by Dean Ing
At the moment Boff was talking by radio link with Tom Schultheis, who had arrived before dawn with several others at this remote, seldom-visited location Wes had dubbed ‘ ‘Delta Base.” “Rajah, we copy,” Boff replied smoothly to something Tom had said, and ducked to stare through the van’s front window. “We should have you in sight shortly.” Pause. “Bet you’re only saying that because I have crullers and five gallons of coffee in here, Delta Base. Out.” He leaned forward, near Wes’s shoulder. “Tom says your man Rogan worked his deadly charm on the train crew at sparrowfart this morning. Crawled all over that flatcar, he did, and then rode with them on a dry run. Upset because they wouldn’t let him drive the hog. Lord knows what he meant.”
“Old-time jargon: a hog is a locomotive,” Wes called over his shoulder. “My guess is, he’s thinking about the maglev runs next month.” One of Wes’s best moves had been to lure
Boff Allington away from Microverse Corporation in Sunnyvale, on Tom Schultheis’s advice. The son of a London electrical contractor, Allington managed to get himself sent down from Cambridge, where many of England’s scientific “boffins” gathered, without a degree. His only degree, Allington would cheerfully admit, was BDIFBY: Been Doing It For Bloody Years. Programmer, circuit designer, electronic troubleshooter, Boff Allington ran PTA’s computer and electronics division. In common with all of Wes’s top people, he liked to deal directly with the hardware and would rather take personal charge in a crucial test than delegate it to others.
Jouncing down a road that led through a waist-high sea of grass undulating in soft summery breezes that smelled of mud and fish, they crossed miles of the Sacramento River lowlands before Alma spotted something that shone silvery bright on the horizon. “Oh, I can see it from here,” she breathed, her eyes round and bright. “You call this a secret test, Wes?” “Secret enough,” he answered. “It takes a mile or so to get a diesel loco up to speed, and we had to lease an old rail spur someplace. Rogan has cruised up here at three a.m. several times on trial runs with just his copilot. Anyway, not many people out here in the flats, Alma.”
“It occurs to me,” Boff Allington drawled, “that you may give a new meaning to ‘delta country.’ ” By now they were near enough to see details in the distance. The train was nowhere in sight, but the huge spade shape of a delta dirigible loomed above several vehicles, seemingly almost touching the grassy fields though its control cabin floor was fully twenty yards above the ground. As they watched, the leviathan slowly pivoted, one stubby wing dipping and then coming horizontal again, nosing around as the breeze changed direction. Allington, at his console in the van, punched a query into the keyboard and read the display. “Rogan and Christopher aren’t doing it with the engines, so the brute is weathercocking on her own. Very nice, Wesley.”
Wes continued at a pace that reminded his passengers of off-road racing. As they slowed and drew near, the van passed through the shadow of Delta One. It took twelve seconds by Alma’s reckoning to traverse that shadow at thirty miles an hour.
Alma spoke over her shoulder. “Nice? More of your Brit understatement, Boff. Is the Matterhorn nice? Is the Grand Canyon nice?” She felt very small, letting her eyes rove across a vehicle literally acres in extent, that moved almost imperceptibly like some vast live animal floating in a sea of air. It was two hundred thousand pounds of Alumalith and high-tensile filament looming almost overhead. It was three million cubic feet of helium, and it was a dream come true for Wes Peel. Its propellers, idling inside circular shrouds, seemed tiny though they stood as high as three Kaplans, and the smoothly contoured cabin under its chin seemed no larger than a pimple. Briefly, Alma felt a chill shake her shoulders. This enormous airship was many things, but it was not “nice.” Then, “There’s Tom,” she cried.
Alma, the eldest of two children by Wolf Schultheis and his Tennessee wife, still greeted Tom as they had as children: a full embrace, a firm kiss on the lips. As they helped themselves to coffee and doughnuts, they could hear the angry muted soprano buzzing of the engines buried in Delta One’s hull, revving up in brief bursts. Two of the prop shrouds stood on gimbals, widely spaced on the craft’s trailing lip. The other two, retractable for efficient cruising, lay exposed flanking the leviathan’s hull ahead of its stub wings.
Dave Kaplan grinned around a mouthful of glazed jelly-center and glanced up. “Don’t worry, his props are feathered,” he said to Alma. “Rogan’s just impatient.”
