by Dean Ing
Vangie cocked her head toward the wall clock. “Two minutes past expected,” she said, “unless he’s ducked outside with that cowboy. ”
“That cowboy,” said Schultheis, “happens to be one of the best LTA men in the business, Vangie.” He headed for Wes’s inner office, secretly pleased with the woman’s assessment.
“A cowboy riding a lighter-than-air craft is still a cowboy,” Vangie said darkly.
Suddenly David Kaplan felt a surge of friendliness for a man he had never met. “You’re a hopeless elitist, Vangie,” he said with a mock-serious wag of his finger, and followed Tom Schultheis to the next room.
“. . . ran this bitchin’ Lola for half the season,” said a gravelly voice Kaplan did not recognize, nor could he see its source at first. “I didn’t know whatthehell I was doing in Formula cars, of course; I was just a kid. But I was third in points before the Corps accepted me. I had a choice of wheels or wings, and I chose wings.”
The speaker stopped as Wes glanced past the visitor’s big leather chair and stood up, waving toward the latecomers. “Glenn Rogan, meet our top stress man, Dr. David Kaplan. I believe you know Dr. Schultheis.”
Glenn Rogan came up from the big chair twisting with the lazy grace of an otter. Kaplan took his hand and understood instantly, for the first time, what charisma was all about. Rogan was an inch or two taller than Tom Schultheis, with a welterweight’s nose and curly blond hair cut shorter than his sideburns. He was in his midthirties, roughly Kaplan’s age, with permanent squint lines and eyes like splinters of green glass. His grip was very gentle, but what Kaplan felt like an electric surge was the humming intensity of the man.
Rogan wore scuffed western boots, tan gabardine slacks with an ornate belt buckle and, much too casual for most hiring interviews, a polo shirt that showed a solid muscular belly, his throat and forearms lined by sinew. Rogan was a dynamo, his hidden rotor spinning in such perfect balance that it seemed not to be spinning at all. But brush against his terminals and zzzzap. The man was rigged for silent running. Dave Kaplan, smiling through his own uneasiness, said what he usually said to put applicants at ease, “I hear good things about you.”
Rogan’s response was unexpected; a faint sidelong jerk of his head toward Tom Schultheis with a fainter wry lifting at the comers of his mouth. To Kaplan he said, with a touch of a southwest twang, “Present company excepted?”
Wes caught it. “Tom seems to think you can do no wrong, Mr. Rogan. It’s only fair to warn you that if Tom thinks a bottle’s half full, David will argue that it’s half empty, and vice versa.” Behind the heartiness was a hint that Wes could do without the constant friendly bickering of his top people. “Tell you what; let’s sneak out to the development hangar. Delta One’s bulkheads are already in place.” He saw silent agreement; turned and moved a hand toward the rosewood panel behind his recliner chair.
The panel slid back silently. Perhaps Rogan had expected an exit door, for he laughed to see the nicely stocked bar. Wes chose a manhattan glass, helped himself to ice and single-malt scotch, and waved a hand toward the layout. “Help yourselves.”
But, “Jesus, Wes,” Kaplan chuckled, shaking his head. Schultheis declined as well, his face carefully noncommittal as he glanced at Rogan. “How about you?”
Rogan remained perfectly still for a moment. Then he gave a negative headshake. “Thanks, but I’ll most likely be sittin’ in a gondola sometime this afternoon. Even if it’s only a mock-up. ” His glance toward Schultheis said that he had sidestepped a trap. Wes caught that, too, and revised his assumption about the two. They might share mutual respect, but not friendship.
Draining his glass, Wes ushered the others through a sliding rear door and claimed the driver’s seat of the topless four-place Electrabout just outside. “You can take a look at our production lines another time,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the massive concrete-block complex to their left. Rogan, sitting beside him, nodded agreement as Wes continued over the hum of the squat utility vehicle with its massive battery packs.
Wes drove slowly through patches of sunlight on a bright Hayward afternoon past production buildings which he owned lock, stock, and beryllium. “Local rigs come off Line Two,” Wes indicated a pair of gleaming trucks on fat wheels, with only modest streamlining, and sporting enormous expanses of glass. “Ugly devils, but they don’t have to be aerodynamic and they’re dead reliable.”
