The Thunder of Engines

by Laurence Dahners

  She shrugged offhandedly. “That may be true, but nice clothes make a subliminal impression. We need every advantage we can get if we’re going to negotiate with Aaron Marks.”

  “Maybe we need to show him we’re poor so he’ll be nice to us.”

  Arya stared at him a moment, then said, “Shut up, Kaem. I don’t tell you how to do physics. You don’t try to tell me how to do business.”

  “You sure are telling me to ‘shut up’ a lot lately.”

  Imitating his tone, she replied, “You sure do need to be told to shut up a lot lately.”

  Arriving in Kaem’s room, they found Ron Metz sprawled on his bed. He took one look at the suitcase Arya was pulling and raised an eyebrow, “What? Are you moving in?”

  Arya stepped closer to Metz, bent, and, spoke in a breathy voice. She said, “Kaem won a bet, and I owe him a wild sex session. Can you be a good boy and make yourself scarce for about thirty minutes?”

  Kaem’s hair stood on end. What?!

  Metz looked stunned but scrambled to his feet. He stared at Kaem a moment, mumbled, “You owe me big time,” and left the room.

  Arya turned and saw Kaem’s wide eyes, “What? It got him out of here, didn’t it? Which closet’s yours?”

  Wordlessly, Kaem pointed. Despite being highly distracted by what Arya’d said; and by how good she looked; and somewhat by the way she cursed each time she pulled another item out of his closet; he did notice that he had a package. My Mylar? he wondered. He glanced again at Arya, then tore open the package. Yes!

  Kaem called Gunnar and asked him to bring whatever he thought he’d need to try using the Mylar as a form for making stade.

  Arya turned to him. “That turtleneck and the black slacks you wear to Curtis’s parties. Is that… the best you’ve got?”

  Kaem shrugged, embarrassed, “I guess so.”

  “Are these the slacks?” she asked, holding up a hanger.

  He nodded.

  “Where’s the turtleneck?”

  Kaem pulled open a drawer.

