Chapter 54: Intelligent Conversation
Thanks to boothnat and euphoric for editing!
There was silence at the table before he spoke again.
"We have much to discuss," Mr. S announced, and then abruptly fell silent.
The irony was not lost on him, nor on his guests, who sent wordless glances to one another round the table. Even Vee, the rabbit faunus, seemed to forgo her initial reluctance about the whole situation to express some skepticism.
Mr. S took in their reactions, and it was plain to see: they despised the very concept of him.
He could hardly imagine what Ironwood had to threaten or promise to get these people in here with him. After all, they were engineers, and Mr. S, having been in a similar position as these people - though he did win first place at national competitions - knew exactly how he would feel if some business dude got him fired from his job through political shenanigans just so he could hawk his pet project he'd still yet to reveal in any capacity.
Of course, Mr. S was only a little sensitive to the precarity of the situation because, once he told them his brilliant plan for bringing space technology to Remnant - backed by nearly a century of real world experience he'd inherited from Earth - well, they would be sure to come around.
He'd just say "chemical rockets" and they would all leap up in amazement.
Delta, in a swift reversal of her current attitude, would probably say something like "oh my gods," or something. He doubted she was a sun god nun.
And Jon, maybe, would just immediately shout in amazement, "Are you serious?" in reference to Mr. S's obvious genius.
And Vee, the rabbit faunus, would come out of her shell a little to ask more about Chemical Rockets.
And this would all happen before the last syllable had even left his lips.
Except, it wasn't that simple, was it?
His desire to advance rocketry was balanced on a razor edge against his need to remain discreet about the fact that he wasn't actually Mr. Schnee. And, a small part of the act of playing Mr. Schnee consisted of avoiding questions like: "how in the world did you manage that" and "where did you learn something so esoteric?"
And he couldn't exactly answer those questions by saying he was self-taught.
Because, you see, rocket science was kind of complicated.
Modern Earth rockets like the Atlas II were designed by literally thousands of engineers. And those thousands of engineers were working with design considerations and rules of conduct discovered over nearly a century of successful - and quite unsuccessful - attempts by the tens of thousands engineers that came before them. And those tens of thousands of engineers were themselves supported by the collective efforts of nearly a hundred billion humans, who had - over the course of millenia - contributed to the development of millions of non-dust technologies that allowed the creation of chemical rockets in the first place!
Mr. S couldn't exactly muse up a design like that without either looking like a superhuman god, or, more likely, an alien impostor, which was exactly the thing he was trying not to look like.
So he was at an impasse. And the engineers, he could see, were growing steadily more and more frustrated with his inaction.
It wasn't completely hopeless, however.
Because while he couldn't directly design the rocket, he could… influence them in the right direction. He could drop hints, and do it so subtly enough that they wouldn't even realize he'd been the one to bring up the topic of chemical rockets, that he'd been the one to ask the innocent question which, after some argument, had led them onto the idea of using liquid oxygen.
Oh, it would take some finesse and trained conversation, but it was doable.
The only hiccup was that it would require finesse and trained conversation. And recent history had shown Mr. S to have all the conversational finesse of an artillery division.
With his talent, as well as with the painkillers coursing through his system, Mr. S couldn't fail to look like a crazy man! Or, at least, he would look crazy until he started talking about the funding, at which point he expected to appear more eccentric.
And so, knowing well the flattering effect of huge piles of money, Mr. S decided to start off on that strong note.
"I am willing to spend ten billion lien on the execution of this project - " Mr. S said, supplying the first words of the past five minutes.
Though this was a good commitment, it was lacking in rhetorical effect because he still hadn't told them what the project was.
The engineers, still silent, only looked at one another for hints of what to say.
Delta spoke up, finally, leaning forward into the light so that the dark-blue tips of her hair glimmered with a violet sheen.
"Ironwood never told us what the project was," she explained.
Mr. S, feeling a dangerous loss of control at that question, rapidly pivoted to pleasantries.
"Of that matter, later," he chuckled, looking around at the gathered pupils. "First, introductions! Whom do I have the pleasure of meeting?"
Again, after a confused pause.
"I'm Delta, I work with aero-design," the woman folded her arms; with a stern scowl. Her punk-rock t-shirt was of a neon bent.
"A pleasure to meet you, Delta," Mr. S smiled briefly at the woman.
"I believe we've already met," Jon Braun spoke next. Standing up, he turned slightly to better look at everyone. "You may call me Jon Braun," he bowed.
"Yes, I remember we spoke at the Gala," Mr. S recognized, happy to see the man once again.
"I, uh, guess I'm Smalls," the large man sent weary glances at all the other figures in the room, looking for all purposes like a mouse in a house of giants.
