Firefight Y2K

by Dean Ing

  We shifted vantage points twice, getting further from the transporter as we eased toward where we thought Infante might approach. As I walked the Six carefully to keep the pneumatics quiet, my hopes went in both directions. It was like preparing for a race in chancy weather, you don’t know whether to count on rain or shine, so you choose your equipment and hope. And get the butterfly-gut syndrome. And you live with it.

  I was on the point of suggesting another move when Satterlee made a startled motion. I followed her outstretched hand and saw George Infante scrambling into his harness, not half a mile off in a creekbed. The Seven had been there-how long? I wondered if he knew we were there. It seemed he didn’t; he came up from the gully on legs, but cautiously. As the Seven approached the transporter, Infante showed less caution. Satterlee guessed why.

  I accelerated for the transporter and saw exhaust pluming from its old diesel. “He has it running,” Satterlee shouted, pounding on my bubble. “He took our man out! Go, goddammit, go!”

  I reached the road and went to wheel mode just as Infante vaulted from his Magnum. It was already on the transporter, but he hadn’t chocked or strapped down. When he saw us he stiffened in recognition as if from electric shock. We were already too near for him to reach the cab-over. I wished we’d waited until he got started; a Magnum can outrun a transporter and eat holes through it.

  Infante opted for his Magnum, pouring back into his harness as we neared shooting range. Ever see a quarterhorse rear back? When Infante rolled backward off that ramp, he went to walk mode so fast the Seven actually went up on her hind legs before setting off down a ravine.

  Satterlee risked a shot and missed, nearly falling with the recoil. We exchanged glances as I whirled the Six on wheels down a gentler incline, hoping to snag Infante with something. Both of us saw the terrible, bleeding lump of meat wearing tatters of a police rain slicker. Infante had run over the stakeout man. I hoped it was after he was already dead.

  I broke radio silence and called for everything in Oregon. Then I brodied as hard as I could. Infante had neatly suckered me into building up velocity downhill and had his magnificent, deadly goddamn Seven running backward toward the road.

  I stayed in wheel mode but without pausing to think about it, momentarily engaged the legs to stilt us over a narrow gully. It saved us a few seconds. I dared not give Infante time to select a tree or he would have a bat and we, the baseball. We reached the road two hundred yards behind Infante and both Magnums went howling toward the main highway, turbines like sirens. Satterlee somehow put a shot directly into Infante’s rear video sensor. To me it looked as though the sensor had simply exploded. Infante raked his duralloy gangsaw beam back, elbowed it, and made it a shield for his bubble. I saw a long clean scar appear along the beam as Satterlee fired again. She might as well have hit a bridge pillar.

  Infante saw the patrol cruiser’s flasher before we did; he crashed off into the brush parallel with the road. I shouted a warning on my com set. Too late. As the cruiser rushed toward us, Infante swept his extensor beam out across the road and the driver barely had time to duck before a set of wailing gangsaws took away his windshield and roof. They tell me the officer lived.

  I had gained over a hundred yards. On a hunch, I motioned Satterlee out of the way and manipulated my beam out ahead about fifteen yards. What would I do if I were Infante? Run that third axle back as a feint to make us swerve, maybe. I hoped he would, so I could hook onto it and set my brakes.

  Craning his head back as he reached the road, his rear video only a memory, Infante saw my strategy. Then he saw the campers. Ahead, parked in disarray along the shore of a small lake, a group of Oregonians were going about the lovely business of fishing, rain or no rain.

  Satterlee shouted something. All I caught was “ . . . hostages!” If Infante got among those poor devils he could grind all but one to powder and still have himself a ticket out. He turned sharply but had to avoid an arroyo. I stilted it, by God, something I could still teach him. Then I held my breath and drove straight through a grove of aspen. Both Infante and I saw that I had the momentum. I might, could, I surely would ram him scant yards from the nearest camper. I shouted for Satterlee to jump.

