Chapter 1

“Congratulations, Doctor Lewis!”

“Thank you, Doctor Lewis! Congratulations, Doctor Menendez!”

“Thank you, Doctor Lewis! Congratulations, Doctor Lewis!”

“Thank you, Doctor Menendez!”

“Are the three of you about done, or can we go get something to eat now?” Beth was looking at the three of us like we’d lost our minds.

Margie looked back at her. “I’m sorry, are you one of those lesser mortals that those of us who have been elevated to a higher status, nearing the pantheon of the gods themselves, have to sometimes stoop to deal with?”

Dora shook her head. “I’m afraid so, Doctor Lewis. Perhaps after diligent hard work on her part, she might be more eligible at some point to become worthy of our notice.”

Hannah raised an eyebrow. “You do know that while I’m still owed five minutes of tickling, the fifteen of us know where both of you are ticklish? We’re debating right now about whether we start at half an hour, and work our way up on the time, or not.”

Margie blinked. “I was going to say, you wouldn’t dare tickle a pregnant woman, but I know better. Not only would you tickle both of us, you’d all positively delight in it.”

Eve looked at both of them. “You know it.”

Margie surrendered. “Okay, then. Let’s get dinner!”

The five of us that had received degrees today wore our mortarboards into the restaurant. We took over a banquet room which, with twenty-six family members, twelve personal security staff that would be eating with us, plus twelve more that were simply providing general security, was pretty much our normal now. We appreciated that even though today was low key as far as degrees, Stanford had still given us mortarboards that had the date and the degrees each of us earned embroidered on them.

Technically, Margie got the fewest degrees. She received her Doctorate of Business Administration. Beth got a Bachelor’s in Chemistry, with a Master’s in Mathematics. Eve got two Bachelor’s, Mathematics and Statistics, and a Master’s in Philosophy. Dora got Bachelor’s in Mathematics, Spanish Studies, and Civil Engineering, and her PhD in Political Science.

I looked at my mortarboard. “I don’t feel like I earned all of these.”

Helen smirked. “Probably not, but if nothing else, that gives you plenty of letters to put after your name on your resumé, if you need to go look for a job somewhere.”

Doctors Korn and Fallow had surprised me. I knew from my testing plus my papers what I was going to get. Bachelor’s in German Studies, Russian Studies, Spanish Studies, Psychology, French Studies, Chemistry, Biological Sciences, and Physics. I wasn’t expecting Bachelor’s in Applied Physics, Biochemistry, Cell Biology and Pharmacology. The Master’s in Mathematics, the two PhDs – in Political Science and Economics – I sort of expected.

“It could be worse, you know,” Helen continued. “You could’ve been appointed as the Special Defense Minister for the Federation of Terran Nations. Oh, wait...”

“It’s Spatial, not Special. English is such a screwed up language when pronouncing words. Anyway, that’s not official until there legitimately is a Federation of Terran Nations, and you know that vote’s not until next week,” I pointed out.

“It’s a moot point in our discussions, and you know it,” she argued back.

“That’s not what I mean.” I shook my head. “We’ve found out that the governments of too many nations already knew way too much about the shivalingam in the first place.”

“That’s for damned sure,” she agreed. “It’s funny finding out that the Japanese push on Australia during the war had as a secondary objective taking Uluru, courtesy of intelligence they’d captured in China.”

“No more than finding out even more about Hitler than what we found out at the meeting,” Hannah said. “We’re still sorting through that huge set of files Cris sent us.”

“That reminds me. I remember being told a while back that he had more than just three women. Why did he only bring those three to San Francisco with him?”

Beth answered me. “They’re his version of Spic ... pardon me, that’s Doctor Spic ... Eve, and me. You have seventeen, but if you really were going into someplace dangerous ... or that you perceived that way ... you’d bring those women that you knew had at least some abilities. I think that Maria may have been more adept at using them than the other two, and well more than Cris, but none of them are as good as any of us.”

“That leaves Hugo, though, doesn’t it?”

I nodded. “Yeah, Bob, it does. You’re the unofficial prognosticator of future events, since you’ve done pretty damned well in the past. What do you see happening?”

