Sabotage (3 page)

“The solution patented by Paul C. Fisher was a pressurized cartridge of thixotropic ink. His ‘astronaut pen' worked at any angle, underwater, and in extreme temperatures—with a shelf life of a hundred years. He understood that oftentimes the easy design—in this case, pencil graphite—introduces a host of undesirable consequences. The engineer's challenge is to foresee the consequences; his art is to adapt with all achievable simplicity.”

Dr. Malcolm Clare was a man with a kind of star power that intimidated most students. From 1971 to 1974, he had served as a flight test engineer at NASA's High-Speed Flight Station. He had worked on eleven projects, including a number of spin tests for fighter jets, before moving to Mojave. He had founded Malfactory in the California desert, an enterprise that designed aircraft and spacecraft prototypes. He later developed the company into ClareCraft, one of the world's leading prototyping facilities, headquartered at the Mojave Spaceport. During his time he'd been responsible for the design and oversight of forty-one aircraft and four rockets.

Clare's spaceplane, Spica, had earned a five-million-dollar prize for its novel engine. At full thrust, most combustion chambers reached temperatures upward of 3,000 degrees Celsius, enough to melt the heat-resistant sidewalls. The traditional solution had been to lay in networks of cooling tubes, whereby heat-absorbing liquid fuels would abduct thermal energy, but such “regenerative cooling” systems added mass, expense, and complexity. Clare's design employed a novel configuration and material for the tubing that contained the blaze and its damage to achieve breakthrough weight and efficiency.

Dr. Clare had joined the Stanford faculty in 1981, where he taught advanced courses in aerospace engineering. He spent his years alternating between innovation at ClareCraft, research at Stanford, and consultation at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a technical advisor to NASA's Deep Space Network supporting interplanetary spacecraft missions. Students welcomed his regular guest lectures at Caltech. In 1992, he had earned the Royal Aeronautical Society's Gold Medal for “pioneering experimental contributions to modeling transonic wave drag,” as the official text put it. By the early nineties, his contributions to aerospace engineering had become legendary.

In 1994 Clare's celebrity nosedived. The face of aeronautics had vanished from the press and television. Interviews and guest lectures had come to a halt as Stanford's most visible professor withdrew into reclusion. His inexplicable departure from the headlines had created fodder for detractors. “It appears the great innovator's spigot has run dry!” critics had chided as conjectures abounded.

Yet as a magician harbors mystery behind his curtain, Malcolm Clare continued to baffle students with his eccentricities and prowess.

*   *   *

Ten minutes late, Austin parked his bike and dashed across the courtyard between the Hewlett and Packard buildings. He ran up the stairs and entered the amphitheater, taking a seat in the back under a hanging periodic table. He entered quietly, careful to avoid the professor's notice. At the bottom of the room, Clare paced the floor.

“To continue our theme of parables,” he said, “there's a story told by the painter Giorgio Vasari in his biographical history of artists. In his tale, city officials asked to see the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi's design for a cathedral dome. Filippo instead proposed that whosoever could make an egg stand upright on flat marble, without aid, should be hired to build the cupola. When none could find a way, he lightly smashed one end on the marble, making the egg stand on its flattened shell. Rival architects argued they could have easily done the same. Filippo said they could have also built the dome, if they had seen his model. He earned the commission.”

There were chuckles.

“You may wonder why I've chosen these stories to stress the power and pitfalls of simplicity. The answer is, your midterm scores. I was impressed by your ability to apply textbook theorems and formulas. Nonetheless, the average was quite low. Success on this test took creativity. You were evidently pressed for time. Some students left pages unanswered. In posted solutions, you'll see much of the algebraic busywork was avoidable if you'd viewed problems through a simpler lens.

“Don't worry about grades. This is only a gauge of your preparedness for the quals. I encourage you to visit me during office hours to discuss how you might better employ your scientific intuition. That's enough on the test.