  Angling his course off behind the parked vehicles, Infante unlimbered a silenced handgun and fired through his bubble. A mistake; the polymer turned the slug and gashed his own bubble. Then he swung his duralloy beam out as if to sweep three kids and a woman toward him. It probably would kill them outright, at the rate he was moving. Racing parallel with him, a covey of horrified campers screaming between us, I lashed my extensor out and parried his with a jolt that nearly tore me from my harness. With a cry of anger, Satterlee flipped clear of my rear wheels. Her riot gun got thoroughly graunched, but it proved one thing: the slug it fired in the process blew out the right rear tire on my remoting axle.

  Infante’s gangsaw extensor waved in an arc, bent at its elbow. In one wild swing his gangsaws cut a swath through the back of his bubble. My parry had sideswiped the length of his duralloy beam, taking limit switches with it. For the first time, now, Infante had a real mechanical malf. Those switches prevent the beam from swinging back to hit the vehicle-but only when they work. Infante ducked away from the shards of plastic that spewed around him in his bubble, then turned away from me as he stopped the extensor beam.

  I thought he intended to run, but instead, he fired at me through the hole his own gangsaws had made. A hole appeared in my bubble with the toll of a muted bell. The slug stopped on its way out. I thrust my gangsaw beam ahead as a shield and tried to accelerate, intending to ram him from behind. Part of me was scared puckerless, remembering what Infante would do to a man. And part of me, looking past that bullet-hole, just didn’t give a good goddamn. Now I saw I could engage his rear axle if he slowed, or pursue him toward the lake if he went ahead. In either case he was beyond taking hostages. I rolled smashing through a litter of unattended camp equipment, boats and all. Infante ran for it in wheel mode, not realizing the trouble I had just to move straight with that deflated rear tire. I saw I would have to give it up, and went to walk mode faster than I thought possible. The Magnum Six leaped up on her legs with hard pneumatic coughs and I ran her straight at him. Still on wheels, looking back without his rear video, Infante laughed as he easily outdistanced me.

  And found himself boxed.

  He faced the lake on the right side, and an almost straightup bluff on the left. Fifty yards ahead, the bluff came to the water’s edge. It was thirty feet up, much too vertical even for a Magnum. And directly behind, I loped the Six with a spine-jarring stride. She staggered, but she was highballin’.

  Infante risked going into the water to get around the bluff. Another mistake. It was a steep dropoff and even with her right-hand legs on full extension, the Seven tilted over at a dizzy, crazy angle. Her turbine swallowed water and seized explosively with a flashing exhaust spray. But he still had his air plenums. Popping his bubble back, Infante set his gangsaws howling as I raced down on him.

  I ran my duralloy beam out and above him like a great arm to wave him back as he leaped and clawed up the brush-covered precipice, money spilling from his jacket. His gangsaws moaned just over my bubble and continued the arc Infante had programmed. He saw my beam and made a lightning decision to dive for the lake. With no limit switches, his beam elbowed at precisely the wrong angle, George Infante met his own gangsaws in mid-air.

  Kneeling at the lake’s edge, I lost the meal Scortia had fed me. Satterlee had the decency to let my brief spasm of heaves and tears pass before she approached. I washed up in the icy clear water and stood shaking, judging the path of Infante’s murderous-and suicidal-weapon. It was still swinging in the same arc. There was no danger to me, so I climbed the chassis to the ruined bubble and flicked off the pneumatic valve switches. I did not look at the gangsaws again.

  Satterlee refused to let me rig a sling on the Seven until a crew arrived to make the necessary police videotapes. I couldn’t argue
with a bruised miz who had, in a way, poked out Infante’s eye when she obliterated his rear video. I owed her. I would’ve kissed her if she hadn’t been a cop. After the first camera passes, the police asked me to move the Six back a bit, and I made myself think about something else. It had been gnawing at me since my first inkling that Infante himself was erratic.

  And in a half-hour I isolated the malf in the Magnum Six. I erased all calibration programs, including mine and Infante’s, and carefully recalibrated myself. The campers watched me with suspicion, unaware that I was only making a checkout. Well, maybe I played a little, running backwards and essaying that slanting gait Infante had used.

  When Tom Kelley arrived in the police copter, I had good news. “Hey, your new solid-states in the Seven did more than you thought,” I hailed him. “They damped out a malf that we put in, ourselves.”

