textfiles/magazines/LWS/two.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. May not be distributed
without accompanying WELCOME.LWS and
EPISOD.LWS files.
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EPISODE #2
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       The Second Renaissance of Space Exploration
            Technology and What Happened To It

>>Bashful boychild software engineer Andrew.BAS stumbles
unwittingly into the neurosis and smashed dreams of the
military-industrial complex.  Within days, he loses his soul
while waiting for a government security clearance.<<

                     By M. Peshota

     File cabinets lined the walls, the air bled entropy.
It was a place of brilliant men sentenced to long hours of
ineffectualness, their eyes red from filling out government
forms.  One man who noticed neither the defeat in the faces
that surged past him, nor heard the cynicism in the workers'
early morning plaints was Andrew Sebastian, or Andrew.BAS
for short.  Clad in a crisp white engineer's shirt and a
gray junior men's department suit, he strode
enthusiastically across the lobby, placed his briefcase on
the floor beside him at the receptionist's desk, leaned over
and whispered to the woman behind it, "I am here to begin
engineering the second renaissance of space exploration
technology.  Where should I go?"

     The woman glanced up in surprise.  "Is someone
expecting you?"

     "I would suppose so," he said, "because someone offered
me a job."

     Andrew.BAS was just out of college with a degree in
computer software engineering and Dingready & Derringdo
Aerospace was the first firm to offer him a job.  They
were the ones who ran in all the engineering magazines the
ads that pictured powerful rockets blasting through space,
manned by recent engineering school graduates.  They
were the ones who mailed him the recruitment brochures
filled with showy oil paintings of space stations twirling
rhapsodically towards the Pleiades, manned by recent
engineering school graduates.  They were the ones who
corresponded with him on stationary on which the words
"space" and "innovation" were spelled in three-inch
high capital letters and superimposed over silhouettes
of recent engineering school graduates holding their moon
helmets.  Since Andrew.BAS did not get the job he wanted
most--that of mission commander on the space shuttle--he
took the next thing that came along and that was the
engineering post at Dingready & Derringdo Aerospace.

    The engineer-manager was growing cross.  Already he was
starting to dislike the kid computer programmer with the
dreamy blue eyes and effusion of freckles, cowlicks, and
dimples who looked like the kind of kid programmer Norman
Rockwell would have drawn had he drawn computer programmers.
He grumped, "You showed up for work a day early.  Dingready
& Derringdo doesn't like new employees who show up for work
earlier than scheduled."

     "My apologies," Andrew.BAS proffered. "I was anxious to
begin engineering the second renaissance of space
exploration technology.  I'm sure you know how it is."  He
smiled.

     The engineer-manager wanted to snap that no, he did not
know how it is.  He did not know <<anything>> about the
second renaissance of space technology.  Being an engineer-
manager who preferred to keep his nose safe in a file
cabinet and far from the primal chaos of the heavens, he did
not want to know anything either, and he was sick of dimpled
programmers like this one asking about it.  He suspected
that the second whatever-it-was had something to do with the
employee recruitment brochures that Dingready & Derringdo
mailed to colleges.  Usually, any problems with new computer
programmers could be traced to those.

     Andrew.BAS continued, "If you'll just show me to my
office, I'll get to work right away on the underground
Neptunian launch pads."

     The manager gloomed.  Oh, why were kid programmers
always like this?   He snapped, "The underground Neptunian
launch pads will have to wait."  Then he turned to the
receptionist and asked her if she had any forms that the new
employee could fill out.  Since she did not, Andrew.BAS was
sent home.

