Every Man's Fantasy Ch. 23

"You love the girl," Gloria insisted.

"... and I love the girl, very much; but I don't lust after any other woman. I'm strange like that."

"You're not so strange," Gloria whispered.

"I know, darling," Solange whispered back. "I know."

******

When Eva Welwyn returned to Earth for some work commitments and to interview more recruits for the expanded Petticoat Team, Danielle and Roger went to the Ocean City Astroport to see her off.

In tribute to her friend, Danielle wore the professional feminist uniform of a conservative business suit (dark-blue, pinstripe) with knee-length pencil skirt, pink blouse, high heels and her platinum hair tied in a pony-tail. With Eva in her grey suit, high heels and her brown hair in a pony-tail, they looked a classy pair as they hugged on the platform.

"I'll miss you, Eva," Danielle said. "Who else am I going to tease about her feminist nonsense?"

"I'll be back before you realise it, Danielle. And I'll bring new members of the Women's Support Group for you to corrupt with your internalised misogyny."

Having waved Eva off, Danielle took Roger's arm to promenade elegantly along the platform to a jetcar. As they walked, a great booming voice called out above the hubbub of the crowd and the whoosh of a departing hovertrain.

"Princess!"

It was a voice so familiar to Danielle that it acted directly on her nervous system. She turned with a great smile and spied the owner of the voice fifty feet behind her. A dozen space-riggers, dressed in blue overalls with yellow safety harnesses, were disembarking from a passenger transport. Among them was a giant man, more than seven feet tall, with a big red face and a huge red beard like a spade.

"Geraint!" Danielle cried and ran toward the giant, leaving Roger behind on the platform, nonplussed.

"Geraint!" Danielle repeated as she flung herself at the man, who scooped her up and threw her into the air, catching her as if she were no heavier than a child. He hugged her to him and she kissed his cheeks with joy.

"Look at you, Princess bach," Geraint said admiringly, holding her at arm's length. "Proper tidy you are, too."

Geraint was a Welshman and his bass voice had the singsong lilt of the valleys.

"Oh, Geraint!" Danielle exclaimed. "I knew there was a rigging team on its way but I had no idea you were in it. I've missed you so much! Are the other lads here?"

"No, Princess bach, just me. It's a small job, look you. Right easy."

She gave him another kiss and he put her down.

"I want to show you my home at the Science Institute," she said. "Promise me you'll come for a visit when your job's done?"

By this time, Roger had sauntered up.

"This is my husband. Roger, meet Geraint, one of my friends from Oakshott Industries. He's a space-rigger. He's come to work on the new beacon."

"Pleased to meet you, Geraint."

"How do, Roger bach? Looks like the lads were joshing, Princess. They said you married a pygmy."

Roger pulled himself up to his full six feet four inches but he smiled at the joke.

"I guess anyone would look like a pygmy next to you, Geraint," he said.

"I warrant that's so," the giant agreed.

"Tell me, how's Seren?" Danielle asked.

"Painful sad it is, Princess, but Seren left me."

"Oh, no! What happened?"

"We drifted apart, you know. Not every woman wants a husband who's away for months on other worlds."

"I'm so sorry."

"The oddest thing, look you, was that it happened when I came home to settle down. I worked twenty years on the rigs, so it was time to go home, buy a farm and raise sheep and children. That's when Seren chucked it in."

"I'm sorry, Geraint," Danielle said again.

"Don't be, Princess, it's probably for the best. That's why I came back to work on the rigs. First of the gang to quit and first back. But I haven't given up the dream of a farm, look you."

The sentimental moment was interrupted by some of the younger riggers pushing each other and swearing.

"Knock it off, boyos," Geraint ordered.

Danielle took a look at the gang of riggers and frowned. They were a tough-looking bunch who slouched around in worn overalls with safety belts nonchalantly undone and a day or more of truculent beard-growth.

"These aren't Oakshott men, are they?" Danielle asked Geraint.

"Agency blokes, they are. Our lads are at bigger jobs. These boyos know their stuff, but they're not disciplined like our lads. ... Look you, Princess bach, could you talk to our Princess? She's new and these boyos are already taking the mick. I can keep them in line but I can't be everywhere."

"Sure I will. What's her name?"

"It's Cho."

Danielle went to find the rigging team's engineer. She was sitting on a bench on the other side of platform, working on a computer tab, studiously ignoring the roughhousing men.