She could see the featureless gleam of a helmet visor through a side window of the cabin high above. “Who’s in the cabin?” “Just Rogan,” said Kaplan. “The copilot’s manning the cargo bay.”
Judging from the angle of that visor, Alma had a sudden intuitive sensation of eye contact with the pilot. “With all this high tech,” she murmured, “we should have some way of getting a doughnut up there.”
“Not before a test,” said her brother, who was listening. “Rogan claims they’ll never get him on an operating table with a full stomach.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, and quit chewing. Not until this moment had she truly considered that a test like this might end with mangled human bodies. “But what could happen? Helium doesn’t bum.”
“Fuel gas does,” Wes replied. “And there’s a ton of it up there. Your crafty brother here decided to make the air bal-lonets double-walled. Some fuel gas mixtures are the same weight as air, and they bum cheap and clean, so why not start out with ballonets full of fuel gas? It lets you lift that much more cargo, and you can refill the cavity with air any time you like.”
No one was a more sincere booster of Tom Schultheis than Alma. “Sneaky Tom! Maybe I could do some PR on the low-pollution angle,” she said, reaching for the memocomp in her bag.
“No no no,” said Wes and Tom together. Tom added a bit sheepishly, “Think of it as a trade secret. You want the truth, Alma, it was Dad’s idea.”
“Well, hell, so were you,” Kaplan joked.
“Don’t start, you two,” said Wes, raising one hand like a traffic cop. “Tom, I’ve lost count of the ideas you say your father gave you. Do I ever get to meet the man?”
‘ ‘He’s coming out from Tullahoma soon to stay a few weeks,” Alma began with delight, and stopped. The glance that passed between her brother and Dave Kaplan was a shared “ohh, shit,” but Alma could not imagine why.
“If we get through our test programs without a major foul-up, I intend to throw a wowser of a party,” Wes announced. “Promise you’ll bring him?”
“No problem. With all the goofy ideas you two have in common, he’ll talk your arm off,” Alma said, meeting her brother’s warning glance with a smile. Without room for an ounce of guile in a head stuffed with ideas, Wolf Schultheis could spend an entire party sharing the technology that had occupied his life. Wes had been known to do the same. Alma had not the slightest idea what harm could come from such a meeting.
Boff Allington, walking about with his headset still in place, was speaking softly to an unseen presence. “Oh, keep your rompers on, Rogan. . . . No, she’s Tom’s sister; nice girl, not to be chatted up by your type. . . . And the same to you, thank-you-very-much,” he chanted, laughing.
Tossing his coffee into the grass, Wes donned thin leather gloves. “We’re wasting time,” he said abruptly. “Boff, tell Christopher to drop me a sling; I’m going up.”
Allington’s jaw dropped. “Inside? During the coupling trials?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Wes replied, gazing upward, feeling the hair rise on his arms and grinning with anticipation.
He waited while Allington used his headset. The first response was a growling chuff from Delta One which Wes recognized instantly. It issued from a slow movement of the big pneumatic cargo struts, and unmistakably became a mammoth sigh. Got-damri Rogan can make it talk, Wes decided, watching the sling descend. He still wondered why a man who had tested hypersonic jets would enjoy herding a hundred tons of delta dirigible around.
Wes slid into the sling�
��s seat, buckled in, and jerked a “thumbs up” at the helmeted man who peered from the hatch. Acceleration sucked his innards downward as the sling winch reeled him up, and in moments he stood on the abrasive floor covering of Delta One’s cabin. He patted the shoulder of Jim Christopher, a man of his own size and coloring, as he started forward. “I can’t resist this, Chris,” he said.
“It’s your bird,” Christopher answered from his cargo-master’s bubble near the entry. “Spare helmets velcroed in the seats.”
Wes felt the passageway flow rise and fall in a gentle rhythm, and sought handrails as he moved forward toward the cabin. Rogan did not turn, but pointed at the copilot’s seat at his right. Wes, who had not flown an aircraft for over a year, felt the same surge of pleasure he had known the first time he’d stepped into that cabin. Unlike the cramped spaces in most aircraft, Delta One’s center aisle lay broad as a man was tall, and every seat had room to swing a cat. Hell, it doesn’t even smell like an aircraft, he thought. No stink of jet fuel or scorched rubber, only a faint pleasant musk of plastic. He tried the helmet, found it only a little tight, and arranged his headset after snugging his body harness in place. Rogan glanced his way. “Let’s do it,” said Wes, and Rogan reached for the controls at his right.
