Analog SFF, July-August 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Ah,” Scarborough said. “Then?”

  Don shrugged; he thought he'd told it all. “Drove him to town. M'brother did that. I sat in the back to hold his leg and make sure the blanket didn't blow off. And pound on the cab if things turned bad, except they didn't. Pops stayed out to look after the stock, which is how he'd broke the leg to begin with.”

  Scarborough pecked another note. “No airlift available?” he wondered.

  “Not in a blizzard, which is the other part of how he broke the leg. Sheriff's car met us somewhere on the way and did us escort.” Another memory made him smile. “Deputy shook our hands when we got there and told m'brother he drove real good and sort of didn't think to say he looked kind of young to be driving. Didn't ask to see a license, either, which was a good thing because he didn't have yet.”

  More notes were entered. “I don't think that's shown up in any of the bio pieces we've seen,” he said.

  “What's to show? I only mention because, well, that's how the life was. Where's the self-reliance?”

  Scarborough worked on it a while. “Not sure I follow.”

  “What I'm trying to say,” Don said, “it's not just counting on yourself. It's ... well, you see a job, you go do it best you can and not be ashamed to ask for help. Out there, Pops was on the phone to the hospital people. They told what to do, and they buzzed the sheriff's people and I guess got the road folks to plow out some of the snowdrifts. I forgot to mention that. All we did was get Mr. Ungrodt to a place where people knew how to put him back together.”

  “And you see nothing exceptional in all that?”

  “It's how the life was,” Don said. “When your name comes up out of the hat, you do what's needed. Simple as that.”

  Scarborough was still trying to digest the idea. Don felt a small vibration as their aircraft powered up. The display screens came alive, showing some of the airport terminal building and the line of aircraft crowded up to it. The deck tilted slightly and seemed to rise a few centimeters. Air cushion undercarriage, Don realized; so they'd worked out the bugs in that concept while he was gone. He wondered what other surprises waited.

  “So you don't think you did anything out of the ordinary,” Scarborough said.

  “Just held onto his leg and got almost frostbit in the back of the bucketer.”

  “When?” Scarborough asked. “How old were you?”

  Don had to think back. “Going on, eleven. Larry—that's m'brother—he was fourteen.”

  “So you'd describe it as a community coming together toward a common goal,” Scarborough decided. “As if Norman Rockwell never died.”

  Don's turn to be puzzled. “Who?”

  “Sorry. Old family joke. My grandfather. Or his. Rockwell was ... oh, twentieth century. He painted pictures. Something of a romantic, I guess. People doing ordinary things. Being, oh, just people. Except, somehow, a lot of undercurrents. Ideals and values and basic decency. That sort of thing. You'd have to see some of his pictures to know what I'm talking about.”

  “Sounds like it,” Don said.

  Utterly smooth, their craft was taxiing now. The right side display showed the terminal building off at an angle while the ones forward and left looked out on a broad, almost featureless expanse. Far off, another aircraft was moving also.

  Scarborough consulted his unit. “No athletics in school? We've found no mention, but...”

  “Lived too far out. Took too long getting home.”

  Another entry tapped into the unit. “And then you went to the university at Lincoln,” he said. “On scholarship.” He waited then to have it confirmed.

  “Couldn't have paid for it without,” Don said. “Wasn't all that big a scholarship, either. State government.”

  “Mm. Yes.” Another uncertain pause. “And graduated with a degree in engineering. We've searched, but we find no record of advanced degrees beyond that. Just a routine bachelor's. Correct?”

  “Anything else I got from the college of natural perversity,” Don said.

  “Uh?” Scarborough wondered.

  “Old joke,” Don said.

  “Oh.” Scarborough seemed to understand. “And you worked on various projects around the world. Primarily energy systems.”

  “Wind and sunlight, mostly,” Don said. “Includes storage and real-time distribution. Couldn't always get the harvest when it was needed most. Or the right place.”

