The Feminine Queendom 12 © Copyright to Beverly Taff

List of Characters.
Charlie Sage Maths and electronics genius.
Shirley Sage Charlies elderly mother
Chloe Charlie’s one time early school friend.
Josephine Flint Surgeon and associate of Chloe’s.
Mrs Anston Director of Anston Aerospace.
Ronnie Garage mechanic at top of lane
Pauline Garage owner, Ronnie’s sister.
Briony Pauline’s teenaged daughter.
Billy Pauline’s middle son.
Abigail (Abby) Pauline’s youngest daughter.
‘Poppy’ Charlie’s little micro-runabout.
‘Doris’ The armoured mobile home.
‘Lady’ Chloe’s Sports Car.
Colonel Wilson Vindictive misanthropist doctor.

Chapter 12

The visitation was shocked at Charlie’s outburst. Men had no right to show such offence or aggression towards women and several of the ‘suits’ reached discreetly to feel for their tasers in anticipation of some sort of violence.

All of the visiting committee had been reared and educated in the feminista realms of modern education and their only experience of adult men had been via documentaries about male behaviour in the rookeries. If any of them had wished to have a child, the sum total of their experience had been a visit to the sperm banks and personally choosing a sperm sample deemed to best suit them. Their only experience of the donor had been a short video recording of the male followed by a bio-log of that male’s measured capabilities, mostly associated with his IQ and any personality traits that had been discerned by the feminista authorities.

Each of the male donors had been vetted by the sperm-banks as to suitability for breeding on a crude psycho- biological basis.
Fatherhood had never been a societal consideration. Invariably, because of historical criteria, the male donor’s IQ’s had invariably been lower than the female IQ’s as a consequence of the feminista flawed reasoning that Charlie had recently exposed. This last fact, however, was not yet generally known because the feminista were still reeling from the exposure and thus they were struggling to remedy the situation without revealing the truth universally.

As a consequence of this social malady, the visiting panel in Ms Anston’s office that morning had never actually met an intelligent sperm donor in the flesh and the only yard-stick they each had was the flawed learning from their university educations.

When Charlie had expressed shock at their disclosure of a year’s delay before coming to him, they had automatically assumed that Charlie was about to explode into a violent rampage. His unexpected reaction of flopping down into the large arm-chair that Ms Anston kept in her office, was something they had never expected.

Ms Anston quickly recognised the collective uncertainty of the un-nerved visitors and she moved swiftly to defuse ant misunderstanding. She spoke forcefully and somewhat annoyedly.

“That’s enough ladies!! Settle down and put your bloody tasers away. There’ll be no harm done to Mr Sage in my office!”

The reference to the ‘sperm-donor’ by its proper name and title was enough to convince most of the visitors that this was an exceptional situation and they quickly complied by removing their hands from their taser pouches and sighing with relief. One visitor however was encumbered of a more stubborn, prejudiced streak and Ms Anston had to step from behind her desk to physically force the woman to re-holster her weapon while scolding her.

“I said, PUT YOUR TASERS AWAY! There will be NO assaults in my office!”

She then turned to her factory floor supervisor and stupefied the group be calling him by his given name.

“I’m sorry about that Charlie, I would never have knowingly exposed you to such danger. It seems these ladies have not been fully briefed about you.”

“Thanks Ma-am, apologies accepted. Now, about this gadget?”

He stood up again then reached out to lift the component and inspect it visually. The suits watched uncertainly as he asked.

“Can you switch on the current please?”

The woman holding the switch-box advised.

“It’s four-forty volts, three phase are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Charlie gave her a censorious, sideways look that said volumes so she shrugged and switched on. The component promptly rose to about twenty centimetres off the table and hovered rigidly without wobbling or swaying at all. Charlie surprised everybody by stepping on a chair then standing on the board-room table and grabbing a hard writing pad. He rested it on top of the component then proceeded to sit on the writing pad that did not displace at all. When he found his balance, he lifted both feet of the table and the only thing connecting Charlie to the ground was the heavy duty cable that supplied the component with energy.

