“Tabby, why did you help me with getting the spaceship?'
“I've noticed the same thing you have. Something doesn't feel complete yet. I have seen you watching the stars at night...'
“You know Ben talks about the responsibility of being at point. I somehow feel responsible. If I hadn't discovered that gravity could be made, I could let it go. But I somehow think it is my task to see this through. I've got to walk point again.'
The airplane took off drowning out all talk. During the quiet after the takeoff, we sat next to each other, enjoying the feel ofjust being together, until the next plane started warming up its engines. Back at the hanger we got to work on what was happening with the kantele when they tried to form a wormhole. The remote test ships had torn themselves apart. Most of the pieces of one of the ships were in the hanger with a duplicate of the original construction. The ship was about two and a half meters long with a large spherical kantele in front. The cylindrical body of the craft housed a large computer and sensor package and in the tail was a small maneuvering rocket. The largest piece of the destroyed test ship was about 50 centimeters long and about 15 centimeters wide. Tabby looked over the pieces while I reviewed the data tapes from the test runs. After two Mozart CDs and one Bach, she came over to my workstation.
“I want to show you something.'
“Good. I am getting nowhere with the data.'
She brought me to the pieces of the kantele sphere first. She handed me a magnifying glass. “Look carefully at the edges. Now look at the edges of the pieces from the body cylinder.” I knew she had found something but I couldn't see it at first. I went back and forth between the two groups of pieces. Finally, I saw it. Most of the pieces on the broken sphere were bent inward while the metal from the cylinder was bent in every direction.
“Let's check the data record again.” I smiled at Tabby and pinched her bottom. From the corner of my eye I saw Felix smiling at us.
Back at the workstation we carefully followed the pressure and gravity readings off the kantele sphere. On paper they were all within the tolerances of the construction. But I noticed that there was a flutter in the numbers way down in the fifth decimal place. I highlighted the block of numbers with the cursor.
“Do you see what I see?'
“I sure do.'
“Why don't we sleep on it?'
“Sounds good to me.'
“Felix. We are ready to go to our hotel room.'
“I'm sorry sir ... sorry Daniel. But I was told you would be staying on the base.'
“I am not spending a night on an Air Force base, especially not on my honeymoon. We called and made reservations at the Best Western before we left home. All we need is a ride to the motel. And before you ask, I reserved a room across the hall for your men.'
It was two days later when we had a solution to the star travel problem. This time the meeting had thirty people in it.
“Okay, I assume everyone has gone over the basic data.” I waited until most of the heads nodded. “The kantele sphere is not strong enough for the forces generated with using it as a star drive. The original specifications overlooked a problem with the production of the space drive. The gravity field that is generated has a slight vibration to it. Under most conditions it will not cause a problem until thousand hours or more of run time but under the extreme conditions the vibrations will weaken the sphere enough to permit the gravitational force to crush the sphere.
“The solution is to go back to the original design. Remember the sphere was used to eliminate the contamination of the gravitational field with molecules found in the air and on the nearby surfaces. In space we will not have those problems. We have the added benefit of being able to adjust the parabolic reflector to project the field farther away from the dish so the structural strain will be less.
“As for injecting the field generation with air or some other gas, that might not be necessary with the open design. Once the gravity field is started with an initial push of gas the increased strength of the field generation will pull the scattered molecules in space into the field. If it is not enough we can work on some type of gas injection in a following test.
'The next problem will be the actual generation of the wormhole or tear. There is a chance that at a sufficient velocity the tear will be generated spontaneously. I am hoping that this will work. But we do have the backup with the suspected way the aliens traveled. We can try to inject a plasma flow into the
gravitational field.
“Tabby and I have made copies of our notes and working theories. We will be heading home now. I request that data from the next tests be sent to our lab at the farm and that we start working in adjunct with the rest of the groups on the project.'
Tabby and I cuddled for the whole trip home much to the discomfort of Felix and the other man in the SUV with us. I was surprised when we got to the cabin. It felt like home.
I woke to the sun peeking through the windows. Tabby was curled up against my side. From the great room, the sound of trickling water drifted over the balcony. I was warm. I traced the curve on Tabby's back and counted her vertebrae.
“What are you doing? I am still tired. If you want sex, you need to do more than tickle my back.'
“I'm thinking. And I just wanted to touch you.'
“Wacha thinking about?'
“A few years ago I worked in an office and avoided my boss. I didn't stand up to anyone. I even would run away before confronting someone. How the hell was I able to talk back to those people? How in the world do I have the guts to tell all those PhDs they were wrong? Why did I drive the sub into the flying alien? How was I able to help those wounded FBI men? A few years ago I would have driven past an accident and called an ambulance. How could I have changed so much?'
“I remember reading a story. I can't remember the exact words but it said, ‘The difference between a man down the street and a hero is what has happened to him?’ You never know what you will do until you face it. But after facing it, you change.
“Do you remember those old re-run western movies and the bit about seeing the elephant?'
“Yup. You never could tell what a man would do until he saw the elephant.'
“You now know what happens after seeing that elephant.'
I stroked her back softly until she went back to sleep. I watched the sun finish rising through half closed eyes listening to the tinkling water and the soft breaths coming from Tabby.
Chapter 20
Construction Begins
There were a million and one things to do. We never had the chance to finish the two weeks we had scheduled for our honeymoon. The day after we got back Ole called with a problem with the new design. We were forced to open up the U of M lab by the county road and start working on the space drive problems. Tabby was best with the engineering questions while I worked on the theory and ideas.
Four months later the first new kantele star drive was tested. They moved in a new satellite optical telescope just to watch the test. The government had started work on the telescope last year with the idea of using it as a guidance system for their new space weapons. The test cylinder moved like the proverbial bat-out-of-hell. The tracking system on the new telescope nearly didn't follow the probe. As the speed of the cylinder approached 200,000,000 meters per second, the optical telescope lost the image of the cylinder and just tracked a distortion line. The internal clock on the cylinder was timed for one second of travel after the onboard computer sensors decided that the probe had entered a wormhole. After the test, they found the cylinder out past the orbit of Jupiter. The onboard computer had
already started the probe's deceleration and its return to earth using its standard gravity drive.
It took another six months before all the details about the test were fully analyzed. Manning, at JPL, proved
