Graviton Collection
Sam was bored, smelly, grumpy as he had been on duty too long, and lonely. The only other people within a perimeter of fifty thousand miles were his wife and their two employees, all off duty in the habitation hub.
“Get in here, you silly bitch!” Sam cried out. Naturally, the radio was off and he wasn’t close to within earshot of anyone. Also, he didn’t actually feel that way, he just said it to say it.
Sam had a few minutes before the end of his shift and before his wife, Thelma, would take his place. The work was really easy. Even among the asteroids, way out in space, the metals they output had to be guarded. They had missiles, torpedoes, and laser cannons to greet an aggressive intrusion and all of these weapons were, of course, better ‘manned’ by the automatic system built to use them. Before the weapons would fire, however, a human had to give permission.
Thelma showed up a bit early. She hadn’t called on the intercom but was plainly visible, waving at the reinforced glass of the control cabin’s shock door. Sam called for the AI to let her in.
“Hi, babe. You’re a bit early,” Sam said, greeting her with a hug before they made their way to the seats and strapped their weightless selves into the control seats. Sam was made for weightlessness, a short and knobby gnome of fifty or so years. Thelma, of the same height and only nominally younger, was a bit rotund and tended to bounce around. They had been married for comfortable decades, launched a few children out into the world, and built their asteroid mining business.
“Yes, I was bored so I thought I’d come a bit early. Nothing here to see, as usual,” she said. There were no actual views to the outside but the screens told them everything they needed to know and then some. There were no thieves, or anyone, in the area. There hadn’t been a robbery for years; the armament had become the usual deployment for miners and it had taken its’ toll. The screens for the habitat, the large rubberized tube that circled the hub, were all green. The rotational gravity and air pressure for the living tube remained nominal.
“There’s some amber.” Sam pointed out the references to Thelma. The mile-wide foil reflectors that fed concentrated sunlight into the smelting furnace were a bit off-kilter. Realignment was a tedious procedure that the couple personally oversaw, instead of leaving it entirely to the AI.
“Looks like we’re only losing two dores a day. Let’s leave that until next week?” Thelma asked, but it was only a polite question. Sam always agreed with Thelma’s judgments. Their atomic grinder pulverized the rock of the unnamed metallic asteroid before the concentrated reflection of sunlight heated it until the gold, silver, and platinum could be centrifuged out of the remaining slag. the homogeneous metal mix was mashed into an ingot, a dore, of four hundred earth pounds, give or take a pound.
“We’re still surpassing our projections of one hundred dores a day. Our six months will soon be completed and we can return to the moon with all the gold our refinery can handle,” Sam declared. Early on it had been necessary to build the refinery on the moon as it was difficult to melt the dores down and separate the pure metals without gravity. The refinery produced the ‘Good Delivery’ ingots of 400 troy ounces or 27.5 earth pounds. The moon was especially good because any polluting fumes were blown away from the surface by the solar wind. The lighter gravity made the metals less cumbersome to handle.
“I hope we make a profit on this load,” Thelma lamented. Sam remembered that, when they first started, the price for gold was still high. They had banked so much money that they had to buy most of the banks of the world to hold their money. They weren’t the only miners out here now, though, and gold had become so common that the price had dropped below that of copper. “But this work is very satisfying. Gold is a beautiful metal of many uses, even if people are gilding their home shingles with it.”
“Gilding galore just like the Rajahs of old! Heh. Shiny shingles that last several lifetimes! Never leaks! Yeah, well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Something a little different,” Sam told her. “I have an idea.”
“Really?” Thelma’s eyes widened, thinking of the old days when they had first decided to try asteroid mining.
“While we are here, maybe we could use the ionic drive to mine gravitons?” Sam asked. The drive was a long tube, extending almost a mile from beneath the hub. Its’ magnets accelerated matter ions to near the speed of light. These speeding particles provide enough thrust to get their ship back in weeks instead of the years it would have taken with the rockets of yore.
A cloud seemed to appear before Thelma’s eyes, but only for a second. “Remind me, isn’t a graviton a subatomic particle?” she asked politely.
“So true. Part of the proton and, of course, the differing number of protons in an atom defines the different elements,” Sam said.
