Eagle and Kat (Kinsella Universe Book 8) Read online

It was a cross both of them bore. To Kat's parents she was Kitty, a name Kat loathed. Her given name was Kathleen, which she tolerated. His name was James, but his parents had called him Jimmy since he had been a baby. In spite of repeated entreaties from both of them, their parents refused to give up their pet names for their babies. Even when they were sixteen years old.

  "I get the message, Kitty," Jim said.

  "Click the button, idiot!"

  He laughed and clicked the mouse button.

  The image on the screen had obviously been taken with a HD TV camera. The Volkswagen sat in what looked to be the parking lot of a college campus. The VW shifted and started lifting straight up. The camera lifted to follow it, then there were various zooms, attempting to keep tracking the VW. The cameraman wasn't very good, hadn't practiced enough, and soon the VW was gone.

  "Well, it looks real," Jim said, trying to keep his voice neutral.

  "Back, next button," Kat commanded.

  He did as bid. This time the view was focused on the small group of people again, including the cameraman, focused on the VW. The picture trembled, and the view changed to blue nothing as the VW went up. The camera moved, panning down and out the window.

  The ground grew more and more distant. In about ten minutes, it was clear the VW was now outside of the atmosphere. Jim was getting a little antsy when the picture went dark for a few seconds, then the camera was looking down on the moon from several hundred kilometers above the surface. Another blink and they were a couple of kilometers above the surface, and then the VW settled onto the surface.

  It was clear from the video that the VW was being maneuvered to land in a clear space.

  Jim looked at Kat. "Explain this to me."

  "The first rational thing you've said in a while," Kat agreed.

  "You haven't gone into math like I have."

  No one, Jim thought sourly, went into math like Kat did. She read everything she could about math. On her advice, however, he had done some reading of his own. He had a pretty good background in math–you needed that when you dealt with celestial mechanics.

  "You've had some relativity theory, plus a smattering of other stuff," she said.

  "Yes," he agreed, not sure what her point was.

  "I'll keep this simple. These two guys, Benko and Chang, are graduate students at Caltech, working on their doctorates. They were trying to detect frame dragging on a local scale, using a gas turbine engine. They'd made some modifications to the turbine blades...basically they put some printed nanoscale circuits on the blades, circuits that allowed them to create some very tight, very small, magnetic vortices. They wanted to see if they could detect any relativistic effects."

  Jim nodded, although for the life of him, he doubted that the experiment could possibly work.

  "These two guys, Benko is a thinker and Chang is a doer. Benko grabs an idea and runs with it. Chang is my kind of guy. A hardware geek; he makes things work. Together, their IQ approximates yours. They don't get close to mine."

  It was an old argument, and one that had been settled amicably long before: Kat was the smartest person on the planet.

  "I'll make a long story short. They found their relativistic effect, but they weren't smart enough to know it when they saw it. They were waiting in line to order pizza and talking about it when Professor Kinsella overheard them. She was curious and went and looked."

  Kat tugged softly on Jim's shoulder and he turned to face her. "Relativity. We know gravity can affect electromagnetic radiation. Gravity lenses, bending of light, orbital precession, that sort of thing. Slam dunk, right?"

  "Yes," Jim answered, "except Einstein and everyone else since hasn't been able to put big G and E into the same equation."

  "That's not entirely true, but it's close enough. No one has found a direct relation. Physicists and mathematicians are like the Christians looked for the Holy Grail back in the Middle Ages. They have sought after the GUT, the Grand Unified Theory. Unsuccessfully. String theory has been a contender now for nearly thirty years, but they still haven't been able to get it to work."

  Kat gestured at the computer. "Until now. Stephanie Kinsella wrote the equations that relate them, Eagle. What Benko and Chang did with their gas turbine was to create a point gravity source at a distance from the turbine. Stephanie Kinsella and her students found out how to manipulate the turbine RPMs, the magnetic vortices and all of that to increase and decrease the size of the gravity well that was being created, and where it was in relation to the turbine."

