The Great Escape Chapter 18, Part 9 of 9

The Great Escape
Chapter 18, Part 9 of 9

"You've just heard me say I'm married."

"I know, but I've seen your husband in his video film, and I'm much better looking than him."

"That's true. All right, you can buy me dinner."

"Excellent. Do you mind if my wife comes along? She'd be thrilled to meet you, especially if you can play Bridge or sing. She's quite the social organizer."

"I can do neither, I'm afraid. Why do you want to bring your wife to our assignment?"

"Another obvious reason: if I can have dinner with one beautiful woman, how much better will it be with two?"

Danielle laughed.

"Your husband is also invited, of course," Paul added. "We'd both like to meet him. We enjoyed his video film very much. Eight o'clock. Cassie won't mind if we talk shop."

As she and Roger dressed for dinner, Danielle said:

"I give you permission to flirt with Cassie tonight."

"Whose Cassie, and why would I want to flirt with her?"

"She's Paul Kessler's wife, and she'll be the most gorgeous woman you've ever met."

"Really, what does she look like?"

"I've no idea."

"Then how do you know she's so gorgeous?"

"Because Paul Kessler is the most gorgeous man I've ever met, and, as a rule, wives are better-looking than their husbands."

"That's true. All right, I'll flirt with her as you wish. I only hope she's not some brainless actress or model."

"Oh, don't pretend you're not shallow! But even if she's a brainless model, you won't be disappointed. She'll be elegant in the latest fashion, and though she'll have a perfect complexion, she'll use a tiny bit of make-up to make herself seem human, like the rest of us."
"It sounds like you're the one who should flirt with her."

"I would, except Paul wants to talk shop."

When they arrived at the revolving restaurant at the top of the Arts Tower, Paul stood up to greet them and make the introductions.

It was Danielle who was disappointed. Cassie was a plain woman. Not ugly, but ordinary-looking, with mousy-brown hair that she hadn't bothered to have tinted, an average kind of face with indifferent brown eyes, a nose slightly too big, a slightly receding jaw, and a mouth slightly too small. But her teeth were good, and her gown was beautiful. Black and strapless, it showed off the shoulders of a fit and athletic woman.

Danielle had no time to wonder why the handsome man she knew had an ordinary-looking wife because they ordered drinks, and Paul immediately began talking about the court case.

"We've hit a snag," he said. "As you know, Hyper Star Japan applied to its local patent office for a judgment on the motor, and the case is still being dragged on. Six months ago, I asked the Celetaris patent office for a judgment on your engine, but they contacted the Japanese office before starting work."

"Of course, the patent offices have to agree with each other, so the Celetaris office told me today that they've agreed to wait for the decision of the Japanese office, which leaves us exactly where we were. I'm sorry."

Danielle took this disappointing news philosophically.

While Danielle and Paul talked about the lawsuit, Cassie turned to Roger and asked him about his work.

"I enjoyed your video-film very much, Roger, and your book. I agree with your central thesis, but one detail leaves me with a question."

"I'm glad you liked them," he said, impressed that anyone knew his book and film. "What's your question?"

"On New Exeter, you interviewed Mayor Grandly, but why didn't you answer her when she said you obscured the difference between a democracy and a republic?"

"You're right. I picked it up afterward, but my producer thought it was too technical a point and edited it out."

"So, what is the answer?"

"Well, republic and democracy mean the same thing, 'rule of the people,' so the difference is conventional: whether politicians are representatives who rule in the people's stead or delegates who perform the people's will. But the rule of the majority can be just as tyrannical as any other political system."

"I see, so the more important question is the difference between a limited government and an unlimited one."

"Exactly! You understand very well. The biggest mistake those who invented limited government made was to call it 'democracy,' which suggests majority rule. Still, they meant a system where a government can be removed peacefully because it is subject to the same laws as the people."

"Citizen legislators. So, what should our system have been called?"

"Constitutionalism, liberalism, individualism, capitalism. Any of them will do. They all imply limited self-government."

"So, will your next book focus on the real meaning of 'democracy'?"

"The one after next. I'm working on a history of the outworld settlements of the Anglo Sphere."

"I look forward to watching it."

"So how is the air-suit going?" Paul asked Danielle.

"I've also hit a snag. I know why Nakatani Corporation only makes the gauntlet and the air jellies but not a complete air suit."

"Danielle is making a suit that will turn a man into a Superman, letting him fly and lift fifty times his weight," Paul explained to Cassie.

"Really? How does it work?" she asked.

Danielle explained:

"The suit is supposed to work by compressing the air around it into a solid force, which can be used either to move external things, like the gauntlet, or the man in the suit, like the air jellies."

"I've used the air jellies," Cassie said, "and I've seen the gauntlet in action."

"I thought it was a simple engineering problem to make the suit," Danielle said. "Merely a case of miniaturization. I even had an insight, I believed, but it seemed impossible. The beam-emitters are smaller than the wavelength of the microwaves and cannot be used to focus the beams.

