Stargate

by Stephen Robinett

  Table of Contents

  Stargate

  Part 1 I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  Part 2 VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  Part 3 XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  Stargate

  Stephen Robinett

  * * *

  1976

  ISBN: 0-312-75600-3

  [978-0-312-75600-0]

  St. Martin’s Press

  Originally serialized in Analog (6-8/1974) by “Tak Hallus”

  Part 1

  I

  Desperate? Perhaps. I prefer to think of it as rising to an opportunity. True, it was the only opportunity available, but opportunity, alone or in a herd, is nonetheless opportunity.

  In early March, some mogul at Standard Design and Engineering decided to close down the Los Angeles office, my office. If my nose had been farther from the drafting screen, I would have seen it coming.

  The ax fell the day after Dolores agreed to marry me. I still felt smug the next morning at the office. I had no particular reason to feel smug. I knew Dolores would accept. If she said no, one of us would have to move out. She still had three months of law school and the bar exam ahead of her. The original plan was for Dolores to finish law school while I got some engineering experience. At that point, we would re-evaluate our “relationship.” If it was working, we would pick up the option. It looked as if it would be working, so I advanced the timetable a little.

  I couldn’t sleep the night I asked her. I tossed, put the pillow over my head, heard imaginary footsteps in the house and some real ones, the dog’s. Dog—that’s his surname—couldn’t sleep either. Dolores, who can sleep through anything, lay prone beside me. She slept through the ‘18 earthquake as if it were someone rocking her cradle. About midnight, I woke her.

  “Dolores.”

  “Hm-m-m?”

  “Wake up.”

  “Hm-m-m?”

  “Dolores.”

  “Is it time?”

  “No. Wake up.”

  “Hm-m-m?”

  She’s like that in the morning, too.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  She rolled over and squinted at me. I had the reading lamp on. She shielded her eyes from the light. “What is it?”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “I’ve been sleeping.” She rolled on her stomach, turning her head away from me, fading fast.

  “Dolores.”

  “What?”

  “You have a nice back.”

  “Don’t wake me up, Bobby.” My mother doesn’t even call me Bobby. I tolerate it.

  “Dolores.”

  “Hm-m-m?”

  “Let’s get married.”

  “OK,” she said.

  I sat up and looked at her brown back, delighted. I had expected an argument, logical, legal, irrelevant. She gets that way studying law, picky. “Do you mean it?”

  Silence answered.

  “Dolores?”

  She was asleep.

  The next morning, I asked if she remembered our conversation. She spread honey on a piece of toast and sprinkled it with cinnamon before she answered.

  “Sure.” She bit the toast.

  “Sure what?”

  “Sure I remember.” She chewed. “You asked me to marry you and I said OK.” She bit the toast again, grinning around the bite.

  I was smug when I got to the office. I liked the idea. Shacking up has its advantages, but, marriage offers a promise. Shacking up, she can always leave. Married, the question is, will she stay? A subtle but significant difference.

  I told Bernie Mitchel, the other engineer in my department, at coffee. Bernie is married with four kids. I learned more about design engineering from working with Bernie for two years than I did in seven years at school. When I graduated from Berkeley and took the job with Standard, I thought engineering was done with a drafting screen and my sterling imagination. You get the idea, draw it out on the screen, let the computer redline anything that exceeds the parameters of the material you choose and print out a blueprint. It was that simple in school. No one ever had to build the things we designed.

  Bernie took me down to the shop with one of my first sets of prints and told me to build it. The part was a bearing race for the swivel on an old-style Jenson Gate. People argued with me at every step.

  First, Folley, the shop computer man, complained I cut the tolerances too close. I quoted theory. The metal could take it. The shop computer could handle the design. What more did he want? He grunted. Once the program was laid in, the tool-and-die-maker went apoplectic. He stormed into my office waving the tool requisition at me. He would have to order most of the machine tools, he informed me, inquiring whether I knew what each one of them cost. I didn’t. He told me, tool by tool. He also informed me that a lathe was neither superhuman nor psychic. It could do only what it had been told to do. A milling machine, I learned, had never been trained in acrobatics. In the future, I was instructed to try, if it wasn’t too much of a burden on my b-b-sized brain, to design parts he could make with his present equipment. There was a cross-check program in my drafting screen for that very purpose. He left.

  Four days later, I had a sample bearing race on my desk for approval. I took it to Bernie’s office. He grinned. The grin unsettled me.

  “Did you learn anything?”

  I nodded. “Quite a bit.” I told him about Folley’s tolerances and machine tools, adding that the general opinion of engineers seemed to be low.

  “Just new engineers,” answered Bernie, reaching into a desk drawer at his waist. He brought out a bearing race and handed it to me. “Look at this. Carefully.”

  It could have been the race I designed. The few differences were unimportant.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “Parts catalog.”

  I must have blushed. He grinned. In effect., I had re-invented the typewriter. Why design and make an item that requires special machine programs and special tooling when you can order it from a catalog for half the price? I learned a lot from Bernie.

