Edgers!

In my non-palatial autotel roomette, there is a hot air dryer. An insanely powerful, automatic hot air dryer; none of that "press button, receive bacon" stuff. Just hold your hands or even head under it and it starts up like a baby jet engine.

In point of fact, there's only one label on it:What?

I was a little afraid to put my hands under it. Y'know, for a group of people so concerned about clarity they all sound like itinerant elocution instructors, sometimes I have no idea what Edgers -- even the ex- ones on Frothup -- are attempting to communicate.

Frothup: Dropping In, Part 10

[TO THE BEGINNING]

At about that same time, Lupine's first passenger squirt-booster drop was finally cleared and moving toward the boarding locks. T, Handsome Dave and Rannie Wu had first-available clearance, none of that "standby" flying for them. I got the story later, mostly from T. I've filled in the details as best I could.

Dr. Schmid was Acting Captain; in conference with his and the late Captain James' off-watch alternates — high-level Navs boffins to a man but command-skilled, an uncommon combination — along with the Chief, E&PP's Airframe supervisor, the lead squirt-booster pilot (Butch, teleconferenced from Aberstwyth Port HQ) and assortment of Port officials plus the Mayor of Aberstwyth himself (advised by my new friend Raub from Innovative, sitting beside him) had decided to run a full watch of cargo-only squirt—boosters. This despite every last one of them having been gone over by Engineering and Airframe multiple times, all sabotage found and removed and in pristine condition.

I'd've done it, too.

It was a last-minute thing and didn't get communicated down the ranks; T and Lt. Wu found out while in the same waiting room I'd read my comic book. T took the news with a shrug and got comfortable in a seat. Time to nap. Conversely Rannie Wu was furious. Oh, controlled as ever, but T told me later, "You could practically see steam pouring out her ears." Both of them normally work third shift; with the change, they'd lose a night's sleep with no chance to make it up, especially given the time-slip between ship and planetary surface. Handsome Dave was luckier; the Chief hit his pager before the big conference had even broken up and diverted him to the squirt-booster maintenance bay where he usually hangs out, with a reminder to bring his luggage and be ready to report to Departure at the end of his normal shift.

They made port and were clearing what passes for Customs about the time I was cooling my heels in the Irrational Numbers Security office, a windowless cubbie on the second floor at the front of the mu-shaped building. Mike had called them from Final Test immediately, while Doc checked out the empty amplifier cabinets. Nothing had been damaged; the amplifier modules, each one about the size of a file drawer, sixteen to a cabinet, had been simply been unlatched and slid out.

In the Security office, Mike, Doc and the sole Security worker on duty — a skinny guy carrying a disturbingly-large revolver in a low-slung holster — were watching multiple screens on which, over and over, an automated truck painted just like the "Aw Boo Moo Pow" one I'd seen in the morning rolled up to the dock; two shifter-loader robots rolled out, vanished from the picture and popped up a few seconds later on a high-angle image of the Final Test bay, where they proceeded to load themselves full and return to the truck. It took three trips each to empty the cabinets, a little over two minutes total; at the end, the loaders rolled in, the rear door rattled down and the truck drove away. Another screen showed a wide shot of the entire dock area, a u-shape with the Irrational building fronting three sides; the thieving truck went out onto the street through the gate and turned right. Almost immediately after, one that looked exactly like it arrived from that direction, pulled up to a different section of the docks, and robots rolled out from the building to unload it.

"Back it up again," Mike said, "You can about read the door as it turns."

Doc squinted at the screen, "It is not going to resolve the bar code."

Security shrugged. "Best cameras they'll let me buy."

The entire gibberish wasn't readable but by rocking the clip back and forth, they pieced it out. I suspected wishful thinking for a couple of the letters but the three seemed sure: An Bou Moo Pau. Whatever that meant.

Doc must have read my expression; while Mike and Security talked, he turned to me. "It's an encoding scheme; Junior at Phi-Low's runs so many trucks, he's got barcode readers at all his main clients to track them. Scans barcodes off the street traffic, too. He even sells tracking services to the other carriers."

Sounded like good news to me. "So they could follow that truck if we had the code? I mean, the company could have?"

"Still can. Should be all sorted out by this evening. This has got to be some crazy mistake."

I'm sure I looked as confused as I felt. I guessed, "That 'Ah-Boo' stuff?"

"Pronounceable version of the barcode — people can't read the bars. Sometimes they need to."

I wondered why they didn't just number them but about then, the Security guy looked up, frowning. He was on the phone. "Joan? This is Tack. Tack from 'Rational Numbers? Yeah. Is Junior in?"

He must have been; within minutes, Tack was explaining our problem someone at the other end. He read off the code. Twice. Looked frustrated. "Yeah, it could be 'Ah.' Maybe. But the end is bee-ay-you, clear as the sky."

As much rain as I'd seen in Aberstwyth so far, that didn't sound especially clear.
Things were looking cloudy on the phone, too. "Look, I can give you the time stamp. Another truck came in right after this one left." he fiddled with the camera playback, "14, um,14:32:40 and 14:33:25. Can't you check that? Yeah, I'll hold."

He covered the phone mic. and turned his attention to us. "Says the code we read isn't one of his. Wrong sequence. But there's more than one way to skin this snake."

Maybe there wasn't. After a minute, Junior must have come back; Hack said, "Yeah? What?" and looked annoyed. "Surely it read something?" he asked.

It appeared it hadn't. Tack thanked the guy at the trucking company and hung up, exclaiming, "Dammit!"

Other than knowing the truck had been a fake, we'd learned nothing. Or had we? Dr. Daugherty seemed lost in thought. "Tack, don't we get gate counts from that same system?"

"Sure. But it's just time-in, time-out — oh." He turned back his computer, clicked a couple icons and a new screen showed up. "Last three hours, here we go." He scrolled down, muttering times, then stopped. "It's not here."

Daugherty looked unsurprised. "Thought so. —Trick code." It took twenty minutes and another call to Phi-Low Haulage but by the end, even Tack was convinced: the barcode on the fake truck had unwritten itself. Junior had explained the optical reader could be used as a backup input if the normal serial IO failed. "It's for places where access is controlled, that kind of thing." Whoever had done it knew a lot more about internal procedures at Irrational Numbers and the trucking company than seemed possible.

I asked if the police had been notified; Tack leaned back in his chair. "Probably not the way you mean. It's on the Public Notice page on the 'net, but about now, the Director of Public Safety is having a nap, the Assistant DPS hasn't started her shift yet and Ev — he's my cousin, works nights — is asleep. That is 'the Police.'"

