"Uh, no, I, I don't know. Maybe he mentioned it. Look, if you are tired, just go home."
"Are you kidding? And miss seeing if this thing works or not? You gotta be nuts. What, are you trying to get rid of me? Do you want me to go home?"
I will never understand women. I guess Rebecca just needed to complain about something. She is like that. She shook her long black hair and rolled it back up under her paper hair hat. "Well?"
I replied, "Skip it. Let's just go have a look, shall we."
She led me through the rat maze to the clean room and vacuum chamber area. Jim came through the airlock with a blue paper outfit on. I never could get used to those damn things, but I began putting on a similar garment. As I was putting on my paper slippers I asked, "Jim, is it ready?"
"You're not going to believe what's in there. I think we've done it," he replied
"If you two have, then we're going to stop and make sure you both graduate by May. That only gives us about two to three months to finish writing your dissertations and defend them and fill out all the paperwork."
"Neither Jim or I have enough credits yet. We're both two classes short. How could we?" Rebecca objected.
"Well let's worry about one thing at a time. Okay, Jim, let's have a look."
I could spend a while talking about what I saw here, but it would be technical and not real exciting to you. Or maybe it would if you are the techie geeky sort like me. Let's just say that the damn thing worked. There was a little box ten nanometers long on a side (one nanometer is one billionth of a meter by the way) and inside it were two moving pistons. One of them was attached to the other in such a way that the Casimir effect pushed on one and pulled on the other, then vice versa. This way the plates were never allowed to be pushed all the way together. Attached to the outer side of the box was probably the tiniest generator the human race had ever built. From the generator was a wire so small you could only see it with an electron microscope that was attached to a larger wire, which led to a microvolt meter. The resistance in the larger wire loaded the generator, allowing us to measure the power dissipated by it. We measured more than twenty times just to be sure. Each time we got one microwatt of power constantly coming from the generator. Energy for free right out of the spacetime! Now, mind you, this is in no way violating the law of conservation of energy. The nanodevices simply transfer from the vacuum energy via the Casimir effect to the nanogenerators. What an amazing concept. This could put OPEC right out of business. About time!
Of course, this was only one microwatt. The first step was to scale the thing up. Also, we had spent about two and half million dollars just to get this one little box. Of course, now that we knew how to build one, we could do it for say fifty bucks or so. A full up version would require 1026 of them. Yikes! Way too expensive. But Jim reassured me that it would cost no more to sputter a hundred thousand of these things than it would to sputter one. After some arguing and a lot of cursing, I agreed with him. Rebecca backed him up. So, with some tweaking, we had the energy for a warp drive.
All I need to do now is figure out how to actually do the warp! I thought. So close! So close.
CHAPTER 4
We discussed the next step for at least two more hours. At one point I reached across the table to grab a pencil and something in my side moved too much making a popping noise. I grimaced and winced and cursed as I decided the pencil could be damned and stay right where it was.
Rebecca looked at me. "Are you all right? Maybe you ought to go home."
"Don't worry about me," I said through clenched teeth.
"I think she's right, Anson." Jim looked concerned.
"Okay, who am I to argue with the likes of you two? Let's all go home. Sleep in tomorrow and we'll get together Friday night. I'll call tomorrow and have the two of you retroactively registered in two special topics classes. We will talk Friday about our next step. How's that?"
Rebecca looked over at Jim and frowned. "Could we just wait and talk about it at the grad student cookout Saturday, instead? I already have plans."
"Oh crap! I forgot about that. Can you two come over Saturday morning and help out with that?"
"You already asked us once," Jim and Rebecca simultaneously chimed in.
"Oh yeah, I forgot." I paused, "What did you say?"
They laughed. "Your mother was right about you. You would forget your head if it wasn't attached to you."
"Yeah," I said. "So, Saturday then?"
"Suits me." Jim shrugged.
"Hey, I'm just along for the ride. Whatever you say." Rebecca smiled cute as a button. That is the only way to describe her. Not that she is a supermodel, just cute—the kind of cute that makes the human race go round.
"Great. You two go home and get some sleep."
Ring. I rolled over and looked at the phone. Ring. "The machine can get it. I ain't movin'," I said. Ring. "Hello, this is Anson. I can't come to the phone right now, but if you will leave a name a number and a message I will get back to you. Beeeep!"
"Hello, Dr. Clemons this is Colonel Ames . . ."
You have never seen a man with busted ribs move so fast. I grabbed my side with my left hand, rolled hard to the right, sat up on the side of the bed, and grabbed the phone.
"Hello, uh, hang on a minute, let me turn this thing off." I slapped the machine hard. Composing myself, "Hello Tabitha, how are you?"
"Fine thanks."
"What can I do you for?" I said thinking I was being cool. I'm sure I wasn't and I'm sure she didn't think I was either.
"Uh, well. I wanted to talk to you about the meeting at Goddard. You left early. I hope you're okay?"
"What me, never better," I lied. Rolling over so fast really hurt.
"Well, good. I was hoping to come see you and talk for a while about what you can do with the funds we have left for your project. I'd also like to catch up on what you've been doing."
"Okay, sounds cool. When are you coming down?"
"What do you mean?"
"When will you be in Huntsville?"
"I'm sorry. I am in Huntsville. We talked about this on the plane, don't you remember?"
"Uh, no."
"Oh."
"How long are you here?"
"My plane leaves Tuesday next week. I have some things to do with Space Camp on Monday so I'm staying over the weekend. Could we meet sometime between now and Tuesday?"
"I'm open all day Friday."
"Are you okay?"
"I think so. Why?" She sounded confused.
"Today is Friday."
I looked at my watch. Sure enough it was Friday. I'd been asleep for nearly two days; no wonder I was so thirsty. I shook my head to clear it. "Maybe these painkillers are wearing me down."
"We could do this some other time. You can call me when you feel better."
"Hold on!" I pleaded. "Listen, do you like hamburgers and hot dogs?"
"I guess. Why?"
"Well, I'm hosting the spring semester graduate student cookout at my house Saturday evening. You're here anyway. Why don't you come over and join us? I'm sure the students would love to meet a big famous astronaut like you. We could talk then. What do you say?" It took a little more conniving and goading but I finally convinced her to come to the cookout—for the students, of course. I had a lot to do to get ready. I was now a whole day behind schedule.
First, I had to take care of Jim and Rebecca's classes. I called up Jan. She really runs the graduate school, not the dean. All he does is sign stuff when she tells him to. After a few minutes we decided that if both of them took Physics 804: Topics in General Relativity and Physics 798: Special Topics in Vacuum Energy Physics that they would be able to graduate. If they defended their dissertations on time, that is. By the way, there is no such class as Physics 804 or 798. Oops! Guess I will just have to teach it myself then and make up a curriculum for them. The Graduate Handbook allows for such things. The students then just have to write papers or take exams or something. I can do that no problem.