"The computer reports that the acceleration is derived from an external magneto-ionic effect. Would such an effect be a result of a flare?" he asked.
"I believe it could, captain. I should have to do a bit of math, but...."
"We will a.s.sume, then, that the computer is correct," the captain told him. "Could such an effect have a sufficiently great effect on this ship to give it as much as six hundred forty pounds of thrust?"
"Again, I should have to check the math, captain, but I would a.s.sume so."
"Mr. Blackhawk," the captain turned to his engineer, "could such a thrust throw Hot Rod off her communications beam and cause last night"s disaster?"
"I guess I"d have to check by math, too, captain...." Mike appeared to debate the question. "It would be a very small acceleration at first, of course," he said, "from six hundred forty pounds of thrust. But Hot Rod"s cable is slack, and the velocity needn"t be great to give it quite a jolt when the slack was taken up. Yes, I feel sure that could happen, captain."
[Ill.u.s.tration]
The captain relaxed a little, and a half-smile played near the corner of his mouth as he said to Mike, "I believe, then, we may have found the _real_ saboteur, Mr. Blackhawk." Then to Ishie. "Doctor, I believe that your field is the one in which the most experience lies towards finding a means for counteracting the effect that is now influencing our orbit. I am putting you in charge of the problem. The pull, according to the computer, is as I said, six hundred forty pounds. Do you think you can work out a method for counteraction?"
"I think ... possibly, yes, captain. Let me say, probably yes."
"Then please do so, and report the method to me. I will then submit it to the other scientists aboard that may have some selective knowledge in the field, and to Earth. You may, of course, call on any of the personnel of the ship for a.s.sistance, and possibly Mr. Blackhawk may be of a.s.sistance to you. He is familiar with the equipment aboard.
"You probably recognize the urgency of the problem so I shall not attempt to underline that urgency further, other than to say that it is of the utmost importance," he ended.
Five minutes later the two conspirators were back in the engineering quarters, grinning like Cheshire cats, and mentally rolling up their sleeves to go to work. They had, to all intents and purposes, carte blanche to work out the construction of the device they would need for an enlarged Confusor with a real thrust, even though they would have to appear to co-operate with a mult.i.tude of other interested parties.
Mike and Ishie were both becoming adept students of the mythical Dr.
Confusion, and neither doubted their combined ability to handle that part of the problem.
"Now," said Ishie, "Confusion say he who can fly on wings of mosquito fly better on wings of eagle. How much thrust do we want, Mike?"
"What are our limits?" asked the practical engineer.
"Limits, schlimits. We got _power_. Of course," he added, "we _are_ limited by the acceptable stress limits on the wheel, and ... yes ...
by the stress limits on our plastic, too."
"The wheel was designed to stand upwards of 1.5 gee maximum spin--but that"s only radial strength," Mike began figuring. "Don"t think anybody ever calculated the stress of pulling the hub loose, endwise.
No reason to, you know, and it wasn"t expected to land or anything.
And really, n.o.body expected it to stand in service more than a 1.5 gee spin on the rim. They computed these racks to take all kinds of shock, but the overall structure is rather flimsily built." He paused for thought. "We could maybe put a tenth of a gee on the axis, but I better check some of the stress figures against the structural pattern with the Cow first. We"ll have to give some thought to strengthening things later, if we really want to go into the fantastic possibility of landing this monster anywhere."
Consulted, the Sacred Cow computed a potential maximum stress-safety at the hub of something over two-tenths of a gee, and the two finally settled on one-tenth as well within the limits.
"Now the other limit," said Ishie. "This little piece of plastic will only stand a pressure approaching the point at which it begins to distort and run out of the field. This stuff is quoted to have a compression-yield strength of one hundred ten pounds to the square inch. We probably shouldn"t exceed ... hm-m-m ... ninety pounds. Let"s get the Cow to tell us how big a chunk of surface area that represents."
The answer was discouraging. Mike rapidly converted the figure in centimeters to feet, and came up with nearly an eighty-three foot diameter for a circular surface.
"Looks like we"ll have to put it out on the spokes," he muttered in disgust, but Ishie shook his head quickly.
"No need, Mike. Later on we"ll need a few thrust points out on the rim for good aiming, but we don"t have to have all this surface area in one unit or even in one place. Also, we do not need to consider only the surface of an h.o.m.ogeneous piece of plastic material.
