The Repair

Part 5 & Epilogue

5

"Tea?"

"Why not? I can't offer you cold drinks yet," smiled the editor, "but tea is all ours. After all, it is five o'clock already. And there are cookies. Have you done with the fridge?"

The two-kilowatt kettle was turned on, the cookies were taken from the drawer. After the first cup the repairman looked at the shotgun hanging over the editor's table:

"Nice gun you have there. Is it real?"

"Yes, but not in the working state. Tell me more about these flying saucers. Our authors need some fresh inspiration, maybe you could help them?"

"Okay. Why do you think the flying saucer is like that, why does it look like disk? Because it is built around the thing called superconducting magnetic energy storage, and it has a toroid form, like a slightly flattened donut. The same old good tokamak as ITER's plasma camera, but with a slightly different function. The energy is accumulated in the form of magnetic field, which is created by a superconducting coil. Through that coil the electric current is also withdrawn. This machine is known for a hundred years and could have been an ideal accumulator, keeping energy without loss, with instant charge and practically limitless output, if not for the cost of helium cooling and the restrictions for the magnetic field. Or, better to say, if not for the strength limits of the chamber structure, because the so called Lorentz force try to tear it into shreds. So this device can be compared with a scuba diving cylinder under high pressure. We don't use such cylinders for accumulating significant amounts of energy only because we can't make them strong enough. The same problem would restrict using superconducting magnetic storage systems even in the high-temperature version. The best attempt, as far as I know, was made in some electric locomotive, for the purpose of acceleration and recuperation the energy of deceleration, but otherwise they are too big for common transport. In the first years after the discovery there existed projects of such big underground storages to balance the daily peaks for the whole countries, but they understandably remained projects. On much smaller scale this device was used somewhere to protect the power grid, but all that is stationary, of course. There is no space enough for it on the roads.

"But there is space for it in the air and still more space... well, in space! Flying machines of the alternative present don't use the clearly outdated scheme of the Wright brothers, especially in big cargo and passenger air vehicles. They fly in the central part of huge toroid latticework constructions, made of composite pipes, inside which circulate coolant and there is superconducting core. Due to the same Lorentz force the construction holds itself, and because of the huge volume the field density can be kept quite moderate. Because of this concept of volume - meaning the bigger volume the better ratio - they even joke that this is the reincarnation of zeppelins. But I wouldn't say it is only about the size. As many other ways of life, the discovery made aviation much simpler and much more affordable... Oh, by the by! You can write in your magazine that the secret of the Tunguska meteorite has been solved."

"By you?"

"I don't know the details of the whole story, of course, but the essence is as this. The drive of the alien starship went from superconducting to normal state. Probably just because for some mistake or accident it entered the Earth's atmosphere, for which it was not intended. You see, the true spaceships don't need to cool their superconductors and need not to keep vacuum in their plasma cameras. On the other hand they can't fly in planets' atmospheres, for which purpose they use more traditional flying saucers. So there was a huge blast which literally evaporated the whole spaceship... Hopefully, the crew had managed to bail out somehow before it happened. It's interesting that three years after that, namely in 1911, there was made the discovery of superconductivity, the cold one.