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floating in midair while making some adjustment clearly a freefall setting. Then he turned to gaze back at
the woman and the youth working on the construction in the area at the rear. The exposed section
revealed banks of chip-like devices packed in a system of mounting frames strung with bundles of
conductors. But the conductors were too heavy for them to be circuit chips; and woven among them was
a forced-flow cooling matrix of capacity no electronic system would have needed. A light of
understanding came over Wernstecki's face, and the pale eyes shone with genuine astonishment.
"Artificial gravity? You've done it? Experimentally? You have verification?"
Pang waved the last of Wernstecki's suspense away with a toss of his hand. "That unit behind us at the
back there was actually the first prototype that we built on Valkyrie, before we moved down here and
Lan's team joined us. The view on the screen was the final phase of the dipole array wiring."
Valkyrie was an orbiting platform above Titan that housed an odd mixture of scientific and other
facilities, including a spherical swimming pool, a 3-D sports arena, an arboretum featuring some strangely
shaped plants, and a school of weightless architecture. However, many of the former occupants had
evacuated to the surface since the bombardments caused by Athena began. During his spell on LORIN
5, Keene had learned that the rest of the space was to be vacated too, and the platform converted into a
close-range defense station for Titan.
"You're talking about huge currents," Wernstecki commented distantly. He was visibly excited, his mind
racing over the implications.
"One of the problems with the early experiments was to deliver enough without getting friction or
reaction effects that would have swamped the measurements," Pang agreed. "Solid conductors were
unworkable. In the end we resorted to pinch-stabilized mercury bridges. Doing it in zero-g eliminated a
lot of spurious background, and the electromagnetic shielding had to be a hundred percent. That was
why we stayed so long up in Valkyrie. But in the end, the effect we achieved exceeded the attraction of
normal matter by a factor of over fifty. We were measuring tens of nanograms, but it was there. It was
real. We could switch it on and off." He inclined his head to indicate the direction behind. "With power
flowing, we can make that array act like a twelve-ton mass. And even with that array, we could improve
the figure by a factor of a million . . . if the structure could stand it."
As Wernstecki leaned back in the chair, thinking, his eyes came unconsciously back to Keene. Keene
could almost read him fitting the pieces together. Artificial gravity had been talked about for much longer
than Kronia had existed. The immediate applications would be in spacecraft and satellites, eliminating the
need for ungainly simulations by rotating structures or whirling modules at the ends of booms and tethers.
Later, larger-scale booster systems could perhaps be implanted in low-gravity bodies like asteroids or
the gas-giant moons to create Earth-normal conditions at the surface. And after that . . . who knew?
Whole new technologies of matter manipulation, weight neutralization, freight handling, earthmoving . . .
But taking it beyond the research stage that Pang had described would require lots of electrical power.
Hence, the Tesla Center was the obvious place to continue the work. That was why the project had
relocated here and why Pang had brought Keene's group into it. He had needed power engineers, and
nuclear-proficient ones at that the watts to induce normal bodyweights on spacecraft flight decks or
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increase Titan's effective mass thirtyfold weren't going to come from any other source. The source would
need to be efficient and compact, suitable for being built onto space vehicles. Keene's spaceborne MHD
concept had fitted the need perfectly.
"So how far are you now toward a more advanced stage than that prototype?" Wernstecki asked finally.
Pang let Keene answer.
"We have a one hundredfold scaled-up engineering proving model almost built here," Keene said.
"Down in one of the heavy equipment bays." He looked inquiringly at Pang. "I assume we'll be taking Jan
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