Chapter 23

It was an epic party.

Under a bright tropical sun yet cooled by a gentle breeze, hundreds of crewmembers were scattered all up and down the long broad beach, eating and doing all sorts of activities, which were all going on at once.

Before Boz had left, he'd noted that the Replicators had lots of memory in use, and had wondered why.

Now he knew why.

There were hundreds of boats of all sorts, doing all sorts of things, just offshore.

Speedboats raced around, pulling waterskiiers.

Jetskis raced around too.

Glass-bottomed boats, fitted out to support scuba-divers, mostly sat still so the people diving underneath them could find them again.

Houseboats sat still too, with people lounging and relaxing all over them.

Fishing boats moved along, with fishermen on board trolling for fish.

And the heads of many swimmers bobbed just above the water wherever they swam - usually not far from shore.

On land, things were similar.

Motorcycles, dune-buggies, and ATV's raced around, while RV's sat still with their awnings deployed for shade and their air-conditioned bathrooms available to all.

People were everywhere. And several GP robots were circulating with trays of food.

There were several contests of various sorts going on as well.

Overhead a couple seaplanes reached altitude and started dropping skydivers.

There were also a few ultra-light planes - Boz still thought of them as motorized hang-gliders - flying around too.

In the center of the beach, near the food tables, there was a King Tiger tank parked, with a set of hula dancers, and some Polynesian fire dancers, just in front of it. As Boz watched, someone walked right through a hula dancer, and thereby demonstrated it was an illusion. That explained why the tank was there. It also seemed to be the source of the Hawaiian-style music being played. And it had some papers taped to it's side, so apparently it was also acting as a bulletin-board of some sort.

Boz did a double-take and realized that this was more people - at least three times more people - than he had in his entire crew.

He was still surveying the situation when Simon came up and enthusiastically exclaimed "welcome to our party!"

"It looks great!" Boz answered, "but whose party is it, exactly? And how could we possibly use all the food you've cooked? What I see could probably feed five thousand people?"

"Ah, you've gone right to the crux of the issue!" Simon enthused. "For a party, you need food, and I didn't want to cook for five hundred or so crew members. That's a lot of work. So I called in some friends, and that worked out better than I'd hoped."

"What friends? We haven't even met very many people in this dimension."

"Well, back in our home dimension, before you inherited the battleship, I was managing a hotel as you know. We had a program where we invited visiting chefs to come cook for a couple days in exchange for a week's stay at the hotel. We made many contacts that way, especially among the high-end chefs of France and Italy. It turns out that this dimension has local versions of most of those folks, and, even though it's a couple decades later here than it is at home, most of those local versions still remember the good times we had before super-powers first manifested here and, one way or another, wrecked international trade and all economies. Some weren't reachable, yet in trying, I reached their peers, inheritors, or organizations. And pretty much everybody I reached was only too excited to take us up on the deal I was offering."

"What deal?" Boz asked.

"Help out with our party - cooking, gathering local foods etc - and they can keep half the leftovers and as much local food as they can gather. That's really motivational to a chef, since these local foods include coconuts, bananas, mangoes and many other things that they basically haven't seen since international trade collapsed."

"There is enough food here to feed all of Mars Colony for a day." an amazed Boz remarked.

"Yah, it's too bad we couldn't invite them too, but I checked and the portal doesn't reach that far."

"True, "Boz replied. "the far end of it can be anywhere on Earth and out into orbit, almost, but not quite as far as, the moon. And Mars is much further than that. We'll have to take them some leftovers."

"Absolutely," Simon agreed, then explained. "The party is informal. No sit-down meal is scheduled - just get what food you want when you want it. I knew you'd want to compete in the rifle and pistol target-shooting contests, so I signed you up for them. They start in about an hour, down at the west end of the beach. I didn't know if you wanted to compete with shotgun as well - I know it isn't your favorite - so I left it off. The races - at least one race for every type of vehicle you see here - start later this afternoon. There's plenty of time for you to enter any of those if you want, or the aerial acrobatics competition in whatever type of plane you wish to fly. I think you'd enjoy that. Information and sign-up sheets are taped to the side of the tank. Other than that, you can pretty much just do whatever you want, whenever. You could start by wandering around and meeting people - most of the French and Italians also speak English."

