Chapter Five:

It was a year before their next launch into space, and was only possible after proving that the craft they sent could be destroyed in several different ways, agreeing to limit its speed, and narrowing down a very specific lists of objectives which really only proved what they already assumed would be true, but still needed to prove.

Viniker yearned for previous days when they decided what they wanted to do at the start of the week and were doing it before the week’s end.

This flight included a population of rodents and a robot responsible for their care. The trip would be for 8,000,000 miles into and back from space, where they were certain the animals would be exposed to some of the worst that the universe had to offer.

Maree wept for the poor animals as the craft, Menagerie, lifted off into the atmosphere. Earlier animals had lived in the same capsule under water to prove that the ship didn’t leak, that their air-recycling would work, that the rodents wouldn’t die of panic and that the robot could actually feed them.

They’d seen casualties. They’d pressed on. In this case, it would be a miracle if any of the rodents survived, but they’d learn enough to move forward and test the shielding that they’d need for humans to follow where these rodents led.

Menagerie left the ionosphere. She pushed into space with its improved deflectors and receptor array, on a no-nonsense trip, just straight out and straight back.

Cameras showed the rodents, running on wheels, playing, chewing, doing what rodents did. They hadn’t gone 1,000,000 miles before the first one died, but the consensus was that it was spontaneous, not a result of exposure. The robot extracted the poor creature from its cage, placed it in a container where it was exposed under pressure to the cold of space, and then stored it, flash frozen.

They passed an asteroid that took out a third of their population. Analysis showed that the asteroid was packed with heavy elements such as uranium. It also interfered with Menagerie’s ability to transmit, and gave an unintentional push to its receptor array.

The robot was able to throttle back speed – an unplanned test of a later function, only allowed because the ship was still pointed away from Syriahs.

Over the next several days, rodents died in varying states of agony from exposure to radioactive fields that couldn’t be detected, and then couldn’t be avoided, until Menagerie was upon them.

Then the ship turned around, weeks after its launch, and the real problems started.

The rodents didn’t like being weightless, as they were when they shut down the acoustic drive and started using the deflector array for breaking. Some died of panic, some wouldn’t eat others couldn’t figure out how. Most showed the effects of radiation poisoning – hair loss, lesions, tooth loss and blindness – and the additional stress was simply too much.

None made it back to Syriahs. As far as that was concerned, their greatest achievement was their ability to slow down Menagerie before it crashed, and to recover its frozen cargo.

Another thing they learned was that a rodent frozen in space would burn a person’s hand if he or she touched it. It took days to thaw and then to study the rodents.

“I had no idea that radiation levels would be this high,” Maglen informed the rest of the Professors, seated around the long table in one of the conference rooms at the new Viniker Hebel building.

Viniker Hebel – even Viniker wasn’t used to it. It had been more than 100 years on Syriahs since a common had been given a name. With what turned out to be fantastic wealth, having completely changed the way that people moved on Syriahs, there was no denying that, from then on, people would want to be able to say, “I am descended of Viniker.”

Of course, Viniker would actually be the family name – Hebel was an older term for ‘acknowledged’ or ‘elevated.’ That solved the award being given to the person who had actually earned it, without having to call him, ‘Viniker Viniker.’

Sitting next to him, his wife of several months, Professor Maree Hebel, now also a person of name through him. They’d held off on children to ensure that they would be Vinikers and not commons, as could happen depending on which way traditional winds were blowing.

Her parents had been more excited about the naming than the inventions she created. It was as if they couldn’t say ‘Hebel’ enough.

“I had no idea that weightlessness would be so hard on their bodies,” Viniker countered. “Without that, maybe some of them would have survived.”

Another Professor, Enigmat, shook his head. He was a young man like Viniker, black-haired from the southern regions of Syriahs, his eyes dark brown and his skin very pale. In the south, they could have true, dark night in two seasons in a row.

“Yer animals were doomed before the ship turned ‘round,” Enigmat informed them. “Lethal doses, those were reached a’fore you were half way out.”

“That is discouraging,” Maglen informed them all. His health had been failing this last year. Maglen was ancient by any standard, and no one lived forever. Were he not at the Academy, and then accessing cutting-edge medical technology administered by people at the top of their field, he wouldn’t have lasted this long.

Grellin, an old man but not of Maglen’s years, nodded. “We could cover the craft in lead and it wouldn’t have been any different. With those levels, we can’t even consider sending humans into deep space.”

Viniker felt his heart drop. Was that it? Space would be the province of robots flying the silent void in their faster machines? If that were true, what was the point? Robots didn’t care if the trip took a year or 1,000 years.

