Warp Speed (10 page)

"Thank God for gyroscopic motion. Amen, brother!" I muttered to myself and the squirrel that ran across the trail in front of me.

Finally, after about six miles we were up the last hill and back to the boulder.

Jim cried out, "One more lap!" and kept on going.

I plowed in behind him holding my own. I looked at my heart rate monitor readout on my handlebars:
one hundred eighty three beats per minute!
That is about ninety percent my max and I had kept it there for about thirty minutes so far. Not bad for an old man. This time around he dropped me on the big oak. I didn't have enough left even to do a chain ring grind over it. I had to hop off my bike and climb over it dragging my bike along with me. Jim was waiting on me back at the boulder.

"What happened, old man?" he laughed.

"Whew!" I panted. "I got hung up on the tree again. One of these days you have to show me how to get over that thing. By the way, you know you're not but about fourteen years younger than me."

I laid my bike off the trail with the deraileur side up, which is proper bike etiquette. My legs felt like lead. I sat down on the boulder sucking on the tube in front of my face, which came up out of my jersey around to my back and into the water bag in my back jersey pocket. I felt my rear middle jersey pocket to make sure there was still plenty of water. I'd finished about a fourth of a liter, not enough.

"I was thinking," I said still breathing hard, "about the light 'Becca saw."

"Yeah?" Jim took his helmet off and handed me an energy bar.

"What if it was like sonoluminescence?"

"How, there was nothing in that vacuum chamber but vacuum?" Jim asked.

"When we get back to the lab Monday remind me to make you work out on the board how many different molecules are actually in that vacuum chamber, at least fifty times. Where did you get your Ph.D. anyway?" I scolded him.

"Okay, sure it's not a
perfect
vacuum, but how could there have been enough molecules in there to luminesce?" he asked.

"Just like sonoluminescence. With that you have a bunch of sound waves pressing a tiny amount of water and other additives into such a small ball that it gets it as hot as the sun for a microsecond or so. Hence, the little flashes of light. What if the dumbbells set up some kind of crazy electromagnetic field configuration that trapped enough of the particles from the vacuum chamber into a small enough ball that the same type of thing happened? Maybe the flash of light didn't cause the explosion but was a symptom of a bigger problem."

"You thought of all that while we were racing? No wonder you couldn't get over the tree. And those chain ring grinds are hell on your big chain ring by the way. I wish you would quit doing that, because I'm always the one who has to put the new one on." He paused for a second and shook his head. "You
are
focused, just not on riding," Jim said.

"I can't help it Jim. It was my fault that 'Becca got hurt. I can't put it out of my mind that I could've done something to prevent it."

"It was all our faults, Anson, not yours alone. You want to get it out of your mind for another hour? I know what'll do it." He looked down the trail and put the energy bar wrapper in his pocket. "Two laps the other way before it gets dark." He buckled his helmet and put his sunglasses back on.

"Fine with me. Double or nothing on the beer?"

He nodded and took off. He needed it this time. The other way means going up the "screaming downhill" at the end of each lap. Hills are my specialty. Going up them I mean. Going down them scares the living hell out of me.

We called it a draw. On the last lap we were dead even on the last "whoop" before the big uphill climb. Jim hit a rock just right and went over the handlebars. We were moving fast so I was worried that he was hurt. Jim rolled up on his feet laughing hard as he dusted himself off and wiped the blood from the big scrape on his left elbow.

"Cool!" he said.

"Kids!" I said.

We surveyed the damage to his bike and realized that his front rim was a wavy curve shape like a potato chip.

"Well, you really potato-chipped that one!" I told him. He popped the quick release skewer and took the wheel off the bike. Jim grabbed the wheel at the four and seven o'clock position and commenced to beating the thing against the ground. He rolled it around in his hands about ninety degrees and repeated the process. Finally, he held up a perfectly good wheel and then put it back on his bike.

The first time I saw that trick I thought,
Now ain't that the damnedest thing!
Since then, I've done it myself a million times. The problem is that the wheel, although back in round, is structurally very weak afterwards. Any good knock would potato-chip it again for sure. So we rode out two-up (again, for you civilians, that's side-by-side) talking about our next step for finding out what happened to 'Becca.