  “I’ve got to take you shopping,” she muttered, but held up the turtleneck, looking at it from both sides before she folded it neatly and handed it to Kaem.

  ~~~

  As they walked into Staze’s freshly rented building, Arya asked, “How many in Marks’ party?”

  Kaem got out his phone, “Ten.”

  “Ten?! Crap! I’ll bet we can’t get a reservation for thirteen.” She started making calls.

  Gunnar arrived at Staze a few minutes after they did. He laid out his molds for the six-inch cubes and the three- by six-inch test plates. Kaem set up the rack of electronics and started plugging all the wires together correctly. That done, they made a hundred-second stade in each form to be sure everything worked. Those stades would be gone long before Marks and his people arrived.

  Done, Gunnar turned to Kaem, “Is that the Mylar?”

  Kaem nodded, “It’s the thickest they had in stock that was aluminized on both sides. They can custom make thicker, but I’m hoping this’ll work for proof of concept.”

  Feeling it, Gunnar said, “I’ve worked with Mylar a lot and this’s way thicker than any I’ve ever seen.” He looked around, “You just want to wrap it around some object and see if we can staze it?”

  Kaem waggled a hand, “We could just form a bag, stick the microwave emitter head in the opening, tie it off and then staze the air inside the bag. I’m afraid the hard part’ll be getting the laser emitter to fire into the Mylar between the reflective surfaces.”

  Gunnar cut out a four by eight-inch piece of the Mylar, folded it double, then ran a power tool down the two edges.

  “What’s that?” Kaem asked, surprised.

  “Ultrasonic welder. Pretty good for welding plastics together.” He picked up the piece of Mylar and demonstrated that the two sides had been firmly welded together, making a bag out of it.

  He said, “You might consider getting Mylar that’s only metalized on one side. You’d have them lay two sheets face-to-face, with the aluminized surfaces on the outside. Then they’d weld together the entire sheets, all but a strip along the edges. That’d make you double-thick, double metalized Mylar with edges that are split apart a little way. To get the light inside the Mylar where you want it, you could stick the laser guide’s head in between the unwelded edge flaps.”

  Gunnar turned the bag inside out so the seams were on the inside. Moving to the folded end, he pulled out a knife and scraped a little hole in the reflective coating. “Hand me the end of the light guide for your laser.”

  Kaem did and Gunnar held the end of the fiberoptic cable against the defect in the reflective coating. “Pretty good fit,” he said after inspecting it. “Turn on the laser and let’s see if we can see light leaking out the edges of the Mylar.”

  Sure enough, when Kaem turned it on, the exposed edges of the Mylar brightened.

  Gunnar said, “Let me get a microwave emitter head to stuff into the end of the bag. You pass me your cable and we’ll see what happens.”

  Kaem laid the cable out next to the Mylar bag, then set about adjusting the settings on his racked electronics.

  Gunnar jacked in the emitter head, stuffed it a little way into the end of the bag, and wrapped the electrical tape tightly around it to squeeze the Mylar bag closed. He put the light cable for the laser against the hole he’d scraped in the reflective surface and nodded at Kaem. As soon as he heard the snap of the capacitator’s discharge, he set down the light cable and poked the bag. “It’s hard!” he said with a satisfied tone, starting to unwind the electrical tape.

  A moment later he slid the bag off a lumpy, deformed stade the shape of the partially collapsed Mylar bag.

  Gunnar’s eyebrows went up as Kaem excitedly punched the air.

  Arya asked what’d happened. Once Kaem explained, she said, “It’s a doggy bag?”

  Kaem nodded.

  When Gunnar asked what the hell that meant, Arya explained how they thought they could keep leftovers until the next night by stazing them.

  Kaem turned to Arya, “There’ll be a lot of other uses for staze bags though.” Before she could start asking questions, he handed the lumpy stade back to Gunnar and said, “Put it in the cube-shaped stazer and hook up the cables. I’ve got an idea I want to try.”

  Gunnar took the ends of the cables over and hooked them up to the cube, then opened the door to put the stade inside. He halted, staring into the chamber and exclaimed, “Aw, shit!”

  “What?”

  “I forgot. We ruined the cube mold when you had me scrape out a ring of the silvering for that drinking glass trick of yours.”

  Kaem winced, but then said, “Tape a piece of aluminum foil over the scraped area. It might still work.”

  Grumbling about how the forms were looking more and more like kludges, Gunnar did so, carefully taping the aluminum foil down.

  Kaem said, “Put the little stade in there.”

  Gunnar shook his head and closed the door with the box empty, “Let’s do one thing at a time. First, we make sure we can make an ordinary stade.”

  Kaem rolled his eyes, but busied himself changing a lot of the settings on the electronics.

  “You have to change it that much just because it doesn’t have a stade in there?” Gunnar asked.

  “You’re just going to have to wait and see,” Kaem said as the capacitor charged.

