FSF, April-May 2009

by Spilogale Authors

  "Greetings to you,” Gunnar said when the woman had come to a halt, spreading her legs to balance the weight of a waist thickened by years of carrying full water jars up steps cut from island rock.

  "Greetings,” she said, in a Greek dialect as bastardized as the letters that appeared on ancient Scythian coins. She alone observed him with equanimity.

  "Speak,” he said, viewing a full half circle of the beach and horizon, moving his eyes independently. He knew what was coming; three times now he had performed this rite.

  She waddled up to him, pointing the forefinger of her left hand at his face. When it touched his closed mouth a rapturous look transformed her thickened features and the Attic awe encompassed her functioning. Obediently he opened his lips, and, with a sharp snap, clipped the end of her finger off. The nauseating taste of warm blood, and dirty fingernail, filled his mouth, but he swallowed quickly and spoke again.

  "I have accepted. Speak."

  The woman could not resist looking back at her entourage with triumph, and Gunnar thought, “Poor fellows, now she is a full-fledged witch, ugly and to be obeyed in all things.” She would have the ultimate power over her fellows. Commands were to be her normal mode of speech. The mere pointing of her maimed hand, a gesture of pollarded horns, could call a man to her bed, or a maid to his; but, more important, it would fuse the serfs into a unit. They would be a group that would respond to the messages of Gunnar's people when the time came. He knew that the inheritors and owners of the Earth understood their world very well from its blueprints; but they could not find the switches and valves and all the simple tools to work them.

  "Did you speak your true thoughts when you promised to eat the master, Great Fish?"

  Gunnar made the obligatory answer. “You have prayed to us."

  "Demon of Poseidon, my people would be saved.” She too was familiar with the ritual.

  "I am no demon, but a servant,” he rose to his feet, and gave the toothy yawn that had impressed Everetsky. “Poseidon wants more servants who love the sea."

  "We will accept."

  Gunnar bit a piece of blubber from his forearm and spit it into the cup of her waiting hands. Immediately she kissed it ritually and squirreled it into the dirty fold of her blouse.

  "When the appointed time is come I will return.” He watched them go, the woman leading, and the men with their heads inclined to the woman.

  Gunnar was ashamed of himself, not for his threats to his host and their outcome. He had planned that series of happenings, and had, in fact, played this role many times before. His people could not hope to fight the land dwellers if a war was to be fought on the basis of numbers and equipment. The sea cities were very vulnerable, the simplest sort of guided torpedo could destroy the domes, and economic sanctions would quickly disrupt the lives of the ocean bed farmers and their cities. He was not ashamed of his tactics, but of the unmanly squeamishness which had overtaken him. To feel his stomach turn at the mere taste of human kind. It was true that the heavy starch diet of the airbreathers and the dark cooked meats they ate gave their flesh an unpleasant, alien taste, but it was not so different from the savor of enemies he had killed in the days-long hunting duels in his homeground.

  He stopped his train of thought and studied the sea with heightened awareness. Wondering what disturbed him would do no good. He knew it would be better to relax, but the strange dislocation of his abilities was still with him. He breathed deeply, sucking great mouthfuls of air, and held them until his chest and diaphragm puffed out in a rotund bladder. Slowly he let the air escape through his nostrils, a silent flow of aspiration, until any observer would have noticed the change in his posture. Everything about his body was lax, his legs lay separately on the sand, and his head lolled, but the eyes were alive. They turned in their sockets independently scanning the surface of the sea. It was a look born in the middle twentieth century studies of frogs’ nervous systems. There were circuits spliced into the optical nerves that bypassed the brain and fed the sorted visual stimuli back to the eye muscles. Only the significant motions on the surface of the sea were allowed to reach the brain.

  After a few seconds of this activity Gunnar's legs twitched, his eyelids drooped, and the eyes themselves seemed to withdraw back into the skull. He brought his knees up, and hugged them, sitting in this childlike posture with a broad grin on his face.

