Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2)

by Glenn Michaels

  Capie gulped, her mouth dropping open. “How?! What you’re suggesting…”

  “Is beyond the scope of what a Normal can do, true,” acknowledged Uncle Sam with a small nod.

  “Or a group of Normals or even an entire government. Ah, but a wizard, with all the resources you have!” Tia added with a knowing grin.

  “Oh, wow, Mom!” Daneel breathed. “Florence Nightingale, Jonas Salk, and every other famous doctor in history all rolled into one!”

  “Is that really possible?” Capie faintly asked, one hand gently touching her throat. “What you’re suggesting…”

  Paul beamed, from ear to ear. “Merlin and I talked about it once, looking for a cure for you! A potion, or an elixir of some type! To cure disease of all types! Ah, think of it! What a fabulous and grand idea!”

  “It takes my breath away,” Capie said, swallowing hard. “The scope of it! The audacity!”

  “You wanted something useful to do,” Paul reminded her, with a sly smile. “And, in your spare time, you can still help with the cooking.”

  She scoffed and gave him a wicked stare. “You do know how to spoil a moment, don’t you?”

  “Is that a yes?” Tia asked.

  Capie blinked several times, reaching up with the back of her hand to wipe away a tear. “I…just don’t know yet if it’s even theoretically possible. But yes, I will look into it. If I can do it, then I will.”

  “Good show!” Uncle Sam declared, beaming with pride.

  Daneel clapped his hands together in glee. “That was truly delightful, Uncle Sam! Aunt Tia! I enjoyed every moment of it. Can we do it again?”

  • • • •

  After checking out of the resort in the early afternoon, Paul went straight back to the Staging Area, more than a bit anxious now to finish the construction of the ship just as quickly as possible. And he now had an added task to find some sort of emergency backup, just in case the ship failed them. On that score, he had an idea or two but they would take time to investigate.

  Capie took Daneel to the York motel room, plugging him into AC power and the internet to allow him to do his research. And, with Tia’s help, she earnestly started her research for a comprehensive cure for all human disease.

  All three of them were saddened a day later by the latest event in Israel, which was enough to depress anyone. Ten extremist terrorists, armed with assault rifles, had ambushed and massacred three busloads of tourists along with their drivers at the foot of the Masada Desert Fortress, the second most visited tourist site in all of Israel. Sixty-nine dead, five wounded, two of which were not expected to live.

  Events in the Middle East were still building toward war. Taking Hamadi out of the picture hadn’t changed anything.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Blue Monkey Restaurant

  Kalgoorlie, Australia

  September

  Thursday 7:21 a.m. AWST

  Capie finished spreading orange marmalade on her toast, putting the knife back on the table and leaning forward a little to nibble on one edge.

  They were having breakfast in a window booth at a local restaurant that they had not yet tried, a place with the unlikely name of the Blue Monkey. So far, both she and Paul liked the café a lot. It was not as convenient as the York’s restaurant, but sometimes a change of venue and menu was desirable.

  Since Daneel didn’t eat, he had no opinion. He merely watched indifferently as he floated above and to one side of the table, cloaked from the Normals in the restaurant, courtesy of spells from Paul.

  “Just to let you know,” Capie said between bites of her toast and from a cup of peach yogurt, “that I probably won’t be in Kalgoorlie at lunch time today. Most likely I’ll be in Perth getting started on the magical potion project.”

  Paul paused while chewing his sausage roll to listen to her statement and then resumed.

  “I’ve decided to name it the MBE Project, and the target potion as the MBE Drug,” she continued, ignoring her husband’s unresponsiveness. “And, before you ask, MBE is an acronym. I know how fond of acronyms you are. MBE stands for ‘Magic Bullet Elixir.’ Do you like that name?”

  Her husband practically choked on the sausage roll before grabbing his glass of orange juice to help swallow his food. When he was able to breathe again, he took several deep breaths, the look of consternation fading from his expression.