From his unfathomable perch he smiled enigmatically.

“Yes! Definitely anti-grav. So what have you ladies done with it so far?”

A row of uncertain stares told him that every-one of the panel had left the component virtually untouched, except to activate it and ponder the science. Nobody had even been certain enough to touch it while hovering. Charlie wagged his head judgementally.

“So ladies. Have you had it apart; you know, to find out what makes it tick?”

A collective mumbled ‘no’ rippled through the group and once again Charlie made his feelings obvious. He muttered softly to himself, - ‘If an infinite number of monkeys –‘ then he left the rest of the universally known hypothesis hang in the air as he stood up and nodded to the switch holder to switch it off.

Once the gadget had settled back on the table Charlie picked it up and frowned.

“Whoever made this has done their damnedest to keep its secrets, there’s no obvious way in.”

“Exactly!” The senior suit responded, “That’s why we’ve been unwilling to try and break our way in. For all we know, it might be booby-trapped.”

“So, if you can’t resolve its construction why didn’t you try and determine its effects.”

“How?” The suit demanded with the contempt running thick in her words. “Do you know anything about gravity?”

“Not as you know it.” Charlie replied, but I wouldn’t have just let it lie idle for a year without trying every option.”

“And where would you even start?”

“To quote the red-king; begin at the beginning and go forw-.”

“All right Mr Sage. That’s enough sarcasm. Do you think you can do anything?” Ms Anston scolded him, though her suppressed smile gave her away.

“Not without some proper facilities. My work-bench is a bit too primitive for the likes of this. Let me have a think about it.”

Ms Anston cast a querying glance at the assembled suits who gave a collective shrug for not one of them had even dared to touch it while it was switched on. She turned again to Charlie.

“Very well Mr Sage. You can work on the damned thing for a week but you’ll be chaperoned all the time. Two of these ladies will be attending that component at all time but you have carte-blanche to work on it.”

The arrangement was not exactly what Charlie had wanted but he was sure he could determine what principles of gravity the gadget exploited. By Charlie’s standards it was a fairly primitive achievement but to the assembled suits the science might as well have been magic.

Ms Anston declared that the main Anston science laboratory was to be made available and the suits looked askance with disbelief. They deemed it almost a sin to allow a man loose in any workplace reserved for women but their views were counteracted by the small group of Anston executives who seemingly were accustomed to such unconventional work-practices. Oft-times they had been down to Charlie’s seemingly chaotic workbench to see some ingenious modification outperform their own original devices.

The Anston research executives simply nodded agreeably and their
obvious co-operation disabled any protests that might have been growing in the suit’s thoughts.

ooo000ooo

Charlie left the boardroom with the two government chaperones and several of Anston’s own research executives who led the group to the spotlessly clean labs. As he walked through the double doors, Charlie could not help but envy the excellent facilities and pristine circumstances. He contrasted this with the ill-lit, dirty, noisy chaos of his own dedicated work-bench and pursed his lips irritably.

‘Still’, he reasoned, ‘it was not the metal-bashing that counted; it was the reasoning behind it that mattered. One idea was worth a million factories.’

Charlie immediately took the component to a large oscilloscopic magnatrometer and asked one of the Anston staff to activate it. The lady hesitated uncertainly because the penetrative capabilities were severe.

“Don’t worry Miss,” Charlie assured her. “I’m pretty sure I know what they’ve built here and there’s nothing radioactive or explosive inside.”

The researcher’s reluctance was palpable and the uncertainty spread through the assembled scientists like the plague as they inched away nervously. Charlie sighed resignedly and asked the operator to show him how it was activated. Her willingness to let Charlie expose himself to any unknown dangers was painfully obvious as she hurriedly explained the procedures.