     When Andrew.BAS arrived at work the second day, he
learned of yet another obstacle in the way of the second
renaissance of space exploration technology.  That was that
he needed a government security clearance. The need of a
government security clearance shouldn't have surprised
Andrew.BAS.  Afterall, Dingready & Derringdo Aerospace was a
government defense contractor, and defense contractors tend
to like their employees to have security clearances.  It was
just that Andrew.BAS had never had anyone not trust him
before.  Indeed, for most of his young life he had listened
to other people tell him how trustworthy and responsible he
was, how, if they were trapped in a faulty spaceship airlock
and it was ten minutes to rocketman heaven, they would want
Andrew.BAS to be the one to go find Captain Picard or Mr.
Spock (it was mostly other engineering students who told him
this).  Now Dingready & Derringdo was telling him that they
had to run a background check on everything from his program
editor to his ping pong paddle before they could even tell
him where the men's washroom was.

     For the rest of the day, the cherub-cheeked computer
programmer slumped despondently in a folding chair in a
corner of the defense contractor's lobby, rereading his
college engineering texts, thumbing through the moon colony
blueprints in his briefcase, waiting for his security
clearance, and brooding about what a rotten start the second
renaissance of space exploration technology was having.  His
spirits improved by the following day, though, for he knew
that once he arrived in the fusty lobby of the defense
contractor, his government security clearance would be
waiting for him and it would be but minutes before he was
festooning his office walls with Neil Armstrong posters and
ordering parts for inter-galactic transports.  When
Andrew.BAS arrived at work, however, he learned that, not
only did he not yet have a government security clearance,
but no one could tell him when and if he would ever get one.

     "Does this mean that I won't be able to schedule any
lunar docking maneuvers over the weekend?" he asked the
receptionist.

     She eyed him coolly.  "What you do on your own time is
the least of my concerns."

     Each morning, for the next seven-and-a-half months,
Andrew.BAS would arrive promptly at eight in the lobby of
the defense contractor, take a seat in the folding chair
and, for the next eight-and-three-quarters hours, rework the
moon colony blueprints in his briefcase, daydream about the
second renaissance of space exploration technology, and wait
for his security clearance.

     As he did so he watched the shabby parade of fly-bitten
technocrats lurch past him in the morning and again in the
evening, and prayed fervently that he never became one of
them, but by month eight of his vigil he knew with a
perditious dread that he had grown as irretrievably rumpled,
cynical, and dull-eyed as them.  His once lily white shirt,
spotless as hope itself, pressed smooth as the courage
requested on Line 147 of the NASA employment application,
impeccably wrinkle-free as a space age engineer's optimism,
was now as blighted as that of a man who has just crawled
from a train wreck.  The pencils in his pockets refused to
line up straight anymore, no matter how hard he tried to
make them do so.  His once rosy, downy cheeks were now the
sickly hue of hemlock grown in a prison yard.  His formerly
perfect posture was now squashed over like a linear equation
crushed between two elevator doors.  He hardly ever combed
his scraggly blond bangs to look like Bill Gates' anymore.

     Andrew.BAS had once been a man who often forgot, thanks
to the effusiveness of a busy imagination, that ninety
percent of the world that man has begot is built of
institutional blank walls, but now his mind curdled into
that blankness, bloated with apathy, became
indistinguishable from the hopeless plaster around him.
Before he knew it, all that he had once studied for, all he
had dreamed of--the days of hammering silver-sleek rockets,
firing sun-powered planet probes, launching space
exploration's long-awaited second renaissance when everyone
would wear white space suits and look very brave and
Andrew.BAS himself would spend long afternoons bounding
childlike over moony terrains, bearing a big American flag,
seemed to him, like the dogeared moon colony blueprints on
his lap, rather silly, like the delusions of a man who has
stayed up too late too often prattling about blackholes with
college chums, a man who has, rather pathetically, worn
Project Apollo patches stitched to his windbreaker long
after everyone has told him that he and the world both are
too old for that kind of thing.  Finally, one day, the young
engineer removed the moon colony blueprints from his
briefcase, and tossed them away.  He knew his soul was lost.

>>>In the next episode, "When Men of Destiny Meet,"
Andrew.BAS befriends another new employee who also failed to
get a job on the space shuttle.>>>>

                           <Finis>