And then what? The question hung unspoken. Revolution, right? Unite with the underground armies of Feck the Fairy, and cause some sort of mischief? Conrad wasn’t sure of the exact reason for this, or what exactly was supposed to happen afterward. Prison? More summer camp? The glorious collapse of Queendom society?
“What’s an AU?” he asked.
“Distance from the Earth to the sun,” Bascal said, in a tone suggesting he found the question a bit stupid.
“Isn’t that a long way?”
“Not out here it isn’t. We’re fifty AU from the sun, and almost twenty from the orbit of Neptune. Stuff is a lot more spread out in the upper system. Have you gotten us off the planette, by the way?”
“Um, yeah,” Conrad said, turning and rummaging through his growing pile of notes. “If the sail is folded into a thirteen-meter sphere, we can fill it with hydrogen.” He plucked a simulation sketchplate from the pile and held it up, showing a little cartoon balloon rising up through the cartoon atmosphere of a cartoon planette. “That’s enough to lift the cabin, fifteen people, and about two tons of cargo.”
“Raw. Where do we get the hydrogen?”
Conrad pointed to a patch of blue on Bascal’s Camp Friendly map. “Adventure Lake. We move some solar panels onto the dock, and run the current down into the water on metal cables. Oxygen bubbles up on one side, and hydrogen on the other. We just throw the oxygen away, and fill the bag directly from the dock.”
“Hmm,” Bascal said, pinching his chin and nodding. “Peter, are you listening to this?”
“Yeah,” Peter Kolb replied, from the next table over. He had his back to the prince, and didn’t turn. “Hydrogen’s a fire hazard, you know. Explosion hazard.”
“That’s true,” Bascal said, and turned back to Conrad with an expectant look.
Conrad shrugged. “You didn’t let me finish.”
“Please do.”
It was hard not to smile. They were doing a good job, acting all mature and businessy, like real engineers and scientists. On the other hand, they really were coming up with answers, so maybe it wasn’t completely an act. “We can’t lift out of the atmosphere with just a balloon. It isn’t physically possible. We let the bag up to its full height— about a hundred meters if it’s going to reach from the docks to the d’rector’s cabin—and it’ll only rise another hundred meters or so before its density matches the air, and it stops.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So, the density of xenon drops off a lot faster than the density of oxygen does. It hugs the ground, not the sky. And the whole time the balloon is rising, the gas inside it is also expanding, until finally it starts leaking out the bottom.”
“And? I’m not following.”
Conrad inched the simulation forward, second by second. In the cartoon, the open-bottomed bag of wellstone film rose and swelled with yellow, false-colored gas, until little swirls of it were coming out as promised. “And, it’s two hundred kilos of hydrogen, spilling into a pure oxygen atmosphere.”
“It explodes,” Peter said, and now he was turning around to look, just in time to see the simulated blast on the wellstone sketchplate.
“Specifically,” Conrad said, “it explodes down, propelling the bag up and lifting the whole cabin away from the planette. Rather fast.”
The sim showed this: a flaming balloon dragging a wooden cabin behind it, with the planette falling away against a background of stars and dotted lines.
“Raw!” Bascal said approvingly. “Conrad, that’s great. You thought of that all by yourself?”
He felt himself blushing. “Well, the textbooks helped.”
“Will it work?” Bascal asked Peter.
Peter shrugged. “I dunno. I guess. Can I check the simulation?”
“You sure can,” Bascal said, snatching the plate out of Conrad’s hands.
Conrad was about to be annoyed, and to protest, when suddenly Xmary was there, holding a couple of plastic bowls. “Food science report!” she said excitedly. “I’ve got some new creations from the fax.”
“Got what?” Conrad asked.
“Edible paints,” she said. “And papier-mâché. Some of the combinations make a decent porridge.”
Conrad peered into the bowls and wrinkled his nose. “It looks like shit.” And it did, literally.
“Well, it tastes like peas and oatmeal,” Xmary shot back, with just a touch of indignant sneer. “Try it.”
One of the bowls had a spoon in it, and Conrad didn’t want to be too much of an asshole, and anyway the stuff didn’t smell bad. In fact it barely smelled at all, so he picked up the spoon and touched its goo-smeared plastic tip to the end of his tongue. No ill effects presented themselves. Sighing, he shoved the spoon in his mouth and sucked the brown paste off it.
“Hmm,” he said, trying not to make a face. The taste wasn’t horrible, but this was definitely one of those cases where the texture and color didn’t match. This wasn’t going to be popular, even as a substitute for beans and franks. “We can call it Slop Number Two.”
Bascal was choking back a laugh. “Well. That’s great, then. Another problem solved.”
“I’ll keep trying,” promised a slightly crestfallen Xmary.
“I don’t know about this,” Bertram the sailor boy cut in. He sauntered over to Bascal and Conrad’s table and sat down heavily. “You’ve got a photospinnaker clewed and guyed to a spriting gondola. Using a log cabin for the gondola may not be as bad as it sounds, but you’re still talking about a fairly downsystem design, right? An AU is a long distance to sail, even with real sunlight to propel you. And this planette doesn’t have a real sun, just a pinpoint fusion source. The energy drops off fast as you move away from it.”
The grin fell off Bascal’s face. “Bert, I like you, but if Ng were here, he’d punch you in the gut for that. How smart do you think you are? I’ve physically been sailing around my family’s planette, which has a lot of other shit orbiting besides a pocket star. Have you ever done that? Have you done anything remotely like that? Tooling around in Earth orbit, hell, I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of laser sail protocol.”
“No,” Bertram admitted, his voice betraying a slight quaver.
“Well, I’ll educate you. Out here in the real universe, sila’a have a special protocol, see? Called laser sail protocol. You log your request with the star, and if there are no competing demands then its entire energy output is focused in a laser beam, which does not drop off fast as you move away. In fact, it tracks your sail automatically, for hours if you need it to. Do you know how much speed you can build up that way? Would you care to guess?”
Bertram was hunching his shoulders now, looking suitably chastised. “I’m ... sorry, Bascal. You know more about this than I do, so if you’ve already worked it out, I ... apologize. How long will this trip take?”
“Actually, I haven’t worked it out,” the prince said, and burst out laughing.
There was a layer of wellstone film covering the entire planette, at an average depth of just over two meters. It was a lining of some kind: not only waterproof and shovel-proof but antimagnetic and stuff. Conrad figured the hard part would be getting it up and out of the planette. In fact, truthfully, he’d figured on that step being impossible, at least within the eight weeks remaining in their camp sentence. But Bascal had a lot of tricks up his sleeve; he went down into one of the holes, whispered something to the plasticky material at the bottom, and was presented with the wellstone’s programming interface.