They argued and they postulated, but there was no progress. Hours later when they broke up, Viniker and Maree walked hand-in-hand back to their apartment from their namesake building.

“I know how important this was to you,” Viniker said to her.

“And you,” she added, not looking up at him. The night breeze was cool, the dull glow of the smaller, dwarf sun casting long, black shadows across their path. In the years since the advent of the fliver, people had begun to ride even short distances rather than walk. Fuel was sunlight – essentially free. Why risk a rain shower?

Maree preferred to walk, and Viniker felt it kept them healthy. As well, these slow-downs were welcome in their fast-paced lives. It took time to walk from place-to-place. That time could be spent talking, thinking, just appreciating what they had.

“My dream was to find anti-grav,” he said. “I did that. You are the one who sought the stars, who took us to faster-than-light travel.”

She was quiet as they walked further on.

He looked up at the sky – at what they could see of it. Densely populated as the area around the Academy was, the light from thousands of light bulbs combined with the emissions of their second sun drowned out the stars above them. Only the brightest could be seen, alongside washes of color from distant systems.

“We’re safe here,” Maree said.

Viniker smiled. “I suppose we are,” he said.

She turned to him. “No,” she said. “From the radiation in space – we’re safe here.”

“We have miles of atmosphere,” Viniker began.

Maree shook her head. “We have technicians now that don containment suits, go up on flivers and fix satellites,” she said. “They don’t die of exposure.”

“You’re right,” Viniker said. “They don’t.”

“So it’s not the atmosphere,” she said.

“Or they’re not up there long enough,” Viniker said. “But you’re right – it bears study.”

They returned home with a new sense of purpose.

A dosimeter is a device that measures different kinds of radiation exposure. There were four types to worry about.

Alpha radiation is a heavy isotope which is a helium atom with no electrons. It reacts with the first thing it comes in contact with – hungry to replace those electrons. Even a person’s dead layer of skin was sufficient to protect from alpha radiation – the only danger was breathing it.

Beta radiation is more common and more damaging – it is those electrons, freed from their atoms. Also highly reactive, a thin protection is all that’s needed to be safe.

Neutron radiation is a rogue element with no electrons, and is very damaging. It has no charge and will pass through anything. Because it is a single atom, the most effective protection is hydrogen – so water can be used. The one-hydrogen to one-neutron collision stops both dead in their tracks.

Gamma is an electro-magnetic wave. It contains enough energy to ionize a cell in a living body, to alter or damage DNA. Dosimetry from Menagerie and from technicians working in low orbit revealed that this and protons is what they were exposed to. Even the technicians were affected, just not by much. A body exposed for a short time could simply heal and live on, so a technician couldn’t go up to low-orbit more than once a month, and not more than once every three months into high orbit.

There were other types out there – positrons and anti-protons, charged nuclei, muons and cations – but in terms of shielding, these were the four categories to worry about, and in fact gamma and proton exposure were their chief concern.

Radiation exposure had been studied extensively in Syriahs’ nuclear age, when fission-based power plants pumped energy into the continental grid. Reactors at the time had been encased in lead, then surrounded with water. Graphite and boron rods were used to control the reactions within them – boron being the best because it has eight isotopes which are all good neutron receptors.

A friend of Professor Maglen, a woman named Herren, was an expert in the field, and he called her in to advise them. She was a tall woman – as tall as Viniker, and just as thin. Her hair clung to her head in long, silver whisps, her dark eyes searched the soul when she made eye contact. She stroked the young man’s cheek with wrinkled fingers like so many sticks when they were introduced.

“So this is the man who took my automobile away,” she said, a hint of a smile on her thin, pink lips.

Viniker almost apologized before he realized she was teasing him.

They were in a large but poorly cleaned lab in the Academy Physics building, on its lowest level actually two stories beneath the ground, where containment from exposure would be optimized. Because no one was particularly concerned with this science anymore, the equipment was outdated.

It had taken Grellin’s influence to get access to the place, and he accompanied them now, mostly out of curiosity to meet Herren. This was a former Professor who’d outlived her science – a dread for any of them.

Herren regarded Maree but said nothing to her. Instead she crossed the room and opened a large, sheet-metal locker against one of the walls. Dust made motes on the floor as she revealed its contents: a set of full-length body suits made of what looked like some type of yarn.

“You left your knitting?” Maglen asked her, a smile wide on his bald head.

She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe he’d come up with the idea. She took one of the outfits down and handed it to Viniker.

“This looks like yarn,” she said, “but in fact that’s a weave of boron nanotubes, suffused with hydrogen and nitrogen. We were designing access suits for radiation workers when our funding dried up.

