Solving the Stealth Problem

by featured writer | Jun 25, 2007 | Story

Author : Patricia Stewart, featured writer

“Hey boss, can you come down to the lab? Ah, the prototype has disappeared.”

“It’s supposed to, you idiot. That’s what stealth technology does.”

“Sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to say it disappeared. I meant to say it’s gone, as in, we can’t find it. Hello? You there, Boss?” All he heard after that was the sound of the phone bouncing onto a desk, followed by footsteps quickly fading away.

Two minutes later, Drake Griffin burst into the lab. “All right, Kemp, where’s my ship? Start from the beginning.”

“Well, sir, as you know, this was the first manned test. Tom Marvel, the test pilot, entered the prototype 45 minutes ago. He activated the start sequence in accordance with the test plan. The ship disappeared as expected. Then, Tom used the antigrav system to elevate from Alfa Stand. We know this happened because the weight sensors dropped to zero. He was supposed to hover for 30 minutes, then fly to Bravo Stand. But according to the sensors, he never made it.”

“Maybe the sensors are defective? Have you checked them?”

“We tested them prior to securing the hangar. But we cannot enter the hangar again until the ship reappears, or we get approval from an S-Level Director. That would be you, sir.”

“What are the risks?”

“Well, for one thing, the ship could be hovering directly above your head when it lands.”

“Can’t you radio Tom, or instruct the aircraft to decloak?”

“No, sir. Visible light and radio transmissions are the same thing, except for wavelength. All electromagnetic radiation curves around the ship. That’s how the cloak works.”

“OK, Kemp. Here’s my plan. You’re going into the hangar with a hard wired camera mounted onto a 20 foot pole. Then you poke around in there until the camera disappears. If you’re killed, I’ll make sure you get a big fat raise. Now, go find my ship.”

After 40 minutes of very tentative “poking,” Kemp located the ship on the floor, approximately 100 feet from Alfa Stand. The camera revealed that the area inside the stealth bubble was pitch black, except for the feeble glow of the instrument panel. Marvel was on the cockpit floor, curled up into a fetal position. Kemp hastily jury rigged a transmitter onto the end of his pole, and pushed it through the cloak. He then instructed the ship to power down. The ship materialized, and instantly frosted over. Kemp sheepishly touched the hull. “It’s ice cold, sir. I wasn’t very good in thermodynamics, but my guess is that the cloak is endothermic somehow, and it sucked all the heat from inside the bubble. It looks like poor Tom froze to death.”

“Why didn’t the earlier test reveal this endo-thingy?”

“We never engaged the cloak for more the 15 minutes. And those tests were run by the onboard computers. The electronics are not sensitive to the cold. I guess Tom’s core body temperature dropped so fast he didn’t have time to abort. What should we do, sir?”

“Well, the first thing is to get Tom’s body out of there. Then, I’m going back to my office and write a directive to the effect that after the research boys say they’ve solved this problem, they all get to ride in the next test flight.”

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Displacement

by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 22, 2007 | Story

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Consciousness seeped back slowly; recognizable sounds gradually replacing static; blackness giving way to a dull aching in his head. He resisted the urge to open his eyes.

“How are you feeling?” The voice reminded him of someone, a woman he knew? He couldn’t quite put a finger on it.

“What happened? Where…” Memory of the moment started leaking back in, vaporously thin and with apparent gaps. “My experiment, my lab… did something go wrong?” He risked a look, blinking back against the light.

“No Rick, everything went pretty much the way I’m sure you envisioned it would.” Blue eyes smiled at him from beneath blond bangs, she looked not unlike like his assistant, and yet subtly different. “This will just take some adjusting.” She studied his face for a moment, thrusting her hands deep in her lab coat pockets before turning away.

The walls seemed to vibrate with light, crisp luminescent tile covering the room floor to ceiling. “Is this the past?” He half whispered to himself. “Or is this some other part of the complex? I don’t know this place.” From the corner of his eye, he could swear her hair was darkening, shortening, but when he looked at her, it was the same shoulder length mahogany cut as before. Was it brown before?.

“No, you haven’t been to this place, and this isn’t the past, not yet.” She turned to face him, her voice almost reproving. “You can’t simply wander backwards in time Richard, I’m afraid your concepts and equations are interesting, but flawed.” He found himself captivated by her eyes, chestnut flecked with amber. “Time is all about absolutes Richard. Moving forward. Displacement equations were what you should have been looking for, but I think they’re a little beyond your comprehension. No matter though, ideas like yours are precisely why we’re here.”

“I don’t understand.” The room seemed to be fading in and out of focus, he could barely make out the books on his bookcases. “Here? In my study? Why are you here?”

“You’ll make a fine teacher Richard, you’ve got so much of the future in you, I’m sure you’ll do wonderful things.” Her glasses glimmered in the pale firelight, hands stuffed into the pockets of her cardigan.

Richard stared down at the tome open upon his desk, following the same lines of text over and over several times without reading it.

“Santayana?” A woman’s voice. He met the gaze of his teaching assistant, wrapped in her cardigan in the corner chair on the other side of his desk.

“What was that?” Had he said something just then? He felt a sense of unease, as though something was about to happen, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what.

“You said ‘Those who do not learn from history’…” She began to repeat the phrase.

