by Ben Bova
It was a week later that it really sank home in Johnny’s mind.
It had been a wild week. Army officers quizzing him, medical doctors trying to find some trace of the disease, news reporters and TV interviewers asking him a million questions, his mother and father both crying that he was all right and safe andcured —a wild week.
Johnny’s school friends hung around the house and watched from outside while the Army and news people swarmed in and out. He waved to them, and they waved back, smiling, friendly. They understood. The whole story was splashed all over the papers and TV, even the part about the disease. The kids understood why Johnny had been so much of a loner the past few months.
The President telephoned and invited Johnny and his parents to Washington. Dr. Gene Beldone went along too, in a private Air Force twin-engine jet.
As Johnny watched the New Mexico desert give way to the rugged peaks of the Rockies, something that the shining ones had said finally hit home to him:
You will live some eighty to one hundred years, just as the history of your times has shown us.
“How would they know about me from the history of these times?” Johnny whispered to himself as he stared out the thick window of the plane. “That must mean that my name will be famous enough to get into the history books, or tapes, or whatever they’ll be using.”
Thinking about that for a long time, as the plane crossed the Rockies and flew arrow-straight over the green farmlands of the midwest, Johnny remembered the other thing that the shining ones had told him:
Before your life ends, you will have visited a few of the stars nearest to your own world.
“When they said you,” Johnny whispered again, “I thought they meant us, the human race. But—maybe they really meantme ! Me! I’m going to be an interstellar astronaut!”
For the first time, Johnny realized that the excitement in his life hadn’t ended. It was just beginning.
THE SIGHTSEERS
While we are thinking about how best to defend the nation, it is good also to think about the condition of the nation we want to defend. “The Sightseers” is a rather dark vision of some of the disturbing trends that you can see in almost any of our largest cities.
Actually, this short-short story is the result of an embarrassment of riches.
Years ago, when the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference was actually held in Milford, Pennsylvania, I found myself in a quandary. It was a week before the conference started. To participate in the conference, you had to bring an unpublished piece of fiction and submit it to the workshop. I did not have any unpublished fiction on hand. Everything I had written, at that point in time, had been bought.
So I sat down and dashed off this short-short, based on a vague idea that was gestating in the back of my mind.
The idea is this: large cities and large stars exhibit the same kind of life cycle.
As massive stars burn up their energy fuels, they swell gigantically while their cores get hotter and denser and finally become the kind of matter that astronomers call “degenerate.” As large cities use up their energy sources (taxpaying citizens and corporations, who eventually leave the city), the city swells into urban sprawl while its core degenerates into ghettos.
For massive stars, the ultimate outcome of this evolutionary track is a catastrophic explosion. We have already seen serious riots in many of our large cities. Will a city-wrecking explosion occur one fine day?
As I recall that Milford workshop twenty-some years ago, most of the participants did not think much of this story. Except for Gordon Dickson, canny pal that he is. “This looks to me like the germ of an idea for a novel,” he suggested.
How right he was. The novel is called City of Darkness. It attracted a fair amount of attention in Hollywood after it was published, but no firm offers were made. A few years later, somebody produced a film called Escape from New York, which bothered me somewhat. It seemed to have certain elements from City of Darkness. But plagiarism laws do not protect ideas; if they did, Hollywood would have starved to death long ago. Still, the producers of that film may well have come on their ideas independently.
The film does have one element that “The Sightseers” and City of Darkness could only hint at: Adrienne Barbeau’s bosom. That is one of the great advantages of film over print.
My heart almost went into fibrillation when I saw the brown cloud off on the horizon that marked New York City. Dad smiled his wiser-than-thou smile as I pressed my nose against the plane’s window in an effort to see more. By the time we got out of the stack over LaGuardia Airport and actually landed, my neck hurt.
