He stood there tonguetied, trying to think of an appropriate answer: something witty, maybe poetic.
The computer’s scratchy voice upstaged him: “Final boarding for Flight 68. Final boarding.”
She reached up on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Oxnard stood there grinning like a schoolboy as she scampered through the doorway of the access tunnel that led to the plane.
Two lights later, on Friday, he followed her.
The studio was impressive.
It was huge, about the size of a modern jetliner hangar, Oxnard realized. But it looked even bigger because it was almost completely empty. The bare skeleton of its wall bracings and rows of rafter-mounted old-fashioned spotlights looked down on a bare wooden floor.
“You won’t need all those lights,” Oxnard said to his guide. “With laser holography, you can....”
“We know all about it,” said Gregory Earnest. He was small and wiry, with thickly curled dark hair and beard that hid most of his face, so that Oxnard couldn’t see that he looked like one of Canada’s most numerous residents—a weasel. “We’re just as modern and up-to-date as you Yanks, you know.”
Oxnard completely missed the edge to Earnest’s voice. They continued their tour of Badger Studios, with Earnest proudly showing off his company’s shops, equipment and personnel—most of them idle.
They ended in the model shop, where a half dozen intense young men and women were putting together a four-meter-long plastic model. It lay along a table that was too short for it, overlapping both ends. To Oxnard it looked something like a beached whale in an advanced stage of decomposition.
“The latest and most modern modeling techniques,” Earnest told Oxnard. “Straight from Korea. No second-rate stuff around here.”
“I see,” Oxnard said.
“Americans always think that we Canadians are behind the times,” Earnest said. “But we’ve learned to survive in spite of Yankee chauvinism. Like the flea and the elephant.” His voice had an irritating nasal twang to it Oxnard replied with something like “Uh-huh.”
His main interest was focused on the modeling team. They were buzzing around the long cylindrical model that rested on the chest-high worktable. They had a regular bucket brigade system going: two girls were taking tiny plastic pieces from their packing boxes and using whirring electrical buffers to erase the Korean symbols painted on them. Another woman and one of the men took the clean pieces and dabbed banana-smelling plastic glue on them. Then the remaining two men took the pieces, walked around the model slowly and stuck pieces onto the main body.
At random, apparently, thought Oxnard.
“Hand craftsmanship,” exuded Earnest. “The mark of true art.”
Still watching the team at work, Oxnard asked, “What’s it supposed to be?”
“The model? It’s one of the starships! For the series, of course.”
“Why does it have fins on it?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
Ignoring the business-suited executive, Oxnard stepped between the two gluers and asked one of the stickers: “What’re you using for a blueprint?”
The youth blinked at him several times. “Blueprint? We don’t have no blueprint.”
One of the young women said with a slightly French sneer, “This is artistry, not engineering.”
Oxnard scratched at his nose. The banana smell made him want to sneeze. “Yes,” he said mildly. “But this model is supposed to be a starship, right? It never flies in a planet’s atmosphere... it stays out in space all the time. It doesn’t need aerodynamic fins.”
“But it looks smash-o with the fins!” said one of the other young men.
“It looks like something out of the Nineteen Fifties,” Oxnard replied, surprised at the sudden loudness of his own voice. “And out of Detroit, at that!”
“Now wait a moment,” Earnest said, from well outside the ring of workers. “You can’t tell these people how to do their jobs....”
Oxnard asked, “Why? Union rules?”
“Union?”
“We don’t have trade unions.”
“Lord, that’s archaic!”
Earnest smiled patiently. “Trade unions were disbanded in Canada years ago. That’s one of the many areas where our society is far ahead of the States.”
Shaking his head, Oxnard said, “All right. But a starship can’t have wings and fins on it. What it does need is radiative surfaces. You can change those fins from an aerodynamic shape....”
They listened to him with hostile, sullen countenances.
Earnest folded his arms across his chest and smiled, like an indulgent uncle who would rather let his oddball nephew make an ass of himself than argue with him. Oxnard tried to explain some of the rationale of an interstellar vehicle and when he saw that it wasn’t penetrating, he asked the crew if they’d ever seen photos of spacecraft or satellites.
“They don’t look like airplanes, do they?”
They agreed to that, reluctantly, and Oxnard had to settle for a moral victory.
For the time being, he thought.
When Earnest showed him the set they were constructing for the bridge of the starship, it was the same battle all over again. But this time it was with Earnest himself, since the carpenters and other contractors were nowhere in sight.
