Read Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7) Online
Authors: Laurence Dahners
Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7) (18 page)
Ell brought
another one out over her shoulders, dropped him to the ground and immediately leaned down to give him a couple of breaths. She sat up and examined him a moment, then gave him two more. He shuddered and took a deep gasping breath on his own. She watched him take a couple more breaths, then asked Mary to cuff him too. She headed back in the house.
Vivian
stood shakily and then went back in the house and looked around. All the people seemed to have been moved outside. Ell was opening all the windows and picking ports up off the floor and stuffing them in her backpack.
Red and blue flashing lights reflecting in through the windows signaled that the police had arrived.
Back outside,
Vivian took a deep breath. She sure hoped they hadn’t hurt Char.
Ell came up to her, “Hey, Viv. I’m so sorry about this.
Your friend Chardet is OK. How are you holding up?”
Vivian threw her arms around the young woman and squeezed
so hard she shook. “I’ll be OK Ell… thanks!”
Avral rose back into consciousness on a hard surface. He felt vaguely nauseated and found that his wrists and ankles had been cuffed together. Slowly he turned his head to the side. He saw the cheap house they’d been staying in. Red and blue lights flashed off its windows and walls.
He saw Donsaii’s slender form flit from one location to another, then approach Varka who threw her arms around
the girl.
Dammit!
He rolled his head to stare sightlessly up at the sky.
Going after Varka instead of Donsaii was like going after a wolverine’s cubs without first taking out the mother!
He
resolved to give Menahim a piece of his mind the next time he saw him. He had a sinking feeling that that would be a long time from now though.
Chapter Six
Gary leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. The results of his testing on the graphene he’d spun during his time riding the D5R spaceplane out to orbit continued to astonish him.
Graphene’s properties had been eval NOncmaconuated years ago now
by testing tiny specimens. Its tensile strength of over 100 gigapascals, or 14,500,000 pounds per square inch, made it the strongest material known to man. The problem had been that no one could make much of it. Well that wasn’t true; graphite after all was full of graphene. But no one had succeeded in making unbroken sheets of it that were very long without significant flaws that compromised the theoretical strength. But, out in microgravity, with a controlled atmosphere in the chamber, his spinner had spun out kilometers of nearly perfect graphene.
The problem he had was
at the edges of the spun strip. The middle of the three inch wide band he’d spun was nearly perfect and microtesting showed it easily exceeded the expected strength figures. But the edge had a lot of irregularities and when tested as a complete specimen, tears started in them. Those flaws made it significantly weaker.
He wondered if Ell would let him go up
into orbit again. He could try to make much wider ribbons, or fold over the edges and somehow trim them before they left the chamber. Or maybe he could make graphene as a tube that didn’t
have
an edge? A carbon macrotube so to speak.
After
thinking and drawing feverishly for hours Gary thought he had a workable plan. Finally he asked his AI to try to connect him to Ell.
His heart lifted when she said, “Hi Gar’,”
sounding happy to hear from him.
“Uh,
hi. I wanted to thank you for lifting me and my project out to space.”
“Really?
” she chuckled, “I heard you spent the first hour barfing. I didn’t think you’d be all that grateful.”
Embarrassed he said, “Well yeah, sorry about that.”
She laughed, “I puked my guts up on my first trip too. Did your experiment work out?”
Feeling a little better to hear that she’d
also been space sick, Gary launched into an enthusiastic description of the graphene ribbon he’d been able to make.
“So two nanometers thick and 75mm wide?” she asked.
“Yeah. The two nanometers is very consistent but the width varies from 70 to 75mm.”
“Have you tensile tested it?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of hard to grip the ends. If you pull on the ribbon it tends to rip across from one side to the other. I’ve been twisting it into a thread, which is problematic because the resulting threads are hard to see, then I grip them and then they frequently just slip out of the grip because they lay in flaws in the grip metal. But, if they don’t slip, they break at three to four pounds… uh that’d be…”
“Thirteen to eighteen Newtons, so you’re
up around a hundred gigapascals?”
“Uh, yeah,” Gary said, surprised that she could get her AI to
calculate that for her so quickly.
“Wow! That’s great!
ption of ="+0">Thousands of researchers have worked unsuccessfully on the large scale production of graphene for decades and now you’ve done it on your first shot! We need that stuff for what we’re doing in space. Do you think you could scale up to huge quantities?”
“Um, I hope so.
Uh, if I can get a grant to build some modified versions of my current spinner, would you be willing to let me take them up in your space plane again?”
“Absolutely. But you don’t need to apply for a grant. Just get the modifications made and send
us the bill.”
“Really?
! We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars.”
“No problem. We really need high tensile strength materials and you’re way ahead of the pack.
In fact, we’d be happy to have you work at D5R here full time if being in an academic setting isn’t all that important to you.”
