The Ship: The New Frontiers Series, Book One

by Jack L Knapp

  “Bill the arrangements to the company, Chuck. You select the stone, have them contact us. I don’t suppose you’ve thought about it, but you’re Morty’s heir. We’ve got the documents on file. I don’t know about what arrangements he made for any other property, though.”

  “He had a lawyer in Andrews, not that he did much business with him. He might have filed a will there. I talked to the lawyer when I was trying to collect what some of the businesses owed grandpa. I’ll give him a call when I get there. The old ranch isn’t worth much, but I don’t want to see it sold off. It’s got that cemetery, you see. As soon as Morty’s laid to rest there, that’s the two people who were more family to me than anyone else.”

  “I doubt you’ll have a problem. His holdings in the company listed you as next of kin.”

  “I’m really the only kin, except for an uncle that grandpa refused to talk about. He never said why, but there was a rift. I don’t know how to contact my uncle, and for that matter he might not even be alive now.”

  Panit made a note on the tablet. “I suppose we should look into it, just to clear up any questions.”

  “I’ll stay here until Frenchy shows up, but I’ll need to go into Clovis after that. The mortuary company will want to know how they’re going to get paid.”

  “Like I said, bill it to us and I’ll let Frenchy know. Where will you be?”

  “I guess I’ll go over to the hangar. I don’t really want to talk to anybody right now, but I’ll tell Frenchy what I’ve got in mind when he gets here. Mel’s probably at the hangar, but he’s pretty good about leaving people alone when there’s nothing to be said.”

  #

  Lina entered the hangar from the rear personnel door. Chuck was sitting in the small break room, nursing a cup of cooling coffee and looking at nothing.

  “Chuck, I’m so sorry. I know how close you and Morty were.”

  “Hi, Lina. Yeah, he was more father than grandfather to me. I just don’t know...I’m really going to miss him.”

  “You know how proud he was of you, don’t you?”

  “We never talked about thinks like that, Lina. We did before, when I was growing up, but that was when I was a kid. We talked about a lot of things during the summers when I stayed on the ranch. Grandma, too. I rode with her, she had horses and loved to ride, and we talked about everything. It was never the same after she passed away. It hit grandpa hard too. We never talked about feelings. Neither one of us was very good at that.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Make the arrangements, and after that, I guess I’ll see. I don’t know, I’ve been flying the Twin, but that’s so routine now that I’m not sure I’m still interested. This has been a shock, even though I should have thought about it happening. But grandpa had so much energy...”

  “I know. I couldn’t believe it either, not at first. He was such a part of the ship...do you know what we’ve been working on?”

  “No, I’ve stayed busy flying the Twin. We needed as many hours in the logbook as possible, but that’s pretty much over now that we’ve got the experimental certification. The inspector approved that based on how many hours we’ve operated the impellers and how well the flight demonstration went. As for those logbook hours, each flight of the Bedstead counted four times because there were four impellers. The barge counted, as did the marine system that’s operating now. The Twin’s flight hours counted twice. All told, we had almost five thousand hours of operation in the various logbooks. The inspector didn’t like the idea that we’d been flying the Twin, but Will pointed out that we had the turboprops when we started. All we did was use the impellers on battery power as an auxiliary system. Anyway, he approved the system for experimental purposes and crew training. No passengers, but then we don’t really have the capability now. The seats are out and the batteries and the impellers occupy the passenger cabin. What it means is that any pilot can fly the Twin now, once he’s familiar with the impeller sysem.”

  “We’re almost finished with the first space-capable ship, Chuck. It’s smaller than Morty wanted, but the hull is finished and the impellers are in place. We’re working on fuel storage and running tests on the fuel cells. There are other things to do after that.”

  “You’ve got the cells in?”

  “Right, we’re still working on how to control fuel flow to them, so we haven’t given them a full test, but they’re in place. It’s basically the same system you’re using, a charging system to feed the batteries. The batteries serve as an accumulator, temporary storage so power is instantly available without waiting for the fuel cells to increase output. They smooth out the power supply to the impellers.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got it under control.” Chuck’s voice was listless. He’d perked up for a moment, but now he seemed depressed once again.

