Chapter 18

Time: Saturday, June 24, 2006 2:47 AM

Melanie sat on the couch in her dark living room, her stopwatch running in her hand. The glass doors to the condo's small balcony were wide open, and over the last few minutes Melanie could feel the warm, muggy air from outside begin to invade the room. She looked again at her stopwatch, and realized Eric could be arriving at any time. She focused her eyes at Eric's planned destination point and stared.

"Oh!" she cried softly as Eric suddenly appeared at the spot. Melanie felt a brief rush of air and she looked down at her stopwatch. "Two seconds less than seven minutes! How far did you go?"

Eric was dressed entirely in black, and he pulled off his black ski-mask before replying. "The full great-circle loop! I've just been around the world. There's not much to it, once I have the technique down. Melanie! How visible was I?"

"I don't think I saw anything before you stopped. Maybe just a hint of a flicker of speed. And the rush of air this time wasn't bad either, just a breeze and almost no sound at all. Eric! Congratulations!"

As Eric sat down on the couch with Melanie, the balcony door magically slid closed and locked, and the air temperature of the condo suddenly dropped from 78F to 62F."

"Brrr," said Melanie.

"Oh... Too cold?"

"No, just leave it. It's been such a hot day, this feels kind of nice. Around the world in seven minutes, huh? My god in training gets a gold star!"

Ever since getting back from Illinois, Eric felt intensely motivated to experiment with his kinetic abilities, with the goal of understanding their full value. He and Melanie had experimented with flying together in the Allagash in the early spring. The wind against their bodies had stopped Eric from pushing their speed past 100 kph.

But over the past week he began to rethink the issue. His idea was to create a vacuum tube in front of where he wanted to go, and push himself and a bubble of air down the vacuum conduit. The main limitations were the length of the tube (1100 meters in front and behind), and the speed at which the tube was opened. Opening the tube too fast produced a supersonic shock wave. Over many trials, Eric decided to limit the radial expansion and collapse of the tube to 100 meters per second, well below sonic velocities.

A tube radius of one meter was more than sufficient for his needs. When combined the limit of 100 m/s for the radial velocity, the result was a 10 ms lead time needed to open the tube. So his maximum speed was 1100 down the axial length of the tube every 10 ms, over a hundred kilometers per second, fast enough to circle the globe in seven minutes. It took almost a giga-Newton of force to hold the vacuum tunnel open, but that was still only a small fraction of his force capability.

"You want to try it?" asked Eric.

"Uh... Okay! What should I do?"

"Just stand and hug me. There'll be no feeling of acceleration. Our bodies will be pushed uniformly. You'll feel weightless. Just try to hug and relax. Keep your arms and legs next to me."

Melanie gulped and hugged Eric. She saw the balcony door magically sliding open again. And then her world was a rushing vortex of flashing lights. There was no apparent motion, but the visual effects and the weightlessness made her feel dizzy. Fortunately the ride ended very soon.

Melanie looked around and recognized that she was standing on the Allagash plateau. "Home on the range Eric! Wow! How long did that take?"

"A little less than eight seconds. I didn't quite push for maximum speed. You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine... While we're here, mind if we pick up some cash?"

"Oh, good idea, I'm about out too..." Less than a second later Eric had whipped out a few thousand dollars from their "vault", a deep crevasse accessible only through his force. With the cash in his pocket, he and Melanie returned to Cambridge.

Back in their condo, Melanie walked over and closed the balcony door manually. She then yawned and joined Eric on the couch.

"Want to sack out, pumpkin?"

"In a bit. I'm too excited right now. Eric, can I ask you something?"

"Sure. What?"

"How do you keep track of where you're going, when you're traveling that fast?"

"Oh... yeah... It's a little bit like writing a program, and having the computer run it much faster than you can think of all the steps being executed... Really, it's no trouble at all... As long as I have a high-level description of what I want, it's no problem."

Melanie just stared at him. Eric realized he wasn't getting through.

"I started thinking about this months ago, when I was joining wood. I could twist many trillions of fiber-pairs together, but I didn't have to visualize each pair. I just think of a high-level goal, and then push the high desire down to the micro level. When I'm creating the vacuum tunnel, I've got individual locks on trillions of trillions of individual air molecules, but the effort just feels like one holistic dance... I don't know how else to describe it... It actually very easy..."

Melanie nodded and kissed him. "That's okay. I think I get the idea. Want to go to bed? I'll pet you... anyway you like!"

"Uh... Yeah, sure... Actually, there's one more thing I should tell you about."

"Oh?" Melanie waited patiently and then realized Eric seemed embarrassed about something. "What's up?"

"Yeah... Maybe we should have talked about this together first, but... Oh heck! Here, I'll show you..." Eric opened his hand and their checkbook snapped into it. He handed it to his wife.

Melanie opened the checkbook and saw the balance. "$13,000! Wow, what did you do, deposit some cash?"

"Uh... No, not that..."

Melanie leaned over and kissed him. "Sweetie, just tell me. What did you do?"

Eric sighed. "I sold some coins."

"Coins? What coins?"

"Well, it was a combination... I went to a landfill Tuesday night, did a bit of probing. You wouldn't believe all the treasures mixed in with the mountain of trash. Old coins down the backs of decaying sofas, stuff like that..."

"Oh... I see..."

"A lot of the coins were over a hundred years old... the bottom of the fill is a goldmine..."

"Ah... Yeah, I guess."