Allotropes (an Ell Donsaii story #8) (13 page)

Gary’s eyebrows shot up, “That’s gonna cost!”

“Little is achieved if nothing is ventured. Don’t be cheap Gary, do what you have to do.”

***

Carter stepped into the waldo controller room to start his shift and found AJ there before him practically dancing from foot to foot in excitement. “Carter!” he said, “I’ve got an idea!”

Carter had to grin at his enthusiasm but made him wait until Carter’d waldoed up and checked to make sure the shift
at the asteroid had gotten off to a good start. Once that was done he pulled his gloves off and turned back to AJ, “OK, let’s hear it.”

“So I’ve been trying to figure out how to
process ore without gravity…” he waggled his eyebrows. “But then I thought, why not just do it
with
gravity.”

Carter lifted an eyebrow, “So you figured out how to create gravity on our rock? That’d be pretty cool, but I have a feeling if you had gained control of gravity you’d be cashing
in, not talking to me.”

“Well no. First I tried to figure out how to bring the rock back to the moon
but Joe told me about how any attempts to fly asteroids toward the earth would run into legal problems over the risks of an impact. Then I thought about trying to spin the asteroid and put some kind of bag around it to catch the ore as it flew off.”

“Yeah,” Carter shrugged, “I’ve considered that but the ore would be flying off in all different directions
. So as the ore flew off we’d have to have a bunch of ‘socks’ I’ve called them, to catch stuff and each sock would need a crusher and port at the end of it.”

“That’s what I was thinking too, but… how about if we crack the asteroid into tw
o big pieces? Drill some holes through the center and load explosive, fire just enough of a charge to break it without sending the pieces flying apart. Before you fire the charges, attach them to each other with a 500 meter graphene cable so they can’t fly
too
far apart.”

“How are you going to put the cable on the surface between them before you break them apart?”

“Don’t have to. Attach the cable anywhere you want. That attachment point will
become
the ‘surface between them’ once they fly apart and the cable comes taught.”

“Oh, yeah,” Carter said, getting excited, “Then we spin them around one another.”

“Uh huh. They don’t have to spin very fast. Just barely enough that anything that we break off of them will fall into a single funneled ‘sock’ that will catch the ore and feed it into the crusher.”

“
And, said crusher will work without so many hassles because it has gravity feeding the ore into it!”

“Yeah!” AJ’s eyebrows bobbed, “And, one more thing. Instead of a crusher we put some big ports across the openings of the sock
at each step where it narrows.”

“Wait a minute AJ, the whole reason we want to crush the ore out there is so we won’t
have
to hold open big ports to send the ore back here to process it. It takes a
lot
of power to hold big ports open and send stuff through them.”

“Yeah!” AJ said with a big grin. “We build ports that have holes in them! I know all the ports the company has built so far are
built on solid plates. But that’s only because the middle of the port disappears when the port opens. So there’s a plate across the opening until the port comes on and you’re suddenly looking at an opening to wherever the other end of the port is. But I got the research guys to give me a ten mm port pair.” He held a port pair up, “and I drilled the plates out to just under the diameter of the actual ports and glued them, one to the other with a five mm gap between them. I’ve modified the port controller to pulse the ports on for a microsecond, then back off every quarter second. Watch what happens!” He turned the ports so they faced downward over a piece of paper on his desk. He picked up a five mm steel rod, sliding it down through the hole in the ports a little. To his AI he said, “Turn it on.” A buzzing sound came from the port and the end of the rod that had been sticking out the bottom fell onto the paper. AJ let go of the rod and it slid through the two ports falling to the table in a pile of small chunks.”

Carter’s eyes were wide as he stared at the little pile of metal fragments. “Jeeez… that’s great AJ. Are you saying it doesn’t take much power to run the port like that?”

“Nope. The port’s only on four microseconds out of every second. With the big ones they’d probably only be on one microsecond out of every minute or so and you’d use an AI to decide when to turn them on, so that they’d only come on to slice the ore when a big chunk of ore was actually in the port’s throat. Even though big ports use a lot of power when they’re running, they wouldn’t use a lot of power over time.”

“Awesome!” Carter clapped
AJ on the back. “I think the company
might
actually be glad they hired you.”

***

Steve heard a roaring sound outside the small office Ell’s security guys had in the outbuilding on her farm. Slamming out the door he looked around urgently … and saw Ell under whirling… blades? He assumed it had to be Ell. She wore a complete set of motorcycle leathers and a helmet. The leather rippled and dust blew up around her as he slowly stalked her way. She held onto something like a set of motorcycle handlebars attached to a vertical rod going up to the rotating blades above her. Another rod curved away from the vertical rod, around, over her, and down along her back. The curved rod looked to have a bicycle seat and a “Y” shaped set of bars at the bottom that had wheels for it to stand on. It had a small cross bar that her feet rested on.

Ell saw him and took one hand off the handlebar to wave at him.
With the other hand she untwisted a motorcycle like throttle and the roaring began whistling down in pitch as the blades on the fan slowed. As they slowed he could see there were actually two coaxial sets of blades, one above the other, turning in opposite directions. The whole thing settled a little and Steve realized that Ell had its three feet locked down to a small concrete slab. The settling confirmed to Steve that the rotors had been actively trying to lift into the air. He fixed her with an eye and, concluding the noise level had reduced enough for her to hear, said, “Are you trying to build a personal helicopter!?!?”

Ignoring his horror-struck expression, s
he grinned at him and said, “Yeah! Cool huh?”