Boz nodded, said "thanks" and looked around.

Seeing Big Tom nearby with a coconut ice cream cone in his hand, he thought he may as well start socializing with someone he already knew, to sort of get him warmed up.

As Boz walked up, Tom smiled "Boz, I'm glad to see you. I didn't think you'd get away from the ship. Tell me, are there any of us still aboard, or did you leave just robots manning the bridge? Are they even up to that?"

"The robots are pretty good at following directions if you keep the focus fairly narrow. They have no creativity, imagination, or initiative and can't handle general instructions like 'keep the ship safe'. But if you tell them that nobody not on the list of authorized people is allowed onto the ship, they're pretty good at following narrow instructions like that. But just in case, I left 2 of my Duplicates there as well."

"That's good," Tom said, "I'd hate to get stranded here because a robot decided that sunburned me isn't really me, or something like that."

"Yup," Boz agreed, "and that is exactly the kind of mistake they are prone to make. But, FYI, I didn't leave them in the bridge. The bridge is the room with all of the windows at the top of the superstructure. The bridge was the ship's control center back in the days when the human eyeball was the primary sensor available. That's why it's high up - for a better view - and is basically all windows from about the waist up. But when radar and other such sensors became commonly available, that started the process that ended up with command centers buried deep in the ship for safety, like ours is. With lots of computer screens to display and correlate data from multiple long-ranged sensor types, we don't need windows in the command center."

"I had wondered why you didn't call it the bridge", Tom replied.

"That's why," Boz allowed, "We still have a bridge, and it still has controls for running the ship. But mostly we don't bother to go up there. You may have seen it - it's the big room with tons of windows which Beth has effectively turned into a greenhouse, by putting all kinds of houseplants in there."

"Oh yah, that one," Big Tom grinned, "it's very relaxing in there. I'm not normally into flowers and such, but I can tell you, when you're stressed over something and need a break, half an hour in there watering plants, or listening to music, or just sitting in the lounge chair, really makes a difference. I thought you had put it in as a sort of a break room."

"Not intentionally, but I'm glad to hear it's good for that," Boz grinned.

They lapsed into silence for a moment before Tom asked "so have you been doing those wrist stretches I showed you?"

"Yup, and you were right, they do help. My max bench press went from 285, where it had plateaued for a while, to 300."

"Glad to hear it. It's always nice to reach a large round number as a milestone." Tom congratulated.

"Thanks." Boz smiled. "And this reminds me - I'm glad to have run into you here - I never know what to say to people at events like this. I can converse OK if there's a shared interest, or some other obvious thing to talk about. But I'm no good at small talk. With most people, I have no idea what to say."

"Me neither, though it isn't as hard for me as I know it is for you," Tom agreed. "So, since it helps to have something to talk about, what do you say we start something conversation-worthy?"

"What? Are you thinking something like a weightlifting demonstration?"

"No," Tom shook his head, "nobody would come up and converse with us about it. Few would even watch. It's too much like bragging. No we need something where it is easy for them to come up and ask questions, and even better if it inspires questions in some way."

"So, not like juggling - not that I know how anyway - because they need to keep their distance from whatever is being juggled, and about the only questions they'd ask are 'how do you do that' and 'how long did it take to learn'?"

"Right." Tom agreed. "And target shooting is no better, for similar reasons. The same goes for Aikido lessons."

"We're rapidly running out of the things I know how to do." Boz lamented.

"Luckily it doesn't have to be something you know how to do," Tom smiled. "That repair robot following you around might be enough: people sure are glancing at it a lot - at least the Italians and French folks who haven't seen one before. We just need to build on that a bit."

"No problem there," Boz chuckled, "we can just start now the project I'd expected to do later - the reason I brought the robot. See, I figured I'd try socializing and making small talk with people, but wouldn't last too long at it. Then I figured that after I got tired of socializing, I could stay nearby while still amusing myself trying something I'd always wanted to try: sculpting. I want to carve a giant head out of stone like the ones on Easter Island. The robot is here to help with that."

"What, by bringing a large rock here? I sure don't see any such rocks nearby."

"Not exactly. He will be providing the rock just not by hauling it here. He'll be making it out of sand." Boz replied.