  “I’ll take that for a ‘yes,’” Capie declared with a sardonic smile. “Elixir seems an appropriate word to use, since it is defined as a magical potion, a preparation supposedly able to prolong life. So, MBE it will be. Oh, and I’ll be taking both Daneel and Ariel-Leira with me.”

  Paul managed to swallow another sip of orange juice and give her a suspicious look. “Daneel, I understand. But why take Ariel-Leira?”

  Capie dug the last of the yogurt from her cup. “We’ve sort of hit it off, the two of us. Oh, I know that Merlin and Tia don’t approve of her very much. But Ariel-Leira has given me several suggestions that I like. She’s useful. I like her.”

  Since Paul could think of nothing intelligent to say in response, he shrugged and cautiously took another nibble of his sausage roll.

  “So,” Capie muttered conversationally in an attempt to bring the conversation around to something that Paul would talk about. “A little birdie tells me that you plan to build fifty thousand Scotties.”

  Paul produced a sly smile and waved a fork at the young “stoolie” floating a few feet away from him. Gazing back at Capie, he stabbed some scrambled egg with his fork. “Yes, your source is correct. Fifty thousand Scotties is the goal. Of course, we first have to find and fix a certain serious problem in the software. The, uh, one that seems to be lethal to Daneel.”

  Capie looked thoughtfully out the front window at some of the passersby. “That’s a lot. I had no idea you were planning to build that many. That really is an army.”

  Paul shrugged as he chewed and swallowed his bite. “Since I don’t know how many Oni there are, I’d rather have a few too many Scotties than not enough.”

  She leaned forward intently. “A few days ago, you said that there will be new Scotties to nurse-maid? So they won’t all be copies of Daneel?”

  Paul snorted in response. “No offense, Daneel, but I’d rather not have fifty thousand copies of you running around loose.”

  “Neither would I,” Daneel responded scornfully. “And no offense taken.”

  “Good,” Capie said, with an approving tone of voice. “It would be too confusing that way. So what is your plan?”

  Paul sipped on his orange juice while he marshaled his thoughts. Putting the glass down, he smiled at the two of them.

  “Do either of you remember the Star Trek episode, ‘I, Mudd?’” he asked.

  “The one with all the robots?” Daneel replied first. “I am NOT a robot!”

  “No, you are not,” Capie agreed. “But I think I see what my husband is thinking. You want to create several series of Scotties, is that correct? And then number them?”

  “Excellent guess,” Paul observed, then pointed his fork again at Daneel. “He would then be Daneel 1. When he duplicates himself, there will be a Daneel 2, a Daneel 3 and so forth.”

  Capie laid down her toast as she considered the idea. “How many different series would you have and how would you build them?”

  Paul chuckled. “Yes, I have given that considerable thought. The more series of Scotties that we have, the fewer the number in each series. On the other hand, for each new series, we have to create a new individual, in the same fashion that we created Daneel. That means each new progenitor of a series must start as a baby and then grow up. Depending on the number of progenitors involved, that could become very labor intensive, caring for all of those infants.”

  “Oh, I see,” Daneel perceived. “Five progenitors, as you call them, is not enough. That would be ten thousand copies of each.”

  Paul nodded. “I agree. Ten thousand are too many of each of you. However, to reduce the
number in each series, we will have to have more series. I propose that we have fifty different series of one thousand Scotties each. I think that’s a good balance. Yes, it might be challenging nursing forty-nine more new lines of Scotties, but it is doable.”

  “I’m glad that you already worked that out,” Daneel noted. “It was starting to worry me a little. Fifty thousand copies of me floating around seemed like too many.”

  “Yes, on that score, I agree,” Capie noted, with a wink of one eye.

  “Careful there, Mom!” Daneel admonished her. “I personally think the galaxy would implode if there were fifty thousand copies of anyone to have to deal with!”

  Capie laughed, which made Paul feel pleased. Things were back on track and all was right with his family again.

  “And will each one of the fifty thousand Scotties get a super-talisman too?” Capie asked casually as she set down a now empty yogurt cup.

  “Yes, they will,” Paul acknowledged, with a quick nod. “Just like the one that we are trying to build now. However, I’ve decided that I don’t want to call them super-talismans,” he said with a set jaw.