Cho was a short and slim young Chinese woman from Singapore. She had a sweet childlike face, small mouth and long black hair. She looked intelligent but also reserved, probably shy.

Singapore had one of the best engineering schools in the galaxy, but Cho was a Nakatani recruit on her first job out of the engineering lab. Her overalls were shiny new and too big. Her safety harness was meticulously done up and her utility belt was full of the text-book recommended tools, rather than the food and emergency repair kit (lipstick, nail-file, hair-ties and moisturising handwipes) that Danielle carried after her first outing on a space-rig.

Cho had never worked with a rough bunch of riggers before. Not knowing how to handle them, she kept her distance.

"Hello, are you Cho? I'm Danielle. I used to work with Geraint as an engineer on a rigging team. Can I talk to you?"

Cho nodded but looked defensive. She didn't smile but she moved her computer tab so that Danielle could sit down.

"It's very daunting, your first space-rig," Danielle confided, talking without gaps so the proud girl wouldn't interrupt her or leave.

"The worst thing is not knowing how to treat the men. I mean, what the text-books tell you to do isn't like real life. You want to be friendly, and you want to get them involved but with men like these, being too friendly will send the wrong message."

"It's just as bad if you stay aloof, coming out of your cabin just for meals or work. Then they'll think you're a snob and they'll play up. It's important to remember that it's their rig and their rules. They're the one's risking their lives every day. These are tough men doing tough jobs that even robots can't do. They earn the right to let off steam. But men's play can be boisterous. That's when you leave them to it and escape to your cabin. They'll soon calm down and invite you back."

"The best way to get them to accept you is to do your job well. Then they know they can rely on you."

Cho nodded but still didn't smile, though her defensiveness was beginning to dissolve.

"They'll want you around when something goes wrong. When you fix it (which you will, because it's what you've been trained for), then you'll get their respect and, afterward, you'll never do anything wrong in their eyes. They'll be your champions and your bodyguard."

Still Cho didn't look persuaded.

"In my case," Danielle went on, "it was a set-up. We were constructing a new hyperspace beacon that had cooling-flow assemblies on opposite sides, but there were two left-handed assemblies and no right-handed one. The lads asked me what to do. We were right up against the time-limit for turning on the beacon and would incur stiff penalties if we had to wait another couple of days for the correct part to be sent."

"I told them to fit the spare left-handed assembly backward and bend the Venturi mechanism to redirect the flow. I showed them where to make the welds and the thermal joints. I calculated that the re-jigged assembly would last 100 hours, which gave us plenty of time to get the correct part sent after we met the deadline to turn on the beacon."

"The guys thought I was a genius and from then on they treated me as one of them. Something like that will happen to you."

"How do you know?" Cho asked. "And what did you mean by calling it a set-up?"

"Because the team-leader of the riggers deliberately hid the right-handed assembly and packed a spare left-handed assembly. He also left the technical manual for the cooling assemblies in my cabin, poking out of the bookcase, knowing I would find it, so I was familiar with the flow-rates and tolerances."

"And who was that?"

"Geraint, of course."

Cho looked over at the giant and smiled at last, feeling more comfortable than she had done since she embarked on Earth with the rigging team.

"Did Geraint tell you that I'm not shaping up?"

"No, but I guess you reminded him of me when I first started."

"Thank you, Danielle. ... Can you tell me something? Why does Geraint call me Princess?"

"It's an Oakshott Industries tradition. Every team of riggers is assigned an engineer and, if she's a woman, they call her Princess. I don't know why, but I like it."

"How can you like it? Isn't it sexist?"

"Of course it is! It's the best kind of sexism. The kind that makes rough strong men respect and care for women. Forget all the feminist nonsense you learned in college. There's no time for petulance or manufactured grievances on a space-rig, when you might be seconds away from a nasty death. That's when you learn to appreciate male chivalry. You'll also thank God that riggers are eighteen-stone men and not eight-stone women."

"When a servo motor freezes solid on a compression hatch, and you're pushing with all your might to close it before the cylinder implodes, sucking you into space, but it won't budge an inch, then you'll thank the man who comes to your rescue, jamming himself between you and instant death. And you'll appreciate his muscles when he closes the hatch with one push."

"I understand."

