Firefight Y2K

by Dean Ing

  “I can.”

  “I can’t afford you, either.”

  “Ah.” His answering smile was bleak now. “I suppose there’s something to be said for traveling light. We could keep it light, you know.” He got up slowly, favoring his back like an older man.

  “Looks like you’ve put in a long day, too,” she said to change the subject.

  “They seem to get longer as we get older,” he said.

  “ ‘We are all her children, and age too soon; Yet our witch-mother sea is still bride of the moon.’ ”

  A fragment of Korff; strike three. “Mister Matthews, you are now invading my privacy,” she said, staring at her plate.

  “I suppose it never occurs to you that others might miss him,” Matthews said. “Or that his work belongs to us all-even if he did dedicate it to you.”

  He had already turned away when she spoke. “He gave himself too easily to the sea.”

  Pause. Then, over his shoulder: “Maybe you’ll explain that sometime.”

  “Maybe I will. But I’m rotten company tonight, Matthews. I’m sorry.”

  He nodded and left her. Presently she withdrew a square of filmy plastic from her jacket; folded the remainder of the meat inside. “You’ll want a midnight snack before I’m done,” she muttered to the kitten, and counted out the coins for Fran’s tip.

  G G G

  It was almost ten p.m. before Vicki had enough data on the magister egg counts. It was messy work with its own special odors. She washed up, setting out a few fragments of crab for Scrapper, and carried a tray of remains into the display room.

  “Never say I’m not fair,” she muttered as she emptied the tray into Evileye’s tank. He reached one tentacle out, suckers flattening against the clear acrylic to anchor him, and sent two more of his powerful limbs after large morsels. He was in no hurry, but watched her warily as he began to feed.

  Why had she told Gary Matthews she might explain her bitter memories of Korff? It would only make a bad situation worse. It was her firm conclusion that, among the more intelligent species, the female became the giver; a genetic bias, perhaps, in caring for the young. The male, biased toward the hunt, became a selfish taker.

  She watched Evileye reach far across his tank for a remnant of C. magister with the tentacle that proved his maleness. Its underside had a faint groove from which, at mating time, a special appendage grew. This detachable pseudopod was his gift to the female. “And you wouldn’t do it unless it felt damned good,” she said, wondering for the first time about that particular tentacle.

  Big specimens of Evileye’s kind were in special demand for dissection, precisely because everything was so large. Fine structures, the optic nerve, even the circulatory and neural systems. Perhaps someone had already made a study of the nerve pathways of O. dofleini with respect to that special tentacle. If not, perhaps she would sacrifice Evileye to that end. It would be a great pleasure.

  She noted the series of faint lines, perhaps abrasions from the stones in his tank, that marked the tips of three tentacles that were most directly in line with those evil eyes. “One day soon, you may give your all for science,” she warned, and took the tray back to her office.

  The far end of her narrow office held lab hardware and the sink. Presently she began to chuckle as she completed her cleanup. It might be possible for a man as honest as Gary Matthews to admit that he had a selfish purpose in paying court to a woman-herself, for example. But even under torture he wouldn’t allow the comparison of his own flesh, his sex tentacle as it were, to that of Evileye. Still, that was clearly how it was. Basically, all he wanted was his own selfish pleasure, regardless who got destroyed in the process. Take a step or two across the evolutionary ladder and you had a cunning, highly intelligent male predator who made not the slightest effort to please anyone in his lust-driven pursuit.

  You had Evileye.

  Her wry amusement lasted until she had fed new figures into her desk computer, saved the updated data on a spare disk, and filed the disk away. Then she remembered Scrapper’s late snack, and sitting, reached for her pea-jacket. She’d forgotten to shut the door to the display room, a common occurrence. But then her gaze followed a long trapezoid of light into the big room. In the edge of the blade of light, a saffron bundle of fur gamboled, fell over its feet, reared, pounced.

  A runnel of water, a very small thing really, edged into the light. Vicki wondered if the big tank had sprung a leak, and then something else flicked into the light for a bare, ghastly, enervating instant, and in that tick of time her heart went as cold as primeval ooze.