  “Chuck, I’m sorry. I wish none of this had happened. We were happy for a while, you and me, but then...”

  “Yeah, I know. I just...did what I had to do. We didn’t talk much about what happened to you, but you mentioned that the man who attacked you had a white stripe in his hair. That’s pretty unusual, but anyway, you don’t have to worry about him now.”

  “Chuck, I don’t know if that makes me feel better. I’ll have to think about it. I’ve got to go back to work, so will you give me a hug before I leave?”

  Chuck wordlessly stood up and opened his arms. The hug lasted longer than Lina had expected; it seemed as if neither wanted it to end.

  #

  The man drove the backhoe toward his flatbed trailer. Reversing up the ramp, he parked the machine, then began chaining it down. He would return later; the man had promised to set Morty’s headstone when it was ready. Chuck had chosen white granite and kept the inscription simple; Morton Alleyne Sneyd, the dates of his birth and death, and US Army below that, followed by the years when he’d served. Morty had, in many ways, been a simple man. He wouldn’t have wanted a lot of extra stuff. Chuck had refused the offer of a cross incised above Morty’s name; the old man hadn’t been a believer.

  Chuck stood by the raw mound, trying not to think, only remembering. Errant tears dripped down his cheeks. He already missed Morty; it felt as if someone had removed some vital part of his character. The few people who’d come to the graveside service had offered a hug or a handshake and a few words of condolence, then left the small cemetery. Lina was the last to leave, and only departed after Chuck promised to call her as soon as he left the ranch.

  He slowly walked the half mile to the ranch house, planning to stay overnight. By the time he’d arrived at the house, he’d changed his mind. It was too soon, there were too many memories.

  Chuck found his old backpack and dusted it off. He loaded the pack, a coil of rope on the bottom, a blanket atop that, then food and water enough for two days. He buckled the cover over the pack, shouldered it, and walked away from the house. If he hurried, he might be in time to watch the bats fly.

  #

  Three days later he drove into the factory campus and parked. Lina had been expecting him. She came out and met him as he exited the pickup.

  “I’m glad you’re back, Chuck. We need to talk, but first Dad wants to see you. He’s in the assembly building I think, or if he’s not there he’s down in the hangar with Mel. Let me give him a call. Don’t go away, okay?”

  “I’m too tired to go anywhere, Lina. I guess I’ll talk to Frenchy, but then I’ll be ready to crash. I finally did something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I guess I’ll see about one of the bunks in the hangar.”

  “I made up the bed in the trailer, Chuck. I dusted it down and aired it out too.”

  “Lina, the trailer holds too many memories. It hurts too much, okay?”

  “So we make more good memories, Chuck.”

  “Lina...does that mean you’re moving back?”

  “Yes. I won’t pretend I’m happy about everything that happened. That incident...well, it shocked me. What shocked most was how ready you were
to accept the violence. No attempt to notify the authorities, you just...”

  “They didn’t give me a choice, Lina. I intended to take a case of water to the man I saw, it’s pretty dry out there, but there were...I don’t think I should say anything more. It’s better if you don’t know what happened. But you heard the gunshots. The first ones were when they opened up on me.”

  “They shot at you?”

  “Yeah, they did, and they had full-auto rifles. Some kind of AK-47 knockoff, modified to fire full auto. They had no training, or not much; that first guy sprayed his whole magazine at me.”

  “I thought that was you. You had that rifle from the storeroom, the one dad brought here.”

  “I left it set on semi-auto. For one thing, I only had a narrow field of view with the night vision binoculars, and they washed out as soon as the rifles fired. I was firing blind until I flipped those up, after that I shot at the flashes from their guns. The other thing was that I didn’t have ammo to waste.”

  “What were those men doing on the ranch? I know dad never gave anyone permission to be out there.”