He chuckled. “I foresee a lot of irritated women if we continue talking about things that shouldn’t be talked about at a celebration like this, Cal. One thing I’ve found over the decades is that there is a time for work talk, and a time to just experience the fun of whatever it is you’re doing.” He made a patting motion with his hands. “I know, you don’t see it that way. Ginny and I found out during the War that we had to separate business. When you were out for a night on the town, especially here on the coast, it was never really out of your mind. Blackout curtains, air raid wardens, and everyone in uniform.”

He shook his head. “Thing is, you knew it’d be there tomorrow. All that stuff you’re worrying about inside, it doesn’t matter tonight. Concentrate on the good! We’re not suffering from rationing, so we can eat well. We’ve all got people who love us, who care for us, and who love and care for you! That includes both of us, you know. You’ve proven to Stanford that their faith in you wasn’t misplaced. Enjoy the moment. Enjoy tonight. Enjoy the children. They’ll grow up soon enough.”

Beth looked down the table. “Bob, that sounds like a man who’s had an epiphany.”

“Not that, my dear. A man who’s realized that the mortgage was paid off long ago. I became a writer because I had one of those, and my previous attempts to earn a living during the depression didn’t pay well. Tough to earn a living in those days, even harder when you’ve had tuberculosis and never really recovered from it. That’s why I tried to make a living without working.” He laughed, continuing, “Thank God I never made it as a politician. I think I would have been an honest one, but my price tag would have been high. Now ... the only debt I have is to your husband, and that’s one I’ll never be able to pay off by conventional means; if for no other reason than he makes more than the rest of the country, combined.”

“Not yet,” I pointed out. “Working on it. Are the two of you up to next week?”

He took in a deep breath, then let it out. “It’s not like we haven’t had to attend funerals of family members before. I expect I’ll feel a little like Lazarus felt like when Rangy Lil passed away. They’re not dead yet, of course, but ... probably in the next five years, they will be. I’m just glad I’ll have a chance to say goodbye, especially to Lawrence.”

“Don’t worry, Grandpa Bob. We’ll be there to help you through it.”

“Thank you, Carrie. I appreciate the three of you giving up your spring break to wander through part of Missouri with an old man.”

Toby chuckled then. “Grandpa Bob, my Grandpa Tobias is the same age as you. I have the same memories of those parts of Missouri that you do.”

Ginny shook her head. “That’s still going to take some getting used to for us. I look forward getting to know all three ... or is it all six ... of you better.”

“Yes,” Carrie said with a smile.

We finished up the evening by officially welcoming Yagyu to our crew. He’d arrived from Kansas on Monday, and was part of our personal security staff. He’d also assist Sayel in training the kids. While they had the powers of the shivalingam, they didn’t have the full hand-to-hand combat skills needed should things get messy.

Rather than going home after the meal, only to have to drive back on Friday to fly to Kansas when the kids got out of school, Bob and Ginny stayed in the hotel across from Stanford that we’d stayed in before. That also let Ginny be available Friday when we started doing destructive testing in the lab on different materials that had been coated in or made with the flame and heat resistant chemical. While we were doing that, Bob was going to be touring NASA Ames with Dora’s cousin, Doctor Virginia Valenzuela.

The next day, with everyone back from break, all of our assistants were present. We’d spent lab time during the week getting things set up for today, painting, dipping, and otherwise coating a large variety of items. The other thing was, since we were dealing with heat and not just mixing chemicals, we wanted to be safe and not accidentally burn the building down.

Instead, we took everything over to the Peterson Laboratory Building of the Engineering department, to their high heat testing area, where their furnaces were located. There were several simple tests we ran first, just to confirm that untreated plastic bags would melt around a hundred thirty, paper would spontaneously combust at two hundred thirty two, cotton fabric would do the same around four hundred, and the glass jars we had were rated up to a thousand before they’d melt.

After five hours of testing, we shut everything down and gathered in a classroom to talk over the results. Loretta Rendall, Assistant Dean of Engineering and my coordinator with the Engineering Department, had gone out while we were cleaning up and brought in Doctor Madix and Doctor William Nix, the Associate Chairman and one of the professors in the Material Science and Engineering department, to join us for the discussion.

We had the ubiquitous lunch of choice for research students delivered: pizza. That and lots of water, because we’d been in a really hot environment. I wasn’t affected by it at all, but I had to use the same conscious body control I’d used during football games and sweat a little. I was trying to figure out why everyone was so excited. I felt like we’d failed miserably.

