The Scarab (4 page)

Obviously, I hadn’t thought all
this through yet. Mare loves her job, and the islands don’t have a burning need
for interstate high-speed Hover Patrol officers. I knew I was beyond the realm
where words could help me when I tried to calm her down. I got as far as “Mare...”
before she blasted me for ten minutes about how demeaning it was to be referred
to as an animal whose only purpose was breeding. Things got worse from there.

Why is it that you can never have
what you want and be happy at the same time? It must be another Heisenberg
corollary.

****

At the airport, as I was leaving
Bayside, probably for the last time, Captain Jenkins met me at the gate and
pulled me aside. I was scared stiff that Mary had called the guy crying, and
now he was going to haul me back to jail for violating some indenturement law. “You
won’t remember this, but two months ago my wife came in for a tune-up. You
demanded she get a traction adjustment and a new air bag release valve,” he
said in a low, conversational tone.

“Oh, she probably had a Mitosa
Wagon. I’ve seen a lot of those towed away as wrecks. The adjustment only took
half an hour.”

“Well, I thought you were a crook
at the time, gouging her because she was a woman. She went in for a $50 problem
and ended up paying over a thousand.”

I cringed. “Look, I don’t see a
dime of that. The parts eat most of it, and my salary is garnished. I just told
her I wouldn’t work on the car period unless she got it done right.”

“Well, I yelled at her something
fierce. But a few weeks later, some drunk ran her off the road into a ditch.
You probably saved her life. Hell, this black box that I’m supposed to forget
all about will save a lot more.”

Leaving on this plane was my big
chance, I was relieved the chief wasn’t going to slap me in jail long enough
for Exotech to get it’s mitts on me. “Just doing my job.” I shrugged.

“Yeah. I never got a chance to thank
you. Not many people will thank you for doing a job, but cops know how it feels
to get only negative press. I wanted to do something for you.” He took a file
out from his briefcase, my file I assumed. I’m not sure what he was doing, but
I wanted to keep liking him.

“Thanks.” I cut him off and wouldn’t
take the file.

“It might make interesting reading
on the plane. And if it were to get lost, we wouldn’t look for it too hard,
seeing that you wouldn’t live in our jurisdiction any more.” He tried to slip
it to me again, and I refused again.

“No, sir. All I did was give
advice. But I wonder if you could give someone else some advice in exchange.” I
studied the beckoning bustle and noise of the airport, waiting to enter my new
life through this gate. “In a few months, Miss Anselm’s going to get a plane
ticket in the mail. Without acknowledging you know what’s going on, I’d
appreciate it if you hinted strongly that she was due for a vacation.”

Jenkins smiled. “It would be true.
Deal.”

It would be my first time on a
plane since my return from Brazil. This had been a week of many beginnings and
endings. Almost everything I considered part of myself had changed at one
stroke, everything but the game.

Still depressed from my last day in Bayside, I threw myself
into the task of qualifying for SimCon. A week later, sitting at my
thirty-year-old plaid kitchen table, with an open window view of the beach, I
held this year’s 400 page design guide which the Simulation Coalition sent me
after receiving the entry fees. We were this year’s final entry (late in fact,
but they squeezed us in with a word from somebody in Washington).

Each year, the game had a different
theme continent—Africa, Asia, Australia. This year’s four day race would be set
in Europe. Some wise-guys, complaining that they had skipped Antarctica, held a
“winter games” session. Events included snow slalom, penguin herding, blind
blizzard driving, and cold starting engines in 40 below weather. The virtual
race had been a re-enactment of Byrd’s last dog-sled run to the South Pole.

SimCon was the Olympics of ground
vehicle design. A vehicle was street legal if it flew at less than four meters
off the ground, was less than two meters wide and three meters high. Although
no length restriction had been imposed, long bodies made easy targets. Even the
smallest design decision could make or break your vehicle. A few years ago,
with the addition of sting-ray missiles over the tail lights of a simple sports
model, the Lamborghini Aerospace Courier Elite became the vehicle of choice for
messengers, diplomats, bank presidents, and rock stars. LAS sold 2000 units
before their plant even had the tools to make them. Many young designers and
small companies risked everything at this bazaar of nations to become famous,
respected, and most of all—rich.