“Let's continue where the last class ended. I believe we were discussing the principles governing hypersonic combustion in scramjet engines. We'd seen how these engines require few moving parts, since the aircraft itself uses speed to compress air. Who can tell me why a hybrid ramjet/scramjet engine would have a lower minimal functional Mach number?”

*   *   *

“That concludes today's material. Thanks for your attention. As you know, I don't like slideshows, so rather than post a PowerPoint, I'll email out my lecture notes. See you next time. Oh, and I'd like to see Austin Hardy in my office. Right now.”

Austin felt a pang of guilt. He wasn't sure if the professor had noticed his tardiness. No one missed a minute of Clare's class. The professor had made clear that attendance and punctuality were required of students wishing to master advanced aerospace studies.

Austin wasn't the type to show up late. Today was a rare exception. As he descended the amphitheater steps toward the professor, he fretted over the reception of his apology.

“Sorry,” he said. “No excuse for the delay.”

Malcolm Clare almost laughed. “You think that's what this is about?”

“What else?”

The professor had an odd wrinkle to his face. “Let's walk to my office.”

The two had become well acquainted, developing a mutual appreciation and respect for each other's intelligence and company. Austin was outspoken in class. His habit of extracting double meaning from scientific jargon had earned him a reputation for adding levity to lectures. Clare had adapted his own arsenal of retaliatory wordplay. Austin was also known to challenge the professor on occasion, highlighting potential snares in the theories presented, which they often discussed over drinks outside of class.

The professor led Austin to the top floor of Gates, where he was consumed by the spectacle that was Office 317. Toy rockets stood poised for launch on wall outcroppings. Perched model planes tilted back on their wheels, angled for takeoff. A bat-winged ornithopter dangled from string beside an American WWII fighter; the fighter was a Vultee XP-54, a radical design whose elongated nose had given rise to its moniker—the
Swoose Goose
. Suspended at the center of the room was a Douglas B-18 Bolo, an American bomber of the late 1930s, entangled with a Nakajima Ki-27, a low-wing monoplane of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force.

The décor reminded Austin of his own working models and the reason he'd built them. At age ten he'd been flying alone to meet his father in Lisbon. His airliner had experienced a midflight explosive decompression over the Atlantic Ocean, coupled with a hydraulic systems failure. The pilot had successfully forced a belly landing on the island of Terceira in the Azores. Despite the trauma, his fear of flying had been short-lived; rather, he'd become fixated with building planes that wouldn't fail. He had begun studying ways to create small flying machines, first from kits, and later from everyday materials. His motors were constructed from magnets, nails, coiled wire, and car batteries. Using more compact batteries, he had integrated smaller, lighter propellers into balsa-wood airframes. Homemade radios became transmitters and receivers that controlled the planes' servomechanisms. By his early teens, his planes were delivering paper messages and light objects to kids in his neighborhood.

He continued his sweep of the professor's office. A gilded telescope and a pair of British pilot goggles served as paperweights beside a biplane, carved of black walnut, its propeller blades creating a room fan. Inflated dirigibles hung suspended by invisible thread, among them the
Norge,
the first uncontested airship to fly over the North Pole. A glass sheet protected a fifteenth-century map of the world on Clare's desktop, along with scrolls of Ptolemaic and Copernican planetary cartography. Da Vincian flight experiments adorned the shelves as bookends. A number of tomes caught Austin's interest, among them a volume on Norse mythology.

Clare hung his coat in an armoire and took a seat at his desk.

“Hope I'm not keeping you from any prior engagement. If at any point you have to leave, I won't be offended.”

Austin hadn't expected geniality, much less an invitation to the inventor's inner sanctum.

“Thanks. I'm free most of the evening,” he said, sitting.

“Any idea why I called you in?”

“I'm guessing it wasn't to share your collection of artifacts.”

