by Sean Wallace
“I have a combustion chamber for a heart,” he said, fingering the surgical line. Thick staples held his flesh together. “You know what’s interesting about Industrivism, what we all just found uncanny about it? Every other ideology they’re selling out there – Communism, Americanism, Kaiserism, you name it, they all promise that you’re going to die. Spill blood for your country, or your class, or the Glorious White Race, or something. The only difference is that they all promise that the other fellow will kill you worse.
“But Industrivism, when I started reading about it, I noticed that nothing about death or blood or glorious combat was ever mentioned. It sounded sweet, so I came here and went looking for it. We all came here, just over the last month or so, for the same reason.”
Jake glanced at the pulp writer, who was smiling.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to die,” the man with the combustion chamber heart said. “We’re making tank-suits.” He hiked a thumb at Diesel. “They work fine. He doesn’t even need to dream anymore.”
“THIS IS MY DREAM.”
Jake said to the pulp writer, “Good thing it was you, eh? I bet most fellows would have to throw in a little of the old blood and guts.”
The pulp writer shrugged. “Women know a lot about blood and guts. I was just tired of writing about it.
“Mr Diesel, I’ll be pleased to write about you.”
“What about me? What am I supposed to do with all this!” Jake said, suddenly red in the face. It was fine when the pulp writer was just as confused as he was, but now she had signed on for something he still didn’t understand at all. “How come you didn’t tell me, ‘old man’? I did everything for you!” He pointed to the pulp writer, and seemed nearly ready to shove her in Diesel’s direction. “I found her for you!”
The pulp writer tensed, and deep within Diesel’s tank-suit something whirred and whirred. Finally, from the horn came the words.
“I APOLOGIZE.
“I NEEDED YOU AS YOU ARE.”
“But why?”
“CONTROL GROUP. IN THE FACTORY, BUT NOT OF THE FACTORY.”
“We’ve been working on something for you,” said the man with the combustion chamber heart. “We’re building all sorts of devices and implements, all diesel-designed if not diesel-powered. Tank-suits for men on the edge of death, limbs for vets and even spines. We haven’t gotten your thing quite perfected yet, but maybe . . . how would you like to never need to sleep again?”
Jake shivered and started to cry. The pulp writer reached into her purse for a handkerchief, and laughed when the tips of her fingers caressed the brick. She recovered the hanky from under it and handed it to Jake, who took it without a word and blew his nose into it.
Finally, Jake said, “I have to get back to work.”
“Spoken like a True Industrivist,” said the pulp writer.
Once upon a time There was a knock on the door of the second-class stateroom, but Herr Diesel’s embarrassment was not due only to his reduced circumstances but to the fact that he had been on his hands and knees, ear pressed to the ground, to listen to the reverberations of Dresden’s steam engines. An article Herr Diesel had read promised that her steam engines outputted twenty boiler horsepower at five hundred revolutions per minute, but Herr Diesel suspected Dresden’s capabilities had been overstated by its proud engineers.
The door opened, and the mate who opened it jingled the keys on the wide ring he carried. He was English, but Diesel was a polyglot and so understood the man perfectly.
“You’re to come up to the poop now, sir. There is an unfortunate issue with your accommodation.”
Diesel rose to his feet and dusted off the knees of his trousers, which was not strictly necessary as the rooms were kept clean, even in second class.
“What would the problem be, sir?”
“Well, there’s an issue with the water,” the mate said. “The water supply, I mean to say. The WCs are all overflowing, the urinals as well, so we need everyone to clear out. All the other passengers are already in the dining hall, sir, but you had not answered any previous knocks.” With that, the mate made a fist that flouted several large white walnut-knuckles, and knocked on the open door slowly, three times. Then he crooked a finger and said, “Come along then, sir.”
Herr Diesel followed the large mate out of the second-class area. Something was very wrong, Diesel knew it. He asked, “Pardon me, boy, but what is the problem with the water supply?”
“It’s the piston in the pump, sir. It got all stuck like a you-know-what in an underserviced you know where, eh?” The mate winked at his own crudeness, reveling perhaps in the reputation of sailors and the absence of any of the fairer sex as he led Herr Diesel to the poop deck.