"They can do that?" Tom asked.

"Sure, like this," Boz replied.

He started to instruct the robot, but Tom interrupted, "Wait a sec. Right here isn't the best spot for an Easter Island type giant stone head. About a hundred feet that way," he pointed towards the shore nearer the tank, "will be better both for the final product, and, more importantly, for sparking conversation while you work. See, there's good traffic flow from the food tables to the sign-up sheets on the tank and we'll be just near enough to that so that a lot of folks will stop, check it out, and ask questions."

"Perfect," Boz answered. "Lead on - I follow."

They walked to the new location, nodding and smiling at folks on the way, and soon enough they arrived.

"Right here," Big Tom said. "Now show me how to make a big rock out of sand. Does it take a lot of glue?" he joked.

Boz had been instructing the robot. Now he stepped back and signaled it, while saying "like this."

In the clear dome on top of the robot's cylindrical metal torso, two small round things, positioned like eyes, and appearing to be eyes, suddenly acted a lot unlike eyes. They lit up and emitted beams of golden light, which struck the sand ten feet in front of the robot and altered it. The sand began to mold itself as if it were soft warm wax being shaped by the hand of a giant. In moments, enough had flowed together to form a squared-off stone block fifteen feet high, and five feet square in cross-section.

The light turned off and Boz spoke, "My grandpa invented those. He called it the Shape Matter power. It uses quantum theory somehow, just like most of his stuff. It's how the repair robots can fix things in foot-thick armor-hard steel without major time in a shipyard. Fusing stuff together - like sawdust into blocks of wood, or sand into stone - is just one of its functions. It can separate things, like taking the oxygen from rusted iron and thereby giving you pure iron, and, if you're set up to capture it, pure oxygen. It can change the shape of any matter. And it can combine those abilities to put things back together again. So for example if you tore a tennis racket in half, it could fuse the strings and wood back together and shape it all just as it was before, like new. Or it could shape the wood and strings from the broken tennis racket into a hair-brush, or several toothbrushes, or a set of nunchucks. It couldn't shape the wood and strings into a pair of sneakers, since those use cloth and leather and polymers not present in a tennis racket. But it could shape it into wooden sandals strapped on by strings. Or, if you added in a bit of metal - say a spoon, to be shaped into the needed metal parts - it could shape the broken tennis racket into a fishing pole. You get the idea. They get most of their repair work done using just that power, with some help from their telekinesis to bring them things and hold things in place. It's much faster than unscrewing bolts, pounding nails, welding things, or plugging in parts according to a blueprint, which they can also do, of course."

"Awesome," Tom replied, "now get ready to repeat that a whole bunch of times in small bite-sized chunks more suitable for conversation. Here come some people who seem to be curious about what just happened."

They stood around and talked with people for a while, finding it easy because they had something to talk about.

When the conversation slowed, they had the repair robot make two more, and shape one according to photos of an Easter Island head.

Shaping the stone like statuary was no more effort to the robot than shaping it square.

But having a nearby life-sized model to look at made it easier for Boz to try to cut similar statuary from one of the squared blocks.

Not that he got to start on that right away.

No. The additional 2 blocks, one of which was shaped like famous statuary, sparked a lot more curiosity and resulted in many more conversations.

Then it was time for the contests Simon had signed Boz up for.

The rifle, pistol, and shotgun ranges were set up on the west end of the bay, on a long spit of beach with some sand-dunes behind them to stop any stray rounds.

Guns, ammunition, hearing protection, targets and everything else, were provided by the Agamemnon, so only the disinterested had reason not to participate.

Consequently, many folks tried it out.

The rifle competition was first, and started with tests of prone-position accuracy at 300 yards. It was graded on maximum precision.

Boz did OK - he put every round on the paper , with all but the first two rounds in the target circles, and some in the black middle-area of the target, but no bulls-eyes.

The gun club, who had left the Virgin Islands with him, did much better. This was their favorite form of target shooting. Eight of them each put all their shots into the black, and they also got several bulls-eyes among them.

Then came the pistol competition. It was in Boz's favorite format: a combat course.

He usually did well at them despite not generally being good at things needing fast-twitch reflexes.