  He laughed. "In that case, the first thing that would have happened is that the point source would have attracted the Earth, and the Earth would have attracted the point source and the one would head for the other."

  She punched Jim in the solar plexus. Not hard, but enough to get his attention. "You don't understand this, okay? You are playing catch up. Keep on playing catch up, that's a good thing. However, don't try to get ahead of yourself unless you are thinking about it and asking questions, not making stupid statements about things you know nothing about.

  "They aren't true point gravity sources, the points are just very, very small," she said. "Remember the inverse square law?"

  Jim nodded, he remembered of course. The cornerstone of celestial dynamics.

  "Well, let's just say you have to create an arbitrarily very deep gravity well to get noticed because of it. While the gravity source isn't a true point, Professor Kinsella posits it as smaller in size than an electron. Probably by a couple of orders of magnitude smaller. The inverse square law breaks down on anything that tiny, and it starts being an inverse cube law.

  "It all goes back to relativity and frame of reference. To the point gravity source, the Earth is about as far away as a star in the Andromeda galaxy is to Earth. Something a few feet away, though, is right around the corner so to speak."

  Jim tried to wrap his mind around the concept and came up short.

  "Okay, you want me to think," he told her. Kat nodded. "Let me ask you to think as well. What if this is all faked?"

  She laughed. "Eagle, you're still not thinking. You didn't ask the important question."

  "What question is that?" Jim replied.

  "Right this second, you and I are sitting in your bedroom. Where is Stephanie Kinsella right this second?"

  Jim shook his head. "Caltech?"

  Kat grinned at him. The Cheshire Cat had a grin like that...and Kat knew it. "At 5 AM our time this morning Stephanie Kinsella, Benko, and Chang and sundry others from her lab met with the President of the United States. When I left to come over here, they were still in the meeting."

  "The president?"

  "Yep, the man himself. The president of the entire country. And why is that? Because Stephanie Kinsella sent a preprint of a journal article to all of the leading mathematicians and scientists a couple of weeks ago. They went to bat for her with the administration."

  She turned again to the computer, this time going to her web site. She typed a few things, and then waved at the screen. "Read this, Eagle. This is one of the things she has in reserve, if those NASA screwballs try to mess with her."

  Jim read what was obviously a proposal. Then he read it again. Then he laughed.

  "You think she's going to really propose this?"

  "I'm sure of it. I've hacked into her user space at Caltech. I'm pretty sure she can't detect it, much less trace it back to me."

  Jim reached out and touched her cheek with his fingertips. "Hold still," he told her. "Trust me and hold still."

  She did, her eyes wide. He closed the distance and kissed her on the lips. Solidly. Thoroughly.

  When he pulled back, Kat sighed. "Now I have a better understanding why so many girls get talked out of their britches."

  "Yeah. I have two questions for you. Are you 1 million percent positive about this?"

  "Oh yeah! The way I want to pay my dues is by doing."

  Jim smiled. "Will you promise me something?"

  "In exchange for what?"

  "Earlier, you threatened to leave. Just walk away from me. I want a pledge on your part. That you will never again have a hairbrained idea like this that we don't talk over in detail–together–first, before we reach any conclusions. Oh, and yeah, don't ever threaten me like that again."

  "Eagle, I admire you. You know that. You are more of a doer than most. Still, I'm not going to be held back."

  "You said your role model, this Professor Kinsella, has made mistakes. You said you've made mistakes."

  "Okay, I said that," Kat admitted cautiously.

  "You want to change our long term plans a little, and toss out the short and medium term plans entirely. Do you think it's right for you to do that, without putting me in the loop? That maybe dumping a great, huge load of bricks on top of my head isn't the right way to go about discussing that magnitude of change?

  "Or," Jim said into the silence that followed, "the bottom line: are we equal partners or not?"

  Kat sighed. "Like I said, I make mistakes."

