---------------------------------------------- "The Adventures of Lone Wolf Scientific" -------------------------------------------- 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. ---------------------- EPISODE #2 ---------------------- 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 <> 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.>>>>