Pillar to the Sky (21 page)

Perhaps the Brit’s interruption of the exchange of greetings was slightly rude, but the enthusiasm in his voice was almost like that of a boy screaming,
I wanna see it!

Fuchida nodded and pointed to the chamber.

“We have two strands of carbon-60 nanotubing within the chamber,” he proudly announced. “One strand is two meters in length.”

“Two meters,” Eva gasped.

Gary could sense Fuchida’s smile beneath the face mask as he nodded.

“
Bozhe m
iĭ
!
” Eva exclaimed in Ukrainian. “When did you get beyond the millimeter stage?”

“Oh, about six months ago,” Franklin replied offhandedly.

“And you didn’t tell us?” Gary asked, half good-naturedly, but with a touch of hurt as well.

“Recall that was just about the same time I brought you two on board. Regardless, you do know now.”

The implication, though it did sting a bit, was obvious. No matter how he felt their friendship had evolved, Franklin did keep some cards close to his vest and separated as well. Of course, it was how he made his billions.

“Come on,” the aircraft designer announced, “let’s see it.”

“Well, there it is,” Fuchida said, pointing to the chamber. Everyone leaned forward to the view ports. They saw two claw-like clamps separated about two meters apart, and behind them two large steel cylinders separated by a few centimeters, and empty space in between. Nothing else could be seen. It reminded Gary of the hoodwink of a supposed flea circus when he was a kid, a few miniature carnival rides spinning around, the barker claiming fleas were on board.

It was disappointing but Gary knew what was coming.

“A single thread,” Fuchida quickly said, “as we are now mastering manufacturing of for significant lengths. If our computer projections are correct we’ll quickly have strands of any length that are two millimeters wide.”

“How quickly?” Franklin asked.

“Give me six months for 0.2 and six months more for our goal of 2 millimeters at the length you desire, if all goes well today.”

“I don’t see a bloody thing,” the Brit said, but it was obvious his question was rhetorical. He had, without doubt, along with his aviation designer friend, been hovering around this lab since it was built.

“It is, of course, invisible to the naked eye, though I do have microscopes which you can watch through and cameras operating at a thousand frames a second recording the test when we start,” Fuchida pointed out. “Behind it, between the two pistons, with a clearance of 1.5 centimeters between them, there is a woven mesh of fifty such strands. At such scales, I must say it was difficult to weave and is less than ten millimeters in length, but it is sufficient for the second test.”

“You’re going for tensile and compression, aren’t you?” Eva asked excitedly.

“Exactly.”

“Then let’s do it,” the Brit announced. “Push the button.”

Fuchida turned to Eva.

“Doctor, would you do me the honor, since we are on the same team now, of pushing that button?”

“I would not think of taking that away from you, sir,” she said.

He laughed softly.

“Don’t you think I already did it before you got here?”

Gary did laugh out loud at that. Of course Fuchida and his team would have made sure of it, rather than suffer the humiliation of a failure in front of their funding source, and Franklin was indeed not all he seemed to be if he did not know that as well; he had most likely checked ahead before even flying in.

There actually was a red button on a control panel that Fuchida pointed to, and, delighted, Eva made a dramatic display of depressing it. The two claw-like pistons began to move ever so slightly. Even though he had most likely tested this dozens of times, Fuchida kept a careful eye on the computer readouts and motioned for them to come and look over his shoulder.

“Those two pistons are being driven by a hydraulic compressor which is exerting over a hundred kilograms of outward pressure on that one thread one-tenth the diameter of a human hair to try to pull it apart.”

Gary wondered for a moment, if the thread broke, what the kinetic energy would be as it flew apart and if the glass wall would be shattered.

“This exceeds by nearly 50 percent the anticipated outward load on a pillar. If you went in there right now and simply tried to wave your hand between the two pistons, though invisible to the naked eye, that strand is thousands of times sharper than a samurai sword; you would with ease slice your fingers or hand off on it and barely feel it at first as your fingers fell to the floor. Actually, rather dangerous stuff when this slender. I’ll be glad when we move up to the visible range, as you know or maybe heard rumors that we have had several accidents.”

