Every Man's Fantasy Ch. 18

Danielle laughed.

"Your husband is also invited, of course," Paul added. "We'd both like to meet him. We enjoyed his video-film very much. ... Eight o'clock. Cassie won't mind if we talk shop."

******

As she and Roger dressed for dinner, Danielle said:

"I give you permission to flirt with Cassie tonight."

"Who's Cassie and why would I want to flirt with her?"

"She's Paul Kessler's wife and she'll be the most gorgeous woman you've ever met."

"Really, what does she look like?"

"I've no idea."

"Then how do you know she's so gorgeous?"

"Because Paul Kessler is the most gorgeous man I've ever met and, as a rule, wives are better-looking than their husbands."

"That's true. All right, I'll flirt with her as you wish. I only hope she's not some brainless actress or model."

"Oh, don't pretend you're not shallow! But even if she's a brainless model, you won't be disappointed. She'll be elegant in the latest fashion and, though she'll have a perfect complexion, she'll use a tiny bit of make-up just to make herself seem human, like the rest of us."

"It sounds like you're the one who should flirt with her."

"I would, except Paul wants to talk shop."

When they arrived at the revolving restaurant at the top of the Arts Tower, Paul stood up to greet them and make the introductions.

It was Danielle who was disappointed. Cassie was a plain woman. Not ugly, but ordinary-looking, with mousy-brown hair that she hadn't bothered to have tinted, an average kind of face with indifferent brown eyes, a nose slightly too big, a slightly receding jaw and a mouth slightly too small. But her teeth were good and her gown was beautiful. Black and strapless, it showed off the shoulders of a fit and athletic woman.

Danielle had no time to wonder why the most handsome man she knew had an ordinary-looking wife because they ordered drinks and Paul immediately began to talk about the court-case.

"We've hit a snag," he said. "As you know, HyperStar Japan applied to its local patent office for a judgment on the motor and the case is still dragging on. Six months ago, I asked the Celetaris patent office for a judgment on your engine but they contacted the Japanese office before starting work."

"Of course, the patent offices have to agree with each other, so I was told today by the Celetaris office that they've agreed to wait for the decision of the Japanese office; which leaves us exactly where we were. I'm sorry."

Danielle took this disappointing news philosophically.

While Danielle and Paul talked about the law-suit, Cassie turned to Roger and asked him about his work.

"I enjoyed your video-film very much, Roger, and your book. I agree with your central thesis but one detail leaves me with a question."

"I'm glad you liked them," he said, impressed that anyone knew both his book and his film. "What's your question?"

"On New Exeter, you interviewed Mayor Grandley but why didn't you answer her when she said you obscured the difference between a democracy and a republic?"

"You're right. I picked it up afterward but my producer thought it was too technical a point and edited it out."

"So what is the answer?"

"Well, republic and democracy mean the same thing, 'rule of the people', so the difference is a conventional one: whether politicians are representatives who rule in the people's stead, or delegates who perform the people's will. But the rule of the majority can be just as tyrannical as any other political system."

"I see, so the more important question is the difference between a limited government and an unlimited one."

"Exactly! You understand very well. The biggest mistake those who invented limited government made was to call it 'democracy', which suggests majority rule, but really they meant a system where a government can be removed peacefully because it is subject to the same laws as the people."

"Citizen legislators. So what should our system have been called?"

"Constitutionalism, liberalism, individualism, capitalism. Any of them will do. They all imply limited self-government."

"So will your next book be on the real meaning of 'democracy'?"

"The one after next. I'm working on a history of the outworld settlements of the AngloSphere."

"I look forward to watching it."

"So how is the air-suit going?" Paul asked Danielle.

"I've also hit a snag. I think I know why Nakatani Corporation only make the gauntlet and the air-jellies but not a complete air-suit."

"Danielle is making a suit that will turn a man into a superman, letting him fly and lift fifty-times his own weight," Paul explained to Cassie.

"Really? How does it work?" she asked.

Danielle explained:

"The suit is supposed to work by compressing the air around it into a solid force, which can be used either to move external things, like the gauntlet, or to move the man in the suit, like the air-jellies."

"I've used the air-jellies," Cassie said, "and I've seen the gauntlet in action."

"I thought it was a simple engineering problem to make the suit," Danielle said. "Merely a case of miniaturisation. I even had an insight, I believed; but it seems like it's impossible. The beam-emitters are smaller than the wavelength of the microwaves and cannot be used to focus the beams. The air-suit needs an endless source of compressed air much more powerful than we can get from free-falling, even at maximum velocity, or it needs a fuel cell heavier than a man because most of the microwave energy is lost as waste heat."

"I see," Cassie said. "I suppose you're using the beams in phase to make a standing wave?"

"Yes, exactly. How did you know?"