Somewhere inside the great airship, a deep hollow whooom of outrushing air made way for abrupt helium expansion - a trick possible only with turbine compressors and superstrength plastic films. Delta One would have awed the Zeppelin designers of a half-century before. The pioneers of LTA flight had used stomachs of cattle to line their gas cells; spruce and duralumin for their airship frames. Starting afresh with the advances of sixty years, Wes’s team had found startling new tricks. As a caterpillar spins a cocoon, they had spun a thin-wall pressure container of ten-foot diameter with superfilament and used it as a rigid bulkhead. With their lightweight compressors, helium could be recompressed within seconds and stored rather than valved overboard in emergency.
The tall grass dropped away below Wes, whose windshield sloped inward toward his feet, and he felt the great craft wheel away with all its sopranos in full voice. He blinked away the misting of pride in his eyes and coughed to free the glorious tightness in his throat.
Wes listened to the cross talk as, far below now, drivers lined their vehicles up a good two hundred yards from the arrow-straight tracks, Allington transmitting from inside the van while the others readied video monitors. Wes punched an alternate channel and heard Allington respond. “Boff, give Alma a remote headset here on Echo channel. She doesn’t know where to point her Nikon.”
‘ ‘Rajah, ’ ’ was the reply. Delta One was completing her long sweep, lurking low like some enormous predator, scarcely moving now, parallel to the diesel loco.
The voice of Alma Schultheis, high and excited, entered Wes’s helmet. “Wesley? Thanks for the play-by-play. Can’t I get closer to the action?”
“Sure you can,” Wes said laconically. “You ever see a hundred thousand pounds of cargo get bunted off a flatcar at sixty miles an hour? If it gets loose, it can go a lo-o-ong way before it runs out of inertia, ’ ’ he added, speaking softly. Beside him, Rogan was talking with the locomotive engineer. Wes went on, “Okay, the diesel’s on its way.”
Peering past Rogan’s shoulder, Wes saw a plume of diesel smoke far to their left, the headset voices falling silent as they monitored the two big cargo vehicles on a glancing collision approach.
After her first howling surge, Delta One fell almost quiet, pacing tiie loco with ease, and by some freak of acoustics Wes heard the faint throb and whine of a railway diesel as Delta One swept in from the right to an almost parallel course very near the loco. The size of the behemoths made their speed deceptive, and in a minute or so the diesel loco was nearly abreast of them at sixty miles an hour, pulling three cars: boxcar, flatbed, boxcar. And now a great silvery beast, longer than the train, sidled directly over the track at matched velocities.
Allington, reading the Van’s meters: “Zero delta vee and holding! Zero target azimuth.” Now the howling coloraturas of the huge craft penetrated the diesel’s drone, and on the console video monitor Wes watched four dull gray airfoiled struts swing down to flank the flatcar. The flatcar load, an oblong steel hopper containing many tons of sand, jittered slightly with the multiple vibrations of an old track and old rolling stock. Wes saw bright reflective spots, small laser alignment devices, lance from the ends of the struts. The struts moved like live things, perhaps the grasping arms of some huge preying mantis, and then slid down toward sockets near the base of the flatcar’s load.
From the van: “Two locks; four!”
Jim Christopher’s dry, “Four locks,” verified it.
A very un-British whoop, then, “You have a cargo, Delta One. Disengage and try the downwind leg.”
Wes remained silent, watching the monitor as the metal struts loosened, one a heartbeat slower than the others. He heard a grunted curse, probably from Christopher who was manipulating the struts, and then the last strut was free, the great delta rising in what Wes feared might be the start of a victory roll.
But Rogan was tending to business. With her blunt nose angled sharply upward, Delta One veered away in a maneuver that seemed in dreamlike slow motion. But at ninety feet per second, a craft of this size only seemed to move slowly. Below, so near that diesel smoke belched under his feet, Wes saw a man leaning out of the loco against the wind, watching Delta One wheel with the grace of a streamlined silver cloud.
Then the diesel began to brake as it dwindled down the track, Rogan mooching his huge craft off to loiter over a field, and Wes remembered to breathe again. He said into his mike, “Get your shots, Alma?”
