Six Bits

by Laurence Dahners

  Six Bits

  By

  Laurence E Dahners

  Copyright 2015

  Laurence E Dahners

  Kindle Edition

  Author’s Note

  Warning!

  This book is a collection of short stories, novelettes, and novellas. Two of them, Porter and Macos have been available on Amazon as stand-alone stories in the past, but readers have complained that they were too short to justify Amazon’s minimum $0.99 price. Thus, I removed Porter and Macos from Amazon and compiled them with some new short stories to provide a better value.

  However, if you already purchased and read Porter and Macos when they were available as stand-alone stories you may be disappointed.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  Table of Contents

  SANDER

  EXCELTOR

  MACOS

  PORTER

  BILLY BENOIT

  GUITAR GIRL

  The End

  Acknowledgements

  SANDER

  On this, the 25th anniversary of the establishment of Sander’s School for Underprivileged Children, it is my intention to make public the true story of why and how the school came to be established and named.

  The story you’ve been told is not true. I wasn't really the one who first saw the alien ship. It was instead the namesake of this school, a fellow known to my family as Sander. No doubt you know of him by a different and ill-regarded name, but I wish to shine a kinder light on this troubled man’s soul.

  I was twelve years old when my family first hired Sander. My dad had been using the net to search for a hired hand for a couple of months and there hadn't been a flicker of interest to that point.

  By then my folks had been working a 1013 kilogram nickel iron 'roid for about ten years. Course nickel and iron wasn't worth much out in the asteroid belt but this 'roid had a surprisingly high content of rhenium. Rhenium, you'll remember, was in high demand at that time for the production of high-strength, high-temperature ReTiCuO superconductors.

  We were pretty isolated out there. Living inside that small mountain of ore as it slowly roamed the hard black void of space, we kept in touch with other belters by laser or radio, but seldom breathed the same air as other human beings. Our social calendar was mostly determined by the ‘roid’s elliptical orbit. It swung in pretty far, coming nearly as close to the sun as the Earth. When I was eight, Terra was in our part of her orbit during our close swing and we actually ran an orbital transfer over to Earth with the boat and delivered some product in person. We gawked, acted like tourists and generally saw mankind’s birthplace. We only stayed three weeks, but the kids I lasered with out in the belt quizzed me for days on what it was like. They especially wanted to know what it felt like to be in a crowd. We sometimes visited belt communities on big ‘roids when we got close to them, but that wasn't often and those outposts of civilization were all pretty small.

  My Dad worked pretty hard mining the "Rock," as we called our 'roid. He did it with a fusion-powered torch. He was big, like I am now, angular, gruff and hard working. When I was caught up with the school computer, I'd sometimes go with him to sit in his cabin on the torch while he was blasting away at the parts of the Rock that appeared promising. He hunched over his screens with intense concentration. The torch was essentially a big set of superconducting magnets that controlled a hot fusion containment field. The miniature sun thus produced blew out one side of the containment and heated rock to a vapor which was sucked up and separated. Good stuff like rhenium was condensed out in collectors and stored for delivery in the raw state. The "slag," as we called it, was pumped out to Mom.

  Mom's control room was entirely different from Dad's. Where his was utilitarian and plain, she decorated hers. She had a couple of big wallscreens devoted to constantly displaying things of beauty. Sometimes it would be art, other times scenes from Earth or Saturn.

  Mom used the slag, which was mostly nickel-iron, to make "product.” Apparently she had a real talent for it, 'cause she was always getting offers to move to one of the belt communities where she'd be closer to the demand. Essentially what she did was inject alloying materials, then gas into Dad’s molten slag to make a foam out of the nickel-iron. Then she blew it into various useful shapes in the microgravity. Using various techniques, she could make the foam denser in certain parts of a structure and heavily alloy areas where she needed more strength. After that she’d add layers of solid material to reinforce high stress areas.

  You might think that production of stuff like that could be handled entirely by computer, and you'd be mostly right nowadays, but back then it was still an art that was well beyond a machine’s intelligence. The production of anything at all complex required true virtuosity like my mother’s. For the most part she was making large, very-low mass structures with tremendous mechanical strength. Good stuff for boats, since they need high strength, but can't afford to mass much or it takes too long to accelerate 'em. I guess there was a lot of demand on Earth too 'cause of gravity, but fabbers in LEO made most of that stuff. Even so, when Mom didn't have belt orders to fill, she made stuff for Earth on standing orders. The feeling I got was that she was so good at it that they were always happy to have her product if they could get it. Not happy enough, however, to pay the transport margin over the prices she could get in the belt.

  Anyway we were needin' some help. Even though I was gettin' old enough to be some help, I wasn't much good 'cause I hadn't gotten far enough in school yet. I could handle a 'puter, but I was still pretty slow. Besides, I had to spend most of my time with the school 'puter.

  Actually, I think I could interface pretty well for a kid, but Dad was never satisfied. It being his theory that self-satisfaction was the enemy of personal improvement, sometimes he’d sit down and show me just how much faster he was.

