ROCKET SEASON
Manifold Earth Universe
Volume 5
Rocket Series:
Collection 1
D.W. PATTERSON
Copyright © 2024 D.W. Patterson
All rights reserved.
First D2D Printing – July, 2024
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 added 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
Human Generated Content
To Sarah
If we want to expand into the solar system, this tyranny [The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation] must be somehow deposed.
Don Petit – NASA Flight Engineer
PREFACE
Almost a hundred years ago science fiction authors would publish their stories in one of many science fiction magazines. Sometimes it was an actual novel which was serialized in the magazines first and later released as a novel, and sometimes it was a series of short stories and novellas with a common thematic development. These might be later put into novel form with some connective additions. This was called a “fix-up” novel. Examples of this would be Clifford Simak's novel City and Isaac Asimov's I Robot.
Rocket Season is a collection of the stories Rocket Summer, Rocket Fall, Rocket Winter, and Rocket Spring with some connective material and some new material. In this way it is similar to one of those fix-up novels.
Rocket Season is the story of Jack Williams and his quest to develop a new type of rocket based on Mach's Principle and not chemistry. The principle or effect was posited by 19th century physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach and can be stated as the inertia of an object is determined by all the distant masses in the universe. Though it might sound bizarre this idea was originally incorporated by Einstein into his General Theory of Relativity.
If true, the effect could lead under the right circumstances to the coupling of mass to the gravitational field of spacetime. Frame-dragging, a proven effect, is a manifestation of this coupling. In frame-dragging an accelerating mass (a rotating black hole for instance) drags spacetime with it. Spacetime, in turn, will drag, or accelerate, other masses in the vicinity, and so an accelerating mass could drag spacetime which in turn would accelerate other masses (such as a rocket body) with it.
This would allow a reactionless rocket engine (that is a rocket engine that does not expel mass to develop thrust), and that would revolutionize the access of space.
ROCKET SUMMER
CHAPTER 1
Williams' Farm
Hell's Hollow Road
North Georgia, USA
Jack liked to sit just inside the edge of the forest and look out on the farm's pasture. Before baling, the grass was as high as a nine-year-old boy sitting cross-legged, and when the wind blew the waves of grass looked like an ocean to such a boy. Jack had never been to the ocean, but he imagined it something like a windy day crossing the pasture.
The farm was nestled in a closed valley surrounded by low mountains, some people called the mountains, hills, and the valley, a hollow, but to Jack they were mountains and valley. He looked up at the peak called Muletop across the pasture and thought that anyone who thought it a hill instead of a mountain should try to climb it.
Deep in such thought he didn't hear his dad the first time he called but he heard him the second time.
“Jack come on,” said his dad, “it's about time, the live-stream's starting.”
“Okay,” yelled Jack as he got up and started running through the sea of grass towards his home. He was short but he was fast.
The two-story white house was about fifty feet from the much larger red barn. Jack liked his house, but he loved the barn. All the smells of hay and horses brought him comfort when he was upset. He had spent many hours sitting in the barn, usually in the hay loft, while reading and thinking and recovering from whatever insult he had suffered at the hands of his three older sisters.
After all, life for a nine-year-old boy wasn't without its trials. Sometimes it was the adults who talked to him like he was a baby. Sometimes it was having to bear every decision his mom and dad might make without his consultation. Other times, it might be his sisters torturing him because he was the youngest. Still, he usually liked his family, even his sisters, and heading home after a day outside was always a joy. He reached the yard, and his dad again spoke up.
“We're going to miss it Jack, hurry.”
Jack rushed by his father, around the side of the house and bounded onto the front porch. He was already camped in front of the wall-sized television when his dad entered the room.
“All right,” said his dad. “everyone's here now, let's watch this carefully, we are about to see history made.”