“Why, sir, have you led me astern if the rest of the complement is in the dining hall, presumably at least enjoying some English tea, if not a glass of complimentary beer?” Herr Diesel enquired.
“Well sir, it’s a bit embarassin’ to say, but we know your reputation. You’re the famous Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the eponymous engine.We have a lot of toffs in first class, sir, and you see they caught wind of your name on the manifest, but also that you were sequestered in, erm, humble accommodation. We told them that in addition to our own capable mechanics, we’d have you take a look.”
“I see, and you’ve told me that the problem is the water pump’s piston.”
“Yes sir.”
“And this was explained to you by the German hands, or by a fellow Englishman?”
“Sir, we are all bilingual round here. Sea life, eh?” The mate winked again, crudely, and nudges Herr Diesel with his elbow.
“Then, sir, I am now convinced that you are not simply mistaken, and I have diagnosed the mechanical difficulty. It can be repaired instantly.”
“It can?” the mate said.
“Yes. You see,you mountebank, Dresden is outfitted with a pulsometer pump, a clever and economical design which takes advantage of the principle of suction. A ball valve separates two chambers, one filled with water, and the other with steam. A pulsometer pump requires no piston, and has no piston, as it depends solely on suction!”
“Suction, eh? Yes, something like that!” The fraudulent mate, in actuality a paid assassin in the employ of certain Germanic interests determined to keep the patent on Herr Diesel’s inventions the exclusive property of the sons of Goethe, launched himself at the man. But Diesel, forewarned by the inaccuracies in the thug’s narrative, had already plotted a stratagem. He ran to the right, evading the killer’s apelike arms, and secured for himself an emergency flare from the poop deck’s box.
“Stay back,” Herr Diesel cried, holding the flare before him. “Or I shall ignite it!”
The assassin paid no heed, having taken the measure of the inventor and finding the man’s courage wanting, but he had again misapprehended Herr Diesel. Diesel yanked the cap from the end of the flare, igniting it, just as he was tackled by the assassin. Flaming and tumbling, limbs coiled about one another like a pair of enraged octopodes, they rolled the length of the poop deck and fell into the churning white sea below, dangerously close to Dresden’s rudder head, where surely both lives would be lost.
Jake slipped the carbons back into the envelope, reared back like a major league pitcher, and flung the manuscript over the open transom and into the office of Espionage! a pulp dedicated to spy stories and non-fiction features about a new philosophy dedicated to anti-Communism, technological-organic unity, and physical immortality. It was catching on.
Cosmobotica
Costi Gurgu and Tony Pi
Earth gleamed like a jewel against black satin on the other side of the porthole, mesmerizing Henri Coanda by way of H-bot’s iconoscopic eyes. If it weren’t for the shadow of nightside and the whorls of white below he might even see where his mind presenced from, the peaks of the Carpathians. Romania, his home. Awe and pride overwhelmed him. This was the opposite of his catastrophic failure almost three decades ago at the Internati
onal Aeronautic Salon in Paris, when he had flown his Coanda-1910 – the first jet airplane in history – for a brief, glorious minute before crashing and burning.
Tomorrow, on June first, 1939, he would land a cosmobot on the Moon in the name of Romania. This was triumph.
Henri felt a tear roll down his face, the real face under his connect-helmet Earthside. His chrome-and-steel cosmobot had been built to copy many things his body could do, but not that.
“Dialing a course correction. Firing engines three and seven,” Tiberiu Avician radioed via his cosmobot unit, designation T-bot. The robot twisted a Bakelite knob on the bronze-and-glass flight board, a grand plaque whose perimeter was etched with stars and comets.The cosmoship Luceafarul eased into the new course correction. Tibi took T-bot’s metallic hands off the board, while Henri maneuvered H-bot back into the pilot-pod beside him. “Estimated arrival in Moon orbit: nineteen hours and fifty-six seconds. Just imagine, Henri. In a few short years SoloCorp could have mines on the Moon, perhaps even Mars!”
