[fiction] [orig] forty-year-junction

He crawled one-handed down the mountain, holding that which he carried tightly to his chest to keep it from harm. His movements were automatic, guided only by habit; his mind was overwhelmed by his own renewed religious fervor.

Above, inside the rising helicopter, the argument suspended at his arrival was resumed.

"I don't see what good it's gonna do us. We still can't fix it; and until we do, we're stuck here. Supply dump or not, sooner or later we're gonna run out of fuel for this bird."

"Look, all we need is a lousy rectifier! Something like a 1N914 would almost work. A 1N4001 would be perfect, if somebody on this team hadn't forgotten to stock that one little item for our supplies..."

"Go ahead, rub it in. I still think a copper-plate rectifier will work. Do you honestly think you can get the natives to set up a clean room environment in the middle of a desert?"

"Doesn't have to be all that clean. Any kind of a half-cocked half-amp rectifier will do, if the forward voltage drop is low enough. We can cripple home with a high leakage device. The natives are used to following orders. They're already carrying around our sputtering chamber. If they can follow the rules I just gave 'em, they can stay alive long enough to deliver that diode, one that'll work. That native we just talked to is bright enough to figure out what we need from the file I gave him."

"You sure he won't try to eat the damn thing? I still think he just plain flipped out when he saw you practicing with the searchlight on that bush. Okay, let's see if he can follow your instructions well enough to get his tribes organized in a week. If not, let's try somebody else. Even with the booster's power supply blown we can still jump forty or fifty years at a time."

The thunderous roar of the hovering helicopter masked any crowd sounds which the descending native might otherwise have heard. When he topped the last obscuring ridge, he was stunned to see his people below him, prostrating themselves before something they had made. He forgot his precious burden. It slipped from his lax hand.

Even as he remembered and reached to catch it, the little lap-sized computer bounced once on the stony ridge, then sailed down into the ravine, gone forever, with one last flash of sunlight on the LCD display above the keyboard echoing in silver the warm sunlit flash of gold on the shoulders of the golden calf.

Since I wrote it in the 80's, this story has seen publication in enough out-of-the-way places that I don't consider it saleable. Accordingly, I'm posting it here with my fanfic byline, sharing it around.

C&C welcome: siaru@stormbringer.org