"Being called 'Princess' is nothing compared to what they call the male engineers who don't shape up," Danielle recalled with a smile. "Besides, it reminds you that the best way to be treated like a lady is to act like one."

Cho processed these ideas.

"I'll remember what you said, Danielle. Thank you."

Danielle nodded. She took a good look at the girl and thought it was likely that she would toughen up enough to succeed. It was a good sign that Cho had cut her fingernails short but had none the less applied thick nail varnish, of a pale girly-pink. That was the proper attitude: feminine and functional.

Cho sat up straight and Danielle caught a glimpse of her computer tab. Its screen was covered in equations and diagrams that seemed familiar.

"What are you working on?" Danielle asked.

"Just a problem I've found with some new hyperspace technology."

"May I see it?"

"Do you know hyperspace engineering?"

"A bit."

Cho showed Danielle her working out.

"I was looking at it in the lab before they sent me to work on the rig. Do you know how the Goldrick Junctions work?"

"Is that what they're calling the Beltway Hyperspace Junctions now? Yes, I know how they work."

"Well, I think they're incompatible with the new technology. The Traveller won't maintain band allocation, so it can't be guided out of the beltway into a spur pathway."

"Show me."

Cho flipped back the pages of her tab and went through the calculations from the beginning, apologising for her amateurish diagrams.

"I see a mistake here," Danielle said, pointing to a formula. "That means these equations here, here and here are wrong."

"I don't see it."

"You have the Traveller receiving the signal from the Beacon via retarded waves but at this stage of the cycle they're advanced waves."

"Oh! ... I'm not sure it fixes the problem, though."

"No, it makes it worse. This is a very important result, Cho. I need to think about it properly. It could be that we can't simply convert the Beltway to the new technology. You need to publish it. I'll help you, if you want."

"You'll help me? Who are y...? Oh, my God! I'm so sorry. I've seen your picture lots of times, but I didn't recognise you."

"That's all right. So you'll send me the document?"

"Yes, Doctor Goldrick."

"Geraint is coming to visit me when the job's done. Will you come, too? Then we can talk about your work. You don't mind if I work on it myself and bring some others in as well?"

"I don't mind."

Cho was rather overwhelmed. They were distracted by some movement among the riggers. The call to embark on the shuttlecraft had been made.

Danielle stood up and beckoned Geraint and Roger over.

"Geraint, I'd like you to bring Cho with you when you come to dinner. She's given me an important problem to think about. Please take care of her. She has a big future in hyperspace engineering."

"Ach, I'll look after her, Princess bach, don't you fret."

Danielle leapt up to hug the giant once more.

"Goodbye, Geraint," she said, kissing him. "I'm taking my pygmy home now. I've got work to do."

******

Back in her office, Danielle re-wrote Cho's work, correcting the faulty equation. She added a few lines of conclusions and put Cho's name at the top of the page. She sent the document to everyone in the Samothea Project Team, including those in the Nakatani and Oakshott engineering labs. Then she contacted Stephen Oakshott.

"I've sent a report to your lab, Stephen. There's a problem with the Beltway hyperspace junctions."

"What's the problem?"

"It's complicated."

"It always is. That's why I keep you egg-heads. Tell me, anyway."

Danielle explained about band allocation but Stephen was none the wiser. He asked the most important question for an industrialist:

"What does it mean for our business?"

"If we can't solve the problem, then we can make stand-alone hyperdrive systems and tethered pathways, like those from Celetaris to Samothea, but we can't do the most lucrative project, we can't use the new technology to upgrade the Beltway system."

"I see. So why did we miss this before?"

"Because no one was looking for it. We simply assumed the new technology was portable onto the Beltway. I'm sorry, Stephen."

"No apologies, Goldrick," Stephen insisted. "You've always been my best egg-head. The question is: can you fix it?"

"I don't know. I need to work on it."

"You do that, Goldrick. Let me know what you learn."

******

Danielle stayed in her office all day and most of the evening, missing dinner. She returned late to her apartment, horny as always after intense brain-activity. She woke Roger from his light doze and got him to fuck her.

Sexually satisfied, Danielle slept well, rose early and was in her office struggling to convert her original design for the Beltway hyperspace junctions to use the new technology even before Hazel, Wildchild and Yael (inveterate early risers themselves) had finished breakfast and gone out for a run in the park.