There had been “talk” some years back of a careless tech in Japan, acting on his own before the project director could stop him, who had gone into a chamber after a test strand had shattered during a test like this one and part of a strand spinning through the air had neatly cut his jugular. He had bled out within the chamber. The project director, most likely Fuchida, ordered the door to be kept sealed and no one to venture in. It must have been a horrific few minutes watching a coworker die like that. The broken strands of carbon nanotube, at such a microscopic diameter, were impossible to see with the naked eye, weighing less than a mote of dust on the wind; if one came into contact with human flesh with sufficient velocity, it would just slice through; if inhaled, even through a respirator, it would pierce the respirator filters, then wreak havoc in the victim’s lungs. As a precaution, the room had to be sealed off, the body still inside, because it was feared that the invisible strands would escape by piercing through the layers of air filters and go into the atmosphere. Fuchida, if he was indeed the project leader, ordered the filters shut down and the entire lab, worth tens of millions, shut down and encased in reinforced concrete. If true, it was most likely what killed the Japanese funding for his project.

It must have been a surreal funeral service outside that lab, Gary thought as he continued to gaze at the two pistons, wondering how they were designed to actually grasp and hold the microscopic thread while testing it.

After several minutes Fuchida powered down the pistons, then offered the button to Franklin for the compression test, saying that after all he had spent to reach this moment, he deserved the experience. Franklin casually hit the button without comment, eyes fixed on the chamber. The two pistons separated by less than two centimeters appeared to move, and after several seconds Gary actually took Eva by the arm and pulled her back away from the glass wall. The pistons had actually compressed and were now tightly wedged against each other. Something had gone wrong!

Even Franklin, seeing Gary’s reaction, stepped back, but Fuchida just chuckled.

“Happens all the time,” he announced. “Those pistons are of the highest-grade tungsten steel to be found anywhere in the world. They are now fused together. The mesh held up; I’ll show you the close-up high-speed film later. The mesh cut right through the pistons when we attempted compression.”

“So how do we know if we have true compression strength?” Eva asked, relaxing from Gary’s protective grip.

“Right now, by the rate at which it cuts into the face of the pistons at a given pressure. Believe me, we were a bit bewildered at first until we figured that out. Eventually we’ll coat the pistons with the nanotubing, just to make sure, since they are rather expensive and then useless after a test in which they are fused together, but I’m confident we will exceed what is needed.”

There was evident pride in his voice and a round of congratulatory comments from the rest of the group. Then Franklin looked at the computer screen, announced that they had to leave, and asked Fuchida and his team to join them for dinner at eight.

Eva was obviously reluctant to leave. The question of developing a material strong enough to make a tower viable had consumed her for years. She wanted to hear the details, not just of the molecular arrangement, but how Fuchida had finally cracked the mystery of how to actually spin the material out lengthwise from a few millimeters to a strand two meters long and then spin them together into a mesh. Given the fibers’ incredible strength, it was almost a paradox to make something stronger than the machines needed to produce it. Even with high-grade tungsten steel, it was like trying to spin wire rope when your tools were made of butter and the rope being made could rip the machinery apart.

It would have to wait, she thought, as their British host led them out of the lab and through the inner airlock. Once clear, he removed his respirator and hood; then, still wearing the rest of the jumpsuit and hairnet, he motioned for them to follow him through the middle door and then out into the main building.

He gestured to the vast open expanse within the four-acre building.

“You go to some of the museums of the Industrial Age in England,” he said, “and you can see examples of the rope-making and wire-making works of the nineteenth century. They were called ‘rope walks’; they took threads of manila and twisted them into strands and eventually into cables capable of hoisting a ship’s anchor—rope thicker than my leg. A ship of the line in Nelson’s time needed miles upon miles of rope; one whole part of the ship was even known as the ‘cable tier’ where the huge ropes for the anchor were stored. They were spun out in vast open sheds a hundred or more yards in length. When your Yank, Roebling, was making the Brooklyn Bridge, his wire works in Trenton where the suspension cables were first drawn out into thin wire stretched nearly a quarter mile.