“Robotics overtook any need for humans to handle radioactive material,” Maglen said. He stepped forward and picked another of the suits out of the locker. “I remember these. Didn’t the dean then say that this didn’t protect the face and eyes?”

“He did,” Herren said. “But that could be accomplished with a leaded, glass face shield, padded with more of this.

“With a heating element,” she said, looking back toward Viniker, “you could make a suit fit for the vacuum of space with this.”

“I wouldn’t want to knit a cover for a space craft,” Grellin said.

“Foolish man,” Herren’s eyes all but pierced the other Professor. “You don’t have to make it into a fiber, but you can. The nanotubes can be wrapped around your craft to make it safe, as well.”

Maree looked to Viniker. “Will this work?”

Herren stared daggers at the younger woman. Viniker rubbed the material between his thumb and forefinger.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The machine that made their suits no longer worked – its parts had been robbed over time to fix other equipment, and the original designer had died years before. However, the process could be re-learned and, in fact, improved upon. It took a week to produce more suits, with tighter weave and, as it proved, more suited to the harsh environment of space.

The first experiment was to provide them for free to the satellite workers. With a dosimeter on its inside and at its belt, outside, the team proved immediately that the technology cut exposure to a fraction.

That was within the protection of Syriahs’ upper atmosphere, though. Viniker petitioned for another trip through space.

Original queries were met with, “You’ve done this already,” and “why didn’t you try this the first time?” Designs, examples of the suit and long explanations of the technology were added to the request. There was an unwritten rule at the Academy: All else failing, bury them with an explanation.

This time there were representatives of the Sariyan government at the Observatory when they were ready for a launch, another month later.

Legislator Edrimus Prem dressed in the latest fashion – a body-suit which outlined his form, perfectly coifed blond hair and manicured fingernails, startlingly handsome in his middle life.

Legislators in Syriahs were elected every four years, then elected their own leaders in the legislature. Parties tended to shift as people’s sentiments adjusted to life around them, however the people were always the same, always of family, and often interchangeable.

If one had come here, then he sensed that what was going on was going to come to public attention, and then needed a position on it. That wasn’t improbable, Viniker knew. The public was still paranoid about their nearly hitting the planet with a super-light missile of their own making – now they were dipping into the sensitive topic of radiation. In the days of nuclear power, exposure and how to control it had frequently been a topic of an election.

Prem was surrounded by unnecessary body guards – persons who did more to guarantee that he didn’t answer a spontaneous question than to protect him from any threat from the public. Syriahs had been at peace for generations.

He watched quietly as the orders were given for the upgraded Menagerie to launch into space. He dutifully smiled when it was announced that the rodents onboard were seeming to do fine in their cages, now covered in bon-tubes, as they were being called for their boron, oxygenated-hydrogen and nitrogen construct.

Viniker watched the reads from the multiple dosimeters on the ship – the one on the outside, behind the deflector array, the one inside on a new hull composed of hard-cast bon-tubes, and one in every cage for every group of rodents.

To his surprise, he saw them all spike to some degree as the EM drive moved the craft away from the planet’s atmosphere.

“Wait!” he ordered. Even Ambergee jumped. He turned to her.

“Professor, I’m going to bring the ship around and do that again,” Viniker said.

“What?” Prem spoke up – a look of concern on his face.

“You haven’t slowed down,” he noted.

Ambergee sighed. “We’re not anywhere near light speed,” Viniker assured him, “and we’re over the ocean. There’s no danger.”

“I’d like to hear that from one of your deans,” Prem insisted. Grellin stepped forward.

“Grellin, of the house Esteve,” he said, extending his hand to Prem. “I can assure you, Legislator, this is within the parameters of the experiment.”

They shook hands. “Carry on,” Prem said.

Stupid, Viniker thought but didn’t say. This is how the ‘Great Families,’ could be. They trusted each other; they didn’t extend that to the commons.

Grellin remained standing next to Prem, as Menagerie pushed back toward Syriahs’ atmosphere.

Dosimetry dropped. Viniker ordered a halt.

Prem turned to Grellin, who simply nodded.

A few more passes determined beyond doubt that there was a protective threshold around Syriahs, and that they’d found it. This boundary existed between what they considered lower and upper atmosphere. They all noted this, and then Menagerie moved on into deeper space.

An hour later, on the acoustic drive, Menagerie passed through what they’d come to call a ‘solar storm,’ a collection of particles and gamma rays that passed around and through the craft.

On the exterior of the craft, the levels were in excess of lethal.

Just within, on the other side of their bon-tube shielding, levels were much lower, however they reached lethal levels before the storm passed.

