The New Frontiers Series, Book One:

The Ship

 

 

 

 

 

Jack L Knapp

 

 

 

By the author:

The Wizards Series

Combat Wizard

Wizard at Work

Talent

Veil of Time

Siberian Wizard

Magic

Angel (a short story in the Wizards Series)

 

The Darwin’s World Series

Darwin’s World

The Trek

Home

The Return

Defending Eden

 

The New Frontiers Series

The Ship

NFI: New Frontiers, Inc

NEO: Near Earth Objects

BEMs: Bug Eyed Monsters

MARS: the Martian Autonomous Republic of Sol

Pirates

Terra

 

Fantasy Novel

The Wizard's Assistant

 

COPYRIGHT

 

Book One, The New Frontier Series: The Ship

Copyright © 2015 by Jack L Knapp

Copyright © Revised Edition II 2016

Electronic edition cover by Blair Howard

 

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your sole use, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s hard work.

Disclaimer: The persons and events depicted in this novel were created by the author’s imagination; no resemblance to actual persons or events is intended.

Product names, brands, and other trademarks referred to within this book are the property of the respective trademark holders. Unless otherwise specified, no association between the author and any trademark holder is expressed or implied. Nor does the use of such trademarks indicate an endorsement of the products, trademarks, or trademark holders unless so stated. Use of a term in this book should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark, registered trademark, or service mark.

 

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

NFI, an Excerpt: Chapter One

NFI Excerpt, Chapter Two

 

Prologue

“Good morning, Mr. Jindae.”

Panit Jindae glanced approvingly at his secretary. Always efficient, always cheerful, always well turned out, she was an asset to any company.

“And good morning to you, Mrs. Stendall. Any phone calls or faxes from our friend this morning?”

“He’s certainly no friend, Mr. Jindae! A right pain he is; I’ve tried to get rid of him, but he doesn’t want to take no for an answer. Maybe he finally got the message, no faxes, no phone calls this morning. So far.” Mrs. Stendall was English, and from time to time her speech reflected that.

“We can hope, Mrs. Stendall. Did the division reports arrive yet?”

“No, sir. I’ll check with communications right after I get your coffee. If they’ve arrived, I’ll bring them in. The Jamaican this morning?”

“Why don’t we try the Kenya AA for a change?” Panit sounded hopeful; the Kenyan coffee was his favorite.

“I’m sorry sir, the shipment hasn’t arrived yet. We have the Kona and a new shipment from Costa Rica, if you’d prefer that to the Jamaican.”

“The Costa Rican, then. Newspapers?”

“On your desk, sir. I’ll have the coffee ready shortly.”

Panit nodded and pushed through the door. Hanging up his hat and coat, he sat down at his desk to begin his day.

He scanned through the headlines, then went to the business section. He read several of the articles, concentrating, occasionally making notes on a legal pad. The notes would be filed with others about recent developments in the transportation industry.

Not all had to do with auto manufacturing. Panit knew that occasionally things that appeared unrelated would impact the company’s divisions. Attention to such details had brought him from engineering to sales, and from there to his current job.

Half an hour later, savoring his coffee while reading through the newspaper’s financial section, he became aware of an annoying buzz.

Ridiculous! Considering how much the company paid to lease his fourteenth-floor office, surely someone could keep the climate system functioning? Pressing the intercom, he asked Mrs. Stendall to notify maintenance, then tried to concentrate on the article. The comments regarding recent automotive design and its effect on marketing were unfortunate, but perhaps the upturn in the economy might revive sagging sales?

The buzzing was louder. Intolerable!

“Mrs. Stendall, did maintenance ever respond?”

“Sir, they say it’s not the air conditioner. It’s coming from outside.”

“We’re fourteen floors above the street! We shouldn’t be hearing this! Are they using jackhammers down there?” Fuming, Panit walked to the window. The lake view always calmed him, allowed him to concentrate on managing the different manufacturing sections. But the view this morning was different.

A clumsy-looking thing floated outside his window. He looked at it wide-eyed, and the graybearded fellow sitting in the device’s middle actually waved at him! The nerve...

“Mrs. Stendall!”

 

Chapter One

Chuck Sneyd had never understood just how precarious his existence was.

Not wealthy, not poor; compared with other residents of Lubbock, the family was unremarkably middle class. The furnished apartment was small, but not excessively so, and both parents lived at home. His mother Pam worked in an office; his father Silvester was a mechanic for a large ranch north of the city, where he took care of the farm machinery and helped out during haying season. And then, one Sunday afternoon during his senior year of high school, a drunk going the wrong way on Interstate 27 drove head-on into his mother’s Toyota. Silvester had been driving, Pam was in the passenger seat. The bodies had been identifiable, barely, from driver’s license photos.

His family had not been ‘loving’ in the traditional sense. Chuck was not close to either parent. Even so, losing them was a shock. It was the first of many.

The court-appointed probate attorney handled the details. There was insurance, enough to pay off their credit cards and almost enough to cover the loan on his father’s three-year-old Chevrolet 1500. The credit union had accepted the attorney’s settlement offer, rather than repossess the truck.

The apartment manager had pointed out that the rent had not yet been paid, so Chuck agreed to vacate as soon as he could dispose of the family’s few possessions. Their clothes he donated to charity, a few personal things he simply dumped. In the aftermath, Chuck faced an uncertain future. He was essentially without family; there was an aunt and uncle, supposedly. His father had mentioned the names, but no more than that. Chuck had no idea where they could be found, or even if they were still alive. His maternal grandparents had divorced. His grandmother had remarried, but had not kept in touch with Pam. His maternal grandfather had died soon after of pancreatic cancer.

He considered going to live with his paternal grandfather, but rejected the idea almost immediately. The old ranch where Chuck had spent his summers was a happy place no longer. His grandmother Mary Ellen had died late during the previous summer. Her death had shaken Chuck, but Grandfather Morty Sneyd had been devastated. His depression was such that he could barely talk to Chuck.

An uncertain future indeed; he would have to leave school and find a job. But then, just when things looked bleakest, a friend’s parents offered to take him in for the final three months of school. Chuck graduated with the rest of his class, but the experience taught him a lesson. He would pay his own way, or do without.

Chuck had expected to attend college. If not at a university, he could always live at home while he took vocational courses at the community college, but that was no longer possible. Maybe college was in his future, maybe not; in the meantime, he needed a job.

Chuck didn’t anticipate a problem finding work. This was West Texas, after all, and while work in the oil patch was hard, it paid well. But there was no work. Drill rigs were being idled, experienced hands laid off; no one was hiring. One of the periodic downturns in the oil business had, for all practical purposes, shut down the oil exploration business. Disappointed and depressed, Chuck walked along the sidewalk after the latest job interview, which had resulted in another refusal. By chance, he passed an Armed Forces Recruiting Station.

He looked at the men inside, all uniformed, all purposeful. Not for them the challenge of finding a job fresh out of high school! They had jobs, work that would keep them employed for years to come. Chuck walked inside, hesitant, but curious. Perhaps they had written material he could look at before he decided? The first man he saw when he went inside was a marine, a Staff Sergeant. He explained that yes, they did have handouts, but since his job was explaining what was in the pamphlets, why not have a doughnut and a cup of coffee?

And listen as he explained what the Marines were really all about.

***

Boot Camp had not been the challenge the recruiter promised.

True, a lot of boys who had grown up in cities had trouble adapting to the physical requirements and the strict discipline, but Chuck had been cleaning up after himself most of his young life. And he’d been hiking from the time he was old enough to follow Grandfather Morty around the old ranch. Morty explained things, which kept Chuck interested despite the effort of keeping up with him, and as he grew old enough to explore on his own, only one portion of the ranch was off limits. An enormous sinkhole existed near the western fence line, and the walls were steep. Morty forbade Chuck to approach it, although the two sometimes watched the bats fly at dusk.

“See those crystals, Son? Notice how they have straight sides and a parallelogram shape?”

“Grandpa, what’s a parallelogram?”

“You’ll learn in a year or two, son. Those are calcite crystals, and they make the sinkhole’s rim too slippery to approach unless you have something to hold on to. I thought about bringing a rope and going down inside to have a look, but never found the time.”

“Maybe I could use a rope too, Grandpa?”

“No, Chuck. It’s dangerous, and curiosity kills more than cats.”

Chuck had often carried a light pack on his later hikes, and occasionally a rifle as well. Morty loved to hunt, and he’d enjoyed introducing his grandson to the practice. The low, rolling hills held deer and antelope, more than might be expected considering how dry they were. The challenge of outwitting one of the big bucks was part of it, but the meat was also welcome because money was always tight. Chuck had quickly learned to shoot, including the advanced art of accurate snap shooting. Release the safety as he brought the pump-action Remington to his shoulder, find the front sight, align it with the rear notch, and gently squeeze the trigger. The recoil was light, easy for a teenager to handle, and the 6mm cartridge was lethal for the mid-sized game they hunted.

