Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(21)
“I’ll only know after I build a map of the fractal structure.”
“We’ll go back in tonight,” Jennifer said.
“No,” Jack said. “Mark needs more recovery time. Besides, I’ve got other things for you to do before you try again.”
“Like what Stephenson’s up to?”
“Something big’s about to happen. Time to use those special talents to find out just what it is.”
The soft scratching sound, amplified by the all-consuming darkness, seemed to grow louder with each occurrence, until it seemed to echo off the walls. Even the brief gaps between sounds acquired a loudness that beat at his ears.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Nothing.
Convinced that the sandpaper strip on the matchbook had by now removed all but the paper from the match end, Raul opened the paper packet and tore off the next candidate. This one sputtered to life at the first strike, the brilliance of the curling flame raping Raul’s dilated pupil like the thrust of a red-hot poker.
He squinted, forcing himself not to look away, guiding the flame to the wick of his makeshift candle. Although it acquired a dull red glow, the wick stubbornly resisted the flame’s caress, something Raul’s fingertip was unable to do.
“Shit!” Raul dropped the match, which hit the floor and went out, crushed by the darkness that rushed in to fill the space vacated by the light. Raul almost expected to hear a thunderclap.
He had more luck with the next match, the wick sputtering into a smoky flame that remained lit when he pulled the match away. Setting it atop one of the abundant pieces of alien machinery that surrounded him, Raul paused to let his eyes adjust.
The generator sat there, casting shadows from its crudely fashioned components. And, crude though it was, Raul felt the warm glow of pride spread through his body as he looked at it. After all, it was his and it worked. Considering his circumstances, the thing was a miracle of engineering.
When he’d first begun building it, he’d intended to run the thing with steam. But that would have required him to also build a steam engine and to come up with enough heat to power the thing. It could have been done, but only if the generator was small. Raul had quickly concluded that he could shortcut the process and come up with a mechanism to use physical energy to drive the generator—his physical energy.
If he’d still had legs he would have set it up as a bicycle. Instead he’d fashioned a pair of padded handgrips, positioned at such a height that he could lie on his back beneath the apparatus and pump the handles with his hands and arms, his effort spinning the magnets within the surrounding wire windings, the moving magnetic field lines inducing the current he required.
As great as that accomplishment had been, it had brought him face-to-face with his next problem.
Working by the light of his improvised candle, Raul had opened the panel that allowed access to the bank of power cells that could provide seed energy to the matter conversion units. He had finished the cable that would link his rudimentary generator to the power cell, not knowing if it could provide sufficient amperage to kick-start the cell. It didn’t.
No matter how fast he cranked the handles, Raul couldn’t get the amperage high enough to make a difference. After several attempts, he lay back in a pool of sweat that spread out across the smooth alien floor, too exhausted to drag himself to a dry spot. As he lay there, tears of frustration dripping down his cheeks to mingle with the sweat, a memory wormed its way to the surface of his mind.
His father had always been a tinkerer. Even though he’d been a top scientist on the Rho project, specializing in cellular regeneration, his real love had been applied physics. Before Raul had gotten sick, he could remember his dad taking him to the garage to see the latest version of his thin film capacitor.
“This is what’s going to make us rich,” Ernesto had said, holding up the fist-sized device. “As soon as I solve the dielectric breakdown problem, you’ll have to go to the Smithsonian to find a battery.”
That had been a month before Raul was diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer, a month before Ernesto Rodriguez had set aside all his capacitance tinkering in favor of an obsessive effort to build a Rho Project cure.
After Raul had found himself tethered to the Rho Ship and its amazing neural net, he had noticed that among their many accomplishments, the builders had solved the perfect capacitor problem, producing a thin dielectric with nearly perfect permittivity and almost no leakage current.
What that meant was that they could store charge better than any battery ever made. If you completely charged one of those babies it could generate a lightning bolt. And the Rho Ship’s circuits had millions of them.
It was one of these that Raul had been putting so much work into recharging. He glanced down at his arms, the muscles so defined that their peaks and valleys cast little shadows across his skin. That’s what fourteen hours a day cranking generator handles did to you.
Raul grabbed the candle and pushed himself across the floor, tracing the path of the thick wire cables to the open wall panel where they connected to the capacitor leads. The capacitor scared the hell out of him. One wrong move, a stray touch, and it would turn him into a smoking pile of charcoal. His mighty nanites would be zapped to kingdom come in the dozen nanoseconds it took the electricity to surge through his surgically shortened body.