  “I think I know. They had a cart and an ATV. I didn’t see their tracks from the air because the ATV had been driven across some pretty hard ground. Too many shadows, maybe. Anyway, they had several jugs of kerosene and a six-pack of empty bottles. There’s only one reason for having those.”

  “You mean fire, right? They were planning to set fire to the factory?”

  “Got it in one. They also had quite a bit of ammo for the rifles. Whether they’d have shot people trying to get out of the plant, I don’t know. Maybe they just liked having automatic rifles and lots of ammo, there are people like that. But I think they planned to fire the buildings and slip away before morning. Two people riding the ATV, two in the trailer, which would have been empty then, so yeah, they’d most likely have gotten away.”

  Lina’s phone rang and she answered it. The conversation was short.

  “Dad’s at the hangar building, looking over the King. We can meet him there.”

  “Okay. Want to walk with me?”

  Lina nodded and Chuck took her hand. Together they walked to the hangar.

  Frenchy was washing his hands when they came inside. “The only oil or grease is in the bearings and they’re sealed, but somehow whenever I get close to machinery I get greasy. Anyway, Chuck, we need to talk.

  “You’re Morty’s heir, so you inherit his share of the company. I’d also like you to take over the job he was doing. You know more about the impellers than anyone else, more about the control systems too. I’ve already talked to Will. He’ll take over the Twin, maybe hire another pilot, leaving you in charge of the ship Morty was building. It’s almost finished.”

  “It’s that far along? How did you manage that?”

  “The engineer we hired had a crew of assistants he was comfortable with, so we hired them too. They had considerable experience working on a near-space rocket ship. I’m sure the guy they worked for is pretty unhappy about now; he lost his chief engineer and two dozen experienced people, everyone except the people working on his rocket’s propulsion system.”

  “We’re copying their bird?”

  “No. Actually, the one we’ve built looks more like the old space shuttle, except bigger, and with thicker wings and wingtip vertical stabilizers. That part looks something like the lifting bodies the Air Force used for reentry experiments. According to Jose...good man, by the way...the design could function in an emergency to get the ship down without burning up. He thinks.”

  “I’m definitely interested, but can we wait until tomorrow? I’m bushed. I hiked back to the ranch, fixed lunch, then started driving. I need a day to recover. But I’ve got something I want to discuss with you, so will tomorrow do?”

  “Sounds good. Suppose we meet at nine tomorrow morning. That give you enough time?”

  “Nine it is, Frenchy. The ship sounds interesting, but first I need sleep.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “So how long have you been working on spacecraft?” Chuck asked.

  Jose, ‘Call me Joe’, was showing Chuck around the craft he and Morty had been working on. “Seems like all my life. I started out working on Apollo 13, then switched to the Shuttle program after Apollo ended. After that, I started a consulting company. I was working on reusable civilian orbital vehicles and thinking about retirement when Lina’s father contacted me. When he mentioned you folks were developing an all-electric drive I got interested. A lot of people have been working on that concept, but they’re not getting much thrust. When Frenchy told me you had a craft that was already flying, that hooked me.”

  Joe pointed to the ship and continued. “What we’re doing here, as far as the frame and exterior hull is concerned, is basically what we did when we built the first shuttle. We don’t have to deal with rocket engines, fuel tanks, or the plumbing and pumps that go with them. This bird looks like the shuttle to some extent, or maybe more like one of the experimental lifting bodies we built for the Air Force, but it’s not nearly as complicated. We also don’t have to bother with tiles over the skin so this is much easier to build. Frenchy told me we wouldn’t need to re-enter the atmosphere the same way the shuttles did. For that matter, we can’t; at the very least, we’d have to replace all the external photovoltaic panels after every reentry.

