they wanted. The propaganda ofthe deed' would be remembered for centuries. Nothing would go wrong. Hamlet had begged for permission to be the artist for the deed. He knew he would not survive but he also knew his name would be recorded in the history books. Freud, the psychologist for the Cell, started the weeks of hypnotic controls that would be used to protect the Cell if Hamlet was caught still alive. Even the old spy novel trick of hollowing out a tooth for a cyanide pill was done.
Santa was happy. There was so much to do. There was so much passion in the artistic details of the deed. Every member of the Cell felt the excitement. Planning the death of another person was the second most powerful force uniting the Cell. The first was taking part in the killing. For those few people who have the psychological twist that permits murder, there is no greater joy than the killing after a successful hunt.
Hamlet had a wife and children at home but the hard-eyed angular beauty, Snow White screwed him and used him every chance she had until he was exhausted. The sex pushed his already overloaded psyche to the point that all that mattered was killing Daniel Karpinen.
* * * *
The loading of the shuttle was a mess. The last few items of belongings took up most of the spare room in back. The two cats had to be caught a half a dozen times. Whenever the shuttle door was opened, one or the other cat would make a break for it. My greatest surprise during the loading was that Felix would be coming with us. The door was finally shut and we took off with our stocked and ready space shuttle.
The cats decided that this was the best time to play pounce-your-it. We were able to keep them off the pilot but both Tabby and I got scratched and Felix was bitten by the kitten. There was no pressing need for speed so the trip to where the spaceship was orbiting took six hours. The cats finally settled down an hour into the trip. The kitten decided to fall asleep draped over my shoulder. Move-over went belly up on Tabby's lap. Tabby was scratching Move-over in his armpits; his rumbling purr was the loudest sound on the shuttle.
Finally through the porthole, I caught my first sight of the completed ship. The outside surface was covered with a yellow Teflon-polymer film. The film was a blend of resins and carbon fibers resulting in a finished coat that was stronger than tungsten steel and able to shed most micro meteorites. The call letters YS2 were printed in black on the large spherical fuel tanks for the maneuvering rockets.
We entered the cylindrical docking bay and opened the doors. The two cats took off with the slinking motion of feline exploration. The first thing Tabby did when we got on board was to announce on the intercom that the christening of the ship would occur in one hour.
I hadn't been active with the final preparations on board for the test run. I knew we were going to be stopping by each of the outer planets in turn and deploying a number of satellites and probes at each planet. NASA had conducted a contest in the schools for projects on each of the planets. Along with the scientific research, there would be real time Internet feedback to the schools on their projects.
“What is the final count on scientists and technicians that we will be taking?'
“Twenty-one. Schmitt, Manning, and Jorge all insisted on coming. We got a fully trained five man NASA shuttle crew, six of the most skilled members of the construction crew, and four of Holcum's military boys ... Let's see ... that makes eighteen and with the three of us twenty-one. Yup that's the crew.'
“On our next trip we will get rid of most if not all of the others.'
“Oh really? Just what do you have in mind that we need that much privacy?'
“I was planning on inspecting the blue prints again.” Tabby's grin was worth the verbal word play.
The ship's christening was broadcast worldwide. Only four of us went out of the ship, Tabby, two of the NASA crew, and me. The NASA crew videotaped the event. Tabby broke a bottle of water on the side of the ship and pulled the tape off the name.
She had worked on the speech for the last two days after learning that everyone had decided she would be the one doing the christening. After a few false starts, “The Wright brothers took man from walking on the ground to flight within the atmosphere of the earth. In the nineteen-sixties, Russia and NASA took man from our planet into flight within our solar system. This ship will take man and woman from our solar system into flight to the stars beyond. I christen you Raptor.'
I switched my mike to private conversation. “Short but sweet.” I was surprised when I heard tears. “It was fine.'
“I couldn't think of anything else to say.'
“It was enough. You will see.” It was enough. We got selected network TV sent up to us from earth. The public and media fell over each other repeating the short phrase sensing Tabby's emotion in those few words.
We got on board and started to Mars. We were purposefully taking the planets in order from the sun and not traveling the most economical path. Part of this test flight was to show the versatility of the kantele space/star drive. The main gravity dish started up with Holst's Planets playing to fuzzy the electromagnetic waves. I had insisted that we use real music for scrambling the waves with the music being audible in at least the ship's bridge. Most of the artificial gravity spheres in the walls were turned off as the force of gravity from the main dish started to orientate us to down being where the dish was. A tug-of-war between the main kantele dish and the smaller gravity spheres in the ‘now’ ceiling of the bridge started. Sometimes we felt lighter and at other times heavier. A few of the crew's stomachs couldn't handle the changes but we were prepared with upchuck bags. Slowly, the forces balanced until it was just bearably more than normal g-forces in the living quarters.
It took nine months to deliver all the satellites and probes. The Raptor was fast and we didn't stop long at each planet. The gravity gradient produced by the larger dish in the Raptor was nearer the needed part of the gravity curve, cutting the velocity required to obtain a tear in the universe's fabric to less than half of the original 200,000,000 meters per second. And by balancing the smaller gravity kanteles in the walls with the main kantele drive, it was possible to accelerate at over 4 g's while only experiencing 1.5 g's in the living quarters.
I did not take a leading role during this trip. I let the NASA pilots make all the decisions with the scientists. I watched and learned. I learned about my new ship and how it runs but mostly I learned about people. People were something I had little experience with. But with twenty-one of us in the small confined space of the Raptor, I had the perfect way to learn about them.
Everyone else on board was kept busy. During the stops orbiting the planets, the crews were busy tweaking the ship's design and running experiments. Schmitt became a media figure as he handled most of the scientific briefings that we broadcast to the world. Tabby was in engineering heaven. Oh yes, Tumble became a teenage cat. Move-over resented the changing gravity. Move-over rarely went to the cylinders nearest the main kantele dish with the strongest gravity. But Tumble loved the different forces. With the higher gravity near the drive dish, Tumble could jump across a cylinder with acrobatic displays that looked impossible. Both cats spent most of their rest time in our quarters, the farthest from the drive kantele.
It is hard to describe the outer planets. The colors and views are nowhere as vivid as those produced by the movie studios. But occasionally the real universe can surprise you. In close orbit to Jupiter, it was possible to see the swirling storms and huge atmospheric displays. Some of the dancing colors were reminiscent of the borealis of earth and others seemed to be electrical and plasma bursts of energy. The rings of Saturn were generally blah. There was no color to them except for one brief instant when we passed out of orbit and the nearby light reflected off them in weak rainbow colors.
I should have noticed more about the rest of the planets but it was during the flight to Uranus that I noticed something odd about the ship's flight. The NASA pilots handled the seconds of multidimensional flight with ease and a minimum of midcourse corrections. But I was watching both the pilots and the computer readouts. There was something not planned in the midcourse corrections before dimensional flight. I took to sitting with a laptop by the fountain playing with the tracking information from the flight paths.
We were at Neptune before I got my first hint at what was causing the midcourse corrections. It was simple when the answer came to me. Since man can not make anything uniform, we expected midcourse corrections but the ones I saw were not random and they were larger than the computer projections
indicated. We were using gravity as a source in making a dimple in our four dimensional space. The dimples or creases were easier to make when there were helping gravitational forces and harder to make when there were not. The gravitational power of the large gas planets made the dimpling easier near them and if there was an overlapping of gravitational forces from two or more planets even if they were distant, the crease would have a tendency to migrate with their lines of force.
I talked my findings over with Tabby and we made corrections to the computer guidance programs. The corrections the pilot made in the flight to Pluto and earth were less but they were still there. It is just impossible to