Henri grinned. If T-bot had real muscles under those steel cheeks, he’d see Tiberiu’s warm smile. Although two decades younger, Tibi was his best friend.
He hovered over the flight board, monitoring the glass gauges crowded around a bassorilievo of two angels trumpeting above a sun-disk display. The central glass was lit with emerald stars marking the latest flight-path between the Earth and the Moon. “Oversees says we have exactly two hours till we fall over the horizon. We need to perform a last inspection.” Henri turned H-bot’s head to the front porthole. There it was: the Moon, its scarred surface almost all that Henri could see. “Look at its splendor, Tibi. No man or bot has ever come so close to the Moon, nor seen it as we see it now.”
Henri sensed a sudden movement and turned. T-bot’s cable-snake arms were flailing uncontrollably, its bell-shaped head shuddering and twisting as though from a war of impulses inside. Henri tried to catch T-bot before he crashed into the flight board, and the two-second radio delay between command and movement was barely enough. Henri constrained T-bot and pushed it backward, as far as possible from the flight board.
“Oversees, Tibi’s in trouble. I’m coming down!” Henri sent through the frequencies. He tethered T-bot behind the pilot-pods using its safety cable, then checked the flight board one more time to ensure they were still on course. Then Henri plugged H-bot back into the pod and presenced down planet-side to the Launching Center.
He awakened disoriented inside the Navibot Sphere, dangling in the sealed chamber in his rubber harness. Once the dizzy spell passed, he pulled off his cosmobot helmet and looked to his left. Tiberiu spun and flailed uncontrollably in the harness next to him. His friend was having a seizure.
Henri unbuckled himself from his harness and dropped gently down onto the cushioned surface below. He tried to grab Tiberiu to steady him, but it was hard to approach without getting kicked or hit by Tibi’s flailing.
The door to the Sphere opened and the cosmo-jockeys, clad in padded uniforms and cushioned hats, rushed in alongside Dr Ana Aslan’s medical team. The jockeys stepped in on his behalf, their gear giving them adequate protection. Sometimes their charges would twist their bodies in the same way as their piloted cosmobots in space, and end up tangled dangerously in their harnesses. Experts in their job, the team brought down the distressed cosmonaut without injury to him or themselves.
“What happened to my son-in-law up there, Henri?” an authoritative voice asked from the door. It was Grigore Cuza, the de-facto owner of Solomonar Corporation, the mother company behind Cosmos Exploration Enterprises. Grigore was as usual a statement of power and controlled image, stalwart in his signature dark brown wool suit.
“One moment we were looking at the Moon, the next T-bot became erratic. It doesn’t make sense.” Henri said, looking desperately to Ana. “How is he?”
“I gave him a tranquilizer, and he’s stable for now,” she replied. “We’ll need to run some tests to find out what caused the seizure.”
The medics struggled to carry Tiberiu, a bull of a man, on a stretcher out of the Sphere. Henri, Ana, and Grigore followed them into Bay 1 where wires and pipes clung like webs against the vaulted ceiling.
“None of this makes sense,” Henri said with a trembling voice. “Tibi’s young, strong, and has survived far worse trauma when he was a test pilot. Is he having a reaction to the cerebralizing serum?”
“We can’t rule it out,” said Ana. “You shouldn’t have presenced back to Earth, Henri. I warned you about breaking the trances. There’s a limit to how much serum your brain can handle.”
Grigore offered Henri a glass of water, and Henri drank deeply from it. He didn’t realize how tired and thirsty eight hours of presencing had made him.
Grigore was the same age as Henri, but years of political struggle had left its mark on him. Henri admired him for being able to stand up against a multitude of opponents: the board of directors at Solomonar; the ministries; the Royal Court; the politicians of the Romanian Parliament; and, especially, all the foreign agents who tried to infiltrate, steal, and extort their way into their research secrets.
“Don’t worry, my friend, we will take good care of Tiberiu,” Grigore said. “You, on the other hand, need to finish the mission. The nations are on the brink of another war, but we can give the world a better ambition: travel to the stars.”