The air suit needs an endless source of compressed air that is much more powerful than we can get from free-falling, even at maximum velocity, or it needs a fuel cell heavier than a man because most of the microwave energy is lost as waste heat."

"I see," Cassie said. "I suppose you're using the beams in phase to make a standing wave?"

"Yes, exactly. How did you know?"

"We do something like that in microwave surgery to burn away bad tissue within an organ or a bone. Normally, a microwave lance cuts through the tissue to get to a tumor, but if we don't want to damage an important organ, like the brain, we set up three microwave lances at the points of a triangle. We tune the wavelengths so that the microwaves are out of phase when they go through the healthy tissue but in phase where they cross within the tumor."

"Then we have as much power as we need to burn away bad tissue or cauterize the arteries that feed the tumor, giving the nanotechnology robots time to eat away the tumor."

Danielle had a revelation.

"Cassie ... you're not Cassie. You're Doctor Cassandra Leighton, the neurosurgeon! I'm so sorry I didn't recognize you. You invented that laser surgery technique. They built the medical center here for you!"

"For my team and me, yes. Don't worry; no one recognizes me when I'm not wearing my scrubs."

"But I blame Paul for not telling me who you were," Danielle said accusingly.

Paul only smiled, and Danielle had another revelation. She realized the depth of the man's pride in his wife and why he loved her. The most handsome man she knew, who could have any actress or model he wanted, genuinely loved a woman for her mind. She felt comforted by that and admired him more than ever.

"Can you not solve the problem, Danielle?" Paul asked, bringing her out of her reverie.

"No, but Roger will."

"I will?"

"Of course. It's your job. Whenever I'm stuck on a problem too difficult to solve, you always come up with the answer."

"Darling, that's absurd!"

"No, it's not. You solved the problem of communication through the hyperspace plume."

"I didn't, really," Roger modestly explained to the others. "I made a completely wrong suggestion but helped Danielle see the right answer."

"So do it again," Danielle said. "I bet you can."

"I bet I can't, but maybe it will help you to explain the problem to a simpleton. For example, if the problem is that the microwave energy is lost as a waste of heat, why can't you reflect the waves with mirrors?"

"Brilliant, Roger!" Cassie exclaimed. "It can even be self-governing: the compressed air can act like a mirage and focus the beams back on themselves!"

"I'm sorry, that won't work," Danielle said. "I've tried it. Energy dissipation is unavoidable because it takes more power to bounce the microwave beams off the compressed air than the energy it can reflect."

"What about the reflection boundary?" Roger asked.

Danielle smiled pityingly at her husband.

"What's the reflection boundary?" Cassie asked.

"It's a purely theoretical concept in hyperspace engineering and has nothing to do with actual reflections. Sorry, Roger. What made you think of it?"

"Jonathan Wright told me it's the point from which the plume is reflected, and you told me the plume consists of waves, so I thought it was waves reflecting on waves, which is what you need for the air suit."

"Oh, Darling! The one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other."

"Can you explain it to me?" Cassie asked.

"Of course. The main thing to understand about the hyperspace plume is that, in theory, it takes up neither space nor time, but in practice, it interacts with space and time, so the problem is how to calculate the interaction. The answer is an old idea from a quantum theory called 'absorber theory.' We say that the plume interacts with space-time using half-advanced and half-retarded light waves, where half the light waves travel into the future and half into the past. They almost completely cancel each other out at a point we call the 'reflection boundary.'"

"Those that don't cancel out tell us how long the plume lasted, so the time to the reflection boundary gives you the equivalent distance traveled in normal space."

Roger and Paul looked blank by now, but Cassie seemed to be following. Danielle continued:

"But the microwaves we want to focus outside the air-suit are all retarded waves and cannot be made to reflect off the air."

She stopped, staring ahead but unseeing, thinking hard.

"Unless," she said.

There was a pause.

"Unless what, Darling?" Roger asked, but she didn't answer. Danielle was in her own space, concentrating, oblivious to all around her, her brain fizzing along its unique pathways.

Roger smiled, took a small tablet computer from his jacket, and projected a blank page onto the glass tabletop. He put a stylus in her hand, and she automatically began writing.

He came prepared for these moments when Danielle's genius needed to be indulged.

She scribbled down equations and formulas, sometimes preferring to write rather than type. She made sketchy and symbolic diagrams alongside the equations, sometimes crossing them out or drawing circles around them, linking them to formulas and other diagrams.

Paul and Cassie kept quiet, fascinated by Danielle's degree of concentration, despite the background hubbub of the busy restaurant, until Roger said:

"We can talk. It won't disturb her now."

Ten minutes later, Danielle snapped out of it and continued precisely where she left off, saying:

"Unless we treat them as half-advanced waves and use Rosa's algorithm to predict where they will interfere with the waves focused on the compressed air."

She wondered why Roger seemed amused, and Paul and Cassie stared at her. She looked at the mathematics-filled page before her as if seeing it for the first time.

"Oh, sorry, did I miss anything?"

"Nothing important, Danielle," Paul said. "Did you get the idea down?"

She read over her page, nodding, re-calculating in her head.