Marines were expected to carry much heavier packs, and for that matter the recruits would shoot the Marine Corps way. Even so, Chuck had no problem adapting. The dry, rolling hills along the Pacific were not that different from the hills near the Texas-New Mexico border. He graduated from boot camp with a PFC stripe on his arm, thanks to his shooting ability, then headed off to Camp Pendleton’s School of Infantry. Joining the Combat Training Battalion was his first clue that the Marines had something different in mind for him; but first, he had to get through an abbreviated version of Marine infantry training. Only then would he be sent to the school that the Corps, in its wisdom, had decided he was suited to attend.

The Marine Corps boasts that every marine is a rifleman, and by the time they finish the School of Infantry, they are. The training for those who would be professional infantrymen was more intense, but at the conclusion of the course, whether cooks or bakers or communicators, they could be grabbed if needed and sent to fill in gaps as infantry marines. It was expected that they would function almost as well as professional infantrymen, should their services as riflemen be needed.

After graduation, Marine PFC Charles Sneyd reported to the Communication-Electronics School at Twenty-Nine Palms Marine Corps Base to undergo training as a radioman.

Even in the Marines, there are often unintended consequences. Chuck was exposed to computer programming as a part of his training, and took to it like the proverbial duck to water. He acquired a laptop computer from a fellow marine who intended to trash it.

The battery would no longer hold a charge and anyway, he intended to upgrade as soon as he had the money. Video games require lots of memory and fast processors. Chuck had spent considerable time in Grandfather Morty’s workshop during the summers on the ranch, so replacing the laptop’s battery was simple. No question, the machine was slow, compared to current models, but maybe something could be done about that? The Exchange had books, so did the camp library. And parts could be ordered online, couldn’t they?

 

Chapter Two

Morton Sneyd, by most accounts, was a failure. His neighbors and acquaintances often wondered why his wife remained with him. It had not always been that way.

Thanks to a ROTC scholarship and part-time work assigned by the university, Morty graduated from Texas A&M University with an MS in Mechanical Engineering. The part-time work helped Morty support himself while in school. He had enough math credits for a minor, and briefly considered majoring in that subject; but employment opportunities for mathematicians were limited, while mechanical engineers could pick and choose from a list of several companies they wanted to work for. But that would have to wait; ROTC had paid for his tuition and books, now the Army expected him to live up to his part of the bargain.

If Morty refused the commission, he understood that he’d almost certainly be drafted and he would also have to repay the government for what they’d paid out while he attended Texas A&M. Not to mention that being an officer was better than being a private. So it was that he’d gone along with his adviser’s suggestion and accepted a reserve commission in the US Army, branch Artillery, with concurrent call to active duty.

The Korean ‘police action’ was finished for all practical purposes. There was no peace, only an armistice, but the North Koreans had lost most of their military assets. Their Chinese and Soviet allies were not enthusiastic about investing more in the failed effort. For the time being, there was no enemy to fight and the Army had more officers than it needed. It was also once again short of funds, a chronic condition between wars. In practical terms, transfers were rare and it didn’t make sense to ship junior officers oversees with no immediate need for their services. Morty soon found himself at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, taking the prescribed entry course for artillery officers. From there, he’d gone to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, for duty with the Field Artillery Training Center. It was ‘duty with troops’, a goal for newly-commissioned officers. Sort of.

Lieutenant Sneyd was soon involved in the minutiae of recruit basic training. Occasionally he would conduct an inspection, always while accompanied by one of the NCOs responsible for actually training the men, and occasionally he would be called on to resolve problems associated with turning civilians into soldiers. Most of his day was occupied with paperwork. A loner with few friends, he spent the majority of his off-duty hours studying physics. In this way he became interested in the work of Newton, Einstein, and a relative unknown named Nikola Tesla. Newton and Einstein were theoreticians and mathematicians for the most part, while Tesla had built high-frequency devices and actual working models. In a sense, his work on alternating currents, transformers, and generators laid the framework for modern society. Not all of his work had succeeded, in part because Tesla was chronically short of money to develop his ideas.

Four years later, Morty finished his obligatory tour of active duty. Some are not suited for military service. He was glad to see the last of the Army, and likely the officers who knew him felt much the same about Morty. As a side effect, the tour of duty with the Training Center had forever changed his thinking, leaving Morty with an abiding distrust, even resentment, of authority.

He tried to restart his interrupted career after leaving the Army. He sent out résumés and soon had job offers. He worked for a year at Ford, designing parts for brake systems, but did not find the work challenging or interesting. Junior engineers produced technical drawings, while senior engineers decided which of several options would find their way into the final design. Morty’s engineering skills had also grown rusty while he was in the Army, which didn’t endear him to his supervisors. At the end of a year, he quit Ford.

A pattern was set: Morty drifted from job to job, doing competent work, but never really excelling. Between jobs, he began offering his services as a consultant. Morty had found his niche. Consulting was different; no two jobs were alike. He accepted the jobs he found interesting and the companies he worked for had no grounds for complaint. The contract work supported him and the new wife he married shortly after leaving his last full-time job. Morty’s consulting paid well, but there were often months between contracts. Like Tesla, Morty was often short of funds.

Fortunately, Mary Ellen’s job as a clerical assistant in an accounting department brought in a regular paycheck. They realized that Morty would never be a wealthy man, never become a pillar of the community, but he was a good father to their children and a devoted husband to Mary Ellen.

One of his consulting jobs had paid well enough to indulge Mary Ellen in a lifelong interest in riding. Morty bought a small West Texas ranch, rundown at the time, but with grazing and water enough for the horses she loved. Between jobs, Morty helped Mary Ellen care for her small herd of horses and worked on upgrading the ranch, and always, he tinkered. Occasionally he patented a device, which added to their income. The small family was happy during the 1960s as the children, two boys and a girl, grew up. But eventually they left home and moved away, never quite happy in the small west Texas town where Morty and Mary Ellen had settled.

In time there had been a grandson, Charles, called Chuck by most. His parents were, charitably, not good with children. The relationship was more dutiful than loving. So it was that Chuck spent his summers from the age of six at the ranch with his grandparents. Morty spent time with him, teaching him about nature and showing him about the ranch and the town, while Mary Ellen taught him to ride. The pattern was soon established; he lived with his parents while school was in session, then left for the ranch as soon as school ended. His parents never seemed to mind, and Morty and Mary Ellen loved having him.

Chuck finished his junior year and headed for the ranch, not understanding that his grandparents, usually so content, faced a crisis. Mary Ellen had just been diagnosed with brain cancer. She’d gone to the optometrist to complain that her new glasses weren’t working well. The optometrist, puzzled by the failure, had examined her eyes again and spotted something. He referred her to a specialist, who had given them the bad news.

The neurosurgeon had been straightforward with them. “There’s not a whole lot we can do. The tumor is deep inside the brain, where we can’t get at it. None of the drugs we use for chemotherapy can cross the blood-brain barrier, so they can’t get at the tumor either. I’m sorry.”

“Doctor, how long?” Morty asked, voice hoarse with strain.

“I’m sorry. The best I can do is give you a guess. Not long.”

“How long, doctor?” Morty pressed.

“Perhaps six months. One day, there will be other therapies, but for now? There’s really nothing we can do except provide palliative care. I’m sorry.”

“What about one of the cancer centers? Maybe there’s some sort of experimental procedure?”

“Morty, you don’t have insurance,” the doctor said gently. “M.D. Anderson is probably the best cancer hospital in Texas, but it’s my understanding that they don’t even accept Medicare. So far as I know, they’re not working on this type of cancer anyway.”

“Thank you for being honest, doctor.”

Morty took Mary Ellen home and cared for her as best he could. Chuck arrived soon after, but was largely left to his own devices.

A month later the cancer took Mary Ellen’s sight, and three months later it took her life.

Morty, crushed, immersed himself in his work, seeking the only solace he’d ever known. Neither he nor Chuck knew how to deal with the tragedy. As soon as he could arrange it, Chuck left the ranch, heading back to school. Morty barely noticed.

Chuck tried to understand; perhaps Grandmother Mary Ellen had provided the framework for their relationship. But whatever the cause, things had changed between the two of them.

***

It was during this period, when his grief was still raw, that Morty started reading the old notebooks Mary Ellen had given him. And discovered the notebooks, journals really, had been written by Nikola Tesla.

The notes fascinated Morty, and immersed in the old notebooks, he slowly recovered from losing his beloved wife. While reading, he discovered a passing reference to an unusual result Tesla had documented, but never pursued. Morty thought about it, then realized it might lead to something at least as revolutionary as Tesla’s other discoveries. But Mary Ellen was gone now, Chuck was back in school and would be looking for a job after he graduated.

There was no one to share his thoughts with, and no distractions.