Once the magnatrometer was activated, a fuzzy image appeared on the screen. The image remained there and upon seeing that Charlie was neither concerned nor disabled, the operator became emboldened and stepped up beside Charlie to improve the focus. She failed and turned to Charlie apologetically.

“I can’t get it any clearer.”

Charlie stood back as he made some notes before doing a calculation that nobody could decipher because he was using his own special functionary symbols. Eventually he nodded his head and explained.

“There’s a dense metal lining inside the thing and it’s partially shielding the internal image. This is going to take a bit of time.”

“What metal d’ you think it might be?” The operator asked.

“It looks like Osmium, that’s probably what’s making it so heavy and so difficult for the magnatrometer to penetrate accurately. The Osmium diffuses the image. I can recognise some sort of gravitational capacitor in there and it looks like it’s attached to a large coil that neutralises the immediate gravity effect but only for a limited distance.
They can use this to make some sort of hovering tank but it cannot extend the antigrav effect further than the few centimetres. It would not support an air-craft or propel a craft into space.”

A deafening silence settled on the group as Charlie recommenced some more calculations. Necks craned to try and see what he was writing but nobody could decipher the symbols, eventually Charlie sat back.

“From what I can discern from that image (he tapped the oscilloscope screen), they could build a tank that hovers about twenty centimetres above whatever source of gravity is affecting it.”

“That would be the Earth then.” One of the suits ventured.

“Full marks for deduction miss,” Charlie replied. “You’ve got yourself a hovering tank that leaves no footprint at all and will not affect land-mines, nor get stuck in the mud.”

“How about over water?” The researcher pressed.

“Water’s matter, it’ll hover over water but probably not so high. Density affects the performance. For instance it fails completely to react to air; if it did, it would have to be tethered down – like a balloon.”

“Can you describe how to reproduce one?” The senior suit asked Charlie. “You know, like reverse engineering.”

“I’m guessing that the circumferential ring can be split by unscrewing two laminated plates.”

Charlie took the component to a microscope on another bench and focused the edge of the circumferential ring under the lens to locate an exquisitely machined line that indicated where the two laminated rings were joined. The line was invisible to the naked eye and that presaged an extremely high quality of precision engineering. Having discovered the ‘join’ Charlie asked wryly.

“Did nobody think to look at this from any angle but above?”
“We’re going to somehow have to separate the two halves at the ring.”

“Once again there was an embarrassed silence that Charlie left hanging as he turned to Ms Anston.

How?” Ms Anston asked.

“We’ll have to get it down to the machine shop.”

It was the director’s turn to smile. After fifteen years of repairing and modifying thousands of artefacts, Charlie’s workstation now comprised a cabin with a large, dirty and very untidy bench that was notorious throughout Anston Aerospace as a place to be avoided if you wanted to remain clean. Even his desk and chair were unsavoury locations that were heavily stained with assorted greases and metal filings. Simply tapping his desktop keyboard could invite metal splinters into manicured female fingers.

Across the workshop from the line of similar cabin work stations stood the heavy machine tools, presses, lathes and all the paraphernalia of a typical multifunctional, heavy engineering shop. The noises and smells were deafening, Ms Anston relished explaining to the suits that heavy industrial overalls and safety boots were de rigueur.

“Very well then ladies, Mr Sage, we’ll meet in your workshops after lunch and ladies, please collect your protective clothing at the store before entering the heavy machine shop. I suggest you do that now to save time after lunch. There is a separate working canteen for executives when they are involved in practical applications. I suggest ladies that you get kitted up now, then eat before meeting in the main workshops at one. We’ll meet down at your work-station Mr Sage.”

“My treat Ma-am,” Charlie replied cryptically.

Ms Anston gave him another sharp glance, she was never sure with Charlie but whatever the implication, there always seemed to be a thread of irreverent humour laced through his observations. She could never be sure if he had ‘crossed a line’ or not.
ooo000ooo