The Best Defense (near-future HFY) - One Giant Leap 06: Politics and Math Rarely Mix
Carlos Perez
Date: March 16th, 2028
Location: StarTran Research and Testing Center, Martin County, TX
“I just can’t get around the math.” Carlos shook his head, not taking his eyes off the whiteboard. “They can’t be using an Alcubierre drive.”
“Not unless they’re using something completely alien and unknown to our understanding of physics,” James agreed. The lanky, redheaded mathematician and physicist leaned back in his office chair, hands interlaced behind his head, looking a lot more relaxed than Carlos felt. “Which I suppose isn’t outside the realm of possibility, but I don’t see a way around it based on everything we do understand about gravity.”
“Which is still precious little.” Carlos finally looked away from the too-flawless mathematics they’d been working on for weeks. That everyone in any field remotely related to gravitational physics had been working on for weeks. “Hell, we don’t even know exactly why the sail is working so well!”
“Yeah, and I’ve been telling you for years to just focus on testing, but now we might not have that luxury.”
“Ugh. I know. But this was all supposed to take time. Simple little satellite test. Analyze, modify, repeat. It was going to be years, but everything would be understood. Now we’ve got more questions than answers, and I have no clue how to get anywhere.” Carlos angrily drew wild lines through the equations, mashing the felt tip as he did. “Not unless those stupid aliens decide to come back and explain their technology!”
“Fundamentals.”
“We did this already, James!”
“You know what you’re like when you’re overwhelmed by a problem. It’s just like we’re back in undergrad. Fundamentals.”
“Fine.” Carlos sighed. “Fact: we know the sail is operating at almost 30% higher efficiency in orbit compared to tests on the ground.”
“30% beyond the already-expected increase higher in the gravity well,” James corrected. “Details matter.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m not writing a paper right now.”
“Too bad. I am.”
“Seriously?”
“Always.” James tapped the side of his head. “Actually, two. One for Advances in Practical Mathematics, and the other for Psychology Today titled ‘Genius Melted Own Brain Because He Didn’t Listen to His Best Friend.’ I’ll just have to write them down when I have a chance.”
“Either I’m tired or you’re more convincing, because I can actually believe you’d write both of them.”
“Bet your ass I would, but you’re definitely tired. Back to the topic at hand. What else?”
“The aliens have a gravity drive that looks like it follows the same principles as ours, but way more efficient. And their ship spins, which means they figured out how to fix the slosh from their own atmosphere causing turbulence on the spin. Assuming they breathe, but since they need gravity that’s a logical assumption.”
“No assumptions allowed when doing fundamentals.”
“Fine.” Carlos scowled. “They spin and we don’t know anything more than that for certain.”
“And?”
“And they have a magic FTL drive that doesn’t seem to obey the laws of gravitation as we know them!”
“It’s not magic. It’s just tech we don’t grok yet. What do we know about it?”
Carlos tried very hard not to grit his teeth. He and James had known each other since they were undergrad freshmen. He was always calm and collected, while Carlos was the emotional one — kind of a Spock to Carlos’ McCoy. He’d never have been able to get through school or start up StarTran if it weren’t for James. It wasn’t just that James was a brilliant theoretical physicist, though that had helped on everything from cramming for exams to creating the first true reactionless spaceship drive; his best friend knew how to keep him focused when Carlos would otherwise just bang his head against a wall.
Somehow, though, even after a decade, it was still irritating. It worked, but man it was irritating.
“It results in — fine, it seems to be associated with a burst of low-frequency EM radiation,” Carlos growled after a moment, correcting himself before James could even say anything. “That means people around the world are assuming an Alcubierre drive, since it would indicate a severe momentary redshift of starlight coming from opposite the ship relative to us, and that could happen if they were futzing about with artificially expanding space behind them. But that can’t be the case, because an Alcubierre would need to compress space in front of the ship at an equal rate, so there should also be blueshift effects, with a whole bunch of x-rays and gamma rays. And it shouldn’t just be in one spot, because it should create an afterglow streaking out of the solar system. And that kind of gravitational gradient would be orders of magnitude beyond the energy-mass equivalent of the sun, so kind of obviously not caused by anything remotely like an Alcubierre to begin with.”