Morty spent long days working, trying different approaches to the puzzle. His first efforts didn’t produce much in the way of results, but from time to time there was promise. When he needed money for a new precision tool or measuring device, he accepted one of several offers to consult, usually away from the ranch and west Texas. In the evenings he thought, and like Tesla before him, filled notebooks with drawings and notes in the margins. As soon as the jobs were finished, he rushed back to the ranch, anxious to try out the new ideas he’d come up with.

Frequently, in the evening when he was too tired to work but not yet exhausted enough to sleep, Morty would walk up the hill behind his house and visit Mary Ellen’s grave. From there, he could look out across the ranch she’d loved and explain his thoughts. A lonely, obsessed old man, visiting his wife’s grave of an evening? Some might have thought it strange, or a little pathetic.

Morty didn’t. It gave his life balance.

 

 

Chapter Three

Chuck limped down the stairs and headed for the parking lot. Graduation exercises were scheduled to take place in two weeks and he had not decided whether he’d attend or not. For the moment, he was thinking ‘not’.

He had no doubt that he’d find a job in a short time. His MS in Business Administration, coupled with a BS in Computer Science, meant that instead of taking the first offer he could, he could wait for a better one. Then, finally, he could put poverty behind him. The hitch he’d done in the Marines might also confer other advantages; Chuck was not only older, he’d held responsible positions and made decisions that held real meaning, characteristics that a future employer would value.

He had found few friends at UTEP. Compared with the marines he’d known, Chuck’s fellow students had no real concept of life outside of school. Video games, drinking, chasing the opposite sex? Was he supposed to hang out with them because they were fellow students? The idea was meaningless, even repugnant, after Fallujah. He’d been close to the men he served with, closer than brothers. Some were gone now, and the losses still burned.

Chuck had found the idea repugnant. The men were shallow, in reality no more than overaged boys. His fellow vets understood Chuck, but like him, they preferred their own company, their own private demons. He’d dated occasionally, but it made him uncomfortable. He had few conversational skills and as for dancing, that was out too. So he had reverted to his old habit, pre-service, of avoiding the company of others. The cause, lack of interest more than a conscious act of rejection. Occasionally, he wondered; was he suffering from some mild form of PTSD? He had no way of telling and no interest in contacting an ‘expert’ who might find the condition, whether or not it really existed.

No one would be there to watch him cross the stage, not even his grandfather. Chuck had no other close relatives, only an uncle he hadn’t seen in years and an aunt he preferred not to see. As for grandfather Morty, he was busy with his latest scheme. He had no time to watch an empty ceremony, but he had invited Chuck to come to the ranch after graduation. Well, why not? They’d been close once, before Grandmother Mary Ellen’s death. Morty had seemed cold at the time, but in hindsight Chuck realized he’d not yet come to terms with his wife’s loss.

He didn’t have a job yet, but the job hunt could wait; the small pension from his disability rating was enough for his few needs, and thanks to his part-time computer work for fellow students and faculty, he had an adequate cash reserve.

Should he go? Chuck had always enjoyed the old ranch; he had but two regrets, the death of his grandmother, and never exploring the cavern where the bats lived. But Morty had been adamant at the time, so Chuck had obeyed him. Even so, the cavern had fascinated him. He’d often ridden his favorite quarter horse to the hilltop overlooking the entrance and waited for the bats to fly. The mysterious feature and its population of bats, had wakened Chuck’s curiosity and given him a lifetime interest in science, even though he’d chosen other fields to work in. Science majors, after all, didn’t command the starting salaries offered to MBAs.

Did Morty really need him, or was this just another attempt to bring Chuck into one of his many schemes? Granted, some of them had paid off, but always in the past Morty had lost interest and sold his patent to someone who would market it.

Well.

They had been close, Chuck and his grandfather, so maybe the thing to do was spend time with Morty. That closeness, his only real human relationship, might still be there.

And who could say? Maybe this time he would finally explore that mysterious cavern!

***

Morty hung up the phone and smiled. He hadn’t told Chuck exactly what he was doing, but he had mentioned that the new device was working and promised to be a financial success. If, that is, they could work out the bugs. Chuck hadn’t commented, but Morty knew he’d gotten the message. Maybe Morty’s comment had been enough to convince him to visit the ranch.

“Working” was an exaggeration. Morty had gotten results, but they were not consistent, and the device, charitably, was not reliable. In fact, it was prone to self-destruct under stress, which had so far prevented even a full-power trial. He glared at the collection of motors, generators, and machines. How to balance the mess, how to ensure that this one wouldn’t do what the last one did, fly apart under the gee forces? He’d avoided injury, but controlling the collection was a headache.

How had Tesla intended to do it? Had he even gotten to that point, or had he been satisfied to make notes and move on to something else? From his writings, Tesla had decided instead to work on his broadcast power system. He might have intended to investigate the impeller later; there was no way to tell. As for Tesla, he had been more than an inventor. He’d also been a gifted machinist, at least for his time.

Modern lathes and milling machines were computer controlled now, although Morty supposed you could still buy the kinds that Tesla had used, machines controlled only by the skilled hands of a human. But Morty’s hands were not that skilled, he’d known that from the beginning, so he’d bought computer-controlled machines. Now all he had to do was learn how to tell them what to do! For the moment he was stymied. Hopefully, Chuck could help when he finally got here.

So much promise from the new device...but only if he could solve the engineering problems.

***

The first impeller had been more than promising, showing that he was on the right track. Powering up the machine produced an impressive amount of thrust, but it came at the cost of vibration that soon shook the device to pieces. Morty’s first solution had been to reduce power, thereby slowing the machine’s revolutions. That reduced the shaking, but at the cost of most of the thrust. Which brought him back to the machines in his workshop. Clearly, he would need more precise machining if the device was to be usable.

There was also the problem of the coils to consider. They were added to the rotors after manufacture, complicating the problem. They would have to be balanced precisely, as well as mounted in such a fashion that they would interact with the stationary primary coil. Tesla believed the resulting electromagnetic field was important.

The device also generated considerable torque, so Morty had come up with a simple solution; he gang-mounted an impeller with another that produced opposite torque. The two impellers produced double the thrust of a single-impeller model, but unfortunately, they also produced twice as much vibration. None of the paired impeller units had lasted more than five minutes before something failed. Either a circuit shorted, or more commonly a mechanical part had broken. It was discouraging; it seemed like every time Morty solved one problem, two more cropped up!

Had Tesla experienced similar problems? Had he foreseen what would happen, causing him to put this device aside while he worked on his broadcast-power system? According to the notebook, Tesla had discovered the underlying principle, but the idea was never mentioned again. Possibly he had abandoned the effort as unsolvable. There simply were no materials available back then that combined light weight with the strength he needed.

But a century of progress had produced things Tesla could only have dreamed of; cheap, plentiful aluminum for one, high tensile strength corrosion resistant steels for another. Even titanium was available nowadays. And then there were the carbon nanotubes and carbon-fiber sheets, just becoming available, things never envisioned during Tesla’s lifetime. There were also plastics that rivaled steel in strength but at less than half the weight. Who could say what Tesla’s inventive genius might have produced if he’d had access to modern materials?

Morty had access to those things, and more. He’d come up first with a working Tesla turbine, then a Tesla transformer that generated impressive lightning bolts as well as ultra-high voltages and short-wavelength AC frequencies. At that point, he’d decided to build one of Tesla’s impellers. The effort had helped Morty get through his grief after Mary Ellen’s death, then had become an obsession. But failure followed failure, each redesigned device solving one problem even as it revealed another. Maybe, with Chuck’s help, that would change. After all, modern fighter aircraft were so unstable as to be essentially unflyable without computer controls. Maybe such control systems would solve Morty’s problems?

Morty cranked the old pickup truck and headed for the town of Andrews. There was a tire company there that used machines to balance tires, so maybe someone could tell him how the machine worked. Maybe he could get his hands on a used machine, cheap, and rebuild it? Maybe convert it to do what he needed? That, after all, was one of his skills.

***

Chuck packed his bags and tossed them into the pickup, swept and mopped the apartment’s floor, and made a quick pass through the bathroom before calling the landlord to inspect the property. Chuck would not be there for graduation, and he would not be returning in the fall.

The truck’s tank was full, and a check of the oil and radiator levels showed nothing that needed correcting. An hour later Chuck was on the road, a bag of sandwiches on the seat beside him and a case of bottled water on the passenger-side floorboard, headed east on US 180 toward Carlsbad, New Mexico. He refueled in Carlsbad, then continued east, soon crossing back into Texas. Andrews was straight ahead, although he wouldn’t be going that far.

He soon turned north, following a farm-to-market road that passed Morty’s ranch.

 

Chapter Four

The device did not impress Chuck.

“Grandpa, that’s the thing you’re so excited about? Rube Goldberg would love it!”

