Transmat World: Chapter 5, Episode 1
Tampa; August, 2145 A.D.
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The auction hall smelled musty. Rows of cubicles gave mute testimony to a different era. The Pre-Hit office building rented out for a pittance to a government surplus auction company. Cubicles were now rusty metal frames, but they served well as boundaries separating auction lots. Enrique did not consider it the least bit sad he was spending his 28th birthday in a run-down auction hall looking at old government discards.
The contract to design superstructures for floating cities ended months ago, Enrique’s fourth job in as many years. Funding for the project finally ran out, and no money was to be had now because of the depression. Even when there was plenty of work he wasn’t sure what to do. As a mechanical engineer he knew he should specialize, but he found everything interesting. A minor largesse from a munificent aunt allowed him to loll introspectively about Florida looking for meaningful direction in life. There were so many avenues of exploration, focusing was difficult. Frequenting the quarterly government surplus auctions in a Post-Hit Tampa was a routine and welcome part of his angst. He found overlooked or misunderstood treasures he played with or sold online.
The blind auctions were lots ranging from a large crate up to four small crates. Inspecting the containers was okay, but not opening them. Enrique spied two interesting boxes in one lot. The plywood was something seldom used now. Laminated softwood instead of oriented-strand bamboo, it was warped and molded. Sweat ran down his scalp under his hedset. The building was not retrofitted for even standard off-grid solar air conditioning. The crates had to be old, possibly Pre-Hit. He made out part of a stencil with two words on the top of one crate — “HAMILTON SUNDSTRAN.” He searched the name on the internet to find a contractor for NASA from the Pre-Hit days: a contractor specializing in space suits.
“We may have something, grasshopper,” said Enrique.
“Who are you calling ‘grasshopper,’ you goofball geek?” said Rousseau, Enrique’s hedbot. “What you have is two boxes of oxidized junk.”
Enrique suspects Rousseau knows the nickname reference from an old martial arts television broadcast but likes to be contentious as part of his character.
Those hedbot programmers are geniuses, thinks Enrique.
That Rousseau looks to be a giant grasshopper makes the conceit a constant source of entertainment for Enrique. He tried not to overdo it.
“Can’t you tune in your little Transmat propulsion units to cold arctic air and point them at my face?” asks Enrique.
“Yes, but I might accidentally get that mixed up with the methane recovery unit at the local waste processing facility. Since the propulsion units are located on my butt, the cute fraulein down the aisle might wonder why you have a giant grasshopper continuously farting in your face,” said Rousseau.
“Just do it,” said Enrique and was relieved to feel brisk, refreshing air on his face. He glanced down the aisle in vain for the cute girl. Lying hedbot.
Out of curiosity Enrique put in the minimum bid of 400 new-dollars, hung around until three in the afternoon when the auction ended, and the crates were his. No one else had bothered to bid, figuring anything that old must be ruined.
He wrestled the wooden mysteries onto the bed of his electric utility scooter with a two-wheeled hand truck kept for just such contingencies. He had sprung for big pneumatic tires so cracks and spreading expansion joints in places like this would not damage rescued loot in transit.
Rousseau helped out by riding on top of the crates and giving directions accompanied by advice on lifting things safely. “Use the legs. Keep the stomach muscles tight. Lift it smooth and slow.”
Enrique scrubbed mold off the wood in the parking lot and trucked them upstairs to his apartment. Carefully prying the wood apart, the autopsied crates revealed two identical stainless steel containers. A bolted flange ran around the horizontal center of each and there were small pressure connections on top, placed in sunken cavities to keep them from being bumped into and broken off. With the last bolt out, the first container was an inert mass, giving no hint to its contents. A telltale hissing would have betrayed pressure inside the container after removing all but a few of the bolts. A vacuum would create a sucking noise when he opened the little valve on the pressure connection, but nothing happened. Enrique had a hunch. He got a kitchen match, lit it, and held it next to the flange while he pulled the two halves apart. The match reminded him of the pocket flamethrower with brainwave-activated safety he saw in an old Neiman Marcus catalog. That silly stuff amused him for its low practicality/price ratio.
“It’s gonna blow!” wailed Rousseau over and over from the corner he had scurried to, covering his big grasshopper eyes with small, ineffective insect arms. As soon as the top half came up, the match winked out. Enrique was right. They filled these containers with an inert gas to preserve whatever was inside.
“Bit of an alarmist, aren’t you?” said Enrique.
“I am but a voice of caution,” said Rousseau, vibrating his wings and shaking his head as he regained his composure, “ranting in the night.”
“I agree with the ranting part,” Enrique said. He removed the top and there it was, the Lower Torso Assembly of an Extravehicular Mobility Unit — in layman’s terms, the pants portion of an old NASA space suit. The other container held the Hard Upper Torso. Everything was there and in good condition, disassembled, batteries not included. Enrique can’t believe it. The government let a $12 million old-dollar antique slip through its fingers. He decided he wasn’t giving it back. Call it crazy or call it inspired, Enrique decided to fly that suit to the Moon.
The decision did not spring full-blown into Enrique’s mind. It started out as a “Fly me to the Moon, baby!” self-entertainment comment with a big quizzical thought vacuum at the end — a vacuum that started sucking in what-ifs and why-nots. To an engineer, those are definable and achievable given the technology available. Gut most of the antiquated life-support systems, put in a modern high-energy-density battery, install back-mounted Transmats for thrust, small helmet-mounted Transmats for food and water, replace the oxygen tanks with a Transmat, add modified personal Transmats to take care of body functions, and he could be on his way. He could run communications and controls through his TecHed hedset.
If it were a matter of making it to the Moon and back, Enrique would not have considered it; but there was a base on the Moon, a small city in fact — with airlocks. All he had to do was make it to the Moon. Zoom up there, land, and knock on the door, Hi, I’m the nutcase from Earth that flew to the Moon in a space suit. May I use your shower facilities? Enrique was warming up to the idea.
He examined all the parts in detail, removing corrosion, checking for fabric deterioration, and replacing o-rings and other rubber gaskets. Rousseau crawled through legs and arms, transmitting hi-def, 3D images to Enrique’s hedset. Over a period of two months he assembled, modified, and tested the suit. It worked perfectly. Primary guidance came from an inertial system he’d won in a government auction. He popped for a newfangled solar-system-based guidance systems and hooked it up to initialize and periodically re-fresh the inertial system. The head-up display on his hedset served as virtual instrumentation, a 3D map, and visual communications. Rousseau was in charge of taking video.
The first real problem he faced was how to vector thrust from the Transmats. He attached the twin Transmats to the bottom of the modified Primary Life Support Subsystem (the “backpack”). They guaranteed compressed air at 30,000 pounds per square foot continuously out of four-inch square openings when activated, as long as the subscription was paid. A small, pnuematically-actuated butterfly valve added to each outlet worked as throttles. Tiny Transmats added to the valves supplied dry air at their working pressure of 30 psi.
