They nodded.
Kaem said, “Now you use a rod to plunge a little one by one-millimeter mirror in from the right end of the tunnel.” Kaem ignored Gunnar’s elevating eyebrows and continued. “You stop it one millimeter from the back-left corner and staze that little one by one by one box that’s left. You back the plunger out a millimeter, or more, and staze again. You just keep doing that over and over until you get to the end of the row. Then you pull the whole plate and plunger back a millimeter and staze the next row a chunk at a time too.”
“Holy shit!” Gunnar exclaimed, wide-eyed. “Why didn’t you come up with this before we spent $32,000 on the first printer?!”
Kaem frowned, and spoke as if it were obvious. “You didn’t tell me about your printer idea until just now.”
Gunnar blew a raspberry at him.
Norm said, “Wait a minute. When you’re done, you’re just going to have a millimeter thick sheet of stade in the bottom of your machine.”
Gunnar turned to him, “Yes. Until all the temporary stade dots destaze themselves and vanish. Then you have dots, or a 3D construct.”
Norm sank back in his chair. On his face there was a mixture of elation at the solution, and disappointment that he hadn’t come up with it himself.
***
Grace’s phone said, “You have a call from Carl Welch.”
Crap! she thought. “Is that Simone’s brother?” Grace had only met him once, back before she and Simone had even been engaged. He’d been ‘unable’ to come to their wedding and distant when Simone tried to remain in contact with him afterward.
The phone said, “Yes.”
“I’ll take it… Hi Carl. What can I do for you?”
“Kary said you did something to Simone?” he asked in an angry tone.
“Well, I didn’t do anything. She asked to be put in stasis.”
“And just what the hell is that, Grace?”
“Um, as I told Kary, you can watch a talk about it on the internet by—”
“I’m not going to watch some bullshit video on the internet. What the hell did they do to her?!”
“It’s a…” Grace paused, trying to think how to avoid stepping on land mines. Deciding they were unavoidable, she said, “It’s a way to stop time around a person. It’s stopped the progress of her cancer until—”
“Where the hell do you get off, trying some experimental treatment on my sister?”
“Carl, she’s the one who found out about it and pushed to do it. Besides, she was really sick. It was her only chance. You really should watch—”
“What a load of crap! Let me talk to her.”
“Carl, you can’t talk to her while she’s in stasis. Time’s not passing—”
“I’ll be there this weekend. She’d better be ready to talk.”
Grace’s phone said, “The call has been disconnected.”
I might just have to take a little trip down to the beach this weekend, Grace thought.
***
Gunnar looked up and saw Kaem coming into the big room at Staze’s building. Class must be over, he thought. “Kaem,” he said, lifting his hand to attract the younger man’s attention.
Kaem walked over, saying, “What’s up?”
Gunnar leaned forward, saying in a low tone, “I’m worried about the stazers’ security.”
Kaem sat down and leaned closer. Speaking quietly, he said, “You’ve thought of a flaw in our thermite setup?”
“Oh. No, that’s not it. I’ve realized that someone who wanted to steal the secret wouldn’t even have to open one up. All they’d have to do is hook up sensors to the cable feeding the microwave and laser emitters. They could read the signal the stazer’s using to create stasis directly off the feeds. I’m sure there’re a lot of ways they could duplicate that signal without knowing exactly how your electronics are set up or even how they work.” He shook his head, “We can’t let anyone but ourselves use the stazers until we’ve got our patent in hand.”
Kaem grinned, “I thought you were worried about getting a patent. That as soon as we got one, the government would slap a Secret designation on Stade and tell us we couldn’t use it.”
Gunnar said, “What else can we do? If it’s not patented, our competitors are going to be able to build stazers of some kind by stealing the technology right out of the ends of our cables!”
“It wouldn’t be very easy,” Kaem said. “The first thing the stazer does is send a pulse of several different waveforms into the mold. It reads the reflections as they return from it. Those reflections correspond with great precision to the dimensions of the mold and the reflective layer surrounding it. Then the proprietary chip on the stazer’s board does a series of extremely complex calculations that determine exactly what signal’s required to achieve stasis in that particular mold. This means that we can sell a company a stazer that only stazes certain things, for instance, six-inch cubes. They wouldn’t be able to use that stazer to make five-inch cubes without seeking additional permissions from us.”
Gunnar frowned, “That’s something of a relief. But wouldn’t they be able to use their measurements of the stazing signal to build themselves a bunch more machines that’d make six-inch cubes?”
“No,” Kaem laughed. “They wouldn’t be able to insert something to measure the signal without changing the apparent dimensions of the mold from the viewpoint of the stazer.”
“What
