Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) (4 page)

“Do some research and start on a patent application.  The university has a number of consultants you can talk to about that.  You’re fools if you don’t avail yourselves of their advice.”

Stan Benko finally couldn’t contain himself.  “For what?  A bit of math connecting gravity and electromagnetism?  For a go-cart than can, at best speed, be out-walked by a dog?”

“Come outside, Mr. Benko,” Stephanie Kinsella commanded.

The group all followed her outside.  “Mr. Benko, does your knowledge extend to knowing which way is south?” the professor asked.

He pointed in the right direction.  “Now, Mr. Benko, move your hand straight up, until you point directly above you.”  He moved his hand, ignoring the fact that he passed over the moon to get there.

“Mr. Benko, the only reason you and Mr. Chang have any place at this table is because you suggested changing the orientation of the point-gravity source.”

Stan let his hand drop.  “So what?”

He missed seeing Johnny Chang staring at the moon.  He missed the two graduate students staring in the same direction.

“So what?  Mr. Benko, point your hand to the south again.”

He saw everyone was looking in that direction, but didn’t understand what they were seeing and shrugged, doing as he was told.

Stephanie Kinsella stepped close to Stan and took his hand in hers and lifted it to point at the moon.  “Tell me, Mr. Benko, the best angle for the point gravity source to be directed?”

Stan was beyond thought, beyond reason.  “The moon?  Are you crazy?  We get fifty-eight lousy centimeters a second acceleration!  Six percent of what you need to lift something off the ground!  The moon?  You’re insane!”

Stephanie Kinsella turned to Johnny Chang.  “How long will the propane fuel the go-cart turbine?”

“Two hours, just about,” Johnny said, never taking his eyes off the sky.

“It can’t lift itself from the ground,” Stan said rudely, emphasizing each word, “it can’t even manage anything beyond a slow walk!”

Stephanie Kinsella turned to Anna Sanchez.  “Miss Sanchez, an acceleration of fifty-eight centimeters per second, for a burn of two hours duration, what is the delta V?”

“More than four kilometers per second,” the young woman said, without bothering to check her calculator or PDA.

“Mr. Benko, Mr. Chang.  You will go prepare your paper.  I will see that it’s published.  You will have precedence for everything you’ve discovered.”  She lifted her hand and pointed at the moon.  “If you include that, Mr. Benko, I’ll break every bone in your body.  Each and every bone.”

She turned and stalked away, followed by her graduate students.

Stan Benko watched them walk away, then turned to his friend.  “The arrogance of that bitch is simply... beyond belief.”

“Stan, you don’t like her.  I understand that.  You need to understand some things.  She figured this out the first day.  There’s been nothing we’ve done since the pizza party day that’s surprised her.  She did the math long ago and knew what was going on.

“You’re worried about precedence?  Stan, she’s bent over backwards, every step of the way, to make sure we get it.  How many times has she told us to do the math?  How many times did she listen to our reports and ask us if we had any changes?  Hell, you know we didn’t have any changes!  We lucked out, Stan.  We found something remarkable!  And we don’t have the wit to understand it.  We still don’t.”

He waved at the go-cart, sitting in the hangar.  “That’s the future, Stan.  We don’t understand it much, but we’ve had a little hand in making it happen.  Stan, she could have taken it all away from us that first day... but she hasn’t.  Think about that.”

“So, what are we supposed to do?”

Johnny shrugged.  “It’s not a nice feeling knowing that you’re in water too deep for you to swim in.  Stan, we’re in water over our head.  We were kids, gosh wow, about physics.  We weren’t going to get a doctorate unless we hit the jackpot.  Well, we hit the jackpot.  It’s time for us to write our paper and gracefully accept that the ball is now in someone else’s court.”

Chapter 3 — Discovery

Captain John Gilly was one of a solid phalanx of worker bees in the White House who arrived before seven in the morning.  Most of the early birds were eager beavers, eager to impress the boss, but in John Gilly’s case he simply wanted to get an early start on the overnight intelligence reports from around the world.  That, and his phone didn’t ring very often until later in the morning.

This was a Monday morning and eager beavers or not, some of his fellow early birds were dragging their tails.  John smiled to himself as he got off the elevator and made his way down the long, high-ceilinged hall that led to his office.

The liaison secretary was sitting at her desk looking like she’d pulled an all-nighter.  “Captain Gilly, the President wants to see you as soon as you come in.  Please go right up to The Office.”

There was never any doubt in the White House which office was being referred to when “The Office” was mentioned.  John nodded, dropped his briefcase on his chair, hit the power button on his PC and walked rapidly back towards the elevator.

A few minutes later he was showing his ID to one of the patient Marine guards, before reporting to the President’s private secretary.

“You’re to go right in, Captain,” she told him.

John nodded, absently wondering who was in the meeting, and what was so important this early on a Monday morning.

He entered the Oval Office and stopped.  The President was standing at the window, staring outside; the room was otherwise empty.