When Wildchild and Yael turned up at Danielle's office for their morning physics lesson, Danielle said:

"I'm sorry, girls, I can't give you a lesson today. I've got a difficult problem to work on."

"Can we stay, please?" Yael asked. "We want to watch you work."

"If you're quiet but it'll be very boring for you."

"We don't mind."

"I doubt you'll get much from watching me frown and grind my teeth," Danielle said.

She thought for a moment. Then:

"However, if you don't mind being sounding-boards, it may help me to explain it from first principles."

Danielle conjured a rubber balloon from the holographic projector and explained how its surface was analogous to the three-dimensional universe, so a hyperspace jump was equivalent to squeezing together two distant points on the surface of the balloon.

"The craft that passes through hyperspace is a 'Traveller'," Danielle explained, "and it travels in an interface between normal space and hyperspace that we call a 'plume'. In the old technology, the plume is created by a hyperdrive motor for relatively short hyperspace jumps, or by twin beacons to make what we call 'tethered' hyperspace pathways. In the new technology, we need both a hyperdrive motor and a beacon to make the plume."

The girls followed so far, which encouraged Danielle, though the complications were just beginning. She projected some equations onto the wall. The girls blinked at their complexity.

Wildchild got up to look at the screen more closely, setting the rows of equations to scroll upward with a wave of her hand, seeming to follow the sequence, while Danielle continued her explanation.

"The Beltway junctions split the plume into what we call 'allocation bands'. They allow the Traveller to remain in the plume while the hyperspace pathway itself changes direction."

"Redirecting the pathways is simple. It's the mechanism the junctions use to keep the Travellers in their allocation bands that's difficult. Writing these equations was the hardest job I've ever done."

As Danielle explained in general principles how they worked, Yael joined Wildchild in front of the screen. They scanned the equations together until Danielle finished, when they conferred for a second, then Wildchild said:

"I think we understand how you fix the Traveller inside an allocation band. It's like chess."

"What do you mean?" Danielle asked.

"In chess, there are some laws that say how a piece can move and what happens if it's taken."

"Rules of the game, yes," Danielle said smiling encouragement, seeing where Wildchild was going with her analogy.

"And there are decisions," Wildchild continued, "to do with where I want my pieces to be."

"Tactics," Danielle said.

"Yes: rules of the game and tactics. So there are times when a tactic is so obvious it's like a rule of the game, such as when I can move my knight one way to block an attack or another way and it'll be taken."

Danielle was pleased.

"We call that a 'forced move'; where an intelligent player has no real choice."

"So your hyperspace junctions impose forced moves on the Traveller. It's forced into an allocation band by its kinetic energy."

"Exactly!" Danielle exclaimed. "The mass of the Traveller is fixed. It's a 'rule of the game'. But its velocity is a variable, a 'tactic' in your analogy. We can make the kinetic energy into a 'forced move' by sending the Traveller into the Beacon at a precise velocity."

Danielle projected a map of the Beltway, with the distances in normal space between junctions.

"So here's a test for you," she said. "Suppose a 50-ton Traveller enters the Beltway Junction near Capella Space Station at 10,000 mph, where will it exit the Beltway?"

The girls checked the formula against the map.

"On the Arcturus spur," said Wildchild.

"Quite right," Danielle confirmed. "And what if it enters at 45,000 mph?"

"Then it will come to Celetaris," said Yael.

"Correct. At the moment, the Beltway has 1024 allocation bands between 5,000 mph and 500,000 mph, though not all of them are used."

"So why can't the same system work for the new technology?" Yael asked.

"This is a tricky part," Danielle warned. "Communication through the plume makes the allocation bands unravel when kinetic energy is the forced move. Now we need to build the allocation bands with a new forced move."

"Like electric charge?" said Yael.

"It won't work," Danielle said. "Nor will magnetic fields."

"Quantum spin," Yael now suggested.

"No."

"Parity," she attempted.

"Not parity, either," said Danielle. "We can't scale quantum spin or parity up to the mass of a spaceship."

There was a pause because Yael was temporarily out of ideas. Then Wildchild said:

"You told Roger that electromagnetism was a mathematical phenomenon."

"I did."

"So how about temperature?"

"Very good," Danielle said. "Temperature is a statistical effect, the average energy of individual atoms. But remember that the new technology requires a signal through the plume between the Beacon and the Traveller. The information will be washed out by a statistical average."