“I think so. The boys are getting whiplash, pounding each other’s backs.”
“Premature. That’s the easy part,” he said, and resumed watching as Allington began talking Rogan in for a downwind run. Again the parallel course, the inexorable sidelong sweep of dirigible to train, the mantis-claw extensions. Wes could hear Alma cooing sweet nothings as she used the rest of her film roll, for the delta held position longer before locking onto the cargo and was far beyond Alma before disengaging to soar away.
They called a temporary halt as Wes conferred with his boffins on Alpha channel. Fifteen minutes later, Wes accepted Kaplan’s decision: One strut lock was sticking slightly, but the hardware was new; it should operate more freely with more trials. “All the same, we should machine wider tolerances back at the plant,” Wes said, and gave Allington free rein to continue.
Rogan swung Delta One back to loiter parallel to the loco and, moments later, the diesel plume signaled another run. With that wondrous surge and pounce that kept Wes grinning, Rogan again swung his silvery monster into position above the train with perfectly matched velocities. This time the struts paralleled downward quickly, finding sockets immediately.
“Zero-zero and four locks,” Allington called out.
Wes seemed unaware that he was chanting, “Take it up, take it up, Lord,” until he remembered to switch to Echo channel. “This is one picture you want to get,” he murmured in his headset, softly to avoid splitting Rogan’s concentration.
Allington again: “You have a cargo, Delta One. Up cargo, up ship!”
Rogan’s hands moved swiftly as he talked to his cargo-master. Slowly, as great gushers of water ballast jetted from stubby wingtips, Wes saw the struts begin to shorten.
In his headset, a female gasp and, “Wesley, I see a slit of light under the load!”
“Not now; use your camera,” he said, and dialed more zoom on the monitor. It was obvious now that the jolting sway of a freight train could not be perfectly matched by the huge stable platform hovering above it, and Wes prayed that the load would not smash against bulwarks at the end of the flatcar. Then the loco was receding underfoot and, her engines wailing in fierce four-part harmony, Delta One lifted, clearing one hundred thousand pounds of cargo from between two boxcars of a moving train.
We
s was a split-second late, because Rogan shouted it first: “Hot DAMN, we got it!” In the near distance, Wes could see tiny hats flying in the air. Down the track, a man in the loco cab was waving his cap in jubilant circles. Allington regained his calm as he talked to Rogan.
No one but Wes heard Alma Schultheis murmur, “You’re a genius, Daddy.” She knew her father’s work on sight, but she would not have said it for Tom to hear.
Wes switched channels in time to hear Allington, with a new note of concern: “Three locks, Delta One, I say again three locks. Do you confirm, Chris? You have a malf on strut
four. . . . Your option, old stick, just remember Dave out there in the grass. That bloody hopper is loose at one comer.” Rogan turned to Wes for the first time. “Mr. Peel, Chris wants to land the cargo on the road; he won’t retract it into the cargo hold for fear it might tip with only three locks.”
“I heard.” Wes realized instantly that the crew was playing it safe, preferring to ruin metal struts instead of risking damage to Delta One’s cargo hold. Least risk, soonest mended. “Hover near Kaplan, close to the grass,” said Wes, who had started his career with heavy off-road equipment and knew better than to block even the worst farm road with fifty tons of sand.
Christopher’s voice: “Glenn, some of that wet sand has shifted aft in the hopper. Can you jolt it forward a bit?”
“I can try,” from Rogan, who ganged the throttles forward. Wes had time to wonder, What the hell: control failure? Glenn Rogan swung Delta One back toward the van at a horrifying nose-down tilt, engine shrouds tilted upward to counter the effect of flight surfaces that would otherwise have smashed the huge craft into the roadway. Wes could see that the steel hopper, as big as an interstate tandem trailer, sagged away from one rear strut. Abruptly, Rogan swiveled the engine shrouds and the engines howled furiously, the high grass flattened as though pressed by an invisible sheet of glass. Delta One slowed her progress, nose still depressed, with a suddenness that had Wes’s harness biting into his shoulders. The maneuver would have been simply unbelievable to men of the Zeppelin era. Then the huge craft nosed upward to the horizontal and hovered. Wes sighed, watching his monitor. The lock mechanism of die errant strut now lay level with the socket. “You got the sand shifted,” he said, and heard the cargomaster confirm it.