The President turned and saw John and waved a hand for him to approach the President’s desk.  “I’d tell you to sit, but you won’t.  I’d tell you to be at ease, but I don’t think you remember how to do that anymore.”

“Sir, you’re the President; I am a Navy captain.  A captain is a big deal any place other than Washington.  When I commanded the
JFK
I was the emperor of all I surveyed.  Here... I’m pretty small potatoes.”

John hastily wandered through his mental list of action points he’d had to do lately.  He couldn’t think of one that hadn’t been done on time or satisfactorily.

The President didn’t nod; instead, he walked behind his desk and sat down.  “I was talking to the Chief of Naval Operations the other day about something else; I mentioned that I would like your tour extended.”

John bit his lip, wondering what the CNO had said about that.  Evidently this private meeting wasn’t an ass-chewing, so maybe it was something good.

The President met John’s eyes.  “He told me that this is a typical assignment for an officer who’s performed very well.  The officer comes here as the Naval Liaison to the President, and after a year he is sent to a cush embassy someplace as the Naval Attaché.  Since I’m properly grateful, I send your name to the Senate for confirmation, and sometime in your last couple of months of duty you get a star and a much nicer pension when they boot you out the door a little later.

“Except the CNO said that you’d told him privately that if you could get out of here early, you’d accept a job as a training chief at boot camp.”

John shrugged, “That’s correct, sir.”

“I thought we had a good working relationship, Captain.”

“This isn’t my cup of tea, sir.  I’ve no complaints about working with you, but this isn’t what I want to do in my final days in the Navy.”

“Just a few problems with some of the fatheads, eh?”

John knew better than to answer.

“John, you have no idea just how valuable a person is who can look me in the eye and disagree with me to my face.  Someone not in the least interested in telling me what he thinks I want to hear.  Someone who is willing to argue a point; someone who makes me think.  Someone who makes others think.

“And, on top of that, throw in someone who, when the decision goes against them, puts his shoulder to the wheel to get the job done with as much enthusiasm as if he’d won the day.  You are one of very few in this building; there’s not that damn many more like you in this city.”

“Sir, that’s my job.  Giving advice when called upon and then doing what I can to see that what was decided happens.”

“Well, good news and bad news.  I understand you are a good sailor — but you have other talents as well.  You will not be seeing an embassy any time soon.  Frankly, I would be surprised if that ever happens.  Not if I have anything to say about it.  The thought of you holding a tray of canapés is enough to make my stomach heave.”

John could read the President’s expression a little.  He doubted he was on the shit list, not after the puff piece a second before.

The President reached down and lifted a bound report from his desk, the report being about an inch thick.  “According to my Science Advisor, this is the biggest scientific hoax of all time.  Ten thousand times bigger than all of the previous hoaxes combined.

“On the other hand, Friday I received a delegation that included Stephen Hawking, Alan Guth... a half dozen other leading lights of modern physics and mathematics.  They told me that Hawking was literally risking his life to come here to talk to me.

“Those men told me this is the biggest discovery of all time; that it will change humanity more and faster than anything that has ever come down the pike.  They brought along a petition from two dozen other stars of math and physics who agreed with them.

“You, Captain — you taught math at the Naval Academy.”

John grinned.  “Yes, sir, for three years.  Freshman math survey.  Algebra to calculus for smart kids who didn’t have the background.”

“There’s not much math in here, but what there is is Greek to me; in fact, half the symbols are Greek.  Go figure.”

The President held out the report to John.  “Take this into the outer office.  Read it.  You may not take it out of the outer office; if you have to take a whiz, give it to my secretary, Ellen Felter, while you’re about your business.  When you get done reading it, come back and we’ll talk some more.”

John blinked and hefted the report.  “An hour or so, I suspect.”

“I read the good parts in forty-five minutes.  I have read the damn thing six more times since.  Cover to cover.  Do your best, Captain Gilly.”

John nodded and went outside and was waved to one of the other desks.

The report cover was a simple white sheet with minimal printing on it.  An inch high line that read “Gravity/Electromagnetism” followed by a second line with much smaller type that said, “How to get there from here” and in the bottom right corner a simple block of four lines that read: “Doctor Stephanie Kinsella; Professor of Physics; California Institute of Technology; Pasadena, California.”  Someone had applied a “TOP SECRET” hand stamp, and underneath that was a handwritten scrawl, “President’s Eyes Only.”

A mixture, John thought, of wit and modesty, and then stomped into a bureaucratic pigeon hole

The table of contents was equally interesting.  A simple vertical list.  “Page 1: History; Page 2: Theoretical Underpinnings; Page 3: Executive Summary of Proposal; Page 4: Proposal Detail.”

John smiled to himself.  He had a feeling that Professor Dr. Kinsella was young; the report was perhaps two hundred and fifty pages long.  A fair amount of detail!

He read the history.  It was a dry report of some rather bizarre observations and subsequent clueless behavior by grad students.  The first page included a web address on it and was labeled, “Our web cam.”

