John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“Waiting sucks,” Major Gries muttered under his breath while he flipped through an unclassified white paper about synthetic gecko skin. This small five-employee company in New Mexico had decided that they had a new invention that would allow infantrymen to walk up walls, trees, windows, you name it. But Gries was having a hard time getting in to see the scientist who was supposed to be there to meet him. Apparently, as Carolyn Breese, the secretary of Gecko-Man, Inc. explained to him, Dr. Forrester had forgotten that today was Wednesday and that he was supposed to be there for a meeting.

“Major Gries,” the secretary told him. “I just contacted Carl, uh, Dr. Forrester, again and he was in his car on the way here. He apologizes for his confusion and says you should make yourself at home. Would you like some coffee?”

“Yes, ma’am, that would be nice,” Shane said.

“Normally, one of the other engineers could show you around, but everybody is at a preliminary design review in Clarendon this week. Sorry.” Carolyn Breese finished filling a Styrofoam cup with hot black coffee. “Sugar or cream?”

“Black is fine, ma’am. Thanks.” Gries sat back down into the folding chair against the wall across from the secretary a bit annoyed now that he realized there was going to be a considerable amount of time killed in small talk with Mrs. Breese. That was not a real bad thing and Shane was not the type who was too stuck up or important to spend time talking to a little old lady. In fact, she kind of reminded him of his mother. But he had a lot of work to get done and he had a three PM flight from Albuquerque to LAX that he had to make. He had hoped he would have time to get lunch from some place other than the airport; that didn’t look promising now. Airport food was killing him and making him soft. Shane hoped that he could get in a ten kilometer run sometime tonight but most likely he would end up on a hotel treadmill, which got old fast.

After about forty-five minutes, Forrester finally arrived. Shane guessed he was about five foot nine and weighed in at about two hundred and thirty pounds, not much of it muscle. His hair, although short in length, was extremely unruly and did not appear to have been touched by a comb in years. The most stereotypical part about the scientist’s appearance was that he was wearing slacks, a shirt and tie, but at the same time was wearing running shoes. Running shoes , Gries laughed to himself. This guy hasn’t run anywhere but to the fridge and back in his life . Shane smiled and offered his hand.

“Hello, Major. Sorry I’m late. It simply slipped my mind about our meeting today. I’m Carl Forrester.” He shook Shane’s hand, smiling happily in return.

“Hi, nice to meet you, Dr. Forrester.” The humor in the man’s appearance was enough for Shane to forget about being angry that he had been kept waiting.

“Come, come with me,” Dr. Forrester told him, leading him down the hallway. The little laboratory was located in an old strip mall that had gone belly-up. The walls had holes and raw unsanded white spackle and sheetrock mud splattered at random, as if someone had made a piss poor attempt at fixing them. There were filing cabinets, one Moesler safe with little green magnets on each drawer saying closed, books, and spiral-bound reports stacked all along the floor and on top of the cabinets.

“Here we are.” Dr. Forrester pecked in some keys on a cipher-locked door, then swung the door open to a makeshift laboratory that was filled with workbenches, a Snap-on toolbox, a few computers with wires running from them into aluminum boxes, and rolls and rolls of what looked like orange sandwich wrap — Shane had already been to several composite armor companies and recognized it as Kapton, the polyimide material that was used in most of the next generation armor labs.

“This is a sputtering chamber where we grow our synthetic gecko skin.” Forrester pointed at a large enclosed chamber with a computer control panel on the front of it. There were several manipulators, spinning tables, and stylus arms inside the large enclosed device.

“Why don’t you give me a little background before we get into the show? I’m not certain I understand how this stuff is supposed to work,” Gries requested.

“Ah, great, great.” Forrester motioned to a workbench stool with a stack of papers on it. “Yes, yes, have a seat.”

Shane looked at the bench, then around the cluttered laboratory for a place to set the papers. He carefully picked them up and set them on the floor. Forrester had already turned away from him and was erasing a whiteboard across the room. Shane chuckled to himself again and sat down.

“You see, a few years ago some fellows at Berkeley and at Carnegie Mellon had the idea that being able to emulate a gecko and walk up walls and across ceilings might, and I’m sure you’d agree, be a fun and useful thing.” Forrester stopped long enough to grin from ear to ear at Gries. “Think about it. If we could create a material that enabled us to have the nimble little lizard’s incredible grip, wow, the applications would be endless.

“The efforts of those fellows made the idea a step closer to reality because they were clever and worked out how to make a material coated with synthetic gecko hairs. Uh, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me see…” Dr. Forrester ran his fingers through his unruly hair.

“Ah yes, the hairs on gecko feet. Biologists call them ‘setae.’ These little setae are the key to its remarkable grip on just about any surface, rough or smooth, wet or dry, and the things are so sticky that the little lizards can hang from a ceiling with their entire weight held up by a single toe. Isn’t that just marvelous?”

“Yes, I’ve seen little geckos do that trick before. The ones they call leopard geckos are all over Iraq,” Shane added.

“Iraq, yes indeed, leopard geckos, hmm, marvelous.” Forrester chuckled and his belly jiggled like Santa Claus’s. “Well, it wasn’t until as recently as last year that we understood how these little guys can do such a nifty thing. In fact, there was some very, shall I dare say, heated, debate about why geckos’ setae were so fantastically sticky.”

“Really,” Shane asked, trying not to let his eyes glaze over or to check his watch.

“Oh, indeed. There was one school of thought that there was some gluey chemical interaction taking place between their feet and the surface they walked on. But that didn’t pan out. This really clever fellow, uh, named Ron Fearing, and a few of his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley finally figured it out. Can you believe that it turns out to be an electromagnetic interaction between a gecko’s feet and the surface molecules, wow!” Forrester said excitedly.

“Oh, yes, believe it or not, the adhesion is in fact due to very weak intermolecular attractive forces called van der Waals forces. Amazing, isn’t it?” He chuckled again and spent the next few minutes drawing a diagram of the gecko setae and explaining the van der Waals attraction.

While Forrester’s back was turned, Shane stifled a yawn and did check his watch. He had no more than an hour he could spend here and it was airport food for sure. If he didn’t make it through security, fast, it would be soggy sandwich time.

“The way it works is that the gecko setae measure tens of microns across and at their tiny ends they split into lots of even more tiny, thinner, extremely flexible hairs, each just hundreds of nanometers in diameter; now, isn’t Mother Nature just incredible?” the scientist added, looking over his shoulder at his audience and apparently failing to notice that Shane’s eyes were creeping closed.

“These little hairs then broaden out into flat spatulas, just like egg turners, at their tips. The wonderful little buggers can bend and conform to the surface of the wall at the molecular level and believe it or not again, this maximizes the surface area contact between the spatula and the surface, which in turn maximizes the van der Waals attractive force. I just can’t hardly believe it, can you?” Forrester seemed almost giddy.