risen but Paul felt like it was an order.

  “Of course, sir.” The sir slipped out totally naturally, though Paul noted it as it passed his lips.

  He followed Aristide out of the lab and through the office block, on the other side was a big green SUV. It was one of the new generation hybrids that had just come on the market. The big industrialist waved Paul into the front seat with the bodyguard come driver while he took the back seat with Cooper Paaly.

  The big vehicle backed out of the parking slot silently on its electric motor and equally silently slid forward towards the big assembly shed that Paul had yet to ask about or explore.

  The shed was huge, its scale a little distorted by the lack of any nearby features to give the eye a reference. It was all of seventy feet to the top of the immense doors. The Hummer slid around the building and Paul was surprised to note that there were big doors on this side as well and that the road continued on the other side of the fabrication shed. There was also a low single story office block off the back with big windows looking out into a segment of the hollow that was hidden from the part the he’d been in before. The hollow was wider and deeper here, spread out on the small plain were three structures, almost like the big shed though smaller, each serviced by broad concrete spur roads.

  They pulled up next to the door into the office building. There were people walking around in here though the space was still relatively empty. The front of the building, with the windows, had some tables and chairs and a row of vending machines but somehow seemed to be waiting for some future use. The clean new office space behind the first wall was hushed.

  There were some odd drawings and renderings on the walls, some of which showed space suited figures on what looked like the moon’s surface, and big construction equipment, apparently this was some kind of engineering think tank, looking at the future for Aristide’s business. Suddenly Paul’s heart thudded because he realized that, less than a mile from here, was the device that made these visionary pictures more than a possibility, it made those pictures real.

  The back wall had a big door that they walked through and Paul looked around and up. It was a huge highbay space, gantry cranes and all. Squatting in the center of the floor was a massive and enigmatic structure. It was almost like a foreshortened oil derrick resting on four massive posts, each one of which terminated in three huge shock absorbers like those you might see in an airliner’s landing gear. They connected at the bottom to big flat skid plates. About midway up the post, seven or eight feet off the floor, a deck was attached to the four posts. The decking was pierced steel planks on structural channel sections a foot deep or more. Above that point, four thick beams rose at an angle to support an upper structural deck, though it had no flooring, just a matrix of thick structural elements. On top of that was what looked like an oil tank or an immensely overgrown hockey puck, probably ten or twelve feet thick and thirty or more feet in diameter. Hanging below that upper deck structure was a much lighter structure in which three large cylinders were mounted, lying side by side. They looked like sections taken out of passenger jet hulls, terminated with flat hemispherical caps. There were various protuberances, including two that looked like the outside of airlocks.

  “How do you like my Alexis Aurora Mr. Richards? The first of what I am sure will be a long line of Aristide space craft.” Richard Aristide asked quietly.

  Paul had been beginning to realize what this huge structure was, but the scale and the audacity of the thoughts behind it were so far out of his normal experience it was like he had stepped into another world.

  “You built this on the expectation that we’d solve the problems?” Paul heard his voice choking.

  “Yes Mr. Richards I did, I knew Cooper would solve his problems and I had my engineering futurists work this design up based on what Cooper thought should be possible. I think you may have exceeded that, but no matter, more power and thrust are always useful.” There was an amazing mixture of cool acceptance and arrogance in the big industrialist’s voice.

  “What is this for? You could probably carry every damned satellite launched in a year on that cargo deck. It’s big enough to carry four or five busses to the moon.”

  “Very good Mr. Richards! In fact it’s designed to build a city on the moon, I want to build a town there, a place to do research, a hotel resort and a place where people can live. The first stepping-stone to the stars Mr. Richards, the stars that are our destiny!” There was a fervor in the man’s voice that Paul could understand, though it seemed at odds with the rest of his persona, but then, who really knew someone else’s mind?

  Paul stood, stunned by the audacity, by the incredible faith all this indicated. Cooper said “From the results we are getting now I’d think in less than two years, with a Gen four or five Stack, we should be able to get this thing in space.”

  Paul looked around at his friend, realizing that Cooper was still looking at this as a research project. Richard Aristide wasn’t going to take that lightly. Glancing over, Paul saw the big industrialist’s face tightening. “Dr. Paaly I hope you are joking! This whole project has been delayed quite enough already.”

  Cooper looked back at Aristide blandly, “I think we have made good progress, Paul and I were discussing the Gen four design when you came in, I don’t see why we should put off making the leap forward.”

  Paul spoke up before Aristide could explode, “Cooper you know that the Gen four you’re thinking about is a risk, I’m not sure it’s really feasible and it’ll cost a lot to develop. We’ve gotten away on the cheap till now because we’re using relati
vely huge geometries and materials that are easy to work with, sort of. Going to embedded electronics is going to be much harder, and it’s not necessary.” He turned to the massive old industrialist, “Mr. Aristide how much does your freighter’s hull weigh?”

  Aristide’s face had smoothed and calmed, “Getting on for seventy five tons, but I’d like to be able to haul a lot more than that aloft.”

  Paul winced, it was more than he had anticipated but the math was simple enough. “The current Stack is putting out almost a ton of lift, I think with some chamber design changes that can be doubled, probably tripled. We had always talked about a taller Stack and if we tripled the Stack we should be able to triple the thrust. That gives you something like ten tons per Stack…”

  The gangly old physicist exploded, “Damn it Paul that’s all well and good, but what about all the auxiliary equipment hanging off the Stack? No, no we need to get the next Gen working.”

  “Cooper if we have to do what I think we will the best we can expect out of your next Gen slice is half of what we are getting now, if we can get it working at all. Set that against a rack of auxiliary equipment that is a tenth of the baseline thrust? Which is the more practical solution?”

  “But it’ll be a mess, a nightmare to maintain, not simple to install.” The big hands flapped, as if the big researcher cared about those sorts of things normally. Paul figured Cooper was looking at the potential loss of money to do more research rather than the practical issues, which were real but minor in this age of ultra-reliable electronics.

  “Cooper!” Aristide’s basso-profundo growl actually shut the gangly old physicist down, “We will do this Mr. Richards’ way. No, no arguments, I will continue to fund you to improve the design, but in the mean time I want this ship space-born in six months.”

  He looked at Paul, “You are a contracting engineer Mr. Richards, I would like you to come and work for me, I can pay very well. You can take over the project from Cliff Samson?”

  Paul looked into the black eyes, “I have commitments, Mr. Aristide, that I will need to close out, but they should take only part time for a few weeks. And if Cliff has managed all this,” he waved at the massive ship, “then he should stay, I’ll work on the things I can do, like the power and propulsion modules and maybe guidance and control, but I’m not the man for life support and structural on this scale.”

  The thin lips curved, “Very good Mr. Richards, done, and I don’t need to tell you that this is all most secret?”

  Richard nodded, “Not a word if you say so Mr. Aristide.”

  “Good.”