by Jerry
“I was only trying to see the sunset,” protested Morgan.
“Sunset! Through that?” Fergus Massey gestured at the rolling grey cloudbanks.
“I hoped the image-intensifier might penetrate the layer. It works pretty well on the abdominal walls of pregnant sows . . .” He howled as Jane kicked his shin.
“Father, Morgan has something to ask you.”
“Oh?”
Jane turned to Morgan for confirmation but saw she would get little assistance: he had acquired a sudden resemblance to a goldfish. “He wants to ask your permission for us to be wed. Don’t you, Morgan?”
Morgan managed a strangled gulp. Massey looked thoughtful. Then his shoulders began to shake, his eyes bulged, and his face went redder than Morgan could recollect ever having seen it—and he started to laugh as if nothing could ever stop him. Eventually he gasped air enough to speak. “Oh dear! Brainless Morgan to wed my Jane!” And that set him off again.
It was true that Morgan lacked natural sense. The entire population of Crazy Harbour was agreed on that. Even Jane, though she alone thought to discern something deeper behind it. What nobody realised was that it was not Morgan’s fault.
It had happened like this.
Colony skipships are fast, but never large enough to carry everything that a colony might need; and there is a dire mass penalty to be paid for superlight speeds. Consequently there is a strong incentive for miniaturization. By a stroke of good fortune, the items most useful to an aspiring colony are also the easiest to miniaturize.
Plants, animals—and people.
Nature worked out that trick long ago.
So, while much of the volume of a skipship is given over to things like balloon-tired tractors and climatological computers and everything-machines, which cannot really be miniaturized at all, but only packed efficiently, most of the people—all save the essential real-time crew—and all of the animals, travel as frozen germ plasm.
In its early days, a colony needs a well-defined and closely circumscribed range of talents: builders, farmers, doctors, breeders. Luxury items like lutenists and bureaucrats have to wait their turn, and the rapid-incubation programs are set to give priority to the desired genotypes.
It was some twenty-three years since Morgan de Vere, then known only as embryo KKG-33650-000774-POG. had been decanted into the incubators on Skaun Secundus. But many years before that, on Earth, a technician named Linda Strauss had indulged in an excess of home-brew at a Thanksgiving party. The next morning her eyesight was less reliable than usual, and she misread a genotype selector. In consequence a phial labelled with the codes for a plant biologist acquired the genetic material appropriate to an artist.
The phial was shipped to Skaun Primus—and thence to its branch colony on Secundus—in the skipship Maundy Thursday.
That phial was Morgan Knutsson de Vere.
Crazy Harbour, the branch colony beachhead on the shore of the only large lake on Skaun Secundus, never learned that Linda Strauss’s hangover was responsible for Morgan de Vere’s unorthodox outlook on life, but from an early age it had been apparent that his heart was not in plant biology. His ineptitude at a craft revered by any farming community lent him his nickname, Brainless Morgan.
Finally he was reassigned to a manual post: cargo-handler on the shuttle-runs between Primus and Secundus, bringing in new equipment and taking away the old for repair. While the polyfarmers of Skaun Primus possessed a rustic tendency towards improvisation, most of their equipment was too sophisticated to be successfully mended that way. The qualified engineers of the Skaun system were all on Primus, because that was where the everything-machine was. And while it was possible, though laborious, to load damaged mechanisms into a shuttle, it was quite impossible to do the same with an everything-machine—which, among other tasks, built shuttles. Indeed it built almost anything. except another everything-machine.
Morgan found his new job quite acceptable, as it left him a great deal of leisure time, which he spent sketching on the back of cargo manifests, or painting with materials adapted from other purposes. The inhabitants of Crazy Harbour found his paintings imcomprehensible, executed as they were in panclasmic repressionist style. His not inconsiderable abilities at cargo-handling went equally unrecognised: Brainless Morgan, by definition, was a total incompetent. Morgan vowed that his worth should be impressed upon them, but had so far been unable to devise a foolproof method.