  On the day I got the had news, I told Bernie I was getting married.

  “Dolores?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?” He sounded less than enthusiastic.

  “We haven’t decided yet. Soon.” He nodded, absorbing the information.

  “You don’t seem overjoyed by the news,” I said.

  “Frankly, I have some news of my own, bad.”

  “Connie’s pregnant again.”

  “Worse.”

  I saw it coming. I was being fired. “Worse?”

  “They’re closing the Los Angeles office.”

  “I’ve always liked Phoenix,” I said, hoping for a transfer. The home office is in Phoenix.

  “No transfers.”

  “When did you hear this?”

  “This morning. I’m senior around here so I got the glad news first.”

  “They’re canning you, too?”

  “That’s what the note with my severance pay says. I’ve been calling around all morning. I thought it was only fair to let you get started, too. Severance pay is two weeks for every year with the company. You’ll get a month, effective Friday.”

  “But—”

  “That’s what I said. Patterson from Phoenix will tell you sometime this afternoon.”

  I felt angry and upset and defeated and confused. I had leaned out from the horse on the merry-go-round, strained for the gold ring, grabbed at it—sure I got it—only to open my hand and find air. Patterson ca
lled that afternoon. As soon as I saw his pinched face on the screen, I snapped, “I know, I know. Thanks a lot,” and hung up. I never liked Patterson much. He is the kind of person who enjoys spreading bad news. I enjoyed hanging up on him.

  I told Dolores that night.

  “So?”

  “So I don’t have a job.”

  “So?”

  “So we may not eat in the foreseeable future.”

  “I’m too fat anyway. It’s the Mexican in me.”

  “Don’t joke. This is serious.”

  “You’ll get another job.”

  “Fat chance. Look at this.” I fluttered an engineering newspaper front of her. “These people don’t want design engineers, they want expeditors and managers. They just call them engineers.”

  She studied the paper, puckering slightly. Dolores puckers when she thinks. I have watched her study, writing summaries of legal case reports, thinking, puckering. Finally, she looked up from the paper, laying it on the kitchen table.

  “You’re right. Maybe you’ll have to take a different kind of job.”

  I grunted. Seven years of school and two more working at design engineering rarely equips people to sell shoes. Design shoes, perhaps, but sell them, no.

  “What kind of job?”

  She shrugged. “Look around. We’ve got a couple of months. If we can stretch things past the bar exam, I can support you.”

  “We’ll have to postpone getting married.”

  “Why?”

  “Things are too”—I threw up my hands—“up in the air.”

  “I don’t see what difference that makes. We’re living together now. If we get married, we’ll still be living together, same bills, same income. It’s all the same thing.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “It is.”

  “A man should be able to support his wife.”

  “But not his girl friend?”

  I grunted. Talking to Dolores, my conversation tends to degenerate to grunts. It was different. Sending her to law school might have been a mistake. She bickered more.

  By Friday, I was reconciled to my enforced retirement. I did very little work during the week. I spent most of my time on the phone getting rejected by weasely-looking personnel directors. It was hard on my ego. The man at the engineering division of Spieler Interstellar was particularly nasty. He not only gave me one of those don’t-worry-we-won’t-call-you looks, he said it. I added him to my list of hated strangers, along with the phone company and collection agencies.

  Just after I got my desk cleaned out, Bernie walked in, beaming. He had a job. It was written on every grinning tooth. I growled at him. His left eyebrow went up.

  “Hostile.”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “When a friend brings good news? Hardly.”

  “This is no time for good news, Bernie. I just talked to that creep in engineering at Spieler.”

  Bernie smiled and nodded. “I hope we meet him in a dark alley some night.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “Yesterday. A jerk.”

  “Who’s your job with?”

  “Merryweather Enterprises.”

  I whistled. Merryweather Enterprises, in spite of its eccentric owner, had a reputation. They paid well, left people alone to work, and dumped money into some of the most imaginative development programs around. For every ten projects they lost, one paid off and kept them afloat. Spieler Interstellar had the better balance sheet, but Merryweather Enterprises contributed more to the advancement of science and technology. If all you knew about the two companies was who owned them, you would have expected the reverse to be true. Spieler himself was somewhere around thirty-nine, a financial whiz-kid who built twenty thousand dollars in capital into multibillion-dollar Spieler Interstellar in seventeen years. Merryweather, on the other hand, was nearly sixty. Age alone should have indicated who would be receptive to innovation. Age alone was deceptive.

  “Doing what?”

  “Design. And”—he slipped his hand dramatically inside his coat and withdrew a sheet of paper, dangling it before me by one corner—“I have a little something for you.”

  “What?”

  “Read it.”

  I read it.

  Jos TITLE: Chief Project Engineer.

  SALARY: $100,000 per annum.

  I whistled again. It was well over three times the salary Standard paid me.

