Universe Vol1Num2

by Jim Baen's Universe

  "Remind me never to go yachting with you, okay?"

  A moment's pause that Thomas always used to broach new subjects.

  "I still like 'Yellow Bird'," he proclaimed, referring to the da Vinci-esque hang glider coming together in my garage. It was the first designed for a four armed, long tailed, Exile pilot. Building it was a blast, but the name was a sore point. "'Yellow Bird' adds grandeur, dignity. You saw the videos . . ."

  "Yes," I interrupted, recalling the clips of the long extinct species soaring over Homebound, a canary yellow condor with biplane wings eating roadkill. "Look, it's your rig, so you have final say. But don't you think it's bad luck?"

  "Why would 'Yellow Bird' be bad luck?"

  "You honestly don't think that naming a dangerous, prototype aircraft after a carrion eater is a bad idea?"

  "No. Why should I?"

  I shook my head. Apparently, you can not only take the Exile out of the food chain but you can also take the food chain (or at least the fear of mortality) out of the Exile.

  "Thank you for coming, gentlemen. Grab a seat." I felt my stomach lurch. If Thermal had showed up early instead of his usual ten minutes late, this really was serious. I checked my watch to ensure we were on time, but it didn't calm me any.

  "Now," Thermal began, adjusting his hairpiece absently, "we need to be on the same page here. I'm not pointing fingers or blaming anyone . . ."

  Beside me Eleanor let out a quiet whimper of terror.

  ". . . but we have to figure out how to get the Skin project back on track. Frankly, you guys aren't the only team in trouble." Everyone nodded. The Propulsion Group's antics had caused a site wide evacuation and left building sixty-six smelling permanently of burnt milk. "Still, I'm worried. The entire airplane is at risk." He pounded his fist on the table. "We need solutions, people!"

  A nice speech. Also, the last civil words he spoke that morning. Frankly, if berating us could have helped the situation, Hurricane Thermal would have fixed the entire project before lunch.

  "And what about these integration tests?" he snapped an hour into the blame-storming session. "Wind tunnels ain't cheap, you know! And you want to pump lightning through one? That's what computer simulations are for!"

  "Sir," I answered, "we can't be sure our models of complex aerodynamic behavior for Skin are accurate. I built the whole schedule to accelerate this testing . . ."

  "But the other tests came up great. This stuff's been used for centuries! Why not just cut . . ."

  "Sir," interrupted Thomas, politely but firmly butting into Thermal's tirade. "I have kept the Chairman abreast of our progress and he agrees with our testing regime. Until nine months ago, my people had never even exposed Skin to Earth's atmosphere. While we're making incredible progress here, when would you rather find any problems? In three months on a wind tunnel mockup or next year when the FAA starts throwing lightning at a full sized fuselage?"

  Thermal scowled, but apparently was at a loss how to glower at a creature without a face. He paused a moment, as the spreadsheet deep inside his toupeed cranium weighed the risks.

  "Fine. You've got your test, Ford. Next up, though, we need to talk about reducing overtime expenses . . ."

  ****

  Score: 1.22

  We won that battle, but the fifteen weeks leading to Lightning Discharge Testing were a nightmare. I don't know how many hours we worked because we stopped recording overtime. Suffice to say that styrofoam noodle dinners and sleeping bags under desks lose a lot of their charm for a man of my advanced years.

  It wasn't just the hours, though. Marco and Marjorie discovered a flaw in our manufacturing process. When we scaled up to mass production, our yield of uncontaminated Skin would fall, dropping the score to 1.22, only somewhat preferable to carbon composites. When the big day rolled around, I just wanted the entire ordeal to be over.

  "Telemetry ready," Eleanor's tinny voice called over the video link. Then, with an audible smirk, "How's the weather back home?"

  Computer modeling had made wind tunnels as common as Ford Model Ts, so we had been forced to rent time at another facility. Frankly, we'd been lucky to find one that could get the scale wind speed and voltage we needed without going overseas.

  "It's raining here," I grunted, pausing to swill some more coffee. "As if you didn't know."

  "Rain? They have legends about water falling from the sky here in Arizona. Silly superstitions."