  "Hauptman-Everetsky was foolish,” he thought as he changed his position to stand, moving in a serpentine flow that ended in a run toward the surf. His last thoughts before he hit the water in a flat dive were of his hunger, and a mental note to come back to the beach to see if his calculations about Greta were correct. He hit near the bottom of a wave and let the undertow carry him toward the sudden deep just beyond the breakers. Turning in a free somersault he pushed for the boulder-filled bottom and found a current that carried him between the rocks. As he estimated his speed he slowed himself by pressing his heels into the sand, touching at chosen points much like a professional polo player guides his pony with touches of his spurs. When he saw the bathysphere that Everetsky had ordered sunk, he momentarily regretted not wearing his swim fins, but he did not dwell on the thought. It could hold no more than three men, he thought, and swam toward its hatch.

  The three guards saw him as soon as he came into the bathysphere's circle of light. They started out the open hatch. Gunnar caught the first man by the scruff of his neck as he came out, but they had expected to use the vanguard as a delay to allow others to come up on him. What they had not allowed for was the simplicity of Gunnar's tactics. He held the man like a kitten and plucked the mouthpiece of his oxygen recirculator out of his face, pointed him toward the bottom, and, with a wide hand spread across his buttocks, pushed him under trampling feet. The second man tried to divert him with a shot from his speargun. Gunnar, feeling foolishly inept for his slowness, ducked and caught it just over his shoulder, and drove the blunt staff into the marksman's solar plexus. He hauled this opponent out by a flopping arm, without time to watch his agonized contortions. The third member of Everetsky's murder party refused to join the combat. Gunnar showed his grinning face at an illuminated port, and disappeared to the top of the sphere. He took the cable ring in his hands and, threshing his legs, swam the bathysphere over onto its side. With a little adjustment the hatch fitted neatly into the bottom and Gunnar surveyed his handiwork before he swam to the man curled up on the bottom with his legs doubled up over his stomach. No matter how he struggled, the man felt himself being drawn straight out. A round face, suspended inches from his mask gently studied his last reactions.

  * * * *

  The beach was deserted when Greta finally escaped from the chateau to look for the seaman. She kicked a puff of sand into the night breeze in exasperation and would have left, but she saw something break out of the water amid a froth of incoming waves. A second later she could see Gunnar's figure wading ashore. He bent and reached under the water, and taking a handful of sand wiped it across his mouth. As he drew closer she could see the flicker of his tongue picking at the crevices in his teeth.

  "Hello,” she said, not finding anything else to say for the moment, and wrapped her long cloak tighter around her.

  "Hello,” he said, noticing her shivers. “Come, you are not used to the night air without screens to protect you.” He led the way to the shelter of the cliff, and continued. “What are you doing here?"

  Greta did not know, except that she was attracted to him, and that he was the first man she could remember feeling anything but familiarity for, but she said, “Well, you beat Abuwolowo so easily."

  "In the jousts of love,” Gunnar said declaratively, having thought better of finishing his statement questioningly.

  Greta gave him her best arch smile. “But I could talk my brother-in-law into letting you stay. He owes something to me."

  Gunnar would have told her about the affair he had just ended in the sea, but the strange repugnance overtook him again. “He would not really want me,
” he said, but even he, not given to nuances of this sort, noticed the hesitant tone in his own voice.

  "But his concern is always for the amusement of his guests,” Greta said, and giggled fetchingly at some private joke, “and they are getting bored. Very bored,” she said masterfully.

  "And I would soon be boring too. Little Greta.” He rumpled her hair with a touch of rough power, and she stepped closer to him.

  "You couldn't bore me. Ever.” She turned her face up and Gunnar saw the plumb line of her throat. Thin, but adolescently rounded with a touching surplus of young fat. The strongest rules of his dialectic told him that he should destroy her as an incipient breeder.

  "No,” he said, “I can do better.” He explained himself to the elders in the dome under the sea.

  Greta was tired of waiting for an embrace that never came. She changed her posture, and spoke with irritation. “What was that?"