Within their shielded cages, the rodents received a dose, but it was survivable. It turned out that the robot failed for the worst part of the storm, but then was back online as it passed.

“We progress on,” Ambergee announced. In this case, this was technically her experiment. The topic here was undeniably astrophysics, not propulsion.

The scholars continued to monitor their panes, the Professors broke up. Ambergee joined Maglen, Viniker and Maree. When Grellin moved to join them, Prem followed.

“The real test is when the survivors come back with decreasing gravity,” Maglen said, rubbing his bald pate. The spots seemed more pronounced than the last time Viniker had seen them.

“In that vein, we should only go out for a few more days, then come back,” Maree said.

“Is that safe?” Prem wanted to know.

“Perfectly,” Grellin assured him. “Safer, in fact. Less time for Menagerie to build up speed.”

Prem nodded sagely. “Ah,” he said.

Viniker wanted to shake his head. That was simply ridiculous. At sub light speed, even if they lost complete control of the craft and it headed for the most densely populated part of Syriahs, it would burn to vapors in the atmosphere before it touched ground.

However, if Prem were reassured, then there was no reason to argue with him.

“If we have survivors, and we should,” Maree said. “Then we should see how they recover.”

Maglen nodded. He turned to the rest. “That would be useful,” he said. “We have old data on the long-term effects of radiation exposure, but nothing like what we’re gathering now.”

Ambergee nodded. “Agreed,” she said. She would take care of the orders given and changes that would need to be made. Of course, their government overseers would want to know why the change was necessary, and why they hadn’t thought of it before.

“I’m more interested in this barrier that Professor Viniker seems to have discovered,” she added.

“I was going to ask you…” he began.

She smiled a rare smile – as she usually did when she felt she knew something that someone else didn’t. More commonly, knowing this, she’d refuse to share the information.

Not this time. “There is a theory,” she said, “that the core of Syriahs is molten steel which is constantly churning.

“Well, more than a theory,” Grellin said.

Ambergee cocked an eye at him. “Have you been there?” she asked.

Grellin bit down on his counter-remark.

Seeming to direct the answer mostly to Prem, she continued, “If that theory is true, then that action would generate a magnetic field around the planet, and if that is true, then that field could neutralize or counter the incoming particle radiation that comes with these solar storms.

Prem knitted his brows. “We know this?” he asked.

“We assume it,” Viniker said. “It is quite possibly what a fliver pushes against, when it opposes gravity.

Prem nodded.

“We couldn’t generate that on a space craft, no matter how large we built it,” Maglen said. “Even without a molten core, the requirements in power would be devastating, and the effects on the living beings in the craft unknown.”

“It is an experiment that could be done on-planet,” Ambergee said.

Viniker shook his head. “It could,” he said, “but how would we know when affects were a product of Syriahs, and when they were the product of our own efforts?”

The rest nodded.

“I can’t help but think that this is this is telling us something that we’re missing,” Maree said. She looked to Ambergee.

“What literature do you have on this?”

“There is plenty,” she said. “This is a favorite topic for papers for young astrophysicists. You might want to look at magnetic induction as well.”

That got Viniker’s attention.

“How is that?” he asked.

“Another theory,” Ambergee explained. “If you can’t deflect or block the radiation, then you would want to absorb it.”

Viniker turned and crossed the Observatory to the scholar who monitored Menagerie’s speed and direction. “Can you give me the craft’s predicted and actual speed?” he asked.

“I just noted it,” the young man in yellow and white said. “We got a bump from the solar storm – we’re 3% faster than we should be. I was going to ask Professor Ambergee-“

But Viniker had already left – Maree right behind him.

On the second day of their journey, the robot moved some of the rodent cages where they’d be in-line with the receptor array. Another was moved to the front of the craft, where they would be unaffected by it.

On the third day, the ship turned around. Little breaking was needed, however no additional speed was required, either. Acceleration dropped to nil and the rodents found themselves in free-fall. Within an hour, three had died.

On the fifth day, they passed through another solar storm. Not so bad as the first, they lost more rodents. It was undeniable that stress was a contributing factor to the effects of solar radiation.

On the sixth day Menagerie landed with over half of its crew surviving. A few of those lucky survivors went under the knife by the veterinary unit of the Academy, with former professor Herren assisting. The bodies of the ones from the front of the craft were covered with lesions. Those in-line with the receptor array were much healthier, but not unaffected.

Within a week, the rodents from the front of the craft had all died. A few from the original, unmoved cages passed, as well – all of them were cancerous.

They didn’t lose any from under the receptor array.

Viniker watched the rodents in their cages, playing on their wheel, eating their food. Maree was holding his hand.

“We need a mechanical engineer,” he informed her.