  “The list we have, besides North America, you worked Siberia, Arabia, South India, the Philippines, the Sahel Federation, several Pacific islands. So forth and so on. I miss anything?”

  “Antarctica,” Don said. “But that was a god-awful mess. Nobody puts it in their resume.”

  “I was coming to that,” Scarborough said. “Your work there is what brought you to Mars Petro's attention.”

  “Nobody ever told me,” Don said.

  “We have it direct,” Scarborough said.

  Don shrugged. “If you say so.”

  Their aircraft paused, turned, and hummed like a person biding his time. Fred's voice came through an intercom. “Waiting for the go signal. Ready back there?”

  “We need to buckle,” Scarborough told Don, and found his seat restraints. “All sorts of accelerations and letups coming.”

  “Been a while,” Don admitted, and searched for his own straps. They were under him, of course, so getting them out and secured was a struggle. Scarborough waited for Don to finish before telling Fred they were ready.

  “Tally ho!” Fred replied, and they began to glide forward.

  Very quickly, the force at Don's back multiplied. Though he'd traveled by air many times before he went to Mars, he remembered no time when such asymptotic power had been called on; neither, though, had he seen an aircraft like this. Well, in twenty years a lot of things must have changed. With no sound but an almost subliminal hum they leaped aloft. A slight thump signaled retraction of the stubby wings. In the displays the land below shrank as if under a microscope, then wheeled as Fred set their northward course. Don saw a sinuous river, hardly more than a thread, winding through an expanse of green; all that water with nothing better to do than flow down to a sea so vast his imagination could not hold it. On Mars, each drop had been a treasure.

  The force at his back drained away. Scarborough unpouched his unit. “Still some items to go through,” he said. “What got you into engineering?”

  Don had to think back; it had been so long ago. “Well, several things, I guess,” he said. “To begin with, it was always sort of understood m'brother would take over the spread, him being three, four years older then me. That meant I'd have to find my own way in the world. Besides that, truth to tell, by the time I got to Lincoln I'd put my foot in all the cow pies I ever wanted.”

  He took a breath. “The next thing, we had six or eight of those big windmills on the spread, and the company paid Pops a good bit to have them there. That was handy when the beef prices were down, which seems like they were a lot of the times when it came time to sell. And sometimes I'd be helping the men who came to collect the charge from the capacitors—winter, when the drifts got deep sometimes, and spring when the ground got soft in the hollows. Naturally, I'd talk with them, and they'd explain that the windmills turned turbines that generated power, and that was because when you passed a wire that was part of a circuit through a magnetic field you got a current, and when you passed a big bunch of wires like that through a strong magnetic field you got a lot of current, some of which you could use to maintain the field in the first place. And I asked where the magnetic field came from, and someplace ‘long about there it got complicated. Seemed like every time you got an explanation it left something more to be explained. Like when you turn over a rock and all you find is another rock under it. I must have said something about that because then they told me it didn't so much matter why things happened. What counted was that, if you knew what happened, you could wiggle things around to do what you wanted instead of how things would happen if you left them alone
. Like this thing we're sitting inside of right now.”

  Scarborough chuckled. “So you liked the idea of making things happen.”

  “Well, doing things,” Don said, and made a twist of the mouth. “Either you do things, or it gets done to you.”

  “Mm,” Scarborough said, and spent a while putting entries in his unit. Finally: “Anything more?”

  Don had to think. “Well, you learn engineering, you learn what it's not possible to do, so you might as well not try. But you learn to look at why it's not possible. Maybe there's some way around. And, the other side of things, you learn what ought to be possible, only nobody's figured out how yet. Like, well, again this thing we're in. Show it to Orville Wright, he'd say you'd never get it off the ground.”

  “I'm told we're supported on a cushion of compressed air,” Scarborough said. “Sort of like water skis.”

  “Uh huh.” Don let doubt speak for itself. “That's been how it's done for a hundred years. But it takes energy and some way to convert it to thrust. Back before I went to Mars you'd have needed a body twice this size to hold the charges and engines big as elephants to do the work. I looked at this thing. I didn't see ‘em. So there's been some breakthroughs nobody told me about.”