  As I explained, Kelley furrowed his brow. “But it doesn’t work that way,” he complained. “Dammit, it won’t program a random error, Keith.”

  I nodded. “I didn’t say it was random. In some complex way it was predictable and not a random aberration. It was picked up and integrated by the multigraph functions monitoring his behavior. I checked out in the Six first; but remember, Infante was the first one you calibrated closely because his reflexes were so sharp.”

  Kelley was silent for a long moment. “So I built in a malf that the damping circuits cured in the Seven. Huh! I’m smarter and dumber than I thought I was. Well, we don’t know enough about psychophysics, but systems theory should’a told me,” Kelley grumbled. “When you have a sane man who overrides a master control, the real master control is the man. That’s why you were better in the Six than Infante was.”

  “Come on,” I said, remembering Infante’s panache in a Magnum.

  “Infante was flashy; you were predictable, Keith. Your manual override was really a mental override. That makes a malf fundamentally a feedback-correctable item. No wonder Infante thought the Six was nuts, it was feeding his own aberrations back to him amplified-worse than it was for you. That kind of feedback might push a man over the brink; I dunno. I do know that the original malf was Infante.”

  I gazed out on the lake, where calm gutty Meta Satterlee watched police gather most of eighty-five thousand dollars in bills, like leaves on the quiet water. “I wonder if his malf could’ve been traced,” I said.

  But the real world is not a neat circuit. As the OHP captain predicted, we never learned how, or even if, George Infante managed so much by himself. Nor what plans he had for the Magnum Seven.

  Kelley’s crystal ball wasn’t bad, either. By the time I trained Scortia’s operators, there were Magnums enough to go around and orders enough to please him. Kelley got his bonus in media coverage. And I got mine. It cost Howard Scortia a bundle to get his pocketwatch duplicated.

  MILLENNIAL

  POSTSCRIPT

  I had no idea, when I wrote “Malf,” that fourteen hundred miles away and twenty-five years later I’d be a resident of my protagonist’s little Oregon town, remanufacturing a vehicle called the Magnum. The similarity stops with the name, however. My real Magnum has only four wheels, weighs 1300 pounds, and uses carbon fiber, balsa/glass sandwich, and a bit of titanium. It has no turbines, no walking mode, and definitely no chainsaws. In any encounter with any self-respecting Oregon fir tree it would lose, big-time. So much for the real world!

  A lot of tree harvesters are available now. So is a machine called a “spade,” which can dig out a fifty-foot tree with a largely intact root ball almost eight feet across. The spade can tote that tree to another location and replant it. Technology isn’t always the environment’s enemy.

  Ready for the real coincidence? I have a friend named Kelley, a grad student when I wrote the piece, and in a field largely unconnected with engineering. We lost track of each other for many years but we met again recently. Kelley is now an executive in a firm that produces very large advanced vehicles with lots of wheels, pneumatics, solid-state controls, and oh yes: turbines.

  Perhaps I should write a story in which I get younger, more talented, better-looking and very, very rich. Stay tuned . . .

  THE FUTURE OF FLIGHT: COMES

  THE REVOLUTION

  Excerpted from The Future of Flight, by Dr. Leik Myrabo and Dr. Dean Ing

  All futures are not created equally.

  Of course, all of those futures are educated guesses. Guessers who assume that all long-established trends must continue will, with Thomas Malthus, often show us gloomy futures; evolution with a vengeance. Yet we know that trends are not always continuous.

  The extinction of most dinosaurs, about 64,000,000 years ago, was a natural revolution on Earth; a sudden discontinuity in a very long-established trend. Evidence is mounting that a sizeable asteroid struck this planet with such violence that the ecological carpet was suddenly jerked from under the feet of the great reptiles. Early mammals benefited from this sudden change and a different future evolved. The human race is a beneficiary.

  Occasionally a new idea rekindles the human spirit, reverses trends, and creates real changes in the quality of life. When the change is discontinuous, a sharp break from predictable step-by-step evolution, we have revolution. It may be political and violent, or it may be technological and peaceful.