“But we did the math for it anyway, because people are still arguing about it.” James rolled his eyes. “Nerds.”
“And exactly who was it binging Star Wars cartoons the other week?”
“That’s geek life, not nerd. Get it straight.”
They were interrupted by a knock on the door. Carlos resisted the urge to throw his dry-erase marker at it. “What!?”
“Hey, Carlos.” A tall blond man in a nice suit and with the air of a used car salesman poked his head into the lab. “I’ve got someone for you to meet.”
Carlos groaned. “Now’s not the best time for me to be meeting with investors, Stan.”
“Hey, you think I’d bother you with an investor right now?” Stanley Oswald, the CFO and de facto head of StarTran — on paper, Carlos was CEO, but Stan was much better at the job — opened the door all the way with the dignified air of someone unveiling a new sculpture in front of a large crowd. “I’ve got someone even more important here!”
A woman walked past Stan, almost ignoring him. “No fanfare, please. My staff is already upset enough at the detour.”
Carlos looked her over. She was on the short side of medium-height, with light brown hair, dark brown eyes, and a tailored pantsuit that probably cost an order of magnitude more than the combined price of Carlos’ entire wardrobe. She was reasonably attractive for middle-aged, and he thought she looked familiar but couldn’t place her.
After a moment’s awkward silence, Carlos looked at Stan. Stan just looked back, clearly expecting a reaction. The woman just waited.
Finally, James cleared his throat. “Ah, allow me to make introductions. Ma’am, this is Dr. Carlos Perez, owner of StarTran and inventor of the gravity sail. Carlos, this is Senator Donna Tulson. She’s running for President.”
“Oh.” Carlos felt that click into place somewhere in his brain. “Right. You’re the one that’s in last place in the polls, right?”
“Carlos!” Stan hissed.
“It’s fine.” Tulson waved a hand. “It’s true, at least after the others who already dropped out of the race. But the primaries have only just started, and I’m confident that things will turn around. In fact, that’s why I’m here.”
“I hope it’s not for my endorsement. I’m planning on voting third party. Besides, not sure that would go over well with the general public right now.”
“Are you talking about the rumors that you created the alien craft as a hoax?” Senator Tulson sniffed, as if mildly offended. “Some people, especially journalists, will always focus on the easiest but most sensational story, and that one isn’t even talked about now. It’s hard to blame you when that triangular craft was caught on different cameras near at least seven confirmed missing persons cases around the world. And no, I don’t expect you to endorse me. I’m here with a job offer.”
“A . . . what?” Carlos frowned. “No offense, but I already have a job.”
“Exactly.” Tulson pointed at the whiteboard and its equations. “It doesn’t take an expert to know that is all about you coming up with new ideas to get us in space. That’s what we need right now, and it’s why I’m going to win. None of the other candidates can tell the difference between physics and feelings, and the whole tone of the election just shifted to space. China, India, and Russia have already announced changes to their space programs, but the current administration is dragging their feet. We need an edge, and that’s you. So, job offer. I need someone in my White House that can translate the science. Someone who can get on with the job while everyone else handles the politics.”
“I can do that here,” Carlos pointed out, ignoring Stan’s eager nodding from behind the senator.
“But in my administration, you’d have your pick of resources.” Tulson waved a hand, taking in the room and, by extension, the entire StarTran facility. “This is impressive, but it’s just a start-up. To get where the United States needs you to be, you’ll need a lot more. You need legitimacy, a platform, and people who will listen to you.”
Carlos glanced at Stan and James. Stan was trying to pantomime that Carlos was an idiot for even hesitating about it. James just frowned, the same frown he’d make when running through a particularly tricky equation.
“Sorry, no.” Carlos shook his head. “If I do that, I’ll spend way too much time in front of a camera. I need to actually build stuff.”
Senator Tulson looked at him hard for a few seconds, then gave a single nod. “Good.”
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Carlos blinked. “What?” he asked again. Behind the senator, Stan went from outraged to confused.
