textfiles/magazines/LWS/ten.lws

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"The Adventures of Lone Wolf Scientific"
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An electronically syndicated series that
follows the exploits of two madcap
mavens of high-technology. Copyright 1991
Michy Peshota. All rights reserved. May
not be distributed without accompanying
WELCOME.LWS and EPISOD.LWS files.
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EPISODE #10


            Tense Moments In Mission Control

>>A tense morning at Dingready & Derringdo Aerospace is made
even more so by a visit from boss Gus Farwick.  Clipboard
and camera in hand, the conniving engineer manager is busy
compiling documentation to terminate the employment of his
two least favorite research engineers.<<

                      By M. Peshota
     

     When S-max and Andrew.BAS finally arrived at work that
morning, the two new housemates were grimacing with
exasperation at the other.

     "I don't know why you had to motion to that fool driver
to cut in front of us just because a Flight for Life
helicopter was landing in his lane," the computer builder
huffed, referring to their tumultous drive to work on the
freeway.

     "How was I supposed to know that you'd run him off the
road, pull him from his car, and throw him down an
embankment?" the programmer protested.

     "Drivers who cut in front of one should be dealt with
firmly," S-max grunted with self-satisfaction.

     It was 11:45, and already the day seemed long and
wearying. As they were preparing for work, the computer
builder announced that he had misplaced his favorite T-
shirt.

     "I can't leave the house without my T-shirt!" he had
cried, pawing frantically through the piles of computer
documentation that fell from the kitchen shelves.  "I can't
go <<anywhere>> without my T-shirt.  I've designed some of
my greatest computers while wearing that shirt.  I wore it
when I wired my first parallel circuit.  I wore it when I
used up my first roll of duct tape.  I wore it through my
entire seventeen years at MIT!  I can't design state-of-the-
art digital electronics without it!"

     In his composed, rational way, Andrew.BAS asked, "Don't
you have another shirt to wear?"

     "Noooo!" the computer builder moaned.  "I've never even
owned another shirt!"

     They searched the house for nearly an hour looking for
S-max's shirt, ripped, dirty, pungeant with the smells of
sweat and shorted out electronics, so faded its color was
now the lost, bland hue of every computer in existence.
Across its front was a weathered infinity sign.  On the back
was a grape stain shaped like the North American continent.
"My shirt!  My poor lost shirt!" S-max howled all the while,
as they kicked their way through piles of electrical
schematics, sifted through boxes of tangled electrical
instruments, shined flashlights under S-max's tattered R and
D couch.  "My shirt!" he cried, growing more frantic as the
hunt progressed.

     They eventually found his T-shirt.  It was wadded up
inside the mouth of his electric tuba.

     "I must have tossed it in there when I took a shower
last night," the computer builder speculated, extracting it
from the tarnished, dented instrument.  He slipped it over
his puffy chest.  "I was standing in this very spot last
night when I took it off."

     "And it never occurred to you to check the place where
you took it off?"  his miffed housemate asked.

     S-max looked at the programmer bewilderedly.  "No, why
should it have?"  He grunted.  "Computer geniuses such as
myself have more important things to collect in our massive
amounts of intellect than remembrances of the last time we
absently tossed something into the mouth of an electric
tuba."

     A few minutes later, S-max announced that he had
misplaced his walkie-talkie. "My beloved walkie-talkie!" he
wailed, and the hunt began again.

     Once the computer builder had located his walkie-talkie
(it was found stashed beneath a dusty cushion of his
research couch), and clipped it to his belt, he tied his
tennis shoes in double-knots, then proceeded to the door and
announced that he planned on strapping the twenty-gallon
drum of liquid marshmallow that Andrew.BAS had bequeathed
him the night before, and which was apparently refuse of a
college fraternity prank, inside the satellite dish on the
roof of his van.  He planned to store it in his parking
space at work.

     "I don't know if you've noticed, Andrew.BAS," he said,
flinging clothesline over the drum of marshmallow and the
satellite dish which held it, "but my designated employee
parking space is a very large one.  It is much larger than
yours.  This is no doubt because I am an innovator of
tomorrow's computer technology, while you--"  He sniffed.
"--are a mere computer programmer."

