Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6) (8 page)

“Bein’ the boss shot my dog. Sometimes you have to make decisions that seem like they’re no win. Do you have
another
problem for me?”

Roger grinned, “Nope,
I’ve
got an opportunity.”

Ell closed her eyes
momentarily
, then opened them. “Power generation?”

Roger narrowed his, “Yesss… W
hat are you meaning by power generation?”

“Your black pipes in close solar orbit. You want to squirt water in one end and harvest steam out the other
end using
ports, yes?”

“Yeah! Did you have the same idea?”

“Kinda. T
here are issues though. You know that there is a velocity limitation to how fast stuff can pass through a port right?”

Roger smacked his
forehead, “Damn! And the steam
would
be flowing too fast
when it exited
the pipe
. R
ight?”

“
Right
.  Unless we have a really
large diameter
port for it to flow back through
at a lower velocity
, but then it’ll take a lot of power to energize the port.”

Brow furrowing,
Roger tilted his head back to stare up at the ceiling.
“Wait! We could use a heat transfer fluid, like
T
herminol.”
He brought his eyes back down to look at Ell.

“Heat transfer fluid?”

“Yeah,
a fluid
that wouldn’t boil at the temps we’re shooting for, say 340 degrees centigrade. Therminol is just one
brand
. We pump it through our black pipe in near solar orbit and back
here to earth
.
The transfer fluid
doesn’t
boil at those temps so it doesn’t
expand into steam
and there’s
no
increase in velocity. Once it comes back here hot, we run
the transfer fluid
through
a pipe in
a water tank. The water boils into steam and powers our electric generator.” He sat back up and lifted a finger,
frowning, then smiling,
“Then, instead of just exhausting the steam into the atmosphere and heating the earth, we cool it against a
second
heat transfer fluid
loop
that we’ve cooled by running it through a pipe way out in deep space.
That pipe radiates the heat away.
We condense our steam, don’t heat the planet and save ourselves the cost of buying more water!”

“Roger, that’s brilliant!”

“Oh! And… we don’t just sell steam for power
generation; we can use it for heat!
And
we can use the deep space pipe
s
for air conditioning! Holy cripes! Talk about energy conservation!
My God
, this could solve a
lot
of problems!
”

Ell jumped up and gave him a hug. “Way to go Rog’!” She held him back out at arm’s length. “Way to go,” she whispered, her eyes getting a little misty as she looked up at Roger. Roger, her handsome, smart,
“
friendly boy.
”
The boy she loved but couldn’t
seem to
love
. The boy she wanted Emma to have, but didn’t want to let go of,
especially
when he was having
this
moment of brilliance.

Roger, not recognizing the tumultuous thoughts pouring through Ell’s mind, waggled his eyebrows, “Want to spin another company off D5R with me? We’ll be rich!”

Ell looked wistfully at him another moment
,
then let go and sat down. “Yes
,
you will. I’d rather keep doing research rather than trying to be a commercial success. But I’ll wish you the best of luck and help you get started.”

Roger looked like he’d been poleaxed, “No! I want to do it
with
you
Ell
!” He
quirked the corner of his mouth, “I want us to be rich
together
. If this is an invention, it’s partly yours.”

She looked wistfully at him then said, “I’d rather license my share to someone else so I can keep doing research.”

Roger brightened, “OK, who?”

“ET Resources for one, this is right up their alley.”

“OK! Let’s go talk to them.”

“First let’s get you some patent protection. And you should build a working model.”

Morning fou
nd Dex huddled next to the fire with
Syrdian
crowded
next to himr. Dex’s thoughts stumbled, remembering hi
e
s old fantasies of sleeping next to Syrdian. H
i
e thought about trying to snuggle
even closer
to Syrdian
to “ward off the cold”
but, fearing rejection,
instead
hie got up to put wood on the fire.

A little later Syrdian tore into the pieces of talor hie’d rejected the evening before.
Hi
e
s eyes widened,
“This
tastes
better today.”

“You’re hungrier today.”

“No, really, I think something happened to it to make it better.”

Dex shrugged hi
e
s wings in doubt and started taking the strips of dried meat off hi
e
s green withe frame
over the fire
and stuffing them in hi
e
s carry harness. When hi
e
s harness was full h
i
e
passed some
to Syrdian.

Syrdian frowned
without taking it
,
“I don’t think I’m going to want to eat any of that. I’m
pretty
sure it’ll be too tough to be any good.”

