She smiled at him. “Sorry. I’m leaving town to visit my parents for the weekend.” Besides, if I’m getting out of Lee’s way, I can’t be going out to dinner with you, she thought.
He smiled back, a wisp of sadness in his expression, “I hope you have a good time.”
Chapter Three
Brad Medness entered another set of numbers in the computational engine he was using to test possible designs for a fixture he could use to fire ISEAP’s laser into a Stade tube—assuming the figures for the material’s properties weren’t total bullshit. He started the run and went to get a Pepsi.
When he got back, he gawped at the readouts.
I can probably improve these numbers with a few more iterations, but… They’re already good enough, he thought. I need to start trying to make contact with Seba. See whether I can fit whatever they charge for Stade into my grant’s budget.
His eyes tracked back to the diagram of his fixture, If I lengthen the chamber, the laser pulse should be further constrained and there’ll be even more hydrogen inside the cone to be accelerated into the boron… His hands had started to stretch out to the keyboard. No! he thought irritatedly, Time enough for that after I’ve tried to contact Seba.
He’d always had to force himself to invest the time necessary to deal with people instead of equipment, but asking Staze to build him a device required that he make contact himself rather than through one of his grad students.
Brad drafted an email, trying not to sound like he was begging. He strove to make it sound like working with him would provide benefit to Staze, not just to Brad and the ISEAP.
With a pretty good draft under his belt, he decided to start trying to find an email address to send it to. He could re-read and re-write again before sending the final draft.
Damn this website is sparse, he thought after finding Staze’s pages. There was an address listed for Seba, with a disclaimer that due to high volumes of incoming email, not every email could be given a reply.
He re-read the paragraph on Seba, thinking to slant his email to get the guy’s attention. What the hell?! He’s still an undergrad?!
A moment later Brad got the nagging sensation that Seba had said something to that effect at the beginning of his talk. The talk was still up in a window on his screen so he pulled it up. Sure enough, in his first sentence Seba had said he was an undergrad physics student. Brad hadn’t listened to that first sentence after the first time he watched the video since he’d focused on the meat of the talk during all his re-watches. Why would this company have an undergrad give this talk for them? he wondered. Is he just a PR person?
He went back and re-checked the website. Seba’s listed as CTO!
He re-watched the talk, focusing on what’d been said about the discovery rather than on what he himself might do with it. Stade’s based on a theory of Seba’s, though this Mr. X did the heavy lifting of making it practical. I’ll send my email to X as well. He pulled up the website again.
X had an email address listed with a warning that its inbox was heavily filtered. Brad decided to send his email to X and Gunnar Schmidt as well as Seba. Schmidt looked more mature. He decided that sending it to the CFO would be a waste of time since a bean counter wouldn’t take any interest.
After one more re-write, the email was on its way. I sure as hell hope someone reads it, he thought.
***
Mahesh Prakant walked across the huge concrete floor Staze’s people—Lee among them—had arranged to have poured in Space-Gen’s new vacuum chamber. He’d come out to “inspect the project” after he’d gotten a call from a Space-Gen engineer on-site in Texas. The man had excitedly described the methods being used to make the chamber and Prakant had decided he needed to understand them.
Lee was his guide on this inspection. He said, “So, you inflated a big Mylar balloon, temporarily stazed its interior—”
She interrupted. “We blew it up with water as well as air. The water flattens the bottom of the balloon onto the foundation.”
“Yes,” he said, “then you blew it up a little bit more and stazed the additional outer layer for the long term.”
“We put water in the outer layer too. We needed the stazed water in the temporary Stade to float the inner layer up so the newly stazed layer would extend all the way under the temp Stade.”
Prakant nodded. “And I understand you have some kind of mechanism that makes sure the temp Stade is centered in the long-term Stade?”
“Uh-huh,” Lee said. “There’re little inflatable posts attached to the inside of the Mylar balloon. They’re transparent so they get incorporated into the long-term Stade. We put metalized inflatables where we want openings in the final shell.”
They’d gotten back to the big opening at one end of the huge cylinder. He said, “So a metalized ring left us this opening we’re going to take our rocket out through?”
She nodded, “How are you planning to make sure the rocket doesn’t get away from you when you take it out?”
“You mean because it’ll be lighter than air?”
“Uh-huh, if it gets away it’ll become a long-term piece of upper atmospheric junk unless you can recapture it.”
“We were thinking we’d put just enough water in the oxygen tank to make it neutrally buoyant.” He laughed, “Then one guy could pull it over to the launch pad.”
“That’d work. Um, you could save a step and partially fill the
