Genie and Engineer 1: The Engineer Wizard by Glenn Michaels Read Free Book Online

room reflecting off the scrollwork patterns in the wood.
Feeling miserable and down in the dumps, Paul glanced at the clock on the
mantel. 5 a.m. Though every muscle and joint in his body ached, the idea of
going back to sleep distressed him. Instead, he got up and prepared to go to
work.
    Dragging through the morning was pure torture. Paul’s eyes
were gritty, the lids like lead weights. His head throbbed and his body ached with
fatigue.
    This was the day of the big test, the day that his whole
company had been working toward for nearly three months. The test program
involved a new fuel mixture for the C-5M cargo plane. The Air Force was
attempting a new fuel combination that would supposedly increase the plane’s
range while at the same time leaving less in the way of pollutants in the
atmosphere. In lab and wind-tunnel tests, the results had been promising. The
task at Edwards AFB was to fly an instrumented test aircraft, complete with a
data acquisition system in the plane and one also on the ground, to monitor the
environmental conditions and the usage of fuel.
    Operations were scheduled to start at 9 a.m. with the
takeoff of the C-5M aircraft test bed. As far as the testing team could tell, they
were as ready as they could be, though the new data system, which Paul was
partly responsible for, was still somewhat of an unknown quantity.
    The nightmares of the previous evening continued to plague Paul’s
thoughts. He could not seem to concentrate. When he arrived at work, a
co-worker, Ken Rivera, an African-American engineering graduate of Caltech, seemed
to immediately recognize that Paul was in trouble, and he stepped in to help
whenever and wherever he could.
    For the ten thousandth time in four days, Paul was tempted
to call upon the genie and wish for the data system to work properly during the
test. But there were two problems with making that wish. First, it would waste
a wish on something that was real important to Paul, but trivial on a
nationwide or global scale, and he was loath to waste any wishes in such a
manner. Second, and even more important, Michaels had made it abundantly clear
that there were strings attached to every wish. If Paul asked for the data
system to work correctly, then something else might go terribly wrong, such as
the C-5M aircraft crashing into the Tehachapi Mountains or a major earthquake
striking the San Andreas Fault nearby. Or any one of a thousand other potential
disasters. No, it was best not to tempt fate in that manner.
    The C-5M took off on time, lifting majestically into the
bright, sunny California sky. On the ground, Paul and his team were positioned
to one side of the control room, monitoring the telemetry data streams from the
aircraft. All data channels seemed to be operating normally, the squiggly lines
on the computer monitors showing parameter data from each on-board sensor.
    An hour went by, the test crew running their procedures,
preparing for the most important part of the test sequence. And just as the
aircraft switched the on-board fuel sources to the “environmentally-correct”
fuel, all the telemetry channels suddenly dropped out, all of them reading a
perfect 0.0. All the pressures, the temperatures, fuel flows, and everything
else. Absolute flat liners.
    “Oh, no!” groaned Ken. Paul too could not believe his eyes,
his jaw dropping open.
    The test conductor, Darcy Wilson, standing at her station a
few feet away, spotted the issue on her monitors at virtually the same moment.
“What’s this? Data Ops, what’s going on? Where’s my data ?”
    Paul bit his lip and rapidly flipped through the displays at
his workstation. Nothing was making any sense. How could all the data stop at
the same time? He tried to think it through, but the mental and physical
fatigue was hampering him badly.
    “Couldn’t be an antenna problem,” muttered Ken as he too
examined the displays. “We still have IRIG timing synch.”
    A quote came to Paul, from the movie The