"This plastic can be cast. Very easily. In it, we can insert structures that will absorb the strain from many surfaces within, rather than only on a front surface.
"I expect some of the gla.s.s thread with which the hull of the ship was made could be inserted with no trouble. Each thread, then, would take up the strain, and a ma.s.s of them distributed through the plastic could deliver a greatly increased amount of thrust from a volume of plastic rather than from a surface area."
Mike started to object. "To get an absolutely parallel magnetic field, the gap between the pole faces can"t be very wide."
"Perhaps I wasn"t considering pole faces," Ishie answered. "Our investigation has already shown that once initiated the thrust-effect works best in a very low magnetic field.
"Such a low, parallel magnetic field would quite probably be found inside of a simple solenoid coil."
"O.K.," Mike answered, "but you have also found that a very high magnetic field is required to initiate the action. How do you get that inside a solenoid without an iron core?"
"As you say, a strong field must _initiate_ the action. Let us try another experiment, Mike."
Ishie turned the Confusor off, selected a piece of wire from Mike"s supplies, and wound a ten-turn coil over the large magnetic coils of the experimental device.
The leads from this he ran to a pulse-generator that could be accurately adjusted to supply pulses of anything from a tenth microsecond to a tenth second.
Selecting the shortest possible duration, he then set the magnetic field adjustment on the experimental device to a point just below that point on which it had turned on previously.
"Now we see." Turning on the device, he glanced at the display panel which still showed zero thrust. Then he triggered a single one-microsecond pulse into the additional ten turns of winding. The readout display showed zero thrust. He triggered a ten microsecond pulse. Nothing happened. One hundred microseconds. Nothing. One thousand microseconds--the display changed, dropping so quickly into position that the pulse thrust itself was not recorded--but the figure turned up seven hundred thirty pounds thrust on the display panel.
"So," said Ishie, "we can initiate thrust with a one thousand microsecond pulse. Can you design a power supply that would achieve that field for that time in a solenoid having ... say ... one per cent as high a field strength as the one we are using here?"
"O.K.," said Mike. "I get you. Sounds to me like this thing is going to look like a barrel when we get through with it.
"I wish," he added, "that we could get one point one gee. And land this thing on Earth. And have a big parade, with s.p.a.ce Lab One hovering just overhead to the cheers and the blaring bands and the--"
"Confusion say, he who would poke hole in hornets nest had best be prepared with long legs." Ishie grinned. "You don"t think anybody would really appreciate our doing that, do you Mike? Outside of the people themselves, that is, that aren"t directly concerned with man"s _welfare_? We haven"t done this in the proper manner of team research and billions spent in experiments and planned predicted achievements made with the proper Madison Avenue bow to the financier that made it possible. You know what they do to wild-haired individualists down there, don"t you?"
Mike shrugged. "Oh, well," he said, "you"re right of course. But it was a beautiful dream. How do you suppose we can build these and still keep all the scientists aboard and on Earth happy that they"re just innocent magneto-ionic effect cancelers? Boy, that was a beauty, Ishie!"
"Best we have two sets of drawings. The ones for us can be sketchy, and need not have too much exact.i.tude of design. We know what we"re doing--at least, I hope we do.
"But let us make a second set of drawings that is somewhat different, though of a simpler shape and design, on which other scientists aboard can speculate, and which can be sent to Earth to confuse the confusion."
The two went to work with a will, and as the two sets of drawings emerged, they were indeed different. The set from which they would actually work was only mildly described as sketchy. The papers looked like the notations a man makes for himself to get the figures he will set into a formalized pattern as it takes shape, before throwing his penciled figurings into the wastebasket.
The second set was exact; created with drawing instruments on Mike"s drafting board, and each of the component circuits would have created an effect that would have interlocked in the whole, but it would take the most erudite of persons to figure each into its effect, and its effect into the whole, and the effect of the whole was somewhat that somebody might someday figure out--but would possibly cancel a magneto-ionic effect if such existed. The drawings looked extremely impressive.
As the second set of drawings neared completion, Ishie glanced at the clock, then turned to the Cow"s vocoder.
"How soon will s.p.a.ce Lab One reach the northernmost point of her present orbit and begin a swing to the south?" he asked.
Mike looked puzzled, but the Cow answered, "In ten minutes, thirty-seven seconds. At precisely 05:27:53 ship time."