The Ship: The New Frontiers Series, Book One Read online

  “He’s the one I’m meeting later. Him, and Benjamin.”

  “Sounds serious, Sol. Nothing that will affect the business, I trust.”

  “No, no. Possibly an opportunity, but no more than that.”

  “Anything I’d be interested in, Sol?” T. French Fuqua, called ‘Frenchy’ by his close friends, was a major stockholder in the company. He also managed other investments. He could afford to keep his fingers in different pies, considering how much money he’d inherited and how well he’d done since by moving his investments around. The other two players were, like Sol, senior management who shared Sol’s love of golf. Of equal importance, they played poorly most of the time. Frenchy, on the other hand, managed his own investments and occasionally advised friends. Sol felt superior, in a sense. How could a man who didn’t have to deal with boards, with meeting deadlines, with meeting the payroll for thousands of employees consider himself their equal in business? It must be acknowledged that there was a touch of envy that colored their thinking.

  But Sol could not afford to offend Frenchy. His investments were sufficient that, should he decide to sell off his holdings, the company’s stock prices would take a serious hit. That, in turn, could affect Sol. His annual bonus depended on how the company’s stock was doing.

  “I wouldn’t think so, Frenchy. Anyway, it’s an issue I’ll need to bring to the board and you’ll find out about it then.”

  “I see,” said Frenchy. And smiled to himself.

  He had more reason to smile later. He’d taken the three for a nice bit of change, again. Ability to manipulate stock prices did not necessarily extend to manipulating a golf ball around the course.

  His phone rang as Sol and the others went to the clubhouse. He excused himself, walking far enough away not to be overheard. Glancing at the screen, he smiled again.

  “Thanks for returning my call, Ben. What have you got for me?”

  “Maybe nothing, Frenchy. Maybe a whole lot of something.”

  “You’ve made me curious, Ben. Does it have anything to do with the meeting Sol attended this morning?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes indeed. It’s something that doesn’t come along very often. We’ve been contacted by a man. Strange fellow, by all reports; he’s either a cross between Einstein and Edison or a crackpot.”

  “Really? Can’t you tell?”

  “Not yet. He sounds cracked, but then there was that flying bedstead thing. That’s what Panit called it. One of my people in maintenance saw it, and he said the thing was flying but it didn’t use jets or propellers.”

  “So how does it work, then?”

  “We don’t know, that’s the problem. He won’t say. He just said it runs on electricity, and my man in maintenance confirmed that. He said the device had a battery pack and a small diesel-powered generator, of all things.”

  “Interesting. So when does Sol plan to bring this to the board?”

  “Maybe as early as tomorrow. We’re talking it over this afternoon. The man wants an astonishing amount of money, too much really.”

  “You don’t say! Does this fractured container have a name?”

  “We’ve got a card. It says ‘Morton Sneyd, Inventor’.”

  “Ridiculous name,” said T. French Fuqua.

  Chapter Two

  Charles ‘Chuck’ Sneyd was not a typical student.

  He was older than most, a veteran, and this allowed him to attend the University of Texas at El Paso without taking out a student loan. The GI Bill and the money he’d saved while deployed were sufficient for his needs. He also offered his computer expertise and earned a few dollars that way.

  Chuck had seen enough debt to be forever wary. It was far too easy to build up obligations as his parents had done, and far too difficult to escape the snares of the banks once the debt took over. He’d never understood just how precarious their financial existence was until a drunk going the wrong way killed his parents. This happened during Chuck’s senior year of high school.

  Much of the insurance payout after their deaths had gone to pay off their credit cards, and the rest of the money went to pay off the loan on the pickup truck his father drove. Chuck faced an uncertain future at the time; go live with his grandfather, which would mean changing schools, or drop out and find a job? Fortunately, another option soon became available. A friend’s parents offered to take him in for the final three months of school, so Chuck graduated with the rest of his class before moving on.

  But the experience had taught him a lesson. Chuck would pay his own way, or do without.

  Maybe college was in his future, maybe not, but there was work for young men in the oil patch. This was West Texas, after all, and while the work was hard it paid well.

  But there was no work. Drill rigs were being idled, experienced hands laid off. No one was hiring. One of the periodic downturns in the oil business had, for all practical purposes, shut down the business of oil exploration.

  Disappointed, Chuck walked along the sidewalk after the latest refusal. By chance, he passed an armed forces recruiting station. Feeling down, Chuck looked at the men inside, all uniformed, all purposeful. Not for them the challenge of finding a job fresh out of high school! They had jobs, work that would keep them employed for years to come. Chuck walked inside, hesitant, but curious. Perhaps they had written material he could look at before he decided?

  The first man he spoke to was a sergeant of marines.

  #

  Marine boot camp had not been nearly as bad as Chuck expected. True, a lot of boys who had grown up in cities had trouble, mostly in adapting to the physical requirements and the strict discipline. But Chuck had been hiking from the time he was old enough to follow Morty around. Morty explained the things they saw, and only one portion of the ranch was off limits to Chuck’s exploring. A huge sinkhole existed and the walls were steep. Morty forbade Chuck to approach it, although the two sometimes sat off to the side at dusk, watching the bats fly.