Gary’s eyes
goggled, “I... I’m honored to be offered the job… but I do want to keep doing research… so I’d probably better stick with academics.”
“Research is what we do. D5R stands for ‘Dimension Five Research’
after all. We’d want you to join our ‘Quantum Research’ subdivision if you came. We start scientists like you at $150K and have great benefits including your retaining 50% of your intellectual property. You know if you perfect the large scale synthesis of graphene while working for us, you should find it pretty easy to get back into academics in Materials Engineering if you wanted. Universities should be jumping at the chance to have you on their faculties.”
“That’d be awesome!” He said excitedly. “I need to check into what my contract says here at Clemson. I’ll get started on the spinner modifications and talk to my department head right away.”
“Uh, Gary?”
“Yeah?”
“You should be worried about what will happen to your existing intellectual property rights if you come to work for us?”
“Oh. Yeah. Do I need a lawyer?”
“Not for us, we’ll grant that the graphene spinning tech is something you brought into your relationship with us so we have no claim on any royalties for your existing methods. But you need to write down exactly what your current tech is because I’ll bet Clemson will feel it has a claim on that.”
“Oh.”
“And if you figure out a completely different way to make it after you start working with us, you’ll want to be able to show that you aren’t using what you brought with you from Clemson.”
“Thanks, I really hadn’t thought about this stuff.”
“My AI says that Clemson’s policy is for you to get 40% of any royalty income from your inventions. D5R’s 50% policy means that anything you invent here will pay you a little better than it would at Clemson. Really important that you have careful documentation of which is which though. The potential profits could give impetus to pretty big legal battles.”
“
Uh, thanks for the advice,” G S ad need a lary said, head spinning. “I think I’d better get some legal advice for sure.”
“Good idea.”
***
Vivian stepped uncomfortably to the front of the room to speak to the Portal Tech employees.
She hated public speaking but this was important. “Good morning. We are taking time to speak to you this morning about something that happened to me last week. I was approached by a man interested in hiring me away from Portal Tech for exorbitant amounts of money. When I said I wasn’t interested, he then arranged my kidnapping.” She paused at the sound of indrawn breath. A susurrus of low concerned voices washed over the room. When it had abated and she felt she had their attention, she spoke again. “As you know, we’ve been concerned that something like this might happen and that’s why we’ve offered you implanted ports that would allow you to let us know if you were threatened, attacked or kidnapped. It was through just such a port that I was rescued after my abduction.
“
The ports we are producing are a boon to mankind, but as I’m sure you have realized, they can be
used
as weapons, or to pass weapons as well. We are specifically manufacturing ports that are not easily used as weapons. However, as happened to me, groups out there who want to use ports as weapons may decide to obtain the expertise to do so by bribing or threatening you… or your loved ones. Initial indications are that the men who abducted me work for a foreign government that would like ‘weaponizable’ ports for its military.
“Not many of you have taken us up on our offer to provide you with implanted ports. Now that the potential threat has become real, we wanted to be sure you were aware and remind you of the offer for you to get an implant.
“Also,
if
you are approached by someone, be cautious, especially of offers that seem ‘too good to be true.’ Let us know what you’ve been offered, we can help you try to determine if it’s a legitimate offer and may be willing to make a counteroffer.
“I’ll be happy to take questions
now.”
Hands went up all around the room.
***
Dr. Hanson stepped into the clinic room
ette to see John Parker, the man who’d lost his hand to a shotgun blast. His wife sat with him. There also was a young woman and a man, both too old to be Parker’s children. Hanson merely glanced at the two though, focusing instead on her patient. They were probably just other relatives; people needed a lot of support after losing a limb.
After asking how he was doing she briefly examined
Parker’s stump where everything appeared to be very well healed. “Well, Mr. Parker, everything seems to be going very well. On x-ray the stems appear to be very solidly fixed in your bones. We need to plan for the secondary surgery to install your transcutaneous stems. Are you up for that yet?”
“Well… S0">n>
Hanson frowned, patients sometimes had odd requests and she wondered what this one would be. “What’s that?” She studied his face carefully and glanced at his wife. It wasn’t all that unusual for patients to lose touch with reality and ask for something bizarre. She’d had a patient once ask her to reopen his amputation stump to apply some extract of pig bladder he’d found on the internet. The patient had decided the extract would make his finger grow back.
“I work for this high tech company out in the Triangle and we’ve been working with Ryan Keller here, a grad student in Biomedical Engineering at UNC.
Hanson turned to look at the young man, but found her eyes arrested when she realized that the young woman between Ms. Parker and Keller was Ell Donsaii! Astonished that she could have been oblivious to her presence until then, Hanson said, “Hello,” and nodded to both of them. “Ms. Donsaii.” She turned her eyes back to Parker and raised her eyebrows.