Edgers. I must have rolled my eyes or looked frustrated, because he got a little defensive, "We take care of our own problems. All the private security plus a lot of 'concerned residents' follow Public Notices. They've all read my report and by now, they've seen the video, too. I just posted it. We'll find whoever did this."

He sounded confident. But he still looked worried to me.


About then, the arrivals from Lupine were boarding the bus. T was grinning to herself at the back of the group; she'd just watched Handsome Dave doing his charming best to draw Lt. Wu into conversation. After responding curtly to his first two attempts, the attractive officer had leaned close and whispered something. T, a shameless eavesdropped, had only caught a few words: "...Spring Break...Cancun...video...Starship Company computers..." Whatever the details, it worked; Dave had slowly blushed right up his hairline and moved away. "Handsome" is not the same as "saintly."

I don't know if they had the same bus driver I'd had from my trip into town. T said he was curt to the point of rudeness and not at all helpful in sorting out their luggage; the bus had rattled and snorted into town, made several stops before arriving at the same autotel where I was staying, spat all their bags out in a big heap and roared off almost before they'd exited. "See the Egress..." T mused.

Rannie was disinclined to take matters stoically. "What a dump," was her only comment. Like the other two, she'd picked up a rent-a-phone at the port. She took it out, punched "O" and started looking for a better hotel. From what T told me, she found the automated directory assistance wasn't very good with non-Edger accents.

Handsome Dave had his own orders from the Chief. He had made contact with Innovative Mold on the bus trip in; he took his luggage and while T said, "Your buddy just vanished," he'd actually stashed his stuff, all but a box of replacement circuit breakers and assorted small parts and headed out to rendezvous with an Innovative delivery truck; he and my recent acquaintance Raub were going to start repairs with the squirt-booster at Innovative, then proceed to the port as time allowed. That left T with an open afternoon, a private room and nothing to do; she's as addicted a reader as I am and settled in with paperback, expecting a quiet end to a frustrating day.

...She wasn't expecting the peace and quiet to last: "A policewoman's work is never done," and while she wasn't doing it, new items were being added to her to-do list — but I'm getting ahead of myself.


Back at Irrational numbers, I realized I'd been putting off a call. Waiting wasn't going to make it any easier. For a wonder, I got through to the Chief on my first try. He was as receptive to diplomacy as ever:

"Boss? Are you sitting down?"

"What?"

I took a deep breath. "Our new 'Drive finals were stolen."

"The HPAs? How? Don't they lock doors down there?" (The Chief has a pretty dim opinion of most planet-dwellers, Edgers maybe even more so).

"Um. It's a factory. Trucks in and out. Somebody pulled up, yanked all the modules, loaded them into a truck and drove away."

"'Somebody?' They know who?"

"Actually, more like nobody: it was all automated." I had to explain it in more detail. It still added up to "robots" and "We don't know."

He was unfazed. "Fine. How long will it take to replace it all?"
I hadn't considered that.

Mike, Doc and I were still in the Security office; Tack was on the phone again, talking to his opposite number at some other factory, asking after their security cameras and, for want of a better word, bragging about the theft.

While was doing that, I asked the others how long it might take to start over. Mike looked glum. Dr. Daugherty considered it; you could we wheels going 'round and in about thirty seconds, he grinned. "Five weeks. Maybe a month."

Mike shook his head. "Six weeks, minimum. More like eight. Doc, we don't have a crew. And the semiconductor line will have to be cleared and re-set."

I relayed this to the Chief. He came as near to spluttering as I've ever heard. It wasn't more than a little hesitation and a tooth-gritting edge to his words, "Six...weeks? Unacceptable. Bobbi, handle them; I have to take this to Dr. Schmid."

And he hung up on me, just like that.

While all that was going on, Daugherty sat there smiling. "We'll get 'em from R&D. They designed the semi fab line, after all."

Mike snorted. "Oh, sure. They'll help — if they feel like it. If the same ones show up three days in a row."

It didn't sound like any Research and Development group I'd ever heard of. There was a good reason for that.
* * *
Mike and I were back in Dr. Daugherty's cluttered office; Tack had more-or-less diplomatically chased us out, promising updates, "the very first I find anything out."

Doc had no more set foot in the door and started to sit down than he suddenly was reminded of something. He stood right back up, grabbed a stack of printouts and exclaimed, "Class!"

"'Class?'" I asked, but I was asking a dust trail.

Mike smiled. "The class you have now missed a day and a half of. The plan was to take a little more time with the assembled amps, then I'd get you up to speed for Day Three."
We spent a little time figuring out what I needed to pick up. The relevant chapters of Surfing Through Hyperspace are the standard introductory text each side of the Line, of course, and the basics behind ultra-linear amplifiers, even solid-state ones, are a prerequisite of the job. The high-power solid-state silicon-carbide version is a little tricky and they are peculiar to the Far Edge, at least until now. Too, they don't look at the system in quite the same way — partially due to the WW II German tech they have and we lack, plus divergent developments from there — and as a result, the terms and even schematic symbols are quite a bit different.

Eventually, I got tangled up on something or other that I'd lose my Earthside vacation privileges if I got too specific about. I just couldn't quite wrap my mind around the notion and Mike admitted it was something he was a little shaky on himself. Finally, he came to some sort of decision. "Time to take a walk — I know a couple of guys over in R&D who might help."

I thought he was talking about elsewhere in the Irrational Numbers plant. Next thing I knew, I was following him out the front door, across the street and through a gate into Memorial Park. Both pillars were well-stenciled with "EARTHERS GO HOME," "NATO" under the circle-and-slash symbol and "NO MORE CRATERS," in an assortment of eye-searing colors. It looked fresh.

Mike noticed me noticing. He said a word I missed — something "phage" — looking annoyed and embarrassed.

"What?"

He waved a hand towards the gate. "It won't last. I'm on the Park Committee. A coating on the concrete inhibits crosslinking and it was seeded with paint-eating bacteria. Gone by tomorrow. —Look, they are vocal but they mean no harm. Kids, mostly."

"Not in the habit of stealing 'Drive finals, then?" I asked.

"As far as I know."

"If I was inclined, this place could make me paranoid."

