Vaz 4: Invaders Read online

  Without looking at anyone, Gettnor said, “Are there any other tests you’d like to perform?”

  No one said anything for a moment, Harlan thought they were all as surprised as he’d been. The silence stretched but then Harlan broke it himself, “I’d like to put on the harness and try to crash into something myself.”

  Eyes still on the floor, Vaz slowly shook his head. “I’ve tried that myself. If you run at a wall, your own sense of self-preservation slows you down when you’re getting close. The AI in the harness can tell you’re not going to hit hard enough to hurt yourself, so it never activates.”

  Harlan felt a little frustrated, but Reven said, “What if we held a sheet up for Dad to run at? He should be able to run full speed right at it, knowing that it won’t hurt if he hits it, but the radar will show a big object that he’s about to run into and the AI should stop him.”

  Gettnor smiled, “That would work! Lisanne, can you get a sheet while I help Mr. Davis put on the harness?”

  It turned out that “helping him put on the harness” meant giving him advice rather than actually doing it. Harlan had the impression that Gettnor would have been uncomfortable actually touching him. As Harlan was a big man, he had to let out a few straps, but he still managed to be in the harness by the time Lisanne returned with a sheet.

  Soon, Lisanne and Clarice were standing and holding up the sheet by the corners. As Harlan contemplated running at it, he asked them to fold it double horizontally. “I’d like to be able to see over the top so I can tell I’m not going to hit something on the other side. I’d also like the bottom to be up off the ground so it won’t tangle my feet.

  Gettnor looked at the arrangement with some puzzlement, “You don’t need to worry about it. You won’t reach the sheet unless you go slowly enough the AI doesn’t try to stop you.”

  “Yeah,” Harlan said with a little laugh, “but the whole reason we’re doing this is because I can’t convince myself it’s really going to work, right?”

  “Okay,” Gettnor said dubiously. It sounded suspiciously like he thought Harlan was a little out of touch with reality.

  Harlan lined up the ladies so that there was a clear area behind them in which to stop after he’d gone through the sheet. He stepped back about 25 paces, then charged at the sheet.

  Somehow, despite the fact that rationally he knew that this was exactly what should happen, he still felt immensely surprised when the harness suddenly bit into him as he neared the sheet. It slowed him from a full tilt run to a near standstill, then eased off allowing him to move forward and slowly walk through the sheet. Behind him, Reven clapped her hands together and excitedly said, “Can I try it?”

  Gettnor said, “Why?” but everyone else seemed to think it was a good idea.

  Soon Reven had been fitted with the harness and she took her turn charging at the sheet barrier. Once it had stopped her, she said, “That’s so cool!”

  “Do you want to try the fly-board now?” Gettnor said, still seeming puzzled by her wish to hurtle at sheets.

  “Oh!” Reven said eagerly, “Do you already have a working model?”

  Gettnor turned, “Just the basic one we sketched out when you were here before.” He stumped across the room toward a large workbench.

  Reven squeaked when she saw beyond him to what lay on the bench. She ran past Gettnor to stare hungrily at the board lying there. Harlan had been expecting something like a wooden board with a couple of the discs stuck on the ends to serve as a proof of concept. Instead they saw exactly what Reven had described Gettnor laying out with his CAD program. A seven inch wide board which looked to be a couple of inches thick. At each end it had circular 10 inch wide areas that presumably contained the bigger discs.

  It didn’t look sexy like something a design artist would have created, but it certainly didn’t look like something cobbled together in someone’s garage. It looked like it had been machined out of a block of aluminum. The top of the deck fit seamlessly into the rest of the board with discrete screws hidden in the deck’s traction ridges.

  “This is so awesome!” Reven breathed. “Is this just a model? Or will this one actually fly?”

  Gettnor said, “It’ll fly, it just needs to be linked to your AI. Ask your AI to link to ‘Fly-board 1’ and give it this password.” He called out a long alphanumeric string.

  Reven’s eyes widened, “That’s some password!”