  "Nothing.” Plausibly, he said, “I must go back to my family. I have been gone very long."

  "Your wife you mean."

  "I am too young to swim in the breeding tides."

  The metaphor's meaning escaped Greta, but the surface of the statement could be turned into the small victory of a compliment.

  "You will come back when you are ready?"

  Gunnar found the source of his weakness. Somehow she had taught him to find the meaning behind simple words. He smiled.

  "Of course. Where else would there be for me to go now?"

  Greta had forgotten all her careful training: the sophistications that her governesses had taught her. She beamed, threw her arms around his waist, and leaned her head on his sternum. “Thank you,” she said, appreciating a compliment with coquetry.

  "You are very welcome,” Gunnar said, and managed to keep his laughter out of his voice. “But you can do me a favor.” Before he spoke he studied the water. Now he must leave, he decided, and turned back to her. “It is very simple.” He said, “Remember to tell your brother-in-law this: war will be fought in places he has not yet thought of."

  "Yes?” Greta said, bewildered.

  "No more.” Gunnar patted her head kindly, and sat down, smoothed his suit onto his body, and put his fins on his feet. When he had his mask in place he could no longer speak and he walked silently into the breakers to vanish. Later that same night he talked with the porpoises, chased a school of silvery fish out into the moonlight and then dove to flirt in swirls in a whirlpool current that spun him out in the direction of home.

  Greta gave Hauptman-Everetsky her cryptic message; he took little notice of it, and she remembered less and less of Gunnar with the passing years. When she did recall, it was too late; the figures coming out of the surf, to be greeted by the servants, were not Gunnar, but triumphant victors. The island was without power, the servants in revolt, and nostalgia was not a shield.

  The war had been fought; neither she nor her brother-in-law had known it. In the subterranean tunnels the ripped ends of power cables spluttered hopeless sparks, water poured from torn mains, and bells and voices, however loud, brought no servants back from their welcoming songs. The always obedient chattels only watched, with blank dark eyes, as the fish came to play their game with Greta.

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  Department: Science: A Lighter Look At Science by Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty

  Over the years we've discovered that we can start an exploration of science and science fiction just about anywhere. Today we'll start with something that might seem trivial (and maybe not related to science fiction at all). We'll start with a balloon.

  Our exploration of balloons will take us high in the sky (as you might expect) and deep in the ocean (which you might not expect). We'll talk about the adventures of a guy in a flying lawn chair and balloons on Mars. We'll explain why you might want to take a balloon full of lard on a submarine voyage. In the end, we'll leave you with a bang (not a whimper).

  Balloons at the Cutting Edge

  First, a nod in the direction of our sponsor (science fiction, that is): Balloons have long been the stuff of science fiction, starting when these lighter-than-air craft were at the cutting edge of technological advancement.

  Back in 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a newspaper article that purported to be a factual account of a three-day hot-air balloon voyage across the Atlantic Ocean by European Monck Mason. It ran with the headline: ASTOUNDING NEWS! BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK: THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!

  Poe was writing his article sixty-one years after the Montgolfiers took a short hot-air balloon flight. Extrapolating in the manner of skilled (and lying) science fiction writers everywhere, Poe provided plenty of details, including the method of propulsion, the precise dimensions of the air craft (length: thirteen feet six inches; height: six feet eight inches; volume: about 320 cubic feet of gas), and a description of the steering mechanism. Appearing in the New York Sun, Poe's story concluded with “This is unquestionably the most stupendous, the most interesting, and the most important undertaking ever accomplished or even attempted by man. What magnificent events may ensue, it would be useless now to think of determining."

  Two days later, the Sun printed a retraction that began: “The mails from the South last Saturday night not having brought a confirmation of the arrival of the Balloon from England.... [W]e are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous."

  That's right—Poe made it all up. It wasn't until seventy-five years after Poe published his story (now known as the “Balloon Hoax") that the first human-carrying lighter-than-air craft (the British dirigible R-34) crossed the Atlantic in 108 hours and 12 minutes.