He smiled sourly but didn't say anything in reply. We walked across the park in silence, skirting the crater. On the far side, the rimwall had been graded down and one of the radial streets ran tangent to it. Across the street, the terrain swept down in a shallow swale and in it, a remarkable building with a huge and variegated series of roofs.

As we got nearer, it seemed to be mostly roof, held up by pillars,posts and the occasional short, random-looking stretch of wall. Various smaller sheds and trailers were scattered around in the vast roofed-over space. In the distance, the harsh blue-white glare of a welder stood out; nearer, a delicious cooking smell mingled with woodsmoke where a couple of people tended a huge kettle over an open fire. It wasn't crowded but there were a fair number of people and machines about, most of them looking busy.

A well-worn graveled path led through a pair of telephone pole-sized pillars; on the right-hand one, an ornate, neatly hand-painted sign reading "TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE COOPERATIVE #68" was nailed up slightly askew; a different hand using electric-violet paint had added a large, sloppy question mark to the end and turned the "OO" of "cooperative" into crossed eyes. Below it, a thumbtacked paper labelled "A Codified Set Of The Builder's, Crafter's, Maker's Rules" had been overstamped with a circle-A in a star, the logo of the most rabid association of the FCS; "There are NO RULES" was scrawled across it.

I stopped and looked at Mike. "This is 'R & D?'"

He gave me a crooked grin. "Best on the planet. Only one on the planet. Where do you think Doc lives?"

Edgers: about the time they're starting to seem normal, they do something to remind you they're insane.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Frothup: Dropping In, Part Nine

[STORY BEGINS HERE]

Irrational turned out to be mostly something I do know: applied geekery.

A little study over another vending-machine breakfast got me on the right bus in a series of buses and three transfers later, I debarked a couple blocks away from the factory, along the portward-facing arc in the industrial district, just a little north of the city's east-west centerline. There was a pretty park across the street, bright with in early-Spring growth, ground mounding up towards the center. I admired it as I walked along; Lupine's little pocket park and planters along the passageways don't amount to that much greenspace and Enviro & Physical Plant's greenhouses are all Authorized Persons Only, for a number of good reasons.

A sign over the first gateway I passed read "Memorial Park" and the hill or bluff rising at the center, across nearly a block of greensward and low plantings, suddenly took shape as the outer arc of a circular feature: it was the crater left when Cut & Run crashed. Right across from the Irrational Numbers plant and office. It looked too pretty to have been the center of so much suffering.

Nothing is completely safe and though I doubt all the details will ever be known, most infamous disasters have no single cause, no easy villain Instead, they follow the Titanic Rule: the ocean-liner's tragedy was the result of multiple factors. [Too fast for conditions, poorly-equipped lookout, brittle steel, inadequate rivets, "watertight" construction with designed-in failure and inadequate lifeboats, to name a few.]

In most such disasters, take any single item off the list and the death toll drops precipitately. The true wonder is that nothing as bad has happened before or since out of hundreds of thousands of Edger Glocke-ship landings, no few of them surreptitious smuggling at Earth (and probably even now, Agreement of '89 or no, Edger ships not considering themselves party to a contract they didn't sign). Edgers have screwed a few ships right into the ground and so have NATO/Russian crews; but never as badly as here on Frothup.

It was in that somber frame of mind that I climbed the steps to Irrational's main door, just as a large, driverless truck pulled out of a gate next to the entrance, the legend "Aw Boo Moo Pow" on what I guess you'd still call the driver's-side door. Um, "Aw Boo...?" all right, then.

The lobby was unremarkable, if you ignored the far wall, papered in a regular black-on-white pattern of two-inch tall numbers. In front of the wall, a desk; behind the desk, a woman of that indeterminate middle age I still think of as older than me, despite what my mirror reports.

She was on the phone, finishing one call as I entered and switching to another line with a remarkable bray of "Irrational Num-bers," in an accept that combined an Upper Midwest rasp with the slight over-enunciation typical of most Edgers. She gave me a look that implied I was underdressed for the lobby, tucked the handset under her chin and averred, "Deliveries go through the gate, loading dock, South side. Follow the signs," returning her attention to the telephone immediately after.

I just stood there and waited, studying the wallpaper. I found "3.1415" at the upper left and it started to make sense, in a Far Edge way. Finishing her call, she looked up and realized I was still there. "Can I help you?" she asked, in a tone that implied that she couldn't, wouldn't and I was dim for not realizing it.

"Um, Miz...Mandelbrot?" (That's what the sign on her desk said, YVONNE MANDELBROT, OFFICE MANAGER. The Fate's jest or more Edger humor?). "I'm from the Lupine? To meet Findlay Michaels?" Couldn't keep the questioning tone out of my voice. I felt as if I was back in grade school.

She gave me a doubtful look, but only said, "All right," and turned back to her phone. There was some trick to the thing; her voice was barely audible most of the time. I caught "Earth...says she's...Oh." She hung up and gave me a less-unfriendly look. "He says he'll be out momentarily. Please have a seat." And at that, she tuned her attention back to the phone, looking more like Margeret Hamilton than ever.

Findley Micheals showed up to collect me before I'd read the wall halfway (...1134999999837... and who saw that coming?) and led me back through the office-type offices to what was obviously Engineering space, workbenches and parts racks, test equipment arrayed on carts and emptier space past that. On the other side of the corridor, a row of offices.

Mike stopped at a shut door of translucent glass and tapped, then opened it even as someone on the other side sang out, "C'mon in!"

Within was a still-life pandemonium. It was a small office — still three times the size of the Chief's tiny cubbyhole aboard Lupine but where the Chief's extreme degree of neatness and order makes a preposterously-small space look nearly reasonable, this room felt tiny.

Whiteboards took up most of two walls, with jammed-full bookshelves below them; the far wall had floor-to-ceiling shelves, heaped and cluttered with an assortment of books, loose paper, test equipment and unidentifiable electronic assemblies. Overflow was piled in the corners and had spilled onto the floor.

To our left, a desk, and turning from the desk, a merrily-smiling, craggy man, with dark, curly hair and bright blue eyes. He wasn't much over five feet tall but he seemed to fill whatever space was left, leaving barely enough room for Mike and me to stand. "Come on in," he repeated, "You must be the young lady from the Earth behemoth we're improving.!"

Mike grinned. "She is. Roberta Ecks, meet Doc Daugherty. Doc's our chief design engineer for the solid-state 'Drive amps."

Doc beamed even wider, holding out his hand and adding "And systems, don't forget, they're no real good without a combiner."