“Are doomed to repeat it.” He finished it reflexively, then paused, the words familiar on his tongue, but with no idea where the thought had come from.

“Santayana isn’t it?” She regarded him quizzically. “Are you ok? You look a little lost.”

“No, I’m fine, I think I’m fine. Santayana, yes, yes you’re right.” He pushed back in his chair, rubbing tired eyes and feeling suddenly so very old. “We should pack up for the night though, I’m tired, and I’ve got a class to teach tomorrow.” Class to teach. Why did that seem so foreign a concept? He must be tired, he would sleep, and everything would be better tomorrow, he was somehow sure of that.

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Getting Old

by submission | Jun 19, 2007 | Story

Author : Grady Hendrix

When new Aunt Sally arrived, David had just one question burning in his brain. He managed to make it all the way through her visit before it came out.

“What happened to old Aunt Sally?” he asked.

“She’s gone on to a wonderful place where it’s always summer vacation,” his mother said. “She’s much happier there.”

Being a normal eight-year-old boy, David knew that this meant that she was dead.

New Aunt Sally was exactly the same as old Aunt Sally. She brought the same presents, she said the same things, she embarrassed him the same way. The only difference was that she didn’t seem to upset his father as much. He and old Aunt Sally were always shouting at each other, but new Aunt Sally and his dad got along just fine. It was like she was the same, only better. Better for his dad, at least.

“Why did new Aunt Sally come?” he asked his mother.

“Because we asked her to,” said his mother.

“But why? What was wrong with old Aunt Sally?”

“Nothing was wrong with her, but new Aunt Sally is so good, don’t you think? Now go do your homework and stop asking so many silly questions. It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

But he did worry about it. He worried about it all the time. Old Aunt Sally had just been plain Aunt Sally, but suddenly one day she became old Aunt Sally and new Aunt Sally took her place. What if one day he was suddenly old David Lighter? Come to think of it, he was already old David Lighter, just nobody had called him that yet.

He lay in bed all night, staring at the ceiling and promising God that from now on he would be very, very good. He would be very, very, very good. He dug his nails into his sweaty palms until they bled and he bit his lip until it tore and he swore that he would be so good that his parents would always want the old him. Always.

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The Oceans of Jupiter

by featured writer | Jun 18, 2007 | Story

Author : Patricia Stewart, featured writer

The USS Jovian Explorer skimmed above the turbulent cloud tops of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. The large clamshell doors on its underbelly slowly opened and locked into position. Moments later, the restraining clamps released the Simon, a two-man research “submersible.” The nearly spherical vessel plummeted downward and disappeared into the yellow-orange mist. After safety deploying her charge, the mother ship activated her antigrav engines and lifted into a higher orbit to temporarily escape Jupiter’s lethal radiation belt.

When the submersible descended to 60,000 km above Jupiter’s core, the pilot, Jonah Grumby activated the antigrav thrusters and gradually slowed their decent, eventually leveling off at 50,000 km. Although the craft had the ability to maneuver, they elected to ride the winds to reduce buffeting. “OK, Hector, you can begin collecting data.”

“Roger that. Wow, this atmosphere is pretty soupy. Besides hydrogen and helium, sensors show: methane, ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide, condensed water vapor, and a bunch of other hydrocarbons. I’m also picking up the larger molecules too. At least ten amino acids: arginine, glycine, lysine, valine… Well, this is interesting. There are polypeptides, and some pretty complex proteins too. Hey, I think we have all of the ingredients for life here. Let’s drop down another 10,000 klicks. If the atmosphere thickens much more it might behave like a liquid. Maybe we can find some single celled organisms.

“Z minus 10,000 it is. In fact, let’s have a look outside.” As the ship descended, he opened the iris covering the one-meter in diameter observation port, and activated the floodlights. It looked like an upward flowing snowstorm. When they leveled off, the streaking “snowflakes” resolved into small randomly moving specks. Under the magnifying effect of the observation port, however, the “snowflakes” appeared to be little jellyfish-like creatures with four flapping wings. As they prepared to collect specimens to take back to the mother ship, a “flying fish” about the size of a large dog flew past the observation port. It had a huge gaping mouth almost as large as its body. “I guess it’s a filter feeder,” Hector suggested. “I don’t see any eyes. I wonder how it knows where it’s going?”

“It probably doesn’t need eyes. There’s no natural light this deep. I’m going to go further down. Their food chain must be based on Chemosynthesis. Jupiter produces three times more energy than it receives from the sun. There must be something akin to hydrothermal vents, or maybe an entire hydrothermal ocean that’s driving the whole ecosystem.” At 28,000 km, they plunged into a liquid ocean. The ship rocked and creaked, but the force field maintained the hull’s integrity. A three meter long streamlined creature, about half the size of the Simon, approached the submersible. It also had a large mouth, including an impressive arsenal of teeth. “Well, well, I guess this menacing looking fella must be the top of the food chain.”

As they watched the hypnotic movements of the new creature as it investigated the submersible’s lights, a distant shadow began to grow larger, and larger, and larger. By the time it reached the illumination field, all that was visible were two rows of teeth, as one row passed above, and the other below, the Simon. “No, Jonah,” said Hector, “I believe this guy is the top of the food chain.”

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