Star of Fire 火星 Mars Space People

Part 3. Robin

“[von] Kármán [at Caltech] can take the Buck Rogers [rocketry] job.” – Jerome Hunsaker, head of the aeronautics department at MIT.

Chapter 19. Brown Gold

Triage

The cardboard box with the large “Coffee” label had been removed from the x-ray scanning conveyor belt when the screeners observed that it was packed with rectangular packages – obviously about 10 kilograms of contraband. Customs Inspector Ng cut the top of the box in the centerline and along its edge. Removing a piece of cardboard revealed a calendar showing scenes of Vietnamese rural landscapes for the Cleret Roasting Company. He examined the triplicate shipping form. Very nice touch of distraction. It listed numerous packages of coffee and tea. Merde. Ng removed a package near the center of the box. He deftly slashed the bag with his cardboard cutter. Coffee beans spilled out onto the floor. Damn. He removed the package beneath the one he had opened. He tore the top of the bag open with his teeth and gently opened the tear. Some unroasted coffee beans. Next he placed the entire lop level of bags on the table, shaking each one next to his right ear. Then he picked up the cardboard box and emptied it on the table. He shook one more bag. The same old sickening rattle. Sergeant Ng scurried to the wall phone.
Inspector Nuygen thumbed through the thin dossier of the French Canadian. Born in Coaticook, Quebec, the youngest of twelve children, a wandering and errant Catholic, devout at home. Speeding tickets, a busted nose during a riot at a hockey game in Quebec City, a note for having been in possession of an untaxed bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon. Hum, likes prostitutes in nursing whites and French maid outfits. There was a special seal from the Governor of Shanghai’s Biotech Development Board on his visa. Was this man a player? Could he be an agent of our comrades to the north? The phone rang. He took the call and pressed on one of the buttons near the desk phone to call his assistant.
Phillip stood up as he heard the door being unlocked. An athletic female officer entered, carrying his small carry-on. She brushed something off his shoulder and handed him his case. Smiling, she stated that his small difficulty had been cleared up. She wheeled around, stepped through the open doorway and waited for him to emerge into the land of those who would live. They walked together, exchanging pleasantries, just as if they were old high school friends. He retrieved his passport from the now smiling customs official. The officer commented that he hoped that he would enjoy his coffee and stay in China. Phillip’s day wasn’t starting out all that well.
His plane was waiting for him. What the hell?

People’s Republic of China (PRC)

