The Deep Space Adventure

2.

Dr. Dillion Schlemiel wasn't your typical scientist – engineer type. He didn't look quite nerdy enough, wasn't absent minded or single purposed, and actually paid attention to his dress and personal hygiene. He looked more like an accountant, or perhaps a lawyer type, didn't wear thick glasses to correct extreme myopia, and was actually rather popular with the ladies. However if you found him at work deep in the engine room of a spaceship working on installing an experimental anti-gravity propulsion unit, you'd swear that was exactly where he belonged, and what he was born to do.

Professor Matic and Reno climbed through the hatchway and down the ladder into the lower level of the rear engine room. Dr. Schlemiel was sitting right behind the huge rear end of the ship's main nutomic rocket engine where he had opened up the main wiring junction box and was busy splicing in the power feed to the Graviton Polarity Generator already mounted right in back of the powerful rocket engine. Compared to the nutomic rocket, the GPG was tiny, barely the size of a refrigerator. Dillion turned around and looked up when he heard Reno and the Professor enter the engine compartment.

"How's it coming?" Matt asked.

"I've almost got the Spindizzy hooked up now." Dillion said calmly. "I'll have it ready for calibration as soon as you get that density meter interfaced to the systems."

"Robert, Matt and I have already finished that." Reno replied. "Spindizzy, WTF is that?" he asked.

"That's the nickname the guys at the WSP rocket repair depot gave to my invention after I described its theory of operation to them." Dr. Schlemiel laughed. "A bit colloquially put, but actually an accurate description of what happens at the subatomic level when the Graviton Polarity Generator is in operation. The gizmo operates by interacting with the spin vector of subatomic particles against a magnetic vector which modulates the gravitation forces."

"I still don't understand it." Matt said scratching his head, "But I've watched the videos taken of the scale models, and I believe this thing is for real. Still, the real proof is going to be what happens when we try to use it to propel Fireball XL5."

"Don't worry about that!" Dillon said. "I guarantee I will knock your socks off!"

"The thing is so small!" Reno said with a question in his voice. "Truck diesel engines are larger than that."

"Size is deceiving." Dr. Schlemiel said. "What really matters is the amount of mass that my invention is asked to react with. The larger the mass, the more effect for a given power input. This ship is massive enough to react against the Spindizzy using about as much energy as would be required to power the nutomic rockets at one third power. That's decent efficiency considering the velocity that we will be able to obtain, but it's nothing compared to the device's ultimate potential."

Now Matt was really curious. "Which is?" He asked.

"Well if you buried a Spindizzy into a fair sized asteroid with a mass of about that of a good sized city," Dillon started to brag, "you could send the thing across the galaxy at many times the speed of light powered by a bunch of flashlight batteries!"


"There!" Dillon remarked as he finished putting the last screw back into the hatch cover on the Spindizzy, "I'm all finished back here." The scientist-engineer slowly got back on his feet from the crouched down position he had been in for several hours. "That wasn't too good for my back." he complained. "So let's try the initial calibration, shall we?" he asked Reno.

"Is that safe?" Reno asked. "I thought we weren't going to power this thing up until we were in space?

"Good point, Reno." Dillon laughed, "but I'm not actually going to be applying any real power to the GPG at this point. I just want to verify that it's functional, and we can do that by measuring the interaction between the device and the earth's gravity when I activate it at its lowest possible idle current."

For the next half hour Reno and Dr. Schlemiel verified that the system connections were correct and that the graviton density measurements agreed with his calculations. Astro and Colonel Zodiac observed the control panel where Reno had patched in his equipment. When the ship was in space they would be controlling the GPG engine, for now they were observing Dr. Schlemiel and Reno as they checked out the panel.

"Everything looks correct" Dillon finally announced as he powered down the equipment. "We still need to go through the simulation runs some more, I want to make sure that you are certified on this equipment."

"I've been though the simulations plenty, and achieved a 99% grade on it." Steve complained. "I'm ready and you know it."

"What about the robot?" Dillon asked, looking at Astro.

"Don't worry about me." Astro replied. "I'll plug myself into the simulator computer overnight and run though the exercises a few hundred times. I'll be more than ready when we launch."

