Zach Hughes: Pressure Man

Routine work was impossible when Larry was around. When he showed up in the lab, Art and Doris halted their work. The three of them burst into Dom’s office. Dom shook hands and examined Larry’s round, beaming face and wondered what Doris saw in the man.

Larry ordered in a vile brand of beer, dominated the conversation with wild tales of adventures in India, where the government had paid him well to set up a workable optional method of family planning. Between tales he threw in a question or two about the current project, sometimes not waiting for an answer before burping happily and moving forward into another change of subject.

Dom noted a look of almost maternal adoration in Doris’ eyes. He drank too much, laughed until his stomach muscles ached at Larry’s outrageous tales. When he finally retired to his quarters he fell into bed with a self-hating groan, disgusted by his overindulgence. He was awakened by Larry’s cheerful whistling from the office. He repeated the groan which had been his last waking sound, called for breakfast in the office, dressed, shaved. He took his time, knowing that Larry was at his desk, going over the specifications. He came into the office just in time to accept his breakfast tray. Larry had his feet on the desk. Papers were scattered everywhere.

“Crazy design,” Larry said.

“Insane,” Dom said.

“Looks damned impossible.”

“It is.”

“The impossible takes a little longer,” Larry said. One of his more irritating habits was the use of glib, trite old phrases. It was just another one of the things you had to forgive if you worked with Larry.

“Coals to Newcastle,” Larry said.

“Water to Mars,” Dom said.

“Can you carry water and phosphates in the same hull?”

“If you use a lot of water here on Earth to wash it out,” Dom said. “Or, you could use the second and subsequent loads of water for agricultural purposes on Mars, or run it through a purifier.”

“This hull would hold a helluva sample of the atmosphere of Jupiter,” Larry said.

“Thousands of tons of it?” Dom asked.

“J.J.’s not being totally open with you, is he?”

“I don’t know. He claims that the ship was sold to the budget makers as a tanker and that if it’s built at all it will have to be able to serve as a tanker.”

“So, I guess we build him a tanker,” Larry said.

“Just like that.”

“Damn the torpedoes,” Larry said.

Dom was beginning to feel better with each bite of his breakfast. “The preliminary layout is neither feasible nor economical,” he said.

“The preliminary layout is junk,” Larry said. “If you put the entire industry to work on it it would take years just to build the outer hull.”

“And there’s not much of the aerospace industry left.”

“They’re making intrauterine devices and toasters,” Larry said. “It’s too big. We’d have a helluva time just getting it to hold together under its own weight in the gravity of the moon, much less Jupiter. The mission is incompatible with the design. What we need is a small, thin hull built solidly around a minimum crew’s quarters and the power plant. Instead, we’re thinking of building a pressure hull around a large volume of space.”

“Which will have to be pressurized.”

“To what?” Larry asked.

“Forty-five thousand pounds per square inch.”

“Jesus,” Larry said. Then, “Here’s how we’ll do it. You’re hung up in the old forest-and-trees analogy. You’re looking on the ship as one unit.”

“Isn’t it?” Dom asked.

“Why should it be?”

“It’s a ship. It’s self-contained. It’s a unit.”

“Why?”

“Pressure on the widest portion of the hull is distributed to every other part of the hull,” Dom said.

“So we make that force work for us, instead of against us.”

“How?”

“You ever hear of mush bonding?”

“No,” Dom said.

“They’re working on it at Caltech. Mush bonding. You expand the distance between molecules and inject alloying atoms. The whole thing compresses under pressure.”

“I’m listening,” Dom said.

“The technique utilizes superheating. Need lots of power.”

“There’s ample power on board,” Dom said.

“We’ll run the seams along the length of the hull instead of around it,” Larry said.

Dom’s breakfast, unfinished, was forgotten. The idea of running welding seams along the length of the hull was damned silly, except that Larry was reaching for pencil and paper. Dom pushed the wheeled breakfast tray aside and leaned over Larry’s shoulder.

“The seams slip over each other,” Larry said, “as they are compressed. The more pressure you apply, the tighter the bond.”

“What’s the limitation?”

“Don’t ask me, you’re the pressure-hull engineer,” Larry said.

“Larry, get the hell out of here,” Dom said. “Get me all the dope on mush bonding. Brief it down for me at first. Talk with Art when you’re ready and see if the technique can be applied to hull metals.”

“I was thinking about taking Doris into L.A.,” Larry said.

“Not a chance.”

“Slave driver.”

“Out,” Dom said.

“That’s gratitude. Solve a man’s problem and he throws you out,” Larry complained.

Dom wasn’t listening. He was drawing busily. He didn’t even hear the door close behind Larry. Two hours later he was putting figures into the computer, because the basic research on mush bonding had been tossed into his lap by Larry. He worked from his desk, communicating with Doris and Art by a closed video circuit. Doris’ computers hummed and clacked out possibilities. Art smoked cigarette after cigarette and began to cough.

It came out looking like a ship, with the traditional cylindrical shape, but it would be unlike any other ship ever built. The hull would be constructed of mono-welded longitudinal sections joined by thicknesses of mush bonding. The more pressure was applied to the hull, the more the mush-bonded sections compressed, and the stronger they became. At three thousand atmospheres, the hull would have partially wrapped around itself, compressing the ship into a solidarity held by massive beams across J.J.’s bedamned cargo hold. It would cost billions. It would be huge, but it would work if the mush bonding worked.

After forty-eight hours with little sleep, Dom threw the preliminary recommendations onto J.J.’s desk. He expected an explosion of protest at the cost and the size.

“Mush bonding?” J. J. asked.

“We’re going on inadequate data there,” Dom said. “The technique needs a lot of testing.”

“Get on it.”

“After I’ve had some sleep.”

“Take a pep pill.”

“I’ve taken a pep pill,” Dom said.

“Take another one.”

“I’m not going to be pushed into becoming a speed freak,” Dom said.

“We’ll pay your bills at a rehab center.”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Well, put the team to work on it.”

“The team is already in bed,” Dom said. “I’m going to farm out some preliminary tests to Caltech, where the work on mush bonding is being done.”

“That’s no good,” J.J. said. “Security on a college campus is impossible.”

“We can go through a front organization. They won’t have to know that the research is going to be applied to a spaceship.”

“All right, but make it open. Try to hide the work and you’ll have every nut in the country onto it. Do it openly and they won’t even notice.”

“The purloined letter,” Dom said.

“Do your correspondence on your own time,” J.J. said.

Officially she was named the John F. Kennedy , because it made for good publicity possibilities to name the biggest ship ever built after the President who spent the money to put the first American atop a stick of dynamite and blast him a few thousand feet into the sky. The decision about the name was made at the top of DOSE.