by Ben Bova
“Yeah. They just towed the last one out to the Smithsonian on a barge. A beautiful hunk of flying machine like that riding to its final resting place on a converted garbage scow.”
That’s engineers for you. Our careers were hanging by a hair, and he’s upset over a piece of machinery.
“Beautiful, maybe,” said Tommy Rohr. “But it was never a practical commercial airliner. It could never fly efficiently enough to be economically viable.”
For an engineer, Rohr was unnervingly accurate in his economic analyses. He’d gotten out of the dot-com boom before it burst. Of the five of us at the lunch table, Tommy was the only one who wasn’t worried about losing his job—he had a much more immediate worry: his new trophy wife and her credit cards.
“It’s just a damned shame,” Wisdom grumbled. “The end of an era.”
Kurtz, our bushy-bearded metallurgist, shook his graying head. “The eco-nuts wouldn’t let it fly supersonic overpopulated areas. They didn’t want sonic booms rattling their neighborhoods. That ruined its chances of being practical.”
“The trouble is,” Wisdom muttered as he unwrapped a soggy sandwich, “you can build a supersonic aircraft that doesn’t produce a sonic boom.”
“No sonic boom?” I asked. Like I said, I was the newcomer to the APT group.
Bob Wisdom smiled like a sphinx.
“What’s the catch?” asked Richard Grand in his slightly Anglified accent. He’d been born in the Bronx, but he’d won a Rhodes scholarship and came back trying to talk like Sir Stafford Cripps.
The cafeteria was only half filled, but there was still a fair amount of clattering and yammering going on all around us. Outside the picture window I could see it was raining cats and elephants, a real monsoon downpour. Something to do with global warming, I’d been told.
“Catch?” Bob echoed, trying to look hurt. “Why should there be a catch?”
“Because if someone could build a supersonic aircraft that didn’t shatter one’s eardrums with its sonic boom, old boy, obviously someone could have done it long before this.”
“We could do it,” Bob said pleasantly. Then he bit it into his sandwich.
“Why aren’t we, then?” Kurtz asked, his brows knitting.
Bob shrugged elaborately as he chewed on his ham and five-grain bread.
Rohr waggled a finger at him. “What do you know that we don’t? Or is this a gag?”
Bob swallowed and replied, “It’s just simple aerodynamics.”
“What’s the go of it?” Grand asked. He got that phrase from reading a biography of James Clerk Maxwell.
“Well,” Bob said, putting down the limp remains of the sandwich, “there’s a type of wing that a German aerodynamicist named Adolph Busemann invented back in the 1920s. It’s a sort of biplane configuration, actually. The shock waves that cause a sonic boom are canceled out between the two wings.”
“No sonic boom?”
“No sonic boom. Instead of flat wings, like normal, you need to wrap the wings around the fuselage, make a ringwing.”
“What’s a ringwing?” asked innocent lil me.
Bob pulled a felt-tip pen from his shirt pocket and began sketching on his paper placemat.
“Here’s the fuselage of the plane.” He drew a narrow cigar shape. “Now we wrap the wing around it, like a sleeve. See?” He drew what looked to me like a tube wrapped around the cigar. “Actually, it’s two wings, one inside the other, and all the shock waves that cause the sonic boom get canceled out. No sonic boom.”
The rest of us looked at Bob, then down at the sketch, then up at Bob again. Rohr looked wary, like he was waiting for the punch line. Kurtz looked like a puzzled Karl Marx.
“I don’t know that much about aerodynamics,” Rohr said slowly, “but this is a Busemann biplane you’re talking about, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“Uh-huh. And isn’t it true that a Busemann biplane’s wings produce no lift?”
“That’s right,” Bob admitted, breaking into a grin.
“No lift?” Kurtz snapped.
“Zero lift.”
“Then how the hell do you get it off the ground?”
“It won’t fly, Orville,” Bob Wisdom said, his grin widening. “That’s why nobody’s built one.”