The second page contained a few paragraphs of text; the rest of the page was equations.  John got about a third of the way down the page before he raised an eyebrow.  When he’d finished he was staggered.  True, there were obviously a lot of short cuts here and a great many assumptions.  But gosh!  Most of those assumptions had been part and parcel of the theoretical underpinnings of quantum physics and relativity for almost a century!

The third page was terse.  “Turbines modified according to Benko-Chang methods produce substantial acceleration.   The acceleration is a function of the curvature of space produced at a remove from the turbines.  The acceleration produced is invariant to the mass accelerated; that is, it doesn’t matter if the mass is one kilo, one kiloton or a thousand megatons.  The acceleration the drive produces is identical for each mass.

“Because of the inverse square law, the effect of even a ‘large’ gravity field is small.  It takes a great deal of energy to change that effect.  This device modifies a great many physical laws, including the inverse square law.  Nothing is as it seems.

“This is not a perpetual motion machine; while you can get quite a lot for very little, if you have nothing, you get nothing.  The turbines require energy to spin up, more energy to produce the Benko-Chang effect and still more energy to continue spinning.  When the fuel runs out, the effect stops.

“However there are any number of ways of spinning a turbine, including a nuclear power plant, that will keep the aforesaid turbines spinning a very long time and supply the power for Benko-Chang magnetic vortices for just as long.”

John was curious.  In the first page Benko and Chang had been painted more or less as comic buffoons; yet their names were here, on this.  It didn’t exactly compute.

Two-thirds of the way down the page two paragraphs of the executive summary were obviously the heart of the matter.

“A nuclear-powered vessel using Benko-Chang modified turbines can sustain accelerations of one or more gravities for days, weeks and months.  At one gravity, the moon is hours away.  Mars, a few days away.  The asteroid belt, a week, Jupiter two weeks, Saturn a month and Pluto, these days, a few more days than Neptune.

“These times are based on going there, stopping to look around and returning home.”

John continued to read, “Any turbine-powered vehicle could be modified to use Benko-Chang turbines.  One might want to consider just how many such vehicles are currently in service and just how far they could go with the fuel capacities currently existing.

“This project consists of constructing a modest purpose-built vessel as a demonstration.  Flying said vessel to the moon as practice and Mars as proof of principle.”

The rest of the document was more prosaic; designs for a spherical space ship, a hundred meters in diameter.   Three hundred and thirty feet — the size of some naval vessels, small destroyers and some of the larger frigates.  Not a patch on something the size of the
John F. Kennedy
, the aircraft carrier John Gilly had once commanded.  John closed his eyes, briefly remembering the good times, and then finished the rest of the report quickly.

The numbers were unbelievable.  Doctor Kinsella predicated the ship’s power plant based on a nuclear submarine power plant, salvaged and refurbished to the task.

In his mind John reframed the problem.  Little g is ten meters a second, more or less.  Velocity is the acceleration times the duration of the acceleration.  Little g was a hundredth of a kilometer a second.  Accelerating at one g, according to the formula, meant you piled on one kilometer per second every hundred seconds.  Not even two minutes.  More than 800 kilometers per second, per day.  In a year, nearly the speed of light.

He gulped.  And it didn’t matter how massive the object you were accelerating was?  That had to violate the laws of physics!  Not to mention, local speed limits!

He read through the technical specs for the ship, for the crew.  It was all there, down to supplies and equipment.  Everything was summarized to a considerable degree, but it was there.  And there were cost estimates.  He flipped to the budget summary at the end, and blinked again.  Two billion dollars over two years?  No way!  Absolutely no way!   Ten or twenty times that, for sure!

He flipped back a few pages, and saw a page that said, “RISKS.”  He thought it was about hazards of flying faster than the speed limit; instead it was things that could go wrong with the project.

Item 1 was simple, pointed and politically explosive.  “If there is any involvement from NASA, except loan of engineering staff, the project will never be completed, no matter how much money is spent on it.”

Item 2 was almost identical, but longer winded.  “Military procurement methods preclude success.  A great deal of the equipment can be purchased off the shelf, with sufficient redundancy to guarantee success.  The crew size will mean that adequate technical resources will be available quickly, without years of training and the expense of the usual certifications for manned space flight.”

The author was definitely young, John thought.  She hadn’t knocked heads with Washington, that was for sure.  One hundred people for the “proof of principle” flight?  NASA had kittens risking a single person after the loss of two shuttles.

He shook his head.  So, the boffins were split.  Except, in his heart of hearts, John knew.  He’d seen
Armageddon
the movie; actually he rather liked the movie.  His daughter looked a little like Liv Tyler, although they had been raised rather differently and his daughter wasn’t nearly as sumptuous in the bosom department.

But a line in the movie had stuck with him, the one about who did you want to have advising you: a man with a C minus in physics, or the smartest man on the planet?  Well, John knew for a fact that the President’s Science Advisor had never taken anything with math as part of the course work.  He had been a clinical psychologist who had a knack for party fund raising.  A real knack, and he’d been rewarded with a political job.   The science community was still pissed at the appointment, and it had been nearly two years now.