Once everyone had something to drink and eat, I went up to the whiteboard.

“Well, that was ... interesting, I guess. That’s why we do research, after all, so we can figure out why we failed, and hopefully come up with a solution that works,” I said.

“What the hell are you talking about, why we failed?” Doctor John Ross, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, asked. “Please don’t tell me you were thinking we’d get the same results with this that we did with Ice-X!”

I blinked. “Well...”

“For God’s sake, you’re the one that said this was going to be different, because while there is an absolute zero, there’s no conventional absolute maximum,” he pointed out.

The rest of the team, Dora included, were nodding their heads in agreement.

Molly Lawson, one of my chemistry graduate assistants, said, “This is heat we’re talking about here, Cal, not cold. Ice-X is possibly the best insulator ever found or created, when you’re dealing with cold temperatures. Even then, it took a triple lamination bag to keep helium liquid at one degree Kelvin. A double lamination bag, it let too much outside heat in still, so it’d always boil.”

“Oh, congratulations on that, I didn’t know you’d managed to get that done,” I said.

Dora grinned. “Sorry, I got caught up in all of our end of term paperwork. But I did pass that on to Harry. They’re going to start construction on an Ice-X plant just outside of Jalandhar as soon as the plant near Manhattan is finished, and Siemens is putting in a wind turbine plant just outside Amritsar. They’re going to start site work on that next month.”

“Oh. Okay.” I nodded, then remembered my issues with micro-management. “Sounds good. Now, what did you mean, Molly?”

“I think it’s obvious, really. The plastic bags can handle the cold with proper insulation. They’re designed as freezer bags, anyway. But they’re still just plastic. That means that even with minimal heat transfer, at some point, they’re going to melt. It’s not like the Heat-X, or whatever we end up calling this, can completely prevent the transfer of all heat to the actual material that’s been coated. We know that Ice-X doesn’t do that. Neither does this.” She paused, then her eyes got wide. “Oh, I think I get it! Cody, do you remember what we were talking about?”

“The misapplication of goals? Oh, yeah.” He started nodding. “Yeah, you were right, Molly. For once, age and experience beat youth and intelligence.”

From her seat, Ginny started chuckling. “Oh, don’t tell me, he thought that whatever it would do, would be the same across all materials? That’s ... we had someone like that during the war, he had a set of goals in mind, and even though he found the solution to the problem we needed him to solve, he kept working because he was pursuing the wrong goal.”

A bit of a smug tone in his voice, John said, “Doctor Lewis, surely you didn’t make that common, first-year student, mistake?”

“Doctor Ross, such an insinuation is well beneath a man of your stature. Besides, I am still sort of a first-year student. I said at dinner after the degree presentations that I wondered if David and Stephen were being a little generous.”

Doctor Madix chimed in. “Well, now that we’ve proven that Cal is a fallible human, and I won’t mention who else made that mistake in his third year as a student here, what were the results?”

“No matter how well coated, we couldn’t get plastic bags to survive beyond four hundred degrees. Paper was thickness dependent, actually. A single sheet that had been saturated and dried burned at six hundred degrees. Two sheets that had been saturated and then laminated burned at six-fifty. Three sheets, the outermost sheet that was exposed to the heat source started to char a little at six-fifty, but no combustion until six-seventy-five. Standard cardboard that had been saturated lasted until seven hundred. Cotton cloth acted similar to paper, it lasted until eight-fifty, then up to nine hundred with three layers. Glass didn’t melt until the maximum temperature your furnace could go, fifteen hundred,” I said, as I wrote things on the whiteboard.

“What about heat transfer prior to the ignition?” Doctor Nix asked. “I presume you had protected thermocouples or some other way to measure the temperature under whatever was being melted in our furnace.”

“We did. Things sort of went on a curve. At about twenty percent of melt temperature, there was no heat transfer. Then it climbed by about five percent heat transfer per ten percent increase of source heat, until it hit seventy percent, going up rapidly from there such that at ninety percent of melt or destruction, it was full heat transfer.”

He frowned. “So, for clarification, you’re telling me that a single layer of cloth that had been saturated would not transfer any heat through at all at a hundred seventy degrees?”