We shook on it and I said, "Right. Glad to meet you." He didn't seem any crazier than any other RF design type I'd known; in fact, he reminded me a little of the boffin who'd tried to drum the rudiments of Stardrive theory into us at USSF, twenty years ago. That memory was what made his name click. "Just a minute: the Daugherty?," I asked, "The CLASSIFIED Daugherty Shunt?"

He could't've grinned any wider but he ducked his head in a semi-bow. "The one and only. I've always thought it was good of your side to remember my name."

It was like casually running into Marconi, or at least Philo Farnsworth. The Daugherty Shunt doubled bootstrap efficiency of a CLASSIFIED and improved transition stability even more; it was what made huge commercial starships a practical proposition instead of a chancy gamble.

I've even read papers arguing the Daugherty Shunt played as big a part in ending the War as the Agreement of '89. I don't know about that. I do know that by shortening travel times and making it possible for a really large starship to re-emerge much farther into a solar system without shaking itself to pieces, it had simultaneously made large-scale trade much more practical and the War suicidally deadly: imagine a carrier like Lupine popping up well inside the Solar System, launching a swarm of high-velocity attack ships and missiles, and dropping back into a 'Drive bubble. At a significant fraction of the speed of light, the damage would be done practically before Earth could react. Or any Edger system, station or ally — Smitty's World, La-A, Frothup, Witherspoon, whatever.

NATO/USSF had the technology within months of the Far Edge's first use — whether by espionage, a captured or defecting Edger starship or some other means has never been told. —At the time, nobody knew why the Edgers had not struck first. USSF would have been surprised, had they not been too busy capitalizing on their good luck (or clever intelligence work). After the peace, it became clear that even at war, the Far Edge depended too much on technology and "biologicals" — plants and animals — from Earth.

Daughtery didn't stop the war but his innovation had certainly made both sides blink. And there he was in his cluttered, fusty office, a rumpled little guy with a slightly crooked smile, an ordinary-looking engineer. History, right in front of me. I don't know if he noticed but Mike picked up on my sudden awe and stepped in, "We're proud of Doc. Wait'll you see what he came up with for this project." Doc nodded. "I don't know why nobody else ever thought to scale them up."

Oh my life: from awe to befuddlement in two lines. "Scale what up?" I asked.

"Gysels!" they said in near unison.

It didn't clear anything up. That was all they'd tell me at the time; Mike arranged to meet Dr. Daughtery in the final-test area after lunch and took me on a quick tour of the plant. We didn't get into the semiconductor fab wing at all, of course, other than the shirtsleeve QC and a quick peek through three layers of windows and down the line of gleaming white and stainless steel machinery. Not a person in sight — "Fully automated," Mike said, "With one tech keeping watch inside in six-hour shifts; they take a break and do six on the QC console outside, too."

Sounded like a long day to me but with a two-hour lunch and Frothup's plus-size days, it still left plenty of time.

The rest of the factory was nearly as automated, a little less so near the end of the line. Final Assembly still have more machines than people and the overall pace seemed pretty slow. I asked about that too.

"It's not high-volume. We're still supplying three-quarters of the FCS and independent ships, but we still run in batches; past the initial sub-assemblies, one crew follows a 'Drive assembly all the way through."

I asked about spares and replacements — turns out that's done in very small batches, based on maintaining a small stock level. "Things change too quickly to tie up a lot of dead storage." It makes sense if you've got a factory handy; a starship in flight has to be able to fix whatever might go wrong and so we end up carrying a "dead storage" full stock of spares. Even the old Radio Corporation and Beamathon companies worked that way: starships started out with what they needed and restocked-as-used, on their predictable returns to home port. It might be dead storage to the manufacturer; for us, it was the stuff you'd better have if you didn't want to end up dead.

We even got in a quick look at Lupine's new 'Drive finals, a dozen cabinets full of solid-state modules, pushing over 100 kiloWatts from the combiner hidden behind them into a dummy load.

There were a pair of big momentary switches on long, heavy cables, which Mike said were used to simulate transients, and hit one of them. Bang! Half the cabinets cycled off and back on, barely a blip on the power-out meter.

He handed the switches to me and I asked, "Like this?" gave them a simultaneous double-kerchunk-kerchunk. That time, the room lights blinked; but the 'Drive final came right back up as if nothing had happened.

Mike's eyes were a bit big as he admitted, "You know, I've never killed both sides at once; we've never built a final that ran this much power."

I nodded but pointed out, "It's going to take a hit like that some day when we're flying. I'd just as soon find out if there's a problem while it's still down here."

He said he could see my point. He still didn't look especially happy about it.

By then it was lunch time. Mike had a surprise in store for me there, too; we walked to a by-gosh supermarket (what, you thought it was all freeze-dried space food? Didja miss the soybean fields between city and port?) a block and a half away, "Hi-Frontier." Tucked off to one side, just past the deli section, a half-row of hot-food counters and what food! Childhood Sunday-dinner stuff, turkey rolls, meatloaf and pork roast, a lot of rice dishes, corn, soybeans, green beans. We eat all right aboard Lupine, Enviro and Physical Plant's agronomists grow an astonishing lot of tasty veggies and even manage chickens, a few hogs and, yes, guinea pigs (they're actually pretty good), but Hi-Front's lunch counter put them to shame. I stopped Mike half-way into a kind of apology for such an everyday lunch, "...since we had to reschedule at the last minute."

I don't know if he believed me when I told him he couldn't have done better with a month of planning, but it was true.

After a hasty meal by local standards — a little over an hour — it was back to the final test area. Doc Daugherty was approaching from the other end of the hall as Mike opened the door; I was watching him and until Mike said, "Son of a snake!" I didn't look into the room.

When I did, it took a moment to grasp what I was seeing. The cabinets were still there, but empty. All of the amplifier modules were gone. Lupine's history-making solid-state 'Drive finals had been stolen.

_____________________________________________
Author's note: you will find that sequence of six nines well into pi; as is so often the case, Richard Feynman was there first. I love his plan for it.

Frothup: Dropping In Part 8

[STORY BEGINS HERE]

It was still light — light gray and raining — when I got back to my room at the autotel but since Frothup's day runs a bit over 27 hours, it didn't mean it hadn't been a long day. Once we'd been released from not-quite-durance-vile, we'd caught an indifferent meal in what passed for a lunch counter at the port. Afterward, Raub had headed back to his shop to work up alternatives for the sabotaged circuit breakers and I'd caught a bus back into town.

