by Ken Pence
All these people had various overlapping or complementary specialties, but each had been chosen to fit into an integrated group with a synthesist manager in charge. If the defense of their group proposals were accepted, then all members of the group would get a synthesist degree, similar and equivalent to PhDs but universities were different than years ago. Now universities provided the equipment, experience, and atmosphere for experimentation and, of course, each university was known for the reputation of the experts the student groups could consult. A breakthrough from the military in the early decades of the century had revolutionized the learning process.
Direct stimulation learning programs were now used in preparatory, middle and high schools and provided the information foundation for college. This technique for learning was a combination of direct simulation and high power drugs provided early basic skills in math and science. Levels of sophistication varied by price and the privileged and the talented were able to access the best information sources. Quantifiable formulas and scientific theories were more easily taught as were history and literature. Anything that required memorization was a candidate for canned learning. Students tested as well or better than conventional “schooling” in long-term memory recall though many debated the quality of memorization through this method. Programmed learning had replaced almost all learning by rote for the upper quartile students. Teachers helped students integrate their implanted knowledge.
Legacy cycle learning, where students solved problems based on scenarios, was the teaching method du jour. Scenarios would be expanded to draw students into considering real world issues or points to research so they could discover their own answers and then apply them to other situations. Students had already acquired the basic knowledge base in their fields of interest before being accepted into college. Students a century past spent their secondary schooling and undergraduate years learning facts and methods by rote and then trying to apply the theories only after they entered graduate school. University groups, now, were picked to work productively as units such as the one Andrew was about to address. The University of Arizona, here, had become renown for turning out producers...real problem solvers...creative brains for hire…with a synthesist degree and minors in their specialty.
All this flashed through Andrew's consciousness as he looked at the anxious faces around him and started speaking.
"I want you to take a chance on me, on us, for a team topic defense. Success will mean more success than you can imagine. We had come up with several avenues to explore but this is unlike any of those. I'm asking you to scrap all the ideas we had discussed and, instead, head in an entirely new direction," Andrew stated somberly. "We have a chance to use what this university can give us to make our futures -- to make the world a better place” -- everybody winced at that trite sounding phrase but he continued, “at least, to add some excitement to this place." Andrew wished he hadn’t seen so much skepticism on some of the faces as he continued.
"First, I want Susan to make a preliminary report on the assignment I asked her to do earlier this afternoon," Andrew said turning to Susan.
Her head snapped toward him. "You didn't say anything about an assignment... ...you..." I guess he understood me better than I thought. It was a kind of assignment. She grinned. You sneak.
"What have you two been cooking up?" Steve asked looking from Susan to Andrew. Is she the reason you missed the seminar? He wondered.
"Well... John,” she looked at him. ”I'm sorry. I used some of your equipment," Susan said demurely, a little of her enthusiasm spilling out as she continued her description.
"I have here a water container close to twelve (12) centimeters in diameter. It does have water in it but the water has trace amounts of sodium chloride, iodine, and several insoluble organic compounds in it. The container is a type of thin metal, though I thought it was a plastic at first. First, it's not like any metal I've known. It doesn't oxidize with anything but the strongest agents and its hardness is similar to titanium, though I can't find any trace of titanium. The crystalline structure is different from anything I've ever seen. You look at it Tod, before I say any more," Susan said as she tossed it to Tod.
Tod said, "Well, it's a rather crude manufactured product. Probably was injection molded like plastic, but I'd need to know the powdered metal properties before I could say for sure." He held it up in the light to see it better.
"Is this our project?” Steve said in an exasperated tone. “Did you get us together so we can design new canteens? I'll really be useful in designing water containers."
"No, I've got something for everyone here," Andrew said as he took the alien belt out of a box he had brought with him and placed the belt on the conference table before them all.
"What is that supposed to be? We are starting a repair service for music players for fat joggers?" Steve cried looking at the length of the belt. If this project doesn't pan out we'll all be lucky to get jobs skimming algae at a solar farm somewhere, he thought.
Andrew knew he had their attention now, despite their protests. The belt was unusual in an odd way that they couldn't quite pin down. Andrew waited very quietly, "This is the key to a new type of power source...maybe even unlimited power supplies." Andrew let his statement hit them and the silence was absolute about him.
"It can be all of that and more if we can unravel it without killing ourselves in the process. I pretty well know the state of the art in most of those areas, since that's my job and I think we're about as well equipped as anyone else to tackle it. Think this is a good enough for our proposal defense?" Andrew asked.
"Where did you come by these little advances in science?" John asked quietly.
"I can only say that this will be a good test as to how competent we are and I will explain further when I can," Andrew explained as he saw their dubious expressions. "No person will miss these."
There was a brief period of silence while everyone looked around to see if they were sane and really there and then, the tumult of questions really began the serious discussion for the night.