And, if Smalls was nervous, Vee, the rabbit faunus, seemed positively suffocating. "I'm Vee," she squeaked, drawing into herself.
"We're glad to have the both of you. I heard from Ironwood you did quite well in the national competition." Mr. S raised an empty glass in their general direction, sensitive to the fact that Vee looked quite unable to handle any direct attention.
"Yes," Vee was about to squawk before she was kindly interrupted by Delta, who spoke in a stern, disapproving tone.
"If you've heard so much from Ironwood, why are you wasting our time asking for names?"
Mr. S was taken aback by the aggressive stance, though he made sure his body language didn't reflect it. "I thought it might be polite to allow you a chance to introduce yourselves," he answered politely.
As comfortable and in-control as he looked, however, Mr. S was hardly feeling the same internally. His general response to aggressive questioning was to aggressively respond, and his own - rather suddenly developed - talents at conversational politics were, as much as he hated to admit it, rather the life savers as he thought of some way to salvage the situation.
"But yes," he continued calmly, putting a hand to his chest apologetically and looking over at Delta with a disarmingly friendly expression, "perhaps I have been too reluctant to 'get down to business' I believe is the colloquial expression."
The engineers seemed… surprised by that reaction, and even Delta reigned herself in, though she did express some residue of impatience with the way she blew a blue streak of hair off her face.
Mr. S gestured out at the engineers - "But, believe me, there's no one here more eager to talk about my project than I. However, I'm haunted by the prospect that, frankly, it's quite fantastic, taken at face value, and - important as you are to the future success of this project, you must forgive my reluctance to bring up the project before I've ensured, as far as is possible, that you have all the context regarding the seriousness of this invitation."
Now all of them - even Vee - seemed enamored with open interest.
Mr. S continued, this time a harshly cold and impersonal voice shocked the engineers. A rather stark change from the friendly demeanor they'd grown used to.
"Before we go any further, we must make clear the consequences of breaking your silence on this matter. All of you have signed a non-disclosure statement," Mr. S reminded them of that fact with an impersonal manner. "You are under no obligation to take the job, but you have promised your silence on this matter. You are never to speak of this, not to friends, not to family members, no one. I know you've worked on projects for the military before; don't believe that the standards will be any lower here. Breaking the terms of your contract can, and will, come with repercussions. Is that understood?"
Every syllable seemed to be cut with sharp corners, and the impact of the unrelenting seriousness Mr. S displayed was apparent on the younger faces surrounding the table. Vee looked to have drawn fully back into herself. Delta looked to be a little sobered, and on the other end of the spectrum, Oche looked as if he'd hardly heard the announcement.
Slowly, nods of acknowledgment came intermittently from all of them.
Seeing that, Mr. S felt himself falling back comfortably into a conversational stance. It really amazed him how easily this body took to switching emotions, as well as all the new intuitions that guided him to display these facets.
"Then, I suppose we're free to get down to business," Mr. S smiled. "I'd like to ask, first of all: have any of you worked together before?"
Snowflake hissed and bristled on Mr. S's lap, sensing the sudden rise in heartache and tension.
Mr. S petted the cat's hackels down, leaning further back into his chair with an introspective look. He noticed that everyone present looked to be experiencing terrible flashbacks at the mention of their working together.
It wasn't because they hated each other, that much was clear. On the contrary, they seemed to share a certain sense of camaraderie. Of the kind found in people who'd survived natural disasters or failed engineering projects.
Their team hadn't been Remnant's first to make the attempt. There were several declassified projects from the twenties.. and thirties... and forties, all with the same aim, and all with the same conclusion: dust didn't work in space.
With a history like that, Mr. S gathered, it must've taken quite a bit of ingenuity or delusion on their part to try again.
Because this work was hard. It required passion and sacrifice and terrible awareness of the fact that: if you failed, you'd be crushed under the tremendous hope everyone had to put on your success; that - if you failed - you'd only be setting the stage for everyone else to give up too.
And they'd failed
And, from the looks on their faces, Mr. S could sense a deep fatalism of people who would never truly recover from a painful lesson.
Back on Earth, Mr. S considered his job to be a job. He certainly would have quit if he had the money.
Their project, however, had been something more akin to a dream - no, a destiny!
And they had failed.
It had let them down and turned into yet another reminder that Dust just didn't work the way they wished it could. The very basis of their technology couldn't function outside of Remnant. There had been no way around that.
And he could see their depressed expressions growing sadder with the passing moment.
It amazed Mr. S, how intuitively he saw through all of this with his new eyes. It all happened in a flash, and he'd noticed it all in the second it took them to gather their composure. He could read them like a serial.