  As soon as it snapped, Gunnar opened the door. Breathing a sigh of relief, he said, “It worked!” He started working his knife in between the walls of the cube and the stade that filled the cavity. A cube of stade popped out and he heaved it up and out into the room. It stopped a few feet up as wind resistance, in combination with its lack of mass, caused it to halt. It floated there. “There,” he said, “that’ll be a nice conversation piece for when Marks arrives.”

  Kaem shook his head, “Sorry, it’s only a hundred-second stade. It’ll be gone before they get here. We can make another if you want, but first, c
an you put the stade from the Mylar bag in the chamber?”

  “Okay,” Gunnar said, trapping the lumpy little stade and putting it in the chamber. As he closed the door, he said, “I guess you’re right, we haven’t formed a stade with an existing stade in the chamber before. What do you think’s going to happen?”

  Kaem blinked, then slowly said, “I think another stade would form with the first stade inside of it.”

  “So, one big stade then?”

  “No…” Kaem said, thinking furiously, “Because, if the first stade was set for a longer period of time, when the second, outer, stade disappeared, the first one would still be there.”

  “Oh,” Gunnar said, eyes sightlessly staring at the mold. “Now that would be a bitch of a murder. Someone goes in a stade to wait ten years for a cure for his disease. His wife puts that stade inside a slightly bigger stade set to wait ten years and a month. His first stade collapses after ten years and he finds himself inside the bigger stade, quickly running out of oxygen. Or if there was an opening he could get air through, he’d slowly starve in complete darkness. Sad way to go.”

  Arya had appeared behind Gunnar, just as he started his description. At the conclusion, she whacked the man’s shoulder. Hard. “Gunnar! That’s terrible! I can’t believe you even thought of something like that!”

  He crouched and shrank away from her, looking back over a shoulder at her as if trying to decide if she were truly angry or merely teasing. “Hey…! Um, we’ve got to consider the ways our tech can be used for evil so we can think of ways to prevent—”

  “No! You sounded like a little boy gleefully pulling legs off an insect.” Arya said, lifting her hand again.

  Gunnar leaped out of the chair and stepped away from her, staying low with his hands up to fend her off. “You’ve never watched a horror movie where someone got bricked into a wall?”

  “No!”

  “Well, sorry, Ms. Goody Two-Shoes,” Gunnar said, straightening haughtily, “other, perfectly fine human beings do think about such things.”

  “Would you two grow up?” Kaem asked as the capacitor snapped. “Open the door and let’s see what happened.”

  Arya and Gunnar held their stare-down a moment longer, then Arya turned to the cubical stade mold and opened the door. She glanced into the empty chamber and said, “I guess it didn’t work. What were you trying to do?”

  Gunnar was gaping at the empty chamber. “What happened to the stade from the bag?” He turned to look at Kaem, “Did you take it out while we…” He glanced back at the chamber, “You didn’t… did you?”

  Exasperatedly, Arya asked, “What happened?” She looked at Kaem who was ecstatic.

  Kaem punched the air for the second time of the day. “It worked! It freaking worked! I got to thinking about the theory and wondered if we could undo stasis with a frequency shift.” He punched the air again, “Turns out we can!”

  Arya said, “So, you could take your doggy bag out of stasis whenever you were ready to eat?”

  Kaem laughed, “Sure. Or your gourmet five-star restaurant meal from Tuscany, prepared last year, put in stasis and delivered to you by boat. Take it out of stasis and it’s ready to eat, still steaming hot.” He grinned, “More importantly, remember how you were worried about how we might be littering the world with million-year stades?” At her nod, “Well, I’ve been worried about the situation where we made a rocket engine that’ll only last five years but no one keeps track of its expiration date. Suddenly, in the middle of a launch, boom, the engine disappears and the rocket crashes!” Seeing them looking a little puzzled, he gave them a few seconds to catch up mentally. Then he said, “Problem solved, we make million-year stades for most things, then break them down when we want to get rid of them.”

  Gunnar surprised Kaem by saying, “This’d be great for disaster relief. You could drop packages out of airplanes into a war-torn area where people were starving. They could break the stasis on the packages at their convenience.”

  Kaem looked at Gunnar for a moment, then said, “Gunnar, the only person who could break the stasis would be someone with a stazer.”

  “Drop one of those too.”

  “You don’t think the person on the ground who gets the stazer is gonna demand a share of everyone else’s food for his service in breaking it out of stasis? I think you’ve had a great idea, but wouldn’t it be better if the packages were timed to come out of stasis by themselves, a few hours after they landed?”

  Gunnar looked abashed, “Yeah. I guess that’s why you’re the boss.”

  “I’m not the boss!” Kaem said, jerking a thumb at Arya, “She’s the boss.”

  Arya began, “I’m not—”