  She knew how suddenly, and with what lethal precision, Evileye could lash out with that tentacle which now lay stretched over the lip of his tank, its tip flicking in the edge of the light, tantalizing the innocent Scrapper into mock attacks. If she screamed or bolted into the big room, she would be too late. Evileye might have been luring the kitten forward for long minutes. Noiselessly, not daring to look away, Vicki pulled open the top left drawer of her desk and groped for the revolver.

  But the cold metal object she grasped was not the revolver; it was merely a paperweight, long forgotten until this moment of mortal need. Now, straining to see into the gloom, she could see Evileye, crowded hard against the near wall of his tank, one huge eye wide, staring down at the kitten which was busily stalking the lure and did not see the second hawser-thick rope of muscle sliding along the floor behind it.

  Biting her lip, mewling with desperation, Vicki wrenched open a second drawer, then a third, and then remembered with thunderclap clarity that she’d left the goddamn revolver in her apartment a month before. In her middle drawer was a dissection knife that she used as a letter-opener. If that was all she had for an attack on a monster twice her size, then that, by God, would have to do. She leaped to her feet, grasped the heavy Nansen bottle with her free hand and prepared to toss it against the tank in the wild hope that it might prove an instant’s diversion. She took two steps, raised the metal canister, and paused.

  Scrapper had already found her goal. The kitten had wrapped both forepaws around one leathery tip, and kicked with both hind feet against the tentacle in pretend ferocity. The second flanking tentacle had reached the kitten. Slowly, repeatedly, the tip of the second tentacle rubbed the back of Scrapper’s neck, moving up between her ears and back again.

  Vicki Lorenz, her knees failing, slid against the near wall of her office, so near collapse that she dropped the Nansen bottle. At the muffled clang, Scrapper came to her feet in a liquid gymnastic, then turned again to resume her little game. Evileye, staring expressionlessly from his world, seemed equally willing. Moments later he had the kitten on its back as he tickled its almost hairless belly.

  As Vicki walked on unsteady legs into the room, slipping the dissection knife into a back pocket, Evileye moved one eye to keep her in view. Simultaneously, he slid his tentacles back with such guilty speed that one of them actually made an audible “plop” into the water. The kitten sat up and began to lick its breast.

  “You didn’t know I was watching, Evileye. So I believe you.” Her voice shook so much, Vicki scarcely recognized it as her own. “Now I see how you got all those scratches. How many nights, I wonder.”

  Now he wrapped three of his rearmost tentacles around heavy stones in the tank; solid purchase for a quick retreat. Yet he stayed near the wall of the tank, watching as Vicki stooped to pull Scrapper into the crook of one arm.

  “Scrapper doesn’t know how sharp her little claws are; why do you let her scratch you up like that? Hell, why do I? Maybe friends all have claws, now that you mention it. You just have to be willing to bleed a little.” Her voice, echoing in the big room, sounded doubly foolish. She didn’t give a damn; at least it wasn’t so shaky anymore.

  Then she laughed aloud. “Let me tell you something, Evileye; I’ve pigged out on crab, too. Maybe we should pick friends for what they’re selfish about, hm?” She didn’t really expect the big brute to take her hand when she pla
ced it in the water; and he didn’t.

  But when she squatted and eased Scrapper up against the clear plastic of the tank-the kitten did not care for its chill surface-one careful tentacle snaked out along the acrylic inside the tank, its tip moving as if in symbolic caress. Vicki placed her hand flat, fingers apart tentacle-like, opposite the appendage.

  Later she would wonder if she had imagined it; but as the tentacle became still, Evileye did two things: he opened both eyes wide, and he changed from gray to a hue that was ruddy as her own sunburnt skin.

  “That does it, buster; but it’ll have to look like an accident.”

  Among the list of emergency numbers she found Matthews, Gary. He answered at the fifth ring. “If you’re only watching Johnny Carson,” she said, “how would you like to help me out here at the lab? Yes, tonight. The sooner the better.”