  Mom, on the other hand, believed in encouragement. She always praised me for what I could do. She was small. Even at twelve I was bigger than she was, and by my memory, she was really pretty; short blond hair, bouncy, fun, full of energy. She’d tell me how proud she was of me, but hell, she could beat Dad at almost any ‘puter task, so praise from her, when he was so critical, kinda gave me whiplash.

  My sister Gen was about 9 then and, to the great distress of me her older sibling, was a faster interfacer than I’d been when I was 9. She didn't let me forget how good she was for her age and I worried that she’d surpass me.

  'Puters weren't as independent back then as they are now. Course they could do a lot on their own, but they really needed a human to provide direction for anything but rote tasks. Dad, bein' a pretty good interfacer, could run the 'puter on the torch and the one on the vapor separator and several smaller ones that kept the mining operation going, pretty much all at the same time. Mom ran five to ten at a time to make her production runs. Course she couldn't run that many constantly 'cause it took such intense concentration. She only did it for a few minutes at a time during the actual foaming. She ran just 2 to 5 most of the rest of the time when she was trimming, stressing, and melding various pieces.

  My most important chore was to keep an eye on the household 'puter. For those of you that live on a planet, that may not sound like much, but you've got to remember that our household consisted of some air filled tunnels on the Rock. Household mistakes could leave us without air, water, or food. Believe me, if we’d had to pack up the boat and leave the rock to purchase some life-essential at a time when there wasn’t a good transfer orbit, my ass would have been in the proverbial sling with my dad.

  So an extra adult would have made things a lot more efficient. Mom and Dad spent a lot of time helping each other with tasks that required two interfacers and the interruptions hurt both of their efficien
cies. Besides with all the equipment they had, it only made sense to work the machines more hours a day. Our capital investment was wasted while Mom and Dad were sleeping.

  So we'd been 'netting for about a month, looking for someone short on capital. Someone who’d be willing to work for a wage. However, belters tended not to be the types who wanted to work for someone else, so we hadn't been having much luck.

  Apparently, nobody was really broke right then.

  One day when I interfaced with the household 'puter it became obvious that we were about to have a visitor. The passive sensors had picked up a boat that was decelerating at a rate to park it in our orbit. This was a scary thing because people didn't usually transfer into someone’s orbit without calling ahead. There were plenty of pirates around back then, so that’s the first panicked thought that came to our minds. On the other hand we didn't make a great target for a pirate except when our rhenium stores were high and we’d recently off-loaded, so we were puzzled why a pirate would choose to come right then. Our sensors were pretty good, so we'd picked him up about 36 hours out. I told Mom and Dad what was going on and soon we were all worrying and following the plan dad had established in case this ever happened.

  We set up our laser to transmit an auto-message to Ceres base at the first sign of trouble. Then we set up the outside 'bots that normally did Mom's work so that they could be controlled from the cabin of our own boat. All the food was harvested out of our greenhouse and we stocked the boat with even more water and air. We normally kept it stocked for 10 days more than what we calculated for a fast transfer orbit to the nearest belt community. All our valuables and refined rhenium were moved into a deep tunnel and Mom sealed it off. We all moved into the boat 30 minutes before the newcomer matched orbits and Mom resumed trimming operations from an interface in the boat to make it look like we were just doing business as usual. Dad had interfaced with the three big industrial lasers and aimed them at the visitor's approximate arrival point, then hid them behind thin sheets of slag. I 'faced with one of the small lasers and Gen with the other.

  It was kind of an anticlimax when the newcomer came to a perfect match, cut his thruster without a single correcting push and hit us dead center with a tight beam message laser on low power. "Name's Sander. I'm answering your ad on the net. Still got a job open?"

  "Why didn't you message ahead?"

  "Didn't think you'd have any takers."

  We discussed it a while and decided he couldn't be a pirate. He was there in a singleship that didn't have much freight acceleration capability. Not that it didn't have the thrusters for it, you understand, but it didn't have the kind of structure you’d need to attach freight. It was the kind of boat small prospectors favored for drifting around the belt, searching for a high grade 'roid. Not what you’d use for harvesting a ‘roid. Certainly not what you’d use if you were a pirate. It had a big thruster at one end of a cylindrical life support module. Some attitude jets at the other end. Reflective surfaces so you could be easily found if you got in trouble.

  Of course this "drifter’s boat" suggested that he might not be the kind of upstanding character that we'd like, but Mom and Dad had talked about who they might get before they advertised and this was exactly the kind of fellow who they’d thought might need this kind of job. A down-on-his-luck, unsociable, loner type, so to speak.

  So we took him on.

  Sander was a small fellow, maybe thirty or thirty-five. What was left of his hair was cut really short. Slender but wiry, he was given to small precise movements. He claimed to have been born on Earth which may have explained his small stature, but he sure handled himself well in microgravity. He hardly ever spoke unless spoken to, and then he spoke slowly, usually after a pause to ponder.

