Adrienne is a French astronomer, one of those who was working at the Geneva Observatory when they discovered the giant planet Varro circling a star near the left knee of Orion called HD 28185. While she was a student at the Grands Ecoles, she used to work summers driving a truck.
Adrienne's truck was a three-axle rig with a mass of 1000 talents fully loaded. The EU regulations allow 500 talents per axle, so she never had any trouble at the weighing stations. The really big rigs are the five-axle 18-wheelers—you see them on long-haul highways. Adrienne's rig had two wheels on the cab's front axle and four wheels on each of the other two.
Sometimes, when not working on a case, her friend M. Beaucoup the private detective would come along for the ride. There were two bunks at the back of the cab and a little kitchenette, so it was very nice.
The truck belonged to a company by the name of Boltzmann-Stefan GmbH, which made robots. So Adrienne spent her summers, as a university student, hauling robots across the Alps. When they got to Lago de Garda she would always stop and let the robots out to eat gelato. Most of the time robots object to eating, which they believe is a filthy habit, but they will sometimes eat the berry flavors of Italian gelato.
When Adrienne's truck was rolling at a mile a minute on the highway it had a lot of momentum. If you multiply Adrienne's speed by the mass of her truck, which was 1000 talents, you will see that she was steering a thousand units (talent miles per minute) of momentum. Such a substantial amount would take a while to build up. On the level, Adrienne might take as much as a minute, and cover half a mile of road, to get from standstill to highway speed. This reflects the fact that in the upper gear range her engine could supply only about a 1000 ocs for acceleration without straining.
One summer, when they reached the Adriatic coast, Adrienne and the robots boarded ship for Abadan in the Gulf. At Abadan, on orders from the company, she loaded the robots into another rig and got out on the road to Nishapur. Nishapur is where Omar, who around 1066 wrote the algebra textbook which everybody used for several centuries, was born and lived. He was one of the eight astronomers chosen by Malik Shah to revise the calendar and he also wrote a bunch of rhyming poems called the Rubaiyat.
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Copyright © 2001,2002 by Leonard Cottrell. All rights reserved.
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