Even mistakes in SimCon became
legendary. The original race going through the Texas badlands had armadillos as
road hazard for the pilots to swerve around. The first cocky tank driver who
attempted to run them down found out that the programmer had accidentally given
them a density higher than steel. The armadillos totaled his vehicle. Since
then, the “killer dillo” has been a regular feature of the game.

After the extensive overview in the
introduction, the rule book was divided up by price category: under thirty
thousand, the lightweight division representing middle-class consumer fare;
under 100K, middleweight division where the majority of serious designers and
players competed; and the over 100K non-residential class, as they euphemistically
billed the heavyweight military category. Because several government contracts
rode on the results of the contest, participants at the high end regularly used
espionage and every black trick in the book, before during and after the event.

Each team could contain up to two
prototypes per price range, for a total of six. To emphasize the benefits of
using off-the-shelf parts and mass-production techniques, a discount was given
if vehicles shared the same chassis or other common traits.

Every contestant had to allocate at
least 5 percent of the entry fee for vehicle fuel and repairs during the game.
From experience, I knew that a good designer set back at least 10 percent. A
last minute adaptation could save your life in a close game. Something as
simple as tracer rounds could make all the difference in a night fight. Since
the cost of a vehicle could not exceed my entry fee, I had less than $95,000 to
build my prototype. This restriction kept most small businesses out of the
competition.

Like a kid locked in a candy store,
I didn’t know where to begin. Because of my late entry, I only had ten weeks
left to present the AI referee with a draft design. It took about an hour to
download and verify the plans from a standard CAD package, and another hour or
two to “explain” any irregularities and special materials, unusual movement
equations or aerodynamics to a human judge. This gave your vehicle’s price and
preliminary ratings to be published in the convention’s guide book.

The two weeks after that were used
to rework objections raised by the expert-system analyzer. The final design was
due a mere two weeks before the convention. After the second submission, the
only changes allowed were the repairs before each day of the race.

I knew already that getting ready
for the event would keep me awake at night. Normally, a design begins with the
repulsion grid that negates the vehicle’s weight. I almost worked in reverse.

The hardest part in constructing
the scaled-up version of my prototype would be building a sturdy cockpit
cheaply, one that was perfectly round without obstructing my field of vision or
being obvious about why it was circular. The solution came from Jane’s On-line
Military Guide. The B-52 was being sold for scrap in several places, and I was
able to pick up two belly-gunner turrets for ten cents a pound scrap plus
transport fees. They even had swivel mounts for guns in them. I replaced the
old 1940’s glass with clear, bullet proof plexar from a snow-plow factory.

The engine itself was from the more
modern hush-copters, also surplus, but much harder to get. To avoid contact
with the central bubble, all my body support frames had to be curved, and
heavy-duty, like what they use in submarines. As a side-effect, my outer hull
would be over-engineered. My hull would be airtight and float.

Because of my odd design, no repeller
field grid on the market today would fit. I rigged the center for the landing
gear, a ground car arrangement with tiny tires on retractable armatures for
parking. As the final step, I figured out the weight of everything the vehicle
would be carrying, the blaze armor, the machine guns, the ammunition, the
aluminum tinsel (to confuse laser and radar targeting), all the electronics,
and the pilot. I wanted to use mini-repulsion-grids like they do under each
axle of a semi trailer, but the new design weighed just too much for two grids
and not quite enough for three. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford three grids
and stay under the required price.

After working and reworking the
design so tight that it squeaked, I was still overweight. I spent days
agonizing over the weight factors and materials. With this much lift and
expense, I could build several vehicles, but not the one I needed.

Then it hit me—the discounts for
similar designs! I would build them like three separate, but tightly-coupled
machines. The two support lifers would be as Spartan as possible, carrying the
ballast, sweeper guns, expendables, spin brakes, and gearing systems. They
would be little better than glorified open-air sleds with less room for
passengers than a luge. The two would differ only in the handedness of the
coupling. I would pass that off as the American and European versions of the
same vehicle line, with driver slots on the left and right respectively. I
planned to drop in used Porsche or motorcycle engines to power them with as
little modification as possible. Because of the similarity in design, they
would cost two-thirds as much as they would have separately, and used they would
cost even less.

