“Capie and I are having a, uh, disagreement,” Paul unwillingly admitted.
Merlin snorted in polite amusement. “No surprise there. Let me guess. It’s about your game plan, right? The one for dealing with Errabêlu. About what you want to do next, heh?”
Paul blinked several times. “Yes. How did you know?”
But Merlin merely smiled shrewdly and waved a negligent hand in the air. “Let me make a further guess. You want to do some particular thing. And she wants to do something totally different, right?”
Paul’s right eyebrow notched up a little. “Your crystal ball is right on target. So, what’s going on?”
“It’s really quite simple,” came the casual response. “Your Master Plan? From Capie’s point of view, it is NIH—Not Invented Here. You didn’t consult with her when you put it together. You’ve been making all the decisions, dictating what to do next and where to do it. So far, your wife has gone along with you. But she is an independent person, your Capie. She wants a say in what’s going on.”
Paul finished wrapping the box of processors, tossing the empty roll of tape into a garbage can before starting a new box, this one for computer power supplies. But his hands were on automatic pilot while his mind considered Merlin’s words carefully.
“She asked why we couldn’t stay in California, instead of going to Australia.”
“A perfectly legitimate question.”
Paul shook his head in denial. “No, it’s not. Not really.” And then he rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Look, Australia has all the raw minerals needed to help me build the spacecraft. Sure, some of that is here in California and a little more in other parts of North America. But it’s incomplete, mostly hit and miss, especially the titanium. On the other hand, Australia has it all!” He stomped around, looking for another roll of packing tape and found one on the work bench. “Sure, I could bring in everything else I need from other countries, Central and South America for instance. But it would take longer, use a heck of a lot more magical energy for the portals, cost a great deal more. It would probably double— maybe triple the time needed to build the ship.”
“And that, my friend, is only the first part of the plan that she would question,” Merlin added with a faint snicker. “Would she not?”
Paul looked up with a dumbfounded expression, and then sighed in acknowledgement. “You’re right, I’m afraid. Yes, of course she would. There’s no telling how much she would want to change, how—and yes, of course, the next thing she’d want to get rid of is the trip to Mars!” he finished, crossing his arms firmly over his chest.
Merlin offered a bemused smile. “I see! Let me make yet another guess. You consider Mars to be an indispensible part of your plan, right? And not open to negotiation?”
“Correctamundo,” Paul asserted, with a clenched jaw. “No trip to Mars means no super-talismans. No super-talismans means no army of Scotties. No army means absolutely no chance at winning this war. We might as well commit suicide and save Errabêlu the effort in hunting us down and killing us. At least that way no Normals would get hurt in the process.”
“Why not tell her all of that?” Merlin asked coolly, with a gleam in one eye.
Paul snorted and pounded a fist into an open palm. “I can tell that you’ve never seen
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where Odo explained to Quark why he had never “coupled” before. He said, and I quote, because it involved “too many compromises.” It’s going to be hard enough as it is, surviving the upcoming war. Compromises would mean the continued slavery of the human race.”
“If you explain it logically to her—“
“Logically? Hah!” scoffed Paul as he threw the roll of tape against the garage wall, the sudden slamming noise startling Daneel.
“That’s one thing that Marie taught me, Merlin,” Paul snarled, his nostrils flaring. “Logic, my friend, is a worthless weapon to use in an argument of emotions.”
“Ooh, that’s a good one. I may quote you on that one,” Merlin observed as he clasped his hands behind his back again. “Your cynicism is getting better. So, what are you going to do, if you aren’t prepared to compromise on your game plan?”
Paul gritted his teeth in frustration and closed his eyes. “I haven’t a clue.”
SECTION IV
THE OUTBACK
SIXTEEN
Balcony Bar and Restaurant
Maritana Street
Kalgoorlie, Western Australia
August
Monday 5:14 p.m. AWST
The Balcony Bar and Restaurant, part of the Palace Hotel, was a two story structure on Maritana Street, one of the main thoroughfares through the city. With a beaming smile and a “G’Day,” the waitress, Ella, welcomed Capie and Paul and found them a table with a floral covered tablecloth next to one of the front windows on the second floor. From that spot, the two of them could look out past the covered balcony and see the light pedestrian and vehicle traffic on the street below. They studied the menus for a few minutes, noting a great many similarities to foods in the States but also quite a few differences.
There were a few other people having an early dinner around them, but the atmosphere was un-crowded, relaxed, and the smells in the air enticing.
Daneel was safely ensconced back in Room 208 of the York Hotel on Hannan Street, sound asleep, at least for the next hour or so. His late afternoon ‘nap’ was a daily routine, since he didn’t seem to need more than an hour’s sleep every twenty-four hours. The only way Paul and Capie survived was tag team babysitting during the night. That and a lot of magical spells to keep themselves awake when watching the A.I. And just to make sure everything was okay right now, Paul had created a small magical display of the sleeping A.I. on his fake cell phone, now lying on the table. If anything happened, he would know immediately.
Capie was frowning as she looked out the window.
