> Which wouldn't be that hard, since you only need to put a tube around the
> portals and evacuated that space.  Say, instead of a steel beam, you had a
> highly polished cylinder of depleted uranium about 50cm in diameter. Even
> though the vacuum wouldn't be perfect, the terminal velocity should be 
> very
> high, since you'd only have friction along the sides, as there would be no
> front or rear.

Actually I think you'd deliberately want to increase the air pressure to a 
controlled amount, otherwise the cylinder would go too fast, generate too 
much heat due to the friction and melt itself.  If you could control the air 
pressure nicely to regulate the speed (and therefore the amount of heat 
generated) you could have a nice little heat source to boil some water to 
spin a turbine or something ;-)

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