My whole team nodded. “That’s what we saw in there, Doctor Nix,” Peter Benson, one of my engineering graduate assistants, said.

Now he looked intrigued. “Was that standard soda-lime glass you tested, or borosilicate glass?”

“Just standard glass, not Pyrex,” I said. “This was our first test of what we made, so we didn’t get any of the materials that are out already, like Kevlar, Gore-Tex, or Nomex and see what happens with those. I’m not trying to infringe on any of their patents at all. I’m not making a competing product, just working to improve what’s out there already.”

Nix looked thoughtful, then nodded. “What about steel itself? A standard, stainless steel bowl, for example?”

“Your furnace here can only go up to fifteen hundred. We didn’t actually prepare one, but we knew that if it helped at all, it wouldn’t melt until well above the temperature your furnace can reach. Stainless normally melts at fourteen hundred.”

He began rubbing his chin. “That sounds like we need to come up with a proposal so we can get you some time over at NASA Ames, in their Arc jet lab. Last time I wanted to work over there, it took me almost six weeks to get approval. What’s so funny?”

Ginny, Dora, and I were all chuckling.

Ginny explained, “My husband is over there right now, getting a guided tour from one of their best aerospace scientists. I think if Cal wanted to use any of their facilities, it’s not even a case of his asking, it’s simply them letting him do whatever he wants.”

A thoughtful look crossed Nix’s face. “I suppose, if what I’ve heard about Doctor Lewis ... congratulations on those, by the way, to both of you ... is true, then I would imagine so. My apologies, by the way, Ma’am. I caught your first name during introductions, but we got so busy. I’m Doctor William Nix, Associate Chair of this department. I presume from the discussions you were a chemist during the war?”

“Yes. Organic and biochemist, and test engineer for rockets as well. Cal has managed to rope my husband and I into his little family, for which we’re grateful. I’m Ginny for short. Virginia Heinlein, my husband is Robert.”

Nix blinked, then turned fanboy for a while. That meant we headed back by the lab, picked up some aluminum and stainless steel blanks that were a foot square and five gallons of Heat-X, and went to NASA Ames.

Doctor Nix stayed in fanboy mode once he met Bob in person. In the meantime, we got busy putting coats of Heat-X onto the metal blanks, while I spent some time talking to Virginia Valenzuela. She got the other two directors of NASA Ames, Finley Duncan and Justin Boucher from their offices, so the four of us could discuss what I wanted to do.

Doctor Duncan bit his lip a little. “We really can’t just bump the Arc jet time like that. These experiments are scheduled out on purpose.”

Doctor Boucher shook his head. “Screw whatever they’re doing now. This is more important. They’re playing with research, we’re talking about people’s lives here.”

Nodding, Doctor Valenzuela agreed. “Exactly. Finley, we know how damned fragile the tiles are on the shuttles. We’re working with the Soviets on their Buran as well. We have tiles here to play with. Until we see, we won’t know, but ... think about this. The shuttle has to take nearly seventeen hundred degrees during landing. The tiles can easily be damaged. If a coating of Heat-X on the outside of the tiles helps make them stronger...”

“Fine! I’ll shut down whatever they’re working on. What do you want to try first?”

“Single coat on steel and aluminum are dry, Cal,” John said. “We’re working on the second coat on other blanks, and we’ll see what three coats do, too.”

A couple of other NASA scientists were upset that their Arc jet tests on the ceramic compounds they’d created were delayed. We invited them to watch.

“Okay, it’s a piece of aluminum. Anything special about it?”

I grinned. “The material itself? No. It’s just standard, one-eighth inch thick aluminum. Standard melting point of six hundred sixty degrees, with deformation possible starting at one-seventy-five. It does have a single coat of Heat-X on it, though.”

“What’s that?” the other NASA materials scientist asked. He had a slight Belgian accent.

“You’ve heard of Ice-X?” At his nod, I continued, “Same thing, other way for temperatures. Let’s fire this thing up, shall we? Oh, and Doctor Nix? We didn’t think about aluminum, because I wanted to see what other stuff did first.”

He nodded. “Understood, actually.”

