DLT

Sequel to Waldoes
The knot in his stomach tightened.

He decontaminated and cycled the airlock, then inserted the DeLaurent Teleresonator in the microwave-sized cavity and recycled the air pressure.

One must be careful, he thought, so that the intense radiation in the chamber didn't escape and so that the particulates in the shielded cabin didn't enter the chamber and cause problems. Not too hard, especially if done right, but a royal pain if done wrong.

Knowing he'd be using this tool he had made sure to get a full night's sleep and to go over his basic quantum electrodynamics one more time with the other crew members, some of whom he'd kept up until odd hours in the past worrying over the problem. He pressed his face to the stereoscopic viewplate and once more inserted his hands into the waldoes' control mechanisms.

He had prepared, sure, but he was nervous. Every probability manifold he'd worked out on paper had indicated that this tool would either precipitate a proper runaway reaction or simply kill the fissile nature of the material. Still, he needed to know, so he proceeded. Besides, his friend told him, Wasn't it a Warshawski manifold? Wasn't there a whole range of non-extreme outcomes?

Arranging the reactor elements on the processing plate of the tool in the simplest, most straightforward arrangement he had come up with, he plugged it in and began to feed it power.

The Geiger counter started clacking more intensely, but from the other readings the baryonic fields weren't accelerating, so he continued.

The glow sharpened, then wavered, then went fuzzy, then turned a hot pink. It was an intense kind of light, with a hardness that suggested--no--

Relaxing the waldoes he pulled the textbook he had been poring over back off the shelf and flipped to the resonance section. Sure enough, there it was...but the only way that could be working at all was that--really? No...his small assembly was actually picking up the primary engine's resonance and...amplifying a harmonic? But, that--impossible--noone had seen it coming...perhaps one line of reasoning had suggested it, sure, but it was ridiculous, a tiny chance, not even in the Hausdorff domain, requiring mathematical gyrations fit for the circus--how--?

The dial said it all. Engine efficiency was up 8%--not perfect, but better, and as he ramped the Resonator's power back down he sat back in shock.

The captain would be happy.