April 4: A Different Perspective

by Mackey Chandler

  Mo stood crying. Jeff couldn't hear him, but he could see the tears running down his face.

  "I think you might be more successful at living than dying," Jeff suggested.

  "How?" Mo asked bitterly. "I can't work for you now. I doubt anyone else on Home needs a mining engineer. I can't go back to Earth and my wife detests Home. It's horribly expensive and my daughter will probably set the cafeteria on fire for fun and get us all expelled."

  "There is a labor shortage on Home. I think you overestimate how much Home employers value specialization. When you are done working for me, I predict many of the land holders here would hire you to dig them in safe and deep. Your family I can't help. If they don't come around and acclimate, well, divorced and alive still beats dead."

  "With a reputation for sabotage who would hire me?"

  "Why do they need to know? I have no need to announce it. I'll tell Heather and April, maybe a couple others. They are all keeping far bigger secrets than this. I've just ruined your relationship with this shadowy agency. You will round up those seven reflectors you planted," Jeff ordered. "I'll give you priority use of a rover to do it and you deliver them all to me. If anybody questions it I have the authority to say you are doing a secret defense project for me. If they run a veracity analysis on me it is true."

  "I have another thirteen back in my luggage," Mo volunteered.

  "What were you going to do with them gone? Call and have them FedEx you more?"

  "I don't even have a way to contact them," Mo admitted, "I'm not trusted, not important enough and deniable."

  "My guess is you'd have had a convenient accident after you returned to Earth," Jeff speculated. "That way you couldn't have any sudden attack of remorse, or tell a grand story after a couple too many beers." The look on Mo's face said he'd never considered that.

  "No, the only solution I see here is to turn you. Not only turn you but to double you. No need to threaten you with anything either. All the threats are from the other side and the fact, as you recounted, that you need us to survive and prosper on Home or Central is sufficient."

  "I accept."

  "I thought you might."

  "I'll work with you to ID them. They shouldn't even suspect anything, until it is time for me to come home and I don't."

  "Deal then," Jeff said with a nod, like he was buying a pair of footies instead of a man's life, snapped his holster shut and walked back toward the rover lock. "I'm going to take your advice."

  "What?" Mo asked, confused what he was talking about.

  "We don't need a sign here."

  Chapter 24

  "Thank you," Linda told her children. "It's good to know how to patch a leak, no matter how unlikely it is I'll ever need to do it. But what makes me feel good, is how concerned both of you were for my safety."

  "It felt really weird to actually be shown something useful in school and not presented all dramatic and threatening to try to scare us that terrorists are lurking everywhere. I'm not fully convinced I won't find any downside at all, but Ms. Lewis' school just beats the snot out of school back home so far," Lindsy admitted.

  "I'm going to have to give you some lessons at home," Linda felt she should warn them, before they grew too fond of Faye's school. "We just can't afford to send both of you a full week. It's three hundred dollars a day."

  "Each or both?" Lindsy asked big eyed. Her parents never discussed money with her. Didn't even talk about it where she could hear. That seemed really expensive.

  "Each, but everything is more expensive up here."

  "But people make more too," Eric said. "The employment company in the corridor near the cafeteria sometimes posts salaries offered with some of the jobs, on their window screen. The pay looks real big compared to back home, if you had no idea what stuff costs. I mean for stuff like a janitor or home health aide. Not executives or engineers. They offered two-hundred-thirty-five dollars an hour for an experienced cook for a social club. What's a social club anyway?"

  "We had them back home," his mom explained. "We just never belonged to one. There was an Italian social club down Brighten Street we passed. They usually have a bar and a restaurant and that one had bocce ball courts. They are kind of like the fraternal orders, or country clubs. Where is this employment place?" she asked, trying not to be too interested.

  "Spinward from the cafeteria," he had to stop and think. "To the right when you come out of the cafeteria doors." Eric was oblivious, but Lindsy picked up on how interested her mom was.