Monday I decided to go about reconstructing 'Becca's accident. That would be the only way to really see what happened. Nevertheless, it had to be done in a controlled manner this time. After a week or so of planning, we rented the huge vacuum chamber over at NASA MSFC. We hired a local alphabet soup contracting firm to help us set up the experiment. Finally, after weeks of trying to recreate the disaster, we did!

Apparently, some sort of chaotic resonance set up between all of the generators. This resonance field shielded the energy coupling system from allowing the energy to bleed off from the Casimir effect spheres. An analogy would be that we were filling up seven hundred little air tanks with a constant inflow of air at infinite pressure with no release valve. Once these tanks reached their stress limit, they exploded. From the sheer nature of the vacuum energy physics, these tanks had quite a large stress limit. I hadn't expected that.

In other words, the Clemons Dumbbells had a constant inflow of energy into them, but they couldn't dissipate that energy fast enough. Final result: they exploded. I calculated that a piece of material smaller than could be seen by the human eye exploded with as much force as an eighth of a stick of dynamite. DARPA gave us more money.

The only slight problem with the new DARPA money is that the program all of the sudden became deeply classified. Security was tightened up and we had to hire security guards to sit at the office around the clock. There were a lot of retroactive security
issues
that had to be dealt with. I had worked security programs before and had a Secret clearance. God knows how high Tabitha's clearance went. And Jim and 'Becca were cleared from previous programs as well. The others were put on temporary "need to know" company clearances, but they still were only privy to proprietary information. It didn't take but about two months for Al and Sara to be cleared at the Secret level also. Johnny presented documents as proof of his clearance that were passed on to the Defense Security Service. He was cleared at Secret.

For some reason Tabitha put me in for a Top Secret clearance and some other clearance that I had never heard of. She had explained that if things worked out we could find much, much more money in the "black projects." It all sounded cool with me.

After a bit of experimentation and analyses, we figured out just how lucky Rebecca had been. 'Becca was lucky that the thick vacuum glass, the plexiglass shield, a metal enclosure at head level, and the computer at body level were between her and the explosion.

Once we figured out how to recreate the accident we went about figuring out how to prevent it. That was hard. We determined that it was very easy to set up the chaotic resonant field and very hard to dampen it. One of the subcontractors had the idea of designing each individual collector in an orientation that would cancel out the effect of the next one. Then we could construct them in stable pairs. This worked. I put Sara to working with 'Becca on this. 'Becca still needed another hand. Her bronchitis was acting up and you could tell it was wearing her down.

Finally, we were back on track for building the warp drive experiment flight demonstrator. We left the setup in the NASA MSFC facility with hopes that we would soon be building a very big Casimir effect energy collector.

All of this time I had been giving Tabitha and Al the possible spacecraft requirements and general dimensions. The two of them began solid model simulations and finite element analysis of the concept vehicle. They also contracted out a lot of the work to some local shops.

The architecture of the spacecraft started out as empty boxes on the whiteboard with names of spacecraft components written in them. Then we expanded each box and filled it with larger boxes. It turns out that Tabitha is a super genius with systems integration and solid modeling for spacecraft design. Al is pretty sharp, himself. The two of them together were amazing and accomplished some of the best spacecraft engineering I had ever seen.

The problem wasn't the design or complexity, but the sheer size. The size of the damn thing kept growing. Sometime in November we decided that the only way to get the thing in orbit would be to either build it there or take it up on the Shuttle. Expendable Launch Vehicles (ELVs) were just not big enough. Tabitha called me after they figured this out.

"How much do you weigh?" she asked.

"Why?"

"So I can account for it in the mass budget for the mission."

"Hunh?" was the wittiest thing I could think of.

"Well, somebody has to deploy this damn thing. It ought to be the guy that invented it? Besides, there is budget now for a payload specialist." I could hear her smiling through the phone.

