Orbital

Thirty-Three Illumination

Ling drifts over to the chamber, excited to show off his shiny toy to someone new. “Laser chemistry is part science, part dumb luck. Kind of like superconducting materials. You never quite know how something is going to turn out until you make it. With lasers, you need a material that absorbs energy, light, kinetic or even nuclear and then converts it into something useful. For synthetic crystals — what we make here — doping it with different materials can have unexpected results. You might find that a material is much more efficient or can be tuned to a specific wavelength with a unique application.

“What this machine does is start by growing a seed, a tiny precisely aligned piece of crystal, and then feeding in the raw materials, superheating them and letting them grow — kind of like a giant snowflake.” He waves me over to the window. “Look inside, what do you notice?”

There’s a small box suspended in the middle. “The inner chamber isn’t attached to the walls. Is it just floating there?”

“Exactly. The ideal way to grow these crystals is in zero-gravity. Our next problem is all the vibrations. This outer chamber is a vacuum and the inner one is suspended via magnets that constantly adapt to any changes. The computer even adjusts for the precise difference in orbit this machine has in relationship to the rest of the station.”

They said the the Chinese laser was grown from a fragment of crystal made here — which poses the question, how did it get out of this box and onto the Chinese satellite?

Ling is so earnest, it’s hard to believe he’d knowingly do something like that. Meanwhile, I can sense Attwell hovering behind me, watching this exchange, waiting to see if I reveal myself.

“Pretty cool,” I say in that way when someone is starting to get bored. “We’ll have to get one of these for my lab.”

“It’s a hundred-million-dollar machine,” replies Attwell, a little smugly. “It’s the only one in existence.”

I already know this, and how the machine works — well, roughly. My clueless comment was intended to throw him off my scent.

I think it worked. Or he’s still working me.

I want to get more details out of Ling, but I need to do it when Attwell isn’t hovering over his shoulder.

Back on Earth they told me how materials make it from here to the transport ship. The question is if this is how things are actually done here, or do they take shortcuts that could be compromised.

Someone once told me about a breach in a nuclear enrichment facility where one pound of plutonium went missing. Inspectors were shocked to find that in a facility patrolled by armed guards and more tightly locked down than the Pentagon, workers had deactivated an alarm on a door they kept propped open so they didn’t have to walk back through all that security for their smoke breaks.

The kicker was the doorstop turned out to be the missing plutonium. While only mildly radioactive, and nowhere near the health threat of their cigarettes, it was a prime example of security being so tight that it negates itself.

I’ve already seen the faulty fingerprint locks. I can only wonder what other safeguards have been ignored for practicality’s sake. If Attwell has his way, I’ll never know.

“Let me show you my lab,” says Attwell.

“Thank you for showing me this, Dr. Ling.”

“My pleasure. It’s nice to have another person here I’m officially allowed to show this to.”

Were I some Gestapo inspector subtly grilling the man, I’d ask him what he means by “officially allowed.” That sounds a lot like there might be unofficial tours conducted for people without clearance.

Again, sensing Attwell’s watching eye, I say nothing. I just make a mental note to find out when Ling goes to the Tiki bar and test his tolerance for space cocktails.

Attwell follows me into his lab then shuts the door. There are two separate sections divided by a hatch in the middle. Inside the other chamber there’s a meter-wide glass porthole at the end of a long tube that’s connected to the hull.

“You ready for the real show?” asks Attwell as he turns down the lights. “Stay right here.”

He steps into the other airlock and seals the door. His voice is amplified by a speaker on the wall. “This is just a precaution.”

Attwell takes the arm from a spacesuit and slips it on. He then flicks several switches and a blue glow appears behind the glass of the porthole.

“Now comes the cool part.” Attwell opens up the door.

I float down so I can see through the other end. The edge of the Earth is visible just beyond.

“Wait? Is that open to vacuum?” I ask.

“Yes, sir. A plasma force field, for lack of a better term, is holding the atmosphere inside this section. Right now there’s nothing between space and me, except a bunch of very excited ions trapped in a magnetic field.”

I’d heard of this kind of thing being tested in Earth laboratories. I didn’t know we’d already had prototypes we could test in space.

This is real science fiction stuff. It’s why the Millennium Falcon could land in the Death Star docking bay without an airlock door. And now I’m looking at a real one…

“Ready to have your mind blown?” Attwell’s enthusiasm overtakes his skepticism of me.

“I think that already happened.”

“Watch this…” Attwell shoves his sleeved arm through the blue glow and into the vacuum of space.

“Holy cow! That’s a force field!”

He retracts his arm, shuts the door and shuts the machine off. “Also a very energy hungry force field. We’re working on how to more precisely tune it to increase the efficiency.”

“How do you not get electrocuted?”

“Trade secret. What I can tell you is that shield can also be used to block out cosmic rays.”

“That would be great for manned travel.”

“Dixon, if we figure this out, you could float in space without a suit or use bubbles of plasma on Earth to make things levitate.”

“Hoverboards.”

“Isn’t that what this is all about?”

“Where do I sign up?”

“Just don’t get in our way,” he says with a forced smile.