Michelle already had the feeling that she could enjoy working with Heber. He was not pompous like some scientists she had met, and he kept things simple without losing a touch of humor. She thought that was important. Humorlessness, she had found, was usually a sign of people who took themselves too seriously, which invariably meant they would never admit to being wrong—nor even, in extreme cases, to the possibility that they could be. An attitude like that made insufferable clients—as well as bad scientists.
“This is amazing,” she said, turning the micromec over beneath the glass. “I’ve read about these and seen them in documentaries. But it really doesn’t come home to you until you hold one in your hand, does it?”
“It’s nothing compared to feeling it in your head,” Ohira grunted. “You wait. You’ll see.”
Michelle moved the tiny figure against a white-paper background to see the details more clearly. The dome of a head suggested a picture she had seen somewhere of a deep-sea diving suit—an impression reinforced by the stockiness of the proportions. “Walking tank” would be a better metaphor than “robot,” she decided.
Heber seemed to read her thoughts. “The only reason they’re fat like that is the things we have to fit inside. For the strength they need at that scale, they could be quite slender.”
“Surely there still can’t be the kind of complexity in this that we’re used to seeing every day,” Michelle said. “If I opened this guy up, I can’t believe that I’d find all the cogs and springs and other kinds of gizmos that there are . . . well, in my car, for example.”
Heber smiled and shook his head. “The physics changes, which means it’s often better to do things in different ways. Simply trying to reproduce what we do at the everyday level doesn’t always work too well—electromagnetics is a good case in point. For motors and actuators at the microscale, we make far more use of electrostatics. Another technique that works well at smaller scales is what’s called peristaltics, which means moving things by means of an induced wave motion. For example, some crystals expand and contract when you apply an electrical voltage across them. So, you can walk one piece past another.” Heber made a bridge on the desk with the thumb and little finger of one hand, then advanced it by sliding the thumb closer, anchoring it, extending the little finger away, and repeating the motion. “Kind of a solid-state muscle. It harnesses molecular forces, which are very strong. So you can amplify the range through linkages in the limbs and get a finely controllable movement. Clean and simple, really. Not at all like your car.”
All Michelle could bring to mind to ask just at that moment was, “Does it ever need an oil change?”
She meant it as a joke, but Heber nodded approvingly. Evidently not such a dumb question. “Friction works completely differently at this scale. Some surfaces just don’t seem to stick or wear at all. In other cases, a tiny electric current works better than any lubricant. It’s a whole new science that we’re learning about.”
Michelle replaced the mec in its cell in the plastic box that Heber had taken it from, containing examples of several models. Heber closed the lid and returned the box to his desk drawer. “Anyway, those are just dummies to show what they look like.” He rose, closing the drawer. “Let’s go downstairs now and see the real thing.”
CHAPTER TWO
They descended two floors and came to a set of double doors part way along a corridor. Heber led them through into a brightly lit open area where perhaps a dozen people were busy at desks, screens, and white-topped benches. Gray and blue equipment cabinets lined the walls and formed improvised partitions around some of the work spaces. Heber led the way to the far side of the room, lined by windows, where a half dozen or so padded chairs with armrests were grouped near more cubicles and screens. Two men were seated in the chairs, each wearing an open-frame headset studded with terminals buried in multicolored wires; also, each had a kind of collar attachment resting on foam shoulder pads. The head frames and collars connected to electronics mounted behind the seat-backs, which in turn sprouted tangles of leads going off to the surrounding equipment. One of the men’s eyes was closed; the other’s were open but showed no indication of seeing anything. They were engaged in a dialogue that made no sense.