Ten coppers per story was extortionate, in the grand vizier’s opinion, but the storyteller’s guild agreed to share the income from the stories once they were told in the bazaar. There was even talk of an invention from far-off Cathay, where stories could be printed on vellum and sold throughout the kingdom. The grand vizier consoled himself with the thought that if sales were good enough, the income could pay for regilding his ceiling.
The sultan eventually learned of the arrangement, of course. Being no fool, he demanded that he be cut in on the profits. Reluctantly, the grand vizier complied.
Scheherazade was the happiest of all. She kept telling stories to the sultan until he relented of his murderous ways and eventually married her, much to the joy of all Baghdad.
She thought of the storyteller’s guild as her own personal creation and called it Scheherazade’s Fables and Wonders Association.
That slightly ponderous name was soon abbreviated to SFWA1.
1 SFWA is also the abbreviated form of the Science Fiction Writers Association, the professional organization of science fiction and fantasy writers. The coincidence between that organization’s title and Scheherazade’s association is purely . . . well, intentional.
Introduction to
“The Supersonic Zeppelin”
I worked in the aerospace industry for a number of years, and this story is a slightly exaggerated spoof of how major projects get initiated and somehow acquire a life of their own.
The characters herein are also slightly exaggerated portraits of some of the people I worked with. Slightly exaggerated.
The Busemann biplane concept is real, by the way. I’ve always believed that good science fiction should be based as solidly as possible on real science.
THE SUPERSONIC ZEPPELIN
Let’s see now. How did it all begin?
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon—no, that’s not right; actually, it started in the cafeteria of the Anson Aerospace plant in Phoenix.
Okay, then, how about:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold—well, yeah, but it was only a little after noon when Bob Wisdom plopped his loaded lunch tray on our table and sat down like a man disgusted with the universe. And anyway, engineers don’t moil for gold; they’re on salary.
I didn’t like the way they all looked down on me, but I certainly didn’t let it show. It wasn’t just that I was the newbie among them: I wasn’t even an engineer, just a recently graduated MBA assigned to work with the Advanced Planning Team, aptly acronymed APT. As far as they were concerned, I was either a useless appendage forced on them, or a snoop from management sent to provide info on which of them should get laid off.
Actually, my assignment was to get these geniuses to come up with a project that we could sell to somebody, anybody. Otherwise, we’d all be hit by the iron ball when the next wave of layoffs started, just before Christmas.
Six shopping weeks left; I knew.
“What’s with you, Bob?” Ray Kurtz asked. “You look like you spent the morning sniffing around a manure pile.”
Bob Wisdom was tall and lanky, with a round face that was normally cheerful, even in the face of Anson Aerospace’s coming wave of cutbacks and layoffs. Today he looked dark and pouchy-eyed.
“Last night I watched a TV documentary about the old SST.”
“The Concorde?” asked Kurtz. He wore a full bushy beard that made him look more like a dogsled driver than a metallurgical engineer.
“Yeah. They just towed the last one out to the Smithsonian on a barge. A beautiful hunk of flying machine like that riding to its final resting place on a converted garbage scow.”
That’s engineers for you. Our careers were hanging by a hair, and he’s upset over a piece of machinery.
“Beautiful, maybe,” said Tommy Rohr. “But it was never a practical commercial airliner. It could never fly efficiently enough to be economically viable.”
For an engineer, Rohr was unnervingly accurate in his economic analyses. He’d gotten out of the dot-com boom before it burst. Of the five of us at the lunch table, Tommy was the only one who wasn’t worried about losing his job—he had a much more immediate worry: his new trophy wife and her credit cards.
“It’s just a damned shame,” Wisdom grumbled. “The end of an era.”
Kurtz, our bushy-bearded metallurgist, shook his graying head. “The eco-nuts wouldn’t let it fly supersonic overpopulated areas. They didn’t want sonic booms rattling their neighborhoods. That ruined its chances of being practical.”
“The trouble is,” Wisdom muttered as he unwrapped a soggy sandwich, “you can build a supersonic aircraft that doesn’t produce a sonic boom.”
“No sonic boom?” I asked. Like I said, I was the newcomer to the APT group.
Bob Wisdom smiled like a sphinx.
“What’s the catch?” asked Richard Grand in his slightly Anglified accent. He’d been born in the Bronx, but he’d won a Rhodes scholarship and came back trying to talk like Sir Stafford Cripps.
The cafeteria was only half filled, but there was still a fair amount of clattering and yammering going on all around us. Outside the picture window I could see it was raining cats and elephants, a real monsoon downpour. Something to do with global warming, I’d been told.
“Catch?” Bob echoed, trying to look hurt. “Why should there be a catch?”
“Because if someone could build a supersonic aircraft that didn’t shatter one’s eardrums with its sonic boom, old boy, obviously someone could have done it long before this.”
“We could do it,” Bob said pleasantly. Then he bit it into his sandwich.
“Why aren’t we, then?” Kurtz asked, his brows knitting.
Bob shrugged elaborately as he chewed on his ham and five-grain bread.
Rohr waggled a finger at him. “What do you know that we don’t? Or is this a gag?”
Bob swallowed and replied, “It’s just simple aerodynamics.”
“What’s the go of it?” Grand asked. He got that phrase from reading a biography of James Clerk Maxwell.
“Well,” Bob said, putting down the limp remains of the sandwich, “there’s