We watched as the Arc jet fired up. NASA had it set up for experiments such that they could tell not just the temperature of the hypersonic gases, but also the isolated temperature of the side away from them. Normally, they’d pick a speed and temperature to subject the test object to and lock it in, but it was variable. Thus, we started at six hundred, just to see what the aluminum would do.

“Okay, this is weird. It’s putting out six hundred degrees, but ... we’re not seeing the usual glow of the metal getting hot, and the reading on the back side shows normal vacuum temperature, no thermal conductivity at all.” The NASA scientist sounded puzzled. “Oh, I’m Charlie Thornton, by the way. That’s Philippe Martens.”

“Pleasure to meet both of you. I’m Cal Lewis, and this is my crew. Charlie, let’s make it simple, increase to seven hundred for ... five minutes.” When that didn’t do anything, we bumped it to eight hundred. “Okay, now we’re getting some heat on the back side. One sixty, so twenty percent. Let’s see if this follows through, bump it to eight-eighty,” I ordered.

Thornton did so, already amused that the aluminum panel hadn’t melted. He was watching things, and after about thirty seconds, he said, “Okay, it’s at two-twenty on the back side. What’s your next temperature?”

“Eighty degrees at a time. If this follows like before, we should see a five percent conductive increase per ten percent heat input increase,” I replied.

It was funny in one respect, to think that so many of us were simply standing and watching a piece of aluminum get hot for half an hour. “Okay, that’s good. It’s getting hit with twelve hundred, so twelve eighty should put it at six hundred. That’s close enough to melt temperature of the metal itself. It’s already looking a little weak due to gravity on it, now. It’s not failing, but it can’t handle much more.”

“No, you’re right. But this also means that a single coat on aluminum can handle more than bare metal,” Dora said. “The double coat and triple coat are also dry. You’ve got four of these chambers, can we use two of them at once?”

“With the power consumption of what we’re doing, yes. This isn’t bad, all things considered,” Boucher said.

Duncan nodded. “I was wrong. Let’s see what happens, shall we?”

Thirty minutes later, we had an answer that caused a lot of head scratching.

“It doesn’t seem possible for it to do that!” Doctor Nix complained. “I don’t care what’s going on, there should be some heat transfer through a metal. You’re hitting it with eight hundred degree gases on one side, where’s the heat going? All my physical rules tell me that it should be warming the metal up. It’s bad enough that a one thousand degree Arc jet on one side made a whopping ten degree change to the other side with two coats, but three coats taking twelve hundred degrees, with no heat conductivity? And then for aluminum to not melt when it’s twenty three eighty on the hot side, and eleven ninety on the cool side? When the metal melts at just six-fifty?”

“Well, it was looking a little iffy at the end,” I pointed out. “Granted, I suppose it’s possible that the coating itself was giving it some structural stability as well, but I don’t know why that would happen.”

Virginia Valenzuela had gone to one of the supply rooms while we’d been watching. She’d come back with a couple of standard pieces of Shuttle tile. John had coated them twice and they’d dried in the time we were playing with the aluminum.

“Try this in the next chamber,” she said, holding it out. “We know how it works already, we helped design it.” She turned to us. “This is a reinforced carbon-carbon tile. It’s for the leading edges of the wings. By itself, it can handle fifteen hundred degrees. The way the shuttle reenters the atmosphere, the design is that it should never exceed twelve sixty. I’m ... well, the tiles themselves are fragile, and thick, but they don’t add that much weight overall. I want to see what happens to this one.”

At normal reentry temperature, the tile didn’t even look hot. There was zero heat transfer, which was expected at this point. That’s how they were supposed to function on the shuttle, anyway. The tile finally started showing that it was feeling the heat at two thousand, two hundred degrees. It still held up just like it should at three thousand degrees, simply glowing white hot.

“The tile still has to handle thermal shock,” Boucher stated. “Get a water bath ready.”

While Martens got a tub of cold water ready, Boucher explained, “While the tiles are incredibly light and susceptible to physical damage, they’re effectively immune to thermal shock. They also don’t hold heat. One of the things we like to demonstrate for school children is heating one up with a blowtorch so it’s red hot, then within a few seconds, holding it with our bare hands even while the middle is still glowing, similar to your bags of liquid oxygen at the cook-out.”

