The more things change

The more they suck, or so Butthead said. Work has been a handful,and not much time for much of anything.

On the other hand, I have been able to sneak away and do some sailing. Glovers are prohibited from squirt boosting but we can still enjoy space in any other way that doesn't involve rearranging our atoms.

So I went solar sailing with some friends. It's a cool sport, and one I do a lot in my downtime.

A solar sail is a piece of metalized mylar, with a fine carbon fiber reinforcement. They're relatively cheap and easy to replace, and can be deployed from any of the space elevators or from a small orbital. They are driven by solar winds.

The sail is connected to a suit, and once you have launched it you control the lines with your handsw and feet, and a small computerized monitor that can either be worn on the wrist or projected onto your retina.

Once in motion you can activate the suit, which blows up until you look like a freakish Violet Beauregard. You can then pull your head in and use the suit like a tiny spaceship. It's a lot like living inside a balloon.

And you can live there for about ten days. They reccomend you eat low volume foods, and the foods sold for sailing are filling but have almost no actual volume. Otherwise it would get crowded in the suit.

You can then deflate it back to a "suit" to ravel the sail back in once you arrive somewhere.

Some of the more hardcore types will get out of the suit during flight. You have to wear some serious special sunscreen, which usually contains a thin film to prevent too much evaporation through your skin. You also need goggles, whcih have misters to keep your eyes moist and lubed, and auto shade in bright light. A nose/mouth mask and earplugs and you can step out into space naked as a jaybird.

Which I have done, often enough.

People get all freaked out about vacuum but the reality is, your body is more than capable of handling 14.7 psi. Sure, some orifices like the nose, mouth, eyes and ears need to be protected, but the freedom of zero g and vacuum is something to be experienced.

You could lose your snorkel and die, or you could lose an earplug and have the air in your lungs shoot out the side of your head, or you could fart severely and get tangled in your shroud lines, but for the most part, you wouldn't be there if you weren't a bit of a daredevel.

Sorry, folks!

I haven't been ignoring you, I've been off planet. No, I haven't been squirt boosting around the universe, I just took a slow (and safe, for me) shuttle to two local moons.

My company made a handful of very special machines whose sole purpose is the manufacture of one item. The cost was nearly thirty million bucks, and they will all only run once, if everything goes well.

The machines are to grind and figure a mirror. They were made under contract for a company making a deep space telescope for the rim.

When the Hubble was sent into space, and saw first light, a BUNCH of people were really pissed off.

See, some brain trust had decided that it made good sense to figure the mirror in atmosphere. The mirror that would be used in the vacuum of space.

Now, this would ordinarily not seem like a big deal; the index of refraction of vacuum is 1.0000000 (which is the baseline) but air is closer to 1.0003. Not much, right? On an 8' diameter mirror that's the difference between a sharp image and a crappy one. The wavelength of visible light falls between 400 and 800 nanometers, and a good mirror is supposed to be less than an eigth of a wavelength off at any point. Plus, it was figured and polished in earth gravity.Hubble might just as well have been a man's stainless shaving mirror. So they put 'Glasses" on it, which allow it to use about 3% of it's available surface area.

Anyway, my company made a machine that would be assembled in space where no discernable gravity but the mass of the machinery existed; this machinery cast the mirror in honeycomb segments and let them cool slowly by radiation, and when the entire mirror was cool it was stress relieved,and ground to shape.

The lapping was done by another machine, and both machines were dismantled and boosted away.

Then the final machine, the one I helped design, was brought into place. It's mass was infinitesimal, less than a hundred pounds. Pieces of it were actually made of bamboo, and we set the mirror spinning and used it's own mass to keep it going while it was polished.

We didn't have to build a chamber to coat it, we just set up the sputteror and deposited the aluminum right there in space. We did put sheets of plastic so molecular level molten aluminum wouldn't be roaming around the universe- I now keep a little piece of that aluminised plastic in my wallet.

A group of dignitaries boosted in from Earth to catch first light, but they ended up getting stuck farside for a couple days in quarantine- one had some nasty sinus shit and we didn't want to give it to the whole planet.

So I parked myself in the driver's seat, and slewed the big mirror around to Home.

it took a while for Earth to rotate into the right position, but I managed to catch a good view of Christmas Lake just before it rotated nightside. Nice scope.

it never rains but it pours

No sooner than I get home and settled back into work after being shot, I get a service summons and have to take ANOTHER two weeks off work.

