The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  Bear pulled out a laptop they had cable tied to a wooden board that Pinta had cut at the last moment with a jig saw. Bear pulled two splinters from his fingers after dropping it in his lap. The board had Velcro straps screwed to it and he taped them to his knee to hold the rig in place. Tapping keys, he called up the program for triggering the cylinders of compressed gas strapped at various places around the hull of the plane. They looked so much like the water bottles found at carnivals and concerts that the boys had instantly nick named them ‘squirt bottles.’

  He activated one at the bow and through the windscreen it visibly showed as vented gases escaped ‘up’. The nose began to drop under pressure of the release and suddenly the beautiful blue curve of the Earth rolled up into view in the windscreen and O’Hara, behind him, let out an explosive ‘Oh!’ while Petrovski and Wong echoed it—peering over her shoulders to see better. Bear gave another control burst in the opposite direction which stopped their motion and they all sat looking with immense satisfaction at the mother world for a minute or two. There are a limited number of things in man and nature that will take your breath away, the first view of the mother world from this height was one of them.

  Bear’s finally did breath and his breath appeared in front of his mouth. It was getting colder.

  “Are those heating blankets still working?” Bear asked.

  Wong paused a moment and then answered.

  “All green so far.”

  Loose bits had begun to float around the cockpit. A pen almost hit Bear’s eye before he grabbed it.

  “We are weightless! How cool is THAT!” Petrovski yelped from the back like an excited puppy.

  “What about our pressurization?”

  He heard Wong tapping keys behind him.

  “OK . . . there is an amber light on the right vent readout, probably icing up, but OK for now. The blanket we put on there shows its warming the vent, but the temperature gauge on the vent says otherwise.” His XO replied. “Something’s broke.”

  Bear simply nodded. The expression ‘Good enough’ was nearly a definition of Q-Kink. One broken thing was simply par for the course.

  “Swell! What’s the remaining power like?”

  “83%”

  Bear nodded again with some satisfaction, the additional capacitors they had added this last round had increased their range considerably from the first test flight. He made his decision.

  “Let’s risk it again.”

  Jeeter sat up straight as if to take the yoke and then realized that this leg no longer involved him. He was the atmosphere pilot—out here piloting was . . . all about Bear and Petrovski in the back. He lay back in his chair interlocking his fingers over his belly letting his eyelids droop in mock weariness to enjoy the luxury of just riding as a passenger.

  “Where to, Bear?” Petrovski asked from the back while Bear brought the nose up and away from the planet so that only stars showed in the window.

  Bear pointed out the window ahead.

  “That-a-way. Not too far . . . say 2000 clicks or so.”

  Someone hammered on a keyboard while making entries in the back.

  “Ready.” Petrovski said without drama from behind the pilot’s stations, though Bear could hear the excitement in his voice.

  “Do it.” Bear said for want of anything better.

  The world outside the plane flickered and they were looking only into the depths of space again. They looked at all the stars for a couple minutes and then Bear began to work his thrusters again. The Earth’s globe swam into view again from their rear, but they were noticeably further away from it this time. Bear grunted, his best imitation of ‘Caveman’ Craig.

  “Power?” Asked Phelan again into the silence.

  “62%.” This time it was Wong answering from behind him.

  “Great.” Bear said quietly. “Stand by to do it again, but shorten the burst of power and shoot to take us only 1000 kilometers this time. We need to learn to control this better and practice is how we will do it.”

  “Aye aye, Sir.” Wong said naval military to the last.

  Bear moved the nose of the big former bomber so that it pointed more ‘down’ towards the Earth.

  “Do it!”

  The universe external to the ship flickered and they looked like they were much closer to the planet . . . somewhere near the outer edge of the Atmosphere. The effect startled them all and he could almost hear chair arms creaking behind him as people suddenly clung to their chairs to keep from falling. Bear squirted his bottles and rolled the aircraft until the windscreen looked straight down to the earth’s center. They were hovering on the edge of space over the coast of Morocco. Bear peered carefully—’Rand McNally’ wasn’t written anywhere so darkest Africa was the real deal. Certain tabloids would probably still accuse them of using a globe in a studio to fake this flight.