Malcolm shook his head. “The midterm average was fifty-three percent, with a standard deviation of seven. Scores were tightly clustered around the mean. There were some outliers, but none as striking as yours.” He placed an exam on the table. “You scored a ninety-five, and if you hadn't forgotten how to add and subtract, you might have aced it.”

Austin smiled. “Always the arithmetic.”

The professor reclined in his chair, smoothing out his brown flannel shirt. “You have a gift. In my years of teaching, there have been few like you. I asked you in to get to know you a little better, discuss your career, and submit a modest proposal, if your ears are open.”

“Sure.”

“In all the times we've met after class, I've never asked you what you see yourself doing with your degree.”

“Tough question for a first-year,” Austin said.

“No need to commit.”

“If it were in private industry, I'd probably try to build portable, amphibious sports aircraft. But the military has its appeal. I've thought about becoming a flight test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base.”

“Sounds like one thing you'll never do is sit under the fluorescent lights of an office cubicle.”

“My feet would itch.”

“Don't blame you. There was nothing better than working in the Mojave heat. Is that what you always wanted to do? Build planes?”

“Unless you count my adolescent infatuation with espionage,” Austin said.

The lines of Clare's face creased into a smile. “Elaborate.”

It was a strange tangent, but he was used to Clare's surprises. Austin thought about his answer. Growing up, he had often constructed Rube Goldberg contraptions using objects around the house. The kitchen had become a series of concealed electrolytic reactions and mechanical processes that rallied to prepare hot chocolate in cold temperatures. Soon he had undertaken more practical designs, selling homemade radios to neighborhood friends. He had buried a network of small electric cables so they could communicate via Morse code from their bedrooms. By eleven, he and his friends had become conversant in a number of ciphers, most of which Austin had created and documented in a classified handbook of cryptographs.

“The kids in my neighborhood loved coding messages to each other,” he said with a lilt of nostalgia. “You could say that lured me into the technical side of espionage.”

“Not your typical childhood fantasy,” Clare pointed out. He seemed to be finding genuine humor. “What did your parents make of this?”

“They indulged me. My dad joined the U.S. Navy Reserve during the Vietnam War, spent two years as a lieutenant. He later worked as a secretary to Senator Abbott Botulga of California, and served as a U.S. ambassador to several European countries. My mom's a biologist at the Malibu Aquaculture Research Institute. She has ongoing projects in coastal communities in Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Sometimes they'd create stories of political espionage based on their travels. Or play games.”

“Games? What kind?”

The professor was certainly taking every opportunity to learn about him. Austin wondered what this was really about and felt a bit irritated by the lack of candor. For now he was willing to go along. He admired Malcolm Clare, and felt confident the man's interrogation was calculated.

“Whenever we dined out, some minutes after we were seated, my mom and dad would tell me to close my eyes. They'd ask me things about the environment—things like, what color is the ceiling? How many chandeliers are in the room? What's in the painting to your left? It's funny how quickly the mind discards details like that. I guess the idea was to hone visual memory and observational skills.”

Clare stood and lifted a red model biplane from its string, twirling the burnished propeller. A full minute of silence passed as the man toyed with his aircraft. Austin waited for the professor to speak, wishing for a way into his thoughts. Usually perceptive of people's intentions, Austin realized he was clueless, and aware only that there seemed to be a number of things on Clare's mind. The man was present with his words, but Austin had the impression he was torn by distractions.

Clare let the plane dangle by its string again, and gave the tail a gentle push so it flew in circles.

“You said you had interest in becoming a military flight test engineer,” he said. “Let's assume for a moment you didn't go this route. Would indirect military involvement interest you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Let's say you were in a position to assist the military while retaining civilian status.”

“You'd have to tell me more.”

“Unfortunately I can't be more specific,” Clare said. “I assure you my questions are carefully phrased.”

Austin didn't doubt it.

“I'm flattered by your interest in me, Professor. With all due respect, I'd like to know where this is leading.”

Clare chuckled. Most students would have answered any question he asked. Austin was another matter.