For combat courses, one shooter would walk down a simulated city street, shooting some targets when they suddenly popped out, but not shooting others.

Pop-out targets that were "hostile" - such as gang members pointing guns at you - all had to be 'put down', meaning they had to be hit enough times, in enough vital areas, to reliably take them out of the fight. So, for example, one hit right between the eyes would do it, with any caliber weapon. But a hit in the arm would not be enough with any caliber - although there was some debate that really powerful calibers like the .44 magnum could still take them out with an upper arm hit.

Regardless of that debate, most shooters used 9mm pistols for the large magazine capacities they came with, and went for two hits in the torso, which counted.

Maximum precision didn't matter as long as the target was put down. The fastest speed through the course is what mattered - given all "hostile" targets were taken out, and no "innocent targets were hit.

Some pop-out targets were "innocents" such as a child chasing a ball, a woman with grocery bags, or a teenager with a squirt-gun. This last was extra difficult, since at first glance it looked hostile.

The simulated city street was usually done movie-set style: with 2-dimensional buildings consisting only of false building-fronts and something to prop them up.

Pop-out targets were plywood cutouts of the size and shape of people, with full-color paper targets taped to them. They went on mechanical stands which, when a shooter reached a certain point, would suddenly activate and move the target out a door, window, alley or similar cover, and into view, where the shooter had to respond to it, either by shooting it or leaving it alone.

GP robots would be around the course to rapidly take down used targets, put up new ones, and generally reset the course after each shooter. While a shooter was on the course, the robots would stay behind small sandbag-berms - not to protect them, but to protect others from ricochets in case the robots got hit

Boz's Replicator had several such courses in its memory banks, since he liked this kind of practice.

Looking at the course before competing was considered cheating, and steps had been taken to prevent that. Also they had said they'd played mix-and-match among the available pre-done courses to come up with a new one.

The point of the course was rapid, accurate responses to surprises in tense situations. You never knew which doors, windows etc something would pop-up at, and whether the pop-up would be hostile or innocent. Knowing the course in advance would be a big advantage in a competition like this. Some organizations ran combat courses where the shooter already knew what was going to happen and when.

But Boz didn't run his that way.

Boz had done these courses the standard way - with a 9mm using high-capacity magazines, usually holding from 15 to 19 rounds each, or so - and done them in other ways too, just for fun.

Using a Desert Eagle.44 magnum was fun but slow.

Using a .22 caliber Tec-22 with 50 round magazines was also fun, even though you had to hit each target four times or so. But it was also slow, since after each shot you had to aim again, or your shot would go uselessly off-target.

And he'd always wanted to try a Calico 9mm with 100 round magazines, but neither he nor his grandfather had ever had one, nor a chance to scan one into his Replicator.

He resolved to ask Lisa if she knew where he could get one, and maybe if she knew a place to modify the Tec-22 to have a four-round burst option. He'd heard it was possible and that could be fun too.

He usually did pretty well using a .45 with extended 11-round magazines, since that round was powerful enough that one round to the torso was usually judged enough to put the target down.

These courses usually required you to reload at least once, no matter your magazine capacity, and this one would be no exception.

And that helped keep the decision interesting - bigger rounds meant fewer of them in the magazine, and that meant more reloading than the required one. But it also meant fewer hits needed to put down the targets, if you could be confident of getting adequate accuracy. But then, if you tried sending only one shot at each target, you risked getting a less-than adequate hit - say in the arm or shoulder - and having that target not count as being put down.

In the end, Boz decided to go with his favorite - a modified Colt m1911, with extended 11 round magazines. A 15 round magazine was also available for it, but it sometimes had trouble feeding the first few rounds, so Boz decided against it.

He made his selections, got ready, and soon enough his turn at the course came up.

He had fun with the course, especially with the two unexpected additions: one where a GP robot - covered in sandbags to prevent ricochets - 'popped-up' from around a corner with a rifle, and the other where a GP robot charged up the street at him with a spear.

That really got the blood pumping.

While waiting for all the shooters to complete the combat pistol course, Boz did some simple target shooting with a pistol, just to relax, not to compete..

Then he took a turn shooting skeet with a shotgun. He did marginally well, but only scored just above the middle of the pack. Shotgun was not his favorite weapon.