The city’s fantastic! People were crowding all over, selling things, buying, hurrying across the streets, gawking. And the noise, the smells, all those old gasoline-burning taxis rattling around and blasting horns. Not like Sylvan Dell, Michigan!
“It’s vacation time,” Dad told me as we shouldered our way through the crowds along Broadway. “It’s always crowded during vacation time.”
And the girls! They looked back at you, right straight at you, and smiled. They knew what it was all about, and they liked it! You could tell, just the way they looked back at you. I guess they really weren’t any prettier than the girls at home, but they dressed . . . wow!
“Dad, what’s a bedicab?”
He thought it over for a minute as one of them, long and low, with the back windows curtained, edged through traffic right in front of the curb where we were standing.
“You can probably figure it out for yourself,” he said uncomfortably. “They’re not very sanitary.”
Okay, I’m just a kid from the north woods. It took me a couple of minutes. In fact, it wasn’t until we crossed the street in front of one—stopped for a red light—and I saw the girl’s picture set up on the windshield that I realized what it was all about. Sure enough, there was a meter beside the driver.
But that’s just one of the things about the city. There were old movie houses where we saw real murder films. Blood and beatings and low-cut blondes. I think Dad watched me more than the screen. He claims he thinks I’m old enough to be treated like a man, but he acts awfully scared about it.
We had dinner in some really crummy place, down in a cellar under an old hotel. With live people taking our orders and bringing the food!
“It’s sanitary,” Dad said, laughing when I hesitated about digging into it. “It’s all been inspected and approved. They didn’t put their feet in it.”
Well, it didn’t hurt me. It was pretty good, I guess . . . too spicy, though.
We stayed three days altogether. I managed to meet a couple of girls from Maryland at the hotel where we stayed. They were okay, properly dressed and giggly and always whispering to each other. The New York girls were just out of my league, I guess. Dad was pretty careful about keeping me away from them . . . or them away from me. He made sure I was in the hotel room every night, right after dinner. There were plenty of really horrible old movies to watch on the closed-circuit TV; I stayed up past midnight each night. Once I was just drifting off to sleep when Dad came in and flopped on his bed with all his clothes on. By the time I woke up in the morning, though, he was in his pajamas and sound asleep.
Finally we had to go. We rented a sanitary car and decontaminated ourselves on the way out to the airport. I didn’t like the lung-cleansing machine. You had to work a tube down one of your nostrils.
“It’s just as important as brushing your teeth,” Dad said firmly.
If I didn’t do it for myself, he was going to do it for me.
“You wouldn’t want to bring billions of bacteria and viruses back home, would you?” he asked.
Our plane took off an hour and a half late. The holiday traffic was heavy.
“Dad, is New York open every year . . . just like it is now?”
He nodded. “Yes, all during the vacation months. A lot of the public health doctors think it’s very risky to keep a city open for more than two weeks out of the year, but the
tourist industry has fought to keep New York going all summer. They shut it down right after Labor Day.”
As the plane circled the brown cloud that humped over the city, I made up my mind that I’d come back again next summer. Alone, maybe. That’d be great!
My last glimpse of the city was the big sign painted across what used to be the Bronx:
NEW YORK IS A SUMMER FESTIVAL OF FUN!
THE SUPERSONIC ZEPPELIN
I worked for a number of years in the aerospace industry, most of that time at a high-powered research laboratory in Massachusetts. Our lab specialized in studying the physics of high-temperature gases. We were known world-wide as hot air specialists.
I saw firsthand how great ideas can be shot down for totally dumb reasons. And how dumb ideas can gain a momentum of their own and cost the taxpayers billions of dollars while they accomplish nothing.
“The Supersonic Zeppelin” is somewhere in-between those extremes. It’s a fully feasible piece of technology that will never get to fly. But it was fun writing the story and thinking about those fabulous days of yesteryear when we were going to the Moon and thinking great thoughts.
And pushing the envelope on hubris, while we were at it.
Author’s note: While this is a work of fiction, the concept of the Busemann biplane is real.