“You’re old enough to call me Morty, Grandson, and yes, that’s it. It doesn’t look like much, does it?”

“Nope. Chuck looked at the odd collection of machined parts and pulleys. “Where did you get all that stuff?”

“I salvaged some of the parts from machines that I don’t need now, the rest I made; eventually, I’ll be making all new parts from scratch. I admit it looks crude, but looks ain’t everything and the proof is what happens when I fire it up. Give me a second, and you should probably stand clear. You should be safe if you’re behind me.”

Chuck nodded and moved back as Morty flipped switches on a control panel. Had Morty shrunk, or had he grown? It was much easier to look down at the old man and notice the wispiness of the white hair. Yet despite his age, Morty was active, moving around with an agility that would have been remarkable in someone much younger.

Chuck realized he was himself hampered as much as Morty, in part because of his crippled knee. But he also understood that part of his mobility issue had to do with the hours he’d spent sitting behind a keyboard. Maybe, now that he was no longer spending so much time working at the computer, he could work on his own physical ability? Even regain some of what he’d lost? But now it was time to pay attention. Morty was describing each action, each flip of a switch.

“The important thing is not to bring everything online at once; the machine draws so much current starting up that it will trip the circuit breakers, and then you’ve got to start again from the beginning. This switch powers up the front rotors,” Morty pointed to the left side of the panel, “and you have to let them get up to operating speed before you go any further. You also want to watch for vibration, and as soon as you spot the first sign of it flip the master switch off and let the main rotors run completely down to a stop before you restart.

“The second switch brings up the rear rotors, and they have to be counter-rotating at the same RPM before I do anything else.” He pointed to flickering spots of white on the rotors that soon stabilized, appearing to be stationary. That’s what the painted dots are for, to let me synchronize speeds. If I turn on the main motor before that happens, things fly apart,” He nodded at the wall. “You can see what happened when those earlier models failed.”

Chuck glanced around. The damage wasn’t obvious, but now that Morty had mentioned it he could see dents in the pegboard lining the shop’s walls. Lots of dents, some of them deep enough to crack the pegboard! “You’re lucky you didn’t get hurt, Morty!”

“I was careful, and I knew as soon as I applied full power that I was getting into new territory. I shut it down the first couple of times without ever giving it a full-power trial, I was that nervous! There’s a bunch of stored energy in those rotors alone, not to mention in the electromagnetic fields they generate; it’s not obvious, but each one is part of a Tesla turbine. The rotors have coils near the edge that spin through electrical couplers, generating extreme voltages and strong fields. The fields are the important part, but keeping them in place long enough, not to mention variable enough that I can control the output…” Morty’s voice trailed off as he concentrated for a moment, then resumed. “I’ve improved the rotors since then. I needed an adjustable dynamic balancer, and that’s what those three slots I machined in the outer ring are for. They’ve got adjustable weights on a threaded shaft, you just turn the knurled knob to change the balance. It’s precise, even if it is slow and fiddly. Anyway, it works. So far.”

“Those coils on the edge of the wheels; you called them rotors?”

“Right, the large wheels are the rotors, and they have a kind of flywheel effect. As soon as the rotors spin up to full speed, they’re essentially gyros as well as flywheels. Otherwise, the coils will cause enough drag to stop them from spinning when they start picking up the charge from the primary. The drag happens as the coils pass through the base coil’s field. The base coil is that thick copper spiral underneath; I epoxied it to the base and so far, it’s working. It carries a lot of current all by itself, and if it fails there can be a strong magnetic surge. It’s a problem, but it only lasts a half-second or so. As for the coils, I copied the design from Tesla’s notebook; they’re a variation on his high-frequency coil, the one Marconi used without permission in his first radios, and he claimed they were essential.

“As the rotor spins, the secondary coils charge from the primary in the base of the machine, which, according to Tesla, creates a revolving electromagnetic field. Again, according to Tesla, rotating the coils around a central axis—that’s what this main shaft is for—then rotates the entire field, causing it to interact with the fabric of space. I’m not sure I understand it, but I can’t dismiss it either. Tesla was a genius; you know about his broadcast power machine, right?”

“I read about it,” Chuck acknowledged. “He never got it working, right?”

“He ran out of money, so we’ll never know if it would have worked or not. His investors balked at how much it was costing. His original concept was really expensive, but he scaled it down by half and even then, the one in New York only had one trial. He built a different tower in Colorado, smaller than the one in New York, but even so it worked well enough that Tesla thought his theory was confirmed.

“Anyway, he built the larger tower on Long Island. One difference, he dug a deep basement beneath the tower and put in metal grounding rods. His tower was essentially a huge Tesla Coil that was intended to turn the ionosphere and the Earth itself into electrical poles. A user could hook up an antenna and a ground and that was all he needed to tap into the field. Crystal radio sets work like that, no battery or power cable needed.”

“Really? So what happened?”

“Earthquakes was the biggest issue, because residents complained. Plates fell off shelves, things like that. There were also lightning bolts as the coil’s secondary built up to full charge and people were scared that they would set their houses on fire. Tesla was the only one that was really disappointed when the investors pulled the plug. Anyway, he was onto something, and when he wrote that the impeller could interact with space I believed him. I started thinking about it, and I also had Einstein’s ideas about gravity distorting space-time to work with. Tesla likely never heard of the theories of relativity.”

“So how do the coils charge?” Chuck asked, his confusion obvious. “You said they’re part of a transformer?”

“Right, the primary coil is built into the base that the machine is mounted on and the rotating coils are the secondaries. The coils spin up with the rotors at first, not really doing anything, but when I power up the main motor, the central axle revolves and the spinning rotors pass the coils through the primary field.” Morty pointed to a heavy steel shaft running the length of each impeller. A pulley connected a powerful electric motor to the shaft by means of a thick rubber belt. “That’s a five-horsepower three-phase motor I salvaged from an industrial lathe. The two pulleys I installed are different sizes, stepping down the speed of revolution; as soon as I try to get the main shaft up to the same speed as the motor, that’s when it starts flying apart because the gee forces are just too strong. Stepping down the speed reduces the force, but it keeps it from breaking.”

“So what should I be looking at, Morty? You’ve got small motors driving rotors with secondary coils, and a big motor that’s going to revolve this whole mess. What’s with the rails the frame is mounted on? They look like railroad tracks.”

“The frame everything is mounted on has hooked flanges that hold it to the rails. They keep the frame from turning, in the same way that the hooks on a roller coaster holds it on the track. There’s a lot of counter-torque when I turn on the main motor. I mounted two of the smaller units on another frame so tht the torque canceled, but that one broke. This is the only one that’s working now.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Chuck said nervously. “So I stand behind you, you bring up the power, and what’s supposed to happen?”

“See that dial behind the frame? That’s a strain gauge. You watch the gauge, I’ll watch the machine, and with luck I can shut it down before it flies apart. Just watch the gauge, and you’ll see what I saw.” Morty watched the spinning rotors, judging when they were at the same speed. The white blur stabilized, becoming stationary dots. Satisfied, Morty flipped the final control, three switches ganged together to apply power to the big motor.

The high-pitched whine from the rotors changed and a new sound was added to the mix, a kind of rattling whirr over an underlying thrum. Chuck glanced at the strain gauge. The needle quivered, already halfway up the dial. Slowly it moved higher and the machine’s frame crept forward on the rails. Chuck realized that if not for the strain gauge attaching the machine to a large floor-mounted steel girder, it would have flown across the shop.

A sudden loud pop announced a tripped circuit breaker. The whining died away and the main motor slowed to a stop. Moments later, only the still-spinning rotors showed that anything unusual had happened.

“I’m ready for a cup of coffee, Chuck. Come on into the kitchen and we can talk about what you’ve just seen.”

***

“I agree, you can’t just dismiss the man,” Chuck commented, “but I never heard about this being in any of Tesla’s papers!”

“He did a lot more than what was in the papers, the ones about alternating currents, Chuck. His electric motors and generators are the basis for our electrical power system. Edison claimed that direct current was better, but transformers don’t work with DC which meant that Edison’s power system was good for a mile at most. Without Tesla’s coil there would have been no radio, and later on, he built a radio-controlled model boat. There’s no telling what he’d have accomplished if he’d had the financing he needed, but he never really had a sense of how to hang onto the money he earned. He made money, no question about that, but Westinghouse and some others got most of the profits. As for Tesla, he spent every dime just about as soon as he got it, or gave it away. The next time he needed something financed, he had to go to friends or to businessmen and most of the businesspeople cheated him. There’s no other word for it, he got a pittance and people like Westinghouse made millions.”

“You didn’t say where you got the papers.”

“They’re not exactly papers, not like his patent drawings, it was actually a series of journals that contained rough notes about his daily work. They were in an old trunk your grandmother bought at a rummage sale. She got interested in antiques, and one day she came home with that thing. She paid $5 for the trunk, mostly because it was heavy and she was curious. It was locked, no key, so no one really knew what was inside when it was put up for sale.