And paragraphs of anger seemed printed on the following pages.
"Why are you asking?" Delta was among the first to come to.
Jon wasn't far behind her, though he took on a more agreeable face. "We've worked together before, yes," he nodded. "We were with the Advanced Propulsion team. We've since been moved to other departments."
"Advanced Propulsion," Mr. S quoted, looking off to the side contemplatively. "That was the space travel project, wasn't it?"
All of them bristled at the candid description, and Delta in particular flushed with suppressed humiliation as she grew angrier with the seeming nonsense the conversation seemed to have replaced itself with.
"What of it?" she asked briskly.
Mr. S smiled. "Well, then, you have exactly the kind of experience I'm looking for."
-?
If anything, all of them seemed to grow more confused at that answer.
And Mr. S, still desperate to keep his facade of ignorance, attempted coolly to keep his further statements vague, to let them figure the fundamentals of his idea out on their own. Or at the very least, to let them think they'd figured out chemical rockets on their own.
And the only problem he'd so far encountered with this plan was that they... weren't figuring it out.
"What exactly do you mean?" Jon asked politely, trying desperately to keep the peace and still quite at a loss as to why Mr. Schnee was standing in front of a giant globe and making insistent references to high energy chemical reactions.
Mr. S could feel the painkillers wearing off, and he could feel his own patience running short with every distracting throb of pain that spiked up from his rib with every wrong step.
"Perhaps I haven't been clear," Mr. S conceded, pacing around the newly lit room in front of a free standing whiteboard. "You of course all understand the basics of space travel. That you need to maintain an orbit, and that this orbit must intersect the last moment of acceleration the craft experiences, and that, crucially, the entirety of the orbit needs to be located within the low density vacuum of space, above Remnant's atmosphere."
As he spoke, Mr. S drew a wobbly ellipse around the mottled circle he'd so far used to represent Remnant. His arm exploded with gritting pain as he made the movement. A small "x" marked the location of final acceleration, just below the dust limit, where all engines so far conceived tended to stop working.
Tensing, he turned back stiffly to face the group, ready for their insights.
"Yes," Delta hissed impatiently, this being the second of Mr. S's aborted attempts to revive the current of conversation. "I think I understand the basis of my entire field."
Mr. S for his part, was growing rather frustrated with their impatience, considering that, from his perspective, their own obtuseness was the only reason he was being forced into this roundabout inquiry! And, furthermore, he could sense he wouldn't be getting any more painkillers until they finally fucking got it!
"Well, that vacuum was precisely what I wanted to talk to you about," Mr. S said. "I know you never reached this part of the program, but I wanted to ask, did you have any considerations of any high energy chemical products that would be… amenable to use in space?"
Mr. S said that with all the ease of a person who'd run out of pick up lines.
"Are you perhaps referring to the space suit concepts we had?" Jon suggested. "It would have used a high pressure oxygen tank to provide a breathing medium, but It's rather not very useful in a mining context. As, I'm sure you're aware."
"Ok, perhaps I've made things more opaque than they needed to be," Mr. S admitted, receiving looks of 'ya think?' from the gathered group.
Still, he just wasn't quite sure how to bring it up.
He felt another, ginger, throb of pain from his arm just then. The third one that minute.
And Mr. S decided he didn't really care about subtlety anymore.
He took a resigned breath through his nostrils. "Have you ever considered just using a chemical rocke-"
Mr. S didn't even have the opportunity to finish the sentence before they all leapt up in recognition.
Everyone, even Vee looked up at him with amazement. The same look was burning in their eyes, the same, astounded, astonished, unbelieving look of complete... annoyance!
It was the same look - Mr. S was sure - that greeted every vacuum cleaner salesman whenever they put their foot in the door.
"Oh my gods!" Delta almost yelled with exquisite frustration.
"Mister Schnee," Jon scowled lightly, "are you quite serious!?"
"Chemical rockets?" Vee said, turning to Delta for guidance, he rabbit ears twitching with secondhand embarrassment for Mr. S.
Mr. S had been expecting those words, but not with quite that intonation.
"What the matter?" he stepped back soberly, holding his hand out in a guiding fashion.
"What's the matter?" Delta spat, insulted. "What's the matter!?" she let loose, patent frustration twisting her features into a hateful mask.
"Yes," Mr. S nodded, curious.
Surprisingly, everyone elected to answer his question, all at once, while yelling.
"Everyone's thought of chemical rockets!" they uttered in unison.
"Chemical rockets just don't work!" Delta said. "There's not enough power in the stuff."
Mr. S blinked. That was news to him.
"Yeah," Smalls spoke up, "besides, what are we even supposed to put into orbit, a rock?"