Glenn Rogan turned his head as he passed the rigs, thinking that they looked more like oversized pickup trucks than big cargo lifters. Peel might call them ugly, but the slope of their noses swept attractively down to small horizontal air scoops. A Peel Shorthauler boasted low-profile tires so wide that the full-enclosure fenders bulged, front and rear, like the haunches of some great animal poised to leap. Those through-flow radiators served a small engine, allowing the sloping nose and the excellent visibility it afforded in heavy traffic. Studying the tires, Rogan said, “Never noticed gumballs like that on a freight hauler, Mr. Peel.”
“New wrinkle. A bit large for a Formula Ford,” Wes laughed, “but who needs big-hauler treads at low speeds? With tires that wide you can bring the height down, and the rubber compound is soft for traction. Very efficient.”
“Cog-effect tires,” Rogan said. “It’s sure a departure from the big interstate rigs.”
“It’s supposed to be,” said Wes darkly, and sent a lazy one-handed wave toward the truck emerging from Line Two. To Rogan he joked, “When you own the damn factory, you outrank its trucks.”
The scene ahead and to their left seemed innocent enough at first glance, as a Peel rig rolled slowly into sunshine from a short downramp at the building’s mouth.
Paul Ramirez, group leader for the Line Two rollout crew, stood just inside the shadowed opening and trembled with a mixture of anticipation and self-loathing. He’d worked it out in his head for days, knowing you had to defeat several safety factors before you could send a Peel rig gliding across a downslope to ram the building opposite. The brake rider had a real errand, the emergency cable had a real flaw - and Paul Ramirez had a wife and three kids. You had to think of your family first, and old Tony Ciano knew it. You make a bad start as a wild young kid, and you let somebody like Ciano bail you out of a two-to-five stint in the slammer, knowing he could have you put back anytime he liked, and then you light out for a new start three thousand miles away hoping you’ll be forgotten.
Fat chance. Well, this was the one big favor he owed Ciano and maybe he wouldn’t lose his job over it, but maybe he would quit anyway. It would be a reproach to him every time he cashed a paycheck with John Wesley Peel’s signature on it, a man Paul Ramirez didn’t know very well but the only bigwig he’d ever met who bent over backward to be fair. Ramirez glanced outside, judging the path of the short-haul rig, and froze.
In all his midnight sweats of considering ways and means to sabotage a truck, he had never considered that the rig might strike anything but a solid wall. And Holy Mother of God, that Electrabout humming across the concrete was in the path, and you couldn’t mistake the driver’s shoulders or the thatch of cotton-blond hair. Paul Ramirez reached a conclusion attained by the valiant few: two-to-five of hard time beat thirty of remorse.
Dave Kaplan saw a swarthy fellow in white burst from the opening of Line Two, chasing the big rig across the slight downward slope of pavement and shouting, a shop coat flapping between his short legs as he fell and scrambled to his feet again. Kaplan gasped, “Wes, nobody’s in the cab!”
“Everybody out,” Wes said abruptly, still cruising toward the driverless rig at an angle to its progress. ‘ ‘Now!’ ’ He waved his free arm as if to fling Kaplan and Schultheis from the rear seats.
The Electrabout still moved at a trotting pace, slow enough for young men to vault over its open sides. The towering rig ahead, shining freshly with bright paintwork, was slowly picking up speed down the incline, and Wes accelerated sharply as Kaplan and Schultheis hit the pavement running. Wes looked at Rogan. “
You had your chance,” he said, aiming for an intercept point between the bulky rig and the comer of a building on their right.
If Rogan had forgotten how quickly an electric vehicle could surge forward, he was forcibly reminded. He gripped the windshield post hard and stood half-upright. “Want me to climb to the cab?”
“You won’t have time,” Wes warned. “These electrics are heavier than you think.”
Suddenly Rogan realized that Wes Peel was right, and that the Electrabout’s mass was of interest only if Wes could position it in front of the driverless rig. Within fifteen seconds, that new rig would plow into an exterior wall unless the Elec-trabout’s rump was snug against its front bumper, braking hard. Rogan estimated the time, the distance, and made his decision plain. “You’re fuckin’ crazy, man; I’m punchin’ out!” With that, Rogan snatched up his seat cushion and vaulted to the rear seats, then leaped hard from the rear of the vehicle, holding the cushion against the back of his head as his boots struck the pavement.
