“Awesome,” Kaem said, then held up a finger.
His earbud had just said, “You have a call from Jerry Branzon.”
He said, “I’ll take it…” Resisting an impulse to say, “Hi, Jerry,” instead he went with, “Hello Mr. Branzon. What can I do for you?”
Lee’s eyes went wide.
Branzon said, “I hear Marks has a mole in your organization?”
“That’d probably be Ms. Lee, sir. She’s an aerospace engineer who used to work for his company. At present, he’s paying half her salary and we’re paying the other half. She mostly works here, but goes back and forth to Space-Gen, ferrying parts out here to be stazed and taking them back there to be tested. She keeps them up to date on developments and makes suggestions as to how they might best use stade for their program.”
“So, you’re fully aware of her?”
“Yes, sir. She’s sitting next to me.”
“I’m going to need to check that agreement we signed with Space-Gen to see if this is kosher.”
“Mr. Marks said his legal people checked it and said it was okay. However, he said if you got upset I should suggest you could pay for half of another engineer that’d also work for us. A good deal for everyone.”
Branson laughed. “Okay. You’ve got yourself another engineer. I just have to figure out who we’re going to send you.”
After Branzon signed off, Kaem looked around to see what Gunnar was doing. The crotchety man had come in and started working on his blimp while Kaem was watching Lee’s video. He’d been working on it on and off for the past weeks. Just now it was sitting on the worktable with something strapped under it that made it look more like a typical blimp with a gondola.
Gunnar picked up a device that looked like an old model airplane controller and flipped a switch. A thrumming sound came from the blimp, so Kaem got up to go get a closer look. The straps were holding the gondola to the slippery stade of the blimp. The gondola seemed to cover the area of the blimp where Kaem thought the hole had been located. It looked like the interface between the hole and the gondola was sealed by some kind of soft rubber gasket.
The blimp started wobbling, then suddenly broke free of the table and floated up into the air a few inches. The thrumming sound stopped.
“Ah,” Kaem said, “That noise was a pump, right? Pumping air out of the blimp to generate a vacuum and make it lighter than air?”
Gunnar nodded. The noise started up again. Moments later the blimp started moving higher into the air. Gunnar moved one of the controllers and small propellers on either side of the gondola spun up, pushing the airship forward. Moving another controller sped one propeller and slowed the other, causing the blimp to begin describing a circle as it continued rising.
“So,” Kaem said, “are you thinking a full-sized blimp could act as a heavy lifter with full control of elevation?”
Gunnar nodded. “Industry should be able to use it to move big stuff overland where there aren’t any roads. Things that’re too big for planes or helicopters. The military should like it too. Regular blimps are easy to shoot down, but this sucker’s made of stade.”
Kaem nodded his understanding and opened his mouth to point out that the gondola was vulnerable. Then he realized the gondola could be built out of stade as well. Well, not the windows, but if you were going to use stade in the military, you wouldn’t have windows. You’d use a crapload of cameras hooked up to high-definition screens inside. Wires passed in through long crooked tubes to prevent intrusion through them. He hesitated a moment, wondering, Do we even want to sell to the military? For this use maybe; the blimp doesn’t seem like much of an offensive weapon… They might not even want it.
Lee’d been watching and listening. Now she asked Gunnar, “You made this using Mylar right? Blew up a big balloon and stazed it?”
Gunnar nodded. “The first one was a temporary stade. Then we blew the balloon up a little more and stazed the space around the first one with a long-term stade. When the temporary one disappeared, we had a hollow one. Fortunately, it was off-center enough that I had an opening I could seal off with the gondola and use to pump out the interior.”
Lee was looking thoughtful. She said, “I’m thinking this’d be a fast way for Staze to put up buildings.” She waved around, “We should outgrow this building soon. If you buy yourself a huge Mylar blimp to make stade dirigibles, you should think about setting it up so you can have openings for doors and ventilation. Make a stade blimp, pour concrete in the bottom of it, and you’ve got a building.”
Kaem laughed, “You might have trouble getting it approved by the building inspector but I’m pretty sure we could work that out eventually. Um, I’m a little worried about the mirror surface of Mylar stade, both for blimps and for buildings. If you wind up blasting a reflection of the sun at people there’re gonna be complaints. We’ve got to at least diffuse the reflections. I think you’ve got to see if they can make you Mylar with a rough surface. Something that’ll produce a slightly corrugated effect on the surface of the stade like those machined molds Space-Gen used for their cryotanks. Even rougher if possible.” He got a thoughtful look on his face, “If we could get really rough versions, rough enough so the surface could interdigitate with stuff we applied to it, that’d be even better.”
“Stuff like what?”
“Epoxy coatings, asphalt,” Kaem answered. “I’m afraid the one-millimeter feature limit on stade means that the interdigitations we can form will be so big that only stuff like asphalt and concrete will lock to it.”
Lee said, “You want the asphalt to provide a road surface for bridges, right?” Her eyes flashed with another thought, “Bridges carried in and positioned by one of Gunnar’s dirigibles.” After a moment’s pause, she said, “Though if they were air-density stade, one guy could carry a bridge by himself.”