  During his reply she rubbed Scrapper’s neck. Then: “It’s not illegal, but you’ll think it’s crazy as hell. . . . Okay, twenty minutes, but one more thing: you must never, ever, tell anyone.”

  She listened a moment more. Then, with a sigh: “All right then: we’re going to fishnap a two-hundred-pound octopus. Still with me? Right; fifteen minutes,” she said, laughing.

  She put down the receiver and strolled back into the display room with its horrific central exhibit. She leaned forward on the tank lip, certain that no member of O. dofleini could understand her words, saying them anyway. “I could set up subtle lighting and get videotapes; I know, don’t tempt me. Maybe I will, with one of your brothers. But not with you, Evileye. It’ll be a bitch to fake your trail, but we’ve got all night.”

  And maybe, she thought, one day she would tell the details to Gary Matthews, while sharing a London broil, or combing Agate Beach some summer evening. She nuzzled her kitten and winked at Evileye, her buoyancy an almost physical sensation. After long years of self-imposed exile in green twilight depths, she was rising now, soaring upward to the light and to her own element; to life. The least she could do was return Evileye to his.

  MILLENNIAL

  POSTSCRIPT

  Though the brain and nervous system of O. dofleini are suggestive of formidable intelligence, it will probably always be tougher to carry on a conversation with a willing octopus than with the cetaceans Vicki knew in an earlier story. We’re so alien to each other! The eyes of giant squid and octopus are very highly developed, but they didn’t develop in the same ways as ours did. That alone suggests profound differences in neural processing. The day we contact smart extraterrestrials, any experience we have along this line will come in handy.

  My hypothesis, if it’s worth that hifalutin word, is that the farther two critters are apart on the DNA tree, the harder it will be for them to empathize. Birds, we now suspect, really are the direct progeny of dinosaurs. Take one of the avian crowd that features male harems: even if we punctuated the equilibrium of that species with intelligence equal to ours, we might be hard-pressed to understand its motivations-and vice versa.

  We already know that relatively simple organisms like bees have differing local dialects within a species. How about elephants; horses; octopi? And what will happen if and when we help different non-primate species to communicate better? They do it already in basic ways, as anyone knows who has watched the family dog and cat interact.

  One other thing: I always feel like Methuselah when someone reads the previous story and asks, “So who the heck was Johnny Carson?” Maybe the next generation will ask, “What was NBC?”

  VEHICLES FOR

  FUTURE WARS

  Long before the first ram-tipped bireme scuttled across the Aegean, special military vehicles were deciding the outcomes of warfare. If we can judge from the mosaics at Ur, the Mesopotamians drove four-horsepower chariots thundering into battle in 2500 B.C.; and bas-reliefs tell us that some Assyrian genius later refined the design so his rigs could be quickly disassembled for river crossings. In more recent times, some passing strange vehicles have been pressed into military service-Hannibal’s alp-roving elephants and six hundred troop-toting Paris taxicabs being two prime examples. Still, people had seen elephants and taxis before; application, not design, was the surprise element. Today, military vehicle design itself is undergoing rapid change in almost all venues: land, sea, air, space. Tomorrow’s war chariots are going to be mind-bogglers!

  Well, how will military vehicles of the next century differ from today’s? Many of the details are imponderable at the moment, but we can make some generalizations that should hold true for the future. And we can hazard specific guesses at the rest.

  It’s possible to list a few primary considerations for the design of a military vehicle without naming its specific functions. It should have higher performance than previous vehicles; it should be more dependable; and it should be more cost-effective. Those three criteria cover a hundred others including vulnerability, speed, firepower, maintenance, manufacturing, and even the use of critical materials. Any new design that doesn’t trade off one of those criteria to meet others is likely to be very, very popular.

  It may be fortunate irony for peace lovers that the most militarily advanced countries are those with the biggest problems in cost-effectiveness. Any nation that pours billions into a fleet of undersea missile ships must think twice before junking the whole system-tenders, training programs and all-for something radically different. That’s one reason why the U.S. Navy, for example, hasn’t already stuffed its latter-generation Polaris missiles (after Poseidon and Trident, what’s next?) into the smaller, faster, more widely dispersed craft. A certain continuity is essential as these costly systems evolve; otherwise, costs escalate like mad.