The rest of us groaned while Bob laughed at us. An engineer’s joke, in the face of impending doom. We’d been had.
Until, that is, I blurted out, “So why don’t you fill it with helium?”
The guys spent the next few days laughing at me and the idea of a supersonic zeppelin. I have to admit, at that stage of the game, I thought it was kind of silly too. But yet . . .
Richard Grand could be pompous, but he wasn’t stupid. Before the week was out, he just happened to pass by my phonebooth-sized cubicle and dropped in for a little chat, like the lord of the manor being gracious to a stable hand.
“That was rather clever of you, that supersonic zeppelin quip,” he said as he ensconced himself on a teeny wheeled chair he had to roll in from the empty cubicle next door.
“Thanks,” I said noncommittally, wondering why a senior engineer would give a compliment to a junior MBA.
“It might even be feasible,” Grand mused. “Technically, that is.”
I could see in his eyes the specter of Christmas-yet-to-come and the layoffs that were coming with it. If a senior guy like Grand was worried, I thought, I ought to be scared purple. Could I use the SSZ idea to move up Anson Aerospace’s hierarchical ladder? The guys at the bottom were the first ones scheduled for layoffs, I knew. I badly needed some altitude, and even though it sounded kind of wild, the supersonic zeppelin was the only foothold I had to get up off the floor.
“Still,” Grand went on, “it isn’t likely that management would go for the concept. Pity, isn’t it?”
I nodded agreement while my mind raced. If I could get management to take the SSZ seriously, I might save my job. Maybe even get a promotion. But I needed an engineer to propose the concept to management. Those suits upstairs wouldn’t listen to a newly-minted MBA; most of them were former engineers themselves who’d climbed a notch or two up the organization.
Grand sat there in that squeaky little chair and philosophized about the plight of the aerospace industry in general and the bleak prospects for Anson Aerospace in particular.
“Not the best of times to approach management with a bold, innovative concept,” he concluded.
Oh my God, I thought. He’s talked himself out of it! He was starting to get up and leave my cubicle.
“You know,” I said, literally grabbing his sleeve, “Winston Churchill backed a lot of bold, innovative ideas, didn’t he? Like, he pushed the development of tanks in World War I, even though he was in the navy, not the army.”
Grand gave me a strange look.
“And radar, in World War II,” I added.
“And the atomic bomb,” Grand replied. “Very few people realize it was Sir Winston who started the atomic bomb work, long before the Yanks got into it.”
The Yanks? I thought. This from a Jewish engineer from the Bronx High School for Science.
I sighed longingly. “If Churchill were here today, I bet he’d push the SSZ for all it’s worth. He had the courage of his convictions, Churchill did.”
Grand nodded but said nothing and left me at my desk. The next morning, though, he came to my cubicle and told me to follow him.
Glad to get away from my claustrophobic workstation, I headed after him, asking, “Where are we going?”
“Upstairs.”
Management territory!
“What for?”
“To broach the concept of the supersonic zeppelin,” said Grand, sticking out his lower lip in imitation of Churchillian pugnaciousness.
“The SSZ? For real?”
“Li
sten, my boy, and learn. The way this industry works is this: you grab onto an idea and ride it for all it’s worth. I’ve decided to hitch my wagon to the supersonic zeppelin, and you should too.”
I should too? Hell, I thought of it first!
John Driver had a whole office to himself and a luscious, sweet-tempered executive assistant of Greek-Italian ancestry, with almond-shaped dark eyes and lustrous hair even darker. Her name was Lisa, and half the male employees of Anson Aerospace fantasized about her, including me.
Driver’s desk was big enough to land a helicopter on, and he kept it immaculately clean, mainly because he seldom did anything except sit behind it and try to look important. Driver was head of several engineering sections, including APT. Like so many others in Anson, he had been promoted to his level of incompetency: a perfect example of the Peter Principle. Under his less-then-brilliant leadership, APT had managed to avoid developing anything more advanced than a short-range drone aircraft that ran on ethanol. It didn’t fly very well, but the ground crew used the corn-based fuel to make booze that would peel the paint off a wall just by breathing at it from fifteen feet away.