"We do something like that in microwave surgery, to burn away bad tissue within an organ or a bone. Normally a microwave lance cuts through the tissue to get to a tumour but if we don't want to damage an important organ, like the brain, we set up three microwave lances at the points of a triangle. We tune the wavelengths so that the microwaves are out of phase when they go through the healthy tissue but in-phase where they cross within the tumour."

"Then we have as much power as we need to burn away bad tissue or cauterise the arteries that feed the tumour, giving the nanotechnology robots time to eat away the tumour."

Danielle had a revelation.

"Cassie ... you're not Cassie. You're Doctor Cassandra Leighton, the neuro-surgeon! I'm so sorry I didn't recognise you. You invented that laser-surgery technique. They built the medical centre here for you!."

"For my team and me, yes. Don't worry, no one recognises me when I'm not wearing my scrubs."

"But I blame Paul for not telling me who you were," Danielle said accusingly.

Paul only smiled and Danielle had another revelation. She realised the depth of the man's pride in his wife and why he loved her. The handsomest man she knew, who could have any actress or model he wanted, genuinely loved a woman for her mind. She felt comforted by that and admired him more than ever.

"Can you really not solve the problem, Danielle?" Paul asked, bringing her out of her reverie.

"No, but Roger will."

"I will?"

"Of course. It's your job. Whenever I'm stuck on a problem too difficult for me to solve, you always come up with the answer."

"Darling, that's absurd!"

"No it's not. You solved the problem of communication through the hyperspace plume."

"I didn't, really," Roger modestly explained to the others. "I made a suggestion that was completely wrong but which helped Danielle see the right answer."

"So do it again," Danielle said. "I bet you can."

"I bet I can't ... but maybe it will help you to explain the problem to a simpleton. For example, if the problem is that the microwave energy is lost as waste heat, why can't you reflect the waves back with mirrors?"

"Brilliant, Roger!" Cassie exclaimed. "It can even be self-governing: the compressed air can act like a mirage and focus the beams back on themselves!"

"I'm sorry, that won't work," Danielle said. "I've tried it. Energy dissipation is unavoidable because it takes more power to bounce the microwave beams off the compressed air than the energy it can reflect."

"What about the reflection boundary?" Roger asked.

Danielle smiled pityingly at her husband.

"What's the reflection boundary?" Cassie asked.

"It's a purely theoretical concept in hyperspace engineering and nothing at all to do with actual reflections. Sorry, Roger. What made you think of it?"

"Jonathan Wright told me it's the point from which the plume is reflected back, and you told me the plume consists of waves, so I thought it was waves reflecting on waves, which is what you need for the air-suit."

"Oh, Darling! The one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other."

"Can you explain it to me?" Cassie asked.

"Of course. The main thing to understand about the hyperspace plume is that, in theory, it takes up neither space nor time, but in practise it clearly interacts with space and time, so the problem is how to calculate the interaction. The answer is an old idea from quantum theory called 'absorber theory'. We say that the plume interacts with space-time by means of half-advanced and half-retarded light-waves, where half the light-waves travel into the future and half of them travel into the past. They almost completely cancel each other out at a point we call the 'reflection boundary'."

"Those that don't cancel out tell us how long the plume lasted, so the time to the reflection boundary gives you the equivalent distance travelled in normal space."

Both Roger and Paul looked blank by now but Cassie seemed to be following. Danielle continued:

"But the microwaves we want to focus outside the air-suit are all retarded waves and cannot be made to reflect off the air ..."

She stopped, staring ahead but unseeing, thinking hard.

"Unless ..." she said.

There was a pause.

"Unless what, Darling?" Roger asked but she didn't answer. Danielle was in her own space, concentrating, oblivious to all around her, her brain fizzing along its special pathways.

Roger smiled and took a small tablet computer from his jacket and projected a blank page onto the glass table-top. He put a stylus in her hand and she automatically began writing.

He came prepared for these moments, when Danielle's genius needed to be indulged.

She scribbled down equations and formulas. At times like this, she preferred to write rather than type. She made little diagrams, sketchy and symbolic, alongside the equations, sometimes crossing them out or drawing circles around them, linking them to formulas and other diagrams.

Paul and Cassie kept quiet, fascinated by Danielle's degree of concentration, despite the background hubbub of the busy restaurant, until Roger said:

"We can talk. It won't disturb her now."

Ten minutes later, Danielle snapped out of it and continued exactly where she left off, saying:

"... Unless we treat them has half-advanced waves and use Rosa's algorithm to predict where they will interfere with the waves focussed on the compressed air."

She wondered why Roger seemed amused and Paul and Cassie were staring at her. She looked at the mathematics-filled page in front of her as if she was seeing it for the first time.

"Oh, sorry, did I miss anything?"

"Nothing important, Danielle," Paul said. "Did you get the idea down?"

She read over her page, nodding, re-calculating in her head.

"Yes, that's it," she said. "Roger did it again. ... Paul, I told you my husband's a genius, didn't I?"

"He's a very lucky man, Danielle."