“Except for Tesla’s journals and a letter in his handwriting,” Morty continued, “everything else was junk. He owed money to a man in Colorado Springs, and he gave him the journals to pay off the debt; that’s what the letter was about. He’d done that before, according to what I read, and later on he made a habit of running up bills and giving people some of his devices to settle the debt. Some worked, some didn’t and I expect Tesla knew it. Might be that Tesla’s morality got flexible after J. P. Morgan stopped loaning him money!”

“Interesting. So grandma bought this, and you finally found something that’s kept your interest?”

“Yes. At first, I started reading them because Mary Ellen gave them to me, to show I was interested in her gift. Tesla’s not the easiest guy to read, I’ll tell you that much! But I just kept going after she died. I really miss her, Chuck. I just wish I could have told her how I felt while she was alive.

“But I’ve never been able to show emotion and now that it’s too late, I really regret that. Something for you to remember, grandson. When you find your own life mate, don’t be afraid to let her know how you feel.”

“I won’t, Grandpa. But I think grandma knew how you felt. She had to, considering how long you were together. You bought her the horses and the ranch, so I think she knew.”

“I hope so, Son. But I should have told her.” Morty’s expression, so alert while he was describing what he’d found in the trunk, was sad.

Chuck changed the subject. “So what does your machine do, Morty? I can’t deny that demonstration was interesting, but what would you do with it if you got the vibration and control problems solved?”

“Tesla said that it provide impulse, so I call it an impeller. This one’s still pretty crude, but even so it’s an improvement over my first few efforts. You apply electricity, you get motion; it’s just that simple. You don’t need propellers or jets or rockets and you don’t need to couple it to wheels. I’m using AC to drive the motors, because that’s what Tesla worked with, but DC might work better. Easier to control, I think. You could reverse the polarity of the DC electricity and cause the impeller to push backwards.”

“Where did you get the coils on the rotors?” Chuck asked. “Those aren’t off the shelf components, something you can just buy anywhere.”

“No, I made them myself, by hand at first but now I’ve got a small lathe I use just for winding coils. I bought it used from a shop that does custom motor rewinding and I had to do some repairs to get it working, but I managed. I’ve had to do a lot of that, rebuilding, because I didn’t have the money for new machines. The lathe was old and the bed was out of true, but after I rebuilt it it worked fine. That was the last machine I needed too, so now my shop is complete, for the time being anyway. My major expense these days is buying copper wire.

“I can begin building all the impeller parts from scratch when I’m ready for the final version, and the next version will use motors that I’ll build myself. The rotors will have the moving coils built into the hub, and the stator coils will be part of the fixed shaft. I’ll use thicker steel rods for the main shaft too; heavier parts seem to make everything more stable, maybe because of the flywheel effect.

“Anyway, I can do all that, so what I was hoping was that you could come up with electronic control systems to automatically do what I’m doing by hand.”

“I can do that, I think,” Chuck said thoughtfully. “The hard part is designing and installing the measuring instruments. You need sensors and measuring devices, or the control units can’t work. They also have to be located in the right place if you expect good results. Another thing, instead of DC motors why not use frequency-controlled AC? I’ll need to measure the RPM of each rotor, but that’s just standard stuff and it’s easy to do. I’ll set up feedback loops, based on the rotor speed, and run them through a small processor chip. I’ll mount on the frame, probably near where the pillow blocks are. Anyway, the processors will balance the rotor speeds automatically so you won’t have to worry about those.

“I’ll use a central computer to control what the main motor does; a joystick input will make it easy to vary the power input, and that’s your speed control. If I add a switch on the joystick panel, I should be able to reverse the input so you can go forward or put it in reverse, although you’ll have to wait for the speed to drop before you swap directions. I’ll make that part of the programming package too. I can also install instruments to detect vibration and automatically vary rotor speed to damp it out before it causes a problem.

“It’ll take some thought, but I doubt I’ll have any real problems. I should be able to have a working system by the time you finish your next version of the impeller. How many did you plan on using on whatever you want to build?”

“I hadn’t gone that far,” Morty admitted. “I figured to build a cart with maybe two, one on each side. That way, one could run counterclockwise and the other clockwise. That would get rid of the torque problem if the cart was stiff enough not to flex in the middle.”

“Suppose you had four impellers, one at each corner, pointing up?” Chuck suggested. “Would that be enough impulse to lift it off the ground?”

“I don’t see why not, but it would depend on the weight and how much onboard power you had available. We’d have to be careful that all four impellers put out the same impulse, so control might be a problem.”

“That’s what computers are for, Morty. Why don’t we try it?”

“Why would we want to do that, Chuck?”

“Morty, you’ve been thinking that this impeller might power cars or trucks, right?”

“Well, no. It seems to me that it might work all right for long-haul heavy trucks, but it’s not really responsive enough to operate in traffic. Diesel and gasoline automotive systems work fine already, and for that matter there are several hybrid or all-electric vehicles already operating, so using an impeller for power wouldn’t be an advantage. What I had in mind was an impeller, maybe two, to power a ship. For a cargo ship, mount the impellers inside and totally seal the hull with no openings below the waterline.

“Another idea, an impeller-powered hydrofoil ship; angle the impellers upward at twenty degrees or so and the lift would help the boat get up on the hydrofoils at slower speeds, meaning it could be maneuvered easier. Hydrofoils can’t turn as tight as regular ships, but if the impeller system could keep the hull from leaning too far you could make tight turns even at full speed.

“Anyway, that was my first idea. I thought about railroads too; they’re already diesel-electric; the diesel drives a generator, and that powers a huge electric traction motor. It would be easy enough to adapt the electric output to drive an impeller, maybe several, so you wouldn’t spin the wheels while the locomotive was getting the train up to speed.

“It might be possible to do away with the locomotive entirely; what if each railcar had its own impeller, maybe two? The engineer—driver, maybe—wouldn’t deal with that diesel-electric system, he’d just control the power going to the impellers in each car. Edison built a system like that early on, powering each car separately, but it never caught on. Using impellers to counter the lean in a turn would also mean that accidents, where someone was going too fast to stay on the tracks, couldn’t happen.”

“That’s not bad,” Chuck agreed. “Is this as far as you’ve gone?”

“Well, yes. But first, I needed to get it working and I don’t know much about computers. I was hoping you could help.”

“I can, but I can do a lot more than that,” said Chuck. “You’ve got the basic idea, but we might want to think bigger. How about airplanes? Wouldn’t your impeller work on those?”

“Well, sure; I don’t see why not. You’d need a source of electricity, and batteries wouldn’t work, they don’t have enough power for the weight. Generators, such as that diesel-electric system I mentioned, are too heavy to use in an airplane, but maybe we could use fuel cells.”

“I doubt that electricity would be a problem,” Chuck offered. “We’ll have to think about it, but right offhand I can’t see any reason we couldn’t adapt a turboprop engine by using the gearing to drive a generator instead of a propeller. We need to talk about the science behind this too. You say Tesla understood it?”

“I don’t know,” Morty said. “But I now understand a lot more about it than he did, I think. He gave up and started working on that broadcast power system instead.”

“Really? You understand what Einstein meant when he came up with general and special relativity?”

“Well, yes and no,” Morty said. “I understand some of it, but to be honest I think Einstein was wrong in a couple of ways. Anyway, we can talk about that tomorrow; I’m sure you’re tired, and I’ve made up the bed in your old room. I’ve got some repairs to do before I can run that system again, so I’ll work on the impeller while you get some rest.”

 

Chapter Five

Morty found Chuck at the dining table, eating a breakfast of raisin bran. “Sleep OK, Chuck?”

“I dropped off about 8:30 and didn’t wake up until 7:30 this morning. I put on coffee if you want some.”

“No, it would just keep me up. I’m going to have breakfast and then sleep for a while.”

“You didn’t sleep last night?” Chuck asked.

“No, I stayed up and worked. I often work through the night. I sleep when I’m tired.”

“This ends now, Morty! You get some sleep, and when you wake up we’ll start getting you on a regular sleep schedule.”

“It won’t work, Chuck," Morty protested. "I lay there and toss and turn, and finally I just get up. I figure I might as well work if I have trouble falling asleep.”

“Not good enough, Morty! I just found you again, and I don’t want to lose you! Do you realize that we’re each other’s only close relative now, except for my aunt? And you never talk about her.”

“I don’t think I ever thought of it like that, and there’s a reason I don’t talk about your aunt! I just don’t want to get into it. Nothing anyone can do anyway.”

An estranged relative? Chuck decided to let the issue drop. “You get some sleep. I’m going to look around the property, and when you wake up we’ll have dinner and you can tell me how the impeller works. Or, at least, how you think it works.”

