Copyright © 2024 D.W. Patterson
All rights reserved.
Second Printing – February 2025
Future Chron Publishing
Cover – Copyright © 2024 D.W. Patterson
Cover Image – Photo 115346712 / Rocket Launch © Nexusplexus | Dreamstime.com
Previously published as:
Rocket Summer
Rocket Fall
Rocket Winter
Rocket Spring
Contains additional material.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission, except in the case of brief quotations for the purpose of review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events and people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Hard Science Fiction – Old School
CHAPTER 4
A doctor's checkup, including x-rays, found nothing wrong with Jack. But his mom was not eager to have him go back to his experimentation. The cellar was a mess, and even though not too many of her canned goods were damaged, she wouldn't agree that the experiments could continue. Jack's dad, as he had done with Jack's bottle rockets years before, came to the rescue.
“Okay,” he said, at the family meeting with Jack and Jack's mom. “What if I build a wall to protect the canned goods and what if Jack assembles his experiment in the cellar but automates it so that he can test it remotely?”
“I don't know Jose,” said his mom. “What if the explosion is bigger next time? Could it damage the house?”
“Well,” said Jack's dad, “no one can say for sure what might happen, but I think once Jack is sure of what went wrong this time, then we can make it safer for him and the house next time.”
“I don't know, honey,” said Jack's mom. “I want him to pursue his interests, but it has to be safe for him and for us.”
“Alright, let's just wait to see what Jack finds during his investigation, and we'll go from there.”
They all agreed.
After a week Jack's dad asked, “Tell me son, have you figured out what went wrong?”
Jack was silent for a moment.
“Something happened with the piezo cells,” he said. “It got so hot during expansion that it blew itself apart. I'm going to experiment with the voltage ramp, the material obviously has a limit to the power it can handle.”
“But your power supply wasn't all that powerful, was it son?”
“No, not really dad. But these PZT disks aren't the same as the ones the old professor used. I think they must be more sensitive to the power input; they expanded too fast.”
“Okay son, you have a hypothesis to test. I'll tell Mildred and we'll start building.”
Jack's dad rented a robotic 3D builder from the local hardware store and drew up the plans that would isolate Jack's experiment from the rest of the cellar. Jack's room would be in one corner of the cellar with those two walls built into the earth. Another wall would be built by the 3D builder and would be one foot thick and reinforced by rebar. The last wall would be the outside berm. Through the berm Jack's dad designed a pressure release tunnel a foot in diameter. In the chance that there was another explosion the pressure relief door would open and release the gases and smoke to the outside.
Once the 3D builder was finished and, on its way, back to the store Jack got to see his new room.
“This is great dad. It really feels like a lab. Thanks.”
The room was about eight feet by ten feet with a reinforced door. The lighting was recessed and electromagnetically quiet so as to not interfere with the small signals of the sensors. The room itself was also a Faraday shield, that is it was shielded from any radio or other external electromagnetic source. The table had been restored, and Jack's physics professor had come through with a clear vacuum chamber made out of a tough plastic which was a Faraday shield in itself. Everything coupled to the gadget inside the chamber was properly grounded to prevent antenna-like effects. The walls were clean without shelving, the only thing in the room was the table and necessary equipment. Everything was better than the last time.
“Your welcome son, now we need to have your mother tour the cellar and approve it.”
“Right dad.”
Jack's mom reluctantly approved the new arrangement with the understanding that Jack would go more slowly with his experiments. Since that was exactly what he planned, Jack quickly agreed.
He spent the next couple of weeks setting up the controls for his experiment. Unlike before, he sought out equipment that could be controlled remotely over a network. The expense was a little more significant this time, but Jack's dad came through, although he didn't inform his wife of the price of every purchase he made for Jack.
Fall was approaching and the air was cool in the mornings as Jack rose and got started on his project each day after his dad had left for work. The walk outside and into the cellar reminded Jack of the changing seasons and the amount of time he had spent on this project. It would be a shame, if after all that time and everyone's efforts, he was unable to at least get some positive results.
The explosive interruption to his experimental schedule had given Jack time to study the gadget some more. One morning while he was reading through the articles for a third time, he got a notice that the old professor's book had been found. The price was high, but it was as important to the experiment as any of the equipment Jack had purchased, so with a large part of the money that remained after buying other equipment and supplies, he purchased the book.
A couple of days later after receiving the book, Jack could see that between the time the book was written and the time the articles he had read were published, the design had changed. Just as he had built it, there were no capacitors in the newer design, just PZT disks. But with the book at hand, it was conceptually easier to see how the design worked.
