Michaelmas (21 page)

"For uncounted centuries before the birth of Christ, they came again and again. Some remained at the edges of the sea, in their cities, and ventured out then beyond the walls to make orchards and plough fields. And again the six-legged would come, and take the cities, and leave their seed, or stay behind and become the city people, to be taken by the next six-legged who came not from the edge of the world - no, we say that in the books, but we mean the centre of the world; the
source
of the world. The city people had time for books. The city people are obsessed with making permanent things, because they know they are doomed. The six-legged know something else. They laugh at what you say is the story and the purpose of the world. And the more earnest of manner you are, the more amusing it is, be-cause you know, really, it is all nonsense that you tell your-selves to be more comfortable. You know what the six-legged are.

When you were pushed over the edge of the western ocean from your little handhold on what was left to you of Europe, you knew better than to let the six-legged remain free on your prairies, just as we Osseti knew who must not be allowed in the high pastures.

"And so you city people of the West took for yourselves not only the edges beyond the mountains, where you have always had your places for ships and warehouses, but like Ivan you took the great central steppes, too, for a while in which you could build great things.

"Great things. Great establishments on which we all choke, and in which we sit and say the grass is gone forever. It makes us neither honestly happy nor sad to say that; it makes us insane.

There are walls, walls, all around us, and no honest tang of the wind and the seed of the grass.

We say the walls make us safe, but we fear they make us blind. We say the roof makes us warm, but we know we lie when we pretend there are no stars. I do not, in fact, understand how it is we are not all dead. Ever since Ivan, it has been inevitable we would turn the cannon on ourselves someday. It is not only a great solver of problems, it is pleasurable to see such a mighty end to lies. And yet somehow, when we should close these four so-called civilized centuries in one last pang, we merely bicker and shuffle among ourselves, and tell the lie that we are all more like brothers each day.

"I am a good boy. I have been to Muscovy and not been entirely despised by my masters in our democratic associa-tion of freely federated republics. I am friends with Slavs, with Khazaks, with Tartars, and with Turkmen. I am a civilized man, furthermore a crew commander and a fleet commander, and a doctor of engineering. When we go toward mighty Jupiter and approach his great face, when we send in the modules to slice away a little here, and probe out a little there, and suck in a fraction here and there, I shall read all the checklists at the proper time, and all my personnel and I will follow all the manuals exactly. Then the mining extractors will come in a few years, and the orbital factories, and Jupiter shall be garlanded by them. The robotized containers shall flow Earthward; there will be great changes when it is no longer necessary to rip at our soil and burrow ever deeper in our planet, and make stenches and foul the sight of heaven. This much I owe the city people and that part of my blood which comes from men who held on. And, besides, perhaps the grass will come back, and that would be to the liking of those who still live with horses. Who knows?

"I am a good boy. But I see. I see that it was perhaps needful that there be four centuries in which the six-legged were required to bide. I also see that the time is at an end.

The establishments have done their work. I would not have believed it; I would say that city ways should have killed us all by now. There are so many machines that must lie for everyone's comfort. But—" He shrugged. "Machines go wrong. With so many, perhaps there is one, somewhere, that does us good, almost by accident, and so blunts the edge of destiny.

"But, you know, I would not risk it much longer." He smiled. "We are already going very far.

Next time, we will reach distances such that the radio takes an impossible time to transmit the reports and instructions, is it not so? And the trip is so long. It becomes senseless to return all the way, or to think that someone at a microphone in Africa can control what needs to be done at Neptune, or perhaps at Alpha Centauri. Control, or even advise. No, I think it becomes very natural then to make camps out there, and to have repair depots and such, so that it is not necessary to go to the constant expense and time to go back and forth to here. If we can make food from petroleum and cloth from stone in Antarctica, I think we can find minerals and hydrocarbons in space as well, no?

