Trade World Saga 1: Manual Interpretation (7 page)

"How many natives?"

"Just one," he answered and tensed for the next jolt which didn't come.

"Did
you
give the native any artifacts?"

Rett decided that since
Trade
training didn't count and the belt had been taken, he could answer a negative. "No, I didn't," he answered and again came the mind-searing jolt.

"What did you give the native?"

"Nothing," he said and again came the jolt.

"Well, how is his story so far?" the questioner asked the Tros at the console.

"Relatively truthful on all counts, but with indications of information withheld."

"Let us continue then," stated the questioner.

Rett's story was enlarged bit by bit but many of the details were omitted. The questioners seemed to be just going through a routine and had no real interest in his answers.

The service personnel knew nothing of his mobile stressed space field belt and Rett didn't feel inclined to mention it since he knew the penalty for culture contamination through technology transfer.

A small delegation, led by a Tros this time, came to his craft as he was readied to leave the service ship.

"You will be destroyed if you attempt to enter this section of the spiral arm again. Also, if upon subsequent investigation, we find that you have misrepresented yourself or your intentions on the planet where you landed; the nearest ship will be sent to eradicate you and all your associates. This ship is now recorded as being warned from this area," the Tros said and without waiting for an answer spun around and walked away.

Rett began to make plans for his moving from his planet even before his craft sped out into the brilliantly speckled void.

Susan and Tod had finally figured out how the belt had been assembled. It slid together like a puzzle box with no adhesives or extraneous screws or connectors. After careful diagrams and notes had been gathered, they consulted with Steve, John and Joel to assist them in disassembling the component parts. It was a relatively safe procedure with Steve's electronic background, Joel’s mechanical aptitude, and Tod's background in physics, particle physics in this case.

Only after it had been safely disassembled did Susan, as materials specialist, and John, the chemist; begin to figure out of what it was made and why it had fractured in the first place.

It became Steve, Tod, and Joel's job to figure out how the belt had been powered and to duplicate the power source. Then they’d have to figure out the stressed space field after they got a power supply working.

Ling, Desiree, and Fran were given a separate task of preliminary work, whose purpose Andrew wouldn't even reveal to the rest of the members in the group. When asked he would just say he would tell them soon. All members were ordered not to ask the three about their activities until allowed and this hurt the harmony of the group. Andrew had explained that early answers would prejudice their investigations. Nobody liked it. They were supposed to work together, they muttered.

At a called meeting, Andrew prepared to tell all members of the team his purpose. He also knew that the three men had made a great breakthrough on the belt power supply. The tension was palpable.

As the members settled into their places, Andrew spoke, "We should get right down to business. I'm sure you're all interested in the results of our sub-group on the power supply. Our women's sub-group has been doing some preliminary work that we shall discuss later.” The women frowned at this potentially sexist remark. “First; Tod, why don't you do this, since this part is really your baby?"

Tod got up and walked over to the display board. He was grinning from ear to ear and looked more like an imbecilic football player than a physicist.

"About a week after we started on the project, Joel figured out the mechanics of the power production and Steve figured out
how power generation might be controlled but they both really didn't understand the process of the power generation. What we had, but we didn't know it, was a fusion generator that weighed about three kilograms."

"Wait a minute," Fran interrupted, "I thought a fusion reaction took millions of degrees of heat and needed a tremendous amount of energy to start it. The first successful experiment with cold fusion wasn’t cold fusion at all but an unusual chemical reaction."

"Well, you're right and wrong," Tod answered patiently. "What this belt has is cold fusion. It takes a highly sophisticated apparatus to produce the catalyst but once you know what the catalyst is, and we know now, you can use deuterium and produce power in tremendous amounts by varying tiny amounts of deuterium, and I mean
minute amounts
. It was the fact that it was a sealed system that threw us. It was like having a cathode with no anode or one side of an electrical circuit. It didn’t make sense until we threw out some of our old preconceptions. How can you have something producing tremendous energy and no heat? It was contrary to everything we thought we knew. Of course a hundred years ago they laughed at people who suggested there were regions of the earth that moved – tectonic plates.”

“Susan, I'm going to need your help if we're going to make a copy of this; the casing is giving us a fit. To make things ultra simple, this catalyst allows the deuterium to fuse to produce helium with energy released as a directed field of energy, or in this case, a circulating cool plasma. It produces no heat. No. Before you ask…we don’t know why. We use this released energy to produce electricity with the damnedest, miniature closed, magnetohydrodynamic widget you ever saw. This thing is a combination of the slickest principles combined with the crudest control methods. We're gonna’ be able to fix the crude control methods with some of our own. The controls for the energy production prohibit us using electronic switching and limiting functions so we are going to use nano-fluidic controls with electronic controls further away," Tod said still beaming.

"What good does all this do us if we have to produce some complicated, expensive catalyst?" Fran asked.

"Good point," Tod said, now really grinning. "It so happens an old professor of mine works at the plasma physics research center here and a by-product of some of the older experiments can be easily gathered from existing equipment or current reactors now that we know this by-product (the catalyst) is of use."

"I see that your discovery will mean jobs for all of us and fame for you," Ling said sardonically, "but what are we doing our work for. I don't see how our work ties in with your power supply," she said, turning her attention from Tod back to Andrew.

Andrew decided that now was the time to bare his idea to the group.

"What have you been doing these last few weeks?" Susan asked. "You have been flitting from lab to lab and then you've disappeared for the entire last week. What have you been working on? I have a sneaking suspicion, but I want to hear it from your mouth before I'll believe it."