  Scarborough was quiet a moment. “I suppose there have,” he said. “I don't know the details, but—” He hesitated. “I'm told your situation up there stimulated work in that area. Also, I understand you made a few innovations yourself, which people down here improved on.”

  “Anything we did wouldn't be commercial,” Don said. “Not big enough and too expensive. You'd have to be desperate, which we were.”

  Scarborough tapped another note into his unit. “As I said, some people down here saw ways to build on it,” he said.

  Don folded his arms. “I'll be interested.”

  Now the external view displays showed patches of cloud, open water, and scattered islands lushly green amid the blue. By their presence, some of the islands disturbed the shape of clouds in their vicinity.

  “We're digressing,” Scarborough said, “and we want to have this completed before we land. So we don't have much time. You'd say after graduation you worked ... well, pretty much all over the world. Correct?” Don shrugged. “Pretty much.”

  “A journeyman engineer, primarily working in energy systems.”

  “Electrical,” Don said. “But that included some mechanical stuff. Where the two came together, that is.” He thought a moment. “Not much nuclear or hydropower, and with the hydropower it's only if you count flow systems instead of impoundments. Mostly just wind and solar, with a little bit of temperature differentials.”

  “Yes. We have that.” Pause. “Now, we've searched, but it wasn't possible every place you were. Some of the places, records aren't kept very good—”

  “Aren't kept, period,” Don said.

  “Well, yes,” Scarborough admitted. “We need to know, any brushes with law enforcement?”

  “Just the usual shakedown stuff,” Don said. “Off the books tax collection and personnel fringe benefit.”

  Grimly, Scarborough smiled.

  “And had to testify when a yak farmer sued for his herd being poisoned by transformer coolant. They had hoof and mouth disease, and nobody else for a thousand klicks knew something about both. Does that count?”

  “Probably not,” Scarborough said with the twist of a smile, but made a note. “Now, similarly, we've found no record that you ever married. Correct?”

  It was an oblique way of asking a question almost never directly asked, and still an edgy issue in some backward parts of the world. Buried inside was the presumption that a lifelong bachelor had some wires loose. “Thought about it real serious once,” Don said. “Wouldn't have worked, and she saw it sharper than me. Wanted to change the world. Me, I just wanted to find a place where I'd fit.”

  * * * *

  IV

  It took him back.

  Jeni. From whom he'd learned so much about how things got done in the world; mostly because, in the classes she took they were telling her how they got done and it made her mad. Bad systems, bad centers of power, and bad people. Wrong things done for wrong reasons. All that.

  Full of ideals, which he'd liked her for. But maybe short on the reality. As if by the touch of a keypad, he was there again.

  Jenifer (only one “n” if you please!) LaTouche (which she pronounced LaTowsh; French language purists could go storm the Bastille) came from Out East where her father did something with money in the City. Why she'd come so far west for college she never said. In the autumn of her freshman year she pledged a sorority; Kappa something or other. She'd chosen to major in political science and was trying to make up her mind about law school.

  He, Don Tenbrook, was from the far western edge of the Nebraska sand hills where his father raised beef cattle that he sold to feed lots who—to hear them talk—did all the work. Also, by some strange coincidence, they got most of the money. Socially undeveloped, accustomed to solitude, young Don went to Lincoln to make himself into an engineer.

  In an orderly universe they would not have met. The universe, however, is messy. Random forces intrude.

  What happened, in his sophomore year, as he buzzed eastward to Lincoln at the end of the winter holiday break, his GPS/Realtime picked up the advisory about a storm in the Missouri valley. No problem; he was only going as far as Lincoln. Also he was driving the spread's old bucketer. Pops had somehow scratched up the cash for a new one so Don would have something to get around Lincoln in. By the time he reached Grand Island, with night's dark settling down, the advisory had expanded to include the lower Platte. Still no problem. Lincoln was west of there and a bucketer could get through anything short of a glacier.

