Habitats

by Laurence Dahners

“Sir, I didn’t want to kill him. And if I hit the shotgun it would likely just deflect the shot to hit someone else.”

  “Which is exactly what happened, right?”

  “Yes sir,” she whispered, burying her head in her hands.

  Neville said in a tone of complete disbelief, “If we grant that you can hit what you want—why his forearm?”

  Without taking her head out of her hands Donsaii said, “Distal forearm. Because driving the wrist dorsally relaxes the tendons that move the fingers, which would loosen his pull on the trigger.”

  Neville looked down at his wrist and hand as he flexed his wrist back and forth watching what happened to his fingers. “So, if we believe you, in a few seconds you rationally thought out exactly where to throw that cue ball to make Williams drop the shotgun?”

  Donsaii nodded her head; then lifted her wet cheeks from her han C fr”ds, “I should have been able to think of something better—but I… still haven’t figured it out.”

  “On the other hand, if we believe what’s actually possible, you recklessly threw that cue ball in a room full of people and it was sheer luck you didn’t hit someone with it and cause serious injury. And if we believe Mr. Williams claim that he didn’t intend to shoot anyone, just to frighten his wife and her ‘boyfriend,’ no one would have been hurt if you hadn’t knocked the gun out of his hand.”

  “The gun wasn’t on safe and he’d started to pull the trigger,” Donsaii whispered disconsolately.

  “What?! Did you say the gun wasn’t on safe?”

  She nodded.

  “You don’t know that! Maybe getting hit by a cue ball and flying through the air took it off safe.”

  “If you’ll look at the video from my AI you’ll see that the red ring around the safety was visible.”

  “What?” Neville frowned and spoke to his AI. A moment later video from Donsaii’s camera played the clip of Williams extending the gun across the table at his wife. “You’re full of crap,” Neville said. “No red ring is visible.”

  Donsaii’s eyes dropped back to the table in front of her. “It was visible when Williams first took it out of the case.”

  “Bullshit.” Nonetheless Neville ran the video back. There, as the gun came out of the case and lay flat, the red ring around the safety button was readily evident. Neville said, “OK, I’ll grant you that it wasn’t on safe, but how do you know he didn’t put it on safe after he took it out of the case?”

  Donsaii didn’t look up. “His finger never got near the safety.”

  They all watched carefully as the sequence ran again. She was right, Williams’ finger never got near the safety. Without commenting on that Neville said, “And you’re claiming that he was pulling the trigger?”

  “Yes sir. On slow motion you should be able to see the muscles in his forearm contract and the trigger begin to depress.”

  They watched the frames in question. To Stewart’s amazement, she was right.

  Neville shook his head, “OK, I’ll grant you all that. Still, I don’t believe for one instant that anyone can be that accurate throwing a ball.”

  Head back in her hands Donsaii shrugged her shoulders minutely. Atassi said, “Why don’t we let her try to prove whether she’s that accurate?”

  Neville snorted, “Go back to the bar and give her a cue ball?”

  “No, let her use that baseball you keep on your desk. She can throw it down the hall outside, it’s long enough.”

  To Stewart’s astonishment, after some argument they all trooped out of the interview room to the hall. Neville went to his desk Ct taiming t and returned with the worn baseball he liked to handle when he was thinking.

  When they handed Donsaii the ball, she looked at unseeingly for a moment then tossed it up a couple of times to get a feel for it. After a moment she said, “To be accurate, I’ll have to throw this really hard.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Neville said.

  “What do you want me to hit?”

  “The doorknob.”

  “It’ll damage it.”

  Several others had gathered around to watch the show and one of them snickered.

  Neville said, “I’ll buy another baseball.”

  “It’ll damage the knob too.”

  “Lady, that doorknob’s steel. If you can damage it, I’ll buy another doorknob too.”

  She shrugged, turned, cocked, and threw the ball so suddenly that Stewart didn’t really realize that it had already happened until a loud bang from the end of the hall had him grabbing for his service pistol.

