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Brent looked
up to Jeff and said, "It doesn't fit.
I've tried ten different ways and it just doesn't fit I tell you!"
Jeff grabbed a section of the balky machinery.
"Try it
like this" he said as he turned the device and thrust it hard into
a support section of interlinked steel.
The steel protested with scrapes and shrieks, but the device rested
where Jeff had inserted it.
"O.K."
Brent said, "By God it will go in like that; O.K. I'll bolt it in." He was working on the last piece of the flux
field collector that Jeff insisted was the most important component to
make everything else function. It
was the power generator for all the other devices Jeff had built.
Brent looked
up expectantly, "It's in! Now
what?"
"Now we
run diagnostics". Brent crawled
out of the access hatch on the side of the large device and asked,
"What
are the diagnostics?"
"They
give me important information so that I can balance and tune the field
interactions," Jeff explained. That
was good enough for Brent. He
had stopped questioning Jeff weeks ago, right after he had witnessed his
first engine test.
It had been
the day after that first night at Frazier's tavern together. Brent had shown up a little after noon. He came charging into the house without waiting
to be asked. He paced rapidly
towards the living room then spun suddenly around.
"I couldn't
sleep last night at all. I was
impressed with your barn, but a spaceship?
It doesn't even have an engine, at least I didn't see one." Jeff started to answer but Brent cut him off.
"No exhaust,
no fuel, what in the hell powers it?
Even if you have some new propulsion system, that crate is still
a suicide machine, I mean aluminum sheet?
Canoes are built better."
"The energy
source is." Brent was not
listening. He spun back to the
living room and went to the bay window that looked out towards the barn.
"When
you say spaceship, you mean leave the planet, right?
Fly to the moon, that kind of stuff?
I need more than your word."
"You want
proof?" Jeff demanded, irritated
that he would not shut up and listen.
"Hell
yes I want proof. If you really
have solved all these wonders, proof should be easy!"
"You asked
for it," Jeff said, "Come on, I'll show you a time flux field
generator."
They went into
the barn. Artemis tried to respond,
but Jeff just said irritably "Artemis OFF!" and the mechanical
arm went limp. Jeff and Brent
breezed through the card key lock. They
entered a small area and Brent saw a single mass of circuits and components.
"This"
said Jeff", Is a Time Flux Field Generator." He walked over to the command console and entered
a series of commands too fast for Brent to see.
"I just
informed the computer to prepare for a thrust test, it'll take a minute
before it's ready." Brent
studied the Time Field Generator. It
did not look very big. He thought
it rather resembled three donuts stuck together at right angles to each
other and sharing a common hole.
"Does
it run on electricity?" Brent
asked.
"Yes this
one can, but I need to get the Flux Field Collector finished if I'm actually
be able to use it for more than experimentation"
"I thought
this was a Flux Field Collector."
Brent said, somewhat confused.
"No, this
is a Field generator; a Field Collector is a related but different animal. Comparing it to electricity, this is an electric
motor. The Field Collector is
an electric generator."
"So it
does produce electricity?" Brent
asked again. Jeff answered somewhat
impatiently.
"No, it
does not produce electricity, though it would be easy enough to set it
up to do so. It produces a stream
of gravitons, particles that are free to move in four dimensions and have
profound effects on local patterns of time flux."
Jeff knew the phenomenon required
a more detailed explanation. He
also knew that 'graviton' was probably the wrong word for the particles
but he did not know what else to call them.
He concluded that they behaved in four-space much like light did
in three-space, having both a particle and wave nature; but unlike light
were independent of time and could be running at pretty much any time-speed,
backwards or forwards in a random fashion.
He concluded that the summation of all these random motions was
the time-speed of a void. It bothered him to think how close the universe
was to a dead stop.
