up in this place… spending days on end on that computer or in the lab. It's ridiculous. You can't expect her to keep on working like this.'
'Cheryl, I'm not expecting her to do any of this,' Jon said. 'Kelsey is the one who walked into library and hasn't come out.'
'Come out? How can she? Security officers besiege us every time we turn around. It wastes almost half a day going in and out of security. Kelsey feels less intruded upon by just staying here.'
'Well, that's the conclusion most of us come to,' Jon admitted with a sheepish grin. 'It's almost as if the Air Force designs the security this way to make us work harder.'
'It's not funny, Dr. Masters.'
'No one is forcing her to do this, Cheryl. She's doing it all on her own.' He looked at her carefully. 'You really are worried, aren't you?'
'Of course I am.'
'Are you telling me that Kelsey's never worked like this before? This is the first time she's been so..'
'Obsessed? Single-minded? Manic?' Cheryl exploded. 'That's what I'm saying, Dr. Masters. Sure, she's worked hard before-she works hard on everything she's ever done. But never like this. I'm really worried about her.'
'I don't have kids, Cheryl, so I'm no expert,' Jon said, 'but if I didn't know better, I'd say Kelsey is…'
'What?'
'Having fun,' Jon said. When Cheryl rolled her eyes in disbelief, Jon went on, 'No, really. Putting together inertial confinement chambers and laser generators is like.. like putting together a dollhouse or a Lego castle is to most kids.'
'Jon, you're wrong. Completely, absolutely wrong.' But even as she said the words, Jon could see that she really didn't believe they were true. 'I wish this never happened. I wish Kelsey was just a normal, everyday kid.'
'Cheryl, she is just an everyday normal kid-but with an incredible gift,' Jon said. 'I think you see the security and the weapons and the horror and destruction all this could cause, and you wonder and worry about how this will affect your daughter.'
'Of course I'm worried!'
'But have you looked at your daughter lately… I mean, stepped back and really looked at her?' Jon asked. 'I mean, I've never had kids, but I'm a kid at heart. And I've seen supersmart kids before. Some of them are really full of themselves. They'll talk about the offers they get from universities and big companies and consultants to work for them; they'll talk about their stock portfolios and patents and the money they're making.'
He paused, staring out into space as if reliving some scene in his mind's eye. 'I know about those kids- because I was one. I am probably still one.' He chuckled. 'Man, I used to love stuffing one down some four-star general's shirt. He thought he knew everything-I couldn't wait to blow him away. Every tactic, every procedure, every concept he had, I had a response or an alternative that he never thought about. I used to cream the big corporate CEOs daily. They wouldn't give me the time of dayuntil I showed them a design for something they absolutely had to have. I was a third of their age and had bank accounts and portfolios bigger than theirs. I… was… the greatest.'
'Kelsey has done all that stuff too,' he said softly. 'She's built companies, lectured at Cornell, given presentations in front of the National Science Foundation and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. She has almost as many patents as I have and she's a fourth my age But you know the difference between Kelsey and those other Generation-X nerds? The other bozos tell you all the stuff about themselves-myself included. I had to go out and find out all the stuff about Kelsey. She doesn't brag about all her accomplishments.' He looked at Cheryl and smiled. 'Maybe that has as much to do with you as it does with her?' For the first time in a very long time, Cheryl Duffield smiled.
Jon smiled back, then looked around. 'Where did she go?'
'Bathroom.'
'That was a few minutes ago,' Jon said. 'Uh-oh. If I know Kelsey, she's not going to come back here right away. I know where she is.' Jon was correct: He walked directly to the AL-52 laser lab and found Kelsey with her laser goggles on, punching instructions into a computer beside the large mounting racks where the components of the plasma laser were mounted. Kelsey wore only a pair of socks on her feet, and her Top Secret ID badge was pinned to the tops of her underwear peeking over the top of her pants.
Jon was simply and unabashedly dumbfounded whenever he walked into this lab. In an amazingly short period of time, he and Kelsey had managed to build a full-scale working model of a laser that had been virtually unheard of. The bench that the laser was mounted to was the same size as the interior of the B-52 aircraft; the laser waveguides were mounted in an adjacent room, and the power capacitors and other support equipment were mounted in other rooms as well, networked here for the tests.
The room was dominated by a large aluminum sphere seven feet in diameter, with a number of electrodes and cables running around the outside. This was the main component-the inertial confinement chamber. Set on the inside surface of the sphere were four hundred diode lasers, like powerful laser pointers, aimed into the center of the sphere. Inside the sphere, magnetrons-magnetic gunswere also set up, pointing into the center as well. A tube ran through the center, and there was an opening in the front end of the sphere that connected the confinement chamber to a large cylinder with thousands of rectangles etched into it-the laser generators-and from there to the Faraday oscillator that would collect the light energy from the generators and produce a laser beam.
The tube fed tiny pellets of deuterium and tritium into the sphere, and the laser beams bombarded the pellets. The deuterium and tritium elements in the gaseous cloud that formed in the center of the sphere released energy particles but were then trapped, focused, and squeezed by the laser beams until the heat built up to a point where the elements no longer repelled one another but were fused together. When they fused, they created a massive release of heat and energy. Further squeezed by the magnetrons, the fused particles suddenly snapped apart, creating a cloud of free electrons and positively charged particles called ions-a plasma field. The magnetrons then focused the field and sent it to the laser generator, where the plasma energy stripped high-energy particles from neodymium, creating laser light.
Despite its size and complexity, it was a perfect example of simplicity and functionality. It weighed less than thirty thousand pounds, less than half the weight of the chemical laser it was replacing. The inertial confinement chamber was a simple reengineering of the plasma-yield warhead Jon Masters had invented years earlier-instead of simply releasing the plasma energy created inside, the chamber was designed to channel it to the laser generator. It used virtually no power-just enough to light up the diode lasers inside the confinement chamber and to keep the magnetrons firing.
Unfortunately, that was the problem-and Kelsey's current headache. 'How's it looking, Kelsey?' Jon asked, ignoring Cheryl's concerned expression-better get a status update fast before Cheryl decided to escort her daughter out of here.
'Horrible,' Kelsey said. 'I still haven't been able to control the heat buildup and keep it away from the magnetrons.'
'That's a problem I never had to contend with,' Jon admitted. 'With the plasma-yield warhead, I wanted to let the heat build up-we got a bigger plasma field and we could do more damage. Here, we want to control it.'
It took an incredible amount of heat to create a plasma field-a hundred million degrees Fahrenheit, ten times hotter-than the sun. The heat only lasted for a tiny fraction of a second, but it was still devastating to ordinary manmade materials. Further, cooling the sphere or magnetrons was not an option-the only way to do away with the heat was to build the heat up enough to create a plasma field, at which instant it would cool to safe limits and the plasma field would disappear. Even if the creation of the plasma fields were pulsed, excess heat eventually built up to the point where even the strongest materials would begin to corrode and weaken.
'What's the pulse interval looking like?'
'The optimum safe range is between ten and twenty-five milliseconds,' Kelsey replied, 'but I only get a yield of point four one megawatts-almost half the level of the chemical laser we're replacing. Not good.' Kelsey had been experimenting with trying to vary the spacing between plasma pulses. Spacing the pulses out farther resulted in manageable levels of heat but decreased the power available to the laser generators. 'If I can go to five to ten milliseconds I can get to one megawatt of power. I'm shooting for one millisecond-then I can beat TRW's chemical laser output by twenty-five percent. But at that power level, I can get maybe ten ten-second shots off before the magnetrons let go.'