I tried and tried, I really came close, but in the end, I failed to shit a gold brick, which I said I would do if I ever made it to be an astronaut. It had never dawned on me that somebody might have to deploy this thing from the Space Shuttle. I always had envisioned some sort of ELV. To tell the truth, I expected to be about ninety by the time we ever figured out how to do the experiment, for sure not going on forty-two.

"What about you?" I asked Tabitha.

"Nope. I plan to be flying the Shuttle on NASA's dime," she said. You see, payload specialists aren't NASA employees and a company pays for their training and their ride. Taking me was a smart idea on Tabitha's behalf. Now both Tabitha and I could be there for the test.

"I love you!" I told her.

"I know." She laughed. Solo and Leia thoughts popped in my head. I'm sure she'd planned it that way.

We ended up hiring another subcontractor firm to help us with the spacecraft bus and the systems engineering and integration for the demonstrator. You would absolutely not believe the amount of paperwork required just to get something on board the Space Shuttle. It almost seemed like we would invent a better access to space vehicle before we had the dang thing qualified to fly in the Shuttle. It might have been easier to wait for the second generation reusable launch vehicle (2
Gen RLV) being constructed via the Shuttle Replacement Initiative. However, that thing was falling behind schedule and over budget. After all, Congress changes its mind on funding for that program on a daily basis. In addition, it would have to be tested for a few years before payloads were put on it. It just wouldn't be ready in time. So, Space Shuttle it had to be.

First, we had to demonstrate that we could completely control the warp field and the energy systems working as one system in the environment chamber at NASA MSFC. That was a scaled experiment. The fact that all of this was now classified slowed down some of the progress due to security, but it sped up the process due to processes that could be sidestepped. Then we constructed the full-scale experiment: not actually warping just powering up to the available power level in the chamber, then down. Even though the power level for the warp field was at fractions of that required to actually drive the warp for an object the size of a spacecraft, the stress on the field coils were still tremendous. We couldn't figure out how with modern materials to support such huge stresses as would be caused by a full-scale warp bubble. A full-up test on the ground was out of the question. Besides, the power supply wasn't complete yet.

Once as much of the full-up tests as possible were complete, we had to start integrating all of these components into a spacecraft. This part was complicated. Everything we used on the spacecraft had to have been spaceflight proven in some fashion or the other down to the last nut, washer, and bolt. This is where I relied on the experience of Huntsville, Alabama. There were a couple of local firms that could do this integration properly and at the right security levels. We ended up choosing the same company that built the lunar rovers forty years ago. The sheer size of this development project had grown to hundreds of people and millions of dollars. My program management skills were being pushed to their limits. I relied heavily on Tabitha.

By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, the scaled tests were almost complete. Rebecca was basically back to her old self again, although she was now four months behind on her black belt quest. The only scar that remained, after the laser treatments, was a hair-thin ring around her left ring finger. The engagement ring that Jim gave her on her birthday (October second), covered that up nicely.

Finally, Rebecca and Sara had started on the actual flight hardware pieces for the energy collector. This was going to take a while. It took them about a day to grow the prototype element, which was a ten-centimeter by ten-centimeter wafer with four hundred layers in it. Each layer is four thousandths of a centimeter thick. The final system will have to be a rectangular solid about three meters by three meters by nine meters. We chose these dimensions so it would fit in the Space Shuttle payload bay, which is about four meters by four meters by eighteen meters. Effectively we're building three cubes three meters on a side and connecting them linearly. At the rate it took us to actually build the microscopic prototype it would have taken about twenty-two thousand years to make the three cubes.

'Becca and Sara hooked up with one of Sara's friends who works at a local printed circuit board company. They make tens of thousands of computer motherboards a day. By Christmas they had set up the first automated assembly line process to construct Clemons Dumbbell etched boards. The first few weeks were dismal failures and the assembly line was constantly shutting down or failing in some manner. Worst of all, 'Becca found that the quality of the products they had made didn't meet specs. She had to explain to them the severe catastrophic possibilities of Clemons Dumbbells not built to spec. She told then the horror story of having her finger blown off and embellished it very well. Years of being around a lying scoundrel like me paid off.