Our run-in with Port Security had worked out better than expected: though Port Control had flatly denied any chance of the sabotage happening while our squirt-boosters were under their care, the not-police had approached the matter with the cynical skepticism of good cops everywhere and worked their way down the list of every Port employee who could possibly have had access to them. A cleaner named Mallory had shown up for his shift while the vehicles were starting to be hauled to where Raub and I had looked them over. He'd stuck around just long enough take in what was happening; gate records showed him leaving shortly after. Port Security had sent an officer to his address of record, which turned out to be a vacant lot adjacent to the crater from the tanker crash. And that, on this still very Edger-like world, was just about that: he'd been hired without references and there's no official paper trail other than voluntary documents. At least for a certain value of "official."

I didn't hear those details at the time but I have my methods. This is, if it counts as "method" that my best friend is the ship's third-shift Security boss. With one of their own looking very questionable, Port Security decided their opposite numbers on Lupine needed to be brought up to speed; they may be a bit too suspicious of anyone from Earth on the Far Edge but in a crunch, Edgers tend to step right up. Part of stepping up involved an Edger custom I'd heard about but forgotten: they post criminals and debtors. Assault someone, skip out a bill, pull a hold up, dodge making restitution for a crime, run out on a trial or your spouse, flee an accident, whatever, it gets posted. They started out doing it literally, "Wanted" posters tacked up on corkboards and the like; you'll still find that for local stuff in small towns and stations, mining drifts and the like, but mostly it's on computer networks now, internet or even Fidonets in some places. Port Security ran a search on the cleaner's name to no avail — and then tried an image search on the suspect's work ID. The software's tricky but it worked better than you'd think. It turned up three possibles and a little more digging elimated two of them: one too young, one known to have skipped the planet. Number three was a bingo. Vandalism, five years back. It wasn't much as I'd count crime, tagging a building with a political slogan, but despite an attitude towards free speech that'd make the ACLU crow with delight, Edgers take property rights very seriously.

And speaking of free speech... There was a pamphlet shoved under the door of my autotel room when I got there, EARTHMEN GO HOME across the front and a wild mix of misinterpreted, misreported Earthside and NATO-space politics and paranoid accusations on the inside. Who knew the Trilateral Commission even knew about the Hidden Frontier? Or that the Kansas II territorial government was run by non-humans? Despite overheated, ALL_CAPS invective, I was pretty confident neither of the George Bushes nor Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi were crypto-Rosicrucians; but hey, I just fix Stardrives, maybe they all had me snowed, too.

I saved it for the laugh value; C. Jay has a handsome collection of similar things, everything from Chick tracts to a made-up history text from Stalin Mir, where the old Soviets had very nearly managed to convince a generation born there that they and their "perfect" political system were all there was of Mankind. (It didn't work out, though the endgame probably would have gone on a lot longer had the USSR not. Visit the place now and you'll get no closer than low orbit; they even run their own shuttles. Suspicious doesn't begin to cover it and they're fanatical about self-sufficiency.)

Tried to reach Handsome Dave but he was off-duty and not responding; checked my watch (still on ship's time, CST just like Starship Company HQ) and my only choices for scuttlebutt were Drew or Conan the Objectivist.

The ratty little terminal built into the desk in my room had a blinking "Message" icon that finally caught my eye; navigated to the inbox and there was a note from Lupine's IS boffins with the URL for (limited) access to the ship's intranet. Shipname.ftl, as usual. I didn't expect it to be much use with the available hardware, but there was a text-based browser in the terminal's top menu and I was able to fumble my way to my official ship e-mail account.

A note from Handsome Dave confirmed they'd found a couple boosters with the same sabotage; sure enough, they'd been down and unloaded on the suspicious Mr. Mallory's shift. Ship Security — Sheriff Mike — had insisted on checking every single squirt-booster and Lupine's two de-miled landers (LRV's Hardaway and Snodgrass, better known as "Hard Way" and "No Way"). That was the only damage found other than somebody's forgotten and seriously forbidden ashtray on Snodgrass. Probably the squirt-booster tampering would have been caught on pre-flight and if not, probably it wouldn't have mattered much, no more that the one that made my trip down more exciting than it needed to be. On the other hand, a light load that just happened to mate those two squirt-boosters to a couple of cargo containers could have gone majorly wrong.

Dave added that he'd send us replacement breakers in the first trip down once Port and Lupine had squirt-boosters moving again, "maybe tomorrow." Ever the optimist.

Along with the usual routine stuff — new entries in TASKER automagically get e-mailed to everyone in Engineering, and we're not spared the same kind of work stuff you get, either — I found a note from Finley Michaels at Irrational, asking if I was ready to reschedule with them. I replied that I'd check on it, added the Chief to the recipients, logged off and turned in. It was just about full dark and the rain hissing outside was very nearly as soothing as the normal background sounds of my quarters aboard Lupine. I snuggled under the covers and drifted off.


For the second morning in a row, an unfamiliar alarm was going off and I groped for a light switch that, once again, wasn't there. Frickin' rent-a-phone! I found the lights and said a bad word; grabbed for the phone, knocked it to the floor and said a worse one.

Managed to repeat neither of them answering the phone. It was T. As usual, she started right in: "Hey, do you have contact numbers for Port Security?"

"What?"

"Didja get their card?"

"Do you have any idea what time it is?"

"Breakfast time. End of my shift. You're not up yet?"

"T: Planet. Non standard days."

"So what time is it?"

A fair question. "Just a minnit." There was a clock built into the console on the desk, dim-flowing numbers just visible if I sat up. "Four thirty ayem. Jeez."

"Um, 'oops?'"

"'Oops.' Hey, I'm up now. And I think I have a card with a number for the Port cops."

"Fan-tastic!"

I winced. It was too early to be that enthusiastic about anything, as far as I was concerned. But it turned out she was bursting with news, more than enough to finish waking me up:

"I'm going to be down there this evening, looking into the saba-toojie. And you'd never guess who Space Force Intel is sending!"

Hmph. Never guess, would I? Watson, a clue! Sleepy isn't the same as stupid; I've only officially met one USSF-I reservist aboard ship. "Rannie Wu?"

"Aw. You peeked."

"You know we've met." Sort of; at the time, I think she'd've been happy to have me tossed out an airlock for being the cause of her wasting time. "She's an investigator?"

"Closest they've got. Intel trained and you know what she does in the Purser's office."