  "Well, now I want you to trust me, like you wanted me to trust you."

  "How?" she asked.

  "Because, love of my life, you have messed up. You made a mistake."

  "I'll give you a pass on the last couple of phrases because of the first."

  "You want to steal money from your father, you want me to steal a plane from my father."

  "That seems like the easiest way," Kat agreed.

  Jim shook his head. "That's because you're letting your 'Let's get this done now!' goal trump the 'What's the best way to achieve this?' goal."

  "You have a better way?"

  Jim tapped the report on the screen. "This. She talks about how she's going to license these turbines to interested parties."

  "And she's
going to end up richer than Bill Gates and all the other billionaires on the planet," Kat said in agreement. "Those guys, Benko and Chang, each have two and a half times her participation. They will make the Sultan of Brunei look like a piker."

  "Maybe," Jim said.

  "Kat, I know you. You wouldn't be giving me my heart's desire, a spaceship, without having something you want to do with it. That is the critical thing here. What am I supposed to do with the spaceship you're going to build? If what you say is true, in a couple of months, half of humanity is going to be in space. My getting to orbit will, very quickly, be meaningless."

  She looked away. "We're back to balls again."

  "How is that, Kat?"

  "We're actually back to babies and risk."

  "Again, I don't understand," Jim said.

  "Half of humanity isn't going to be in Earth orbit for the simple reason that they can't afford to buy an airplane that can be modified to go that high. Or build something designed to go to space. You said it, Eagle. Millions, tens of millions of dollars, are going to be the entry fee. And while there are a lot of people who can do that, and a lot of companies and governments, it won't be half of humanity. Probably not even 1 percent of humanity.

  "And that's just to pay for the first step. In just a few years, we're going to be zipping around the solar system. While not everyone can afford to spend millions on a single aircraft, there are lots of companies that can spend hundreds of millions on fleets of aircraft, and that's going to be the future.

  "The question becomes why go and where to go?"

  Jim contemplated that. "You're saying 'sense of wonder' and 'because it's there' aren't going to be lasting motivations."

  "That's right. People are going to want to make money from it. Where and how?"

  Jim contemplated Kat's answer. "Well, carefully, Jupiter or Saturn. We can dip down, get close, and haul away megatons of hydrogen. We could probably afford slow orbits, long enough to process that hydrogen, pulling out the deuterium and tritium. Hydrogen to fuel most existing industrial processes, deuterium to fuel fusion reactors for larger power consumption. What do Professor Kinsella's spaceships use for fuel?"

  Kat laughed. "The VW used bottled propane and bottled oxygen to power the gas turbine. The turbine had a generator take off to provide the small amount of electricity needed to run things. Controls and the magnets mainly.

  "What can you use to spin up a turbine? Just about anything you want. Electricity would work, fuels would work, so long as you brought your own oxidizer to work in space. Eventually, if the science pans out, you could burn deuterium or tritium in a fusion power plant to produce electricity to spin turbines however fast you want them to go. The sky is literally not the limit."

  She paused for a second, and then asked, "What do you plan to do?"

  "We have a limited window of opportunity," Jim said. "Once my father hears about this, he's going to want to license the technology himself. What we have to do is get in, get him on board and working on the ship, before he does that. Instead of stealing stuff, we get my father to pay for it."

  "My parents are going to go ballistic if I drop out of school. So will yours," Kat warned. "If he does this, it's going to be him, his company, and his people working on it. Not us. Not ever, us."

  "Preemption, preemption," Jim told her. He tapped the computer screen. "You can't build a ship like this, because your Professor Kinsella would know you stole her designs and come down on us like a ton of bricks. My father would go to her for licenses, not us."

  "We have to come up with a better mousetrap," Kat agreed.

  "And now I'm back to square one," he said. "You must have been thinking about what to do and where we want to go to do it."

  "Do you understand fractional distillation?" Kat asked.

