After a few hours of Moon base design we decided to assign individual action items and go do them. We mutually decided that the move to the lunar surface would be priority second only to the development of the MWMs. Tabitha instilled in each of us the reality of the situation and that the Lunar Base would be a great idea and we needed to be there to hide from the Chinese if they have warp field detectors like ours. We all realized that six MWMs wouldn't be enough to keep the Chinese from developing further warp weapons. Actually, one of the bright analysts about eighteen floors above us had completed a study showing that we needed at least twelve well-placed simultaneous strikes to completely remove the Chinese infrastructure. One really big one would do, but we would risk the onset of greenhouse phenomena and God only knows what other types of global ecological nightmares. Carefully planned "surgical" strikes would be better. So, we needed to be out of reach of their missiles, and detection, soon. It would take us at least another year and a half to build that many MWMs. In the meantime, we would be sitting ducks at the mercy of our modified National Missile Defense system, unless our Chinese counterparts have a smart guy like Al to realize that they don't need launch vehicles. Then there would be no defense. This war was only going to be won by completely removing our enemy's ability to make war or by some miraculous diplomacy. Since neither side was admitting that there was a war to begin with, diplomacy seemed like a very big stretch.
Sara had asked me earlier why I thought the Chinese were attacking us. I told her a story that a friend of mine is so fond of telling about the Chinese business world. The story goes like this.
Back in the early nineteen nineties the Chinese government announced that they were going to open their borders to American businesses with hopes of moving China into the world market place. Once China had opened their doors, American businessmen rushed to the airports and headed off to China hoping to be the first to get a foothold on a billion new consumers. Well, these businessmen spent the first few days meeting their Chinese counterparts while being wined and dined and wining and dining some themselves. After a few weeks of this continued and none of these businessmen had even talked business yet, they began to start pressuring their hosts to discuss business opportunities. The response they got was that they were welcome to stay and enjoy themselves as long as they wanted. However, China hadn't needed to do business with the Western world or anybody else for that matter for thousands of years. So why should they be in a hurry to conduct business now? Needless to say most of these businessmen came home with their tails dragging and nothing to show for their huge trip expenses. That was more than twenty years ago and there are still no large western businesses based in China.
The Chinese falsely believe that they don't need the world and that they are a "chosen people." Well they sure needed the Russians to upgrade their current military. And it was real nice of former President Clinton to give them the American guidance, navigation, and control technologies required to steer the rocket that launched the warp bomb into orbit that killed fifty million American citizens. Oh wait; Clinton didn't give the missile technology away. He got a big campaign contribution in return didn't he? That's okay. I'm sure he is "feeling the pain" of those poor souls in Colorado just as he did for the boys that had to run the "Mogadishu Mile" back in the early nineties.
Oh well, I digressed and Sara was four at the time and had no idea what the "Mogadishu Mile" was. Well, I'm sure that Tabitha and I won't forget it, fellows. That is one of the reasons we aren't going to back down now. If the Chinese wanted to be diplomatic, they wouldn't have destroyed fifty million people without saying, "Give up or else!" The ironic part here is that they did need the rest of the world just as they needed the Russians before. They needed the Americans to develop warp drive for them to steal.
"Now I don't want it misunderstood," I told Sara. And by this time the whole gang had gathered around my soapbox. "I have many Chinese friends. There are no quarrels I have with any people. That is, until they let their government do something as hideous as this. You can argue that it's likely that most of the Chinese people have no idea that these events are even occurring. Hell, most of them are living peasants' lives. But, does that make them innocent? Should the people be held accountable for the actions of their government? At least on some level, yes. Perhaps the outcome of this war will change China, America, the World, and our views on how things should be. We'll see. One of the biggest problems we had back in Gulf War II is that we would never hold the people accountable for their hideous government and the crazy factions that arose during the war. That is why that war dragged on and didn't seem to have a decisive end. This war must, it will, have a decisive end. We had better make sure we are on the winning side when it's over. The only thing that bothers me is why now? For thousands of years China was enough for China. Why did they feel they needed to take over the world, now, so aggressively at this very moment? Doesn't make sense to me. But we'll stop them anyway!"
CHAPTER 18
Tabitha had put in the requisition to construct the "town" in a small lake area in a very large state park in Georgia. When the time came a forest fire would overtake the region. That is, after we yanked the town, trees, lake, bees, and all right out of the Earth. Tabitha hired a few ecologists and biologists to develop a closed system of plant and animal life. As far as these university types knew, this was just another "white collar welfare program." Pork, as it is referred to in political circles.
Jim and I went about designing a real-time modifiable warp field generator. This took several different sets of misshapen coils. The final product design reminded me of the old stellarator systems I worked on back in undergraduate school. The stellarators were really weird arrangements of electromagnets that were used to create tight fields. Plasmas would be captured in these fields. We would then pinch the fields even tighter with hopes that we could spark the fusion process. We were never very successful at creating a fusion generator back then. My understanding is that we're not much closer now, but I have to admit that I haven't really paid attention to that field (ha! pardon the pun) of physics in many years.
At any rate, we did create a modifiable warp field. Our new generator would allow us to modify the outer or Van den Broeck bubble simply by adjusting parameters on a three-dimensional graphic display. We soon realized that we could also modify the flat space region between the warp pole and zero. Flat space would mean no gravity or free fall. Jim and I figured out a way to create a slight curve in the so-called flat region so that we could have a one-gee environment inside the vessel, building, or whatever it was, that we planned to warp. In other words, we could build a spacecraft that had artificial gravity. That would be damned convenient. Since we could modify the gravity anywhere, we could ensure that there would be one gee environment on Moon Base 1. That way long mission duration to the base wouldn't be physically detrimental to the, uh I guess, astronauts.
Upon completion of the new warp field generator design, we sent blueprints to manufacturing a few floors up. The word we got back from them was that they would have it finished in a few days. I had yet to visit the machine shop upstairs, but those guys were on the ball. I hoped that some of them would volunteer to go to the Moon with us.