"Not really, what?"

"She runs Internal Inventory! You can't tell me Engineering's never been in her sights."

"Aw, geez, double-eye. I've met her minions, trying to explain how a $57,000 phantasmajector tube is 'consumable supplies.' The Chief got their boss to back down. So that was her, hey?"

T kind of coughed, and went on, "She's sharp. Mike says USSF is sending a Regular Forces team aboard a Mad Russian courier but all he's got is a couple of names and an ETA about 40 hours from now."

That was a mark of just how much attention USSF was giving it — they'd much prefer using their own ships, few though they are. BisPosEtKom -- Russian for "Express Delivery Co." but hardly anyone calls them that -- flies tiny starships, which despite their minuscule mass carry enormous 'Drives and realspace engines and can probably beat anything flying. The huge Mad Russian fleet, started by ex-Soviet Space Arm pilots and techs, means there's usually one headed where you want to go. It wouldn't be much fun for the passengers or pilot; those things are crowded even when they're empty.

"So Sheriff Mike wants to have it all wrapped up before the cavalry arrives?"

T just snickered. That'd be a yes, then. No pressure.

"So why isn't he headed down?"

There was a pause. T was quieter when she replied. "The Captain. He's got to be here for that."

"For what? Are they going to have services already? Here? Why Mike?" Sometimes I'm not as clever as I like to think.

"No — Look, we go way back." She sounded grim. "You've seen a lot of things that aren't exactly common knowl—

"Are you trying to tell me Mike thinks somebody killed Captain James?"

Grim gave way to bleak, "We don't know. Medical says it's highly unlikely but Mike and USSF-I really suspect the timing. And that's all I'd better say."

"And way more than I should have heard. 'Unlikely?' T, it's impossible."

"I sure hope you're right."

While we talked, I'd been logging on to Lupine.ftl; during T's revelations, my e-mail had popped up and for want of a coherent response, I looked at the inbox list. The usual blather from Personnel, Medical, what looked to be routine stuff from Enviro & Physical Plant (Conan the Objectivist claims he's seen a BOIL AIR notice from them but I am pretty sure he's pulling my leg) and...a note from the Chief. He always sets them to ACK back to him and the sooner read, the happier he'd be:

Roberta, Report to Irrational local start of business for walk-through and training. Dave and locals will repair boosters today.

At least it gave me a way to deflect the subject. "Say hi to Handsome Dave, T; I'll bet you lunch money he'll be riding down with you and Lt. Wu."

"No bets; you cheat."

"I just wonder if he's met the Lootenant already? I'm expecting a full report"

T snorted. Dave's quite the ladies man but none too fond of the starchier sort of officers — or of the Purser's inventory-watching, penny-pinching minions. On the other hand, except for that and not being blond, the Eurasian USSF reserve officer fit his usual date profile: smart, not too tall and strikingly pretty. It could be an interesting trip.

I dug out Port Security's card and passed their contact info to T with a "See ya later." We were off the phone before I realized she'd neatly avoided one factoid: if USSF Intelligence was sending Lt. Wu to look into sabotage at Aberstwyth Port, who was running their side of the investigation into the death of Captain James? She'd very clearly said, "Mike and USSF-I." The more I learn, the less I turn out to know.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

War Poster

C. Jay (you would not believe what the C stands for, by the way) has a nice collection of ephemera and books -- stuff from the NATO and Russian worlds and a few things from the Far Edge like this poster, nearly fifty years old now:Nobody who's seen it so far has any idea what the "Star Palace" was. Some kind of Edger venue, but what or where?

Frothup: Dropping In Part 7

[STORY STARTS HERE]

Even before the rain, it didn't look good. Oh, there were some pluses: we had not found the possible major booby-trap by getting ourselves exploded, for instance; and Aberstwyth proper was on the far side of the port's high, hollow-square berm. But blowing a big hole in the ground and spraying radioactives around is something of a social gaffe, even on the Far Edge — and even more so in a place where they have already had an overlarge share of flaming death from above. Run that by the force multiplier of what appeared to be mixed public opinion regarding the NATO worlds and.... What I said before. Didn't look good.

Raub was more hopeful. He wanted to hand this mess over to Port Security and I let him talk me into it.

I knew that Chief would balk at paying some ex-Edger bomb squad — assuming they even had one — ruinous fees for a possible booby trap that, if it was there at all, was probably on a timer or some kind of freefall switch. I didn't want to have to explain the expense to the Chief or the Purser's office, either. But better them than the citizenry of an entire planet who would be left with the mess.

So Raub called the Port Authority's not-cops and gave them a short summary of the situation. They told us to stay right there, then took about half an hour to arrive. We spent the time talking shop and watching the light rain. We'd ducked into the squirt-booster farthest away from the one that had the power plant got at. It was a big passenger double like the one I'd ridden down in; we'd popped the airlock hatch open and sat on the edge. It wasn't raining very hard but it was continuing to warm up and the humidity was rising, a far cry from the cool. clear morning. I commented on it and he looked surprised. "Yeah, this time of year, it rains at least every other day."

"Pretty big temperature swing, though."

"It is? I still think you've had too much shipboard time. This is normal."

It wouldn't've been, back where I spent my growing-up time, but I was saved a dialogue on comparative meteorology by a siren.

Let me explain something: starships don't show up every day. Even at a port frequented by the generally smaller and more numerous Edger ships, it's weeks between ships. Port Control can be a kind of routine affair, with the ancillary business of storage and surface transport predominating and what few full-time staffers there are operating in very narrow and well-worn mental ruts. Shift change had come and gone in the control center without a word and either our presence wasn't logged or the lone controller didn't bother to check when asked. So when Raub called Port Authority Security, they had called the control center, gotten a "Who-what?" response and despite his careful explanation, had taken things a little bit wrong. (I was miffed. What, sabotage to Lupine's squirt-boosters isn't gossip-worthy news?)

Security showed up expecting the very worst. Sure, they're not "real" police, but you'd be surprised how little those details matter when you are looking at the wrong end of what passes for a standard LEO-type weapon on the Far Edge: a copy of the WW II "grease gun," which even the select-fire edition of can ruin your whole day. The one riding — ha! — shotgun had his aimed at us from their little golf cart-looking vehicle from first clear sight.

It helps to be with a local. When the little quadricycle stopped, two uniformed officers hopped off and as the one kept cheap and nasty armament pointing at us, the other hopped out from behing the controls and barked, "Step down from there and put you hands up—"

Which we did.

