"How about high, then? Does it go really high?"
"No, it won't take you very high, either."
"Then it doesn't sound very interesting," Alex said. He pointed at the carcass. "What's with that weird discoloration on the shoulder blade? Are they always like that?"
"Well," Rick broke in, "it can go pretty damned high, but you'd have to take oxygen with you."
"You people got oxygen?" Alex said.
Rick and Peter exchanged glances. "Sure."
"Can I skip the tour, and just have some oxygen?"
"Wait till you see the machine," Peter hedged. "You're gonna want this bad, after you see the machine."
Alex followed the pair of them across camp, stepping cautiously on the treacherous earth. His occasional curious glances up from his endangered feet across camp didn't much impress him. There was a monkish air about the place, a kind of military desiccation. Four skeletal towers dominated the camp, with microwave dishes, racks of spiny aerials, wrist-thick wiring and cable guides, and whirling cup-shaped wind gauges. Three large, dirty buses were parked side by side under a flat paper sunshade, along with three robot bikes. A tractor with a dozer blade and a spiraled posthole digger had planted a set of tall water-distillation stacks, which were dripping into a fauceted plastic reservoir.
The three of them stopped by the curtained door of another yurt. Two monster winches flanked the entrance, with thin woven cable on motor-driven drums.
Alex followed the two men inside, past a thick hanging door curtain. The yurts were quilted paper, stretched over crisscrossed expandable lattices of lacquered wood. The diamond-shaped ends of these lattices were neatly and solidly lashed together, and eight of the lattices, curved into a broad ring, formed the yurt's round wall. Sixteen slender bent poles of lacquered bamboo ran from the tops of the lattices up to a central ring, bracing the white paper top of the dome.
The paper walls flapped a bit in the constant wind, but the interior had a surprisingly rich and pearly glow, and with its carpeted flooring, the yurt seemed remarkably snug and solid and permanent. Alex realized that the place was a -minor aircraft hangar, all kites and keels and foamed-metal spars and great bundles of reinforced sailcloth. A Trouper was at work in the place, sitting cross-legged on a cushion amid a confusion of specialized hand tools. He bad a gaunt weather-beaten face and an almost bald, freckled dome ofskull, with a few lank strands of colorless shoulder-length hair. He wore black cotton leotards and had a blackened lump of metal on a rawhide thong around his neck.
"How's it goin', Buzzard?" Peter said.
Buzzard looked up from his rapt examination of a flexing cabled joint. "Who's the geek?"
"Alex Unger," Alex said. He stepped forward across the blissfully carpeted yurt flooring and jammed Out his hand.
"Boswell Harvey," said Buzzard, surprised, dropping his eviscerated bit of machinery as he reached up for Alex's hand. "I hack, uh... I hack ornithopters."
"Buzz, we need to boot the ultralight," Rick said.
"Well, Amethyst is down," Buzzard said.
"Beryl will do," Peter said.
"Oh," Buzzard said. "Oh, okay." Alex saw dawning comprehension spread across Buzzard's hooded eyes. "I can boot her from here, off the station." He stalked across the yurt and dropped into a crouch over a cabled laptop on the floor. He flipped it open, stared at the result on the flat screen, and pecked at the keyboard.
Peter and Riak took Alex outside to a nearby section of anchored sunshade. The paper shelter, up on bamboo poling, had its back to the wind and was firmly pitoned to the limestone earth. The ultralights beneath the shelter, both of them missing their wings, were heavily staked down with cabling. Just in case of sudden wind bursts, presumably.
Rick checked a set of input jacks on the motor housing while Peter industriously began assembling the left wing.
"I know this wing doesn't look too great right now," Peter assured Alex, "but when it inflates it gets very aerodynamic."
"No problem," Alex muttered.
"And check this out for safety-diamond bolts and nuts on every spar! Man, I can remember when we didn't have any construction diamond. I used to tower-monkey around Oklahoma working towers for TV stations, and we had to worry about, like, mechanical stress." Peter laughed. "Sometimes using diamonds to build everyday stuff seems like some kind of cheat! But hell, here it is, man; if you got a resource like that, you just gotta use it."
"Yeah," Rick mused aloud, "a lot of the basic thrill went out of hardware design when diamond got really cheap."
"Yeah," Alex offered, "I can remember my mom being pretty upset about that development." He examined the ultralight. The wings seemed absurdly long and thin, but as Peter tightened their struts with a nut driver, they became convincingly tough and rigid. The little aircraft had a big padded bicycle seat with foamed-metal stirrups. There was a foam-padded skeletal back and neck rest, with a sturdy lap belt and shoulder harness. The motor and propeller were rear-mounted in a large plastic housing.
A controlling joystick and a rollerball were set into a plastic ridge between the pilot's knees. "Where's the instrument panel?" Alex said.
"It's in the virching helmet," Peter said. "Do you do virtuality?"
"Sure. Doesn't everybody?"
"Well, it doesn't matter much, because you're not going to be flying this thing anyway. It's all controlled from the ground." With the ease of long habit, Peter swabbed the interior band of the helmet with rubbing alcohol, then scrubbed the faceplate inside and out. "But take good care of this virching helmet, because it's worth twice as much as the aircraft."
"Twice, hell, three times," Rick said. "Let me db that, Peter." He methodically adjusted the virtuality helmet's interior webbing for Alex's narrow skull, then set and wiggled it onto Alex's head. It felt like having one's head firmly~ inserted into a lightweight plastic bowling ball. "Now see, if you want a naked-eyeball look, the faceplate just hinges up like this... . And feel that com antenna back there? Don't snag that antenna on the left-hand spar there, okay?"
"Right," Alex said. Despite Peter's alcohol scrub, the interior of the helmet still smelled strongly of someone else's old excited sweat. Alex began to settle into the mood. There was a momentum to this situation that appealed to him. He'd always rather enjoyed having his head at the mercy of someone else's media system.
With a resourcefulness that surprised himself, he rolled up the pant legs of his paper suit to the knee and stuffed both his makeshift sandals securely into the big baggy pa• per cuffs. Then he straddled the seat, barefoot, and tried it on foi size. With a bit of stirrup-shifting and linchpin work, the seat was not too bad. "Where's my oxygen?"
They insisted that he wouldn't really need any oxygen, but Alex counterinsisted with such leaden, pigheaded emphasis that they quickly gave in.
Rick had to confer with Buzzard by belt phone to find the dust-covered oxygen tank. Then its mask had to be sterilized-purely a matter of routine, Peter assured him, they always sterilized any equipment that might carry strep, flu, or TB... . Finally the chrome-yellow tank was strapped neatly behind the pilot's seat, its accordion tube draped over Alex's right shoulder, and the mask's elastic firmly snagged at the nape of his neck.
Then they rolled him, snugly socketed within his plane, out of the paper hangar. The plane bumped along easily on its little pipe-stçm undercarriage. After rolling the plane eighty meters, the two Troupers faced the ultralight into the west wind.
Rick turned the helmet on, and Alex was rewarded with a meaningless pull-down menu of virtual instrumentation across the upper rim of his faceplate. Alex dinked around a bit with the rollerball and click button. The system seemed to be functional.