This year my service summons was to be a Circuit Court judge. I suppose to other people this might seem unusual but on La-A the law is very simple, and most ten year 0lds understand it. And every citizen is called on to take his turn in the barrel. Each year you spend two weeks doing a job in the government, and your employer must continue to pay you during that time. This is completely voluntary; you can be excused if you're dead, feebleminded, or a democrat. But I repeat myself. Actually, hardly anyone shirks the service. Each person takes the task they have been assigned very seriously, and whether it's a judge or a clerk, and most everyone is happy to take the little vacation from the regular job. Last year I took a job for two weeks as a health inspector.

Anyway, we do our volunteer jobs happily, because it means we pay almost nothing in taxes- as a matter of fact, the tax burden here is such that immigration is limited to family members and Hopkin-F patients. And we like that just fine.

So I have been a judge, for a while. The cases I'm seeing aren't difficult nor is application of the law complex. I'd talk about the cases- there is nothing against that- but they are so boring I have to drink extra caffeine to stay awake during the trials. At the end of which, the plaintiffs are pretty well comfortable with the verdict before it's even handed down. As a general rule, we're a law abiding bunch.

As an aside, the miscreant I dropped several weeks ago was an offworlder who, it turns out, was here trying to organize a union. he had been able to get zero support, anywhere, though he was on fire to "help" the workers of La-A. he finally went off it and started shooting. Until I took him out of commission.

Freaky.

Things I miss

I grew up on earth. That seems a hundred years ago, now, since coming to La-A.

This is my home, and I love it here. I enjoy my gig and I am surrounded by fun things and good friends.

Still.

I read og's comment at Roberta's place, and it made me think of a time, long ago, when I held my Father's hand and stepped up to the cab of a steam locomotive. We spoke to the engineer and watched the fireman pour the coals in. In a time before litigiousness the engineer picked me up and put me in the seat, and let me pull back the big handle and shift the loco down the tracks. It was a thrill beyond compare, and a memory that will never leave me. I loved that spot, and went as often as I could, even spending a summer there as a "guide" before heading off to college. The definitive museum of the American Industrial Revolution. Steampunk heaven.

You can look at the machinery and see the change in the way people thought, and see the way people felt about the magic of the machinery.

I miss being able to walk among the locos and run my hand along the decades old paint. I miss being able to stand in Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion Home. I miss standing in Edison's lab and being amazed by the mixture of chemistry and physics and biology there.

I don't want to rescramble my brains to see it again, at least not yet. Maybe sometime towards the end of my life I will do so, so I can once more walk among the history of my species and marvel at how far we've come, if the place is still there when I arrive at that age.

That's what friends do

Two weeks ago a colleague, on his way home from a job we're both working, rear-ends a car.

Apparently he was just woolgathering, worried about some test results that hadn't come back yet from his wife, and not being as attentive as he should have been. And smacked into another car at about 30.

Everyone is fine, thank God, but his car was hammered up a bit. He's not a specifically mechanical type so this was a tragedy to him, he likes the car and doesn't want to buy a new one, and doesn't have a lot of cash to sling around either.

SO last night I dropped by his place after work with a truckload of tools. I parked the truck in front of his car and used hammers, slide hammers, chain jacks etc. to straighten out the most of it. And we got it back to running condition, and it will be on the road again by mid week (He still has to get some parts that can only be purchased mail order). He was extremely excited, kept saying over and over "I owe you man, this is huge". No, he doesn't. Like I told him. That's what friends do.

When I have a little time on my hands

I hop in the car and drive off to the spacedock. Sometimes I ride the elevator up to the dock itself, it's a hoot. Riding a glass elevator twelve thousand miles high is not for the faint of heart, so most people opt for the windowless lounge- but I like to watch the plains of La-A falling away.

The dock itself is a bustling place. Lots of techs use it like a fleamarket to sell surplussed or damaged equipment from the jumps, some buy spare parts they think they might need, some use the old pieces as jewelry, some just like the shiny bits. I like to wander between the tables and look at the parts, watch the evolution of the squirt booster drive and marvel at the fact that some people still trust their lives to the crudest of equipment.