"Nonsense. I'm the lucky one."

"We're both lucky men, Paul," Roger said. "You married a brain-surgeon, I married a rocket-scientist. Every man must envy us."

The women shared a look, a wifely kind of good humoured indulgence because, although it was nice to be appreciated, they weren't sure they wanted to be trophies.

"Roger, have I had dinner yet?" Danielle asked.

"Not yet, Darling. We've ordered but it is yet to arrive."

She was a little disappointed. Danielle always felt horny after intense brain activity and wanted to go home to have whatever kind of sex it was her husband's duty to perform that day of the week. However, she also decided she was hungry, so she settled down to enjoy the rest of the evening and leave work on the air-suit until later.

******

A week later, with computer models for the air-suit fully tested and working, with Rosa brought on-board because it was her algorithm that was the key to the energy-saving design, Danielle engaged a local sporting-goods manufacturer to make a prototype.

Within a month, the first version of the air-suit was ready for testing in the Engineering Department's largest wind tunnel. It worked in a basic way, as a proof of concept. Now it needed improving.

Three months later, a fully-working air-suit was field-tested by a sky-diver who he jumped out of a hover-jet at 1,000 feet. The suit worked perfectly and he didn't need the parachute he also wore for safety, just in case.

More tests followed and the day came, about a year after she first set out to make the air-suit, when the product was to be officially launched. Outdoor Trends, the manufacturer, brought the adventure sports news media. Danielle's name brought the science news media.

The launch was in Waterfall City, the adventure playground for tourists and Celetarans. Danielle's colleagues on the project and some of her friends, including Cassie and Paul, came to watch the event.

Five stunt flyers stood on the curved bridge across the thundering waterfall, at a specially built platform, getting soaked but cheered on by a crowd of two-hundred enthusiastic fans watching big screens on the banks, with thousands more watching news feeds all over the planet and even on other outworld settlements.

The five flyers turned on their grey full-body air-suits, which lit up white piping along the arms, legs, neck, ankles and waist. They waved to the crowd and took turns to launch off from a specially built platform, diving the half-mile to the steaming lake below.

There were cameras on the suits, on the bridge and on boats in the lake.

The first jumper was at top speed before he was half-way down and engaged the buoyancy setting, slowing down his descent. He fell to the water's surface, changed to horizontal motion and skimmed over the lake at fifty miles an hour, producing a mare's tail of spray in his wake.

The second stuntman now jumped. He fell half-way before putting the compressed air he'd accumulated to good use, sending out jets from his arms and feet to take a spiral path down to the lake, then climbing back up again to the bridge, where he hovered effortlessly.

Stuntman three was a woman. She dived straight down, neither slowing nor changing direction, She hit the lake at one-hundred-and-twenty miles per hour, sending up a huge fountain of water, making a wave that rocked the boats gathered nearby in the lake to view the action.

She erupted from the lake a few hundred yards from where she entered and floated up toward the bridge, completely unharmed, having proved the amazing resilience of the suit after an impact that was like hitting concrete.

The other stuntmen were equally impressive and, eventually the five flew in formation back across the lake and up the waterfall in the superman pose to fly over the bridge and sport on the river between the two sides of the city.

Danielle planned a surprise for Roger, Paul and Herman. Three more suits were brought out and Danielle, Rosa and Cassie put them on.

The three women had secretly been practising, starting in the wind tunnel and progressing to sky-diving from hover jets. So it was first with surprise and then mixed apprehension and pride that Paul, Roger and Herman watched their wives and girlfriend don the air-suits and stand on the platform ready to launch themselves into the air.

"It looks too dangerous," Roger said to Paul and Herman. "I can't bare to watch. Shall we go for a beer?"

Danielle heard (as she was meant to) and shouted "Don't you dare!" before she turned, waved to the audience and leapt off the platform, performing an elegant swallow dive.

Rosa went next. Not being a show off, she jumped feet first.

Cassie was a show-off. She stood on the platform, sucking in the grandeur of the waterfall and the majesty of the lake far below. She shut her eyes to listen to the roar, breathing deeply, enjoying the splash of the torrent behind her. Then she turned around, smiled for the cameras and executed a perfect backward dive, with tuck and pike.

She waited until she nearly hit the lake before levelling out and skimming over the surface to where Danielle and Rosa were spinning circles, making a whirlpool.

The three women flew in formation back to the bridge and beyond, climbing into the sky for a panoramic view of the lake, the river the two sides of the city and the forest upstream. It was a glorious feeling, flying just by holding out your arms and leaning in the right direction.

It was a wonderful success for the air-suit technology. It's commercial success was bound to follow. Just as important, however, was that today's adventure sealed a friendship between Danielle, Cassie and Rosa.

The three couples took hotel rooms in Waterfall City and dined together that night, but the three women stayed up long after their menfolk went to bed, still finding new things to say about the experience, buoyed up by the sheer exhilarating fun of the air-suits.