“I’d been told you were apolitical and unambitious.” Tulson paused, reconsidering her words. “Not personally ambitious, I mean. If you were looking for validation, you’d have said yes. If you wanted power, you’d have given me a vague answer and then gone shopping to other candidates to see if they’d give you an offer. But I hoped you’d be the man others told me you’d be.”
“So you barged in here and interrupted my work for a personality test?” Carlos scowled. “I’ve got better things to do.”
“No.” James put a hand on Carlos’ shoulder. “She’s not playing games. She wants your help, but needed to know if you were unbiased.”
“Correct.” Tulson didn’t look grateful or anything, just satisfied that someone understood. “You didn’t ask about money, even though your company finances could be better. If you’d accepted the offer, I’d have known you were the wrong man to lead the charge in getting us into space. Mind if I sit?”
“Uh, please.” Carlos motioned at the worn office chair James had been sitting in, the only one in the room that didn’t have clutter on it. “What do you mean?”
“Dr. Perez, I’m going to be pushing for a strong response to the alien threat, both in the Senate and through my campaign.” Tulson crossed her legs, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at him intently. “We don’t know who they are or what they want, or how long they’ve been visiting and we just haven’t noticed. We don’t know when they’re coming back. When they do, we need a force strong enough to make them hesitate before kidnapping more people. That means getting into space. We have several private space-launch companies, but your gravity drive is the key to easily getting beyond Earth orbit.”
Carlos raised his eyebrows. “Huh. So you understand the limitations that go into launch systems?”
“In layman’s terms, yes, but most of it is from Wikipedia. I know it takes approximately ten pounds of fuel to launch one pound of equipment into orbit, and even more if it’s going to the moon. I know launch systems are far cheaper than they were twenty years ago, but capacity is still limited when going beyond orbit. I know your drive can project a circle of gravitational force twice the strength of Earth’s gravity, but there’s some problem in simply activating it on the surface and using that to launch things. So your gravity sail is really only useful in space, at least for now. Is there any way to fix that?”
“Well, we’re working on it.” Carlos glanced at the whiteboard. “That is, we were, but I’ve been trying to figure out how the aliens’ FTL works.”
“From where I sit, Dr. Perez, you should focus on the first steps. Get us into orbit. Something more substantial than what we’ve got. Two government research stations and a couple of civilian proofs-of-concept won’t cut it for planetary defense.”
“Not to mention the Outer Space Treaty,” James pointed out. “Militarization of space is multiple flavors of illegal.”
“Except the Outer Space Treaty has provisions for that, Dr. Flynn.” Tulson didn’t even hesitate. “Actions for the benefit of all humanity. Protecting us from an outside threat certainly benefits humanity.”
Carlos didn’t miss that James had never introduced himself, which meant the senator had done her homework. James’ picture wasn’t even on the company website; he took his privacy seriously, even going so far as to live in a mobile home on the StarTran property.
James didn’t look convinced, but he nodded. “Okay. But it’s also not cheap.”
“When I’m elected, I’ll make certain everyone has the funding they need, including StarTran, but we can’t just print money to throw at the problem. We’ve got to make certain we don’t repeat the funding mistakes NASA made. It needs to be affordable, because we need a lot up in orbit if we’re going to have a chance here.”
“We don’t know that they’re hostile,” James pointed out. “Yeah, they kidnapped people, but–”
“And I’m not particularly afraid of home invasions, Dr. Flynn, but I still lock my front door at night. If we have no defenses, we are at the mercy of whatever comes our way. I’m not suggesting we shoot them out of the sky if and when they show up again. I just think everyone is better off if we can.”
That was an odd thing to hear from Tulson, Carlos thought, considering her party’s policy stances on national defense. Not that the other option was any better.
“So, Dr. Perez.” Tulson turned her attention back to Carlos. “What do you need to develop this into a viable surface-to-orbit launch system?”