  I chuckled, glancing around the conference room at the team. Thomas was in the corner, sharing data with Marjorie on an obsidian tablet unreadable without ultrasonic sonar. Tom Hammond and Finn Radke were off to the side, Tom's motorcycle boots propped up on the walnut conference table. There were deep bags under Marco's eyes, but he gave a "thumbs up," confident the test was a formality, that our models had been perfect.

  "You promised we could take the whole weekend off when this works," Marcos said. "Right?"

  "A promise is a promise," I agreed.

  "Actually," Marjorie said, turning away from Thomas, "I might want to use that time off a little later."

  "Sure."

  "And," she said, hesitating as she looked back at Thomas and then at me, "I need to ask you two a favor when that happens. A big favor."

  "The tunnel's ready," interrupted a stranger's voice over the link. "Releasing smoke now."

  The image on the wall showed the top of a 7z7 wing twenty centimeters long, threads of yellow smoke curving gracefully over the slate gray Skin surface. A red display in the corner tracked the speed of the air pumped through the stainless steel tunnel, slowly creeping upwards.

  "Airspeed 200 scale knots," called the stranger's voice. "Preparing for test step 1a. Discharging in ten, nine, eight . . ."

  "Jeez, Tushar," growled Eleanor to the tunnel manager, "we're paying for the tunnel by the minute! Stop padding your paycheck, okay?"

  The audio link died under a sea of static, the video link staying rock steady while a bright blue arc danced across the wing. The part of me that had loved Frankenstein movies as a kid was disappointed that the lightning source was out of frame. Oh, well. They wouldn't be using a Tesla coil anyway.

  Two seconds later, it was over. A hundred mild lightning strikes, each faster than the eye could see. We'd increase the charge in later runs, but for now the conference room erupted in cheers at the image of the unscathed wing and undisturbed smoke threads. I sighed relief as Thomas patted me on the shoulder.

  "Ah, guys . . ." Eleanor called, breaking into our celebration. "We have a problem."

  "What?" I asked. "It looks just . . ."

  "Check the underside."

  I fumbled the remote and heard Tom Hammond's boots thump to the floor at the same moment my jaw did. On either side of the engine cowling the neat laminar threads of smoke had shattered into chaotic lumps of rippling turbulence, like forest fires quivering with caffeine jitters. While we watched, the patches shrank, retreating to the engine pylon before disappearing entirely.

  "I'm rewinding to T plus 100 milliseconds," said Eleanor. I shook my head in disbelief as the freeze frame showed nearly half the wing on either side of the engine lost in a cloud of turbulence. Jay spoke first.

  "Jesus. Half the wing . . ."

  "Half the lift," corrected Tom. "We loose half the freakin' lift when hit by lightning!"

  "And it lasts," interrupted Eleanor, "two point five seconds before recovering to eighty percent lift for five seconds. I don't know if that'll stay there when we scale up or not."

  "If it'll get even worse," I moaned, as if it would matter. This was more than enough to crash a plane on takeoff. "What the devil is causing it?"

  "The engine," answered Thomas. He stepped forward, pointing to ripples in the cloud's edge on the image. "There's oscillation, see? The skin twitches slightly when charged, as if reacting to an impact, but our grounding dissipates it in just a few milliseconds so it's lost in the turbulence of the lightning strike itself. As expected. But underneath, the engine cowling isn't co
vered with Skin."

  "The shock wave reflects back," I said, "and when it reaches the Skin—"

  "Which reacts to the change in pressure and bounces it back again. And so forth. Oscillation. Technically it's not turbulence, but a wave of energy dancing back and forth along the face of the wing."

  "Unless some of that energy is facing downwards to hold the plane in the air it's pretty irrelevant, isn't it?"

  Thomas fell silent, then gave a very human four-armed shrug.

  Two hours later, Eleanor was on an early flight home. We halted testing when a mid-sized strike lost 90% lift for half a minute. Thomas made a quick calculation that showed tripling the thickness of the grounding layer would dampen the oscillations and make Skin safe from anything the FAA could hurl. I followed with a calculation of what the new weight would do to Skin's score.

  We all left the conference room in silence.