***
Rett’s ship in deep space
Rett snapped to full consciousness to the clamor of the proximity alarm.
What is this? He thought as he shut off the alarm. His vehicle gave a lurch and he became dizzy at the same moment. Looking out the port he saw the hazy end of a great ship. Yes, it was an Exploration Service ship ...but what was it doing here? Why has the ES stopped my ship? How did they dare? I am a Tros. He was moving toward the communicator when the floor gave another lurch and the gravity orientation changed and he was tumbled to the deck.
Rett heard the clang of metal before he realized that the bright light now coming through the portal was artificial and his whole ship was, itself, now inside the great ES ship. As he stood there absorbing this revelation, he heard a loud pounding coming from the entranceway.
It took all his discipline to calmly open the entranceway. A group was awaiting him when he opened the hatch. All were bipeds but only two were Tros.
Addressing the Tros confronting him, he said in Trade, "By what authority did you stop my vessel?"
The leader of the group, obviously not a Tros, answered abruptly, "You are in an area under control of the Exploration Service. Our ship is stronger and we need no other reason. You are in an area that is interdicted in a vessel of unauthorized design."
"But I've done nothing and you interrupted my journey. Why did you stop my vessel?"
"What was your purpose in this area?" The leader asked.
"Why did you stop my vessel?" Rett asked equally defiant.
"What was your purpose in this area?" The leader asked flatly.
When Rett did not reply, one of the others in the group walked up and touched a control rod to Rett's shoulder. He was immediately shocked senseless and carried out the entrance and into a room aboard the Exploration Service ship.
Rett regained full consciousness to find himself strapped down to a table with wires
attached to his head, arms, chest, and legs. Swiveling one eye to the side he saw another non-Tros seated before a complicated instrument display. Even in the position he was in, he felt relieved to see a fellow-being and not just some lowly other race. Only when he heard the question did he realize that the humanoid-leader of the group was beside him also and asking him a question.
"Why were you in this area?" The leader asked.
When Rett did not answer, the questioner nodded to the Tros behind the console and Rett was wracked with indescribable agony. As he lay gasping, he heard the question again.
"Why were you in this area?"
When Rett paused to answer, a mild jolt shuddered through him again and he answered, "I was just trying out a solo craft my colleagues and I built."
"Why did you go to this particular system?"
"It was just a convenient point," Rett said, barely getting the answer out before a jolt hit him.
"Why, this particular system?"
Anticipating another jolt, Rett's voice was shaky as he answered, "I was told that this system was very interesting since it had so many electromagnetic emanations coming from it. I was not aware it was under control of the Service." Rett fully expected another jolt after his answer but it didn't come.
"Did you meet any of the natives?" the being asked.
"No," Rett replied and was hit by the strongest jolt yet. When he returned to full consciousness, he was prepared for another jolt which didn't come. How did this being know, he was lying? The artifacts! Of course, he knew. Rett anticipated the reply and said, "Yes, I had contact with one native."
Rett was pounded with another small series of jolts.
"Only one native?"
"Yes," Rett answered and was jolted again.
"How many natives?"
"Just one," he answered and tensed for the next jolt, which again, didn't come.
"Did you give the native any artifacts?"
Rett decided that since Trade training didn't count and the belt had been taken, he could answer a negative. "No, I didn't," he answered and again came the mind-searing jolt.
"What did you give the native?"
"Nothing," he said and again came the jolt.
"Well, how is his story so far?" the questioner asked the Tros at the console.
"Relatively truthful on all counts, but with indications of information withheld."
"Let us continue then," stated the questioner.
Rett's story was enlarged bit by bit but many of the details were omitted. The questioners seemed to be just going through a routine and had no real interest in his answers.
The service personnel knew nothing of his mobile stressed space field belt and Rett didn't feel inclined to mention it since he knew the penalty for culture contamination through technology transfer.
A small delegation, led by a Tros this time, came to his craft as he was readied to leave the service ship.
"You will be destroyed if you attempt to enter this section of the spiral arm again. Also, if upon subsequent investigation, we find that you have misrepresented yourself or your intentions on the planet where you landed; the nearest ship will be sent to eradicate you and all your associates. This ship is now recorded as being warned from this area," the Tros said and without waiting for an answer spun around and walked away.
Rett began to make plans for his moving from his planet even before his craft sped out into the brilliantly speckled void.
***
At the university
Susan and Tod had finally figured out how the belt had been assembled. It slid together like a puzzle box with no adhesives or extraneous screws or connectors. After careful diagrams and notes had been gathered, they consulted with Steve, John and Joel to assist them in disassembling the component parts. It was a relatively safe procedure with Steve's electronic background, Joel’s mechanical aptitude, and Tod's knowledge of physics, particle physics in this case.
Only after it had been safely disassembled did Susan, as materials specialist and John, the chemist, begin to figure out of what it was made and why it had fractured in the first place.