Morty nodded and fixed himself a bowl of cereal. Chuck drank another cup of coffee and watched his grandfather. Morty finished his cereal and went to bed. As soon as the old man started snoring, Chuck eased out of the house and headed for the workshop. He had a lot of thinking and planning to do, instruments he’d need, processors for each rotor axle to control RPM, a control system run by a computer, some sort of input device to tell the computer what to do. As soon as he got that working, he could decide what other software he’d need; the more he thought about it, getting the system under control was going to take a considerable amount of time and it was going to cost money.

Where was it to come from?

***

Chuck was at the dining table, working at his laptop, when Morty woke up. A loose-leaf notebook lay on the table by the computer and a mechanical pencil lay on the notebook.

“Afternoon, Chuck. I reckon I needed the sleep; any coffee left?”

“No, but I’ll make a new pot. I could use another cup too. I’ve been running some estimates of what we’ll need to automate the impellers. I’m thinking of using a simple processor with just enough ram to run a control program for the rotors. I think I can use a Raspberry Pi processor and mount the RPM sensors onto the same plywood base where you’re putting the transformer primary. I can probably use my laptop to control the main motor for now, the one that spins the primary axle, at least for this first test bed. I’ll also need to come up with an input system for steering, as well as figuring out a way to control the output power. Some sort of throttle, I'm thinking, but if we can dial the thrust up or down that’ll let us steer by using the impellers the same way boat captains do with twin propellers. We can start out with a steering wheel for surface craft, but later on we’ll have to come up with something better. I’m going to be writing a lot of code over the next few days, but I’ll take time to have meals with you, so plan on it. No more eating on the fly and sleeping when you fall down!”

“OK, Grandson. Reckon it won’t be so bad, long as I’ve got somebody to talk to.”

Chuck busied himself at the coffeepot and poured Morty a strong cup as soon as enough water had run through the grounds. “You were going to tell me how the impellers work.”

“Chuck, the important thing is that they do work, the strain gauge shows that. As soon as we get one we can run at full speed, we can calculate how efficient it is, and from that I can probably come up with a theory of how it works. I can do the efficiency calculation by comparing the current draw with the thrust output. That’s a starting point.

"As soon as we’ve got two usable impellers, we can have some fun. I’ve got a stack of 3/4 inch plywood sheets we can use to mount things on and I was thinking of a 'boondock buggy'. Bicycle wheels for the running gear, two in the back that just roll, plus a pair in the front that are steerable. How long has it been since you went chasing jackrabbits?”

“You’re serious?” Chuck asked.

“Sure, why not? Lots of room out back, plenty of jackrabbits too. Plus it will give us a way to test the system before anybody else sees it. Gotta have a working prototype if we’re going to make people pay attention!”

“You said you intend to make all the components yourself this time?”

“Well, most of them," Morty confessed. "No need to make that main drive motor, it’s cheaper to just buy one.”

“How much money do you have, Morty?”

“Not all that much. Maybe seven or eight thousand dollars in the bank is all, but I finished a couple of consulting jobs that I haven’t been paid for. I figure they’ll pay me when they get around to it.”

“I’ll need to look into that, then," Chuck said decisively. "Tell you what, machining the rotors and their dynamic balance adjustments, plus winding the coils, that’s your job. We’ll need four sets of those, and if you’re going to make the coils for the motors to spin the rotors, wind those too. What I want is two complete impellers that are as nearly matched physically and electrically as possible. When you start shopping, buy matching main power motors too, and they should be single-phase. We’ll be using batteries at first, and a two-phase inverter is likely to be larger than we need and probably a lot more expensive. I’ll see about building a battery supply and hooking up an inverter to generate single-phase AC. I’ll also be designing the sensors and the automatic controls to keep everything balanced. I’ll match those up with your rotors as soon as you get them built. Meantime, I’ll also be contacting the people that owe you money. I’ll shake loose as much as I can. Letting them decide when to pay you is no way to run a business! I’ll need to know what bank you’re using and your account number.”

“I’ll get you a deposit slip, Chuck.”

“You plan on putting in no more than eight hours a day, Morty, and if you feel tired at any point you take a break. But eight hours is your limit, okay?”

“If you say so, Chuck.”

“Evenings are for you and me, grandpa. You’re going to explain how that impeller works and I’ve got a few ideas I intend to bounce off you to see what you think.”

***

Chuck spent most of his working time during the next two weeks contacting the firms that owed Morty money. Occasionally, he found it necessary to offer a small discount for immediate payment; most had paid up as soon as he telephoned. Morty’s bank account doubled, then doubled again.

Chuck finished working his way through the list, then printed out a balance sheet. Morty looked astonished at the numbers, then smiled. “I should have hired you a long time ago, Grandson!”

Three weeks later, the first components that Chuck had ordered began arriving. As soon as Morty finished an impeller, Chuck installed and tested the control. The two then mounted the completed device on what both now called the Boondocker. They finished the job late one afternoon, then wearily headed for the house. Chuck had put ingredients into a crock pot before starting work that morning. The two silently enjoyed bowls of green chile stew, then Chuck washed up while Morty went out to the patio and found a chair. The two were soon enjoying the cool West Texas evening. Chuck had slipped a dollop of brandy into Morty’s tea, hoping it might help him sleep.

“You know, I never liked walking in other people’s footsteps, Chuck. That’s why I went into consulting. If somebody in a big shop comes up with an idea, most of the other people working there won’t disagree. Even if they think it’s dumb, they don’t want to be noticed so they don’t say anything. That’s not for me. I like to examine an idea from all sides, look at it and see how well the parts fit together. I did the same thing with physics. I don’t think anyone yet has matched Newton, and for that matter I don’t think Maxwell gets the respect he deserves. It’s all Einstein nowadays.”

“Einstein’s reputation is well deserved, Morty," Chuck protested. "You can’t ignore that he predicted gravity’s effect on light waves, or for that matter his insight into the relationship between heat and particle motion. As for gravity waves, well, I suspect that sooner or later someone will detect those too.”

“No question about what he did, Chuck, especially that part about heat, but I think he evaded the question when he claimed that gravity distorts space-time around a large mass. He did the same thing Newton did, he talked about what, but didn’t explain how it happened. He just said it did. Anyway, I began looking at Einstein’s ideas, and some of them didn’t quite ring true to me. It’s like that part about the dual nature of light, that it’s a particle and a wave at the same time? It just didn’t make sense to me.”

“I knew about that, Morty. But Einstein didn’t have anything to do with that model, and I don’t see...”

“It’s like the people who came up with that idea never looked at Einstein’s equation, the one about mass-energy conversion. Did you ever try to work that one out?”

“I can’t say I did," Chuck admitted. "It came up in physics and the professor was damned near in ecstasy about it, but no one ever bothered to explain it. It was all about how beautiful it was, but I never could see that. It’s just an equation.”

“Well, I worked my way through it and it’s not all that difficult. In one sense, I think Einstein cut a couple of corners. Think about C-squared, for example; you’ve had basic math courses, and all you need is algebra to work that one out. You remember your algebra classes, don’t you?”

“I think so, Morty.”

“One of the basic concepts is that if you square something, you square everything that’s part of the concept. For example, if you square two meters, you get four square meters, not just four meters. That’s important; it’s not just the numbers that get squared, it’s everything, including units. It’s also worth noticing that whenever you do that, you change dimensions, in the case of 'meters' from linear to area. You’re changing from simple concepts to complex ones, from first order units to second order ones.”

“Okay, I can see that. But you’re referring to squaring the speed of light, aren’t you?”

“That’s it. If you square the number, you must also square the units. Those are distance and time, usually kilometers and seconds. I can grasp what a square meter looks like, but what about a square second? Any idea of what that is?”

“Uh, I don’t know. But it’s just a way of including both terms, isn’t it, going from first order to that second order you mentioned?”

“It is, in one sense. Mathematically, such an operation is perfectly allowable according to our rules. But if you consider that as a dimension, the square of the speed of light, it doesn’t exist. Other than mathematically, of course. So Einstein included an imaginary unit in his formula, a dimension we don’t have a definition for. But if you think of the formula itself as a single entity, not as separate units to be solved, then conceptually it works. Everything in that formula other than numbers, units of energy, mass, and time, just cancels themselves out. Anyway, if you expand all those terms to their defined values and work the formula, you’ll find that all the units go away, leaving only a pure number. That’s the conversion factor for mass to energy and vice versa.

“And that’s what I think is wrong with the idea that light is a wave, which is to say energy, and simultaneously it’s also matter. The conversion factor works out to something like 900 to 1 or maybe it’s a multiple of that. I don’t remember exactly, it’s been a long time since I worked through the formula, but take it from me, it’s a big number. So given that, how can light be both energy and matter? Electrons have some of that same duality also.”

“So do you have an answer to this?”