I let Grand do the talking, of course. And, equally of course, he made Driver think the SSZ was his idea instead of mine.
“A supersonic zeppelin?” Driver snapped, once Grand had outlined the idea to him. “Ridiculous!”
Unperturbed by our boss’s hostility toward new ideas, Grand said smoothly, “Don’t be too hasty to dismiss the concept. It may have considerable merit. At the very least, I believe we could talk NASA or the Transportation Department into giving us some money to study the concept.”
At the word money Driver’s frown eased a little. Driver was lean faced, with hard features and a gaze that he liked to think was piercing. He now subjected Grand to his most piercing stare.
“You have to spend money to make money in this business,” he said, in his best Forbes magazine acumen.
“I understand that,” Grand replied stiffly. “But we are quite willing to put some of our own time into this—until we can obtain government funding.”
“Your own time?” Driver queried.
We? I asked myself. And immediately answered myself, damned right. This is my idea, and I’m going to follow it to the top. Or bust.
“I really believe we may be onto something that can save this company,” Grand was purring.
Driver drummed his manicured fingers on his vast desk. “All right, if you feel so strongly about it. Do it on your own time and come back to me when you’ve got something worth showing. Don’t say a word to anyone else, understand? Just me.”
“Right, Chief.” I learned later that whenever Grand wanted to flatter Driver, he called him Chief.
“Our own time” was aerospace industry jargon for bootlegging hours from legitimate projects. Engineers have to charge every hour they work against an ongoing contract, or else their time is paid by the company’s overhead account. Anson’s management—and the accounting department—was very definitely against spending any money out of the company’s overhead account. So I became a master bootlegger, finding charge numbers for my APT engineers. They accepted my bootlegging without a word of thanks and complained when I couldn’t find a valid charge number and they actually had to work on their own time, after regular hours.
For the next six weeks Wisdom, Rohr, Kurtz, and even I worked every night on the supersonic zeppelin. The engineers were doing calculations and making simulator runs in their computers. I was drawing up a business plan, as close to a work of fiction as anything on the best sellers list. My social life went to zero, which was—I have to admit—not all that much of a drop. Except for Driver’s luscious executive assistant, Lisa, who worked some nights to help us. I wished I had the time to ask her to dinner.
Grand worked away every night too, on a glossy set of illustrations to use as a presentation.
We made our presentation to Driver. The guys’s calculations, my business plan, and Grand’s images. He didn’t seem impressed, and I left the meeting feeling pretty gunky. Over the six weeks, I’d come to like the idea of a supersonic zeppelin, an SSZ. I really believed it was my ticket to advancement. Besides, now I had no excuse to see Lisa, up in Driver’s office.
On the plus side, though, none of the APT team was laid off. We went through the motions of the Christmas office party with the rest of the undead. Talk about a survivor’s reality show!
I was moping in my cubicle the morning after Christmas when my phone beeped, and Driver’s face came up on my screen.
“Drop your socks and pack a bag. You’re going with me to Washington to sell the SSZ concept.”
“Yessir!” I said automatically. “Er . . . when?”
“Tomorrow, bright and early.”
I raced to Grand’s cubicle, but he already knew about it.
“So we’re both going,” I said, feeling pretty excited.
“No, only you and Driver,” he said.
“But why aren’t you—”
Grand gave me a knowing smile. “Driver wants all the credit for himself if the idea sells.”
That nettled me, but I knew better than to argue about it. Instead, I asked, “And if it doesn’t sell?”
“You get the blame for a stupid idea. You’re low enough on the totem pole to be offered up as a sacrificial victim.”
I nodded. I didn’t like it, but I had to admit it was a good lesson in management. I tucked it away in my mind for future reference.