  Still, new systems do get developed, starting from tiny study contracts through feasibility demonstrations to parallel development programs. There is probably a hundred-knot Navy ACV (Air Cushion Vehicle) skating around somewhere with an old Polaris hidden in her guts, working out the details of a post-Trident weapon delivery system. Even if we don’t already have one, chances are the Soviets do-and if we can prove that, we’ll have one, all righty.

  The mere concept of Polaris-packing ACVs says little about the system design, though. We can do better but, before taking rough cuts at specific new designs, it might be better to look at the power plants and materials that should be popular in the near future.

  POWER PLANTS

  Internal combustion engines may be with us for another generation, thanks to compact designs and new fuel mixtures. Still, the only reason why absurdly powerful Indianapolis cars don’t use turbines now is that the turbine is outlawed by Indy officials: too good, too quiet, too dependable. In other words, the turbine doesn’t promise as much drama, sound and fury-perfect reasons for a military vehicle designer to choose the turbine, since he doesn’t want drama; he wants a clean mission.

  Turbines can be smaller for a given output if they can operate at higher temperatures and higher RPM. Superalloy turbine buckets may be replaced by hyperalloys or cermets. Oiled bearings may be replaced by magnetic types. Automated manufacturing could bring the cost of a turbine power unit down so low that the unit could be replaced at every refueling. In short, it should be possible to design the power plant and fuel tanks as a unit to be mated to the vehicle in moments.

  The weapons designer won’t be slow to see that high-temperature turbines can lend themselves to MHD (magnetohydrodynamics) application. If a weapon laser needs vast quantities of electrical energy, and if that energy can be taken from a hot stream of ionized gas, then the turbine may become the power source for both the vehicle and its electrical weapons. Early MHD power plants were outrageously heavy, and required rocket propellants to obtain the necessary working temperatures. Yet there are ways to bootstrap a gas stream into conductive plasma, including previously stored electrical energy and seeding the gas stream with chemicals. If the vehicle needs a lot of electrical energy and operates in a chemically active medium-air will do handily-then a turbine or motor-driven impeller of some kind may
be with us for a long time to come.

  Chemically fueled rockets are made to order for MHD. If the vehicle is to operate in space, an MHD unit could be coupled to a rocket exhaust to power all necessary electrical systems. The problem with chemical rockets, as everybody knows, is their ferocious thirst. If a vehicle is to be very energetic for very long using chemical rockets, it will consist chiefly of propellant tanks. And it will require careful refueling, unless the idea is to junk the craft when its tanks are empty. Refueling with cryogenic propellant-liquid hydrogen and liquid fluorine are good bets from the stored-energy standpoint-tends to be complicated and slow. By the end of this century, rocket-turbine hybrids could be used for vehicles that flit from atmosphere to vacuum and back again. The turbine could use atmospheric oxidizer while the vehicle stores its own in liquid form for use in space. The hybrid makes sense because, when oxidizer is available in the atmosphere, the turbine can use it with reduced propellant expenditure. Besides, the turbine is very dependable and its support equipment relatively cheap.

  Some cheap one-shot vehicles, designed to use minimum support facilities, can operate with power plants of simple manufacture. When their backs neared the wall in World War II, the Japanese turned to very simple techniques in producing their piloted “Baka” bomb. It was really a stubby twin-tailed glider, carried aloft by a bomber and released for a solid rocket-powered final dash onto our shipping. The Nazis didn’t deliberately opt for suicide aircraft, but they managed something damned close to it with the Bachem “Natter.” Bachem hazarded a design that could be produced in under 1,000 man-hours per copy, a manned, disposable flying shotgun featuring rocket ascent and parachute recovery. “Hazard” was the operative word-or maybe they started with factory seconds. On its first manned ascent, the Natter began to shed parts and eventually blended its pilot with the rest of the wreckage. Yet there was nothing wrong with the basic idea and a nation with low industrial capacity can be expected to gobble up similar cheapies in the future using simple, shortlife power plants.