“Nope. I’m perfectly content to say I don’t know. But to say it has a ‘dual nature’, when the parts of that duality are not equal and more than that, unequal by perhaps 900,000 to one, it just doesn’t seem to fit. It’s a puzzle, and I don’t know that we can resolve it with our current state of knowledge. Anyway, back to Einstein and something I think I do have a better idea about.”

“What’s that, Grandpa?”

“Back to grandpa, are we?”

“It seemed right, somehow," Chuck said. "It’s like when we used to talk about things during the summer when I visited.”

“Okay, if it makes you feel better. Anyway, I thought about Einstein’s concept of distorting or warping space-time around a mass, and I wondered about that. If you extend Einstein’s argument, then space-time, or at least space, has to have a structure. You can’t distort something that isn’t there.”

Chuck thought about it. “Okay, I can see that. So what is the structure of space, Morty?”

“That held me up for a while, but then I understood that there really is a structure, something that extends throughout the universe as we know it, something we’re aware of, and also something that can readily be distorted.”

“So what is this mysterious something?” Chuck asked.

“Well, it’s not ether, not quite. That theory was tossed out about a century ago, maybe too soon. But anyway, I figure the structure of space is made up of interlocking fields, gravitational and electro-magnetic for sure, and maybe even some we don’t know about. I wondered, does that dark energy stuff have fields, and are they different than the other fields we know about? Light is electro-magnetic, part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so it’s not surprising that it would interact with charged particles like electrons or protons. Then Einstein added gravity to the mix, and sure enough, observers saw light bend around a planet during an eclipse. Since then we’ve spotted gravitational lenses, so that’s even more proof. Conceptually, we know that somehow, we should be able to use this information to unite everything in that grand unified theory that Einstein looked for. No one has managed to do it so far, but maybe the answer is in those interlocked fields.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you? You think that space is full of fields that interact with each other?” Chuck asked.

“Sure do. Small fields for the most part, around every ion, every bit of matter there is. Ions carry electrical charges and matter has its own little gravitational field. Bigger bits, like rocks and chunks, would have less of an electrical charge per unit of mass, but more gravitational effect. Don’t forget that electrical charges are strong compared with mass, but short-ranged. Gravity isn’t strong, at least not from small bits of matter, but the effect goes on forever, declining but never disappearing. So the gravitational effect is additive. Dynamic, too, all those small fields adjusting whenever they’re disturbed.

“I call it the matrix theory, not that I get a chance to call it anything very often. Most professional physicists are tied to Einstein’s concepts and they’re not willing to listen to an alternative explanation. Einstein said that light would be affected by a gravitational mass, but why only a large mass? The way I see it, any mass must have an effect, even if the mass was very small, meaning that the gravitational effect would be difficult to detect. Is there some kind of threshold effect? Anyway, that concept of fields gave me another idea. Einstein pointed out that gravity affects light, but nobody extended that idea.”

“Extended it how, Morty?”

“You know about Newton, right? The laws of motion? The one about every action having an equal and opposite reaction?”

“Sure, I learned about that in middle school. Eighth grade, I think.”

“Right, so if the gravitational field effects light, doesn’t it also mean that light affects the gravitational field? Go back to what I mentioned before and think of light as a wave, so that the energy of the light waves would set up a kind of disturbance or wave effect in the gravitational field?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone mention that," Chuck mused, "but it seems logical. It wouldn’t be a very large effect, though.”

“It doesn’t need to be; physics works with very large or very small numbers all the time. Now extend it again, Chuck. If I’m right, that the structure of space is fields interacting with each other, then the fields become the medium for transmitting waves. Like sound in water, you get compression and extension within the medium, so that the wave propagates through it. But extend that idea too. That means that light is really a variable, based on the density of the fields, and Einstein’s value—he used an accepted value derived from Michelson-Morley, if I recall—is correct in theory, but not necessarily in practice. That, in turn, means that just maybe everything we know about the cosmos is more guesswork than science. Our entire body of knowledge about what’s out there depends on our interpretation of intercepted electromagnetic radiation, but if our knowledge of how radiation behaves is faulty then so is every bit of knowledge we’ve derived from it.”

“Morty, are you sure of this?” Chuck whispered.

“Nope. I could be right, or the people who think that Einstein is all they need could be right. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a way of looking at the data, interpreting it. Some do it with mathematics, some with tea leaves, and I do it mostly with logic. The math is probably correct, but logic comes in when we start to interpret what the math implies. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what any of us think. Space is what it is. Someday, when we get out there, we’ll know for sure. But for now, I got to thinking that maybe the impeller secondary coils are creating a field to interact with the other fields that are in space and also here on Earth.

"They’re the secondary coils for a Tesla transformer, a high-voltage highly-magnetic transformer. Two secondary coils in each rotor, four in the pair, charging from one primary coil in the base. Every time a coil charges and discharge, it creates a large, if brief, magnetic field. And since the charging and discharging happens while the rotor pair is moving, that means the field is also moving. So what I think we’re doing is rotating a field in three dimensions, which is why the impeller pulls forward or pushes backward. But it doesn’t matter what I think as long as it works. Put electricity in, you get motion out. No exhaust. No fuel, other than what’s needed to generate the electricity. That means you can stack one impeller behind another or side by side if you want.”

“What about that formula, F=ma?" Chuck protested. "What’s being accelerated?”

“I think the fields are attempting to accelerate the entire matrix, but what happens is that the impeller itself moves.”

“So it doesn’t interact with the atmosphere or anything like that?”

“I don’t see how it could, Chuck.”

“So we could build impellers and put them on, say, an airplane? We could put one in front of another as well as mount them alongside each other?”

“Sure," Morty agreed, "I mentioned that the last time we talked.”

“So is there any reason this airplane couldn’t just keep flying higher and higher, Morty? As far as the moon?”

“You think we should build our own spaceship, Chuck?”

“I think we should consider it, Morty.”

“Where would we get the money? It would take millions to do that, maybe billions. I know that NASA spent billions on their capsules and the shuttle, for that matter so does everyone else who’s building spaceships.”

“Morty, if we had a working model, I’ll bet we could find someone who would be willing to invest money. What about someone who already has factory space that could be converted? They might be able to retool to build what we need relatively cheap. That’s one approach, but it’s not the only one. We could even do it ourselves if we took it step by step. What if we built impellers for cargo ships or airplanes first and used the profits to finance a spacecraft? We could just add our propulsion system to completed bodies. We’d have to keep the impellers secret as long as possible, I think, but it should be possible. It’s not all that difficult to build an impeller, if you can do precision machining. For that matter, I didn’t have much trouble writing code for the computers. Someone else could do it, if they had enough knowledge to get started.”

“Suppose we build that jackrabbit chaser first and see how that goes, Chuck. We can talk about spaceships later. Anyway, I’m tired. Whatever you put in my tea made me plumb sleepy.”

“Sounds like a plan, Morty. Good night, Grandpa, and sleep tight.”

 

Chapter Six

The agenda had been full, meaning that the meeting ran overtime (again!) so Panit got back to his office later than expected. But the graybeard was there, waiting in the reception area, beaming. And so he should! He was finishing a cup of Panit’s excellent (and expensive) coffee!

Panit unobtrusively signaled Mrs. Stendall, then walked into his office. She came in moments later. Panit raised his eyebrows questioningly. “It’s him,” she confirmed. “His name is Morton Sneyd, and he confessed that he’s the one that’s been phoning and sending us all those faxes. He says he’s invented something revolutionary and the device is mounted on that platform he was flying. I pointed out that he didn’t have an appointment and that you were very busy, but he said he’d wait. Do you want to speak to him, Mr. Jindae?”

“I suppose I’ll have to," Panit sighed. "You say his invention was attached to that craft, whatever it was?”

“Yes, sir. He claims his device flies, so I suppose that much is confirmed. He also said it doesn’t use jets or propellers. I asked about the noise, and he said it’s not from his invention, it’s coming from a small generator.

"One of the maintenance people had come up to see what the noise was that you reported and he got a closer look at the thing from the lounge windows. He said that what looked like an external tank of fuel was strapped in front of the generator and there was a bank of batteries fastened down behind the seat, big heavy-duty ones, but no jet exhaust or propeller. I’m not sure what a bank of batteries is, but he seemed to know what he was talking about.”

“Well, then," Panit said, accepting the inevitable. "Why don’t you show our visitor in? If he wants another coffee or a doughnut, give him one. I’ll have a cup too, please.”

“I’ll see to it, sir. He’s already on his second cup; he said it was ‘right tasty’.” Panit snorted derisively and sat behind his desk, waiting.

Mrs. Stendall held the door and Morton Sneyd walked in. “You’re a hard man to see, Mr. Jindae!”

“There’s a reason for that, Mister…Sneyd?”

“Right, Morton Sneyd. Call me Morty.”