  Then he saw the ball bouncing oddly back toward them from the end of the hall. Its cover had split and it looked pretty deformed. He looked at the doorknob. It looked like it had a big crack in it.

  He saw the others looking at one another in startlement. He told his AI to play back the video of what had just happened. The ball crossed the distance in just a couple of frames and struck the doorknob dead in the center.

  Atassi had picked up the ball and was turning it over. The cover had burst open on one seam and strings were falling loosely through the gap.

  Stewart turned to Donsaii. “I think we’ve seen enough Ms. Donsaii. You may go.”

  Neville exclaimed, “But Chief! That could have just been luck!”

  “Sergeant, we’ve seen the lady make two throws, hitting her target perfectly both times. If you can hit that knob from here one time in ten I’ll give you twenty bucks. Ms. Donsaii has, however, proven to my satisfaction that her throw of that cue ball was a well-reasoned and accurate attempt to prevent the death of Ms. Williams. It was not a reckless act with which she endangered people in the room.”

  Neville said, “But Chief!”

  Stewart held up his hand at Neville. He turned back to Donsaii. “Thank you for coming in Ms. Donsaii.”

  She nodded minutely and, wiping her eyes, turned to leave.

  ***

  The spaceplane descended back toward earth and, as gravity returned, Gary’s nausea faded. He looked wonderingly at the large pile of gossamer material in his container. His “graphene spinner” had, to the best of his ability to test out here in space, worked perfectly. Ced mer materi It had taken some adjusting, so he was glad he’d actually flown up into space with the machine instead of trying to have someone else run it for him. Once he’d gotten the settings right… it had begun spinning a three inch wide strip of graphene as fast as the drum the carbon condensed onto could be turned with the motors he had. At first he hadn’t recognized it was working because the graphene was diaphanous as smoke and it wasn’t until quite a bit had piled up in the receptacle that he’d realized that the machine was working.

  The stuff in the receptacle was multilayered graphene about two nanometers in thickness according to his estimates. If it were perfect, the three inch wide strip of barely visible membrane should withstand more than three pounds of tension.

  He twisted a piece of it up into an invisible fiber. He couldn’t see it but could feel it when he tugged on it where he had it wrapped around his fingers. He tried to break it. The fiber might not be visible, but he could see the deep groove in made in his skin! As he stared at it, blood started to seep from the groove!

  He took great care to unwrap it the same way he’d wrapped it on for fear of getting a tangle he couldn’t undo without cutting off a significant chunk of his own flesh. It had hardly hurt, just like when he’d once cut himself with a really sharp piece of obsidian. However, it started to throb. He had thought he’d be able to pull on it until it broke to find out how strong it was but since it had cut him before it broke he couldn’t estimate if it would take the three pounds he’d calculated.

  Nonetheless, he was astonished that something he couldn’t really see could be so strong. He knew the science and the numbers—it still seemed unbelievable.

  He couldn’t wait to get back down to earth and test it with something other than his fingers.

  ***

  Menahim accepted another call from Avral over th
e secure PGM link. “Have you received approval yet?”

  “No, they want to know if there is someone else in the organization you can deal with?”

  “Someone else?!”

  “Yes, someone else. Not so prominent, yet knowing how to make ports. Perhaps more susceptible to bribes.”

  “No, I don’t really think anyone else understands the ports. But how could I know? I would have to bribe or capture someone to find out what they knew before I would know. The only one that we can be sure knows what we need is Donsaii! It would be foolish to expend resources, and perhaps alert them, trying to capture someone else. Besides, who knows what other amazing devices Donsaii might develop in the future? We need her, not some weak substitute.”

  “Nonetheless, they want you to explore the possibilities. Perhaps that woman who is one of the leaders of the Portal Technologies division of D5R. She’s an electronics engineer and so probably understands the electronics necessary to energize a port. Then all we need is to be able to make the actual disks of the ports themselves. That can’t be all that hard and she probably knows enough about it that our scientists could figure it out.”

