Leo Frankowski - The Fata Morgana

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The Fata Morgana

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.

thereof in any form.

A Baen Book

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-57876-6

Cover art by Gary Ruddell

First paperback printing, July 2000

Library of Congress Catalog Number 99-27089

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my father,

Leo Stanley Frankowski

1921-1965

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.

By which time I would have to hire a whole new bunch of

strangers, assuming that I could find such people. Then I would

likely end up having to fire half of them for incompetence, after

gracing each such bumble fingered fool with a month's pay in

return for his efforts at screwing things up. And then I would

have to waste yet another month teaching those with some

small bit of ability the proper way to get things done. That is to

say, my way.

All with the net result of an ungodly amount of personal

aggravation, late deliveries, and cost overruns that, in this

industry, you generally have to eat on your own. It's not like

doing “cost plus” work for the government. Starting with a new

crew, my next job would run at a loss, not only to my bank

account, but also to my reputation, which-in the long run-is the

only really important thing that any company has ever got. Once

you have the right reputation, you can buy everything else you

need.

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TheFataMorganaLeoA.FrankowskiThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©1999byAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBookBaenPublishingEnterprisesP...

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