"—Now move slowly over there — Raub?

He was quick to reply, "Yes, Matt. Um, good to see you?"

"Who's the woman — keep your hands up, Miss! — and what are you up to?"

Raub smiled. I don't know if I'd've been able to. "It's a long story and Port Control should be able to back us up...."

The big one who'd been driving, Matt, shook his head. "No they cannot. I think you two had better come with us."

At least he didn't handcuff us.

The Port Security team were not that different to police officers in your home town: they'd rather be safe than sorry. The good news was, we were going to get in out of the drizzle before it really started to rain. The bad news was, while we weren't quite under arrest, we weren't free to leave, either. They brought us in and abandoned us in the public office of Port Security, tucked in the rabbit-warren of spaces under the outer berm, a cross between a waiting room and a small-town police station, presided over by a cheerful and heavily-armed young woman behind a tall desk. I still had my phone and I made the call I should have made a half hour earlier.

The Chief wasn't answering. Next step was to go up a level — Sheriff Mike, or Dr. Schmid — but I tried the general Shop number first, hoping he'd be out there.

Nope. Handsome Dave picked up. He'd been chased chased out of his lair in the squirt-booster bays by Lupine's Security, who had that section buttoned up vacuum-tight. I gave him a sketchy outline and got as far as the suspicious hatch when he started to laugh.

"Oh, it's darned funny up there, pal. You're not stuck down here!"

"No,no, wait," he snickered. "Did you write down the ID number?"

Darned right I had. I read it off to him and there was a short silence, if muffled chuckling counts as silence.

"Yep, here it is. Power room wrote it up day before yesterday when they had to change out tow units. Latch is jamming. They had to force it."

I didn't have anything to say at first. I was grinning too widely. "You son of a—"
Raub had been chatting with the desk officer, a young-looking woman with a wide smile but he'd sat down next to me while I was talking. He broke in with, "—snake," and I echoed him.

Dave replied, "I'm the snake who just saved your hide."

"As soon as we figure out how to make it official, you mean. I need the Chief."

"Left about ten minutes ago, looking annoyed. I think he's in a meeting. I'll take this to him as soon as he's back."

I tried not to sound desperate when I asked, "Do me a favor: page him with it," thanked him and hung up. Stuck. I guessed I could invoke the Agreement and ask for a lift back but the odds of that working out didn't seem good. Sure did wish I'd brought something to read. The only magazines looked like security stuff, with titles I'd never seen before, things like"SWAT" and "Concealed Carry" and months or more out of date. Still, there was some hope; I figured I might as well smile and gave it a try.

Raub gave me a quizzical look. "Good news?"

"I hope so. Our guys — Lupine's, I mean — bunged that door up."

He looked thoughtfully into the distance. "It figures."

"As soon as I can get hold of my boss, we'll get this straightened out."

"Not him on the phone, then?"

"Unh, no."

He made no reply and the quiet stretched out and hung there. I blinked first. "Hey, what's the deal about snakes?"

"What?"

"When I was on the phone. And I've heard other people say stuff like that, too."

"Oh! That. It's from the war. It started as a joke and we never stopped."

"Okay, but what, exactly?"

He grinned, worries forgotten for the moment. "Simple. Any expression that refers to a person, place or thing, you substitute 'snake.' Unless it had a snake in it already, then it should be 'cow.'"

I took that in. "Um, why?"

"For fun! Because it confuses dirtsiders— er, sorry. I mean you guys. Old-worlders. No offense."

Old-worlders? Suddenly I'm European? But I caught his drift. "Okay. At least now I know. But if I'm a 'dirtsider,' what's that stuff outside under the grass?"

"Frothup. I guess it's dirt, too, but it's our dirt."

I gave up. Edgers! "Fair enough." I had another question but about then, the officer on the desk — her nametape just said JOANNA — looked over at us while talking into the air (Bluetooth, of course) and gestured us over. "Hey, you two. I think we're done with you."

As I later found out, the meeting the Chief had been called away to was a conference wall with Port Authority's higher-ups about my little mess and Lupine's side of it alone involved him, Dr. Schmid, Security Director Mathis, the Purser and a couple of her tame legal wranglers — and for all I know, a couple of chaplains, too. After Dave's page hit the meeting, we were almost in the clear; the only remaining problem was the curiously methodical damage, where it was happening and who was doing it: pretty much the same mystery we started with.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

On The Far Edge: Captain Mitch And His Spirit

[This's not my authorial voice but one from the other side of the line, a kind of gossip reporter for an Edger news site.]

I knew he was a glocker crewman the first time I saw him. The skinsuit gives them away; the working stiffs never bother to unfasten their gloves, even in civic pressure or on a planetary surface. He was sitting disconsolate in one of the little bars near the old cargo port on Smitty's World. These days, the big transfers use Newport, thirty miles away, big enough and modern enough to handle Earthside containerized freight in bundles and the fat, fourth-generation bell-ringers our guys use both independently and to carry cargo on and off the huge station-ships. The older ships and the smaller carriers still find it easier to get a spot in the pattern for the old port, easier to deal with the freight-wallopers and, perhaps, easier on their pride, too.

It was just 1900, 22nd December, Greenwich. Like most ships, stations and planets with cycles too far from the human norm, Smitty's kept strictly to Greenwich Mean Time, or as close as they could. These days, with the phase-rotation ansible and modern computational horsepower, that's close as anyone could want.

The bar'd made a few concessions to the calendar in the form of a bedraggled banner draped across the top quarter of the backbar mirror and twinkling little led lights circling the ceiling, sagging markedly in several spots. It wasn't doing anything for the glocker's mood; he sat by himself near the wall, attention on his sippie of station gin-and-water as though all the worry in the world was contained therein. Or perhaps an anodyne to it and he wasn't hopeful of a successful treatment. He looked up as the door -- and on Smitty's, most of them are merely doors -- jangled behind me and I caught the dark curls, hazel eyes and freckles of one of the Materjacks. Clearly not Micki or little Martha but that still left Mikey and Mitchell, Mark and Marvin, the whole lot of them originally out of some little industrial installation doing mining and refining around La-A's star, or maybe it was Otherstone's. They're all well-known among the smaller starships as fair pilots, navigators and captains, starting even before their father and family ship was lost on Ganymede, early during the war. Skiddoo had been serving as a gunship, all the younger family safely elsewhere, but an entire generation of Materjacks had flashed to a ball of steam and molten metal and with it, their legacy.