"By manipulating
how they flow", Jeff continued, "You can selectively generate
time flux fields, that is, variations in the local speed of time flow,
to some stunning effects. Gravity,
for example, is simply the three dimensional projection of the fifth dimensional
mass constant interaction with the natural time flux field generated by
bodies. Since gravity is caused
by minute variations in the time field, a reverse field can negate it
locally. And you would be appalled
at how small a change in time flow it takes to unleash immense amounts of power.@
"I have
calculated that for the Earth's own time flux field to click off just
one extra second at an altitude of a hundred and seventy-five miles compared
to time flow on the ground, about eighty-six years has to pass. Time slows down as you approach a massive body and speeds up to
a finite value in a void. But
the difference is so astronomically small, its only been measured a few
times, and then its meaning was missed."
Jeff wheeled
the device into the room with the pyramid shaped pilings. It was housed in a sturdy metal cage. Sturdy was not the right word.
This thing looked like a truck could run over it with no damage
to the device within. Jeff left
it on its cart but connected the corners of the metal cage to the steel
cables attached to the screw eyes in the piling faces Brent had seen last
night. Jeff flipped a hidden switch. A display panel, half hidden in a recessed
closet type space, came to life. It
had several buttons and knobs, but the most prominent feature was four
red LED displays that all read A0, 000.0".
The units on the display were "Pounds-Force". Brent looked at the displays. Four displays, four cables attached to the
engine.
Jeff asked
him to select a cable and pull on it as hard as he could. Brent did and display number three obediently recorded "0,088.4
Pounds-Force". Brent released
the cable. The reading returned
to zero. Jeff unwound the control
wiring from the device, terminated by a multi-pin connector, the kind
the military was fond of, and fitted it into a mating connection attached
to the side of the display console.
"How much
juice does it take?" Brent
asked while Jeff was setting up the control linkage.
"To control
it, not much. But to start it
I would practically have to plug it directly into a commercial power plant. This one still has a residual charge from when
I cycled it up over several months when I was still in California, sort
of like a battery. But this 'battery'
is only at about six percent of its capacity."
"Will
it be enough for the test?" Brent
asked. Jeff gave Brent a strange
sort of look, like he was saying 'surely you jest' with his eyes.
"It will
be enough." Jeff finished
the connection and motioned to Brent that he was ready and for Brent to
step back.
"Now watch
this" Jeff said. Concentration
was evident in his voice, his hand poised above a dial on the controller. He turned the dial. The numbers on the display lay there for a
moment. Brent was awe struck as
the mass of circuitry inside the heavy metal cage lifted up pulling the
cage with it. The cables pulled
up too, taking up their slack. The
cables became tight and Jeff directed Brent's attention to the display
readouts. The readouts all read around "0,100.0
Pounds-Force". Then Jeff thrust the controller to a higher
power level.
There was a
sickening feeling, as if one had just gone off the high point of a roller
coaster, or was in an elevator that suddenly dropped too fast.
The lights near the ceiling suddenly shifted away from the metal
cage, feeling the repulsion. The
old timbers of the roof creaked and groaned.
Brent watched as the cables holding down the engine stretched and
screamed. The display values shot up. The metal cage that held the device was pulling
hard against the pylons, trying to go straight up. Brent looked at the read outs and did not believe
them. Reading one said 8,735.8
Pounds-Force. The other readings
were almost identical.
The pylons
groaned under the load, their pitch getting higher by the moment. Brent glanced again at display one and saw
that now it was flashing, over range, it meant. Over ten thousand pounds thrust per cable, and there were four of
them. An object the size of a
microwave oven was generating over forty thousand pounds thrust.
"For God's
sake turn it off!" Brent
screamed. The sound of stressed
metal was still there but now Brent felt the very Earth move in protest.
"Stop
it, stop it now!" Brent shrieked. Jeff turned the controller pot down, all the
way to zero. The device slacked
up on its cabling and just hovered quietly about a foot off the floor.
Two hundred
miles away, or so, the Gravitational Wave Detection and Quantification
machine, Blunderbuss, just went off line.
"Wow!" Brent said when his fear subsided, "That was amazing, just fucking incredible!"
Fear had given way to surge of adrenaline.