  AREA OF RESPONSIBILITY: Project engineer and personnel director, Space Station Merryweather Enterprize in solar orbit. Full authority and responsibility for construction project in progress.

  “What construction project?” Bernie shrugged. “Search me.”

  I pointed at the sheet. “What’s this ‘z’ in Enterprize? A typo?”

  “I think it’s supposed to be a pun. Enter-prize.”

  “What prize?”

  “You got me. Maybe it’s a surprize.”

  BACKGROUND REQUIREMENTS: PhD, Structural Engineering, Astrophysical Engineering, or Sub-nuclear Displacement Engineering.

  I looked up from the sheet. “Matter transmitters.”

  “That’s what it sounds like.”

  “You can write everything I know about Jenson Displacement on a pin.”

  “Read on.”

  ALTERNATE EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENT: PhD, Design Engineering with minimum two years’ experience in Jenson Gate design or equivalent. Apply: Merryweather Enterprises, 1422 Campus Dr., Newport Beach, Calif. AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER.

  I put the sheet on my bare desk. “The PhD I have. The two years’ experience I have, but not with Jenson Gates.”

  Bernie waved away my objection, shooing it like a fly. “Details. You worked on that bearing race for a Jenson Gate.”

  “Because I can design door knob doesn’t mean I can build a house.”

  “Engineering’s engineering. You’ll get the hang of it. You’re a bright boy.”

  “Thanks. But this thing may not be engineering. It says personnel director.”

  “It’s engineering.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They offered it to me.”

  I narrowed my eyes. Bernie is a, good engineer. He also runs his life better than most engineers. If he rejected the job, it had a catch. I asked what it was.

  “No catch.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Sure, I’m sure.” He tapped his chest. “My heart.”

  “I never knew there was anything wrong with your heart.”

  “There isn’t, now. But nobody goes into space after open heart surgery.”

  I picked up the job sheet and re read it. It still seemed out of my league. Bernie interrupted me.

  “I made an appointment for you next Thursday. I also did a little paving the way for you.”

  “What kind of paving the way?”

  “They think an engineering Albert Einstein’s coming to the interview.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Think nothing of it.” He grinned, leaving.

  I told Dolores about it that night at dinner. We decided to celebrate my unemployment with an expensive dinner out. We went to Don Martin’s. Over a steaming pile of frijoles refritos and a pair of plump beef enchiladas, ordered by Dolores with that faintly supercilious air of the bilingual, I told her.

  “It sounds wonderful, Bobby.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Why?”

  I handed her the job sheet. She read it, holding a forkful of beans aloft. She looked up, blinked and ate the beans.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Frankly, I don’t understand it.”

  “What don’t you understand?”

  She returned the paper to me. “The whole thing. It’s gibberish.”

  I looked at the sheet. It seemed perfectly clear to me. I started to explain Subnuclear Displacement Engineering. She waved a taco at me, cutting off my exposition.

  “Just tell me what it means, not what it is.” She bit the taco.r />
  “As far as I can determine, Merryweather’s working with matter transmitters on their space station. They need a project engineer.”

  “You’ll make a lovely project engineer.”

  “Do you know what a project engineer does?”

  “No, but you’ll make a lovely one.”

  “He shuffles people and papers. The closest I’d get to a drafting screen would be watching someone else run one.”

  “What are they doing with a Jenson Gate on a space station?”

  I shrugged. “You got me. The government uses Gates to supply Tranquility Base, but that’s the outside range. After about a quarter of a million miles, the power-distance curve drops off and it’s cheaper to use spacecraft.”

  “You see, you do know something about Jenson Gates.”

  “Dolores, knowing how far a horse can walk doesn’t mean you know how he works.”

  She chewed and swallowed the last of her taco. “How far can a horse walk?”

  “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  Over the next few days, I thought about the job. I had plenty of time to think. Dolores spent her time either at the UCLA law library or sequestered in the walk-in closet she used for a study. From time to time, sounds erupted from the closet. They ranged from the self-chastising; “Oh, no. That’s wrong,” to the revelatory, “Ahhh, so that’s how it works.” Dolores becomes very involved with whatever she does. I had wondered what she did all day. She talked to her lawbooks. Dull company.

  Dog and I went to the beach several times. March is a good month for the beach, comfortable but sparsely populated. I was still unsure about the job. I talked it over with Dog. Dog is a slobbering Saint Bernard. He eats more than Dolores. I told Dog how little actual design work project engineers do. He agreed with me, nodding and walking attentively next to me, tongue out, lolling. I told him they only do broad gauge engineering, spotting potential problem areas and making sure someone is assigned to solve the problem. I told him about the catch: you had to see the potential problem. I reminded him how much I had forgotten about Jenson Displacement. He seemed to remember the paper I did in school on some of the potential engineering problems. Dr. Miller had submitted it to a trade journal without my knowledge. When they accepted it, he told me. I gloated at my own brilliance for a week.