Andrew felt justified in his faith of Susan at that moment and decided to make her number two in charge of the project. She was forceful and did have a gift for administration.

"I have been working with several of the university staff to work out technical problems but when we get that power supply completed; my work can really begin. I've made most of the preliminary calculations for what we found in the other portion of the belt. I've figured out how the belt could produce the intense fields so we might negate or regulate inertia and gravity. I'm able to negate neutrino oscillation, at least experimentally. The neutrinos change states and I can lock them into any of three stressed states. I'm not sure what it will mean but it may pull us closer to realization of what all Unified Field theory concepts tried to do, explain and predict the interaction of matter and energy. Except in our case, we might just be able to put a lot of it into practice and it’s going to kick lynchpins out of string theory and eleven dimensions. It indicates how gravity may be an entropic force – a property of matter. At the very least it will verify and disprove many standard model propositions and theories."

"Spinoffs from this can give us gravity neutralization, force fields, and
faster than light travel,"
he said emphasizing the last. "We are going to design and build Earth's first interstellar craft and, Susan; you're going to be in charge of what it's made of and everything in it."

Bedlam broke loose in the group and they all started yelling comments at once. Most were angry or thought he was crazy or thought, at the very least, their chances of getting a synthesist degree had gone down the tubes.

Steve shouted over the rest, “Hold it Ace.” He then spoke in a more natural volume. “We’re not going to let you say something like that without you explaining about these ‘calculations and crap about nuking string theory…you’re no physicist. Where do you get off with making these wild claims? ...And that bit about space travel. No one talks about that stuff anymore. I can go for a new power source that may or may not prove viable but a space ship? I know it a big leap to go from power supplies to a space ship. Come on. I want to get a degree in my lifetime. I don’t want to be known as some space nut case.”

Andrew looked at Tod and nodded. Tod made sure his wireless connections were secure – then connected to the large display with his MemDex.

Andrew led them through the prepared presentation. “Thought I’d have to explain a bit… Seems that a lot of what we “knew” about general particle theory -- electrons, charm/strange/up/down/bottom and top quarks -- and neutrino states were wrong. Not wrong –- wrong – just misinterpreted. Here’s a current representation. Neutrons are in three states and have a certain predicted mass. Used to be we thought they had no mass and now we know differently …but it isn’t mass like we think it is. We have electron, muon and tau neutrino states but theory kept finding conflicting reasons for the numbers of different neutrinos and why they changed states when they did. Quantum theory wasn’t up to it really. You have been out and got caught in a strong whirlwind, right?” he asked the group.

Several in the group tilted their heads as the rest waited.

“Well; imagine you are in space and are hit with an electromagnetic wave. You might not feel it but instruments could detect it,” Andrew continued. “Quantum theory says you can’t have entanglement or particle spin until you measure it. Quantum theory came up with entanglement and then we could demonstrate photon entanglement. What we thought we knew appears to have been misinterpreted. It is not really particles but rotating fields at a Planck scale of 10
^-35
meters. That is the background energy for all matter – for everything. That’s why string theory keeps trying to come up with eleven dimensions. It’s simpler and more elegant than we thought. You smash up some of these ‘particles’ as we’ve come to call them and they leave different curved trails. From these misinterpreted photos we base our conclusions of ‘current’ physics. They aren’t really particles, per se, but the force of the rotating fields acts like masses of particles. The force acts like mass so it must be particle. At least that is what we’ve thought for about a hundred years. Think of background radiation at Planck frequencies and some is in motion linearly, some rotating and that is what acts as the basis of matter in the universe. We now have some calculations and have shown we can affect matter, at least in some experiments, that tends to go a long way at confirming what we now think…or should I say…disproving some of the older quantum and string theory interpretations.” Andrew could see everyone was trying to get a handle on the concepts.

“Look,” Steve said. “Are you trying to say you can affect matter with some sort of field experiment? Effect matter how? Are you saying all the old theories are wrong?”

“No. I’m not saying they are all wrong but there have been a lot of theories that have been around a long time…long enough to be accepted as fact because of some obscure experiment that was misinterpreted fifty years ago. Any theory that can’t be confirmed by multiple experiments is no more than theology. We can change the nature of space around us and can alter gravity. Affect that and you can do all sorts of things but you have to have an inkling of the right concepts first and I think we do. I’ve been working with Tod when he wasn’t on the power supply because I am no physicist – he is.” Andrew waited for the questions and prepared to demonstrate some experiments. He nodded to Tod and they displayed the dated videos of some of the experiments.

The first video was dated two weeks previously and showed a jury-rigged apparatus on a metal table that arced and burned out the power in the room and the video went dark. Another video immediately followed showing the same apparatus over a polymer table and a ceramic block floated between two curved, small disk-like antenna. The third video dated early the same morning showed a large block of metal; floating and marked “60 kilos.” It was floating between the two antennas and then as one adjustment was verbally noted in the background the block disappeared and a loud crack and crash was heard. The camera continued the display as Andrew came into the view and the camera swung toward a hole in the laboratory roof and the lighting was swung to cover the smashed roof.

“Glad that was late at night. I had to patch that myself. At least I had Tod to hold the ladder.” Andrew looked at Steve. “Yes. We can suspend gravity around any mass and by adjusting the background at different portions of the field – we can produce motion if the field is strong enough. We have a few more if you’re interested.”