“Ten years?” Carlos shrugged at her look. “I’m serious, Senator. This isn’t an overnight thing. Gravity manipulation is so cutting-edge we’re inventing the math for it here. It’s been only fifteen years since the Europeans had their breakthrough, and even then they couldn’t reproduce the effect for most of a decade. Yes, we got the test flight up to two gees, but that was two gees of field effect, not net acceleration on the craft. If we try that on Earth, it would shake itself apart, assuming it didn’t explode first.
“Look, let me show you.” He flipped the white board over and started drawing. It wasn’t a very good drawing — just a rough cylinder and an oval above it — but it wasn’t like he was an artist. “The gravity drive projects a field ‘above’ the craft, which we call a sail for obvious reasons.”
“He calls it a sail,” James said, jerking a thumb at Stan. “Carlos just let him get away with it.”
“Hey, you try going to donors talking about an electrogravity field generator because of right-angle quantum nuclear spin,” Stan protested, “or whatever it was you used in that paper.”
James shook his head. “It’s a spinning singularity generator generating sinusoidal waves that create a drag effect on local–”
“Anyway, it’s a sail,” Carlos said firmly, adding a spike to the top of the cylinder. “The effect is generated by this mast, which has the actual gravity projector at the top. That’s what causes the spacecraft to move, because it’s falling into the gravity sail; but since the gravity is being projected by the spacecraft, it never stops falling forward, faster and faster.
“We got it up to two gees, but only in a narrow band of space about nine meters wide and less than two millimeters thick. And contrary to expectations based on traditional gravitation math, it falls off at more than the square of the distance. You understand inverse square law, right?” He continued on without waiting for her. “That’s the reason why light rapidly gets dimmer the farther you are from the source. Twice as far away, one-fourth the intensity. Gravity does the same thing, but the generator still has to obey the laws of physics.”
Carlos started drawing the classic bending image used to demonstrate the multi-dimensional curvature of space-time. “Yes, we can create a field effect twice as strong as Earth’s, but it’s still not as deep of a well as an Earth-mass planet. Earth is a tiny body on cosmic scales, but the gravity sail is tiny even on an Earth scale. It’s like how an ant is proportionally stronger than a human, but a human can crush it without even noticing. Or think about sunlight — on a clear day, you can get over a hundred twenty thousand lumens of sunlight on a given square meter, but we can easily beat that with artificial lights, even without using lasers; but that only works at a short distance, and you wouldn’t even notice it if it were as far away from you as the sun is from Earth.” He began jotting equations on the board. “So yeah, we can make a gravity effect, but it gets absolutely swallowed up by Earth’s own gravity, which is why we needed to get out so far to test it. In fact, the field gets more efficient if –”
Carlos stopped, looking at his equations and crude diagrams. “James.”
“Yeah?”
“Gravitational turbulence.”
James stepped closer, examining the whiteboard. “I don’t get it.”
“Turbulence!” Carlos grabbed the eraser and furiously wiped all but a few stray markings clear, then started over. “Fundamentals! Check my math, will you?”
“Okay.” James watched. “Gravity well calculations, yeah. Sun’s output, Earth, moon. We already did these for . . . oh. Oh, I think I see.”
“Don’t mind them.” Stan was speaking softly to Senator Tulson. “They get like this sometimes.”
“I’m fine with them doing their jobs.” Tulson leaned back, watching. “I’ll get the translation later.”
Carlos ignored them as he struggled to mathematically describe the pattern he’d just noticed. If it was a pattern at all, and not just a caffeine-and-sleep-deprivation fever dream.
“The math looks good.” James finally broke the silence as he pulled out his phone. “So if this turns out to reflect reality, where does the KvG drop to under 1?”
“Hmm? Um, I’d say about four hundred thirty million. Call it almost twenty-four light minutes. Why?”
“Interesting. Look.” James handed Carlos his phone, which showed the distance the alien craft had been at the point of the light burst. “Triangulated at twenty-three-point-eight-nine light minutes from the sun.”
Carlos stared, feeling almost dizzy. He’d only been thinking about a possible explanation for his gravity generator’s energy efficiency, but now it looped back around to the same problem he’d been wrestling with for the past week. James was right. Somehow, the gravitational turbulence he literally just hypothesized matched the distance the aliens traveled before they went faster than light.