"I don't know …." Dillon replied.

"We've been over this several times, Dr. Schlemiel," Steve replied. "Base Commander Zero has refused your request to come along on this mission because of the danger."

"He's approved a kid to go!" Dillon said pointing at Reno.

"I'm no kid!" Reno yelled, "I'm over 21 years old. I know I look younger, but I'm an adult, and I volunteered."

"He's got you there." Steve said. "Your invention is too important for use to loose the inventor if something goes wrong. You've got the base supercomputers at your disposal to analyze any problems we might encounter and come up with a fix at your end. Worst case scenario if we lose XL5, you'll get it working on another ship eventually. We NEED that anti-gravity engine."

"Well if you put it THAT way..." Dillon answered, "OK. But be careful!"

"Don't worry about that." Steve answered. "I started out as a test pilot, I know the drill."


Steve Zodiac sat at one of the ends of the rectangular table in the ship's conference room. Seated along one of the long ends of the table were Dr. Venus, and Professor Matt Matic. Directly across from them were Astro and Reno. Located just behind the auxiliary bridge in the main section of the ship, it was here that most of the brain work of any mission might take place. The room was large enough to hold the ships normal crew complement of three or four members, plus up to four extra mission specialists that might come on board. Right behind the position where Steve was sitting a large display screen was built into the wall. It could be used as a computer display, ship view screen, an electronic white board, or in several of these modes at once. At the moment it was in teleconference mode connected back to a video intercom with Commander Zero's office in the Space City command center. Dr's Moss and Von Wormer and Professor Ochanomizu were in the commander's office, and all four of them could be seen in the view screen.

"Now that you've helped get the new engine installed and setup in XL #5," Commander Zero said, "I think it's time for a formal before takeoff mission briefing."

"Roger that." Colonel Zodiac replied. "We're all present and accounted for here. Let's get started."

"OK then," the commander replied. "As you know we've been out of contact with patrol ships XL-4 and XL-13 for nearly six months now. Their supplies must be running very low at this point, if we don't find them soon all hope for their crews will have run out. Patrol ship XL-7 was chasing after space pirates that were attacking miners in the Saturn ring system when they called in that they had received a weak signal from XL-4 and they headed out past Neptune to investigate. We lost contact with XL-7 just a few days ago."

The commanders image on the display screen faded out and was replaced by a computer generated map. The command moved a display pointer around on the screen. "Here are the last know positions of all three ships. XL-4's position is what was reported by XL-7 when they picked up her signal. As you can see we seem to have lost contact just beyond Neptune's orbit at a point where the Kuiper belt begins. At the time of the ships disappearance they were not far from the current orbital position of Pluto."

"Pluto is actually not a planet, it's really a Kuiper Belt object." Reno spoke up.

"Yes, that is the current definition by the Astronomical board of scientists," Dr. Von Wormer replied. "Some members of the Kuiper belt are large enough to be planets in their own right, but their origin and orbits do not qualify them as true planets."

"It is believed that Kuiper Belt objects were created from material left over from the initial formation of the solar system that didn't get swept clear during the sun's early T-Tara phase," Dr. Moss added.

"In any case, the Kuiper Belt has never been properly explored." The commander continued. "There are many planet sized object, and thousands much smaller whose orbits have never been properly charted. Astronomers have never had a reason to study them more closely, up until recently there hasn't been any reason to. These objects are in stable orbits and there is little danger of any of them entering the inner solar system where they could pose a hazard. However if there are space pirates or alien invaders lurking out there, the Kuiper belt makes a good hiding place."

"And that's where we come in?" Steve said.

"Exactly." Zero replied. "Your mission is to verify the operation of the Graviton Polarity Generator and to explore the Kuiper belt in the vicinity of those missing ships. You will proceed out beyond the orbit of Jupiter where you will be clear of all space traffic." The commander zoomed in the map image and pointed to a region of space just beyond Jupiter's orbit. "Here you will engage the anti-gravity engine and proceed out towards the region of the Kuiper belt where the missing ships are assumed to be. You will make sure that you can control this new engine before going beyond Neptune's orbit. We don't want to risk loosing another XL ship if we can help it."