  Gettnor looked a little offended, “There’s not much point in having a password if it’s easy to figure out…” but Reven was already mumbling to her AI, telling it to use the password Gettnor had just given.

  Harlan watched uncomfortably as Reven prepared to actually use the fly-board. He’d thought they were coming over to look at the safety equipment and check out the tentative design for a fly-board. Finding a finished fly-board, all ready for Reven to get on and try it out had confounded him. He kept trying to think of a reason why she shouldn’t get on it, but Gettnor had proven the safety harness. If she was ever going to get on a fly-board he couldn’t come up with a reason why it shouldn’t be now.

  Reven said, “It’s linked!” She turned to Gettnor, “Do you have any tips from the times you’ve ridden it?”

  Gettnor blinked in surprise, “I haven’t been on it,” he said, sounding astonished that she would have thought that he’d ride a fly-board. Then, as if it had just come to mind, he said, “You can just tell your AI what HAAT you’d like and the board will maintain it.”

  “HAAT?”

  “Height above average terrain. The board will do the averaging so you don’t drop into every hole, and bump over every rock. That’s another safety feature. If you set HAAT at six inches then ride it directly toward a large object like a car or building, the look-ahead radar will lift you to fly over even a high object by six inches.”

  “Oh man! That’s so cool!” Reven said bending to set the board on the floor, then speaking to her AI, “Set HAAT at six inches.”

  The board lifted into the air to float about six inches off the concrete. When Reven lifted her foot to step onto it, Harlan couldn’t help but step forward and grab her elbow. The floating board looked like it would shoot out from under her. When her weight came down on it, it sank a fraction of an inch and did skid a little away from her, but Harlan saw her feet deftly tilt the board so that it pushed back underneath her. He guessed all of her practice tilting the wheeled boards while riding them gave her a leg up on controlling this one. Looking down at his hand on her elbow, she said, “Thanks Dad. You can let go now.”

  Harlan found it difficult to even loosen his grip, but did let go after a second. Nonetheless, he kept his hand near her elbow, ready to catch her if she started to fall.

  Reven had other ideas. Tilting the board forward, she gently slid off across the big room then banked it to the side to curve around and head back toward them.

  A joyous smile exploded across her face.

  They’d had a pleasant dinner with Lisanne Gettnor while her husband Vaz sat woodenly at the table looking uncomfortable and eating mechanically. Harlan had decided that Reven had certainly hit the mark when she’d told them about Gettnor’s weirdness.

  Now Harlan and Clarice were walking back to their home while Reven cut big circles around them on her new fly-board.

  Harlan had made Reven promise not to set the HAAT above six inches until she’d spent a lot of time close to the ground to be sure nothing bad happened down there.

  Somehow, he didn’t think that restriction would last very long…

  ***

  Eldon Weiss looked around excitedly. So far, his day had been one big surprise after another. After his first trip up in a small saucer to confirm that he could tolerate weightlessness and to test the fit of his suit; arriving here today and seeing this massive seventy-five meter diameter saucer had put him in awe.

  It could lift 3000 metric tons! Actually, it could lift much more than that if it had to; lifting only 3000 tons let it easily stay within the
most efficient range for its massive thruster disc. It also had a couple thousand square feet of crew space, which, considering that the crew only numbered ten, seemed like overkill, but would be nice for trips lasting several weeks. At present, he was sitting in a large room that apparently served as a combination living room and meeting room. It didn’t look too different from rooms you might see in houses or offices, though all the seats were firmly attached and had a full set of safety belting. They all reclined as well. He was alone there except for another man studying something on his HUD.

  When Eldon had first seen it, he’d been surprised to see something that looked like a huge patch of oversized bubble wrap sitting on top of the saucer. When he’d asked about it, he’d been told that the bubbles were one cubic meter Kevlar pouches filled with water. The whole thing was 27 by 27 meters and since a cubic meter of water weighed a metric ton, it totaled 676 tons. That was a lot of water, but not much of a load for the big saucer.