“Sure. Eight protons, eight neutrons, and eight electrons make an oxygen atom,” Thelma said, nodding.
“Yes, but to move, we shoot a bunch of ions down the tube all at once. What if we only sent one down at a time then collided it after it got going real fast. That would break it into its’ basic parts, one of which is a graviton,” Sam asked.
“What are you going to do with a graviton spinning off into space? By the way, doesn’t the graviton contain the gravity?” Thelma asked, not yet convinced that there was any point to this argument.
“Yes, the graviton is responsible for the gravity of the atom, and we can’t do anything with one graviton. But if we send a lot of protons down the tube one after the other, real fast, and collide them real, real accurately, then the gravitons will spin-off going to exactly the same place,” Sam proposed.
“Then we can collect gravitons in a box of some kind?” Thelma asked, the iffiness in the question large in her voice.
“Exactly!” Sam exclaimed, eureka large in his voice.
“They must be pretty small. Won’t they just slip back out of the box, in between the atoms that we use to construct the box?”
“Photons of light, not to be confused with protons, are small too, but they all get reflected by our special coating on our reflectors,” he said.
“So we coat the collection box with our reflective sheeting. OK, but do we have the materials to construct this stuff? Super-fast timers and all?” Thelma asked.
“I’ll tell the AI what we want to do and see if it can come up with a plan,” Sam said and Thelma nodded her ascent.
Sam was so excited by the prospect of doing a virgin experiment that he found it hard to sit still in his off-hours. The AI whirred its’ electronics on the problem for hours before it came up with a workable solution. Instead of the one week, Sam had allocated, two weeks were needed to reline the thruster tubes and aim the equipment at its’ end.
When the time came Sam gathered everyone in the ample room of the hub for the occasion. Not only was Thelma present but so too were Gram and Hester Grove, the hired couple required to babysit the weapons. No one was quite as excited as Sam, or no one was excited but Sam!
“Here we go!” Sam said and pressed the big red button which started the operation.
They waited for minutes, for a quarter of an hour, for something to happen.
“Have we got any gravitons?” Thelma asked.
“I don’t know,” said a flustered Sam.
As soon as possible Gram and Hester offered their congratulations and hurried out to resume nothing much.
Thelma put a conciliatory hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Just leave it running and we’ll close the box right before we blast off for the moon base,” she offered.
Time dragged for Sam until he had to prepare for the return trip. There was a lot to do. The pallets of precious metal had to be secured and balanced. The slag holds, the slag used for fuel, had to be capped and balanced. The large circular habitat tube had to be depressurized and stored around the thrust tube, the air in it compressed to a liquid and stored. Several days of work had to be accomplished with them all living in the weightless hub until the return trip was underway. The long ion engine provided a partial gee of thrust for the entire trip, making life much easier.
Reaching lunar orbit they offloaded the dores onto their cargo drones which landed them at the refinery. They parked the ship in orbit and used a chemical thrust orbital to taxi back to Earth. They dropped onto the spaceport in their back yard; the large yard located in the Australian outback.
“Did you bring the box of gravitons?” Thelma asked as they unloaded their belongings from the landfall taxi.
“Put it in luggage,” Sam said. He had the porter move their stuff into the back of the main house while he had the box moved into the nearest garage.
“Did you do anything with the gravitons?” Thelma asked over dinner that night.
“No. If they’re in there, they don’t do much. They are all akimbo and maybe they have to be aligned in some manner for them to ‘show’ gravity.”
“Are they partial to magnetism?” Thelma asked.
Later that night Sam moved a large electromagnet over the box, the box is six feet by six feet by six inches thick and laying flat on the floor. The magnet had been pilfered from an antique imaging machine he had hoarded for no particular reason. Thelma had come along out of curiosity.
“Anchors away!” Thelma quipped and Sam turned it on.
The box became heavy with a worrisome crunch. So heavy that it crushed the concrete of the garage floor and sunk several inches into the newly compressed earth.
“I bet if we switched the polarity the box would want to push off of the earth with a massive amount of acceleration. This could be how the UFOs move around so fast!” Thelma stated.
“I think we found gravity,” Sam said.
“And,” Thelma said, paused for dramatic effect, and then enthused “and anti gravity!”