  “Power?” he asked.

  “48%.” Wong answered as the crew in back of him finally sorted out their roles.

  He did several more short moves just to make sure the damn thing worked reliably and to give Wong and Petrovski a chance to get the feel of it, but when the Power level reached 24% he peered down and realized they were back over North Africa again. He turned the nose of the plane towards North America.

  “Give me a declination for a return to Kansas?” This was meant for Petrovski. The center of the window pane was foggy by now he noted absently. The windscreen was the original screen from the aircraft on the inside but they had fitted a thick pane of Plexi-glass to the outside using several tubes of caulking to double pane the window and give them some insulation from the bitter cold of space. The heating blankets around the cockpit and the personnel heaters were keeping it warmer inside than out, but they were not enough to make it a tropical paradise and their breath had been fogging into the air for several minutes. The moisture from their exhalations was steadily accumulating on the one surface that had no electrical blanket warming it. The various glasses were passing the few degree of Kelvin outside through and into the interior of the glass and slowly freezing a creeping layer of frost onto it. Bear wore a heavy fisherman’s knit sweater, but not everyone had thought to dress that warmly. He caught Jeeter shivering out the side of his eye and hugging himself. Bear pulled a pint bottle of whiskey out of his pocket, took a swig and passed it around. It passed quickly from hand to hand and even Jeeter took a slug. It came back to Bear half full and he raised an eyebrow at O’Hara who’s had it last. She grinned and wiped her mouth with the back of her arm dramatically.

  “Ish Ka Ba . . . the water of life!” She used a south Dublin accent and looked smugly Celtic as if they had invented bootleg. Her eyes were as bright with hormones as with booze. Her boyfriend had taken her on a trip to outer space. That did not happen every day in the history of dating. Bear just knew that if he played his cards right he could get lucky later.

  “Eau de Vie.” Bear confirmed raising the bottle to her and taking a loud swallow and coughed. “No matches or fire please! This stuff will make a blue flame five feet from an open fire.”

  He looked at the instrument panel. Petrovski had built a primitive navigation system that displayed their relative location above the earth. It was made from off the shelf equipment probably from the aviation equivalent of Radio Shack. Their jury rigged GPS was working marginally here in space just below the orbits of the Global Positioning System satellite network, though it hadn’t working at all once they hopped further out.

  “Give it 7 degrees down.” The physicist said in answer to his earlier question. Bear grunted. The specially modified ball gauge they’d snatched from a commercial aircraft and crow-barred into the instrument panel with some tweaking to make it work without gravity had not withstood the rigors of space. In fact, it had stopped working entirely—stalling rudely upside down and indicating nothing useful.

&
nbsp; Bear laughed, and screwing the cap firmly on his three quarters empty Whiskey pint he put it on the dash wedging it against the slight slant of the glass and hood of the instrument panel so that it stood up. Their last movement had put them into the Earth’s gravity field and the fluid inside began to settle slowly to the bottom as gravity returned to its duty. Bear felt sure they were falling rapidly into the far outer edge of the atmosphere at a speed that would have scared the hell out of them if they’d any way to measure it. After a minute the amber fluid, under the distant influence of gravity finally lay more or less completely flat in the bottom of the bottle. Bear used his squirt bottles to push the nose down until he thought it looked like the surface of the liquid had shifted the needed 7 degrees from with the Earth’s horizon line and turned to the pilot. A primitive attitude indicator using a pint of whiskey was entirely in keeping with the tone of the mission so far.

  “You ready?” He asked Jeeter.

  “You bet your ass . . . my feet are blocks of ice.”

  Bear gave the big command that history deserved for the first successful space flight using the Petrovski effect He pointed at the bottle.