  Apparently, the big saucers took up a set of these bubbles most times they launched. They took them to the space habitat which currently consisted of a row of seven 25 meter cube shaped aluminum boxes. Each of the boxes was eventually destined to be covered with three layers of the bubbles. Three meters of water would provide excellent radiation shielding as well as significant protection from meteoroids. They were taking this set of bubbles to a cube that already had four sides covered, leaving it with a top and bottom that were each now 27 by 27 meters counting the layer of bubbles already surrounding four sides of the cube. Of course, in space there wasn’t really a top and bottom, but to help people stay oriented in the big spaces inside the cubes, everyone followed the convention that the side facing the Earth was the “bottom.” This 27 by 27 meter set of bubbles they were taking up would cover the top of the cube as well as the one meter layer of bubbles that covered the sides, thus it would also be providing protection at the corners. The next trip would have another 27 by 27 meter set to cover the bottom of the cube and thus complete the first layer of radiation protection.

  A chime and a brief announcement warned the passengers of impending liftoff. Eldon reclined his seat, but noticed that the other guy stayed upright. Liftoff, when it came, was certainly anticlimactic. It felt like the pressure you might feel in a big building’s high-speed elevator. The heaviness did continue for longer, about a minute and a half, then it eased off.

  Noticing that the other man in the room with him had stopped looking at his HUD, Eldon said, “Well, that was nothing like the acceleration on my test flight.”

  The man looked his way and gave a little grin, “Yeah, on the test flight they give you a brief dose of 5G. Some people pass out at those accelerations. It doesn’t mean you can’t go up, but you certainly can’t expect to hold any mission-critical jobs.”

  Eldon said, “What was the acceleration we just had? It didn’t seem like much.”

  The guy glanced around momentarily as if thinking, “Most launches are under two G. When we’re taking up bubble wrap like today, they keep it to about 1.2 G. We only accelerated for about ninety seconds because we want to stay under 400 miles an hour until we’re out of the atmosphere. Saucers aren’t very aerodynamic, and the bubble wrap makes it even worse.” He looked up as if gauging the distance to space, “In ten to fifteen minutes it’ll be airless outside and we’ll start to accelerate again.”

  Eldon tilted his head curiously, “If accelerations are normally so low, why do they test us at 5G?”

  The man shrugged, “In an emergency we might have to do 5Gs. Or even more. Mission commanders are tested at higher accelerations than 5Gs.”

  “How much do they have to be able to tolerate?”

  The man shrugged again, “I don’t know. I’m just a rigger.” He leaned forward and put out his hand for a shake, “Rob Marshall.”

  Eyes widening in recognition, Eldon shook his hand. “I’m Eldon Weiss, the scientist you’re baby-sitting this trip.” He lifted an eyebrow, “And I know you’re far more than just a ‘rigger.’” In fact, Marshall was a civil engineer who’d specialized in the transportation of very large objects even back before thrusters became available. When the saucers had started lifting things, people in his specialty had suddenly been in great demand for their ability to apply science to the suspension techniques needed to lift massive structures into space and then safely move them around out there.

  Marshall said, “Hey, good to meet you. I’d been wondering when someone would be getting interested enough to try to figure out whether the nonmetallic asteroids had anything useful in them. What are you looking for out there?”

  “I don’t know!” Eldon said, “That’s the great thing. We really have very little idea what they’re made out of. Just some vague guesses based on meteor fragments that have crashed into the Earth here. Those all went through substantial heating passing through the atmosphere so most of the volatiles probably boiled off.” Realizing he was about to burble over with his own enthusiasm, Eldon paused, then finished, “I hope we’ll find some really interesting stuff.”

  Marshall leaned forward, “Shall we talk about how to select and retrieve your specimens?”

  “That’d be great!”

  Eldon was floating around in what he thought of as the lounge of the big saucer. He’d had a good talk with Rob Marshall during the acceleration and deceleration phases of the trip out to the habitat. Then Rob had pulled out a helmet and taken his leave to go out where they were shifting the bubble wrap from the saucer to the habitat. Curious about how it was done, Eldon had asked his AI for a view of the process. It had interlinked with the saucer’s AI and brought up video imaging from the saucer’s exterior cameras on the big screen in the lounge.

