The Vorkosigan Companion (19 page)

He and Cordelia Naismith trudged off across that alien plain and never looked back.

All four of our children have been nourished on
Star Trek
,
Star Wars
,
Dungeons & Dragons
, the occasional con, and, of course, books. Lots of books. My crawling infant is now married and the father of two, and murmuring of going to graduate school to study Creative Writing, while Lois's daughter is becoming an artist in metals. Lois and I each have tucked away one moldy old copy of
StarDate.

And sometimes, small but distinct on the horizon, we can still glimpse Excalibur, the One Ring, or the
Enterprise.

Falling Free
is a futuristic tale of a faraway world, populated mainly by people, even if some have some superficial changes in their bodies.
Falling Free
is also a brief look into welding engineering, a not-so-well-known engineering discipline that is the science of joining materials, primarily metals. Welding engineering, at least as taught at Ohio State University in the mid-1960s, was a combination of electrical engineering, mechanical and civil engineering, metallurgy, coupled with some courses taught inside the department that looked at the unique and sometimes transient aspects of these engineering disciplines on a weld or a welded structure.

Falling Free
is one of the few novels that the American Welding Society has ever offered for sale. There is even a copy in the library of the Edison Welding Institute in Columbus.

Falling Free
is dedicated to our father, "Dad," Doctor Robert C. McMaster. He was a student, a teacher, a researcher, a writer, a speaker, and a performer. As I read the book, I looked for and found many of his characteristics in Leo Graf. He had the same dedication to and belief in his ability to use engineering to solve social problems. He had the same sense of ultimate duty to integrity, truth, and honesty. He had the same disdain for people who would use technology to achieve other than ethical and responsible goals. He shared Leo's disdain for management and accountants who, it often seemed to Dad, killed good ideas before they could really be tested. He had the same narrower view of the world, but one which in its simplicity was perhaps more accurate and certainly more provable.

Many of the characteristics of Leo I would attribute to our father. For example, in the classroom where he is teaching the quaddies and the repeated radiograph of the good weld baffles the quaddies, who just can't comprehend the possibility that anyone could do anything dishonest. I can also relate to the loudly delivered "TURN THE POWER OFF" as a quaddie was about to send a stream of electrons off into space. That was how Dad would remind a student of any particular safety precaution that it appeared he was about to violate in one of the many laboratory classes to which we were regularly subjected in our five years at school.

The expression "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach" was one heard around the school and often applied to undergraduate students encountered throughout the university. I don't know if the addition of "Those who can't teach go into administration" was a
Loisism
or had a different source.

The Welding Engineering Department at Ohio State was an unpolished gem—something that seemed lost on the college administration. It was unique in the country, being the only school accredited to grant a degree in welding engineering. Our class was only thirteen people, the one before just six, making ours the largest ever. OSU was the only school in the country that graduated WE students. I was never sure if that meant that the welding engineering was something no one else wanted so there were no clones, or if it really was the best of the best, but industry paid the highest average starting salary to our graduates of any school at OSU.

I took the five-year Welding Engineering course. I took a number of classes from my father. He was the best and most enthusiastic teacher under whom I ever had the opportunity to study. The first day of the first class is indelibly embedded in my memory—he came in, introduced himself, rubbed his hands together (he was too polite to spit on them first), and said "Let's go to work." And we did.

The Welding Engineering Department was always underfunded. One of the classes that was taught by my father and in which I participated dealt with resistance welding, a high-current welding process where power supply was of great importance. Everyone has seen the automobile advertisements with the robotic welding machines where a hundred copper electrodes all converge on a car body at once and set off a shower of sparks. Dad pointed out that metal expulsion as evidenced by the sparks usually resulted in a sub-standard weld, something apparently lost on the advertising types who probably thought the drama was a good thing.

I suspect that some of the disdain for "Administrators" came from Dad's sometime disdain for their activities. He would work hard to get research money only to see most of it siphoned off as "overhead," or maybe get some expensive piece of welding or inspection equipment donated, only to have the administration withhold the funds needed to connect it for service.

One of the first assignments was for each of us to choose one of the clunky old resistance welding machines—my choice was a World War II surplus "Capacitor Discharge Welder." Anyway, we were supposed to trace the power for our particular equipment back to its source, an exercise that sent many enterprising students into the many tunnels that carried steam and utility piping and electrical distribution buses throughout the university. In my case, my machine needed some special thyrotron tubes—this was a high-amperage switching device that does the same thing as a transistor, except it was a vacuum tube with a pool of mercury in the bottom. The signal current caused the mercury to evaporate, and that in turn was the conductor for a rush of several thousand amperes to the machine. There were no spares, and they cost a couple of hundred dollars each. We found a couple in the Electrical Engineering Department and boosted them after an evening class. They had more dust on their boxes than a forgotten bottle of wine in an underused cellar. I don't know if they were ever missed, but they gave the machine about an hour of life before the next component failure proved fatal.

One annoying distraction was the heat-treating laboratory, just outside the lecture room door—and also just outside my father's office. Back in those days, in the Welding Engineering Department, we learned about metallurgy and the heat treatment of carbon steel by making a chisel out of steel bar. First, you heated the end to a glowing red, then brought it out to forge on an anvil. Visualize something out of Dante with a dozen students pounding with five-pound hammers—maybe the origin of the expression "the Hammers of Hell."

The X-ray room had thick concrete walls, except for a sheet metal roll-up door. There were signs on the outside of the door telling people of the X-ray hazard, which would suggest that they not linger there. Parking at the university was a problem. Dad used to park his car in front of that door with a sign that said "Car here for radiation protection" that solved his parking problem and seemed to be sufficient to keep the campus cops away. Once at the end of an operating session when the car was not there, the door was opened and there were a couple of neckers pretty far along in their activities. I always wondered if they had any four-armed kids as a result.