I’d never been to Washington before. It was chilly, gray, and clammy; no comparison to sunny Phoenix. The traffic made me dizzy, but Driver thought it was pretty light. “Half the town’s on holiday vacations,” he told me as we rode a seedy, beat-up taxicab to the magnificent glass and stainless steel high-rise office building that housed the Transportation Department.
As we climbed out of the smelly taxi, I noticed the plaque on the wall by the revolving glass doors. It puzzled me.
“Transportation and Urban Renewal Department?” I asked. “Since when . . .”
“Last year’s reorganization,” Driver said, heading for the revolving door. “They put the two agencies together. Next year they’ll pull them apart, when they reinvent the government again.”
“Welcome to TURD headquarters,” said Tracy Keene, once we got inside the building’s lobby.
Keene was Anson Aerospace’s crackerjack Washington representative, a large, round man who conveyed the impression that he knew things no one else knew. Keene’s job was to find new customers for Anson from among the tangle of government agencies, placate old customers when Anson inevitably alienated them, and guide visitors from home base through the Washington maze. The job involved grotesque amounts of wining and dining. I had been told that Keene had once been as wiry and agile as a Venezuelan shortstop. Now he looked to me like he was on his way to becoming a Sumo wrestler. And what he was gaining in girth, he was losing in hair.
“Let’s go,” Keene said, gesturing toward the security checkpoint that blocked the lobby. “We don’t want to be late.”
Two hours later Keene was snoring softly in a straight-backed metal chair while Driver was showing the last of his PowerPoint images to Roger K. Memo, Assistant Under Director for Transportation Research of TURD.
Memo and his chief scientist, Dr. Alonzo X. Pencilbeam, were sitting on one side of a small conference table, Driver and I on the other. Keene was at the end, dozing restfully. The only light in the room came from the little projector, which threw a blank glare onto the wan-yellow wall that served as a screen now that the last image had been shown.
Driver clicked the projector off. The light went out, and the fan’s whirring noise abruptly stopped. Keene jerked awake and instantly reached around and flicked the wall switch that turned on the overhead lights. I had to admire the man’s reflexes.
Although the magnificent
TURD building was sparkling new, Memo’s spacious office somehow looked seedy. There wasn’t enough furniture for the size of it: only a government-issue steel desk with a swivel chair, a half-empty bookcase, and this slightly wobbly little conference table with six chairs that didn’t match. The walls and floors were bare, and there was a distinct echo when anyone spoke or even walked across the room. The only window had vertical slats instead of a curtain and it looked out on a parking building. The only decoration on the walls was Memo’s doctoral degree, purchased from some obscure “distance learning” school in Mississippi.
From across the conference table, Driver fixed Memo with his steely gaze. “Well, what do you think of it?” he asked subtly.
Memo pursed his lips. He was jowly fat, completely bald, wore glasses and a rumpled gray suit.
“I don’t know,” he said firmly. “It sounds . . . unusual . . .”
Dr. Pencilbeam was sitting back in his chair and smiling benignly. His PhD had been earned in the 1970s, when newly graduated physicists were driving taxicabs on what they glumly called “Nixon fellowships.” He was very thin, fragile looking, with the long, skinny limbs of a praying mantis.
Pencilbeam dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out an electronic game. Reformed smoker, I thought. He needs something to do with his hands.
“It certainly looks interesting,” he said in a scratchy voice while his game softly beeped and booped. “I imagine it’s technically achievable . . . and lots of fun.”
Memo snorted. “We’re not here to have fun.”
Keene leaned across the table and fixed Memo with his best here’s something from behind the scenes expression. “Do you realize how the White House would react to a sensible program for a supersonic transport? With the Concorde gone, you could put this country into the forefront of air transportation again.”
“Hmm,” said Memo. “But . . .”
“Think of the jobs this program can create. The president is desperate to improve the employment figures.”
“I suppose so . . .”
“National prestige,” Keene intoned knowingly. “Aerospace employment . . . balance of payments . . . gold outflow . . . the president would be terrifically impressed with you.”