  “When we reenter the atmosphere keep that Whiskey at 7 degrees down as your angle of attack and hold the plane on it . . .” Jeeter looked dubious and then happy again. Flying by the seat of his pants was what aviators liked best.

  “. . . Its close enough now . . . . Do it!” Bear’s last command was aimed at the whole crew.

  The outside flickered and they were suddenly deep inside the atmosphere.

  “Holy Crap!” Jeeter cursed and reached for switches—starting engines.

  Bear looked over his shoulder, grinning at O’Hara and Wong and making exaggerated thumbs up.

  “Oh boy! I’ve seen this before. You’re gonna love it! It’s Jeeter’s patented ‘Holy Crap’ maneuver.”

  The altitude dial read 55 thousand feet.

  “Quit jerking around, boy! Help me fly this bucket!” Jeeter said through teeth clenched nearly as hard as last time.

  Bear laughed and took hold of the yoke while Jeeter restarted his atmospheric engines.

  Use makes master—he got three out of four engine pods going by the time they hit 40,000 feet above the ground, but the fourth simply refused to restart; probably a frozen gas line. This time they both avoided the Vaudeville routine of running the plane up and down the sky unnecessarily and she lay in sweet descent relative to the horizon. The whiskey barely sloshing.

  “Where are we, Antonin?” Jeeter asked over his shoulder.

  “Just off the Georgia coast—coming up on the barrier islands about on the same latitude with Savannah. That’s pretty sweet navigation for a bottle of Old Turkey, eh?” The young physicist grinned at him from the back.

  Bear smiled back.

  “Not bad at all kid. We are all of us starting to get the hang of this thing.”

  Jeeter had been bleeding altitude off the heavy machine, but once he quit answering the loud and demanding radio calls from three different air traffic control facilities startled to find them abruptly on their radars without a flight plan, he finally leveled the plane at 28,000 feet. There, he tried the still offline engine ‘one more time’ and it started up happily and purred like a kitten lying on a the chest of a big breasted woman.

  “Does she really fly?” Bear asked casually.

  “Of course she’s flying.” Jeeter replied with the irked sound of someone whose wife has just been called a whore. He caressed the control panel with the gentleness of a lover. “These babies were made to take it!”

  “Good.” Bear said. “I want you to ‘take it’ to Kansas as fast as you can. We’ll refuel her and then get ready to do it again.”

  Jeeter looked over at him with surprise on his face. He was an old man Bear suddenly realized. This kind of pace was tiring to a man with seven decades of wear and tear on him . . . especially without nosh. He made a mental note to pack in some power bars for future trips since he was a little hungry himself.

  “Of course, we’ll stop for lunch.” He added in a hasty afterthought. “I’m sure you are hungry.”

  Jeeter shrugged and replied matter-of-factly.

  “Well OK then.” He added. “I’ll need a couple hours to check the engine that would not start before we go out again.”

  Bear nodded. They were suddenly talking casually about repeated trips out into space, returning and going out again in a few hours. The world had turned upside down in that instant and no one except the five of them had noticed.

  “That works out great. The capacitors will take about three hours to recharge at full revolutions on the generators and we want to give Commander Wong time to look at the defective heater blankets that showed up.” Bear glanced back at him; he had a cell phone pressed to his ear.

  “Is Subway good for you or do you want some other product placement? I would kill for a meatball . . .” Wong asked.

  They did not make it before his hot sandwich was cold. She ran so low on fuel by Birmingham that they had to land and refuel to even make it to Kansas, landing with the needle yet again on ‘E ‘ and a twenty minute fuel light flashing aggressively on the panel. They practically coasted on fumes to a stop outside the hanger in Wichita. They were learning the price for trading fossil fuels for electricity. She was now a short range aircraft when flying as a classic airplane.