Let’s see now. How did it all begin?
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon—no, that’s not right; actually it started in the cafeteria of the Anson Aerospace plant in Phoenix.
Okay, then, how about:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold—well, yeah, but it was only a little after noon when Bob Wisdom plopped his loaded lunch tray on our table and sat down like a man disgusted with the universe. And anyway, engineers don’t moil for gold; they’re on salary.
I didn’t like the way they all looked down on me, but I certainly didn’t let it show. It wasn’t just that I was the newbie among them: I wasn’t even an engineer, just a recently-graduated MBA assigned to work with the Advanced Planning Team, aptly acronymed APT. As far as they were concerned I was either a useless appendage forced on them, or a snoop from management sent to provide info on which of them should get laid off.
Actually, my assignment was to get these geniuses to come up with a project that we could sell to somebody, anybody. Otherwise, we’d all be hit by the iron ball when the next wave of layoffs started, just before Christmas.
Six shopping weeks left, I knew.
“What’s with you Bob?” Ray Kurtz asked. “You look like you spent the morning sniffing around a manure pile.”
Wisdom was tall and lanky, with a round face that was normally cheerful, even in the face of Anson Aerospace’s coming wave of cutbacks and layoffs. Today he looked dark and pouchy-eyed.
“Last night I watched a TV documentary about the old SST.”
“The Concorde?” asked Kurtz. He wore a full bushy beard that made him look more like a dog-sled driver than a metallurgical engineer.
“Yeah. They just towed the last one out to the Smithsonian on a barge. A beautiful hunk of flying machine like that riding to its final resting place on a converted garbage scow.”
That’s engineers for you. Our careers were hanging by a hair and he’s upset over a piece of machinery.
“Beautiful, maybe,” said Tommy Rohr. “But it was never a practical commercial airliner. It could never fly efficiently enough to be economically viable.”
For an engineer, Rohr was unnervingly accurate in his economic analyses. He’d gotten out of the dot-com boom before it burst. Of the five of us at the lunch table, Tommy was the only one who wasn’t worried about losing his job—he had a much more immediate worry: his new trophy wife and her credit cards.
“It’s just a damned shame,” Wisdom grumbled. “The end of an era.”
Kurtz, our bushy-bearded metallurgist, shook his graying head. “The eco-nuts wouldn’t let it fly supersonic over populated areas. That ruined its chances of being practical.”
“The trouble is,” Wisdom muttered as he unwrapped a soggy sandwich, “you can build a supersonic aircraft that doesn’t produce a sonic boom.”
“No sonic boom?” I asked. Like I said, I was the newcomer to the APT group.
Bob Wisdom smiled like a sphinx.
“What’s the catch?” asked Richard Grand in his slightly Anglified accent. He’d been born in the Bronx, but he’d won a Rhodes scholarship and came back trying to talk like Sir Stafford Cripps.
The cafeteria was only half filled, but there was still a fair amount of clattering and yammering going on all around us. Outside the picture window I could see it was raining cats and elephants, a real monsoon downpour. Something to do with global warming, I’d been told.
“Catch?” Bob echoed, trying to look hurt. “Why should there be a catch?”
“Because if someone could build a supersonic aircraft that didn’t shatter one’s eardrums with its sonic boom, old boy, obviously someone could have done it long before this.”
“We could do it,” Bob said pleasantly. Then he bit it into his sandwich.
“Why aren’t we, then?” Kurtz asked, his brows knitting.
Bob shrugged elaborately as he chewed on his ham and five-grain bread.
Rohr waggled a finger at him. “What do you know that we don’t? Or is this a gag?”
Bob swallowed and replied, “It’s just simple aerodynamics.”
“What’s the go of it?” Grand asked. He got that phrase from reading a biography of James Clerk Maxwell.