  Eldon had joined a number of other skin suited figures out there, all flitting about from place to place around the big sheet of bubble wrap, apparently through use of the thrusters on their safety harnesses. The first thing they’d done was pull in and attach some discs that looked like they were each about a meter and a half in diameter. They attached quite a few of them to the bubble wrap in multiple locations. Then Eldon’s team went around the bubble wrap, apparently detaching it from whatever bound it to the saucer. The small disc thrusters then began pulling the bubble wrap off of the saucer.

  It seemed to be moving slowly. Eldon asked his AI how much force a one and a half meter disc could produce and learned they could generate about 3500 pounds of thrust. Eldon was thinking they should be able to move the bubble wrap faster than they were until he remembered that the patch of bubble wrap massed 676 metric tons. You wouldn’t want to get it moving very fast, he thought, thinking with some alarm about what might happen if they lost control of it. If it ran into the habitat cube at any substantial speed, it could be quite the disaster.

  Shortly after the bubble wrap had been detached and moved away from the saucer, Rob reappeared in the lounge, carrying his helmet. “Taking a break until the bubble wrap’s nearly there?” Eldon said, thinking that Rob would go back out for the final deceleration and attachment of the bubbles to the cube.

  Rob said, “Oh, no, I don’t need to be there for that.” He shrugged, “Heck, I don’t really need to be there for any of it. It’s gotten to be pretty routine now that they’ve done it so many times. Once they’ve attached the thrust discs and released the bubble wrap from the saucer, the AI can control the discs well enough to move the bubble wrap into position. Heck, if people tried to control the discs, it’d probably cause lots of problems. Once it’s situated by the AI, the crew just needs to fasten it in place.”

  The impending acceleration alarm chimed and Eldon used the joyball on his safety harness to move himself over to one of the seats buckle his safety harness to the attachment points on it.

  Rob continued while Eldon buckled in, “I just went out there to kind of keep my hand in. I gave some pointers to a few of the guys, but I really think they know as much about it as I do nowadays.”

  Having gotten himself strapped in, Eldo
n looked up to see that despite the fact Rob had been much more lackadaisical about moving to a seat, he’d managed to get himself buckled in long before Eldon had. Of course, Rob had a lot more experience with maneuvering in weightless environments than Eldon did.

  A few seconds later, the triple chime of actual maneuvering sounded. There were some tugs from Eldon’s strapping. For a moment Eldon couldn’t interpret them, then as he saw stars pivoting across the screen of the outside, realized that the saucer was merely reorienting itself. A few moments later he felt pressure on his back that mounted until he thought they were back at one G. I’m on my way to the asteroid belt! he thought with some excitement.

  Eldon and Rob had started talking about asteroid prospecting again when several people walked in. Eldon looked at them curiously, since they were all going to be spending the next eight or nine days together. Tiona! He thought, seeing her in the group.

  She gave him a little wave and led the group over. “A lot of you guys have worked together before, but not all, so some introductions are in order.” She started introducing people around and Eldon quickly realized that it was mostly for his benefit as most of the others seemed to know each other. She talked briefly about the mission and how it would be a little different from the usual in order to allow Eldon to do his prospecting, then everybody broke up to go different directions.

  Tiona sat down next to him and said, “It looks like you’re doing pretty well so far?”

  Eldon nodded, “Thank goodness! I’d have been devastated to miss this. Weightlessness doesn’t seem to bother me. I did feel a little weird when the saucer reoriented itself, but it was really only until I figured out what was going on.”

  “It was good to see you already talking to Rob Marshall. Because he’s such a wizard at strapping the saucers to the asteroids, he’s gotten a lot more experience out there than anybody else.” She grinned at Eldon, “Even before you whined about it, Rob was already complaining that we needed to bring a scientist out here to look over some of the other rocks. I think he’s got some kind of mystical notion that we’re going to find something really exciting on the nonmetallic ‘roids.”