  “See those crystals, son? Notice how they have straight sides and a parallelogram shape?”

  “Grandpa, what’s a parallelogram?”

  “You’ll learn in a year or two, son. Those are calcite crystals, and they make the sinkhole’s rim too slippery to approach unless you have something to hold on to. I thought about bringing a rope and going down inside to have a look, but never found the time.”

  “Maybe I could use a rope too, grandpa?”

  “No, son. It’s too dangerous, and curiosity kills more than cats.”

  Chuck often carried a light pack on the hikes, occasionally a rifle too. The low, rolling hills held deer and antelope. Morty loved to hunt; the challenge of outwitting one of the big bucks was part of it, but the meat was also welcome. Money was always tight. Chuck had taken to hunting and quickly learned to release the safety as he brought the pump-action Remington to his shoulder. The 6mm cartridge had a light recoil, easy for a teenager to handle and lethal for the mid-sized game they hunted.

  Marines were expected to carry much heavier packs, and for that matter Chuck and the other recruits would shoot the Marine Corps way. Even so, he had no problem adapting. The dry, rolling hills along the Pacific were not that different from the hills near the Texas-New Mexico border. He soaked up the training and graduated from boot camp, then headed off to the School of Infantry. He’d done well enough in boot camp to earn an impact promotion to PFC.

  Joining the Marine Combat Training Battalion was his first clue that the Marines had something in mind for him that did not involve direct combat as an infantryman.

  But first he had to get through an abbreviated version of Marine infantry training. Only then would he be sent to the school that the Corps, in its wisdom, had decided he was suited to attend. The Marine Corps boasts that every marine is a rifleman, and by the time they finish the School of Infantry, they are. The training for those who would be professional infantrymen was more intense, but at the conclusion of the course, whether cooks or bakers or communicators, they could be
grabbed if needed and sent to fill in gaps as infantry Marines. It was expected that they would function almost as well as professional infantrymen should their services as riflemen be needed.

  After graduation, Marine Charles Sneyd reported to the Marine Corps Communication-Electronics School at Twenty-Nine Palms Marine Corps Base to undergo training as a communications specialist. But even in the Marines, there are often unintended consequences. Charles “Chuck” Sneyd was exposed to computer programming as a part of his training, and took to it like the proverbial duck to water.

  He graduated from the communicator’s school and joined the First Battalion, 5th Marines. His deployment was shorter than he expected, thanks to a shell fragment in his right knee. The Corps had offered him a medical discharge and Chuck had taken it. The money wasn’t much, but it would help with his expenses. Chuck had decided to attend college.

  His liking for computers colored his thinking when he enrolled. Most of his classes during the first year were general in nature, not requiring that he declare a major, but by the time his advisor asked what he wanted to study Chuck was ready. His baccalaureate degree was in computer science, but he understood that the BS would not qualify him for a high-paying job. Earning potential was a definite consideration, that and hopefully doing work he enjoyed. An MBA, with his computer science background, offered much more flexibility. So even while Chuck worked on his Masters in Business Administration, he spent his free time picking up occasional classes that would help develop his main interest. Among other things, programming earned him a few extra dollars each month from his fellow students. He occasionally did jobs for faculty members too.

  #

  Chuck limped down the stairs and headed for the parking lot. Graduation exercises were scheduled to take place in two weeks and he had not decided whether he’d attend or not. For the moment, he was thinking ‘not’.

  He had found few friends at UTEP. It had been different while he was in uniform, but like many veterans, he did not make friends easily. He’d been close to the men he served with, closer than brothers. Some were gone now and the losses still burned. Compared with the marines he’d known, Chuck’s fellow students had no real concept of life outside of school. Video games, drinking, chasing the opposite sex? Was he supposed to hang out with them because they were fellow students? The idea was meaningless, even repugnant, after Fallujah.

  Chuck doubted he would have difficulty in finding a job after graduation. With a Masters in Business Administration and a Bachelors in Computer Science to offer a prospective employer, he could finally put poverty behind him. The hitch he’d done in the Marines might also confer other advantages when job-seeking. Chuck was not only older, his ideas and goals were relatively fixed. He’d held positions of responsibility and been responsible for making decisions, characteristics that a future employer would likely value.

  No one would be there to watch if Chuck chose to walk the stage with other graduates, not even his grandfather. Chuck had no other close relatives, only an uncle he hadn’t seen in years, and Morty was busy with his latest scheme. He had no time to drive west to El Paso to watch the empty ceremony.

  Instead, Morty had invited Chuck to come to the ranch and spend time helping Morty with his latest discovery. Well, why not? Chuck didn’t have a job yet, and for that matter the job hunt could wait; the small pension from his 50% disability rating, legacy of the piece of shrapnel still in his knee, provided for his few needs.

  Should he go? Chuck had always enjoyed the old ranch. He had but two regrets, the death of his grandmother and never exploring the huge cavern where the bats lived. But Morty had been adamant on that point, so Chuck had obeyed him. Even so, he’d often ridden his favorite quarter horse to the cavern in the afternoon and waited for the bats to fly. That cavern and its population of bats had wakened Chuck’s curiosity and given him a lifetime interest in science.