  When you talked to him you'd almost think he wasn't too bright. You'd never think that after you'd seen him 'faced with a 'puter though. Even back then it was pretty commonly accepted that high intelligence was necessary to interface well, though you could be plenty smart and still not be able to 'face. Believe me though, when Sander was 'faced, the 'puters and their 'bots performed flawlessly.

  You can imagine what happened. Me a lonely 12 year old; not much personal contact with other people; suddenly confronted with a quiet unassuming fellow who could perform miracles with ‘puters and ‘bots.

  I got a bad case of hero worship.

  In my book, one of his most amazing feats was the ability to set himself spinning in space with such a perfect twist that he could do several hundred revolutions without drifting far enough to bump into anything. He claimed it put his mind at rest like yoga (whatever that is). The few times I tried it, it made me want to barf.

  Sander brewed a serious microgravity beer. Had a little spinner-vat and special yeast. He'd spend hours tinkering with "The System" as he called it. Dad said it was the finest beer he'd ever had.

  Best was just watching him work the 'bots with one of the 'puters. They would work in perfect unison performing tasks so smoothly that it was like a ballet. You'd never see a 'bot he was controlling in standby, waiting for its portion of a task to come up. No, it would be doing something useful while waiting. It seemed to be a point of pride with him. Once when he had a 'bot doing an intermittent task that had a measly thirty second wait period during which it really couldn't accomplish anything else useful, he had the ‘bot spin during the breaks. The ‘bot would spin free, then suddenly break spin, perform its task and spin up again. He'd only done it a few times though, when a laser came sailing over, apparently pitched by one of the other 'bots while I wasn't paying attention. The previously spinning 'bot started using that laser to punch holes that were needed in a piece of work across the room. It'd task, pivot, fire the laser a few times and then turn back to its original task. I hated to even think about the kind of control it would take to have a 'bot perform close tolerance laser punches from across the room like that.

  The guy was so talented that I wasn’t surprised to hear Mom and Dad talking about him one night, almost as if they were suspicious. Dad was saying, “I don’t know why a guy as talented as he is would need to take a job with us. He could get a better paying job anywhere from low Earth orbit to Ganymede.”

  There was a little silence, then Mom said slowly, “I don’t know. He seems kinda sad. As if something terrible happened in his life. I asked him once, but he said he didn’t want to talk about it… He didn’t deny something bad happening though. Maybe his wife or even his whole family died or something like that? Maybe he’s just looking for a quiet place to recover.”

  Sander'd been with us about two, maybe three months when the other 'roid happened by. Now I know everyone has already heard all about that other 'roid, but I've got to tell the story my way.

  We first picked it up with our collision screens. Not that it was going to collide, which is an incredibly rare event in the belt, but our screen had been set up to warn us of anything even coming close. We’d been hoping to find a carbonaceous chunk of rock which might provide us with some of the raw material for Mom's alloys. They were costing a fortune to import and she was having to avoid certain kinds of jobs because the price of alloying ingredients kept her from being cost competitive. So we analyzed images of this one and decided it must be carbonaceous from its low albedo. We hadn't had much hope of finding such a thing since they’re usually farther out, but there’re a lot of freaky orbits in the belt.

  A lot of talk ensued, weighing the pros and cons of trying to warp part of it into our orbit. The obvious thing was for Sander to take our boat over to it, blow it apart and bring in the most appropriate chunk. That way Mom and Dad could pretty much keep on schedule. Some of it might take an extra hand, but I could go along and help. This led to some heated discussions between my parents about whether I was old enough, whether Sander could be trusted with me, whether Sander could be trusted with the boat and so on.

  I pointed out that my folks would still have Sander's boat and he'd been trustworthy so far. After way too much
discussion, to my delight he and I loaded up and started out.

  On the way over we talked about orbital mechanics. He taught me a lot by taking me through those calculations. How long it would take to accelerate how big a chunk of the 'roid sufficiently to match its orbit to the Rock. It already matched our orbit fairly well or it would have been impossible to take any more than a small chunk. Mom and Dad had decided that we could spend up to two weeks pushing on our selected piece. We ran some trial solutions on the 'puter and decided that if it massed more than 5x105 kilograms, establishing a transfer orbit would take too long. We also discussed how we might place our charge in the hopes of blowing a chunk bigger than 5x105 in the right direction so that we’d be able to move it with less push.

  Those were glory days for me since my hero worship of Sander was in full flower. Havin' him spend all that time talkin' to me really made me feel important, even though I knew deep inside that he really didn't have anything better to do.

  I got the feeling he liked talking to me and felt quite proud of it.

  When we got to the ‘roid, we nudged up against it, gave it a push, read our accelerometers, and calculated its mass at 4x1010 kilos. It was mostly black indicating a lot of carbon and its low density suggested the same. It was really rough and irregular and didn't have much spin. It shouldn't be too hard to break a few big chunks off it with properly placed charges. Sander pointed out that the deeper we were inside it when we started lasering the holes for the charges, the less time it would take to place deep charges. So we took a pass around it looking for a crack of some kind we could get down into. We found a crevice on the far side big enough to drive the boat into, which we did.