  With a sigh, I hammered my status E-mail to Thermal and went outside for the first time in recent memory. I savored the scent of a March drizzle, tasting raindrops on my tongue. After a stinging hot shower at the company gym, I shaved and packed up my gym bag. Sure enough, I returned to find a voicemail waiting.

  Before I even opened the door to Thermal's office, I knew he wouldn't be alone this time.

  ****

  Final Score: 0.77

  "Those bastards," hissed Marco the next morning.

  "I'll land on my feet. Hand me another box, willya?"

  "Those worthless, two faced bastards."

  I accepted the box and rummaged through my desk, trying to figure out how I'd accrued so many plastic forks.

  "You should sue," Marco said. "I mean, they have to give you notice, right?"

  "He's a contract worker, Marco," answered Eleanor. "There's nothing he can do."

  "The labor board, then."

  "What part of 'contract worker' didn't you understand?" Eleanor growled. "Basically, anything shy of selling his organs without his consent is fair game."

  "You can't leave, Ford."

  "Really?" I chuckled. "Perhaps if you told Thermal . . ."

  Just then Thomas and Marjorie walked up two-and-tail, Thomas carrying a cardboard box in his toplimbs.

  "Dear Lord . . ." whispered Marco.

  "Those bastards," agreed Eleanor.

  "Thomas?" I asked. No answer.

  "He . . ." said Marjorie, clenching all four hands into angry fists. I had an image of a 1-2-3-4 rabbit punch combination. "He just finished a teleconference with the Chairman."

  "Thomas," I repeated, taking my friend by the top bicep. "I'm so sorry. When are you going back? To the Habitat?"

  "I'm not," he whispered.

  "What?"

  "The Chairman," Marjorie began, wringing an amazing amount of contempt from her translator, "says the Exile Habitat Engineering and Maintenance Company reserves its shuttle seats for employees only."

  "Those bas . . ." Marco began, only to be interrupted by a fuming Eleanor.

  "Let me get this straight, Thomas: You warned your management from the outset that Skin might not be suitable for our application. You spent a year working yourself sick, keeping them abreast of every technical issue. You did no worse than a half dozen other teams that failed. And then, when everything falls apart, they fire you and leave you down here stranded?"

  "Yes," Thomas answered.

  "Man, you guys are more like humans than I ever thought."

  "Don't they owe Thomas a trip back?" asked Marco.

  "Under our old laws, definitely," said Marjorie. "During our journey, we were a sealed society. The only way to keep things stable was to provide lifetime employment in exchange for lifetime loyalty. As we integrate into Earth's economy, though, there is a movement to drop rules that are inconsistent with free market profit."

  I nodded. Market reform is a bitch.

  "I tried to convince Thomas to go before the Grievance Council and demand a trip home, but he refuses."

  "What good would it do?" Thomas asked. "Every job in the Habitat is allocated, and some are even being eliminated under the new rules. Besides, I've only done one thing my entire life. What else can I do?"

  Traditionally, this would've been where I patted Thomas on the back and said "Buck up, old chum!" Unfortunately, I was pretty emotionally drained myself at that point.

  "Ford," said Marjorie, breaking the long silence, "do you remember that favor I mentioned during the wind tunnel testing? Well, I know this is a poor time, but I have to ask you and Thomas for help before you leave."

  "What do you need?" I asked, eager to change the subject from unemployment.

  "My parents are visiting in three weeks. They saw Thomas flying Yellow Bird on one of the entertainment channels in the Habitat."

  I nodded. For the first time the employee newsletter hadn't featured me in its annual story about the Soaring Club. How the wire services had picked up Thomas's photo, I'll never know.

  "My mother wants to try it. She wants to fly."

  "No problem," I answered. "We're going out with the Soaring Club next month."

  "That won't do," she replied. "They're only here for that weekend."

  "We can arrange something," answered Thomas. "Perhaps it'll keep our minds off our problems. Right, Ford?"

  "Sure. Nothing quite like . . ."

  "One second," interrupted Eleanor, turning to Marjorie. "Did you say your folks were coming down on the shuttlecraft for the weekend?"

  "Yes. It's all the time they can spare."