He paced rapidly back and forth, waving his arms and gesticulating,
but made no other intelligible noises for at least another minute. Jeff smiled knowingly as he watched Brent's reaction to his demonstration.
He remembered that his own reaction had been similar the first
time he succeeded in making a flux field generator work.
Poor number two he thought. I
wonder whither you are now?
This Flux Field
generator was a third generation prototype.
The first one was a flop. It
tore itself and one end of his lab to shreds.
The second generation had been more successful, but how could Jeff
have underestimated its power so badly?
The last test
of number two was very much like the test he just performed, except the
restraint was a heavy steel plate bolted to the floor and connected with
cables to a cage similar to this one.
The test was going well. Jeff
was in ecstasy, like Brent now. Then
he made the mistake of going to full Field.
The damned thing tore the metal plate, with chunks of concrete
still bolted to it, clean out of the floor and shot right through the
roof, metal plate and all. As far as Jeff knew, it was still going.
It's probably half way to Alpha-Centauri by now, he liked to think,
but the truth was he didn't know in which direction it left the planet,
or the solar system for that matter. Brent was calming down a bit but was still
excited. "Now I know how
your spaceship will work! You
just bolt that little jewel in and, Buddy, you are Moe‑Bile! Too cool, just too fucking cool!" He was grinning ear to ear.
"Well
there's a bit more to it than that", Jeff said, a lot more than that
to it, he thought. "But you
have the basic idea." Brent
stopped for a second then said
"Well? What are we waiting for? Let's get it installed and take a ride!"
"Now,
not so fast, just slow down a second", Jeff said seriously. "There are plenty of other things that
need doing first. The Flux collector
must be finished, and then started. We
are not talking about a minor thing.
I need to figure out where or how I can load a horrendous amount
of electricity into it before I can get it to run on its own.
I also need to place the security conduit around this property
and get probes four through eight done.
There is a lot of work."
Brent knew he had no idea what Jeff was talking about but he did
not care.
"Let me
help you," he pleaded, "Teach me what you've learned, I've got
to be a part of this." Jeff
nodded approvingly as he turned to Brent, then he saw Linda standing back
by the door watching. Her eyes
were wide.
Brent's first
job on the project had been to dig a ditch four feet deep and about a
foot wide around the entire property.
Jeff rented him a backhoe
and every night after Brent got off work from the refinery, he was out
there digging Jeff's damned ditch.
When Brent
finished the ditch, Jeff gave him several coils of flexible, silvery material,
some type of braided cable, and instructed Brent to lay it in the trench. Jeff showed him how to splice the ends properly
and told him to put as many wraps as possible, but under no circumstances,
less than three full wraps around Jeff's entire property. Jeff worked with Brent under the harsh spotlights
to make sure it was done properly.
They ended
with six full wraps and that made Jeff breathe easier. Brent knew that somehow the coils of braided metal in the ground
were a defensive measure, but he did not know how it would work or who
the defenses were built against. He
thought maybe he had done too masterful a job scaring Jeff with stories
of the Dunuski clan, but Jeff did not seem impressed when Brent suggested
that as the reason for going to all this trouble.
The two ends
of the loop were placed in their own ditch, running from the circular
trenched perimeter up to the west side of the barn.
Jeff told Brent to bury it all, to fill up the excavations. Brent's next job was to help Jeff finish the
Field Collector. That job was
now complete nearly three weeks later and, as Jeff had said, the next
part was the series of diagnostics he had to run in order to fine tune
the device.
Linda popped
her head into the shop and announced dinner was ready. Jeff and Brent came into the house and smelled that good smell of
fried chicken permeating the old wooden frame's downstairs. Jennifer was in the dining room putting the
last touches on the table. It
was apparent that the girls had spent a good portion of the afternoon
fixing this meal. There were candles
on the table, and now Jennifer lit those.
A bottle of wine rested in a bucket full of ice and Jeff suspected
that several more bottles were in the refrigerator.