“All right, Morty. Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

***

Morton Sneyd strolled out of Panit’s office an hour after he’d entered. He nodded at Mrs. Stendall, poured himself another cup of coffee and snagged the last doughnut on his way out the door. She raised her eyebrows at this bit of effrontery, undecided whether to be amused or irritated. The soft chime of the intercom caught her attention. “Yes, sir?”

“Contact the chairman’s secretary, please. I need to see him as soon as possible, and a telephone call won’t do. This needs to be kept strictly confidential.”

“Sir, we’ve had calls from a reporter. He heard about that flying platform. What should I tell him?”

“Laugh it off, Mrs. Stendall! A flying bedstead? Ridiculous!”

***

Sol Goldman hated high-stakes gambling.

Other companies might spend millions developing concept vehicles, but not Sol. Where was the profit in making something that couldn’t be sold? He’d firmly quashed the idea, preferring his designers to work on incremental improvements which were almost guaranteed to pay off. His engineers also avoided flashy, heavily chromed, high-powered models; that was for others. Sol’s company made solid cars that sold readily and held their value.

True, the luxury division pushed this to an extent, but since their profit margin was high, Sol considered that acceptable. It wasn’t really a gamble as he saw it. As for small stakes gambling, especially when there was an element of skill involved, that was different. Sol enjoyed winning, even though the thought of losing large sums frightened him. Today he would play golf, and with luck manage to take home a few dollars.

***

The other three players were impatient. Two of them, like Sol, headed manufacturing concerns. The third one wasn’t even a real businessman, only a financier; Sol had invited him solely because of his investment in the company. Besides, he might be another pigeon Sol could pluck on the course.

That hadn’t gone well during the previous few weeks. Sol frowned in distaste, wondering why he’d ever invited the man. But he had, and unlike Sol, who played a safe game, he often took the riskier shot. Too often, the pigeon had managed to extract a few feathers from Sol’s tail, forcing him to become—well, creative—with his game. And last week the man had attached himself to Sol, watching every shot; you’d think he believed Sol was cheating!

Goddamned jumped up...investor! Nothing behind him but inherited money, yet somehow, he’d managed to force himself onto the board of directors! Worst of all, Sol had to handle him carefully. If he decided to cash in his investment without signaling his intent, move his money before Sol could do something to counter it, that would almost certainly depress share prices. The effect would be short lived, true, but negative. A drop in share prices at the wrong time would affect Sol’s annual bonus. Still, it might be worth it just to get rid of the man!

He headed something called “Fuqua Enterprises”, which was in reality no more than a cover for his own investments. Foolish man, to think that he was on a par with Sol or others who managed real businesses!

Sol was upset. He’d have been even more concerned had he known what T. French Fuqua had in mind.

Frenchy had his own sources within the company, and most of the time their tidbits of information kept Frenchy well informed, at least as well informed about how well the company was doing as the senior executives. He’d found that attitudes among rank and file employees was an excellent indicator of company health. A rise in the number of unhappy wage-earners had, more than once, signaled Frenchy that it was time to cash out his investment while it was still profitable and move on.

The maintenance man who’d described the flying thing to Panit was one of Frenchy’s contacts. He’d called Frenchy a few minutes later, meaning that Frenchy understood what had happened before Sol himself was notified.

“Shall we get started?" Sol suggested. "I had a meeting I couldn’t skip, but we should still have time for a full eighteen holes. I’ll probably have to leave after that, another meeting, I’m afraid.”

“Sol, you’re the chairman. Can’t you delegate some of that to the CEO?”

“He’s the one I’m meeting. Him and Benjamin.”

“Sounds serious, Sol. Nothing that will affect the business, I trust.” Lemuel was clearly fishing for information.

“No, no. Possibly an opportunity," Sol downplayed, "but no more than that.”

“Anything I’d be interested in, Sol?” asked Frenchy, his tone showing mild interest.

“I wouldn’t think so, Frenchy,” said Sol dismissively. “It’s an issue I’ll need to bring to the board, so you’ll find out then.”

“I see,” said Frenchy. And smiled to himself.

He had more reason to smile later. He’d taken the three for a nice bit of change, again. Ability to manipulate stock prices did not necessarily extend to manipulating a golf ball around the course. His phone rang as Sol and the others went to the clubhouse. He excused himself, walking far enough away not to be overheard. Glancing at the screen, he smiled yet again.

“Thanks for returning my call, Ben. What have you got for me?”

“Maybe nothing, Frenchy. Maybe a whole lot of something.”

“You’ve made me curious, Ben. Does it have anything to do with what happened this morning?”

“Oh, yes. We’ve been contacted by a man. Strange fellow, by all reports; he’s either a cross between Einstein and Edison or a crackpot.”

“Really? Can’t you tell?”

“Not yet; he sounds cracked, but then there was that flying bedstead thing. That’s what Panit called it. One of my people in maintenance saw it, and he said the thing was flying but it didn’t use jets or propellers.”

“So how does it work?” Frenchy wondered.

“We don’t know, that’s the problem. He won’t say. He just said it runs on electricity, and my man in maintenance confirmed that. He said the device had a battery pack and a small diesel-powered generator, of all things. He thinks it's there to keep the batteries charged. He ran some calculations, something to do with how much energy would normally be required to keep that contraption flying, and compared it with the generator's output. He figures that the batteries and the generator together give it enough juice to stay up for a good few hours. Not knowing how that thing is flying made him unwilling to be more precise than that.”

“Interesting. So when does Sol plan to bring this to the board?”

“Maybe as early as tomorrow," Ben said. "He’s meeting with me this afternoon and we’ll look at how much development of his invention would cost. The man wants an astonishing amount of money, too much really.”

“You don’t say! Does this fractured container have a name?”

“We’ve got a card. It says ‘Morton Sneyd, Inventor’.”

“Ridiculous name!” said T. French Fuqua.

 

Chapter Seven

Panit had been invited to attend the emergency board meeting, but not as a principal; he sat with others in the back of the boardroom. Only members of the board had seats at the long table.

Old business had been dispensed with, then had come the announcement that a new business proposal had been presented to the company. Sol stood as soon as the secretary finished the routine preliminary announcements and sat down. “Thank you for attending, gentlemen. I’ll get right to the point. We’ve been approached by a man who claims to have invented a new, and different, propulsion system. I emphasize that it’s a revolutionary discovery, not an improvement on the kind of thing we already do. I see this as risky. We need to decide whether to invest in this device, and if we do, how much money we’re prepared to put into developing it. As I see it, we have two options. Should we decide to go ahead, we can approve a budget to explore the proposal. Or we can send him away, but if we do someone else might decide to back him. I can perhaps stall him for a time, but he’s impatient. We need to decide quickly, yes or no.”

“What sort of development costs, Sol?” Frenchy asked.

“Part of it involves an up-front payment to the inventor. He’s got a price in mind that we can’t meet, so if he’s not open to negotiation then there’s nothing we can do. But even if he’s willing to come down on what he’s asking, I don’t know that we want to get involved; as I see it, he’s got an untried system. That’s why it seems like such a risk to me.

"I suspect he came to us because he thought we had the manufacturing capability to produce the item he’s invented. What he doesn’t know is that we’re currently using all our facilities. Our employees are tied up on other projects, meaning that we’d have to hire a lot more people to work on his concept. Which, by the way, is nowhere near perfected. He himself admitted that a lot of developmental work would need to be done. Add to that, we’re looking at years before his device is ready to be marketed. I estimate at least five years, but because it’s so new and untried it may take longer. There will undoubtedly be licensing issues and patent searches, just for starters. He says it’s revolutionary, but is it really? And we’ll need reliability data before we could take the device to market. As a comparison, just look at how long it’s taken Tesla to begin selling their electric cars!”

“Will we have to take on more debt, Sol?” asked Frenchy. “If bringing this device to market takes as long as you anticipate, the debt will have to be serviced. Meaning that adding substantially to our current debt load will cause stock prices to fall, at least in the short term.”

“So they will, Frenchy. You’re interested in stock appreciation, as we all are, but I should mention that the possible payoff is very large. That’s why I thought the board should consider the issue.”

“How large is large, Sol? I’m sure I speak for all of us,” Frenchy glanced around at the other members. “We expect gains commensurate with the risks we’re taking! The longer we have to wait, the larger the potential gains have to be if the investment is worthwhile. We’re already making money and stock prices are reflecting that, so that’s an issue too. Why should we take on something so risky? Our foreign sales of heavy equipment are particularly healthy, even if domestic sales haven’t fully recovered yet. We also have development costs for our new models to consider, they’ve been somewhat higher than expected, and we’ve got to absorb those. The recalls—well, we’re all familiar with that, and the lawsuits haven’t helped either. Can we really afford to take on something expensive that might pay off slowly, if ever?”

That was a preview of The Ship: the New Frontiers Series, Book 1. To read the rest purchase the book.

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