Dex stared at Syrdian
disgustedly for
a moment, then turned and thundered into the air, turning to head
back to
the cave. Hie couldn’t believe that hie
’d ever found Syrdian desirable!
Hie certainly wasn’t going to stay
,
at considerable risk to himrself
,
to help someone so incapable of recognizing hies dire situation or undertaking to try to save himrself.
Dex assuaged
hies
guilt at leaving by thinking that
hie
could just turn this problem over to Syrdian’s parents. A niggling doubt told
himr
that hies parents couldn’t save Syrdian either. Dex had had crazy ideas about how to do it but hie doubted that anyone else would consider them.

So, essentially hie was leaving Syrdian to hies death. Even if Syrdian couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize that.

As Dex rose over the verge and out over
the
forest a
fireball popped through the clouds above, moving slower than any fireball Dex had ever seen. It dropped down, appearing to be
sinking
toward the meadow Dex had just left. Dex could swear that it was
, as bizarre as it seemed,
moving slower and slower as it dropped toward the meadow
.

Dex banked back toward the meadow. To hies utter astonishment the fireball came to a halt, just above the grass of the meadow. The flames shooting out of the bottom of it started a fire in the grass; good thing the grass was
really
green.
The meteorite
gradually sank
to the ground and then stopped, the fire going out.

Dex curved around to circle i
t
,
beating gently with hind wings only
. It seemed to be a long slender object
,
mostly silvery
in
color. It had little legs sticking out of the
sides near the
bottom
and keeping
it upright
!
It looks
nothing
like the meteorites I’ve seen before!
Meteorites were considered powerful omens, sometimes for good, sometimes for evil. Dex found them fascinating. However, e
very meteorite Dex had ever seen—ones that others had found after they
came down
and
one that Dex had seen crash
into the ground
himrself—were black and lumpy. Actually they were
hot
right after they landed and glowing
infrared
. They frequently start
ed
fires
like this one had,
but
eventually
they cooled into irregular lumpy black things. When they landed, they landed hard, usually making a hole
in the ground
.
No one had ever described anything like what Dex had just witnessed! A s
il
very narrow meteorite, shaped like a short
, thick
stick
, which
came down slowly
, and landed gently!
With legs!

Dex banked around it, spiraling down to land about 6 paces away
from it
. H
i
e didn’t feel heat radiating from it like h
i
e had the one other time h
i
e’d
witnessed
a meteorite landing.
The bottom part of it was pretty bright infrared though.
H
i
e crouched down to watch it for a while.

***

Norris walked into D5R resisting the impulse to trot. He’d taught his 11 AM class and
had
arranged for a grad student to teach
his
afternoon class. Donsaii and the others had probably already started the
rocket’s
descent to TC3 and he hoped he wasn’t going to miss the touchdown. The rocket they’d designed to be sterile had been put through the Tau Ceti port and flown to the planet, arriving during the night last night. The landing site they’d chosen based on glimpses through the clouds was on the side of an enormous mountain and it would be just past sun rise there about now. Or Tau Ceti rise?

He strode into the big room down near the end where Donsaii and the others did most of their work, but no one was there! He looked around, hoping no one thought he looked frantic, though that was the way he felt. One of the machinists walked by and he said, “Hey, any idea where the Quantum Research folks are today?”

The guy frowned, “Yeah, they’re all down in the little conference room. Not sure why.” He pointed and Norris turned to head down there in a very disappointed mood.
Has
something gone wrong? Are they just having a post mortem?
He knocked on the door and tried the knob.
It’s locked?

Emma opened the door, “Dr. Norris! Come on in! You’re just in time; we should be coming out of the clouds any time now.” She spoke quietly as if she didn’t want to disturb anyone.

He frowned, “Why are you in
here?” Donsaii, Emmerit, Garcia, Daster
and Kenner were the only people in there. He’d kind of expected a lot of people and a party atmosphere.

“Ah, we decided we didn’t want everyone to be able to see the screens. So far, if folks walk by and see TC3 on the screens, they just think they’re seeing a cloudy Earth or Venus or something. But today, we hope we’ll be seeing things that anyone would recognize came from somewhere else and we don’t want anyone getting freaked out.”

Norris tilted his head in puzzlement, wondering what they thought people might “get freaked out” about, but then excitement took over and he headed around to look at the screens himself. At present all six screens showed unremitting
pale
gray. “I assume everything’s gray because we’re still in the clouds?”

“Yep,” Donsaii said. She pointed to the screens which were arranged in a row of four with a large one in the middle. There was a lone screen above and another below the row. She pointed to the top one, “View looking up,” she pointed to the bottom on
e
, “down,” and she swept across the middle row, “four cameras pointing each direction.”

Norris
had already
noticed a reddish orange glow
on
the side of the bottom
image
, presumably exhaust from the rocket
that was
slowing the descent. Suddenly the gray cleared away to show brilliant green everywhere. Immediately the middle row cleared to show green on the bottom of their images and grey on top. A little cheer burst out.