A young woman in a People’s Liberation Army Air Force summer uniform was scanning the emerging passengers, holding a sign displaying his name. By habit, Phillip examined the frowning officer before emerging from the anonymity of the crowd. He approached her saying, “I’m Phillip. Are you looking for me?”
“Yes,” she said, introducing herself. “I’m Captain Wu. Do you have any luggage?”
“Just my carry-on,” he replied. “I had some coffee beans but I think I lost them in Viet Nam.”
“Never mind the coffee,” she said. “Let’s get away from this mob.”
Phillip observed her long legs as she walked ahead of him. Maybe the orient had a lower glass ceiling than he thought. A soft-spoken sergeant who looked like he had been on the Long March drove the unmarked ten-year old Chevrolet liaison vehicle. Phillip had been to Beijing twice before for industry promotional conferences. He had only been to Shanghai once but preferred that rowdy, less formal city to Beijing.
The leisurely automobile trip took about an hour. The conversation wandered from his experiences in the orient to his tour of duty with the Canadian Air Force. Wu noticed that Phillip had the strange habit of repeating their conversation to himself several times until another interchange occurred. She soon insisted that Phillip call her Liang in private. She slapped his leg as she enjoyed one of his clever observations about Chinese airports and her hand lingered on his thigh until gravity slowly slid it away.
Captain Wu had her driver stop the vehicle at a roadside stand. “I love the shrimp bouillabaisse here,” she said.
“Bouillabaisse, bouillabaisse here?” exclaimed Phillip.
“Yes, I’ve been eating shrimp bouillabaisse noodles at this roadside stand ever since I was a kid.” Liang ordered three bowls of bouillabaisse and took the first bowl she received to her driver. Liang and Phillip each grabbed a bowl and walked to a shaded table. Phillip tentatively sipped the broth from the shrimp noodles.
“This is very good. Good, but it isn’t real bouillabaisse.” He continued to eat the noodles commenting about how much he missed real bouillabaisse. The snack perked up the group and Liang pulled away from the table to make a quick call on her cellular. It was turning into a rather pleasant afternoon. Back in the car, Liang continued the conversation with her hand resting on Phillip’s leg. Damn, he’d been on the road too long.
The Chevy turned into what was obviously a military base. The sign at the turnoff read Dachang Air Base in English. Captain Wu handed Phillip’s passport to the enlisted guard who was backed up by an army lieutenant standing in a reverse fig leaf stance. The officer wore a side arm. After the enlisted guard examined the document given him by Captain Wu, he passed it back to her. Phillip wasn’t asked anything and he didn’t volunteer anything, just standing in place silently observing the Chinese version of a common worldwide ritual.
Back in the car they continued a few hundred meters to a plain looking building. The buildings reminded Phillip of the old World War II barracks at the University of Maine which had been reborn as student dormitories when the soldiers returned home to go to school after the war to end all wars. The class of ’44 had prospered; the three preceding classes received gold bars for their uniforms, a gun and travel arrangements to exotic locations. The sergeant parked the car in an empty parking space. The other three parking spaces were empty. A rocket about 12 feet long was displayed on its launcher in front of the building. The rocket was probably quite old since its paint was faded and chipped in a few spots. Phillip didn’t have a clue to what it was or why it was being displayed here.
Captain Wu led the way into the building. The interior of the building was as austere as its exterior with enlisted soldiers and civilians chatting at the tables in a large dining room. They walked to a large table occupied by an older man and two officers from the PLA Air Force. The older man in civilian clothes signaled for Phillip to sit on a chair across the table from him. Captain Wu sat down next to Phillip. The older man seemed to be speeding up his conversation. He laughed and slapped one of the officers on the back. The two officers laughed, glanced at the Canadian and then at Captain Wu. One of the men collected a pile of papers and stuffed them into his attaché case. Then they were gone.
The old man stood up and extended his hand as Phillip jumped to his feet. The old man introduced himself, “Ken Zhou Xim, General Zhou.” The men shook hands. Zhou turned to Captain Wu and smiled while instructing her in Chinese with a glance towards the wall to his left. Phillip could only tell that the directions involved cups.
Captain Wu acknowledged the order and went to the cupboards on the wall. She returned with a tray populated with a set of cups, a liter-sized stainless steel cream dispenser and a large thermos dispenser. The tea ceremony had really taken a turn for the worst in the new millennium in modern China, thought Phillip. Captain Wu poured Phillip a cup of the brown liquid and passed it to him. Next she placed the cafeteria cream dispenser on Phillip’s side of the table. The two Chinese sat down and looked at Phillip with anticipation.
Phillip sat down, warming his hands on the small cup. Phillip brought the cup near his face. Very aromatic coffee. He sipped a little of the liquid deep into his mouth, his eyes still concentrating on the coffee’s mellow brown color. Was this some kind of a test?
“Is this Kona coffee?” he asked looking towards the Chinese officers.
Captain Wu clapped her hands with delight and the general just smiled and poured some coffee into the two remaining cups. General Zhou pushed the cream closer to Phillip and drank his coffee black. Phillip added more cream to his coffee than the average American would and asked Captain Wu with an inquisitive frown if she used cream. She answered with an affirmative nod but Phillip had barely lightened her coffee before she raised her hand to stop his pour. Phillip’s mind was operating at full thrust. What a turn of events. The coffee dispenser had a silver-colored advertising sticker – “Apollo Coffee.”

