Chapter 16

I brought up the subject of the exploration flight at supper, and all of the women were immediately enthusiastic and ready to go. We started outlining what we needed to take with us, and it quickly became apparent that we were going to need a plane with a fuselage as large as an aircraft carrier. Of course, the women were figuring on taking the children along with us. I never did get a chance to mention my idea of leaving them in a stasis field.

Well, such a plane was simply impractical, but the job could be done with an airship like a zeppelin. A zeppelin could be made almost any size, and was better for our use than a blimp. The difference was that the zeppelin was a rigid body with flotation chambers inside the craft, usually as large bottles of helium or hydrogen. On the other hand, a blimp was a single flexible envelope filled with the gas and having only a small gondola hanging below the envelope.

All of the space inside a zeppelin not taken up by the flotation containers could be used as living space, while the living space on a blimp was limited to the gondola. AI could work out the details once we gave him the list of the things we wanted to take with us.

I envisioned the zeppelin as having multiple engines, some for propulsion and some for steering. The airship would not have any steering surfaces except for some tail fins to help it remain in a straight line of flight. All of the steering would be done by propellers that pulled the airship to face the direction that we wanted to go.

I wanted the zeppelin armed with L-gun turrets like we used on the planes. However, we would hang something like AF1 below the zeppelin to act as a fighter as well to take us down for a closer look at the ground.

The living areas of the zeppelin will have to be pressurized because I want it to remain high enough to be out of reach of the pterodactyls. I think that would be something like above 15,000 feet. I would prefer 20,000 feet for a safety margin. AI will have to set the altitude because so much depends on the design parameters. I have complete trust in AI, and I know that he will make the best compromise.

If we take the kids, and it looks like that is a foregone conclusion, at least one of the women will have to remain aboard Z1, my new name for the zeppelin, since we will not normally be taking them to the ground. I would prefer that two women stay aboard, again for safety. Of course, all five of us will have to be qualified zeppelin pilots before we go very far away from Miami. Also, I want a computer as similar to AI as possible to be the backup pilot.

At this point, I’ll stop suggesting things until I see what the women finally decide to add to the airship’s outfitting. AI will select the scientific instruments, so I think that I am now finished with the heavy lifting part of the design phase of Z1. Anything else I add will probably be as the result of the shakedown flight and what I learn then.

Ah, by the time that they had to get serious about putting things aboard Z1, the women had gotten a lot less ambitious and had cut back on what they were asking for. For example, Loni had suggested a small swimming pool, but it didn’t take much effort from AI to have her drop that request. I don’t know where she got that idea—one of the kids must have asked for it. By the time push came to shove, the women had dropped about 60% of the things that they had asked for, and Z1 was a lot nearer being feasible.

Finally, AI declared an end to the proposal phase and got to work on the actual design of Z1. That took a couple of weeks because he had to stop and ask questions of the women before he could continue. Naturally, that caused a lot of discussions among the women, and some more of the frills were actually dropped at that point.

Eventually, the design was frozen and construction actually began. The supporting metal structure was made from an alloy of aluminum, magnesium, and titanium, with some trace elements thrown in. Anyway, I was amazed at how light the structure was. By the way, some of the materials, particularly the titanium, were scavenged from the 797 that we had originally arrived in. No way were we going to use that plane again in its current form, so why not use its materials?

While the construction of Z1 was being done, AI designed what he called the shuttle craft. He decided to make two of the planes, both of which would be carried by Z1. I named them SC1 and SC2. Essentially, these were jazzed up versions of AF1 and large enough to carry all of us, including the kids, in case of an emergency, yet nimble enough to be used as fighters if the need arose. Both were armed with a full complement of L-guns with computer-directed aiming and firing.

I had been using AF1 to teach Dom and Loni to fly. They made good progress, and they were ready to try out SC1 and SC2 as soon as they were finished. Dom and Loni began flying SC1 and SC2, respectively, in the never ending quest to rid the local sky of pterodactyls. They became quite proficient pilots by the time Z1 was ready to fly.

The trickiest part of flying SC1 and SC2 was recoupling them to Z1. All of us pilots learned to do that before we left Miami. Our first venture away from Miami was a shakedown cruise of only a few days. I was the pilot of Z1, naturally, because it had been my idea. I quickly, if I can use that word, found out that the greatest emotion in flying Z1 was the frustration in how long it took anything to happen. I was used to turning and diving or climbing as soon as I ordered my Mustang to do so, but I had to wait as much as five minutes for Z1 to complete a simple turn, especially if there were any wind to fight.

All of the women agreed with me on that feeling, and we decided that we had to deploy both SC1 and SC2 during any maneuvers that might attract a pterodactyl. Z1 was just so damned big that nothing ever happened in a hurry. Oh, well, the pilot spent a lot of time having a cup of coffee handy.

Because of the way Z1 held steady at the altitude where it had neutral buoyancy, the only way to go down was to dump gas from the flotation globes. That was done by pumping the helium back into storage chambers where it was compressed. Of course, in an emergency, the helium could be dumped into the atmosphere, but we avoided that option simply because once we vented the helium, there was no way to replace it while still in flight.

Going up was a whole lot easier. All we had to do was to drop ballast, but the only way to replace the ballast was to land and pick up more sand. That could be done, but it made us very vulnerable to predators who always attacked because anything as large as Z1 had to have something edible in it somewhere.

Therefore, any change in altitude had to be thought out to make sure that the operation was worth what it was going to cost. Going down was always the easiest choice because the helium pumped into the storage containers was not lost, but it was not a quick change, either. Dammit, piloting Z1 was more of a mental exercise than any other form of flying I had ever been involved in. On top of everything else, the women always called on me to be the one to change altitude if I happened to be available. I suppose that this was only fair since the idea of the airship had been mine to begin with.

Our shakedown cruise was to take us past the other side of the Mississippi River since we had never been there. For some reason which even AI didn’t know, he had never been brought up to date on the geography of that side of the river. We were to travel for a day in that direction which was north, turn east and travel for a day, and then turn south for a day, finishing up by turning west back to Miami.

This was going to give us a lot of navigation practice because we had no landmarks or navigation aids to help us choose a course. We were certainly going to be blown about by the wind, so our navigation would be very tricky. In fact, one of the reasons for the shakedown cruise was to determine just how much trouble we were going to have in finding our position relative to Miami.