  Avral sighed, “This is stupid. If we take her and she’s useless, their guard will be up.”

  “So, don’t ‘take’ her. Offer her millions.”

  “Absolute stupidity.” Avral spat, cutting the connection. He sat back musing. Since his wife had been killed by Islamic extremists when he was only twenty, he had given his life to protection of other innocents. However, he recognized that sometimes he could be somewhat of an extremist himself. In an effort to keep from that path he made every effort to follow orders, no matter how much he was tempted to interpret them creatively.

  His temptation was to try to find this Vivian Varka woman alone with Donsaii, then make an offer to both of them and capture them both if they refused. But… he finally admitted to himself, that would be too far from his agreement with himself to follow orders.

  He closed his eyes and sighed. Varka was not who they needed though, and he had a grim feeling about negotiating or taking her.

  When they had to go after Donsaii later, she’d be on her toes…

  ***

  At a knock on his door John Parker looked up from contemplating how his forearm ended at its midpoint. “Yes.”

  The door creaked open a crack, “John? It’s Ell.”

  The raspy voice didn’t sound like Donsaii. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to her. He’d watched the video of the shooting and the gun wouldn’t have fallen from the man’s hand and blown his arm off if she hadn’t thrown that damned cue ball.

  On the other hand, how could he condemn her? She’d done the right thing, and it had saved Shelly’s life. Throwing that ball was the only thing Donsaii could have done. John would hope he would have done the same in her place, if he’d seen what was about to happen. But… it had cost him his hand! Could he forgive that? Finally he croaked, “Come in.”

  The door opened a little farther and she slipped in. John’s eyes widened, she looked like shit! Her perfectly proportioned body remained graceful and amazing in a black blouse and slacks but her eyes were red rimmed and her nose looked like it had been rubbed raw. Her hair was a mess. She slipped hesitantly to the side of his bed and knelt as if she were praying. “I’m so… so sorry John. I should… should have been able to do something… else… to stop that man.” Tears began to pour down her cheeks.

  John had been prepared to hate her for the loss of her hand, instead he found himself saying, “There wasn’t anything else you could have done. Shelly’d be dead.”

  She took a gasping breath, “And then I should have been here when you woke up but the police had me down at the station to question me. And… I’ve been sitting outside for hours now, too chicken to come in to apologize. I’m… so, so sorry. Lisa saw me and told me to come on in.”

  John’s wife Lisa had left about ten minutes ago. He could picture the two women talking until now. “Lisa said D5R would continue my salary?”

  “Yes,” she pulled a Kleenex out of his bedside box, “they’ve bought you an annuity that will pay your current salary with cost of living increases as long as you live.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, “So, even if D5R goes bankrupt you’ll still have an income. I… I know it doesn’t replace your hand,” her voice broke as she glanced at where his hand should have been, “but at least you don’t have to worry about supporting your family.”

  “What I’d like,” he paused and cleared his throat, “would be if D5R would fit me with one of the hands we’re putting on the waldoes. I’ve been looking at the myoelectric hands they make for amputees and they’re complete crap compared to the hands on the waldoes.”

  Donsaii’s eyebrows rose, “Really?” she whispered querulously.

  “Really, the myoelectrics they showed me are still powered by batteries, believe it or not, instead of through ports. With those batteries they weigh a lot or you have to carry a battery pack on your belt with a wire to the prosthesis. They have very limited sensory capabilities so you can’t hold a delicate object for fear of crushing it because you don’t know how tight you’re squeezing it. You can’t get something out of your pocket because you can’t tell if you’ve got a grip on anything but the inside of your pocket.” He ran down this litany sounding more and more frustrated. In a flat tone, “Really. They’re terrible.” He grimaced, “Our waldo hands are much better.”