When the final results of the pistol course came in, Boz had to go stand on the podium and smile at the crowds while accepting second place.

He was happy with second-place. The gun club were no slouches and he'd done better than they had.

And second-place would facilitate some conversations.

First place had gone to Abe. Boz wasn't bothered by that at all - he was used to Abe's reflexes being significantly better than his own, and he was at peace with it.

The aerial acrobatics contest not long afterwards once again underscored that point, with final rankings rating Abe first and Boz second, even though Boz tried something new: a WW I Sopwith Camel biplane.

It was ridiculously maneuverable, and looked really neat leaving colored smoke streamers in the air.

But Abe could do things with his Komet that left you breathless, and probably should have made him black out from g-forces. So he'd won.

Boz had a lot of fun in the competitions, and all of them gave opportunities for conversation. So Boz spent more time in conversation on this one day than in most normal weeks and some occasional months.

Only after all that - now in the early evening - did he get to start carving his Easter Island head.

He had the repair robot make him a small stone table a few feet from the stone block he would be working on. On the table, he set out his tools - mostly a few particle beam pistols, a couple laser pistols, and many spare batteries for them.

And then he remembered why he had been planning to do this carving at the very edge of the gathering, with nothing behind him and his target - to prevent anyone from being hurt if he messed up and a beam went astray.

This spot had been great for conversation, but there were people all around - people he didn't want to hit if a shot went bad.

He thought about it for a moment, while looking closely at the settings available on the pistols.

But - no surprise - there was no setting that was weak enough to be unable to hurt someone, yet strong enough to carve stone.

He wondered for a moment about the possibility of having the repair robot shape some sand into a large thick box around the stone block, so if any shots missed the block they'd hit the box.

Then he shrugged, accepted the obvious, gathered his things, and headed, repair robot in tow, towards the very fringes of the gathering.

He stopped at the edge of the woods, with a small hill before him and all the people behind him.

It looked like a good spot, so he started the robot making one stone block and one finished Easter Island-type head, and a small table, as before.

Then while the robot worked, he hiked around a bit making sure the site would work.

Satisfied that it would do nicely, he began.

He picked up a laser pistol, and set it to the lowest setting.

He aimed at the top right corner of the big stone block, and mentally noted the line he wanted to cut.

Then he pulled the trigger and held it down while moving his aim slowly and gradually to cut the rock along a line.

At the point of impact - where the laser met the stone - the rock melted and boiled away, leaving glowing red-hot rock on either side of the cut.

When he finished the cut, the chunk of stone he'd cut out fell away.

He examined his work.

On the plus side, the laser did cut rock, and with many such cuts he would eventually get something that looked like an Easter Island head.

On the minus side, that head wouldn't look like it was carved from stone, but more like it had been melted from obsidian.

He tried the laser again, but on the highest setting.

It did the same thing, only faster.

Plus the rapid heating made a crack in the rock.

Boz, somewhat frustrated and deep in thought, set down the laser pistol without reloading it, and picked up a particle beam pistol.

Setting that to minimum power, he tried cutting another corner off the squarish stone block.

He was pleased with the result.

Each positively-charged hydrogen nucleus - traveling super-fast - hit the stone with little individual result. They tended to grab electrons from the target, weakening molecular bonds, and sometimes break off tiny chunks with the force of their impact.

Individually, that wasn't much.

But a stream of millions of such impacts had a significant effect. It cut through the stone like a chainsaw going through particularly weak wood.

And it didn't leave charred melted edges like the laser.

He turned it up to the maximum setting and tried again.

This time it was like running a chainsaw through a large block of Styrofoam - it cut very well and quickly.

He tried several more cuts, adjusting the settings a few more times to get a good feel for what he could do.

Then he had the repair robot use its yellow, shape matter, beams again to re-form his test block, fusing it again with the chunks he had removed, so he could start fresh.

Then he lost himself in his work for a while: comparing the finished head to his own work-in-progress, carefully gauging where to cut and how deep, making cuts, and frequently changing batteries in his particle beam pistol.

After 30 minutes, he had the sculpture roughed out and was starting in on finer details.

Everyone else was still partying, generally down near the beach.