"And how are we even supposed to-"
"Ok, that's enough," Mr. S spoke calmly, surprising himself with how quietly he'd managed to interrupt the tirade. "What's this about chemical rockets not working? Of course they can work."
"No they don't!" Delta rose up in her chair, seeming personally insulted by the challenge. "And I'm wondering, frankly, why we've been brought here if that was everything you had to say?"
"Chemical rockets can work," Mr. S replied easily. And at this, a series of questioning glances came from the group, directed at Jon, who shrank down into seat, apparently having regaled them with Mister Schnee's surprising knowledge about Rocketry, and who now seemed to be paying the price for such premature praise.
"I don't believe it," Delta fully threw her hair back, turning to leave and nodding her head in disgust. Everyone else looked prepared to follow suit.
"If it's anything," Mr. S said, a bit more strongly now, "What I don't believe are your objections. If you have a hundred tons of liquid oxy-"
"I'm aware of the energy that would be released, so stop trying to impress me with freshman chemistry courses!" Delta whipped back with great anger. "The fact is, you can't get all of it to react in a stoichiometric ratio, you can't control the reaction time, and I doubt you have any idea as to how to even get it to a sufficient chamber pressure!" Delta almost laughed simply, despite the great pains the description seemed to inspire within her.
"Use a pump," Mr. S scowled.
"Yes," Delta nodded, rolling a hand in expectation, "but a pump requires dust to run it. Can you see the issue with that?" speaking as if trying to explain something to a particularly slow elementary schooler.
This, coincided with a heartbeat that, once again, reminded him of two things: one, that he was still experiencing a rising pain under his left shoulder, and, two, he was out of patience! Yay!
"Okay, that's it," Mr. S said, taking up an eraser and wiping away the orbit he'd drawn on the whiteboard.
"What are you doing!"
"Let's assume you have one tank filled with a hundred and thirty tons of liquid oxygen, and another filled with a hundred tons of ethyl alcohol."
As he spoke, he pointedly ignored the rest of them, focusing on the two cylinders he was drawing at the top of the board, one in red and another in blue.
"Now, assuming a starting tank pressure of twenty four atmospheres, we can see that the reactants should flow naturally to a chamber here:"
He drew two lines from the cylinders to a small box.
"Now, let's assume for a moment that we have pre-starters and pumps in both of these boxes. Burning the reactants, we should be able to use a portion of the chemical reaction to turn this…" Mr. S paused, looking for a natural word, "chemical pump," he came to at last, drawing a miniature turbine in the box. "This itself can be connected by an axle to a third chamber, which will drive the primary reaction loop, as drawn through…"
The rest of the presentation was as smoothly planned as anything Mr. S had seen in any of his classes, and the picture on the board grew with commensurate rapidity.
Normally, such demonstrations were quire simplified models of the real thing. But, Mr. S, on one hand worried that they might take simplification as evidence of the impracticality of the endeavor, and on the other hand angry enough to actually draw out the entire thing, didn't hold back a single detail.
"And this main reaction will end with a high pressure line that, once it passes through a swirl injector," he gestured again to a small model of the object, "can be easily mixed with its counterpart in the reaction chamber as a fine mist. With this method, it should be possible to develop sustained thrust, without the use of any dust intermediaries." Mr. S flicked the marker to finish off the integral in the upper right corner, "and this, as we've seen, can conservatively lend us up to ten kilometers-per-second of delta-v." He turned around. "Any questions?"
Mr. S turned away from the board, which was now a spaghetti swirl of overlapping engine plumbing that sprawled over it's claustrophobic surface.
Jon, who'd sat furthest from him, was leaning over his desk, jaw hanging so low his pipe was forming a ramp to the floor.
Oche, his grey beard shaking, blinked rapidly, on the verge of saying something.
He was beaten to the punch by Vee, however, uncharacteristically eager to let her words out.
"How, how, how," she stuttered, flowing from one word to the next with the effortless ease of an illiterate author. "How did you come up with that?!" She finally exclaimed incredulously, gesturing a delicate hand out to the engine diagram.
"Vee," Mr. S held out calmly, wise enough by now not to rush to an answer, "calm yourself."
"Where did you learn that!" Vee stood up aggressively.
"We can talk about this later!" Mr. S offered, backing away.
"No, we want to know now!"
Mr. S tried deflection. "I'm not sure what you're talking about."
"I believe what Vee is trying to ask," Jon cut in, " is… how did you learn so much about rocket engineering… or engineering in the first place, actually?"
It was here Mr. S cursed his earlier impatience, and went with the only logical answer available to him.
"I'm self-taught?"