  Jim blinked. "You carefully heat a mixture of various liquids with different boiling points. You can separate out the various fractions, one at a time by slowly increasing the heat."

  "Exactly," Kat agreed. "Once upon a time, Eagle, the solar system didn't look at all like it does now. The sun was a lot cooler at first. It's now been around a long time. You could describe the solar system as the result of a four and a half billion year run of fractional distillation."

  "Okay," he said. "I understand that the composition of bodies changes as you get further from the sun."

  "Planets...and the asteroids. The asteroids are what are important here. You saw the pictures Magellan took at Saturn of Titan? The dark areas?"

  "They were expecting lakes or oceans of hydrocarbons and found well...they aren't sure what they found. Anyway, it's a little chilly for swimming out there, but yeah, I remember them."

  "Eagle, those dark areas are hydrocarbons, mostly ammonia and methane. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon...all of the lighter elements abound in the outer system. Those are the building blocks of life. A little closer in, actually in the asteroid belt, there is a mixture of those and the heavier stuff. Some of the volatiles like what are found on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, a lot of rock like what is found on the inner planets like the Earth and Mars."

  "The best of both worlds," Jim whispered.

  "Exactly. The best of both worlds. Eagle, imagine a rock far enough from the sun that it still has quantities of water ice and organic carbon compounds. Yet it also has lots of silicon and iron-based rock. Imagine hooking up to that rock and extracting the raw materials. The sun is a long ways off, but there are ways of concentrating additional sunlight. Eventually nuclear or thermonuclear power, maybe.

  "No one likes having a mine or smelter down the road. No one likes having a refinery over the next hill," Kat explained. "Put them all on a rock a good billion or so kilometers from Earth and even Greenpeace and the other environmentalists are going to leave you alone."

  They both chuckled.

  "Like I said, we go out there, find ourselves a suitable rock. Drive a stake in it and tell the universe it belongs to you, me, and the kids. Then we go to work."

  Jim thought about it. "Where do balls come in? Kids?"

  She looked at him gravely. "Jim, what is the leading cause of death among NASA astronauts?"

  He blinked. "Old age."

  "Right now, it's tied," Kat said. "Half of them have died in accidents of one sort or another, the other half died of complications of age. These days the numbers are trending towards old age, because hardly anyone goes into space any more. Heart attacks, cancer, and the like.

  "I like to think I'm smart, Jim, but I never imagined you having as big a fit as you did. I'm sure that there are going to be surprises out on our rock. Hell, just having a baby...it's not like there's going to be a doctor on call."

  He looked at her for a long time. "So we have new long-term goals, new short-term and new medium-term goals," he mused.

  She grinned. "Eagle, I tell you true, I promise to talk about things with you. But the rock and babies are medium-term goals."

  He blinked. "And the long term?"

  "Long term is the stars, Eagle. Think about that point gravity source for a second. It's attached to your ship. The ship moves towards it...moving the gravity source. It's like falling downhill, all the time."

  Jim nodded. "Yeah I figured that out for myself."

  "Did you figure that as long as the center of gravity of the ship is within the point source's frame of reference, that it doesn't matter how massive the ship is, it will still fall at the same rate, because the point source is going to be millions of times stronger? That you can build a ship that weighs a hundred tons, a thousand tons, a million tons or ten gazillion tons...but a gravity well is a gravity well is a gravity well."

  Jim blinked in astonishment. "That has to break every single physical law there is."

  "Nope, Kinsella has discovered the get-out-of-physics-free card. Now contemplate something else. Velocity is a function of acceleration over a period of time."

  Jim furrowed his brow. "I don't get it. That's about as basic an equation as there is."

  "So, how long at an acceleration of say, ten meters per second, will it take to reach three hundred million meters per second?"

  "Two years," he said, doing the rough calculation in his head. "A year to accelerate, and a year to slow back down." He paused, and then said what came into his mind first. "And going faster than that isn't possible because that's the speed of light."

  "Except you agree you'd be close to the speed of light in a year?"