  * * *

  "I'm looking at the lifting shape," Dave explained, "and it has a slight cup to the bottom and ridges that run down the outside edge. The shockwave from each meets in the middle and helps to cut down what reaches the ground. It looks an awfully lot like a boat my dad used to have when I was a kid. I need to talk to a boat builder, but I think with a couple flats that swing down like an air brake, to make it lift up on a plane, you could land and take off on water. You can have the computer sense the angle and adjust them to suit for whatever load you have. It would need some distance to land with the boards deployed just enough to keep the nose from digging in, but shouldn't need a long run to take off. It would pitch the nose up within a few body lengths and it would do a very high G takeoff, almost vertical."

  "Tell me why it's worth doing," Jeff encouraged him. There was a slight LEO to moon lag in the transmission. The audio lag was not as distracting somehow, as the delay in a person's facial responses to what you'd said.

  "There's more water than land down there. If you land with the throat plugged ready for instant take off you need to use aerobraking and land on a runway. A fairly long runway, not just any hick field. If you do a powered vertical landing you will need some flush and pump down time. I'm looking at ten minutes, six minutes if I install dual vacuum pumps, which adds another sixty kilograms. It makes loading harder too. We can optimize for horizontal loading or vertical loading, but not both."

  "I thought you worried about back pressure and reflected pressure pulses?" Jeff reminded him. "Wouldn't blowing out an exhaust throat full of water be much harder than just air?"

  "The odd thing is it's easier. You have to time it right. You blow the water out with a blast of compressed air or other gas. The column of water rushes down the throat. It is heavier," Dave agreed, "but that means at a certain point it has enough momentum that instead of being pushed by the compressed air it is a liquid piston pulling a vacuum behind it. If you fire up the engine when the throat is clear almost to the end and at well below atmospheric pressure, it's easier on it."

  "Wow, I can picture it, but I never would have anticipated it."

  "There are lots of lakes big enough to land with such a set-up on all the continents and in fairly tame sea-states you could land on the ocean. You could pick up or drop cargo to a ship."

  "Hold doors on top like the old space shuttle, so you can lift cargo in and out with a crane?"

  "That would work."

  "This will delay it though, right?"

  "If the software exists to do the fluid modeling, then call it an extra two weeks, maybe three. If it doesn't we'll forget it for now and put it off for a few years."

  "It sounds worthwhile then," Jeff agreed, "See if you can do it." He stood there staring off in the distance, Dave knew something was coming.

  "If you hire somebody who does boat design, would you ask them if there are any designs out there already worked up for small underwater drones? Something that could surface and launch two or three Frisbee drones and sink back to the bottom and wait to collect them. Electric drive and very stealthy so I can run it off an accumulator."

  "I already know there are such drones," Dave assured him. "I'll get plans. They use them for resource prospecting and hull inspections, besides military. What sort of environment though? Arctic? Tropical? Does it need to dive deep?"

  "I want it to get dumped out in the Atlantic, either off a reentry bus or dropped by our new shuttle, and make its way up the Potomac to the
heart of DC. The drones will sit and spy on such targets as the CIA or FBI headquarters. I will modify the Frisbees and file off the serial numbers so they can't be traced to us. Also I'll put a self destruct mechanism in them in case somebody captures one. Will a weapons bus work to drop a mini-sub like that?"

  "I'm sure I can make it do so. You might be able to drop a drone carrier on dry land and get away with it too. It can be camouflaged and end up in very difficult to find places. I can see dropping one in a junkyard or in badlands. Very difficult places to search. I can make one look like a fireplug and park it beside a road, or an air conditioning unit on a roof."

  "You are devious, I like that," Jeff said, smiling.

  * * *

  Linda stood in the corridor and read all the jobs scrolling on the screen until they started to repeat. Most seemed technical. Only a few of the high end jobs named an annual salary. What was a senior DBM merge coordinator anyway? She had no idea. There were jobs off Home and jobs that required working seven days a week. Some said no continuing USNA citizenship. One said no stinks, no Timmys and no Zorks. She suspected she knew what a Timmy was from listening to her kids, but didn't have any idea what a Zork was, it sounded pretty bad.

