Disc (22 page)

The young woman said, “Um, our presentation mostly consists of letting you look at this car. Sorry about it being a BMW, but this is the only vehicle we’ve modified to use thruster technology so far.”

Art’s eyes jerked back to the BMW. It looked completely ordinary! “Well, okay. What can you show us?”

The young woman said, “If you’ll step this way, we’ll look in the trunk where a couple of thrusters have been mounted right behind the back seat.” The lid of the trunk popped up and she lifted it the rest of the way. They all crowded around to look in, seeing a couple of flat circular objects mounted vertically behind the back seats. They looked like they were about two and a half to three feet in diameter.

Mullins hadn’t looked over a BMW recently, but he was impressed that the trunk seemed very deep and spacious.

His sudden suspicion was confirmed when the young woman said, “You’ll note the trunk has a lot of extra room because we took out the gas tank.”

Mullins eyebrows rose as he wondered why in the world they’d modified a gas powered car rather than an electric car. An electric car would have already had battery packs to run their thrusters. He turned to the two people from GSI, “Where did you put the battery pack?”

“Um, no battery pack. Let’s go look under the hood.” Everyone walked around to the front of the car and the hood popped up. The young woman lifted it and they all crowded around to look in.

Though he should have expected it, Mullins was still surprised to see that the motor had been removed. A curved tube extended around the periphery of the compartment and a couple of electric motors sat in the corners. One of the motors was hooked up to the condenser for an air conditioner and the other one looked like it was pumping the hydraulics for a set of brakes.

The woman, Hammersmith, said, “As you can see, we’ve distributed our mechanicals around the periphery of the compartment and placed them toward the bottom so that a second trunk or storage space could be inserted here.”

“
Where’s
the battery pack,” Mullins asked again, trying not to sound irritated.

“Oh, I’m sorry. It doesn’t have a battery. This curved tube around the periphery of the compartment here is an inductance coil to harvest electrical current from the alpha particles of a small fusor,” she tapped a finger on an object about the size of a toaster.

Mullins lifted up from where he’d been leaning into the compartment and stepped back a little. “Come on! I looked at fusor technology when it first came out. It needs a meter or so of water for shielding!”

“Uh, yes sir. And that’s still true of high-powered ones. Dr. Gettnor has been able to design this low powered one so that the neutron producing side chain reactions are almost nonexistent. Never say never, but it really doesn’t emit enough neutrons to be a concern.”

Staring at it, Mullins asked quietly, “How much power does that thing generate?”

“A quarter megawatt. To translate that to something car enthusiasts are more familiar with, that’s about 335 horsepower.”

Even without looking up, Mullins could tell his team’s heads were turning back and forth as they gave one another startled glances. He assumed they were as disconcerted as he was. He cleared his throat, “And… how efficient are these thrusters at converting electricity to thrust… or acceleration?”

Hammersmith said, “Very efficient sir. Those two thrusters in the back, running on the full quarter megawatt can generate about 3000 pounds of thrust. Again, to use terms that car enthusiasts are familiar with, that’s enough to accelerate this 4,400 pound car to sixty miles an hour in six to seven seconds. I’d like to point out that if you wanted more performance, there’s plenty of room to put another quarter megawatt fusor in. The thruster discs are less efficient if you run that much power through them, but you could put two more discs here in the front of the car if you wanted. That’d get you a zero to sixty time in the three second range.”

While they all stood around looking stunned, the young woman said brightly, “Can we take you for a ride?”

Mullins found himself being herded a little like a sheep into the passenger seat of the BMW. A couple of his engineers got in the back and Hammersmith got in the driver’s seat. “How do we get out onto your test track?” she asked.

They gave her directions and a couple of minutes later she pulled out onto the track. “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I’ll drive it manually. That way I can give you a feel for the acceleration since the AI wouldn’t push the system hard.”

Mullins said, “Sure,” but then was surprised to see her steering it with a joystick on the center console rather than using the wheel. Once she pulled out onto the track, she shoved the joystick ahead and a good solid punch of acceleration pushed them back into their seats. Mullins glanced back over his shoulder at Rich Carter and saw the engineer looking surprised. He turned to Hammersmith and said, “Why a joystick instead of the steering wheel and accelerator?”

Hammersmith turned to him with a sly smile. “‘Cause the joystick lets me do this,” she said, pulling up on it.

Mullins muttered, “Keeeryst!” as his stomach fell. The car lifted up in the air and swung out over the infield of the track while Mullins white-knuckled the grip of the armrest.

Back in the building, still feeling discombobulated, Mullins and his team listened to a brief presentation from Dante Gettnor. “I’m sure you gentlemen realize that the future of personal transportation is going to be radically changed in the very near future. I assume that Ford would like to lead this change rather than be swept under by it. Because you haven’t had long to think about it let me outline a few of the things that
I
believe will happen in the near future.

“At first, cars will continue to run on streets, but will be powered by fusors and thrusters. The government will need to be petitioned to provide low-level airspace for flight capable cars before they can become popular. Rules will need to be laid out regarding what direction you can travel at each of a number of preset altitudes and to designate locations where cars will be allowed to rise to such traveling altitudes. ‘No-fly zones’ will need to be blocked off and all of these rules will need to be programmed into vehicular AIs. We do not believe that individuals should be allowed to fly their cars manually except in certain restricted areas for sport.”

Gettnor only spoke for about five minutes. When he paused for questions, Mullins said, “This is a lot to take in. We’ll need some samples of the technology to evaluate and some time to consider this at length.”

Gettnor gave him a grin, “Yeah, that could be a problem. Rachel can stay with you for two days while you run this car through its paces. You can look for hidden motors and batteries, measure the power output and the actual thrust. But, then we’re going to be showing it to some of your competitors. You’ll need to make some kind of an offer for the rights to this tech. This will be for use of the thruster and fusor tech in personal vehicles, on the road and for low altitude transportation. Aircraft companies are already bidding on the use of this for commercial transportation, both of people and goods.”