He checked
his watch, 7:30 p.m., then decided he and Brent had put in a full day. They started at a quarter past seven this morning,
and had worked steadily since. He
knew that no more work would be done this evening. Jeff watched as Brent walked over to Jennifer
and playfully gave her a squeeze. She
turned to him and smiled, said something Jeff could not hear, and then
gave Brent a peck on the cheek. What
ever else this project may do, it had been good for the ongoing relationship
of Brent and Jennifer. Their complicated
on-again, off-again relationship was apparently on again.
This time was number five or six, Jeff was not sure.
Brent raised
his glass in toast, "Here's to mighty works, and the friends to see
them through with you." He
nodded his eyes to Jeff. "Here,
Here" Jennifer added. Linda
asked, "Brent says the Field Collector is finished, now what?"
"I still
need to run some tests on it. I
need to set some variables that I simply could not know until it was finished. After that, we have to try to start it. Starting it is the next major challenge."
"Can't
you like just plug it into the wall, or something?" Jennifer asked seriously. Jeff
glanced at her with a blank look. "Hardly",
he said.
"Well
what do you need?" She asked.
"I need
a lot of electricity. Not necessarily
high volts but a pile of amps, I need a lot of coulombs."
"What's
a coulomb?" Brent asked.
"It's
a physical measure" he shot a glance at Linda, she professed a knowledge
of Physics, "of the quantity of electrons flowing through a conductive
path per unit time."
Brent asked
"How much electricity?"
"I don't
know the exact number, mostly because I haven't done the diagnostics yet. But it's safe to say about one hundred and
twenty-five thousand kilowatt hours, give or take twenty percent."
Brent whistled.
That was a lot of power.
"The question
is" Jeff went on, "where do we find a supply that we can tap
into, and suck that much power in only a few minutes?" Whatever the source, they would have to be quick. Any power station would likely send the "all
Hell's broken loose" alert the moment his modest spaceship set down
on their property and tapped into plant's primary output lines.
He assumed he would have maybe five minutes before the
local police showed up. He could
hold them at bay, at least temporarily, but fifteen minutes to an hour
later, the Federal officers would show up.
He could not forestall them without the Field Collector being operational. If the Feds came and the Field Collector would
not start, like a cold Plymouth in winter, he was screwed. That calculated out to a five-hundred Megawatt
plant. If he could divert its
entire output into his Field Collector.
If they were running at full power.
If he really knew what he was doing.
Brent's brow
was furrowed in deep concentration. He
said, "You know, the refinery maintains a back up generator capacity
of four million watts, mostly in diesel run generators, could we use those?"
Jeff did a
rapid mental calculation. He had
not heard that particular number before.
"Yes,
but we've have to stay hooked to them for around thirty-one hours, do
you think we could?" Brent's
eyes went sullen and he looked down.
"No way"
he said. "Those generators
are to keep the plant running if we lose outside power. When they start up alarms go off everywhere. There's just no way we could run them that
long. It's just not possible."
Jeff said,
"I thought about raiding Three Mile Island.
They would get a quick response from the Fed because of their history,
but they still crank out a monumental amount of power. Hell, we'd only need about four minutes total
link up, then we're set."
"Why not
use Kinzua?" Jennifer blurted
out. Brent and Jeff stopped talking
and looked at her. She looked
at them nervously then continued,
"I mean,
why not? It makes enough power
for Cleveland, Ohio. It is so
far out in the middle of nowhere that the police, hell; the Feds could
not get there in under an hour. It's
accessible to the sky or to the road and it's virtually automatic."
"What
do you mean 'automatic'?" Jeff
said, his eyes narrowing at her.
"I used
to have a boyfriend there", Brent's nostrils flared slightly, "He
invited me up to. you know, anyway,
I asked him once how he could be away from the controls, and he said the
place didn't need anyone. It was
all run automatic. I think he
said it made eighteen, or was it eighty kilowatt hours", her voice
trailed off.
"The Dam",
Brent muttered.
"That's
the answer", Jeff Agreed.
Linda was becoming
more agitated however.
"Now just
a damn minute", she said. "If
I understand what I just heard, you're going to fly up to the dam in a
thing that's never flown, hook the power plant to something that has never
run, and steal enough energy to light Cleveland?