  The lady inside was looking at her when she finished reading. She waved Linda in, but didn't get up and come out into the corridor to try to sell her. She considered whether she wanted to go in and talk to her. She wasn't dressed in an interview outfit. After reading all the high powered jobs she felt unqualified to apply for anything. The woman didn't look aggressive though. If she didn't like how the woman talked to her she could just leave. She took a deep breath and went in.

  "I'm Susan Holder," the young woman told her. She had on the spex like everyone here seemed to wear. She didn't get up, but waved at the chair for Linda to sit. It was a remarkably comfortable chair even in a full gravity. "Would you like coffee?" she offered and then looked closer at Linda like she was sizing her up better, "or a cup of tea?" she amended.

  "I'd love a cup of tea," Linda suddenly realized.

  "Black, green, spiced Chai or herbal?"

  "Chai, without milk, please."

  "It's coming," the lady assured her, although she hadn't made a call. Those spex again…

  "Very few people read our job postings board through a full cycle. I have to think your interest isn't casual."

  "I'm just at the point I started thinking about seeking a job again for the first time yesterday. I have two children in school. My husband is working on the moon and will be back and forth for at least several months. I haven't worked outside the home for some time and it may be hard to find something to fit my schedule. Also, I'm a USNA citizen."

  "That is not usually a concern except in defense work. Are you by any chance an aerospace mechanic or an armorer?" Susan asked, dead pan.

  Linda actually laughed out loud. "Hardly, I'm a housewife who had two years of college and never got a degree. I'm really good at hunting down bargains and running a household budget. I have advanced skills in toilet scrubbing and laundry," she quipped.

  "Can you use a word-processing program and do spreadsheets?"

  "Well sure. If you can't use a computer you might as well live in a cave. I worked for awhile after we married for an online shoppers guide. We went out and checked out stores without telling them they were being evaluated and then wrote up articles on them and fitted any pix we could sneak into the piece. Then I got pregnant with my girl and it never seemed like a good time to go back to work."

  "What sort of courses did you take in college?" Susan seemed genuinely interested.

  "A lot of prerequisites for other courses I never took. Introduction to Creative Writing, College English I, Style and Design Fundamentals, Psych, Algebra because I didn't get it in High School, All the required health and civics propaganda of course, such as how not to become an alcoholic. The required Physical Ed, which meant learning to swim and learning some team sports like volleyball. History of World Art, which was very, very general. Stuff I already knew, because it was an interest of mine already. Chemistry I, because they stopped having actual lab in high school as too dangerous, so I didn't get it there. Did you do your schooling on Earth?"

  "Yes, but about ten years after you and in Sweden. It was more of a , "Stay out of the work force a couple years and become more cultured and less of a trouble maker." sort of a free education, different than the, "You pay for it, but then you may go forth and make money." American model."

  Linda nodded. "You understand. I'm just glad I didn't go all in and amass a huge debt since I didn't stay to get the degree. My parents covered some of my expenses and I worked different jobs. I worked for a relative's company answering phones and then I did pickup and delivery in a little truck, I even waited tables a few months."

  "But it sounds like you didn't take fluff courses. You studied writing and composition and have practical experience as a journalist and photographer. A fairly decent general education and the practical real world skills of working general labor and running a household. I'm sure I can find something for you. Are you willing to do the sort of manual work that you've had to do keeping house, or do you insist on a clean sit down job?"

  "Well, I'd rather not do any seriously grubby jobs like crawling around in duct work or cleaning out sewer pipes, but you mean wiping something down with a rag or running a vacuum over the floor that's fine. I wouldn't mind something like packaging, or light assembly, but I wouldn't want to move heavy stuff around like warehouse work and I'm not ready to do full time work yet." A minion appeared and silently sat a mug in front of her, a cup of something for Susan too and disappeared.

