Warp speed

'You thought of all that while we were racing? No wonder you couldn't get over the tree. And those chain ring grinds are hell on your big chain ring by the way. I wish you would quit doing that, because I'm always the one who has to put the new one on.' He paused for a second and shook his head. 'You are focused, just not on riding,' Jim said.

'I can't help it Jim. It was my fault that 'Becca got hurt. I can't put it out of my mind that I could've done something to prevent it.'

'It was all our faults, Anson, not yours alone. You want to get it out of your mind for another hour? I know what'll do it.' He looked down the trail and put the energy bar wrapper in his pocket. 'Two laps the other way before it gets dark.' He buckled his helmet and put his sunglasses back on.

'Fine with me. Double or nothing on the beer?'

He nodded and took off. He needed it this time. The other way means going up the 'screaming downhill' at the end of each lap. Hills are my specialty. Going up them I mean. Going down them scares the living hell out of me.

We called it a draw. On the last lap we were dead even on the last 'whoop' before the big uphill climb. Jim hit a rock just right and went over the handlebars. We were moving fast so I was worried that he was hurt. Jim rolled up on his feet laughing hard as he dusted himself off and wiped the blood from the big scrape on his left elbow.

'Cool!' he said.

'Kids!' I said.

We surveyed the damage to his bike and realized that his front rim was a wavy curve shape like a potato chip.

'Well, you really potato-chipped that one!' I told him. He popped the quick release skewer and took the wheel off the bike. Jim grabbed the wheel at the four and seven o'clock position and commenced to beating the thing against the ground. He rolled it around in his hands about ninety degrees and repeated the process. Finally, he held up a perfectly good wheel and then put it back on his bike.

The first time I saw that trick I thought, Now ain't that the damnedest thing! Since then, I've done it myself a million times. The problem is that the wheel, although back in round, is structurally very weak afterwards. Any good knock would potato-chip it again for sure. So we rode out two-up (again, for you civilians, that's side-by-side) talking about our next step for finding out what happened to 'Becca.

Monday I decided to go about reconstructing 'Becca's accident. That would be the only way to really see what happened. Nevertheless, it had to be done in a controlled manner this time. After a week or so of planning, we rented the huge vacuum chamber over at NASA MSFC. We hired a local alphabet soup contracting firm to help us set up the experiment. Finally, after weeks of trying to recreate the disaster, we did!

Apparently, some sort of chaotic resonance set up between all of the generators. This resonance field shielded the energy coupling system from allowing the energy to bleed off from the Casimir effect spheres. An analogy would be that we were filling up seven hundred little air tanks with a constant inflow of air at infinite pressure with no release valve. Once these tanks reached their stress limit, they exploded. From the sheer nature of the vacuum energy physics, these tanks had quite a large stress limit. I hadn't expected that.

In other words, the Clemons Dumbbells had a constant inflow of energy into them, but they couldn't dissipate that energy fast enough. Final result: they exploded. I calculated that a piece of material smaller than could be seen by the human eye exploded with as much force as an eighth of a stick of dynamite. DARPA gave us more money.

The only slight problem with the new DARPA money is that the program all of the sudden became deeply classified. Security was tightened up and we had to hire security guards to sit at the office around the clock. There were a lot of retroactive security issues that had to be dealt with. I had worked security programs before and had a Secret clearance. God knows how high Tabitha's clearance went. And Jim and 'Becca were cleared from previous programs as well. The others were put on temporary 'need to know' company clearances, but they still were only privy to proprietary information. It didn't take but about two months for Al and Sara to be cleared at the Secret level also. Johnny presented documents as proof of his clearance that were passed on to the Defense Security Service. He was cleared at Secret.

For some reason Tabitha put me in for a Top Secret clearance and some other clearance that I had never heard of. She had explained that if things worked out we could find much, much more money in the 'black projects.' It all sounded cool with me.

After a bit of experimentation and analyses, we figured out just how lucky Rebecca had been. 'Becca was lucky that the thick vacuum glass, the plexiglass shield, a metal enclosure at head level, and the computer at body level were between her and the explosion.

Once we figured out how to recreate the accident we went about figuring out how to prevent it. That was hard. We determined that it was very easy to set up the chaotic resonant field and very hard to dampen it. One of the subcontractors had the idea of designing each individual collector in an orientation that would cancel out the effect of the next one. Then we could construct them in stable pairs. This worked. I put Sara to working with 'Becca on this. 'Becca still needed another hand. Her bronchitis was acting up and you could tell it was wearing her down.

Finally, we were back on track for building the warp drive experiment flight demonstrator. We left the setup in the NASA MSFC facility with hopes that we would soon be building a very big Casimir effect energy collector.

All of this time I had been giving Tabitha and Al the possible spacecraft requirements and general dimensions. The two of them began solid model simulations and finite element analysis of the concept vehicle. They also contracted out a lot of the work to some local shops.

The architecture of the spacecraft started out as empty boxes on the whiteboard with names of spacecraft components written in them. Then we expanded each box and filled it with larger boxes. It turns out that Tabitha is a super genius with systems integration and solid modeling for spacecraft design. Al is pretty sharp, himself. The two of them together were amazing and accomplished some of the best spacecraft engineering I had ever seen.

The problem wasn't the design or complexity, but the sheer size. The size of the damn thing kept growing. Sometime in November we decided that the only way to get the thing in orbit would be to either build it there or take it up on the Shuttle. Expendable Launch Vehicles (ELVs) were just not big enough. Tabitha called me after they figured this out.

'How much do you weigh?' she asked.

'Why?'