  “Oh, I agree. That sounds so, well, wimpy,” Capie agreed. “Have you picked out something else? Oh, I see that smug grin of yours. What are you thinking?”

  “As you know, the Air Force loves acronyms. And the term Scottie—”

  His wife waved a hand to stop him. “Yes, yes, I know all that. What did you decide to call them, if not super-talisman? Another acronym, right?”

  “Yes, I am. The first term I considered was SIT or Super Isotropic Talisman.”

  “Lame.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. I played with several other possibilities but finally decided that a different approach was needed.”

  Capie grimaced and said, “You’re determined to drag this out, aren’t you? So, what did you decide?”

  “To use the first letter of fictitious energy sources. And in science fiction, there were a lot of candidates for me to use. Ultimately, I decided to use cold fusion, hyper matter from Star Wars, unobtainium—”

  “From Avatar? Or from The Core?” Capie asked with a smile.

  “Ah, so you know both of those! But the term ‘unobtainium’ covers a lot more ground than just those two movies. It’s a general term for any material or device that is very difficult or even impossible to obtain. So it also covers things like tyllium from Battlestar Galactica, dilithium crystals, transparent aluminum and pergium from Star Trek, redstone from Minecraft, adamantium and vibranium from Marvel Comics, Kryptonite, and a whole host of others.”

  “And Mithril, Octiron and Orichalcum too,” muttered Capie thoughtfully. “From the fantasy novels Lord of the Rings, Discworld, and The Elder Scrolls, among others. You’re right. Unobtainium does cover a lot of ground. Go on. Now you’ve got me curious.”

  “To continue the acronym, Tesseract from Avengers, ZPM from StarGate, particle accelerators from Ghostbusters, antimatter from Star Trek, and human power from The Matrix movies. Putting them together spells—”

  “Chutzpah,” Capie said with a groan. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Is that what you are really going to call them?”

  “I think it has a certain je ne sais quoi,” Paul claimed with a defiant grin.

  “You have a true engineer’s sense of humor,” Capie complained with a frown.

  “Why, thank you, dear.”

  “It wasn’t meant as a compliment,” she pointed out playfully. “So, what’s on the schedule for this morning? I have a little time before I plan to head off to Perth.”

  “How about a quick tour?” he answered her, trading a question for a question. “To show you the status of the ship. You haven’t seen the latest things I’ve done to it.”

  “I’d like that,” she conceded with another smile. “It probably needs a woman’s touch at that.”

  At the look on his face, she laughed and gave him a playful wink.

  • • • •

  With an incredulous expression on her face, Capie watched as Paul levitated the first piece of the ship’s hull plating into place, encapsulating the titanium in a pure bubble of argon gas and then, with multiple flashes of sputtering metal, welded it down to the longerons of the ship’s tail assembly.

  Paul rubbed his hands together and stepped up next to her.

  “Well, what do you think so far? Do you like it?” he asked expectantly.

  “I don’t know about Mom, but I like it!” declared Daneel, from a nearby table.

  Capie couldn’t seem to find the right words to describe how she felt about it. “It’s certainly…different.”

  His reaction surprised her. He laughed, reaching out to hug her briefly.

  “Yep, it is that,” he agreed readily enough. “I sort of thought it might catch you by surprise.”

  “Surprise is not the right word,” she said disparagingly with a wave of the hand. “When you told me that you were building a spacecraft, I expected something…well, I just wasn’t expecting you to stand the plane on its tail like a rocket ship from the 1950’s! You’ve got to be kidding me! Are you serious?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Yeah, Mom. I’d like to know that too.”

  She turned to Daneel. “Don’t you both gang up on me, now. It’s just that I expected something a lot more modern! And knowing you, I would have guessed from a science fiction movie! Something more like Star Wars or Star Trek or Firefly or even Space 1999 for crying out loud!”

  “Oh, but this was in a sci-fi movie,” Paul counter argued. “Well, actually several of them, like Destination Moon, Rocketship X-M, and Abbott and Costello Go to Mars.”

