Comet! (an Ell Donsaii story #5 ) (21 page)

Emma frowned at the stack of ports. She tilted her head curiously, “What are you doing?”

“
Uhhh
, Ms. Donsaii had me print some 2.5
, 5
and 7.5
centimeter ports onto nitinol sheets
. Now I’m rolling them up and binding them with this heat sensitive polymer that will release them when they get cold.”

“Nitinol?”

“An alloy of nickel and titanium that is ‘super
-
elastic,’ it’ll spring back to flat when the polymer releases in the cold.”

Emma stared at them for a few moments, “And why would they get cold?”

“In space?” Manuel
said
as if
speaking
to an obtuse child.

“Huh?”

“We
are
planning to send things through the one ended ports to far away locations yes?”

Emma nodded.

“So we send one member of a t
wo ended port through while it’
s rolled up
like this
and when it encounters the cold of space the polymer releases it and
the nitinol springs
open
to flat
. Then we can send things through it to that location and bring them back through
the port
if we need
to
?”

Emma grinned, “Great idea! Did you think this up?”

“Well no. Ms. Donsaii wanted to do
it
and asked me how. My contribution was
suggesting the
nitinol and
the temperature sensitive polymer.”

“Good thinking!
No wonder
you’ve
impressed
her
.
I’
d
better
track her down.”

I’ve impressed her?
Manuel thought with a warm glow as he watched Emma walk away.

Emma did find Ell out in the parking lot with an expensive looking reflector telescope. The boxes it came in were scattered around
her
. One of the other machinists was with her and they had the telescope itself pointing nearly horizontally.

“Spying on our neighbors?”

“Hey Emma. Nope, we’re focused on the tip of that radio tower over there.”

“So, I’m just guessing now. Is this telescope supposed to be a ‘sight’ for a one ended port that we’re going to shoot stuff through?”

“Got it in one.”

“Why such a fancy telescope
? Seems like a much smaller one would work to aim at Mars or whatever.”

“Yeah, it would but when you step up to something like this it comes with a big heavy tripod and a
motorized
equatorial mount that will keep ‘Mars or whatever’ steady in your field instead of
shifting
out of it because of
Earth’s rotation. Once you’re aimed, you stay aimed
.”

Emma pursed her lips and nodded. “And that flange you’re bolting to it is supposed to be coaxial so when you mount your port on it you’ll be able to shoot stuff through it on the same axis?”

“Yeah, it’s been a pain in the butt getting it aligned correctly
,
but Mickey here has installed a couple of axis adjustment screws and we’re getting it now.”

“So, we gonna try shooting something through it tonight?”

“That’s
the
plan. It’s
outside of work hours though. Y
ou don’t need to hang out for it.”

“I w
ouldn’t miss it for the world!”

Ell grinned and raised her eyebrows, “You want to look at what I’m calling the ‘port evaluator’?”

Emma frowned, “Port evaluator?”

Ell waved her to come along. Inside Ell showed her a small zoomable telescope
with
a flange around the back and
little tubes running down the sides to the tip. “T
his scope’s
barrel is two centimeters so it will fit through the 2.5 centimeter ports Manuel’s been making even with the attitude tubes.
You can see it’s a snug fit in this flange and once it’s all the way in the rubber gasket should stop the leak of air into the vacuum of space on the other end.
”

“Attitude tubes?”

“Yeah, the ports will probably be tumbling after we put them through so when we put the tip of
this little
telescope through
the port
it’ll be waving wildly around. The ‘attitude tubes’ will release pressurized air like the attitude jets on our rockets to let us stabilize
and
then point the ‘scope’ where we want.”

Emma’s eyes drifted up to the ceiling as she thought, “So we won’t be able to control the direction of the other end of the scope by pointing the end we still have in our hands here?”

“Nope, it’ll be pointing whatever direction the port is pointing. But look at what Manuel set up! He’s mounted the screen displaying the
image
from the little telescope on sensors! If you try to point the screen to the right it depresses the switch for the attitude jet that turns the scope to the right!”

Emma lifted an eyebrow, “That should make it a lot easier alright.
How are you controlling rotation?
”

Ell
’s eyes crossed and she
said, “Damn. I can’t believe I missed that. The port will probably rotate too, we’ll need
even
more jets to control that.” She picked up the “scope,” turned and walked off toward the machine shop.
“Manuel’s gonna kill me,” she muttered
.

Ell and Emma took Emma’s car out for pizza.
There’d been a spike in reporters’ interest in her after videos of her dancing at the
Lincoln
had hit the net.
Ell worried that
it
might result in some paparazzi trying to follow her car again. Back at Quantum Research
after dinner
they wheeled the power supply for the single ended port out to the telescope and hooked up the port which had already been ‘zeroed in’ using the antenna that afternoon.