It became Steve, Tod, and Joel's job to figure out how the belt had been powered and to duplicate the power source. Then they’d have to figure out the stressed space field after they got a power supply working.
Ling, Desiree, and Fran were given a separate task of preliminary work, whose purpose Andrew wouldn't even reveal to the rest of the members in the group. When asked he would just say he would tell them soon. All members were ordered not to ask the three about their activities until allowed and this hurt the harmony of the group. Andrew had explained that early answers would prejudice their investigations. Nobody liked it. They were supposed to work together, they muttered.
At a called meeting, Andrew prepared to tell all members of the team his purpose. He also knew that the three men had made a great breakthrough on the belt power supply. The tension was palpable.
As the members settled into their places, Andrew spoke, "We should get right down to business. I'm sure you're all interested in the results of our sub-group on the power supply. Our women's sub-group has been doing some preliminary work that we shall discuss later.” The women frowned at this potentially sexist remark. “First; Tod, why don't you do this, since this part is really your baby?"
Tod got up and walked over to the display board. He was grinning from ear to ear and looked more like an imbecilic football player than a physicist.
"About a week after we started on the project, Joel figured out the mechanics of the power production and Steve figured out how power generation might be controlled but they both really didn't understand the process of the power generation. What we had, but we didn't know it, was a fusion generator that weighed about three kilograms."
"Wait a minute," Fran interrupted, "I thought a fusion reaction took millions of degrees of heat and needed a tremendous amount of energy to start it. The first successful experiment with cold fusion wasn’t cold fusion at all but an unusual chemical reaction."
"Well, you're right and wrong," Tod answered patiently. "What this belt has is cold fusion. It takes a highly sophisticated apparatus to produce the catalyst but once you know what the catalyst is, and we know now, you can use deuterium and produce power in tremendous amounts by varying tiny amounts of deuterium, and I mean minute amounts. It was the fact that it was a sealed system that threw us. It was like having a cathode with no anode or one side of an electrical circuit. It didn’t make sense until we threw out some of our old preconceptions. How can you have something producing tremendous energy and no heat? It was contrary to everything we thought we knew. Of course a hundred years ago they laughed at people who suggested there were regions of the earth that moved – tectonic plates.”
“Susan, I'm going to need your help if we're going to make a copy of this; the casing is giving us a fit. To make things ultra-simple, this catalyst allows the deuterium to fuse to produce helium with energy released as a directed field of energy, or in this case, a circulating, cool plasma. It produces no heat. No. Before you ask…we don’t know why. We use this released energy to produce electricity with the damnedest, miniature closed, magnetohydrodynamic widget you ever saw. This thing is a combination of the slickest principles combined with the crudest control methods. We're gonna’ be able to fix the crude control methods with some of our own. The controls for the energy production prohibit us using electronic switching and limiting functions so we are going to use nano-fluidic controls with electronic controls further away," Tod said still beaming.
"What good does all this do us if we have to produce some complicated, expensive catalyst?" Fran asked.
"Good point," Tod said, now really grinning. "It so happens an old professor of mine works at the plasma physics research center here and a by-product of some of the older experiments can be easily gathered from existing equipment or current reactors now that we know this by-product (the catalyst) is of use."
"I see t
hat your discovery will mean jobs for all of us and fame for you," Ling said sardonically, "but what are we doing our work for. I don't see how our work ties in with your power supply," she said, turning her attention from Tod back to Andrew.
Andrew decided that now was the time to reveal his idea to the group.
"What have you been doing these last few weeks?" Susan asked. "You have been flitting from lab to lab and then you've disappeared for the entire last week. What have you been working on? I have a sneaking suspicion, but I want to hear it from your mouth before I'll believe it."
Andrew felt justified in his faith of Susan at that moment and decided to make her number two in charge of the project. She was forceful and did have a gift for administration.
"I have been working with several of the university staff to work out technical problems but when we get that power supply completed; my work can really begin. I've made most of the preliminary calculations for what we found in the other portion of the belt. I've figured out how the belt could produce the intense fields so we might negate or regulate inertia and gravity. I'm able to negate neutrino oscillation, at least experimentally. The neutrinos change states and I can lock them into any of three stressed states. I'm not sure what it will mean but it may pull us closer to realization of what all Unified Field theory concepts tried to do, explain and predict the interaction of matter and energy. Except in our case, we might just be able to put a lot of it into practice and it’s going to kick lynchpins out of string theory and eleven dimensions. It indicates how gravity may be an entropic force – a property of matter. At the very least it will verify and disprove many standard model propositions and theories."
"Spinoffs from this can give us gravity neutralization, force fields, and faster than light travel," he said emphasizing the last. "We are going to design and build Earth's first interstellar craft and, Susan; you're going to be in charge of what it's made of and everything in it."