Apollo Tea, Coffee and Cocoa

Phillip asked General Zhou, “Do you own the Apollo coffee company?”
The general nodded in the affirmative, “My family does.”
Phillip then asked the general, “Did you name the company after the American Apollo space program?”
The general laughed. “No, that’s what I tell my superiors. I named it after the boxing champion that Rocky fought in Rocky I. It would have been too easy to name the company after the Grecian god of the sun. [General Zhou is later forced by political and marketing considerations to change the name of his company to Shady Coffee.] Back to my problem - my only customers are the Air Force cafeterias. I need a greater variety of green coffee beans since we’re getting more foreign visitors all the time at the base.”
Phillip had to ask, “Where did you get your Kona coffee?”
“I get it from my family farm on the Big Island of Hawaii,” answered the general. “They own a ten-acre plantation and I buy all of their harvest.”
Phillip placed the slight Pidgin English accent of the Hawaiian Islands. His mind drifted to the Philippino beauty he had chased to the University of Hawaii in Hilo. She was a graduate student in marine biology. She gave him a tour of the Big Island including the Mauna Kea volcano and its by-product, the mineral-enriched soil that coffee trees love. The hot spot creating the Hawaiian Islands had continued moving east but the volcanoes on Hawaii were still active. As beautiful as the stars were from the active volcano, Phillip was interested in a different set of mountains. Unfortunately, it soon became obvious that there wasn’t going to be a long-term relationship.
“Have you been to the islands?” the general was asking.
“Yes, a long time ago, when I was young. Did you learn English in Hawaii?” Phillip continued.
“Yes, my parents were in Hawaii when I was born, but we returned to China when I was ten years old. I used to travel to the islands a lot before my work with the Air Force made it impractical.”
The trio slowly drank their coffee. Captain Wu had never been outside of China. General Zhou passed Phillip a stuffed plain manila envelope saying, “I hope that this will cover your expenses. I’m especially interested in African coffee. You of course know that Starbuck’s has done very well in China, competing against a large Chinese chain of coffee shops?” asked Zhou.
Phillip replied, “China is more open to foreign ideas than North America and there are still a lot of Chinese that will become coffee drinkers. After all, the annual production of coffee in China is only about 15,000 tons.” Phillip spared the general the common Western wisdom that marketing with heavy references to the yin and yang could penetrate the Chinese market.
General Zhou took a technical specification out of his brief case. “If you visit your family and have the time to go to New England, I’m interested in this portable water hydrolysis unit that is manufactured in Maine. Are you familiar with Bar Harbor?”
Phillip answered that he was, but that his family preferred the sandy beaches of southwestern Maine [the Canadian French Riviera]. The general closed by saying that he didn’t need the ruggedized, harsh environment version. “Let me know what you need for expenses, both for the coffee and the machine.” No contract, just a handshake.
“Captain Wu can show you back to your hotel and will see that you get some good Chinese food.” Sex is like a bribe, thought General Zhou, it lubricates the machinery of industry and government.
Phillip thought that this affair might get a little sticky. I’ll have to cover my ass with this business deal. There were twenty fifty-dollar bills in the white envelope.
General Zhou cursed his superiors for their lack of funding. He needed the electrolysis machines and couldn’t afford to buy space-tested units from Boeing or Lockheed Martin. There was even the possibility that the Americans would classify their machines as critical technology, which couldn’t be exported. Ideally he would become a partner in the company in Maine or buy it outright, something that would be a simple task if he were an average Chinese businessman, given the present Chinese policy of the acquisition of American intellectual property. Telling the Americans that the six tons of hydrogen reactant was unnecessary would show his most important card – the presence of unbound water on Mars. One more successful spacecraft delivery for the Americans would improve his status with the Chinese leadership and give him more money that he would control. His engineers had destroyed one hydrolysis unit trying to reverse engineer its fabrication and had ruggedized the remaining unit enough to make it useful on Mars. Now it appeared that his fate was in Captain Wu’s hands.