     "Don't you want to take the Robin Hood hat and tights
with you too?" his housemate asked with emotionlessly
uninflected sarcasm, referring to the costume portion of the
fraternity prank arsenal heap in their livingroom.

     S-max turned and gazed in indecision at the drooping
porch where his electric tuba sat.  The green tights dangled
from its dented lips like the legs of a half-swallowed
leprechaun.  "You know, you're absolutely right.  I had
better bring them to work too.  I just may need them in my
expanding role as innovator of tomorrow's technology."  He
hurried back to the house to get the tights, while the
programmer gloomed that his mornings would be like this
forever on unless he rid himself of this noxious houseguest.

     When the computer builder returned, he offered
Andrew.BAS a ride to work.  The latter refused, having
already witnessed a horrific display of his officemate's
driving skill, but the overbearing inventor insisted.  When
Andrew.BAS mulishly refused to climb into his shell-torn
van, S-max threatened to follow him down the road on his
"cute-as-a-programmer's-lunchbox motor-scooter" and run him
over.  Knowing that the headstrong S-max was fully capable
of this, Andrew.BAS sighed and obligingly crawled into the
front seat.

     When he glanced down at the seat to learn more of the
nature of the pile of refuse upon which he sat, he was
horrified to see that it was a heap of unpaid, overdue
traffic tickets.  When he searched for the seat belt, he
found it knotted around the personal computer that was
jammed next to him in the seat.  The computer's monitor was
smashed as though it had gone careening through the
windshield.

     When the driver ahead of them on the freeway creeped
along at a mere fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit,
S-max pounded the horn, poked his wild-maned head out the
window, and threatened to drown the other driver in twenty
gallons of marshmallow.  "Don't think I carry this twenty
gallon drum of marshmallow and giant wok on top of my van
just so I can make idle threats!" he had screamed.

     By the time they arrived at work, the two officemates
where barely speaking to each other--except for sporadic
quibbling about how S-max had gotten lost on the freeway and
driven to the research complex of the wrong high-tech
defense contractor.

     "I tell you, Andrew.BAS, they most certainly changed
the layout of that cloverleaf since the last time I drove
around it," the computer builder insisted.

     "But we ended up in a different state!" Andrew.BAS
wailed.

     "But it did give us the opportunity to view many
fascinating historic landmarks on the way," he grunted
optimistically.

     "Two of which you ran over," the programmer reminded
him, referring to the wishing well and park bandstand which
were now piles of dusty timber and trellis branded with the
crooked treadmarks of muddy van wheels.

     Reaching their office, they found their boss, Gus
Farwick, waiting for them.  He was pacing the floor with a
clipboard, his usually monotonous face pinched in grief.
Oddly, he didn't seem particularly concerned that the two
research engineers were nearly four hours late for work.
Instead, he held up two of the rubber snakes that S-max had
glued to the defense contractor's hall floor to make it
resemble a space shuttling landing strip. "Who is
responsible for these?" he demanded.

     S-max pushed in front of Andrew.BAS and raised his hand
proudly.  "I am," he said.  "It was my idea from start to
finish.  So were the two plastic diplodocuses hot-glued to
each side of your desk.  Andrew.BAS had absolutely nothing
to do with it."

     Farwick recalled the dinosaurs.  He had not been amused
upon arriving at work that morning, to discover a computer
paper banner stretched over his office door proclaiming
"Facsimile of the Halls of Congress Frozen in the
Technological Stone Age."  He glared at the alleged computer
genius with malevolence.  "I thought it was you," he
breathed.

     S-max whispered to Andrew.BAS, "Gus is no doubt so
impressed with my work transforming his office into an
authentic miniature replica of the halls of Congress frozen
in the technological Stone Age that he is about to put me in
charge of yet another multi-billion dollar defense project
upon which the fate of western civilization hinges.  I
advise you to listen closely.  You may learn a great deal
from this encounter"  He turned to the coal-eyed bureacrat.
"We started out just building a model of NASA's Mission
Control in the coat closet--"  He pointed to the closet
crowded with green Gumbys clenching paper airplanes.  "But
as you know, with unvarnished computer geniuses like me, one
visionary concept just naturally flows into another."