Mullins gazed at Gettnor for a minute, then, his eyes intense, he said, “What if we want to bid on commercial transportation too?”

Gettnor gave him a steady look, “You’d need to make more than just a large bid. You’d need to convince us that your company is capable of doing business in that sector.”

Mullins wondered how the tables had gotten turned. He’d expected to hold the whip hand at this meeting. This young punk was supposed to be begging Mullins to take an interest in his technology—Mullins wasn’t supposed to have to beg for access to it!

***

Gettnor Space Industries, Raleigh, North Carolina — GSI announced today that their new large “saucer” has, at NASA’s request, attached a towing rig to asteroid Kadoma. This is the same asteroid on which astronauts Abbot and White became stranded when they first attempted to modify its orbit. When GSI’s first saucer rescued Abbot and White, it also finished modifying Kadoma’s orbit to send it closer to earth. Now, GSI’s big saucer is performing a second modification of Kadoma’s trajectory to actually place it in orbit around the earth. There NASA hopes to use it as a resource for space activities.

Raj Mehta, NASA’s spokesman said, “Kadoma represents almost 3600 metric tons of material including metals, carbonaceous materials, and various frozen volatiles. These represent an invaluable resource for space research, construction, and manufacturing.”

GSI’s team, which harnessed Kadoma in a network of Kevlar cables during a series of spacewalks, is also harvesting samples from Kadoma. NASA hopes to use these samples to understand exactly what resources will now be available to them.

As in the past, when Kadoma-related activities have made the news, quite a few protests have developed at NASA facilities. These are by groups who are concerned that NASA will make a mistake and crash Kadoma into the earth. Mr. Mehta has tried to reassure them that these concerns are unfounded, but…

Worried about more attacks from the unnamed group that had assaulted them, Tiona had taken to staying in her old room at her parents’ house. Lisanne greatly enjoyed having her there, but really didn’t like having the guards Tiona’d hired wandering around their place.

She called Tiona and Vaz to dinner. When they had arrived and been served, she brought it up. “Do you guys think we still need those guards?”

Vaz shook his head, “No.”

Tiona’s eyes widened, “Yes! They aren’t causing any trouble are they?”

They weren’t, in fact, very intrusive. They stayed in the kitchen and family room of the Johnson house next door. From there they walked regular patrols around both houses. Lisanne said reluctantly, “Well, I guess not. It’s just the
thought
of having these guys walking around our house all the time. It gives me the creeps.”

“
That’s
more creepy than having a bunch of people burst into your house and start kidnapping us?!” Tiona said, tugging on the emotional strings of their family’s previous kidnapping years ago.

“Surely we’re not going to have to live with guards for the rest of our lives, are we?” Lisanne asked.

Tiona said, “It hasn’t been very long since those guys tried to kidnap Dad! It’s not like you’ve had to put up with guards for years or something.”

Lisanne turned to Vaz, “Vaz, you disagree with Tiona? You don’t think we need guards?”

Vaz’s eyes flickered back and forth from Lisanne to Tiona to Lisanne and back. Then, without saying anything, he put down his silverware, wiped his face, got up, and headed back to his basement.

Lisanne sighed, “That’s your dad for you. Always avoiding conflict.”

“Unless he can punch it in the face,” Tiona said quietly.

***

Tiona and Dante sat down at the conference room at GSI’s headquarters near Costa and Sons. Pete Costa was there as were Sophie, Bob Thompson, two engineers from Costa and Sons, and several more ex-astronauts who’d decided to join GSI. The plan was to rough out a space station that GSI could use for microgravity research, orbital manufacturing and space construction. Though Tiona had not expected to be successful, she’d tried to get her dad to come to the meeting. He’d obstinately refused, but after quite a bit of cajoling, had agreed to listen in on the meeting and offer suggestions through Tiona.

Dante brought the meeting to order, setting out their objectives which were to build a safe shirtsleeves-environment in a microgravity orbit. They expected to do so in a low Earth orbit where the planet’s magnetosphere would deflect much of the radiation present in space.

“What if we put it in the
same
orbit as the space station? Then we could support them if they had a problem and vice versa. It’s an orbit that allows observation of a lot of the Earth’s surface and one where the government would give us warnings if space debris might be about to hit us.”

Tiona said, “I guess we can see what NASA thinks about it. It sounds good to me, but there might be some reason they wouldn’t like it.”

“I’ve been thinking that we need to build it with a rotating ring,” Pete Costa said. One of the big issues with the current space station is how sick it makes people to stay out there in microgravity for a long time. If they slept, ate, and lived in a ring that was spun up to provide pseudo-gravity we could avoid a lot of those problems.” He glanced around at the others, “I bring it up now because NASA might object to having a large rotating object so close to their space station. If we were to have a mechanical failure and pieces flew off, it could be a big problem for them.”

Sophie said, “A ring-shaped station has to be pretty damn big. You don’t want it to spin faster than about two revolutions per minute or Coriolis forces mess with your inner ears. To generate one gravity at two rpm, the diameter of your ring would need to be about 450 meters, which means that the circumference would be 1.4 kilometers. Now I know the big saucer can lift some large objects into space, but we’re talking some major construction here. We might not want to
start
with that.”

Tiona said, “I think most of you know my dad’s listening in on this meeting even though he didn’t want to come to it. He’s pointed out to me that the ISS orbits at about 250 miles. It’ll only take about twenty minutes to get to that altitude in a saucer. He says if people want to work in microgravity, but live and sleep at one G, the most obvious solution is to commute back to Earth.”