  What Goes Up...

  We'll move from science fiction into science fact with a quick review of the basic science behind lighter-than-air flight. Consider, for a moment, a helium-filled toy balloon. Let go of the string, and the balloon rises into the sky.

  Why? You could say it rises because the helium in the balloon weighs less than the same volume of air. You could also say helium is less dense than air. Just as an air-filled bubble rises in water because the air is less dense than water, a helium balloon rises because it's less dense than the surrounding air.

  People usually say “a balloon rises,” as if the balloon were causing this to happen. It's actually more accurate to say “the air pushes the balloon upward.” The balloon shoots upward because the air around it is trying to squeeze into the space it occupies. Have you ever squeezed a slippery watermelon seed between your thumb and a finger? The seed usually goes shooting off.

  The rising balloon is a bit like that watermelon seed. The great thumb and finger of air pressure squeeze on the balloon and it goes shooting in the direction of lessening air pressure—that is, it shoots upward. What makes something buoyant is a difference in pressure: the pressure on the bottom of the object, pushing up, is more than the pressure on the top of the object, pushing down. So air pressure pushes the balloon aloft.

  As the balloon heads upward, the density (and pressure) of the surrounding air decreases. The balloon doesn't stop rising until the weight of the balloon and everything attached to it (the payload) equals the weight of the air it displaces.

  Lawn Chairs in Flight

  And all of this brings us to the guy in the lawn chair.

  If you're like us, you've been wondering for years what happened to the version of the future where we all got to fly around on our personal jet packs. We are so ready to go flying. If not a jet pack, how about a personal balloon?

  Back in July 1982, thirty-three-year-old Vietnam veteran Larry Walters decided to stop dreaming of personal flight and take action. He filled forty-five weather balloons with helium, arranging them in four tiers. He tied the balloons to an aluminum lawn chair that he'd bought at Sears. He equipped himself with a large bottle of soda, milk jugs filled with water (for ballast), a pellet gun (to blow out balloons when he wanted to come down), a CB radio, an altimeter, a parachute, and a camera.

  When the tethers were cut, he rocket
ed into the sky above San Pedro, California, reaching an altitude of 16,000 feet. Startled airline pilots en route to the Long Beach Municipal Airport reported seeing him floating unprotected through the thin air some three miles above the ground.

  Eventually, Larry shot out a few balloons and came back to earth, tangling in some high-voltage power lines on his way down. After that, he tangled with the Federal Aviation Administration, which just doesn't have much of a sense of humor about this sort of thing.

  We have always been impressed by Larry's flight. We aren't tempted to duplicate it—but we are interested in considering some of the scientific principles it illustrates and in using those principles to answer questions that might have interested Larry and the other do-it-yourself balloonists who followed his lead.

  How could Larry have stayed out of the air traffic lanes and perhaps avoided the FAA's attention? Now that you know the basics of buoyancy, you can probably answer that. Larry and his balloons rose until their combined weight equaled the weight of the air they displaced. Since the density of air decreases with altitude, it's possible to calculate about how high a given volume of balloons might carry you.

  According to Paul's calculations (which we will admit, we have not confirmed with actual measurement), a balloon at sea level can lift one kilogram per cubic meter of helium (or about 0.062 pounds per cubic foot of helium). Since one is such a nice number to work with, we'll use metric in our calculations.

  So to lift a person weighing 64 kg (about 140 pounds) you need a balloon that is 64 cubic meters. A balloon that size would fill a room that's four meters (or twelve feet square) and four meters (or twelve feet high).

  That's enough to lift a person off the ground, but not very high. As altitude increases, air pressure (and the density of the air) decreases. At 5.6 kilometers or 18,000 feet, the density of air is half what it is at sea level. Since the lift of the balloon is cut in half, the balloon will only support 0.5 kg per cubic meter. So if I want to rise to 18,000 feet I need double the volume of the balloon or 128 cubic meters. Of course using a single balloon does not lend itself to slow descent when you shoot it with a gun!