"I think then we come back once in a while if it is still here; we will come back for new recordings of
Les Sylphides,
and we shall pay for them with gems snatched from the temples of Plutonian fire-lizards, say, or with nearly friction-less bearings, or with research data. We shall tell the Earthmen how the universe is made, and they shall tell romantic stories about us and wish they had time to leave home." Papashvilly shook his head. "Clinging is a thing a man can take pride in, I think, and there is nothing to be ashamed in it. Nothing, especially if one clings so well that nothing can dislodge him. Nevertheless, I have stood on Mount Elbrus and looked northeast, Lavrenti, and from there I could only see as far as one of Timur's hazarras could ride in a week.

And I said to myself : I, too, am six-legged." He had put down his empty glass. "Goodbye, alcohol,"

he had said. A few polite words more and it was time to go. Papashvilly had put his hands on Michaelmas's arms and shaken him a little, fondly. "We shall see each other again," he had said, and had gone up to his room.

Domino said: The European Flight Authority has deter-mined the cause of Watson's crash."

Michaelmas sat up. They were coming out of the hills, now, and whirling down the flats, leaving a plume of finely divided dust along the shoulder of the highway. "What was it?"

"Desiccator failure."

"Give me some detail."

The most efficient engine working fluid is, unfortunately, also extremely hygroscopic. It's practically impossible to store or handle it for any length of time without its becom-ing contaminated with water absorbed from the air.

The usual methods, however, ensure that this contamina-tion will stay at tolerable levels, and engines are designed to cope with a certain amount of steam mixed into the other vapours at the high-pressure stages. Clear so far? All right; this particular series of helicopter utilizes an engine originally designed for automobiles produced by the same manufacturing combine. The helicopter cabins have the same basic frame as the passenger pod and engine mount of the automobile, the same doors and seats, and share quite a bit of incidental hardware. This series of helicopter can therefore be sold for markedly less than equally capable competing machines, and is thus extremely popular world-wide among corporate fleet buyers. The safety record of the model Watson was flying is good, and indicates no persistent characteristic defect. However, this is not true of an earlier model, which showed something of a tendency to blockage in its condenser coils. They froze now and then, usually at high altitudes, causing a stoppage of working fluid circulation, and consequent pressure drop followed by an emer-gency landing or a crash due to power loss."

"Power loss," Michaelmas said. "Like Watson."

"But not quite for the same reason. This is a more recent model, remember. In the earlier ones, it had been found that the downdraft from the helicopter rotors, under certain conditions of temperature and humidity, was creating cold spots in the coils, and causing plugs of ice. This was not a defect in the engine as an automobile engine. So, since it was economically impractical to redesign or to relocate the engine, the choice was between thermostatically heating the coils to one degree Celsius, or in making sure there was never any water in the working fluid passing through the coils.

"Option One resulted in performance losses, and was therefore not acceptable; one reason the helicopter applica-tion worked so well was the steep temperature gradient across the coil. So they went to the other choice; they installed a desiccator. This is essentially a high-speed pre-cipitator; exhausted vapour from the high-pressure stages passes through it en route to the coil. The water vapour component is picked off and diverted below one hundred degrees Celsius into a separate reservoir, where it is elec-trically superheated back to about one hundred twenty degrees and vented into the atmosphere as chemically pure steam. The electrical load is small, the vent is parallel to the helicopter's long axis so that some of the energy is recovered as an increment of forward motion, and the whole thing has the sort of simplicity that appeals."

"But the unit failed in this case," Michaelmas said.

"It has happened only twice before, and never over Alpine terrain in gusty wind conditions.

These were its first two fatalities. What happens if the electrical heating fails is that the extracted moisture vents as water rather than steam, gradually forming a cap of ice, which then creates a backup in the desiccator. The physics of it all then interact with the engineering to rupture the final stage of the desiccator, and this creates a large hole in the plumbing. All the high-pressure vapour vents out through it, in preference to enter-ing the condenser, and half a cycle later the turbine has nothing to work with. Result, power loss; furthermore, the percentage of water required to have it happen is much less than is needed to create condenser freeze-up. You can be almost sure that any change of working fluid, even a fresh one right out of a sealed flask, will have picked up enough."