Ell wheeled the telescope around to point it
generally
at Mars
. She told the low end AI on the scope to aim it at Mars and its mount wheeled it around
to point it pretty close. Ell
used the small directional scope
mounted on its side
to center
the
big reflector telescope
on the planet. Mars was supposed to be
96 million kilometers away at present and so Emma had set the port for that distance. Since the port would be opening into a vacuum they had a glass cover over it. Emma reached for the switch but Ell put her hand up. “Let’s think a minute. Could we be doing something stupid?”

“Yup!” Emma said cheerfully. “But where it’s pointed we shouldn’t hurt anything on the other end. This switch is momentary so if something goes wrong on this end
I’ll be letting go right away. But
keep your face
turned
away the first time I turn it on
.”

Ell stepped back and Emma depressed the switch. They both heard a
thump
as
the
vacuum
of space
sucked the glass tight
up
against the port. Ell leaned down to look through the port. “Damn, we must be misaligned.” She started to reach for the adjustment screws but then with a pop Mars appeared in the port. “Hah! The first opening must have been on the far side of Mars!”

“Huh?”

“You know how our distance is pretty inaccurate. If we set it to open right at Mars, then
half
of the time it will open on this side, and
half
of the time it will open on the far side. If it’s on the far side there won’t be anything to see in the port.”

“Oh
,
yeah.” Emma grinned.

There was another pop and the Mars Ell saw in the port moved suddenly farther away. The port was more stable than the first several
they’d built
but it still reopened
at
a different distance every three seconds or so.

“Are you going to send through one of your rolled up ports?”

“Hmm, I’m realizing we need a better mechanism to make that happen.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, let’s say you open the port, it’s going to stay open about three seconds
,
right?

Emma nodded.

“Now, say
that—
t
h
rough
that glass cover over the port—
I see that the port has opened kinda close to Mars. I want to send a rolled
up
double ended port through but when I tug on the glass window
the vacuum makes
it hard to move.
I have to pull so hard I misalign the port and then once it’s open I try to shove the rolled port in the hole but my three seconds is up and, damn, it cuts my
rolled up
port in half!”

Emma said, “Maybe we could mount the glass window on a slippery surface with a
n angled
mirror on it and the rolled port right behind it? Then when we see Mars through the mirror, we pull the mirror-window apparatus back and the vacuum sucks the port through?”

“Yeah! Good. We’ll need Manuel’s help with that tomorrow though.
It should be mechanical so we aren’t pulling on it with our hands and moving the scope around.
For now, let’s try sending a rolled port through just to make sure that part of
the concept
works.”

After checking their alignment one more time to be sure they were still zeroed in on Mars, they closed the port and removed the glass window. They put a rolled port right behind the port opening and opened it again. As expected
,
the vacuum sucked the rolled port right through
.

Back inside the building they mounted the other member of the paired port onto the front of the “port evaluator” flange and turned it on. With a “bang,” the
little port evaluator
telescope was sucked into the port until the flange on it met the flange holding the port.

Ell closed her eyes. “Damn! I’ll bet we aren’t going to be able to pull the telescope back out of the port against the suction.”

Emma grinned, “You’re probably right, we’ll have to have Manuel make us a ‘telescope extractor’ too.”

“Oh well, let’s see what there is to see.” Ell powered up the camera mounted on the back of the little telescope and they saw a wildly spinning and tumbling starfield. Before they could
hope to control direction with the attitude jets Ell had to spend quite a bit of time stopping the rotation. It was problematic because the jets were strong enough that it was easy to overshoot and start rotating the other direction. “We need a vernier adjustment on the pressure so we can decrease it when we’re getting close.”

“Manuel again.”

Finally, somewhat by accident,
Ell
hit a point at which the rotation was very
slow
. Then Ell worked on stopping the tumble and bringing Mars into alignment. “There it is!” she said as it swam slowly across the field of the scope.

Emma said, “Now you know that once we pull the scope back out of the port, the port’s going to be tumbling again?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, isn’t that a problem?”

“
Now
I’m thinking that
we can calculate
how close
the port is
by how many degrees
Mars
covers in our
video
field.
Allan says this port is about 90,000 kilometers from Mars. I think that’s close enough.
Now that we know we’re close enough,
we can just
pop a rocket through, even if the port’s tumbling and use the cameras and attitude jets on the rocket to stop its tumble and send it the rest of the way.”

Emma narrowed her eyes. “Why not…”

“What?”

“Just film some video through a glass window on the port. Then play it back until you catch Mars passing by on the tumbling image, stop motion, measure how many degrees and decide whether you’re close enough based on that. No need to stick a scope through and stabilize it.”

“Hah!” Ell hugged her. “You’re a genius!” she held Emma at arm’s length and tilted her head
to muse
, “Though Manuel’s gonna be pissed about all the time I had him waste putting attitude jets on my
‘port evaluator’
telescope.”