The Cause by Dan Klasing

Author:Dan Klasing [Klasing, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-04-05T23:00:00+00:00

Forty-one

The same night that governor Franks was locked in a battle of wills over who would wield control of the Revolution I, Drs. Dave Knox and Rick Donnelly stood beneath the craft in its new testing hangar near Mobile, Alabama. They had moved its location east so that the French contractors could use the original plane as a template.

Dave looked straight up at the underbelly of the craft hovering twenty feet above his head while Rick watched the expression on his face. With the smell of cordite hanging in the air, Dave slowly lowered the forty-five-caliber automatic he had just fired at the priceless hand-built aircraft.

“Now, put your gloves on and hold out your hand,” Rick prompted.

Still looking up, Dave holstered the pistol and slipped on a pair of work gloves.

“Okay. One. Two. Three. Catch!” Rick called out, pushing a button on a small remote control.

Dave reached out his gloved hand and caught the bullet he had fired moments ago. He looked down at the pristine piece of lead and looked up at Rick.

“That was awesome! I mean, too cool! I shot, and the next thing I see is this bullet hanging in the air. What? Ten centimeters below the second electronics housing access door? Oh, my friend, you have outdone yourself this time!” Dave could barely contain his enthusiasm. “How did you manage that?”

The pair walked out from under the hovering aircraft as it began slowly descending back to the hangar floor, eventually coming to rest on its tricycle landing gear.

“It wasn’t difficult,” Rick answered without any trace of sarcasm. “I just realigned the gravity wave reflectors so that twelve point four percent of the exterior wave pattern produced fluctuating wave apogees. I was playing around with the amplitudes and found that the gravity waves could hold an object on one side within a narrow bandwidth while still smoothly propelling the craft from the other. Pretty neat, huh?”

“Pretty neat? Do you know what you’ve done? You just made this thing invulnerable to small arms fire! You’re a genius, boy!” Dave exclaimed like a man who just found the proverbial pot of gold.

“First, the fact that we are both geniuses is a bit of an understatement, as you well know. Second, the wave modulation won’t just stop little bullets like that one. A RIM 174 Standard ERAM wouldn’t get any closer than your forty-five-caliber round,” Rick said with the same amount of emotion he would have used telling Dave what he had for lunch.

“Wow! Holy-crap! Wow!” Dave pronounced, shaking his head at the extent of Rick’s accomplishment. “Even a three-thousand-pound missile would just stop and hang there like that bullet?”

“No. In a real-world application, the system will automatically change the amplitude of the waves upon contact with an object and then just release it. It would look like the missile bounced off the craft. But in reality, it would be caught in the gravity wave for only a millisecond,” Rick explained.

“The Directors are going to love this! Love it!

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