  The future we “create” in these pages has an unfair advantage over some others because ours plugs in the revolutionary stuff. We think that is proper because, when people’s backs are against the wall, they turn to any revolutionary help that’s handy. As it happens, much of our world is nearing disaster in its energy needs-and we are not finding permanent peaceful solutions in conventional ways. Some leaders are beginning to look hard for revolutionary solutions (in several senses!). We’re in luck because, among others we will describe, there is one that left the realm of “pure” science fiction around 1960 and it does not require violence or a new government. But it may cause a few governments to evolve in useful ways.

  Revolutionary change is relatively rare. It’s also less predictable than the weather, which explains why leaders often greet it with gritted teeth. The best they can do is rush to see how the new revolutionary change might affect them because, after the revolution, evolution takes over again, and that’s more predictable.

  Thanks in part to outrageous claims by advertising flacks, we have just about wrung all the juice from the word revolutionary. Every new kitchen gadget, diet fad and teaching aid is a candidate for the tag, despite the fact that almost all of them evolve, step by painstaking step, from previous ideas without much discontinuity. The marvelous airships of Alberto Santos-Dumont are often mislabeled this way.

  Santos-Dumont, an eccentric little Brazilian, became the toast of Europe in the 1890s with his dirigible (which means directable, or steerable) balloons. As a boy, he had read the science fiction of Jules Verne to his saturation point, tinkered with engines on his father’s coffee plantation, and built toy hot-air balloons of the type pioneered by the Montgolfiers a century earlier. Arriving in Paris in 1891, he found that cigarshaped balloons had already been tried; hydrogen and other gases were used to inflate some craft, and one Henri Giffard had tried driving balloons with a steam engine. The young Brazilian suspected that existing gasoline engines might be better.

  Santos-Dumont saw the high-tech hardware evolving, and put it together with care and courage. By 1899, after gradual improvements, he was putt-putting over Paris rooftops, steering his little dirigibles where he liked. The Zeppelins and blimps of a later day owed much to the daring and gadgeteering of this tiny aeronaut. His autobiography reveals how he proceeded with detail improvements until, years before the Wright Brothers succeeded at Kitty Hawk, Alberto Santos-Dumont could circle the Eiffel Tower. He won worldwide renown, and deserved it; but his work was not revolutionary.

  We cite the case of Santos-Dumont to show the steady march of evolutionary design, and to applaud it. But the future of flight involves something more: truly revolutionary discoveries
, technologies that are discontinuous from earlier work where Santos-Dumont’s was not.

  Now we take a case that is revolutionary, even though its discovery was predicted in Santos-Dumont’s day. The Russian futurist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, wrote during the early years of this century that “ . . . energy may even be supplied to a missile, from the Earth, in the form of radiation of one or another wavelength. . . . This source of energy is very attractive to contemplate, but we know little of its possibilities.” Of course, there’s a huge gulf between predicting something, and demonstrating that it works. Tsiolkovsky risked his reputation by predicting revolutionary changes, with only the sketchiest notion how those changes might be achieved. Many scientists of his time dismissed him as a candidate for a strait-jacket.

  Then Albert Einstein, in 1917, wrote a paper on stimulating radiation. On the cover of one issue of Gernsback’s Wonder Stories in 1932, science fiction fans saw a propulsion beam; but no one had any firm ideas how power might be beamed without tremendous losses in the beamspread. (Every time the area of the beam doubles, its intensity must drop by half.) During the 1930’s at least one man, the inventor Nikola Tesla, pursued his dream of wireless transmission of power.

  Tesla proved himself a genius in his early years with Edison but later became secretive and scornful of criticism. We know that Tesla sought to beam power, but we must suspect that he never succeeded.

  But by 1954, experimenters managed to amplify microwaves through a scheme they called “Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.” They soon reduced this jawbreaking phrase to its initial letters: “maser.” Then one of the discoverers, Charles Townes, co-wrote a paper suggesting that the scheme should also work for radiation of visible frequencies: an “optical maser.” This created a lot of excitement in laboratories, as scientists worked to demonstrate light amplification by stimulating emission of radiation. Of course they soon adopted the short term: “laser.”