"Yes, that's it," she said. "Roger did it again. Paul, I told you my husband's a genius, didn't I?"

"He's a fortunate man, Danielle."

"Nonsense. I'm the lucky one."

"We're both lucky men, Paul," Roger said. "You married a brain surgeon; I married a rocket scientist. Every man must envy us."

The women shared a look, a wifely kind of good-humored indulgence because, although it was nice to be appreciated, they weren't sure they wanted to be trophies.

"Roger, have I had dinner yet?" Danielle asked.

"Not yet, Darling. We've ordered it, but it has yet to arrive."

She was a little disappointed. Danielle always felt horny after intense brain activity and wanted to go home to have whatever kind of sex it was her husband's duty to perform that day of the week. However, she also decided she was hungry, so she settled down to enjoy the rest of the evening and leave work on the air-suit until later.

A week later, with computer models for the air suit thoroughly tested and working, Rosa was brought on board because her algorithm was the key to the energy-saving design. Danielle engaged a local sporting goods manufacturer to make a prototype.

Within a month, the first version of the air suit was ready for testing in the Engineering Department's largest wind tunnel. It worked fundamentally as a proof of concept, but it needed improvement.

Three months later, a fully working air suit was field-tested by a skydiver who jumped out of a hover jet at 1,000 feet. The suit worked perfectly, and he didn't need the parachute he also wore for safety, just in case.

More tests followed, and the day came, about a year after she first set out to make the circuit when the product was to be officially launched. Outdoor Trends, the manufacturer, brought the adventure sports news media, and Danielle's name got the science news media.

The launch was in Waterfall City, the adventure playground for tourists and Celetarans.

Danielle's project colleagues and some of her friends, including Cassie and Paul, came to watch the event.

Five stunt flyers stood on the curved Bridge across the thundering waterfall at a specially built platform, getting soaked but cheered on by a crowd of two hundred enthusiastic fans watching big screens on the banks. Thousands more watched news feeds all over the planet and even on other outworld settlements.

The five flyers turned on their grey full-body airsuits, lit with white piping along the arms, legs, neck, ankles, and waist. They waved to the crowd and took turns launching from a specially built platform, diving the half mile to the steaming lake below.

Cameras were on the suits, the Bridge, and boats in the lake.

The first jumper was at top speed before he was halfway down and engaged in the buoyancy setting, slowing down his descent. He fell to the water's surface, changed to horizontal motion, and skimmed over the lake at fifty miles an hour, producing a mare's tail of spray in his wake.

The second stuntman now jumped. He fell halfway before putting the compressed air he'd accumulated to good use, sending out jets from his arms and feet to take a spiral path down to the lake, then climbing back up again to the Bridge, where he hovered effortlessly.

Stuntman three was a woman. She dived straight down, neither slowing nor changing direction. She hit the lake at one hundred and twenty miles per hour, sending up a vast fountain of water, making a wave that rocked the boats gathered nearby in the lake to view the action.

A few hundred yards from where she entered the lake, she erupted and floated toward the Bridge, completely unharmed. This proved the suit's extraordinary resilience after an impact like hitting concrete.

The other stunt performers were equally impressive. Eventually, the five flew in formation back across the lake and up the waterfall in the Superman pose to fly over the Bridge and sport on the river between the city's two sides.

Danielle planned a surprise for Roger, Paul, and Herman. Three more suits were brought out, and Danielle, Rosa, and Cassie put them on.

The three women had secretly been practicing, starting in the wind tunnel and progressing to skydiving from hover jets. So it was first with surprise and then mixed apprehension and pride that Paul, Roger, and Herman watched their wives and girlfriends do the air suits and stand on the platform, ready to launch themselves into the air.

"It looks too dangerous," Roger said to Paul and Herman. "I can't bear to watch. Shall we go for a beer?"

Danielle heard as she was meant to and shouted, "Don't you dare!" before she turned, waved to the audience, and leaped off the platform, performing an elegant swallow dive.

Rosa went next. Not being a showoff, she jumped feet first.

Cassie was a showoff. She stood on the platform, sucking in the grandeur of the waterfall and the majesty of the lake far below. She shut her eyes to listen to the roar, breathing deeply, enjoying the splash of the torrent behind her. Then she turned around, smiled at the cameras, and executed a perfect backward dive with tuck and pike.

She waited until she nearly hit the lake before leveling out and skimming over the surface to where Danielle and Rosa were spinning circles, making a whirlpool.

The three women flew in formation back to the Bridge and beyond, climbing into the sky for a panoramic view of the lake, the river, the two sides of the city, and the forest upstream. It was glorious to fly just by holding out your arms and leaning in the right direction.

It was an outstanding success for the circuit technology, and its commercial success was bound to follow. Just as important, however, was that today's adventure sealed a friendship between Danielle, Cassie, and Rosa.

The three couples stayed in Waterfall City and dined together that night. However, the three women stayed up long after their menfolk went to bed, still finding new things to say about the experience, buoyed by the sheer exhilarating fun of the air suits.


To be continued