The main compartment would carry
the over-sized spin engine, electronics, and the primary cockpit. From above,
the whole thing would assemble like a giant, bulging hamburger that had a top
cruising speed of 220 km/h on the highway. Without the twins to help, the main
section would crawl at up to 75 km/h—about right for traffic in the city. As
individuals, the sleds were grossly over-powered and could do over 330 km/h if
they jettisoned their deadweight and no turning was required.

The twins would be joined to the
hull with a modified version of mini-sub docking waldoes. I played with the
external lines a bit to hide the obvious points of joining, but that only made
the main compartment look uglier. With two gaping holes in its sides, and the
segmented armor, it looked like a fat lobster. Before someone else could name
my invention and spoil what little appeal it possessed, I decided to call it
something with a little panache.

Mere hours before my deadline to
call in with the design, I came up with the name “Ghedra” after the
jet-propelled giant turtle of Japanese monster movie fame. I’d name the sleds
for the two little kids who rode on the monster’s back.

To add to the air of mystery
surrounding the craft, I put a polarized gray tint in the cockpit bubble and
gave the frame a black-and-white turtle paint job. Finally, with the last few
dollars, I added a pair of external speakers where the eyes would be, just in
case I felt like blasting “Ride of the Valkyries.”

While I was still struggling with
the final revision near the end of November, Foxworthy called me. “Hayes, how’s
the weather out there?”

I looked out my window. It was
pitch black outside. “Fine.”

“Good, good. Meet any of your
neighbors?”

I shrugged, not in the mood for
small-talk. I wouldn’t live like a human being again until after I met the
deadline. “Just at the grocery store, but I haven’t been there since I found
out they deliver. Something I can do for you, Nigel?”

“We just sold all but 15 percent of
the preferred stock in DeClerk Enterprises using that prospectus you approved.”
I barely remembered the high-gloss advertising pamphlet, but grunted to keep
him talking.

“That’s nice.”

“More than nice, you’re going to be
a rich man if we sell all of it. If we hadn’t sold any of it, you wouldn’t be
in the convention next month. What do you want done with the money while we’re
waiting for ground-breaking on the factory?”

Creditors appeased and record wiped
clean, I finally had my own money, but I was already living comfortably. “Just send
me a check for my allowance, and put the reset in stock somewhere. LAS is a
good company. Use your discretion.”

He seemed disappointed, but I was
busy. “I’ll send you an itemized account of all income every month, along with
a distribution list.”

“Nigel, I appreciate what you’re
doing for me, but I don’t want to know how much money I have. Maybe some day.
Right now, it’s like Monopoly money, it’s not real to me. If anything, it would
only make me want more, and I’d never be satisfied. Now I’m happy, happier than
I’ve ever been in my life. I like being free from banking. From time to time, I
might want something extra like a gift for a friend, but knowing how much I
have would change me.”

After a brief silence, he said “I
want people to know I’m honest, so we’ll compromise. I’ll still send you the
accounting, but I won’t put any numbers on the cover page. Know something
Hayes? I envy you. You probably sleep better at night than anyone else on that
island.”

“When I’m not working,” I replied,
smiling. “Any word on the Congressional probe into Exotech?”

“They’re scheduled to launch it the
second day of the convention. What a coincidence!” he said, impishly.

“You are lethal, Nigel. I can
hardly wait to see their faces. Listen, you want to visit me at the convention?
You’ve helped me this far, I’d think you’d want a front-row seat at the finish
line.”

“We’ll see. I’ll watch periodically
on ESPN to keep tabs. I don’t know if I’ll have time to fly there,” said
Foxworthy.

“Do you have any kids, Foxworthy?”

“Three.”

“You went to see all of them
graduate, right?” This time there was a longer silence. “I never got to go to
my own ceremony because I was working. This time, I’ll be graduating in vehicle
design, and I want somebody there to cheer for me. How about it?”

In a very meek voice, he said, “We’ll
see.”