"A very dangerous design,"

"Most add-on new parts have to compromise-fit the basic hardware, and have to add as little as possible to total unit cost, since they inevitably skew the original profit projec-tions. But as it happens this is a rather good design. The electricity comes from a magneto, gear-driven by the output shaft. The wiring, which you would expect to be the weak spot, is vibration-proofed, and uses astronautics-grade insu-lation and fasteners. It is also located so that no other part can rub through it, and is routed away from all routine ser-vice hatches so that fuel-loaders, fluid-handlers, and other non-mechanics servicing the vehicle cannot accidentally damage the unit. The desiccator has its own inspection hatch, and only certified mechanics are shown how to operate the type of latch used."

They were clearly targeted on Control Tower now; star-ing forward with his eyes half-focused, Michaelmas could see the structure larger than any of the others, dead ahead and apparently widening out to either side of the tapering white thread of highway. He glanced back through the rear window; they were being followed by a short caravan of trucks. The lead unit, a white, ground-hugging Oskar with shooting platforms collapsed against its sides like extra accumulators, carried the sunburst insignia of Mr Samir's crew.

"Then what happened?"

"The European Authority found one wire hanging."

Michaelmas nodded to himself, then grinned humour-lessly and looked around for a moment.

Everyone was busy doing something or nothing. "What did they think of that?"

"They're not sure. The connection is made with a device called a Pozipfastner it snaps on, never opens of itself, and nominally requires a special tool for removal."

"Nominally?"

"The fastener sells because it's obviously tamperproof; any purchasing agent can demonstrate to his supervisor that the connection can't break, can't shake loose, and can't be taken apart with a screwdriver or a knife blade. The special removal tool has two opposed spring-loaded fingerlets that apply a precise amount of pressure to two specific points. It's an aerospace development.

But any mechanic with any experience at all can open any Pozipfastner by flicking it with his index fingernails. It's a trick that takes almost no practice, and most of them do it; it's much quicker than using the tool."

"And I presume anyone on any aircraft service crew knows how to work the special latches that only certified mechanics understand."

"Of course. How could anything get done on time if the nearest man couldn't lend a hand?"

Michaelmas pursed his lips. "What do you make of that wire?"

"Sabotage. The AEV really thinks so too, but they can't bring themselves to accept the idea.

Nevertheless, the unit flew without incident early this morning from a charter service to meet Watson. It was parked while Watson held a meeting with his network's local people, but it certainly wasn't serviced during that time. While Watson was talking, someone deliberately opened that hatch and then either used the factory tool or did the fingernail trick. I suppose it might have been someone demonstrating knowledgeability to an acquaintance. I suppose that someone might have forgotten to resnap the connection before remembering to close the hatch all nice and tidy. There might be some reason why such a person chose to demonstrate on a Pozipfastner that could only be reached by opening an inconveniently located hatch, bypassing scores of others more accessible. The AEV has already drafted an order; henceforth, the desiccator circuit must be wired to an instrument-panel-failure telltale light, or the model's airworthiness certificate will be can-celled; all existing members of the type are grounded imme-diately for inspection of quote potential spontaneous failure endquote and installation of the warning light, and so forth.

The manufacturer has already filed an objection, citing unreasonable imposition of added cost, since there are sev-eral hours' labour involved, but that's
pro forma
so they can file a compensation claim against the Common Market authority.
Und so weiter."

"What about the police?"

"The AEV is thinking of speaking to them about it."

"Will they?"

The chief examiner's against it, and he's the man on the spot. Some of the headquarters bureaucrats are a little nervous about what could happen if Interpol ever learns they've concealed evidence. But the examiner's point is that any physical evidence—fingerprints, shreds of coat sleeve, theatre ticket stubs, accidentally dropped business cards (I'm quoting him; he's a sarcastic person when questioned in his decisions)—was incinerated in the crash. There's no hope of tracing the saboteur. What they have is a loose wire. And the loose wire is an excuse for circulating an order he's wanted put out ever since a mechanic did leave one hanging last year; if they bring in the cops, the manufacturer will just shrug and legitimately claim again that it's not equip-ment failure. Furthermore, the pilot and the broadcaster were both voluntarily in dangerous professions; and besides, we can let them at least accomplish one last good thing. So it's better all round."