“It’s so brown and dusty here,” she complained.
Ella arrived and handed out their drinks.
Paul smiled and waved a spoon at the window. “Compared to Illinois and Wisconsin, yes. But compared to Southern California, ‘Captain, this is the garden spot of Ceti Alpha six!’” he said, quoting from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn.
“And what would we like to eat tonight?” Ella asked, holding pencil to paper.
After they gave their orders, the waitress left, taking the menus with her.
“So,” Capie said, running a fingertip around the rim of her glass. “You signed a lease on a commercial building here in town. And the utilities will be turned on tomorrow. And you’re going to use that place as our base of operations.”
“It’s not perfect, no,” Paul granted to her with a small tight smile. “It’s a bit exposed here, from a security point of view, because we have neighbors and we are in a small town. On the other hand, any Oni or wizards in Australia will be near the capital city of Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory, literally on the other side of the continent, which is roughly 2,000 miles away. Kalgoorlie is ready made for us. We have power, water, a large building to operate in, and a good sized lot. The town gives us access to food, supplies, and quite a few materials. And Western Australia has almost all the mineral wealth we need. Titanium especially but other minerals too including copper, gold, silver, vanadium, manganese, iron, carbon, aluminum, tantalum, and platinum. And too, Australia has rare earth elements like scandium, yttrium, and gadolinium. On top of all that, Australia is one of only two places on Earth with a considerable quantity of komatiite rock, which we will need for the super-talismans we’re going to make. The only thing we need that Australia doesn’t have is the pallasite meteorite.”
His wife quietly studied the slow moving traffic on the street below them.
The waitress dropped off an appetizer and some homemade bread, and stopped at the next table to take an order.
Capie looked back at Paul. “So you are going to be busy building the ship. What am I going to do?”
“We don’t have that much cash with us,” Capie pointed out.
“No, we don’t. Please set up an account here in town, under our names of Peter and Catlin Neumann, and transfer in $100,000 from our new Cayman Island account. We can always get more if we run low.”
The waitress moved away from the other table.
“But you are not going to build the ship in the building we leased, right?”
“No, it is too small a building and the ship too large,” Paul noted absently, chewing on a bite of his stuffed sausage roll. “We need the building as a buildup area for the most part. I can build parts for the ship and we can store the supplies there that you buy. Now, for the ship, I intend to set up a construction site southwest of town, in the pit of an open mine, after I pump the water out of it. I’ll assemble the ship there.”
“Why do we need to build a ship at all?” she asked as she tilted the salt shaker back and forth between her hands on the tabletop. “Couldn’t we just portal to Mars? It would save a lot of time.”
Paul cocked his head to one side, studying the expression on her face closely.
“Yes, it would, dear,” he agreed cautiously. “And the answer to that question is both yes and no.”
“I hate that answer.” And then she dolefully sighed. “Why is it both yes and no?”
Taking a quick sip of his drink, Paul considered how to word his reply.
“As you know, a talisman is not the source of the power we use for magical spells. The talisman it just an amplifier.”
“Right,” Capie said, griping a bit. “It’s the Earth that provides the power. You told me that already.”
“Correct. So yes, with the appropriate talisman, the Earth can easily provide the energy necessary for us to portal to Mars.”
Capie blinked twice. “So why…oh, I get it. But not the power to portal back.”
“That’s right. To portal back, we would need Mars to provide the energy for the portal and Mars is not a good energy source. The gravity there is only one third of Earth’s. It has virtually no magnetic field to speak of, no Van Allen belts. It gets only half the sunlight that the Earth does, and it’s cold. And the jury is still out on whether it has a molten core or not. Even if it does, it must be really small. So, yes, we could get there. But getting back to Earth is, ah, problematic.”
“Building a spaceship is going to take a long time,” Capie grumbled in a low voice.
“It won’t be as bad as all that, my love,” Paul said, in a positive tone. “McDougall’s talisman is going to be of enormous help to us. And time is one of the primary reasons that we will use a retired airliner converted into the spacecraft, in order to speed up the process.”
Capie produced a weak thin smile. “Tell the truth now. I’m sure you would rather have built one of your own, from scratch.”
“You are quite right about that. A spacecraft designed and built from the ground up would have been far superior,” Paul admitted without a hint of modesty. “Ah, but the time element! Two or three years for the design, another two to construct it. No, a converted airliner might be crude, but it will get us there and save us a lot of design/construction time. And, as I was saying, McDougall’s talisman will help out a lot. Likewise, you will have one of the Oni talismans or two, if you like, and that will help you quite a bit with the shopping—”
“But you still need to put together your super-talisman too, right? And your final hardware design for the A.I.?” she challenged him. “You can’t leave Daneel as a free-floating collection of circuit boards dangling a bunch of wires around like that.”