And now here he was, stranded in the saltflats with five cartons of precious fungicide. He knew what the people of Crazy Harbour would be saying.
How very like him.
Morgan sat and thought about Jane . . . and came to with a start. A pleasant enough subject, and no doubt marvellous motivation, it had little practical bearing on the crossing of five hundred miles of saltflats infested by kshoggi. He told himself to concentrate.
Be systematic.
The key was transport. A maxim tremendous but trite. But what is transport? Something that can move, plus something to make it move. A vehicle, and a power source.
Vehicle first. The ground was smooth, the marshes scattered. No rocks larger than pebbles, no crevasses, no deathless caverns of time-rimed ice . . . Irritably he dragged his mind back to the problem. Smooth and flat, all the way to the shallow depression of Crazy Harbour, where the salt gave way to the fine silt of an ancient beach. It was this that attracted the farmers, because with irrigation and fertilizer and halophilic plants . . . Smooth and flat. The manure-spreader’s large, soft wheels would cope well enough; they would even float across marshland. There were cable-brakes on each wheel, for steering.
But no motor.
Other power sources? The shuttle had batteries, but only for lighting. Its engine was ruined. Anyway, it weighed six tons. There was the liquid hydrogen fuel, of course . . .
He could make a jet engine!
He could make a jet engine?
Morgan thought again. He had precious few tools, and his knowledge of mechanical principles was negligible. Keep it simple. Muscle-power? A treadle. with a chain to transmit rotary motion to the wheels? No, that was silly. The resistance would be too great, the vehicle too massive. And he could hardly keep pedalling throughout the six-hour night, and if he stopped, the kshoggi would get him.
Perhaps he could capture a dozen kshoggi and harness them to the vehicle like a team of huskies. Morgan visualized himself, the reins clasped in his hands and the salt spraying up in a great arc as the manure-spreader howled across the desert, with the hero urging on his team from the prow (or whatever muckwagons had at the front) like Ben-Hur surging to victory in a chariot-race! Oh, the rippling hides of those trusty kshoggi, translucent pink leather, as their coiled muscles propelled them ever onward; and the glittering of their jewelled fangs as they thrust their noble heads before them . . .
Fangs?
Trusty kshoggi?
Scratch that idea.
For several hours he invented and rejected a hundred madcap schemes. With genuine reluctance he decided against building a land-yacht. He had the materials: he could make sails from plastic sheeting. But down at ground level the winds blew every which way. It was only some five hundred feet overhead that the restless billows surged ever eastward . . .
A balloon?
He could heat-seal patches of plastic to make a sphere. There was hydrogen aplenty in the tanks. There were materials enough for a dozen balloons. It would be easy to knock up some kind of a basket, or even a harness . . .
Oops.
The wind blew due east, but Crazy Harbour was southeast. He would miss by 350 miles.
Can you tack against the wind in a balloon? Morgan was aware of the principle, having spent more than one ground-leave yachting on Skaun Primus. On Secundus the wind was too erratic and there were few lakes, but a great many sports were practiced on Primus and Morgan had tried most of them. Now yachts tack by trading off wind-pressure against resistance of the water. No. a balloon would be at the mercy of the wind.
There was another sport that Morgan had practised on Skaun Primus. Hanggliding. He was quite skilled at it.
Surely he could rig a suitable shape using aluminum struts and plastic sheeting, and suspend himself from it by a harness? Unlike a balloon, he would have some directional control by banking the wings. Some vertical vanes might improve stability.
He scribbled figures on a pad. Forty-six miles per hour wind velocity, at forty-five degrees; say thirty miles per hour effective speed . . . seventeen hours. Worth a try.
What about launching it? Down here the winds were no help, and he could hardly build a catapult.
But he could use a balloon to lift it above the turbulent zone.
Morgan hung suspended, feeling sick. The ground was an awful long way down, and it was wobbling about too much. He swallowed hard and paid out the cable. He had agonised for an hour about floating up freely, decided it wasn’t prudent, and had to spend a day and a half ripping control wiring from the shuttle and braiding it into cable. Wisps of cloud began to obscure the downward view.