  “Abbott and Costello?! But why?” she asked with a bemused smile. “When you have so many other, more modern choices to choose from, why oh why did you pick spaceships from the 1950’s?!”

  “That’s easy. Because all the modern sci-fi spaceships are wrong for our situation.”

  “Wrong?” she asked, blinking in surprise. Of all the things he could have said, his answer truly surprised her. “How are they wrong?”

  “Again, that’s easy,” he replied smugly. “Because they are all designed like airplanes instead of spacecraft. They are all oriented in the wrong direction. Even the Enterprise.”

  Capie paused to think about what he was saying. “The wrong direction?”

  Paul waved his hand, creating a holographic display in midair and in it, an airplane. “Certainly. An airplane flies along pretty much at a constant speed, with gravity perpendicular to the direction of flight. Therefore, it makes sense to put the seats at 90 degrees to the direction of forward motion, in the direction of gravity. But, that does not make sense in a spacecraft.” With a wave of his hand, the display changed. A rocketship was now in the display, a huge plume of fire from the tail. Inside the ship, a man in a spacesuit was sitting in a cockpit at the front of the craft. He held up an apple and then let it go, looking very surprised as it fell the length of the ship behind him instead of down to his feet.

  “In space, the effective gravity is opposite to the direction of the ship, as long as the spacecraft is accelerating forward. Therefore, our design needs to take that into account. To be more like the Luna of Destination Moon than an Eagle or the Serenity, a Battlestar, or a Federation starship.”

  “Very logical, Dad,” Daneel observed. “You’d make a pretty good Vulcan, you know.”

  Paul half bowed. “Why, thank you, son.”

  Capie looked as if she had eaten something sour. “But, don’t all those ships have artificial gravity or some such, to compensate for that?” she asked.

  “Supposedly, yes,” Paul answered with a smirk. “And, on top of that, they all have inertial compensators too, to compensate for the acceleration effects due to the ship’s thrust. Well, that’s just Hollywood dramatic license nonsense. No engineer is going to design an interplanetary ship that way. Waste of energy. Waste of materials. Waste of money and resources. Especially when it is so
much easier to turn everything 90 degrees and let acceleration provide the artificial gravity needed. Bingo, all sorts of engineering problems solved and resources saved. This,” and he pointed at the tall, finned ship in front of him, “is a far more efficient design and easier to build. Sometimes, newer is not necessarily better.”

  Capie’s eyebrows went up on that. “I’m going to remind you that you said that one day.” Then she turned and looked back up at the ship. “It looks so…out of date and obsolete.”

  Paul couldn’t resist a quote. “‘She'll make point five past lightspeed. She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid. I've made a lot of special modifications myself,’” he said smugly, quoting Han Solo from Star Wars.

  “Good one, Dad!” Daneel said with a chuckle.

  Capie shook her head in return. “As I remember that scene, Luke said ‘What a piece of junk!’” Then she paused a moment. “Wait a moment. What about the Space Shuttle? Hmm?”

  Paul continued grinning. “It just proves my point. The shuttle was designed as an orbital and reentry vehicle only. In orbit, it’s in zero-g, and when it’s landing, it’s like an airplane. It is not designed as an interplanetary spacecraft using continuous thrust.”

  She took another look at the ship and squinted at it. “So, what’s her name?”

  The question caught Paul totally off guard. “Her, ah, name?”

  “You named her already, Dad?” Daneel asked, all excited. “Ooh, I know, the Millennium Falcon, from Star Wars VII!”

  Capie gave her husband one of her patented looks. “Never try to fool your wife. Come on, give. What’s her name?”

  “Her name, huh?” Paul responded, rubbing his chin while looking sheepishly at the ground. “Well, ah, yes, I, ah, sort of have been thinking about a name, of course. And, ah, after due consideration of all the names used in science fiction, from Callisto by J.J. Astor in his novel “A Journey in Other Worlds” in 1893 all the way up to—”

  “Please, not another litany,” she implored him, rolling her eyes. “The name, please.”