  “The big challenge was figuring out where we’d store the hydrogen and extra oxygen. The fuel cells use both, so taking this ship beyond the atmosphere means we have to carry separate fuel and oxidizer systems. You also don’t want to run into a situation where you have to choose whether to breathe or use the oxy to power the fuel cells. That’s where the solar panels come in.” Joe pointed to the fuselage. “Those are high-efficiency thin-film photovoltaic units, mounted over a metal substrate that makes it easy to install them, and protected on top by thin glass panels. They cover most of the body and the wings, top and bottom, so whichever way we’re oriented, some of the PV cells will be working. They can’t provide enough takeoff power to overcome the Earth’s gravity, but they’ll work fine in space. Based on the efficiency figures Morty gave me, they’ll generate enough power to provide constant acceleration of a tenth of a gee. That will drop off after we get farther out, close to Mars for example, so this ship may never go beyond the Moon. We may decide after we get into space to run the fuel cells at reduced output anyway, just to keep the ship warm. Come on inside and let me show you what we’ve got.”

  “So you’ve designed a hybrid. The ship uses fuel cells to keep the batteries charged during takeoff, PV cells after that for sustained power?”

  “Well, it was Morty and me mostly, but you’ve got the idea. Lina also did a lot of the design work, mostly on the interior layout but also when we were designing the fuel tanks for the wings. Morty wanted to use nuclear reactors, but we couldn’t get those. Using fuel cells is an interim step, because we can’t carry enough fuel and oxy for extended trips. There’s still a lot of work to be done before we try to build a real interplanetary ship, but we’ve got to take this one into space and make a few mistakes to see what we’re doing wrong.

  “The suits that Frenchy got us will work for extra-vehicular activity, but we want the interior to be a shirt-sleeve environment. People can’t be expected to live in spacesuits for a week. The crew will also need room to move around and more privacy than they get in the space station. If you’re going to take ordinary people into space, you need to engineer the space around them so it’s as much like their home environment as possible. That’s where the big interplanetary ship comes in, and that’s when we’ll need the nuke reactors. With that much power available, you can accelerate continuously at one gee, only going weightless during turnover. We may not even have to turn the ship, at least I don’t think we will, we just reverse the impellers so that instead of pushing forward to accelerate have them push backwards to slow the ship down. I’m still thinking about that. It might be cheaper to flip the ship and switch the c
ameras so they point backwards in the direction the ship is going. If you feed that view to the screens over the pilot’s seat, it will look like that’s the direction you’re going.”

  “Seems strange.”

  “You’ll get used to it, controlling a spacecraft using display screens. I did. Anyway, we finished installing the hatch that Morty was working on, so the hull exterior is complete. I did a pressure test while we were waiting for you to get back from the ranch. The ship’s holding pressure, although there’s a slight drop in the central section over twenty-four hours. That may have to do with the seals, not quite in their final position, or maybe it was because I used three atmospheres of pressure for the test. That gave me a differential between the ship and the outside of two atmospheres. In space, it will be only 70% of one atmosphere inside the ship, zero outside, so the seals may hold. We might not have any leaks at all. We’ll be taking extra oxygen anyway, just in case. There are scrubbers in the crew section up front. They’re designed to remove carbon dioxide before it can build up to dangerous levels, so all in all, I don’t expect any problems with the ship’s internal atmosphere. If I’m wrong, we’ll just have to wear the suits and hook up to the ship’s oxy and electrical systems until we’re back on the ground. The front compartment didn’t show any leaks, neither did the aft power section, but the cargo section amidships has that big loading hatch. If there really are seal problems, that’s where they’ll be. Easy solution, depressurize the cargo bay unless we’re stowing and securing cargo or removing the straps before we offload a shipment to space. We could probably get contracts to launch satellites, so I can see us having to work in that section getting them ready. It’s a lot easier if you don’t have to wear the suits.

  “The aft section is where the fuel cells are. The hydrogen is carried in tanks in the wings, dissolved in ammonia. We extract the H2 and pipe it to the fuel cells. They pull their oxy out of the atmosphere, so we’ll need to keep that section pressurized. I won’t be using pure oxy back there, probably a mix of 50% nitrogen and oxy.”