Wes judged his arc carefully, sweeping into a path parallel with the rig, the Electrabout now at its top speed of some forty miles an hour as he passed the rig’s front wheels. He had time to think, If one of those gumball tires touches my bumper, it’ll climb right in here with me, and then he was edging into position, feathering the accelerator pedal, and then his neck vertebrae popped with the slam of the rig’s front bumper, harder than he’d expected, maybe hard enough to collapse the Electrabout’s chassis, and another slam as he began braking. A high prefabricated wall loomed less than fifty yards ahead, some vagary of pavement surface making the rig veer toward the right, and now it was time to steer for compensation, except that you can’t steer worth a damn when your tires are locked up and smoking like a chimney and squalling their own panic with six tons of Shorthauler pushing you. But which way to jump, and could he make it with that damned gimpy hip?
He didn’t have to; the rig began to turn more sharply, and now Wes was sliding past the comer of the building. When his two-piece juggernaut sighed to a stop, Wes forced his shaky limbs into action again, wheeling back on tires no longer perfectly round to find Glenn Rogan. By now several men had rushed to the fallen pilot. Wes could see his design and stress men kneeling beside Rogan, who lay on his back stretched out on the pavement, his head still on that seat cushion, and as he braked Wes could see the man’s chest heaving.
With laughter? “I don’t think he’s hurt,” said Kaplan as Wes stepped from his little vehicle.
Rogan paused, held his breath until his eyes met those of
Wes Peel, and then he was guffawing again as he checked his elbows, one at a time. Subsiding at last, Rogan sat up and hugged his knees. “This was a gag; right? You set me up, and I bought it, punched out at zero altitude and fifty feet a second.” He laughed again as he stood up, glancing sheepishly at the men around him, wiping the scraped skin at one elbow. “Got me a little road rash here, but . . .” He looked at the silent Wes again, then at the still-smoking wheel assemblies of the Electrabout. With a sudden furrow across his brow, squinting toward the distant driverless rig, “Whoa, you weren’t kidding. Those flat spots are for real. You really got ’er stopped that way?”
Kaplan, still dry-mouthed, “You didn’t see it?”
Rogan: “I was busy. Cussin’, and laughin’. Mr. Peel, why’d you risk getting squashed for a truck that was gonna stop anyhow?’ ’
Wes: “Because that wall wasn’t designed to stop a truck, and right on the other side of it are thirty people doing assembly work. You want a nurse to check that arm?”
“Nah, just a scrape,” said Rogan, brushing himself off. Pause. Then, “You’re still nuts, you know that?”
Wes, deadpan: “Part of my mystique.”
Rogan seemed on the edge of helpless laughter again as he retrieved the tattered seat cushion, tossed it into the Electrabout, and asked, “Who was it said, ‘mystique equals bullshit,’ Mr. Peel?’ ’
“One of my people, most likely, when my back was turned,” said Wes, and turned to the swarthy man in the shop coat. “Ramirez, you’re in charge of that rollout crew?”
After two tries, the man managed a hoarse, “Yessir. My fault, Mr. Peel.”
“I don’t want to know whose fault it really was, but he has the choice of paying for repairs or a week off without pay.” Wes knew that union rules permitted even stiffer penalties, and looked around at the abashed crew. “Fair enough?”
Dean lng
Paul Ramirez nodded. Wes glanced at the Electrabout with its badly flat-spotted tires, then handed its key to the shaken Ramirez. “So we walk,” he shrugged to his three companions.
Presently they passed the last of the concrete structures, where freight trailers were being fitted with retractable wheels. “Line Three,” said Wes. “Equipment for intermodal hauling. An old idea; we just made it work. Speeds up the changeover at railroad terminals.”
Quickly, from Rogan: “How about rail sidings?”
Tom Schultheis, just as quickly: “That’s where you LTA jockeys come in. If Cyclone can lift twenty tons of cut timber off a mountainside with those rotating blimps, we think a really big lifter could jerk a loaded cargo trailer straight from a smalltown siding to a truck parked a mile away.”
“I hear somebody already jerked some off-road equipment from a flatcar with a Cyclone LTA,” Rogan said cagily.