Roy McCauley, department chairman in the 1960s, was known to put on lead-lined gloves, run in and pick up the Cobalt Gamma radiation source, move it to where it was needed for an exposure, and then run behind the shields. Such was the dedication of this small group of professionals.

Robert McMaster was known as "Doc" around the Welding Engineering Department. I assume this came from his Ph.D., earned from California Institute of Technology just before WWII. He was always a student, taught the value of it by his own grandmother. His dedication to education and hard work is truly what pulled our family from the relatively menial jobs held by our grandparents into a life that was at least at the high end of the great American middle class.

He used to give pop quizzes and would count each answer as one point on his mathematical scale of numbers from 0 to n. He even did a "Sneak Midterm" test one day. Even though I lived at home, our intelligence on these activities was not very good.

His grading system solved the dilemma of how to grade his own son without appearing to favor (or not). It was so based on hard numbers that it was beyond dispute—except once, when the final quarterly grades were given. There was a group of grade totals that started in the mid-nineties and dropped down to about 87, then there was this gap with the next score being about 80. The usual A to B cut would have been made at that point, but instead it was done at 88, leaving me and one hapless fellow 87-total student without effective recourse.

For the most part, our days at Ohio State were pretty dull, but some history of import was happening right in front of us. Few people know that the origin of the "Campus Riot," something that became quite common at the height of the unpopular Vietnam War, was actually a student reaction to the Faculty Council decision to not let the Ohio State football team go to the Rose Bowl. I can still remember one of my high school classmates—well, maybe he was a year ahead—leading the chant "Give me an R, Give me an I, Give me an O. . . ." It was several more years before these things turned really ugly and culminated in the tragedy at Kent State University.

Welding cannot be long separated from nondestructive testing. Nondestructive testing, or NDT, encompasses a number of methodologies for determining that a part or component is sound without actually destroying the part by testing it to destruction. Radiography, or the use of X-rays or gamma rays to look inside a part, is one of the best-known examples. NDT mimics our own senses. But it has the ability to go beyond the abilities of our senses by extending their range.

I don't know where nondestructive testing came in as such a serious pursuit, except that it is a topic that goes hand in hand with welding. I do remember him, maybe in about 1948 or 1949, talking about nondestructive testing. Somehow, and because his favorite topics were high-pressure arcs and nondestructive testing, that led him to Welding Engineering.

All NDT involves a probing medium and a detector. You see with your eyes, hear with your ears, smell with your nose, feel with your fingers and other body parts, and taste with your tongue. Think of it as using your own five—or, for some, maybe six—senses. When you walk into a room, you "see" using visible spectrum radiation, you "hear" using a range of acoustic vibrations sound, you "smell" trace amounts of chemical present in the air, you feel heat or "touch" to determine the textures of a surface, you "taste" to determine the salinity or sweetness of things.

One of his class and lecture demonstrations was to show how carefully a coin slot in a vending machine tested your nickel before it would give up a bottle of Coke or whatever prize you sought from the machine. He would drop a nickel into the slot and in a brief second it clicked and clanked through the mechanism to fall into the collection tray. But then he went back and looked at each step in detail. First, the coin had to be the right diameter and thickness just to get it into the slot. But then it rolled down a ramp past a magnet that ether speeded or slowed the coin depending on its magnetic characteristics. Its mass determined how fast it might be going at the end of the ramp, and the coin had to make a leap at just the right velocity from the end of the ramp into a narrow space in the middle that didn't lead it back to the reject bin. And then he would say, "Do you think they trust you for your nickel yet?" and go on to explain that the nickel then hit an anvil such that if it was just the right hardness would bounce it to the acceptable bin. He always loved to go on to explore how in places where there was a lot of underutilized brainpower, like at an undergraduate engineering school, how much ingenuity and effort might be applied to slip something other than a nickel past the inspection regime. He would also point out that the nickel often received much more inspection than was applied to critical engineering structures where the results of a failure could go way beyond a nickel.

NDT also uses visible spectrum. The "Mark One Eyeball" is still one of the most powerful inspection tools in the arsenal. But NDT then goes beyond using other wavelengths of radiation: infrared and ultraviolet radiation, X-rays, and gamma rays, and beyond.

Nondestructive testing is moving from application to engineering structures into our everyday lives through application in the medical field.

One of our dad's unrealized dreams was the possibility of using several NDT methods simultaneously to probe into the unknown, and then combining those responses and comparing them to our experience. In a way, maybe that is the ultimate sixth sense that we sometimes seem to have—the unconscious use of several of our senses at one time, perhaps in very subtle ways, coupled with our experience to recognize a danger or a situation that is not so clear when we just use one or two of our senses. How else does one "sense" the presence of another person in a dark and quiet room?

The welding and nondestructive testing technology described in
Falling Free
is pretty accurate. Most of the devices described have a basis in real life (I'm not so sure about the Necklin rods). For example, the plasma arc, which Lois has as a formidable hand weapon is to a welding engineer a heat source for welding. Same with the electron beam. Back in the late 1950s, electron beam welding was a new and novel process. One of the OSU students, J. Whittier Slemmons, built one using junk in the early days of the process.

Lois consulted with Wally Voreck, a friend of my family who has spent a lifetime in the explosives field—some military and some industrial. Wally was also a voracious reader of science fiction and was pleased to read the book in an early form and to have a chance to offer suggestions to make the descriptions more authentic. I think it was he who suggested the explosive forming of something for
Falling Free
.