“Well, yes, you do have a point, I agree,” Paul answered with a shrug as he picked up another stuffed sausage roll. “I’ll whip up something for Daneel, as a temporary arrangement. An A.I. final design will just have to wait until after we get to Mars. And I don’t intend to hold the super-talisman ceremony until we are nearly ready to leave Earth. The energy released by that spell is going to panic all the wizards of this planet. They’re going to turn Earth upside down looking for us and I would prefer not to stick around and let them accidently find us.”
She sighed and looked down at the table. “Fine. Do you want me to go with you to Alice Springs tomorrow to buy the airplane?”
“Yes, please,” Paul responded with a grateful smile. “That’s first on our list of things to do. Then on Wednesday you can start the buying spree.”
Capie waved a negligent hand. “Great. Lots and lots of shopping. I’ll need your help some, working up a shopping list.”
He reached over the table to gently squeeze her hand. “You’ve got it, CB.”
• • • •
Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory and with a population of just under 30,000 people, lay nearly dead center of the Australian continent and in a very desert-dry climate. Which made it the perfect location for an aircraft boneyard.
Paul was quite familiar with such installations. One of the largest such boneyards in the world was located in Mojave California, his ‘hometown.’ Hundreds of planes of all sizes and types were shipped and stored there in the Californian desert, mostly because they had reached the end of their service life or had become uneconomical to maintain in an operational status. Ostensibly, the majority of those planes were supposedly stored against the day that they would be needed again, but in practice, this was almost never the case. Eventually, each such plane typically found itself stripped of all serviceable parts and then scrapped for materials.
Alice Springs had, fairly recently, been selected to join the short list of such locations around the world. And, although the selection of aircraft stored there was, as yet, rather limited, they did have one plane that Paul was very much interested in. A Boeing 737-400.
Capie and Paul arrived via portal on Tuesday morning, at 9 a.m. sharp near the front entrance of the Asia Pacific Aircraft Storage Ltd office. They were careful not to let anyone observe them arriving in such a fashion.
Daneel ‘floated’ along in midair behind them, electrically powered through a spell that Paul had cast, drawing on all the sunlight energy freely available in the unclouded blue skies in the Australian outback. On his monitor screen, he was hopping up and down, having learned to walk only a few hours previously. With each bounce, he clapped his hands and gleefully giggled. Another spell Paul had placed around the A.I. would keep any Normal in the area from either hearing the toddler screeching in delight or seeing the hardware hovering in thin air without any visible means of support.
“How do I look?” Paul asked Capie, twisting slightly back and forth in front of her.
Wearing a bright green and yellow flowered Hawaiian shirt, with baggie white shorts that barely reached his knees, together with white tennis shoes and socks, dark sunglasses and an Aussie canvas snap up hat, Paul’s appearance was decidedly odd.
“Like a gauche tourist,” she replied, rolling her eyes.
“That’s the intent,” he said with a huge grin. “By the way, I love that business suit on you. Shall we go in?”
The outer office was modern and air conditioned, with glass and stainless steel everywhere in sight. With a flick of his wrist, Paul moved Daneel over to a far corner of the room, out of the way.
An obvious receptionist, a middle aged brunette, stepped around her desk and approached them.
“Good morning,” she greeted them with a frozen professional smile. “By chance are you Paul DeWitt and Karen Knight?”
Paul nodded, a huge smile on his face. “We are them, yes indeed, little lady.”
“Mr. Street is in a teleconference right now. If you’ll take a seat, he’ll be with yo
u shortly. Can I get you anything to drink?”
“Drink!” screeched Daneel, clapping his hands some more and laughing. “Mommy, drink!”
“No thanks,” Capie replied with a small smile and a shake of her head. Paul declined as well, and they took two thinly padded metal chairs across from the receptionist’s desk. The woman failed to notice Paul waving at Daneel.
“Hi, Daddy!” the A.I. cackled, then returned to his game of hopping up and down.
They only had to wait a couple of minutes before a stocky man in a business suit emerged from the inner office. His smile was courteous but professional as he extended his hand to Paul.
“Mr. DeWitt? Ms. Knight? I’m Corey Street. Pleasure to have the two of you here. Care to step into my office? Can we offer you something to drink? No? Right this way.”
“Drink!” yelled Daneel again.
The inner office was pretty typical for a mid-level manager, with a standard desk, filing cabinets, two chairs for visitors, a desktop computer, a few licenses hung on the wall, and two family pictures on the desk.
Corey dropped into his office chair, waving a hand at the two thinly padded metal chairs on the other side of his desk. Once again, Paul put Daneel into a corner, away from any accidental contact by the Normals in the office.
“Is this about the emails and letters that you sent?” the company agent asked. “If so, I’m sorry to say that my answer is still the same. The 737 is not for sale. I’m under contract to sell it to another party. I’m sorry.”
But Paul already knew this would be Corey’s answer and was prepared to cope with the problem.
“I quite understand your contract, sir,” Paul answered pleasantly. “You’ve promised to sell the jet to a startup airline firm in Southeast Asia. They intend to restore it to limited service as a cargo plane. The good news is that I have the solution and it’s quite simple.”
Corey cocked his head to one side. “You have a solution? And what would that be?”
Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) Page 20