It was better that way.
The wind steadied, and the plastic wing began to billow. He glanced at the tiny inertial navigator that he’d pried out of the shuttle’s console. Yup: due east. Overhead, the lifting balloon strained eastwards with the wind. He would have preferred to stay attached to it, but it made the hang-glider impossible to maneuver.
Jane, I’m on my way. I hope.
He cut loose from both balloon and ground. The translucent wing soared skywards. It’s going to work, Morgan thought.
At that moment a wingtip joint broke, and one corner began to flap uselessly; and Morgan Knutsson de Vere sideslipped, stalled, and went into a flat spin. He had never heard of Lindemann and, even if he had, his glider had no stick to push forward and the rudder was too flimsy to oppose the spin, so the spin continued despite his panicky efforts to prevent it. The turbulent lower winds caught him, buffetting the frail construction violently. He fought to regain control as the ground rushed up . . .
It took two hours to crawl back to the shuttle, and another to splinter his broken shin and spray it with painkiller from the shuttle’s medical chest.
Scratch one means of transport.
Scratch one asset.
Morgan crawled into the cargo-hold early, to rest and lick his wounds.
With his leg broken, he needed to find a less athletic solution. Brainless Morgan thought as he had never thought before, in endless permutations. But the surging power of that upper wind was always at the forefront of his thoughts.
If only those winds were at ground-level. It would be easy to make a land-yacht. But the winds were up aloft.
He could hardly build a mast five hundred feet high.
Oh no?
It was two hours past dawn and everything was ready.
Morgan anxiously ran his eye over the results of three days’ frustrations and triumphs. He was strapped in a sitting position in the hopper of the manure-spreader. Around him were his provisions and the five cartons of fungicide. On the front was mounted one of the shuttle’s landing-lights, several batteries, and the inertial navigator.
On either side of him was a handle, connected by a cable to the rear brakes.
From the front, half a dozen more cables stretched upwards and disappeared into the clouds.
On the upper end of those cables, now hidden from view, was an array of hydrogen-filled balloons, scoop-shaped rather than spherical. Four cables were tethers; the other two altered the attitude of the balloon-sails when tightened or loosened from below.
With a silent prayer to the Saint of Courageous Lunatics, Morgan released the brakes. The balloons bellied in the wind, and the Honey wagon lurched across the ground. Within half a minute it had picked up speed and was moving at about fifteen miles per hour, which seemed to be the fastest it would go.
Morgan fiddled with the right-hand lever, and the Honeywagon obligingly swung to the right as one set of brake-shoes bit. Grinning, he tried steering left, and the vehicle responded accordingly. It was just like driving one of Old Man Massey’s gyrotractors. Oh. Yes, well, the less said about that the better. Morgan was the only person on Skaun Secundus who had capsized a gyrotractor. He adjusted the brakes for a forty-five degree right turn, consulting the inertial navigator until he was satisfied.
Honeywagon rolled across the smooth saltflats of Skaun Secundus, riding the upper winds.
They were far superior to tame kshoggi.
At intervals Morgan consulted maps, and made adjustments to the steering and the angles of the balloons. It took time to get the feel of the controls, and on one heart-stopping occasion he tilted the balloons too far sideways, and they plunged Skaunwards under the pressure of the wind. But of course, as soon as he released the control-cables, they floated gently up again into their original position. Morgan felt very foolish but also very relieved.
By mid-afternoon he had the system pretty well taped. The terrain was flat and the low scrub no obstacle. He could steer well enough to avoid the marshlands, and according to his maps there were no large areas of damp ground between himself and Crazy Harbour. He could stop completely by applying both brakes firmly and tilting the balloons edge-on to the wind.
He stopped for food, and some sleep. His plan called for non-stop travel at night. He only hoped the landing-light worked as well as it had on tests.