You get to see all types. Most spacers and people who live off old earth are pretty comfortable in their own skin. We still get a lot of goths, punks, hair types, steampunk, whatever. I'm often amused by what people will do to "be different". When people have lived in the lockers-for-quarters they issue to techs and steerage passengers onboard freighters, they tend to dress in non-loud soft clothing, and practice impeccable hygeine. Only passengers from Earth who pay full price for their lavish accommodations smell or dress loudly.

The most fun, for me, is the restaurant and offworlder's reactions to it. See, at orbital position, the dock has a mild gravity but it's centrifugal. The elevator switches position as you ascend so the perceived gravity is seamless. But usually ships dock on the night side, and when the passengers debark, the first place they go is the Topsider. Decent drinks, good food, good prices. Not exactly airport food. So people settle in and have a sandwich, a beer, maybe a cocktail, and enjoy some conversation.

Then the sun rises.

As La-A rotates the spaceport comes into sunlight first, and then the crescent of La-A slowly becomes visible. Overhead. If you're not expecting it, it looks as though a planet is speeding toward you out of space, and rare is the day indeed when a passenger doesn't scream out loud. Once, I watched an entire pod (no other word for them, really) of enormous housewives from Lepton-7 gasp and pass out almost in unison.

it's amusing, and since we have good medical care here, hardly anyone ever has any long term ill effects. Still.

And most of the time I rent a room and spend a night. I park my keister in the little 6x6 and imagine it's my bunk on the freighter I would be piloting, had my initial dreams been realized. Sometimes I share the bunk with an offworlder. Sometimes I invite her back to the planet for dinner the next day. Sometimes one takes me up on it.

it's a way of keeping that dream alive. Even if only in my dreams.

Sorry, folks

Not trying to be out of touch, just been, well- out of touch.

I got shot last week, and spent the time between then and now recuperating on a friend's farm, a long way from access to any kind of technology newer than horse harnesses.

See, I was at the hardware store getting a blade sharpened for the lawnmower and I heard gunfire. Curiosity has always made me the type that will run toward gunfire, but this was not the kind I'm used to hearing. As I've said, lots of people here have guns and shoot, but this was hurried and seemingly random. So I got to the parking lot and saw an offworlder holding a kid by the hair and waving a little handgun around. He was screaming something incomprehensible but the kid was terrified.

I walked out and looked around, most people were pretty well ready to pop this idiot but a few recognized me and smiled. 'Go for it, Hank!' one even said.

So I walked over to the miscreant,who by this time was holding his gun more or less at the kid- I figured the way he was going it was most likely he'd shoot himself. I said 'You don't really want to do that, do you?" and he opened fire on me. Three shots, all missed, and I drew and fired at point blank range., just about. As I've said before, I'm a duffer with a handgun, but I was ten feet away. The Glaser entered his left eye, more or less, and didn't exit.

And as he dropped the gun hit the ground anddischarged, the slug ripped into my left calf. He was a better shot dead than alive.

The kid was happy to have it all over, and the cops came and cleaned up the mess. Another offworlder approached me, noticing the glove. 'Aren't you... you people supposed to be some kind of holy rollers or something? How could you kill someone in cold blood like that?"

'First of all, you were here, this was not cold blood. In case you hadn't noticed, the recently deceased was shooting at other people. On La-A that means he relinquishes his human and civil rights, and is considered fair game. Second, "We people" have no specific injunction agianst killing, nor any specific injunctions at all. What we believe is outside of your understanding, but it does not prevent us from engaging in a little herd thinning from time to time, when it is indicated."

"but how about 'thou shalt not kill" and that stuff?'

'While Christianity is just fine by me, I'm not a Christian. And there aren't injunctions against killing in Christianity, just committing Murder. The original text says 'Thou shalt not commit murder". Look it up. This reprobate was about to commit murder. I stopped him. Simple as that"

She walked off in a huff but I wasn't surprised. offworlders AND non-glovers wouldn't get it anyway I explained it.

Anyway, the police cut me a check on the spot, right out of the police fund. (Bodies of miscreants go right to organ banks. The shooter gets the proceeds) I tore it up and said they should put it in the cop's pension funds, and thanked them. Hey, thirty large is nothing to sneeze at, but the cops do a fine job, mostly, like in this case, of documenting. And I don't really need it.

So after getting the bullet pulled and stitched up, i called in, told them I would be unavailable for at least a week, and headed out to Jon's farm for some lazy afternoons fishing from a folding chair on the dock of his little farm pond. Happy to be alive, and now it's good to be back to work.