Still, it didn't seem right to Jack. He felt that there should be something more involved. The whole thing seemed to need something to push and pull against, and yet there was nothing there, or rather it was supposedly provided by the universal inertia, the Mach effect, as the professor argued in the book. But Jack couldn't understand that part, and all the math didn't help.
So, he would just proceed and see what happened.
The next weekend after several preliminary runs, Jack was in his bedroom, he had the app he had written open. From one program he could run and monitor his experiment in the cellar. So far, the experiment had yielded no results. Each time he had run it he had decreased the ramp up of the voltage signal while increasing the power. This time he would be close to the settings that were used during the first, explosive attempt.
He touched the screen to turn on the power supply and heard the familiar whumpf through his speakers as the currents surged into the large capacitors of the supply down in the lab. Jack glanced at another screen showing the room, everything looked good. Another screen showed the strain gauge widget and other readouts. Nothing but the power supply indicator, which showed the supply was on, had changed.
Jack prepared to touch the button on the screen that would start ramping up voltage to the PZT stack. He pressed it and then quickly looked at the screen showing the room in the cellar. Everything looked normal, so he turned to the readout screen. Meter and bar widgets were starting to move. Jack was particularly focused on the strain gauge widget.
It began to move and then he heard a noise. Before he could pivot to the camera screen, he heard a strange sound coming from the speakers. It wasn't easy to place, Jack had not expected any sound. It started as a low hum and proceeded up the scale quickly, at the same time a loud buzz commenced. Then he heard what sounded like a large firecracker going off, then he thought he heard a swooshing sound from outside his window.
Looking at the camera screen he saw nothing unusual, at first, but then noticed something falling on the table on which he had placed the gadget. Or rather, on the table which had held the gadget, because now Jack saw nothing there but the debris falling from above.
“Jack,” he heard his mother yelling for him.
He ran and opened his bedroom door.
“I'm coming mother,” he yelled back.
Jack raced down the steps and down the hall and out the back door. He saw his mother standing near the berm that covered the entrance to the cellar. She was pointing up the embankment.
“Jack, something fell through the roof.”
Jack knew that the hole she was pointing to was just above the experiment table.
“I'll check it out mom,” he said as he rushed past her and into the cellar.
Jack could smell hot electronics but no smoke. He opened the thick door that separated his experiment room from the rest of the cellar and rushed up to the table. As he looked up, he could see the hole directly above where the gadget had been. Everything looked normal except the gadget, the vacuum chamber that had held it, and power supply were missing. The hole in the roof seemed to be about the same size as the missing chamber.
“That ain't good,” he thought.
“No more Jack,” said his mom, at another family meeting.
Jack hung his head.
“I'm afraid I've got to agree son,” said his dad. “This experiment is just too unpredictable to allow you to continue, something we would all regret could happen.”
“I know,” said Jack. “I'll start cleaning out the room tomorrow.”
“Thank you, son,” said his mom.
Jack and his dad were in the cellar the next day finishing the cleanup.
“Did you come up with what went wrong Jack?” asked his father.
“Well, I looked through the data from the instrumentation last night and I think it might have worked dad.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, everything looked like I would expect, except that the data was off the chart, literally.”
“So, if it worked, where is the gadget?”
“Well, my guess is that, if it did work, it is somewhere west of here. But how far, I don't know.”
“You mean you think it lifted off and carried the vacuum chamber with it?” his dad asked.
“Yes, and it dragged the power supply with it too.”
“That's several pounds Jack, that power supply was heavy.”
“I know dad, I wish I could find it, to prove my hypothesis.”
“West of here,” said his father. “That's a wooded area Jack. Make your best distance estimate and we'll go looking for it.”
“You think we can find it dad?”
“I don't know son, but we can give it a try.”
The next weekend they took the four-wheel drive and a drone with them and headed west. Jack had figured that the device had taken a parabolic trajectory and was no more than a mile from the house. Jack's dad got them as close to the suspected area as possible and parked the four-wheeler. He put up the drone and they both watched the camera feed. They were looking for any broken or bent tree branches that might indicate where the vacuum chamber had fallen.
But after two hours of buzzing back and forth, they saw nothing.
“Sorry, son,” said his father as he put the drone back in the four-wheeler.”
“That's okay dad, at least we tried. I know my calculations weren't very accurate, who knows where the thing is.”
Meanwhile, just a few hundred yards to the south, at the bottom of a neighbor's pond, set a strange looking chamber with an even stranger looking gadget inside.
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