  "We have a group of folks willing to take on temporary positions to cover for people on vacation or off sick. You could tell us when you'd be available and we'd give you a com call and offer you the assignment. The pay rate varies quite a bit, but you would have a variety so you don't get bored doing the same thing and sometimes people find work they really like that way, they'd never try otherwise."

  "I'd like to try that," Linda decided easily. "I send the kids to school Tuesdays and Thursdays, but show me any morning jobs you have. The kids can fend for themselves for a few hours. They have cafeteria cards and my girl likes to sleep until about ten if nobody rouses her anyway."

  Susan scrolled through some things on her screen and tapped few keys. She turned the screen so they both could view it.

  "These three may be of interest to you. There is a job packaging pharmaceuticals. It's a full shift, but usually only one day a week. You work with a supervisor who will train you. It's in zero G. The pay is in Yen," she added.

  "Then there is a job open in the worker's cafeteria. They need somebody to clean tables and wheel the carts with dirty dishes into the kitchen and make coffee and such during the peak lunch hour, 1100 to 1330. The cook can handle that stuff OK off peak."

  "Also, I have a job seven mornings a week, but they will take people who can work any one day or several. It's cleaning a private social club. Like a night club. You can go in anytime from 0400 to 1000. That's when they start prepping for lunch and want you to be done. Tuesday through Friday is light, usually less than two hours. Saturday, Sunday, Monday they do a bigger business the night before and it takes a good three hours. You wipe down all the tables and surfaces, strip the fabric off the frame for any chairs that look dirty, to be laundered and refill the salt and pepper grinders and condiment trays. You fill and stock some things like napkins and clean up the restrooms. Do any of these sound interesting?"

  "I don't think I'm ready to deal with doing anything in zero G and I want to be back with my kids at lunch time," she paused, reluctant to speak.

  "Do you have reservations about working in a club?" Susan guessed. "I assure you it isn't a front for a house of prostitution. They serve alcohol and they do have a gambling room, but that is perfectly legal here."

  "Oh no," Linda said, flustered. "I didn't know if I could deal with the rest rooms. Down home
we'll do just about anything to avoid going in a public restroom. Like at the mall," she actually shuddered. "People are just awful," she asserted firmly.

  "I'm going to tell you something that may offend you. If I lose your business so be it, but you need to know. That is exactly the sort of thing that makes people on Home not want to visit Earth. They call it nasty names like the slum ball. In fact, I have heard people discuss this very thing and conclude you can judge a culture or civilization better by their public rest rooms, than high minded speeches or laws. If you find the restrooms disgusting at the club, I'd have no complaint if you quit after a day, but I'd be very surprised."

  "It sounded really good, otherwise. How much does it pay?" Linda wondered. "How does it work? Do you get a cut of my wages or do I pay a placement fee?"

  "One-hundred-seventy dollars an hour, plus you are granted a membership in the club and they pay us a onetime fee to find you, if you are satisfactory and stay at least a month. "

  "I realize that isn't a living wage on Home," Susan said quickly, misinterpreting Linda's shocked look completely. "They know somebody will be doing it for extra money, not a primary wage. You log your hours by sending a text message when you start and stop. You might want to consider getting some spex. It makes things like that a lot easier."

  "My last job I worked, well it was some years ago, but it paid twenty-two dollars an hour and tips. Not long after the switch to new dollars. This seems like a lot of money to me. I can get some spex, my son has quite a few pairs of them. I'll try the job, if they will take me doing the four light days, Tuesday through Friday and find somebody else for the heavy days. I'll try it on faith that you are right about people here not being pigs in the restrooms. I can't take offense at the truth that they are down below."

  "It won't seem like a lot of money, once you do some shopping on Home. They'll be delighted with whatever days you take, because the management and servers are staying over extra hours and doing it all themselves right now. Would next Tuesday be fine to start?"