  "Marjorie, I would have to mortgage my house to get a shuttle ticket."

  "Well, my parents have done well for themselves lately."

  There. That defensive tone again.

  "Marjorie," I asked, "just what do your parents do?"

  "Oh, they're our Economists. It was really a very dry and academic field . . ."

  "Until the Habitat reached Earth," I finished. The Exile Economists. During their journey, only two Exile academics had bothered to study the esoteric field of exchanging goods and services for money, a worthless concept while traveling between the stars. I'd read that they'd designed the entire Exile business strategy, a multibillion dollar juggernaut of which the 7z7 represented a minute fraction.

  "Of course, you really have to credit Mom with negotiating that half percent commission. You'd be amazed at how it adds up."

  I shook my head. Couldn't they see the solution hovering right in front of their, er, snouts?

  "Marjorie," I asked. "Can't your folks just loan Thomas the price of a shuttle tick . . ."

  Both Exiles suddenly threw all four palms rigid and outwards as if to push me away. Thomas' box crashed to the floor. It took two seconds of dead silence for me to realize what had insulted them.

  "Um, forget I mentioned borrowing money."

  The pair relaxed, assuming their original postures. Thomas lifted his box from the floor with his lower limbs. He poked through the contents as Marjorie cast around for something to do to cover her own awkwardness.

  "Look . . ." Marjorie began, hands grasping nervously, "I know you mean well, Ford. My parents are, well, progressive about finances. I doubt they'd think less of Thomas for beg . . . I mean, borrowing the funds. Still, most of our people in the Habitat wouldn't understand."

  "We are still adjusting to the concept of personal wealth, Ford," Thomas explained. "You will have to excuse our taboos about unearned money."

  I nodded and pretended to understand. In a sealed, regulated economy, who would have any needs so strong that they'd go into debt? Gambling addicts? Criminals? It implied the existence of all sorts of Exile vices I'd never considered before.

  "So," Marco asked Marjorie, trying to change the subject. "Where are your folks going to stay?"

  "Well, they said they'd be fine using the futon at my apartment. I think they deserve something more."

  "What if . . . " Thomas pondered, clearly forming some plan in his mind. "What if you went away for the weekend? A tour of Washington wine co
untry. Bed and breakfasts. I'm sure Ford knows dozens of places."

  "Huh?" I asked. "I guess I do."

  "Certainly." Thomas nodded. "Glide in the morning, wine tasting in the afternoon. A personal tour of the countryside while staying in some beautiful places. Much better than the futon. Of course, my partner and I would have to charge a fee."

  I stared at him. "Partner?"

  "You don't mind putting engineering consulting on hold for a while, do you?"

  I felt a grin spread across my face. "Get paid to fly? I think I can manage that."

  "Well," said Marjorie, still weighing Thomas's proposal. "That all sounds nice. Dad told me he had tried a wine while he and Mother were looking at investments in Europe. Something called a 'Riesling,' I believe."

  "He's looking for investment opportunities, you say?" Thomas asked. It's incredible that someone without a face can cast me a meaningful look.

  "If your folks will let Thomas and me take them out for the weekend," I promised, "I'll buy them a case of Riesling."

  "Hmmm," Marjorie said. "I'll call and see if that's what they want to do."

  The Rieslings never panned out, but fortunately for Patch and Benjamin Glider Tours, LLC, it was a terrific year for Washington state Chardonnays.

  ****

  Medic

  Author: William Ledbetter

  Illustrated by Laura Givens

  Sam gripped the cargo locks on the floor as tightly as he could, but still swayed back and forth each time the Osprey zigged or zagged along its radar-avoiding slalom course. A frustrated Ernie Ochoa tried to mount a defensive pod on one of Sam's three attachment points.

  "Hold still, Sam. This is hard enough without you doing the hula."

  Sam tried to cinch himself tighter.

  The plane jerked again and one of the troopers in the back vomited. Dozens of lasers felt out the terrain, keeping the blind aircraft from clipping trees, power lines and radio towers as it flew under radar. The computer-controlled plane did its job well, but the flight equations cared little about passenger comfort or last minute additions to robots like Sam.