  At Grand Island he merged onto the feeway but, because of the worsening weather, he opted off from accepting autoguide. He was running into snowfall by then, which meant the advisories were not keeping up with the facts. In his forward beams the flakes streamed past on either side like meteors. When they thickened to where he could see little else, he switched the front window to digital and kept going. Rutted patches of snow began to show on the pavement, capriciously snatching at wheels, then letting go. By then the advisories had the feeway closed east of Lincoln, all the way to Omaha and beyond. He saw an eight unit freight string gone fold-up in the center median, warning flares and flashing strobes declaring the effort to sort out the mess.

  So it was no surprise when he came to a roadblock thirty klicks west of Lincoln, sending traffic off the feeway onto local roads and, presumably, toward shelter where they could sit out the storm. What surprised was the state trooper who waved him out of the line of exiting vehicles.

  He buzzed his driver's side window down. Wind driven flakes stung his cheek. “Something wrong?” he asked as the trooper came up.

  “You a volunteer?” the trooper asked back.

  Don knew nothing about volunteers. “Just going far as Lincoln,” he said.

  “Call's out for volunteers,” the trooper said. “Road up ahead's a mess. Big strings all over the place. Cal'fornya pilots never saw a snowflake b'fore, know how it is?”

  Don sort of knew. The feeway was one of the main transport routes, West coast to East. It meant freight pilots—ordinary people besides—not experienced with winter conditions and all the troubles that made. “Just headed back for school,” Don said. “Hadn't heard about volunteering. You need...?”

  “Looked like you got the ‘quipment,” said the trooper. “Lincoln you should make all right. But—”

  The upshot was, the storm had made more mess than organized highway service could deal with. A call had gone out for citizens able to help; a bucketer and its operator could. The trooper directed him to the road service yard on Lincoln's west edge. There they checked his bona fides, made sure he knew how to use the bucketer's winch—"Pulled cows out of bogs with it. No, didn't hurt the cows; they're worth money."—swore him as a deputy, issued him a box of flares and
a rack of charges (there'd be people who'd squandered their charges to keep warm), and sent him out.

  A bucketer hadn't the power or mass to handle big freight components, which were what was needed on the feeway, but there were plenty of reports of cars waiting for help all over the county. They assigned him to work his way north on the road toward Wahoo. Most of it was simple cases of cars off the road, either spun out, stalled in drifts, or lost sight of pavement in the snow. All he had to do was set out flares to warn oncoming people who'd been dumb enough to come out in this weather, hook the winch cable to the chassis frame, power the plow blade down to hold the bucketer in place, and reel in; see that the people were all right and give them a charge if their power was down, then move on to the next. He kept in touch with a dispatcher by phone, but the instructions were that if he saw an unreported vehicle he should check it out; if abandoned, leave it; if it had people, help.

  Cold work, of course. Already the temperature had dropped deep in the negative Celsius and deeper all the time. Windborne snow made it worse and wallowing in snowdrifts to secure the winch cable to a car frame wasn't exactly warm work, either. He was dressed for it, though, and between jobs he was inside the bucketer's cab where it wasn't as bad. He passed a snowplow going the other way, leaving a meter high ridge of hardpack snow on that side of the road.

  His sixth or eighth job—he hadn't kept count—the dispatcher had a report, some hours old, of a car off the road on the southbound side. Not heard from in some while, so possibly got out on its own or abandoned, but, last report, the phone had sounded weak, so possibly now out of battery. The dispatcher gave him the GPS. Check it out.

  At the GPS spot he saw nothing, but you couldn't count on different units giving the exact same location. Besides, taken some while back—car's or the phone?—it had been taken from different satellites than now. Wasn't supposed to make a difference. Complain to Murphy.

  He stopped the bucketer in the roadway, activated flashers, planted a line of flares on his back trail, and went for a close look. Driven snow pricked at his face like insect bites; he had to shield his eyes with a glove as he climbed the ridge the snowplow had left on that side of the road.