“Somebody named Rogan,” Schultheis replied, and smiled at Rogan’s surprise. “Wes told me how much Cyclone paid the rail yard expediter to look the other way.”
“A Kelley Magnum tree-harvester, I believe,” Wes said, “off a siding near Tillamook, at three in the morning.” Rogan’s laugh was an octave higher than his voice. “Well, I-be-damn; what don’t you guys know?”
“We don’t know if it’ll work with really big lifters,” said Wes. “But we intend to find out.” He pointed toward the hangar, a vast white half-cylinder of fabric two hundred yards long, anchored to concrete and kept more or less rigid by air blowers. “The answer may be in there,” said Wes, pointing. “The more cargo we lift off the interstate highways, the better for us all.”
As he punched die six-digit door combination, Wes saw the brief silent glance between Kaplan and Schultheis. Think I’m a monomaniac, do you? Well, maybe I am. The door sighed open. The slightly elevated pressure in the hangar kept dust
from filtering in, and they blinked against the brief rush of cool air.
Wes watched Die play of emotions across the tanned features of Glenn Rogan with pride. The pilot stood, lips pursed in a silent whistle, looking up into the softly lit cavern of white fabric. “Man, oh man, oh man,” he said, fists on his hips, letting his imagination complete the shape that would soon be a dirigible with the shape of a broad arrowhead: Delta One.
Light filtered through the fabric walls to reveal a half-dozen girders that hung in place like rigid wisps of gleaming black spiderweb. Rogan did not fully realize its enormous size until he noticed the tiny creature hanging in a safety harness, where one bulkhead joined to a lower straight keel beam. The beams seemed as insubstantial as thinly drawn lines on paper. The creature in the safety harness might have been an ant, but it was a man wiring strain gauges to a bonded joint. Given the man for scale, he saw that the hangar roof soared a dizzying twenty stories above the floor. Where the hangar roof arched downward on either side, it was “only” a hundred feet high - none too tall for the girders that formed the great ship’s vertical stabilizers. Rogan’s practiced eye followed the suspension lines to the ceiling high overhead. “You really can use this hangar as a support structure,” he said, marveling. “And you’ve got bam swallows up there.”
The other men studied the heights. “You can see a bird that far away, in this light?” Kaplan asked.
Rogan merely shrugged. Schultheis raised one eyebrow and nodded at the stress man. “It says twenty-ten vision on his application,” Schultheis remarked.
Rogan walked forward then, shaking his head in awe, and lau
ghed aloud as he stopped, the echoes muted in this enormous space. “Reminds me of the Jesus Christ plane,” he grinned.
Wes: “Do we get an explanation?”
Rogan: “Sure. When the Hughes flying boat was new, engineers used to walk into the hangar and stop dead. The first thing half of ’em said was “Jee-zuss, Kee-rar!” He stared upward again. “And you could stack a pair of those inside this bird of yours. What are the specs?”
“Three million cubic feet of helium,” Wes replied. “Less than it might be because she’s fairly flat; a lifting body with wingtip rudders for better control at high speeds.”
“High?” Rogan smiled. “For us helium-heads, anything over highway speed is high.”
Tom Schultheis’s cough was rich with meaning, but Wes waved a negligent hand. “We’ll double that,” he said vaguely and added a tantalizing hint, “even if you’re a freeway bandit.
1 can’t give you her gross or cargo capacity yet, but she’ll carry more San Joaquin Valley lettuce across this country than any highway triple-trailer rig in one-fourth the time.”
“Dear ol’ goddy,” said the pilot, rocking on the sloped heels of his boots, letting his eyes draw more imaginary lines. “A sure ’nough, four hundred foot, double-delta. Hell, you could play tennis in the wings!”
“Not with the aft ballonets out there,” Wes replied. “What?!” Frowning, Rogan looked to the design chief for verification. Tom nodded. Rogan put his arms out, palms flat, and rocked from side to side gently. “Won’t that make this brute pretty sensitive to balance?”
“We want her sensitive,” said Tom. “There’s more I can’t tell you yet. Just ask yourself how you’d like a computer-fed, three-point balance. ”
Rogan thought about that. “You’d have to fill and deflate ballonets in one hell of a hurry.”