“That is what this will be a year from now if all goes according to plan. Once our friend Fuchida gets up to two millimeters in diameter for our first thread, we’ll start manufacturing it right here.”

He grinned.

“Cables thousands of miles in length,” he said proudly.

“You mean kilometers,” Eva corrected him with a grin. “My prophecy of years ago was true with that Mars mission, what with you English and Americans insisting upon miles, or is it statute or nautical miles?”

There were reluctant nods of agreement over the now legendary screwup that had sent a mission worth several hundred million crashing into the surface of Mars. That was gone over again and again before the incredible
Curiosity
mission was launched using standardized metric measurements to ensure such an embarrassing mistake never happened again.

“Miles are longer,” the Brit said with a grin.

“You men and your obsessions on that subject,” Eva huffed, and they all laughed, though Victoria seemed a bit embarrassed by her mother’s joke.

Franklin rolled up the sleeve of his coverall and realized he had removed his old-fashioned wristwatch before going into the clean room.

“I do think we are on a tight schedule, my friends. Gary, Eva, Miss Victoria, if you will excuse us, the three of us have some contracts and legal stuff to hammer out, which I know bores the two of you no end.”

Gary actually felt a bit cut out by the comment. It was obvious that Franklin was separating them from the others.

He and Eva stood silently, both feeling a bit embarrassed, not sure if they should just go and put their clothes back on, then go stand in the hot Mojave sun.

Conspiratorial smiles were suddenly exchanged between the other three.

“You’ve got a flight to catch, so why don’t you go change,” the Brit said, as if shooing them off. Gary only nodded and started to turn back to the outer door of the airlock.

“No, you’re heading the wrong way,” the Brit said, and Gary looked back at him in confusion, then felt a flush of anger, sensing he was being teased.

“Oh, for God’s sake, just tell them,” the aircraft designer said, starting to laugh.

The Brit and Franklin looked at each other and Franklin nodded to his friend.

“You tell them.”

The Brit flashed his winning smile.

“I hear, young lady, that you soloed this morning,” the Brit said, looking at Victoria.

“Yes, sir.”

He extended his hand and patted her on the shoulder.

“Shirttail still missing?”

She blushed a bit and nodded.

“Well, you got another first ahead of you today.”

“How is that?”

“A driver is waiting outside to take you to hangar number one. We’ll fetch along your street clothes after you get back.”

“Back from what?”

The Brit now broke into a broad grin, like a parent about to give an ultimate gift on Christmas morning.

“Sadly, three of our passengers for this afternoon’s flight had to cancel out. Transferring through a flight from Detroit, they ate at the wrong restaurant and are now in our infirmary with a nasty dose of food poisoning. Poor souls. Not their fault, and insurance covers it all, so they’ll fly a few months from now. So there are three empty seats on today’s suborbital flight.”

Victoria looked at him wide-eyed.

“What are you saying?” Eva asked, with an excited but nervous edge to her voice, and she instinctively put a protective arm around Victoria, as if about ready to hold her back.

“Oh, just that there are three empty seats for this evening’s flight to watch sunset from space. Those seats are yours.”

“
Bozhe m
iĭ
,
” Eva gasped.

“You barely got time to suit up and fall in with the others.”

Eva looked at Gary and her expression changed.

“But … but, I thought passengers had to have flight physicals,” she said, looking at her husband.

“He’s already had one,” Franklin replied. “I asked Dr. Bock to check him out for this and he’s cleared. As for Miss Victoria, I’ll take a chance on a pilot who has already passed her class-three physical and flew solo today. Now haul out of here.”

“But what about me?” Eva asked.

“You had a company physical three months ago and you check out OK as well,” Franklin replied, sounding a bit exasperated. “That is, unless the two of you have another child on the way.”

She looked at him angrily and blushed, then shook her head emphatically no.