Friendly Interrogation

Captain Wu Liang took Phillip to his hotel and dismissed her driver. Her assignment was simple enough – find out if the Frenchman was as stupid as he appeared to be and insure that he’d want a return bout, anytime he could get it. The room was large and had a balcony looking down on the Yangtze River. There was a large bottle of Pinot Noir in a silver ice bucket near the door to the bedroom. Phillip glanced into the bedroom, which was, pardon my French, wallpapered in whorehouse red. Liang leaned back against Phillip and he grabbed her around the waist. She turned her head and they kissed. Then she turned without breaking their lip lock as they continued to kiss. Liang moved away and pointed to a bench, which would have been a footrest in Europe. Phillip walked to the bench and sat down. He waited passively for Liang to serve him a glass of wine.
Liang served Phillip a glass of the wine turning so that he had an advantageous view of her receding buttocks. Liang got herself a glass of wine and sat down on the bench so that their thighs touched.
“Say, this wine is really good. Is it from China?” asked Phillip.
“Yes, it’s from Shandong,” answered Liang.
They sipped their wine with small intervening kisses. Liang sat on his lap and they continued their casual kissing, pillow talk and wine sipping. Liang ended up straddling his legs on her knees and he put down his glass to grab her buttocks with both hands. Then he removed her dress blouse and started to kiss her neck and breasts. Liang put down her glass and cupped his head in her hands. Phillip paused. “What’s that smell?” he asked.
His left hand dropped from her right buttock so that he could turn his head. “Why, it’s shell fish stew,” she answered.
“Bouillabaisse?” he wanted to know. By now Liang was half sitting on the bench.
“Why, yes,” she said.
Phillip got up as Liang fell back on the bench and followed his nose to the large silver pot on the table. A canned alcohol-fed wick heated the pot’s contents. Phillip lifted the lid and stared at the shellfish swimming in their own broth. “Bouillabaisse, bouillabaisse, oh bouillabaisse,” he sang.
Phillip grabbed a bowl and filled it to the brim. No chopsticks this time – he went with a large spoon. Boy, are you one smart girl, Liang thought to herself. Now she’d never find out if the stories were true about Frenchmen.

The truth (serum) shall set you free

Liang decided to try some of the shellfish stew so that the evening wouldn’t be a complete loss. She found that the bouillabaisse was delicious and sipped some more wine after eating several oysters and mollusks. The center of her body warmed up and she noticed that Phillip had a similar reaction, even as he finished off a lobster tail. Make a note of this, she thought, for when you have to teach a seminar in enlightened interrogation. Now Phillip was ready for dessert. Phillip picked Liang up and walked to the canopied bed. They made love without even messing up the bedding.
Liang retrieved the wine, adding a little aphrodisiac truth serum to Phillip’s glass. Phillip had finally taken off his stockings before inserting himself between the sheets. Liang sat on Phillip’s stomach and started to talk to him about the Maritime Provinces of Canada. Phillip started to talk in a monotone and she felt him coming to life. She interrogated him as they made love. He wouldn’t remember the details tomorrow. Phillip was just what he appeared to be – a businessman, nothing more, nothing less. And he had long eyelashes and a firm moustache.