     "Yes, I often marvel at the phenomenon."  The engineer-
manager looked around the office.  He glimpsed at the half-
finished plastic model of the space shuttle propped
unsteadily on ice cream stick scaffolding, the shuttle
landing strips chalked on the floor with baroque confusion,
and the plaster bust of John F. Kennedy sitting on the
computer genius's desk, an outline of a pocket protector
cartooned on its chest with a laundry marker.  He noted on
his clipboard that it looked lonely and afraid.  He pulled a
miniature camera from his pocket, and, walking around the
room, began snapping pictures.  S-max whispered to his
officemate, who was watching the proceedings fearfully. "Gus
is no doubt going to distribute these pictures to other
defense contractors to brag about our operations here."

     The engineer-manager asked the computer builder to pose
in front of the Mission Control model, and the army jacketed
S-max walked over to the closet and stood in front of it
proudly.  He raised his chain, tucked his hand in the
opening of his faded jacket Napolean-like, and propped a
sneakered foot on the space shuttle model like a big game
hunter posing with his kill.  Farwick snapped an entire roll
of pictures.

     The manager then turned to Andrew.BAS and asked him if
he would also like to be in some pictures, but before the
terrified programmer could reply, S-max blurted, "No,
Andrew.BAS would <<not>> like to be in any pictures.  He
contributed absolutely nothing of significance to this
breathtaking project.  He couldn't even glue plastic lizards
on the floor correctly."

     Andrew.BAS felt relieved.

     Their boss was about to leave when S-max suggested,
"Why don't you take some pictures of my desk too?  It is
quite unique.  There are many quaint patterns and rare
bibelot that have gone into its decoration."  He pointed
with pride to the battered gray metal desk pushed into the
epicenter of the office.  An antedeluvian computer terminal
with an askew, blinking copper screen and moose antlers
glued to its crown was enthroned upon it.  Farwick circled
the desk with fascination.

     From the old terminal's monitor bobbed red fur dice.
Its keys were caked with solder and littered with metal
shavings.  From the back of the machine a long radio antenna
protruded tail-like.  "The Motorola Z80 Chip Lives!" was
spray-painted in black on the side of the terminal.  On the
other side was sprayed a long black arrow pointing back and
around to the power switch on the rear.  A big X was painted
over the power switch.  Stuck to the other side of the
terminal was a bumper sticker that read "Honk If You Want
Complete Schematics." On the top was one that said "Follow
Me to the Gallium Arsenide."  A sticker was glued in a
corner of the terminal's neon-bright screen.  It that read
"NO PROGRAMMERS"  and showed a red circle around and a line
drawn through a stick figure with pimples.  Standing beside
the terminal was voodoo doll.  It was also full of pimples.
It had been stuck full of capacitors.  The desk's linoleum
top was scarred with long, hideous soldering burns.  Frayed
wires and dogeared electrical schematics fell from all its
drawers.  The desk chair was covered with fake zebra fur.
Farwick a full roll of pictures of S-max's desk, as well as
close-ups of the programmer-voodoo doll and the "Motorola
Z80 Chip Lives!" bumper sticker.

     As the smiling engineer-manager prepared to leave, he
told the computer builder to inform him <<immediately>>
whenever he embarked on another engineering project like the
Mission Control in the coat closet.  S-max gladly promised
to do so.  His boss then asked him for directions to the
stall in the parking garage where his battered van was
parked.  "Just look for the satellite dish filled with
liquid marshmallow," S-max bragged.  "You can't miss it."
Farwick left, clipboard and camera in hand, looking happier
than he had since S-max began working for him.

     The computer builder turned to his visibly worried
officemate.  "It's too bad <<you>> can't be a genius
computer hardware designer too," he gloated, "then people
would be wanting you to pose for pictures in front of the
many things that had been touched by your engineering
creativity."

     "I don't think my personnel folder is quite ready for
something like that," Andrew.BAS sighed.  He feared that his
and S-max's employment at the defense contract was about to
come to a close.


                          <Finis>


>>>>In the next episode of "The Adventures of Lone Wolf
Scientific," trouble starts when computer genius S-max
discovers that the cans of twine that his boss has put him
in charge of are not "super-string links between key defense
systems," but plain old kite-string that the engineeer-
manager has given the mischevious computer builder to keep
him occupied and out of trouble.<<<<