The Fata Morgana by Leo A. Frankowski
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A lot of good people helped me out by proofreading this book, and by giving me many valuable suggestions. Special thanks go to L. Warren Douglas, Alan G. Greenberg, Gilbert Parker, Tom and Jane Devlin, and Mike Hubble, who has a habit of quoting my books back at me, chapter and verse.
PUMMEL IN THE TUNNEL
I first noticed that something was definitely wrong when somebody hit me in the back of the head with a club.
I went flying down on my knees and elbows, slapped the ground, yelled, and came up on the bounce, smashing someone’s testicles in the process.
A whole platoon of thugs was pouring out of a small doorway in the side of the tunnel. I caught a wall with one hand while swinging with the other, and then there were other things to do. It seemed like I was surrounded by dozens of the bastards!
In the movies, the hero can take on vast numbers of bad guys because the stunt men have the courtesy to come at him one at a time. That way, he only has to fight one opponent at a time, ten times in a row. If your enemies have any brains and coordination at all, they will mob you, all of them at once, and then you will go down, no matter how good you are. At best, you might take out one or two before you are deleted.
My opponents seemed to have neither brains nor coordination, but they did have enthusiasm, and there were an awful lot of them. Also, even waiting in line takes a certain amount of coordination, and for these idiots, fighting seemed to be a series of random events. Once, apparently by accident, four of them came at me at once, and I had to drop and roll. Fortunately, they weren’t bright enough to know what to do to me once I was down. I was up again in a hurry, and dancing around.
I swear that there were at least fifteen of them on me alone. Against odds like that, you fight to win, without thinking about the damage, jail time, or lawsuits you might be generating. I’ve always been partial to knees. Knees are low and easy to get to without the flashy, dangerous, high kicks that some of the other good targets require. Also, knees break easily, they put your opponent down fast, and barring modern surgery, they generally don’t heal properly for years, if they heal at all.
I guess I broke a lot of knees that night.
BAEN BOOKS by LEO A. FRANKOWSKI
A Boy and His Tank
The Fata Morgana
ONE
The boat was dismasted, and in parting company the mast had knocked a hole in the bottom of the ferrocrete hull.
We were sinking in a Force Ten gale, with gusts of up to seventy, but it was debatable whether she would sink to the bottom of the East Pacific Basin, or wreck herself on the rocky shores of an island that couldn’t possibly be where it obviously was.
We had already done everything we could think of, which wasn’t nearly enough. We had stuffed a mattress into the hole, and wedged and blocked it in as best we could with the sea water slapping to and fro on the lower deck. Tons of stuff were awash down there. Plugging the hole seemed to help only a little. The water in the hold wasn’t getting any deeper, but it wasn’t getting noticeably shallower, either.
The engines had flooded out early on, taking the big pumps west with them, and the electric pumps were losing ground as the batteries slowly died. Adam was valiantly working the manual bailer, but he was only postponing the inevitable.
The automatic distress beacon was ready to be switched on and the life raft was inflated, loaded and in the water. Back in the cockpit, all I could do was wait and see if our navigation was really five hundred miles off, and I was staring at one of the Line Islands, or if the solid looking thing in front of me was really a mirage, the Fata Morgana, as Adam had twice called it.
A sad ending for a pair of good engineers, I suppose, but perhaps a better way to go than some of the alternatives. I’ve read that drowning beats the hell out of, say, death by fire, but I don’t know where the writer got his information.
TWO
I guess it all really started because of a problem that exists in the Special Machinery business.
Special Machines are designed and built one at a time, in accordance with your customer’s needs and specifications. If he manufactures widgets, you might make him a machine that assembles widgets, or maybe paints them, or wraps them in plastic film for shipment.
Each special machine is specially designed, you could even say invented, to do only one thing, but to do that one thing extremely well. Such a machine can be very productive, but it is generally of use to only one company. Thus, our industry is one of the last bastions of craftsmanship in this increasingly automated, mass production world.
To be sure, our machines are largely responsible for all that bland mass production, since they can turn out identical products at a fraction of the cost of any other method known, but there is nonetheless a great deal of personal satisfaction in designing something, building it, and then watching it work as you had planned. It is a rare joy that the operators of our machines can never have. When there is an operator, that is, and the whole system is not completely automated.
* * *
I’ve always liked workshops and factories. Some people—my ex-wife, for example—claim that the industrial environment is alien, unnatural, and inhuman, but for me it is the most natural thing in the world.
I am a man, and as such I am as much a part of nature as any tree or beaver or bee. The machines that I build are as natural as any beaver lodge or bee hive. If there is any fundamental difference, it is that, being a man, I use the mind nature gave me to direct my efforts, rather than depending on my instincts alone. Even then, I don’t think that I can claim that a beaver never thought about her work, or that she never sat back to admire a well built dam.
* * *
In Special Machines, our sort of craftsmanship entails a whole set of problems of its own, problems that the rest of the world rarely perceives.
You see, in order to get new business for your company, you have to have competent people ready to start on your customer’s job. No purchasing agent in his right mind would trust an important order to someone who had nothing but a vacant shop.
And in order to get competent people, you have to have interesting work for them to do. Even if you could afford to pay them to sit and do nothing while you were waiting for the next job to come in, the best workers would all quit within days, leaving you with no one but the sort of people who would be better off working for the government. When you start paying people to not work, you are automatically selecting for incompetence.
It’s a shame, but the only sane course of action is when the work is gone, you have to lay almost everybody off. It hurts, but there’s nothing else you can do.
It then becomes a matter of “If we had some eggs, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some ham.” I’ve seen a few companies that never were able to get started up again. Oh, in an ideal world, there would always be a fresh job to get into whenever the last job was winding down, but if I ever began to notice that happening to me on a regular basis, I’d start believing in Santa Claus, or maybe even God.
So when a big (for us) Chrysler welding line was getting ready to be shipped, and nothing new was in the offing, most of my best engineers had their computers in word processing mode. They were updating their resumes on company time, and I knew that I was in trouble.
Oh, I had plenty of money. The previous three jobs had been profitable, the company bank account was flush, and I hadn’t even been paid yet for the last one. The trouble was, looking for work, I’d called on everybody I knew (and many that I didn’t) and I hadn’t been able to find anything, anywhere, that was ready to shake loose in less than two months.