They turned blowers on to deal with the clouds of steam, then quickly turned the Arc jet off and pulled the still white hot tile out. Using the tongs, it was dropped into the water bath, with the expected result. Since the tile didn’t actually retain much heat, the cloud of steam didn’t last like a piece of hot metal would have, dissipating within thirty seconds.

“What was the water temperature before it went in?” I asked.

Martens shook his head. “Unbelievable. Ten degrees Celsius before immersion, obviously there was some boiling, but...” He used a long paddle-like device to stir the water. “Non! It’s thirty-eight! How is this possible?”

Doctor Valenzuela frowned, saying, “I’ve tested shuttle tiles for thermal shock before, with ten degree water. It always heats up to at least fifty, plus or minus two degrees.” She reached into the water and pulled the tile out. “Unbelievable! Completely normal. We’ll have to check, but it appears there’s no thermal shock damage at all.”

Doctor Duncan said, “Stress failure test. Drop your aluminum sheet onto the other coated tile from six feet. This stuff is fragile, so it ought to knock a hole in the surface, or maybe even destroy the tile completely.”

I dropped one of the panels onto the tile that hadn’t gone in yet. It bounced a little under the panel, but that was it.

“Okay, that’s what, about two pounds? Drop one of those steel blanks on it, that’s five pounds,” Boucher ordered. Nothing happened. “Decrease the surface area. Drop the blanks so their edges hit the tiles!”

Upon seeing the same results as before, Duncan exclaimed, “Holy shit! This stuff provides stable protection for the whole piece? If we can get the adhesive to stick, this means we won’t have to worry about tile damage! Let’s check that one with heat. A regular tile subjected to that kind of shock would lose all internal structure.”

The second tile was subjected with the same heat as the first, and had the same result.

Boucher said, “Finley, if we can get this stuff to stick, we can coat the bare metal of the shuttle first before putting any tiles on, so if there is a catastrophic failure, they might have a chance to survive anyway!”

“I don’t know why it wouldn’t, not with the adhesive you’re using now,” I agreed.

Boucher nodded. “Cal, would you come with me? I need to call Florida. Would the rest of you continue working on testing the steel blanks, and get a couple more regular tiles, not the wing ones? And ... I’d like to see four coats on something, not just three, if we have enough material.”

“We can do that,” Doctor Valenzuela said. “Where are you going with Cal?”

“To call Florida, of course. Discovery launches next weekend, so it’s too late to put this on her. We can change her landing to Edwards and get her modified. Challenger doesn’t launch for three more weeks, though, so that’s enough time to get down there with some of this and at least externally treat her.”

“Justin, we don’t know everything we need to know about this chemical, though.”

Boucher shook his head. “We know enough. Virginia, I want a coated wing tile exposed to four thousand, maybe for an entire day. Use all four jets, people. This can save lives! Cal?”

I was rather surprised at Doctor Boucher, but followed him, Chuck and Sayel tagging along. He was definitely a man on a mission, storming down the hall until he got to his office. He threw his clipboard onto his desk, pointed at a chair for me, then slammed down into his own seat. He picked the phone up, and hit speed dial. He also put the phone on speaker.

It rang three times before being answered. I recognized voice of Doctor Eileen Barnum, the head of operations at Kennedy Space Center.

“Whoever you are, you’re lucky you caught me, it’s late.”

“Eileen, it’s Justin, out at Ames in California, on speakerphone.”

Her voice perked up a bit. “Oh, hi, Justin. What’s going on, does Cal Lewis have some letters behind his name yet?”

Boucher looked at me. “Hello, Doctor Barnum, it’s Cal Lewis. A few. Twelve Bachelor’s, one Master’s, and two PhDs, in Political Science and Economics.”

The sound of a telephone handset hitting a desk and then bouncing a couple of times was easy to hear. So was her mild cursing, as she retrieved it. “Sorry about that. Fifteen degrees, just in the first quarter?”

“It’ll go down after this. They had to get all the basic ones awarded first.”

“No shit.” She was quiet for a second. “Sorry about that, I know last time we talked you had your own lab and such. If Justin is calling me, something must be up.”

“Definitely,” he said. “I know it’s realistically too late to delay Discovery. Change her landing to Edwards, instead of Kennedy. If Challenger has to delay a week, that’s fine. We’ve got something for her, and we need to strip all the tiles from Atlantis and Columbia and treat them now.”