“So that’s why they took so long,” he said out loud. “Turbulence. There’s some sort of limit on how close they can get before they have to go slower than light.”
“Maybe.” James slipped his phone back in his pocket. “Assuming it’s the same way coming as going.”
Stan cleared his throat, and Carlos looked up in surprise. He’d forgotten the other two were in the room.
“Uh. Right.” Carlos straightened up and capped his dry erase marker. “So, short version, I might have a way to make the sail work better closer to Earth’s surface. Maybe even enough to make it easier to launch rockets.”
“Because of . . . turbulence?” Tulson asked.
“Yeah.” Carlos tapped the end of the marker against his chin, staring into the distance. “We thought it would be like dropping a pebble in a still pool, that the whole reason it was having trouble was because the gravity is just too . . . thick, for lack of a better term. But now I’m thinking it might be because the big gravity wells in the solar system are more like choppy waters. The choppier it is, the more the energy of the drive just . . . kind of skips off the waves. It gets tossed because it’s too light to cut through the storm. The inverse square law isn’t wrong, it’s more like we didn’t realize there was a cloud of dust until we switched on the light and noticed it wasn’t as bright as it should be.”
“And this . . . boundary that the aliens had to cross?”
“Well, we know they disappeared about a third of the way between Mars and Jupiter, and we might know why they picked that spot, but all we know for certain is they’re not using an Alcubierre drive.”
“A . . . what?”
“Star Trek style warp drive,” Stan supplied. He smirked at Carlos’ look of surprise. “Hey, I pay attention to the geeky stuff, too.”
“And he doesn’t confuse geek with nerd,” James mock-whispered.
“The aliens have an FTL drive that looks like it requires a flatter section of space-time,” Carlos continued, ignoring Stan and James. “That means their FTL has something to do with gravity. Probably something delicate.” He felt frustrated. It was like the answer was just sitting there, close to the surface of his mind, but he was missing something.
“Going back to launch systems,” Tulson continued, distracting him. “I take it you might need less than ten years now?”
“Maybe.” Carlos looked back at his calculations. “I don’t think we’re at the point of using just the sail with no rockets, but . . . if I can talk with some engineers at SpaceX or Blue or some of the others, we might be able to hash out a design that lets us reduce some of the weight requirements.”
“Without explosions?”
“The explosion’s only a possibility. Right now the prototypes will start to shake themselves apart at over point-three gees on Earth’s surface. I might — might — be able to increase that threshold. It’ll take some experimentation. I’m definitely not going to get us up to being able to levitate us out of the atmosphere like that alien shuttle, but we could potentially reduce the launch weight. Assuming I can get the power curve to where it’s cost-effective, of course. Less weight, less fuel, more cargo room.”
“Good.” Tulson stood, smoothing her jacket with a practiced motion. “Contact my office if you need anything. A senator’s phone call can open a lot of doors. I’ll make certain Stan here has a direct line to one or more of my staff.”
She gave them all a level look. “You should know I’ve never been a proponent of the space program. Far too costly. I prefer to invest in infrastructure and essential services. That hasn’t changed, but the world has. This is essential. And I’m still going to need an aerospace adviser, Dr. Perez. If you have any recommendations, please pass them along. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I interrupted your work. Don’t let me keep you.”
Tulson nodded to each of them, then left the room without another word. Stan opened the door for her, then scrambled out after the senator after giving Carlos and James a thumbs-up.
“Well,” James said after the door had clicked shut, “that was certainly . . . interesting. She’s a lot more intense up close. Definitely don’t like her. Or trust her.”
“Why not?” Carlos asked. He didn’t follow politics enough to keep track of individual names. He’d always voted third party since turning eighteen.
“Because she’s never been hawkish in her life. She’s exploiting the current crisis for personal gain. She wants to be president, so she’ll use the alien ship to move ahead.” James looked back at the door. “And the worst part is, she’s absolutely right.”
“Why’s that the worst part?”
James scowled. “Because at this rate, I might wind up voting for her.”