Dusk fell and he switched it on. Excellent.
A few minutes later he encountered his first pack of kshoggi, slithering from their daytime lairs in the marsh-bottoms. In the beam of the light he caught a sudden glimpse of slick pink hides and jagged rows of glistening teeth. Then with horrible grating cries they scattered in alarm as the Honeywagon careened through them. They had never seen anything remotely like it. Morgan whooped for joy. If he stayed awake and upright, the kshoggi were no longer a threat.
For three days he rolled over the desert, terrorizing peace-loving kshoggi by night and sleeping by day. One balloon-sail deflated with a slow puncture, but it scarcely slowed him down and the rest remained sound.
How pleased Fergus Massey would be to see the fungicide . . .
How pleased Jane would be to see him . . .
How clever everyone would think he was.
Brainless Morgan’s balloon-powered manure-spreader breasted the last rise as darkness fell. At the bottom of the long, slow slope down to the lakeside he could see the lights of the colony buildings and, on the far right, the silhouette of Old Man Massey’s poly farm.
No more kshoggi: they kept away from the lake. Presumably the change from salt to silt upset their constitutions. Morgan switched on his headlight. This time he would show them. When he turned up in this contraption, nobody could call him “brainless.”
Or could they?
He got no credit for his paintings, panclasmic repressionist masterpieces though they were. He got no credit for his cargo-handling, which was superb.
Would they try to delude themselves that this was the obvious way to cross the wild saltflats?
They might.
For the first time since he left the wrecked shuttle, Morgan’s confidence began to fade, and his stomach began to sink. They might indeed. They almost certainly would. What could he do to prevent that?
And it was then, barely half a mile from home, that Morgan Knutsson de Vere had his second bright idea.
Fergus Massey belched happily. Placing his empty glass carefully on the side-table he walked over to the window to draw the blinds.
Odd.
There was a triangular patch of light moving down the slope towards his farm.
“Martha! Something’s attacking! Rouse the hands! Get the—”
The rest was drowned by a tremendous crash as Morgan’s vehicle missed the gateway and ripped out the southern end of a hen-house. It came to rest at the extreme end of the farmyard, trailing straw and chicken-wire for a h
undred yards behind it. Chickens were running everywhere and the commotion was incredible. Morgan had hoped for a more dignified entrance, but this one was certainly effective. He brushed a feather out of his hair and composed himself.
The farmyard lights came on. Hesitant farmhands shuffled towards the strange device. It was a manure-spreader. On the back were five cartons, marked BBX-60 FUNGICIDE in red. On the front—
“Brainless Morgan!”
Then they were all around him. From the corner of his eye he saw Jane, caught half way between adoration and bewilderment. But his main attention was on Old Man Massey, who was standing right in front of him with a look of utter incredulity on his face. He saw the fungicide, the unpowered muckwagon, and Morgan.
He didn’t see the cables or the balloons. because Morgan had jettisoned the lot a hundred yards out in the darkness, and they were now several thousand feet overhead and five miles away. That had been Morgan’s second bright idea.
Without mystery there is no prestige.
Massey found his tongue. “Prancing possums, de Vere, how did you drag that thing across the saltflats?”
In Crazy Harbour they still tell the yarn about how Morgan Knutsson Massey de Vere (only he was plain “de Vere” then, you understand), with one leg broken, alone and unaided, crossed five hundred miles of hostile kshoggi-infested saltflats in an unpowered manure-spreader to save the cowcumber crop. And they never have worked out how he did it. An engineer would probably guess, but all the engineers are on Primus: there won’t be any engineers on Skaun Secundus for another two generations—unless Linda Strauss got on the hooch again.
Brainless Morgan looked Fergus Massey squarely in the eye, and smiled sweetly. Then he revealed as much as he could ever be persuaded to of his method.
“Brainpower,” said Brainless Morgan.
JOHNNY MNEMONIC
William Gibson
He had information that the gangsters wanted desperately, even if they had to kill him