  She frowned, her distraught expression gone in the face of a problem to solve, “But, the waldo sensation is fed back to your intact hand.”

  “Yeah, but surely we can do something better.”

  She looked thoughtful, “Roger and Emma are starting a project with a biomechanics grad student trying to use ports to connect electronically to nerves. They’d be a long way, even from a trial, in humans. I don’t even know what’s involved in doing that kind of stuff, but we could talk to them about your ideas.”

  “Really?” he said, startled. He’d been wondering why prostheses couldn’t be hooked directly up to nerves.

  She nodded.

  He looked thoughtful a moment, then said, “Can I transfer to Quantum Research and work on it myself, instead of trying to keep up with it from afar?”

  She glanced at his missing hand and croaked, “J Ccro="3em">ohn, whatever you want to do… will be OK. I’m sure Roger and Emma would love to have someone in QR with a true interest.”

  ***

  Carter looked around in amazement. He’d been working in and on the big steel box out in space.

  Or his “waldo” had.

  He’d been learning how to maneuver it from place to place and do a number of tasks. John Parker, the guy who’d hired him had gotten hurt shortly after his hiring, though the circumstances of his injury still weren’t clear to Carter. The guy’d gotten shot at some kind of “after work” function which made Carter worry about what they did after work around here.

  To his astonishment, with Parker gone, Carter had found himself kind of in charge of the “waldo drivers,” as they called themselves. One of the big shots in the company, a guy named Ben Stavos, gave him general directions. Parker had apparently been Stavos’ second in command on the project and had told Stavos that Carter was the best of the thirty-odd waldo drivers they had hired, which Carter had to admit was true. The other guys were still struggling with things that Carter had found himself able to do on the second day.

  So Stavos had put Carter in charge of getting things done out in space. They had ten waldoes at present with more being built. Someone else was testing more people to find them more drivers because they wanted to have three drivers per waldo to keep them running around the clock.

  The first task the waldo drivers were assigned was to build a bigger steel box. There’d been a big stack of steel plates outside the box he’d done his first test in. His first day on the job, when he’d “strapped in” to the waldo, as they called it, he’d found himself in a waldo outside the box. T
here’d been the stack of plates clamped to it. Apparently the plates and the box had been flown up together in one of the company’s “spaceplanes.” Stavos had asked him to start welding the plates into a bigger box according to a plan Stavos sent to Carter’s AI. The big box was to be built around the small box the testing had been held in. Three other guys started with him that first day and he’d bossed as they pulled a plate loose from the stack and held it to the first box.

  Talk about a flail! First of all Carter himself had barely begun to master the jets that moved the waldoes around in space but the other guys were terrible with them. Fortunately, moving the waldoes from point A to point B was something that AIs were really good at so when one of the guys got their waldo disoriented and way out of position, all they had to do was ask their AI to put them back where they had been. Or they could ask the AI to put the waldo in a certain location in the first place. Then they could lock themselves down on the steel plates with powerful electromagnets built into the bases of their waldoes in order to do work with their arms.

  So Carter had told the AIs to put two of the guys’ waldoes where he wanted to attach the first plate on the original box according to the plan. He had the AIs lock them in place with their electromagnets. Then he and Alex unclamped a plate and re-clamped the stack. Ced to the pl By the time the stack was re-clamped, the plate they’d unclamped was getting away. Carter had grabbed his corner of it and, after some flailing around, Alex had gotten a corner too. Then Carter just asked their AIs to fly them and the plate around to the other guys who were already in position. Once they arrived the first two guys had grabbed and put the plate where Carter wanted it. Once it was in position, he and Alex pulled their welders off their waldo torsos—where they attached magnetically—and spot welded the plate into place.

  Then he and Alex had gone to get another plate while the other two guys worked on completing the welds.

  Just as they got the next plate in place, Carter got a contact from Ben Stavos on his headset. “Carter, you and the waldo team are needed to unload an inflatable habitat from our big spaceplane.”