  Did Morty really need him, or was this just another attempt to bring Chuck into one of his many schemes? Granted, some of them had paid off well enough to pay Morty’s expenses and buy new equipment for his workshop, but in the past he’d lost interest after the idea he’d developed was working. In each case, he’d sold his invention cheap to someone who would develop a salable product and market it.

  Well. The two of them had been close once, Chuck and his grandfather. So maybe the thing to do was spend time with Morty.

  And who could say? Maybe this time he really would explore that mysterious cavern.

  #

  Morty glared at the collection of motors, generators, and machines. How could he balance the mess, how to ensure that this one wouldn’t do what the last one did, fly apart under the gee forces the motors built up? He’d avoided injury, so far, but controlling the collection was a continuous headache. How had Tesla intended to do that? Had he even gotten to that point, or had he been satisfied to make notes and move on to something else? From his writings, Tesla had already decided to develope his broadcast power system when he first speculated about the impeller, and had intended to investigate that later, if ever.

  Nikola Tesla had been more than an inventor. He’d also been a gifted machinist, at least for his time. Modern lathes and milling machines were computer controlled now, although Morty supposed you could still buy the kinds of machines that Tesla had used, machines controlled only by the skilled hands of a human operator. But Morty’s hands were not that skilled, he’d known that from the beginning, so he’d bought computer-controlled machines. Now all he had to do was learn how to tell them what to do!

  For the moment Morty was stymied. Hopefully, Chuck could help when he finally got here. So much promise from the new device...but only if he could solve the engineering problems.

  Morty cranked the old pickup truck and headed for the town of Andrews. There was a tire company there that used machines to balance tires after mounting them to the rim, so maybe someone could tell him how the machine worked. Maybe he could get his hands on a used machine, cheap, and rebuild it. Maybe he could convert it to do what he needed?

  #

  Morty hung up the phone and smiled. Chuck had agreed to help with the design work on the impellers. He hadn’t told Chuck exactly what he was working on, but he had mentioned that the device was functioning after a fashion and promised to be a financial success if they could work out the bugs.

  The first impeller had been more than promising, enough output to show that he was on the right track. Applying power to the machine produced an impressive amount of thrust, but it came at the cost of vibration that in short order shook the device to pieces. Morty’s first solution had been to reduce the applied power, thereby slowing the machine’s revolutions. That had reduced the shaking, but at the cost of most of the thrust.

  Which brought him back to what he could do using the machines in his workshop. Clearly, he would need more-precise machining to higher tolerances if the device was to ever be usable. There was also the problem of the coils to consider. These were added to the rotors after manufacture, complicating the problem of balancing the assembly. They would have to be balanced precisely and mounted in a fashion such that they would interact with the stationary primary coil in order to generate the electromagnetic field that Tesla believed important.

  The device also generated considerable torque, so much so that when Morty had attempted to mount it on a platform floating in water he’d gotten almost no forward thrust. The platform had rolled, and that shorted out the motor as soon as water flooded in. Morty had come up with a simple, if elegant, solution; if one impeller produced clockwise torque, gang-mount it with another that produced counter-clockwise torque. While the two impellers tried to twist the mounting frame in opposite directions, warping it slightly in the process, they also produced double the forward thrust that the single-impeller model had produced. Unfortunately, so far they also produced twice as much vibration. It was discouraging; it seemed like every time Morty solved one problem, two more cropped up.

  None of the
paired impeller units had lasted more than five minutes before something failed. Either a circuit shorted, or more commonly a mechanical part had broken and the unit had shut itself down. Had Tesla experienced similar problems? Had he foreseen what would happen and put this device on the back burner while he worked on his broadcast-power system? According to the notebook, Tesla had discovered the underlying principle, but the idea was never mentioned again. Tesla had probably abandoned the effort as unsolveable. The primitive science of his day had made his problems insurmountable; there simply were no materials available that combined light weight with the strength he needed. In many ways, this was the same problem that had eventually defeated his attempts to build a bladeless turbine.

  A century of progress had produced things Tesla could only have dreamed of; cheap, plentiful aluminum, for one, and high tensile strength corrosion resistant steels for another. Even titanium was readily available now, in sheets and high-strength frame members that held their shape even when subjected to high temperatures. And then there were the carbon nanotubes and carbon-fiber sheets that were just becoming available, things not envisioned during Tesla’s lifetime. There were also plastics that rivaled steel in strength but at less than half the weight. Plastics could be also be impregnated with metal to give resistance to chemicals and radioactivity. Tesla would have marveled at it all, and who could say what his inventive genius might have produced if he’d had access to modern materials?

  Morty had access to those things, and more. Using them, he’d come up first with a working Tesla Turbine, then a Tesla transformer that generated impressive lightning bolts as well as ultra-high voltages and alternating-current frequencies. But then he’d decided to build one of Tesla’s impellers to see if the eccentric inventor had been on the right track, or if this was destined to be one of Tesla’s failures. The effort had helped Morty get through his grief after Mary Ellen’s death, then had become an obsession. But failure had followed failure, each redesigned device solving one problem even as it revealed another.