  Kaem interrupted. “You’re just the business boss. I know. Sorry to interrupt but we need to try another couple of things before the Space-Gen people get here.”

  Arya rolled her eyes and said something under her breath about how they were dodging the issue. However, Kaem had already started talking to Gunnar. “So, let’s try making some short term stades with the Mylar trick and set them in the bottom of the cube. Then we’ll make a longer-term stade in the cube. When the short term stades go away, if I’m right, we’ll have cavities in the bottom of the cube. Space-Gen could use a trick like that to make their combustion chambers. Ones we won’t have to break the glass out of.”

  Gunnar’s eyebrows went up and he said, “Let’s try it.”

  This time Kaem had Gunnar make a longer Mylar bag. They dribbled a little water into the bag to give it weight, then inserted the microwave emitter a little way into the bag. Kaem pursed his lips around the end of the bag and the cable going to the emitter and managed to blow the bag up before Gunnar did his thing and wound the electrical tape around the emitter.

  They stazed it while holding it vertically so the emitter—and the water—was on the bottom. The stade they pulled out this time was rounder and more like the inside of a rocket nozzle, not a lumpy deformed thing like the first one they’d made using the uninflated Mylar bag.

  They made another, then set both of the stades from the Mylar bags on the bottom of the cube—where they stayed only because the water made them heavier than air—before stazing it. They set them on the square ends where the flat surface of the emitter had been and kept them from sliding frictionlessly around by blocking them with bits of tape applied to the mirror on the bottom of the chamber.

  When they pulled the cube-shaped stade out of the chamber, it was flawless. There was no way to tell that the stades from the bags were inside the cube stade.

  However, five hundred seconds later, when the stades from the Mylar bags disappeared, the cube had two slightly wet cavities in the bottom of it.

  After doing some high-fiving, they all calmed down to think. Arya said, “Being able to reverse stasis is going to let us do so many things! Not just food preservation, we could hold fully ripened summer crops until winter without any degradation. And, once they’re in stasis, we can stack them as high as we want without the upper ones crushing the ones below. Rats and insects won’t get into them. We could save members of endangered species until we have a way to resurrect them. Store sperm and eggs without freezing. I’m sure we’ll think of a million other things.”

  Gunnar said, “Those are important, but this is also going to help with the fabrication of a lot of things we couldn’t have made out of stade before.”

  “I think,” Kaem said slowly, “we should stop thinking of pie-in-the-sky projects for a bit and consider how these changes apply to rocketry. We need to be ready when Marks gets here.”

  “Spoilsport…” Gunnar said, his grumpy tone belied by the gleam in his eye.

  Chapter Five

  Marks’ assistant had arranged a couple of limos to take them from the airport to Staze. As Lee was getting in, she found the CEO right behind her. He said, “Lee, sit next to me. Tell me who I’m about to meet.”

  “I’ve only met three people at Staze.” She glanced at him, meeting his int
ense gaze and feeling bowled over by the charisma people said he exuded. It’s not just what “they say,” it’s real, she thought. She looked away to diminish its intensity, then shrugged, “I think those are all the employees they’ve got.”

  Marks nodded.

  “Kaem Seba’s the one who invented stade. He looks African-American. He’s got a faint accent. Maybe he came from somewhere else, or perhaps his parents did. Also, he looks like he’s… not well. As if he’s got some kind of chronic illness. I’d say he’s just a little taller than I am. About five foot eight.”

  “Nice guy? Jerk?”

  “I…” a sudden realization struck her. “I really liked him. He’s funny, and humble, and smart.” And he’s going to be worth a fortune. Is that influencing me?

  Marks looked curious. “Smart, huh? How do you know?”

  “Well… um, there’s the fact that he remembers everything in the contract we’ve got with Staze.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t, but he remembered a lot of stuff I didn’t. And when I looked those items up later, he’d been right. I asked him if he had a photographic memory and he said, he did, ‘for stuff that matters to me.’” She grinned, “Which is the kind of memory I’d like to have.”

  Marks looked thoughtful. “Having a great memory doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart. Look at the autistic savants who can memorize entire books but can’t even take care of themselves. Anything else make you think he’s smart?”

  “Other than the fact that he invented stade?”

  Marks shrugged. “Might’ve been an accident. Just happened to mix the right two things in a test tube.”

  Lee narrowed her eyes, feeling a strong compulsion to defend Kaem. Where’s this coming from? she wondered. Both Marks’ doubt and my compulsion to defend Kaem? To Marks, she said, “Are you aware he’s not a chemistry major?”

  Marks looked a little surprised, “Materials engineer?”

  Lee shook her head.