Tabitha finally came through for us in early June. She found about a million dollars in DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) money, a few hundred thousand from DOE (Department of Energy), and we squeezed NASA BPP for the following half-funded year now. NASA In Space Transportation Program threw in about a million and a half and NASA Office of Space Science claimed if we could prove the energy collection system they'd throw in ten million dollars for a prototype. I found a few private investors locally and it looked like we had just enough to put together a warp drive flight demonstrator experiment. Provided that the Casimir energy collector scaled prototype worked, we would then be in the business of building a faster-than-light spacecraft.
We hired two cooperative education students, one graduate and one undergraduate. The plan was that the two students would work full-time one semester while attending classes part-time and vice versa the next semester. They were set up on opposite semesters so one of them would always be there full time. Al Rayburn was working on a Ph.D. in Aerospace engineering and was on part-time for the summer. Sara Tibbs was an undergraduate in physics with hopes of continuing on to a Ph.D. in cosmology or astrophysics.
As you can tell, the activity around the lab really picked up. I was e-signing time cards now for the pay period including July the fourth. We needed to have the scaled prototype done by mid July to meet schedules we sold to our benefactors and we hadn't even successfully tested the new design yet.
We also hired a clerical slash secretary slash everything else person. Johnny Cache (I'm serious—that's his name) came in and offered to do some maintenance on the front door after a thunderstorm blew a tree limb through it. The weird part is that there aren't any trees around the lab. Thunderstorms in the southeast are screwy that way.
Johnny never left—and he has proven to be priceless. Apparently he worked as a general contractor for the last eight or nine years and was laid off a few months ago. He went around the area doing odd jobs to pay the bills while he was looking for something more permanent. Once I found out that he was fluent in Spanish, Linux, HTML II, C+++, could type about eighty words a minute, and was a licensed subcontractor and a travel agent I grabbed him up.
It is hard to find a resume like that. He explained it easily though. His mom was first generation American. His grandmother brought her here from Mexico. I didn't ask if she was legal or not. Johnny said that he grew up on the Internet and computers were a hobby. His dad was a carpenter until he retired. Johnny learned the contractor profession from him. He and his wife became travel agents to earn extra money on the side. It all sounded logical enough to me.
Johnny was putting the finishing touches on the drywall of two new office areas that was previously useless storage space when Tabitha finally joined us. One of these offices was to be hers. She had convinced NASA that she needed to be here until it was time for mission training. We weren't quite sure anyway how we were going to get the spacecraft to orbit. Cart before the horse.
"Colonel, give me one more day and I'll be through painting your office," he assured Tabitha. It turns out that Johnny also spent four years in the Air Force. From the time they met Tabitha was never able to break him from using her rank.
"That'll be fine." She didn't have a lot of stuff to unpack anyway. Most of her things were still in boxes in her apartment living room floor.
Tabitha stuck her head in my office. "How are you?"
"Hey, when did you get here?" I was pleasantly surprised.
"I just got in. The new guy, Johnny? He said that my office won't be ready until tomorrow." She smiled and sat down on my couch. Offices really need a couch. I've spent many all-nighters working and catching catnaps every now and then on it. I've caught Jim and 'Becca on it a time or two also. Uh, I mean I caught them one at a time—not together—although I have recently noticed some chemistry going on there.
"How did it go in D.C.?" I asked.
"Not sure. But let's keep on plugging and figure out how to do the experiment. We'll get it flown somehow."
All of a sudden a crash—no, more like an explosion—came from the clean room. Then I heard Jim.
"Call 911!" he was screaming.
Tabitha and I bolted to the airlock door where we found Jim walking Rebecca to the kitchen. Her left arm from the elbow down was covered in blood and her hand was mangled severely and coated with glass fragments. She was shaking but not making a sound. When the cold water hit her hand she collapsed to the floor.
Johnny came around the corner, "What the hell was tha—" He fainted when he saw Rebecca's hand. Obviously, medic isn't one of the things on his resume. Tabitha put a cushion from one of the chairs under 'Becca's head. I immediately propped her feet up and held her arm over her head as well.
"We gotta stop this bleeding now!" Jim screamed.
"Calm down Jim!" Tabitha barked. "Get the first-aid kit!"
"Doc, we never replaced it after we lost it in Tsali when we went mountain biking up there, remember!" Jim looked frantic.
"Then get me a couple of towels. Fast!"
Johnny came to, "What can I do to help?"
"Go get the car and pull it around front." I told him. Looking back at 'Becca's hand once the blood flow had slowed some, I realized that her ring finger was missing and there were hundreds of shards of glass sticking out of her arm. The missing finger wasn't bleeding that badly, but the ugly gouges that the glass had made were bleeding profusely. I looked at Tabitha. She saw and only nodded back at me. Jim returned with the towels.
"Jim hold her arm up like this! I'll be right back." I grabbed a sandwich bag out of the cabinet and headed for the clean room.
There was nothing left of the vacuum chamber and there were glass fragments all around where it used to be.
"What the hell happened in here?!" After a minute or so I found her finger inside the remains of the vacuum chamber glove. It had been severed cleanly, most likely by a large piece of glass. I held the bottom of the sandwich bag and turned it inside out so my hand was on the inside (or outside rather) of the bag. I picked up the finger and turned the bag right side out and zipped it.
By the time I returned Tabitha had 'Becca's arm wrapped in the towels and 'Becca had regained consciousness. She was calm, everthing considered—she was probably in shock. Jim on the other hand, was nuts. They were getting her upright and on her way to the car.
"We're close enough to the hospital that we can have her there in ten minutes or less," I told them. Johnny was apparently out in the car waiting. I found the twelve-pack cooler under the sink and ran to the refrigerator. Once I was sure there was enough ice in the cooler I placed the sandwich bag in it and closed it up. I also grabbed my laptop on the way out.
"Johnny get us to the hospital safely. You understand me?"
"No problem, I just don't want to see the blood," Johnny replied.
I sat in the front and Tabitha, Jim, and 'Becca were in the back seat. We made 'Becca lie down with her head in Tabitha's lap and her feet in Jim's. Jim continued to hold her arm up. 'Becca was fairly catatonic.
I popped open my laptop, pulled up my duckbill antenna, and logged onto the Internet. I punched in the Huntsville Emergency Room online service. I adjusted the camera lens of my laptop to see me. A person wearing scrubs appeared on the other end and asked how they could help. After explaining the situation and putting 'Becca in the camera's field of view they took us a little more seriously. I told him our ETA was about fifteen minutes tops.