This had been Grigore’s crusade from the start. Who else but the Great Grigore Cuza could have assembled the brightest minds in Romania to change the world? Odobleja, father of psychocybernetics. Vasilescu-Karpen, inventor of the limitless Karpen Pile battery. Botezatu, mathematical genius. Oberth, maker of the first rockets. Ana Aslan here, whose research in brain aging led to the cerebralizing serum that made presencing possible. Even he, creator of the jet plane.The technological advances developed by the Solomonar Corporation had brought new prosperity to Europe. The latest advances in cosmobotics meant that space explorers didn’t need to worry about life support or a return trip, allowing Mankind to aim for the Moon earlier than anyone imagined, even if it was by robot proxy.
“Grigore, this dream of yours . . .”
“It can work, I know it. We’ve invested decades in this. If we lose this cosmoship, if we lose Luceafarul . . .”
Grigore’s conviction in this plan made Henri believe it, too. He had seen this beautiful dream from up there, this blue and brilliant planet. It could still be saved.
“I simply cannot recommend this,” Ana protested. “Two injections a day’s already dangerous for a man your age, and we’re not even factoring in you breaking your trance!”
“I tested each and every one of my planes myself, Ana, back when people thought heavier-than-air flight was madness,” answered Henri. “I’ll take the risk. Grigore, you take good care of my boy.”
“He’s my boy too, Henri.”
Henri’s team of cosmo-jockeys strapped him back, fit his helmet on, and prepped him for the cerebralizing injection.
“Oversees, tell your team I need them to recalculate the path as soon as possible. I’m alone now on the ship and we have little time before falling over the horizon. ”
“Understood,” came Marcela Avician’s quivering voice over the intercom. After what happened to her husband, Henri wouldn’t fault Marcela if she asked to be by Tibi’s side instead of doing her job, yet she soldiered on, with only her voice betraying her anxiety. “Our team is verifying the calculations as we speak. I’m sure that by the time you presence back into H-bot we’ll have everything we need for the next twelve hours.”
“Thank you, Marcela.” For her sake, Henri pretended that everything was all right, but the truth was, he wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
“Good luck, Henri.”
Henri presenced back inside H-bot and synchronized with its vision. It was still looking out the front porthole. He tried to move to check the flight board but couldn’t. Something was wrong with him now! Could a seizure be next? What could trigger that?
What’s going on?
T-bot was doing every gesture twice, as if to make sure things were done right. It also looked intently to the very place it was operating for a couple of seconds before doing the gesture, then another couple of seconds afterward. This was definitely not Tiberiu controlling the bot, but someone not trained for the two-second lag between the bot-pilot’s mental command to the moment the bot executed the instructions, and the two-second lag before the bot-pilot received visual confirmation that the bot performed the action.
The ship was being turned away from the Moon.
Henri looked around for a way to free H-bot, but the cabin was small and almost bare, safe for the flight board and their pods.
“Oversees, Oversees, this is an emergency! T-bot’s reprogramming the Luceafarul’s path. I don’t know how or why!”
Static.
Henri repeated the emergency call. Again, just static. Sabotage? It was likely a matter of time before the saboteur would scramble the bot-pilot channel too and then Henri wouldn’t be able to presence to the ship again.
T-bot abandoned its navigation adjustments and turned toward H-bot.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Henri asked T-bot over the interbot channel.
He heard a click, then over a clear frequency, the voice of Razvan Ilie, his machinist. “We didn’t expect you back, Coanda.”
“Ilie? What are you doing?”
“Delivering the cosmoship to those who have paid well for it. I truly am sorry, but you are just in the way.”
Ilie, inside T-bot, stood and tried to grab H-bot’s head. But again, Ilie’s lack of training showed as it pushed its legs to stand, an action that propelled it upward from its pod. It bumped into the ceiling and floated there for a couple seconds of time lag. By the time Ilie realized what he’d done wrong in zero-gravity environment, it took another two seconds for him to correct the bot’s movement. Henri could do nothing to fight back, not with its arms and legs locked into the pod—