“Well,” Bob said, putting down the limp remains of the sandwich, “there’s a type of wing that a German aerodynamicist named Adolph Busemann invented back in the nineteen-twenties. It’s a sort of biplane configuration, actually. The shock waves that cause a sonic boom are cancelled out between the two wings.”
“No sonic boom?”
“No sonic boom. Instead of flat wings, like normal, you need to wrap the wings around the fuselage, make a ringwing.”
“What’s a ringwing?” innocent li’l me asked.
Bob pulled a felt-tip pen from his shirt pocket and began sketching on his paper placemat.
“Here’s the fuselage of the plane.” He drew a narrow cigar shape. “Now we wrap the wing around it, like a sleeve. See?” He drew what looked to me like a tube wrapped around the cigar. “Actually it’s two wings, one inside the other, and all the shock waves that cause the sonic boom get cancelled out. No sonic boom.”
The rest of us looked at Bob, then down at the sketch, then up at Bob again. Rohr looked wary, like he was waiting for the punch line. Kurtz looked like a puzzled Karl Marx.
“I don’t know that much about aerodynamics,” Rohr said slowly, “but this is a Busemann biplane you’re talking about, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“Uh-huh. And isn’t it true that a Busemann biplane’s wings produce no lift?”
“That’s right,” Bob admitted, breaking into a grin.
“No lift?” Kurtz snapped.
“Zero lift.”
“Then how the hell do you get it off the ground?”
“It won’t fly, Orville,” Bob Wisdom said, his grin widening. “That’s why nobody’s built one.”
The rest of us groaned while Bob laughed at us. An engineer’s joke, in the face of impending doom. We’d been had.
Until, that is, I blurted out, “So why don’t you fill it with helium?”
The guys spent the next few days laughing at me and the idea of a supersonic zeppelin. I have to admit, at that stage of the game I thought it was kind of silly, too. But yet . . .
Richard Grand could be pompous, but he wasn’t stupid. Before the week was out he just happened to pass by my phonebooth-sized cubicle and dropped in for a little chat, like the lord of the manor being gracious to a stable hand.
“That was rather clever of you, that supersonic zeppelin quip,” he said as he ensconced himsel
f in a teeny wheeled chair he had to roll in from an empty cubicle.
“Thanks,” I noncommittalled, wondering why a senior engineer would give a compliment to a junior MBA.
“It might even be feasible,” Grand mused. “Technically, that is.”
I could see in his eyes the specter of Christmas-yet-to-come and the layoffs that were coming with it. If a senior guy like Grand was worried, I thought, I ought to be scared purple. Could I use the SSZ idea to move up Anson Aerospace’s hierarchical ladder? The guys at the bottom were the first ones scheduled for layoffs, I knew. I badly needed some altitude, and even though it sounded kind of wild, the supersonic zeppelin was the only foothold I had to get up off the floor.
“Still,” Grand went on, “it isn’t likely that management would go for the concept. Pity, isn’t it?”
I nodded agreement while my mind raced. If I could get management to take the SSZ seriously, I might save my job. Maybe even get a promotion. But I needed an engineer to propose the concept to management. Those suits upstairs wouldn’t listen to a newly-minted MBA; most of them were former engineers themselves who’d climbed a notch or two up the organization.
Grand sat there in that squeaky little chair and philosophized about the plight of the aerospace industry in general and the bleak prospects for Anson Aerospace in particular.
“Not the best of times to approach management with a bold, innovative concept,” he concluded.
Omigod, I thought. He’s talked himself out of it! He was starting to get up and leave my cubicle.
“You know,” I said, literally grabbing his sleeve, “Winston Churchill backed a lot of bold, innovative ideas, didn’t he? Like, he pushed the development of tanks in World War I, even though he was in the navy, not the army.”
Grand gave me a strange look.
“And radar, in World War II,” I added.
“And the atomic bomb,” Grand replied. “Very few people realize it was Sir Winston who started the atomic bomb work, long before the Yanks got into it.”