“For God’s sake Ell! Helicopters are
dangerous
! The smaller they are, the faster they act, the harder they are to control,
and
the more dangerous they are.”

“But fun!”
she twinkled at him.

Steve closed his eyes and took a deep breath. His job was to keep her safe… from others, not from herself. “Ell…” he began.

“Come on Steve, You know
you’re
gonna want to go up in it!”

Taken aback he looked at the device, “It won’t lift me!”

“Well, maybe not,” she raised her eyebrows, “but physics says it
can
.”

Looking at it harder he said, “Where’s the motor?”

“In the barn.”

Steve’s eyes widened, “You mean…
power drive shafts are coming through ports? The motor etcetera is somewhere else?”

“Yep, just like we’re doing for my new car.”

Steve’s eyes ran over it again, “So the throttle on that handlebar just turns up the power to some electric motors in the barn?”

“
An
electric motor. That single motor uses a differential to turn the two opposing rotors so that it supplies torque to whichever one is the easier to turn. Keeps it from spinning me around.”

Steve mused, “Pulling the handlebar toward you leans the rotor forward and speeds you up?

“Yup, pushing it away leans the rotor back to slow me down or back me up. Leaning the rotor to either side sends me that direction.”

“How do you turn?”

“Oh, that works pretty neat too. Turn the handlebars, it’ll rotate you that direction. When you twist the bars they actually grip one or the other of the counter-rotating drive shafts to turn you the correct direction.”

Steve shook his head, “This is crazy dangerous and you really shouldn’t be allowed to try it you know.”

She crinkled her nose at him, “I know! Good thing I’m old enough that no one can tell me I can’t do it, huh?”

“No Ma’am. That’s a
bad
thing,” Steve said, thinking of the tremendous loss the human race would sustain should she kill herself.

She twisted the throttle and the blades started to speed up, “Well, step back in the shack. If I crash this thing,
” she winked, “I don’t want to take you with me.” She knocked her visor back down over her eyes.

Shaking his head Steve turned and walked back to the corner of the shack where he could keep an eye on her. The rotors continued to speed up until the little copter was straining upward once again. She leaned it forward and back, then side to side. He could see her twist
ing the handlebars and got the feel that the entire thing was trying to turn.

She ran through more tilting and twisting as if wanting to get a good feel for the dynamics of its responses. Then to his amazement, she twisted the throttle harder and slowly lifted
off the ground, little concrete slab and all. The slab, he realized, had long horizontal bars sticking off of it in four directions.

She only lifted
to about six inches where she performed a number of very slow maneuvers. First she turned to the right and left, then moved forward and back and side to side. Finally she settled it back to the ground.

Steve walked back over as the blades spun back down. “What’s with the
concrete and the long bars?”

“The weight slows the response time and the bars make it harder to tip it over. I flew some radio control helicopters
when I was designing this thing. The first one I had came with some long sticks to attach to the undercarriage. They made it hard to flip over while I was learning.”

“Did you think about having an experienced helicopter pilot teach you how to fly
this
?”

“I learned to fly a helicopter myself.” She pointed her thumbs back at her
own chest. “You’re
looking
at an ‘experienced helicopter pilot.’”

Steve frowned at her, “How many lessons did you take? Are you licensed?”

Ell barked a laugh, “Not even close to a license. But,” she tilted her head, “I can fly one, never fear.” She shrugged, “Experience on a full sized helicopter isn’t really that helpful for flying this thing though. Real helicopters pitch the rotor blades differently during each rotation to lift one side or the other of the ‘rotor disc.’ Almost all of them only have one lifting rotor and use a tail rotor to counteract the torque from the main rotor… So commercial helicopters work a lot differently and a trained pilot wouldn’t really understand, nor have a feel for this one. This thing is really simple. The blade pitch is always the same. For more lift we speed them up, for less lift we slow them down. No tail rotor because the coaxial counter-rotating blades cancel torque. Finally, I’m tilting the rotor disc relative to the weight suspended below it—me—rather than tilting the disc
and
the copter using blade pitch.”

Steve shook his head, “How… did you figure all this stuff out?”

“Oh…” she frowned as she considered it, “the math for helicopter aerodynamics is really pretty simple.” She shrugged, “I didn’t even have to do any of the calculations, just throw the right formulas at this high end AI of mine and he runs them.” She got down off the seat and started undoing the clamps that held the three feet to the concrete slab.

“Are you going to actually take this thing up now?”

“No time like the present.” She grinned up at him as she undid the last clamp.

Steve sighed and walked back over to the corner of the building. Moments later the blades were spinning back up.
With a whir much quieter than the roar they’d been making earlier she lifted off the ground. Once again she only lifted about a foot off the ground. She rotated each direction, and then slid slowly right and left, forward and back.

Steve glanced down the entry drive and when he looked back Ell had lifted
to about three feet and started out into the field where the horses had grazed under the farm’s previous owners. Ell had a few cows to keep the grass grazed down. Her grounds keeper took care of the cattle. As the whirling apparition moved out into the field the cows watched nervously for a few moments then turned and trotted off into the trees.

Ell flew slowly back and forth across the field
before making some figure eights. She started going faster and lifted to about ten feet. Steve watched in growing dismay as she flew it harder and harder, turning and spinning and finally shooting hard up into the air to a height of several hundred feet. Moments later she came back down, skimmed just over the grass and back over to the barn, settling to the ground just in front of its open doors.