The Fata Morgana - Leo Frankowski, ebook
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The Fata Morgana
Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
Page 1
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.
Copyright (c) 1999 by
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions 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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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