Beantown

Phillip flew into Logan International in Boston with anticipation. Boston was one of his favorite cities and he prided himself with his knowledge of the local hot spots. He took the local public transportation, the MBTA train, to get his sea legs back. He would have preferred to ride the discontinued water ferry so that he could see what changes had been made to the bay area where he had sailed as a boy. Logan had possessed the title of the airport with the highest control tower until the French had absconded with the title. The Americans shouldn’t try to sit on their laurels.
Phillip walked up Newbury Street but wasn’t ready to eat. Food tasted better when it was free, at a conference or art gallery reception. Maybe there’d be some free wine and cheese at the Boston Architectural Center. He caught a flash of red wine in a crystal wine glass approaching and touching the lips of a dark-haired beauty that he would later learn was from Rio. Mayan Weavers, whatever that was, was having an opening reception. Bueno. Phillip climbed the stairs to the elevated gallery.
The CTO and founder of Puffin Engineering, Jerry Littlefield, went to The City, Boston, at least twice a year. His last visit was for the Embedded Systems Conference at the Hynes Convention Center. Jerry needed the stimulation of the scientific community in the greater Boston area but hated the waves of humanity and the discourtesy of city people. His isolation in Maine had caused him to approach the design of his electrolytic cells in a way known to not work by his friends at Boston University, a fluke unlikely to be repeated. His friend, Alan Frichtmann, had published two papers on the subject, which he could easily refute if he had been willing to reveal his trade secrets. This week Jerry was attending the Material Research Society Conference, also at the Hynes, so Phillip got a reservation at the local Hilton, which was a short walk to the Hynes. Phillip would be attending the receptions and vendor hospitality suites at the conference and didn’t want to compete with the local drivers in Boston after drinking or run the gauntlet of policemen across the Charles River in Cambridge.
The speaker at the Plenary Session, Mildred Dresselhaus of MIT, presented a more optimistic view of the availability of oil than he had, a view closer to that of the Bush administration. Jerry felt that the down slope of the oil availability curve would result in periodic manipulated oil shortages, warfare and chokepoints vulnerable to sabotage or state and terrorist attacks. Jerry thought that there was a tipping point, the oil break point, on the downhill slope of the oil availability curve given the handful of significant oil suppliers. The tipping point for fish yields had been passed a generation ago. Mildred had been involved in three major studies of the coming oil crisis and the over-the-horizon hydrogen economy. Other sessions covered the evolution of the other major silver bullet for man’s survival – the short-wavelength (blue) light-emitting diodes. [Us tree huggers would say that conservation and just lighting up the areas we need to see and not the heavens would produce the same result.] None of the surface effects or catalyst papers presented seemed to touch on the trade secrets of Jerry’s electrolysis machines.
Phillip realized that this was not a casual assignment; General Zhou really needed the hydrolysis units. Zhou had purchased two units from Puffin Engineering four years ago and wanted several more units. Puffin’s patents were unrelated to the embedded digital signal processors in the active portion of the unit. Puffin’s production techniques allowed the construction of a unit with a surprisingly long life. The metallic catalyst could be poisoned so one had to be careful of impurities, but the effective film area was so large and the ablation so gradual that the inevitable contamination of the catalyst look a long time. The faceted shape of the catalyst’s nanoparticles slowed down the annealing of the particles and the resulting decrease in surface area. The most surprising thing was the placement on the expensive palladium catalyst, which had been only deposited on the permeable electrolytic membrane (PEM) where the reactions would actually take place. The technique of depositing the catalyst and nanoparticles of gold was very parsimonious in the use of the catalyst, an important raw material cost factor and secondarily kept the unit light and less dangerous to the environment when its usefulness was over. The Doppelganger of the device, a fuel cell, had proven to be an intractable problem for Jerry, his contract engineers and his production technician, Norm Garrett. Phillip wanted to get a feel for the device, but more important was the financial instability of Puffin Engineering. Puffin Engineering qualified as a NASA Research Partnership Center partner but Jerry felt that by the time he got approved for a NASA grant that he wouldn’t need it. Phillip noticed with approval the puffin in the company logo.
Jerry had lain off his engineers and technicians and was personally running his gas station full time as well as teaching pipefitting and electrician extension classes at the Central Maine Community College in Bangor part-time. Jerry considered his now unemployed production technician irreplaceable. Things just get done when Norm’s around.
Jerry liked hiking in the radio- (and cellular) quiet area around the Green Bank [Radio] Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia. Deimos, Mars’ highest moon, occluded the light from the star TYC 121-01027-lu on February 20, 2006 in a swath across the American Southwest. Jerry joined the rowdy Gerome bikers, Arizona State University’s Alpha Phi sorority and seven Arcosanti ceramicists dancing in the shadow of Deimos.
Communication satellites are the low-hanging fruits in the exploitation of space. Any country that wants to be a player in space has to develop the ability to launch communications and remote sensing satellites into low orbit; only the big boys graduate to the capability of producing heavy lift launchers and ICBMs. Testacles float in a disconcerting fashion in micro g.

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