  It pissed Jeeter off no end—he continuously reminded them of that trade off by accusing them of turning his noble long range bomber into a “fucking Cessna.”

  Wong listened patiently because that is what executive officers get paid for. He kept nodding sympathetically while chomping noisily on a hoagie with gobs of tomato sauce squeezing around one of his meatballs with each bite and dribbling down his chin. Jeeter was finally grossed out by the display and went to find his own dinner.

  Four and a half hours, five hurried gut bombs, several worried conversations and multiple furious computations between Petrovski and Bear in a quiet corner and they were locked back in the cockpit and had arrived back at ‘launch’ altitude.

  “Power?” Bear asked inevitably and Wong answered as if they had been doing it routinely for life.

  “Green—100%”

  “Ready Mr. Petrovski?” Bear said formally.

  “Ready.” Antonin said more tentatively than Bear had expected. He understood roughly what Bear was contemplating, better than the others and was worried.

  “Everyone have three pair of socks on this time?”

  They had learned from their previous flight. Flying a jury rigged spacecraft added ‘socks’ to the bizarre handwritten preflight checklist along with ‘long underwear’ and “go pee-pee.”

  “Let’s do the ‘Pharaoh’s Barge.’” Bear said, the new name for the maneuver that reminded them of the carnival ride by that name, a large boat filled with seats that swung back and forth like a gigantic swing with the upward swoop very like what Jeeter did with the plane to point it at space prior to activation of the MacMoran drive.

  He did it and the sky filled the windscreen. He cut the jet engines.

  “Atmosphere engines off!” He called as the plane approached the point of falling backward.

  “Do it.” Bear said loudly to avoid mistakes.

  The world outside flickered and the stars filled the screen almost instantly.

  “We gotta work on that ‘Do it’ thing. It just isn’t snappy enough!” Wong grumbled from the back.

  “Camera’s working?” Bear asked ignoring him.

  “Roger, O’Hara said positively. She had two now . . . one for each hand—Bear was not sure why. Since her hands were full, she had tied herself to the seat with a piece of oily rope she had found lying in a corner of the hanger. She looked like the Beverly Hillbillies in space.

  Bear worked his squirt
bottles carefully, not for skill’s sake, but because the switches had a tendency to stick. If you took your hands off them carelessly the maneuvering jets would have turned the B-52 into a Slurpy machine. With a quick spit against the direction of turn he halted the aircraft’s rotational motion. The sun was slightly in sight on the edge of the port windscreen and the stars still filled the view of the crew. A large reddish one was now roughly centered in his vision around windshield center.

  “Give me the experimental solution.” Bear stated and looked hard and meaningfully over his shoulder at Antonin. The young man looked nervous, but smiled slightly, did some entries on his keyboard.

  “Experimental solution?” O’Hara asked curiously just as Petrovski caressed a key on his computer with an audible click.

  The outside world flickered and they were still looking at much the same stars but the red one seemed to be missing.

  Bear lifted his rear off the seat, leaned forward and peered over the nose below the line of sight of the rest of the crew. Jeeter was leaning back in his seat, fingers interlaced behind his neck this time . . . quite happy to relax now that he was baggage again.

  “Power!” Bear called out more loudly than needed in the quiet of the cabin.

  Wong whistled form his station in the rear.

  “69% remaining!” He answered looking up startled. “That was a whopping chunk of our power! How the hell far did we go?” Bear was working his squirt bottles and the planet below them swung into view until its complete orb was suddenly filling a quarter of the possible window space. The red star had gotten very close and it was no star. It was a planet. The planet wasn’t Earth.

  “Holy CRAP!” Was all Jeeter could think to say now bolt upright, starring and shocked.

  Bear felt O’Hara’s hand grip his shoulder crushingly. “Bear!” She squeaked involuntarily. He wondered how she managed it with both cameras strapped onto her hands.

  “Keep filming.” He said firmly and felt her hand ease up.

  Wong simultaneously let out a whoop from the back.