Stringing for the newssite FreeTradeCetera, I tried to keep up with the shipping news, the lifeblood of civilization, our Edge on the mudballers from old Earth. Oh, that is boosterism; but it is who we are. I had spent the first of the week at Newport and not paid much heed to the small fry.

"You, I should know," I said to him. "You might be the Martian or the Saint, or the young one--"
"Or the oldest," he replied, "And that is me, just old Mitch. But you, I do not know, with the big fine notepad" -- he nodded at my well-worn SlateBook -- "and the talk of a glocksman but you wear no proper suit for working," with a frown at my bared hands. He had my story soon enough, as well as any interviewer could. "So you write about the Free Traders and the big Earth shippers for the webs, is that so? You would know, then, if there were to be any openings for a Captain shortly?"

I demurred. "I know them when they're posted, same as you. Someone you know needs a berth?"

"Me. Just me. They've come and took my Spirit Of Skidoo and here I am, an honest man walking the docks with a lamp in my hand. Spirit is gone."

That pile of patches! It was coming back to me. One of the small ones, a Derby or a Cloche, with an older MOF 'Drive and only enough power and mass for the third-level effect: slow and uncertain. The Materjacks had put it together from salvage thirty years before and run short-haul freight to keep the family afloat. "I'd heard it was lost, bounced into a rock free-trading around Sol?"

"No, no, a rumor. Stove up. Stove up some, was all, and I had to sell my share to get her fixed, but the best Cloche flying is still at it and I was still her Captain. What a beauty! As shiny as a silver dime. Smooth as silk to land and in and out of the Jump. She shouldn't be carrying anything but shareholders and their luggage, you know."

"I'd heard her 'Drive tended to glitch and the boom was off-center?"

He replied with some heat, "It is a lie, a jealous lie. There was never a finer little bell."

"Wasn't she down to half a year per light-year underway?" I asked, just to see if he'd bite.

He leapt up. "Six months? Show me the man who told you that and I will show him six months all right! She goes two months per, and that with a light hold and half power! And a beauty, like to blind you under any light, all the portmasters know her."

"So the stories of air leaks and coolant in the lifesystem..?"

"Not one bit of truth in it. Not one bit. She was a beauty, a real beauty," and he slumped back over his sipper, took a long pull and looked near to tears.

I hate to see a man with years in Jump space and with stripes on his sleeves cry. I inquired how he'd come to lose her altogether before he sprang a leak himself.

"A misunderstanding, really, a misunderstanding. When you come right down to the rivets, it was Dutch's fault, my Navigator, though we both sat Pilot, of course. He was the one took on the 'prentice, though we all should have known better. There we were at Witherspoon's, full up with fuelwax" -- kerogen, that is -- "for The Rind, and he shows up with a youngster in tow. She looked young but she had all her papers; we'd had to leave Jack W., the Third Hand, back at La-A with a broken leg, him having lost an argument with the cargo-jack, and we were plenty tired of hash-and-eggs from Engineer Jo, plus if her precious 'Drives were out of true, why, she'd tell us to sling a packet in the 'wave if we were that hungry! It was a trial. --How I miss that neat, fine galley!-- But the 'prentice, she wasn't a Welles or a Witherspoon or a Faux-Smith and on Witherspoon Processing--"

I nodded. It's not that big a drift and if you're not born or married into one of the three families, you are a rare bird indeed.

"Mind you, those papers looked all right. Jo ran them and the local web said they were jake. 16, uncontracted, Basic rating."

Not unusual. If you're a NATO or Russky mudballer, 16 likely sounds young. We figure if you can claim your majority, you've reached it. Even for an underpowered cloche like Spirit of Skiddoo W-Proc to The Rind could be hardly more than four months, five at the outside, long enough to take a 'prentice's measure, short enough to not be a bother if he falls short. Or she.

"It wasn't until the second night out Dutch heard her crying. Took Jo to find out why. She was no sixteen and no Glocker 'prentice, either. Crystal Smith she was, the very granddaughter of the Smith himself, out to see the world."

A scion of Johnathon Harper Cameron Smith, Smitty, sole proprietor of the non-aligned (and sunless) world that bears his name. I told Mitch that sounded like a pickle, but no reason for a man to lose his command, and he nodded.

"You would think that, would you not? Dutch was sure there was money in it, and wanted to divert to whatever port or drift or station was nearest. Jo cursed our lack of an ansible -- you'd think the owners would have one piped in, her the finest Cloche in the firmament! -- and said we should head on Rind-wards and send a message out with one of those Mad Russian couriers after we'd docked. But that is not my way. No, I told them, no, we must get this little one to home, first and foremost, and keep it quiet to not embarrass her gran-dad. Oh, I was clever, clever!"

He paused in his narrative, drained the last few cc's from his sippie and gave it a significant glance. I was eager to hear how he got from a mission of mercy to a captain without a ship, so I waved the bartender over and got him a fill.

"Was I not so clever. We pushed her hard, my little Spirit; dropped out, reset and made the Jump here to Smitty's in under two months, almost--"

A run the big station-ships will do in a week and Gen Fours solo in a month.

"--And the Smith himself welcomed her back as a prodigy and us as heros. He'd have nothing for us but the best, the very best, the finest accommodations and whatever we wanted, entertainments every night and it was not even two weeks gone by before I got word."

I asked just what that word might have been.

"The owners! When we'd gone overdue at The Rind, they'd put out a circular to all their agents; and when their man here sent back we'd been seen on a drunken carouse for nigh the past week, he rounded up a crew and took her out, my very own Spirit." He returned his attention to his drink, pondered it and emptied the sippie as though its contents were only water. "So if you know of anyone out for a Captain, qualified as navigator and pilot alike, and very discreet, mention my name to them, will you?"

And with that, he turned away, as if he had gone suddenly shy of saying more.


I'm told Spirit of Skiddoo had life-support problems before she could get up enough velocity to Jump out from Smitty's and in the subsequent towing and repair, somehow word of the miscarried justice reached the desk of one J. H. C. Smith, Prop., Smitty's World; I cannot say precisely what happened from there, but I am pleased to report that by Christmas Eve, Captain Mitch Materjack and his crew were back aboard Spirit of Skiddoo with commendations to boot and perhaps the only glockers qualified to keep "the finest cloche in the starry sky" actually in the sky.


Merry Christmas from the Far Edge of the Hidden Frontier!