Do you have any concept of how illegal that is? Besides dangerous? Why not take your engine to the government? I'm sure after you demonstrate it they'll give
you whatever you need, safely, legally."
"No, damnit.
Linda we've been through this already."
Jeff snapped, "I don't think you appreciate the magnitude
of what this means. I don't trust them to do the right thing. I don't trust them to let it develop. It will be top secret, overwhelming military
advantages, Big Brother syndrome are too possible. It has to be common knowledge first."
"All right",
Linda snapped, "it's revolutionary, and it's unique. It's an engine for God sake! It supplies motive force, big deal."
"Its not just an engine. Damnit, that's like saying the only use for
electricity is light bulbs. When
electricity was harnessed, what the hell, it is only good for lights. Look at a computer or a communications satellite
and tell me the people who harnessed electricity conceived them. This is fundamental as fire. The invention of the wheel won't have the effect
this will."
"And you're
wise enough to know what to do with it?", she shot back in a sarcastic
tone.
"I invented
it. It's mine. While it is mine I will use it as I see fit."
Jeff glared at Linda.
She looked
at him feeling torn. He fired
her mind, thrilled her body, but as an attorney he scared her to death. He had some plan, but she did not know what,
he would not tell her. It had
something to do with the eight probes.
He had shown no interest in starting a company as she originally
hoped. He seemed unconcerned with making money, now
he was blandly discussing grotesquely
illegal plans of action.
"God,
I can pick them," she muttered under her breath.
Jeff got up
from the table, went through the kitchen and out the back door. Brent found him there a few minutes later.
He tapped Jeff on the shoulder and offered him a cold can of beer.
He sat down on the back steps next to Jeff.
"Attorney's
are funny when it comes to breaking the law" Brent said. "You know she cares for you deeply; she
doesn't want you to end up in jail."
"What
about you?" Jeff asked. "Aren't you afraid of prison? She's right you know. We mess this up and its lifetime lockdown for
us. Maybe for everyone." Brent looked surprised,
"Everyone? Isn't that a bit paranoid?" Jeff just stared up at the night sky, to the
millions of stars that filled it. He
pointed up.
"Look",
he said. "Look at the awesome
power that surrounds us. It is
everywhere; trillions times trillions of tons of fusion burning hydrogen,
evaporating its essence, literally being squeezed into the oblivion of
the night. And what can we say
about the power great enough to force the stars to burn, to hold the fabric
of space itself together, and set order in the universe?@
He held his
hand open in front of Brent=s twinkling eyes; AWe can say that power is
now under the dominion of a man. Always
out of reach from everyone, but not from me.
How do you turn back from the knowledge? How can you forget what you have seen once the image has burned
into your mind? I saw it. I built it.
Its time has come."
Jeff popped
open his beer, then continued,
"Have
you ever noticed that scientific advancement tends to come simultaneously
to different people in different places?
The process to refine aluminum was developed here in America, within
a few days it was also announced in France.
Neither inventor knew of the other, yet both processes were the
same. It was as if a higher intelligence
decided to tell Man how to refine aluminum. But He didn't tell just one man. He told at least two. Ready or not here it comes. I asked the question once: what is gravity?
And to my utter surprise, my question was answered.
He has told someone else too.
I feel it."
"What
does He want you to do with it?"
Brent asked.
"Well"
Jeff sighed, "He doesn't want me to give it over to the government. Not yet, but I should not hoard it either.
One short term plan. That is what I'm to do. That's what I'm going to do."
"What
is the plan?" Brent asked. Jeff quietly said,
"I'm sorry,
but not yet." He fell silent. Brent looked up to the sky and listened to
the wind rustle through the forest.
"So when
do we hit the power plant?"
"Tuesday
night, meet me here at seven, and get ready for an astonishing ride."
"Are we
going to fly there?" Brent
said, totally deadpan. "Yes." Then he added, "It’s coming. God help us, it’s nearly here."
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