Kaem laughed, “On a still day. Not if there was any breeze.”
Lee waved the point away as if it were insignificant. “I want to point out that the most important thing you could use a stade building for would be to give you a place to mass produce lighter than air stades. Rocket engines, cryotanks, fuel feeds, and rocket bodies being a particularly desirable set of devices we could make very light. Hell, the fueled rocket could weigh less than the fuel inside it.”
“That’s a great idea!” Kaem said, “But, I’ve got some other ideas for vacuum stades as well…” He frowned, “We’d have to populate the inside of your building with mechanicals that could do the stazing, since human workers couldn’t be inside the vacuum, stazing things.” He looked at Lee, “When you’re not working on rockets, could you work on how we could do all that stuff?”
“Sure!” Lee said, sounding excited. “What kind of things did you have in mind to make out of lighter than air stade?”
“Chain for one.”
Lee blinked a couple of times, then a huge smile spread across her face, “A skyhook?”
Kaem grinned and nodded, “Eventually. But don’t tell your old bosses about it, okay?”
“Lord no. Can’t afford to get them flustered. We’ll still need them for a while.”
Kaem nodded, “At least until they’ve launched the upper parts of the hook.”
***
Kaem, his mother, and his sister were sitting with his dad in one of Dr. Starbach’s exam rooms. Emmanuel had been lucky in that the lab had been able to produce his CAR T-cells quickly. He’d been reinfused with the cells only nine days after they’d been harvested. Then, though he’d had a version of the dreaded cytokine release syndrome that made some people so sick, he’d responded well to treatment and only spent two nights in the hospital.
Now they were back to find out the results of his first scan after the treatment.
To learn whether the T-cell therapy was working or not.
Though Kaem had patted his dad on the back and spoken effusively about how, “Of course, the results are going to be great,” he’d had to force his smile because of the gnawing unea
se in his gut. I wish this were over with, he thought. Bad or good, I just want to know. To have it be done with!
A knock came on the door.
Kaem’s dad gave him an uncertain look, so Kaem said, “Come in.”
The door opened and a young blonde woman stepped in. “Hello, I’m Dr. Sue Snell, Dr. Starbach’s fellow. He’s busy with another patient and asked me to come get things started with you.”
Kaem had been ready to finally get an answer. Now he was ready to chew nails.
Dr. Snell looked at them and said, “You all look anxious.” She smiled, “Perhaps I should start by telling you that the results of your scan look good. Very good.”
Kaem punched the air.
It felt like he could float out of the room.
The End
Hope you liked the book!
To find other books by the author try Laury.Dahners.com.
Or his Amazon Author page
Author’s Afterword
This is a comment on the “science” in this science fiction novel. I’ve always been partial to science fiction that poses a “what if” question. Not everything in the story has to be scientifically plausible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Essentially you ask, “what if” something (such as faster than light travel) were possible, how might that change our world?
I think the rest of the science in a science fiction story should be as real as possible.
Therefore, in this story, the central question continues to be what if someone invented a way to stop time in a certain volume of space-time, thus creating something often called stasis in the tropes of science fiction.
Stasis is not a new idea. Niven’s “slavers” used it to escape from bad situations into the future. In Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War, people who threaten the authoritarian government are “bobbled” in stasis fields to get them out of the way. In both of these SF universes, the stasis fields are indestructible but—to the best of my recollection—they are always spherical and are only used to protect oneself from destruction (Niven) or to punish offenders by sending them forward in time (Vinge). Sometimes stories by other authors use stasis for the preservation of food or people but they usually ignore the presumed mechanical properties. Those stories seldom delve into other changes that would derive from an ability to stop time within a space.
The question in this series then becomes: What if these indestructible segments of space-time could be induced in non-spherical shapes? Wouldn’t this provide the ultimate material for rockets, construction, and other engineering projects that would benefit from such exotic properties? What other benefits could be derived from an ability to stop time?
For those of you who are interested, the CAR T-cell therapy featured in this novel is a real treatment for cancer. The 2018 Nobel Prize was awarded to James Allison and Tasuko Honjo for its discovery. Though it’s early days, it appears to have more potential to cure cancers than almost any other therapy. Of course, for decades we’ve been able to cure localized cancers by surgically removing them, and chemotherapy has been able to cure some leukemias, etc. However, this new ability to supercharge your own immune system so it attacks your cancer cells and kills them—without attacking your normal cells the way chemo does—seems to have unbounded potential.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the editing and advice of Gail Gilman, Nora Dahners, Hamilton Elliott, Philip Lawrence, Scott McNay, Stephen Wiley, and Jim Youmans, each of whom significantly improved this story.
Other Books and Series
by Laurence E Dahners
Series
The Ell Donsaii series
The Vaz series
The Bonesetter series
The Blindspot series
The Proton Field series
The Hyllis family series
Single books (not in series)
The Transmuter’s Daughter
Six Bits
Shy Kids Can Make Friends Too
For the most up to date information go to
Laurence E Dahners website
Or the Amazon Author page
The Thunder of Engines Page 27
