“So you’re a space-scientist?” She was actually beaming at him.
“No, nothing like that. I just design, develop solutions to problems the real tekkies
have. Most of it’s for space programmes though. ‘Space Scientist’ is a bit comic-book as a
label. Why, you interested in engineering?”
“I just like new exciting things, clever things. Some satellites, when you see the
pictures of then building them, they look like jewellery.”
“There’s more than enough gold and platinum in a deep-space probe to make a girl happy,
you know.” But she was fun and had been extremely good – not to say hungry – in his bed;
she was also intelligent and had a good mind; he liked that almost as much. From what he’d
learned about Fay over the past three weeks, she was just the sort of woman he could
imagine himself thinking seriously about. Thirty-two, a brunette – can’t have everything -
and with a very, very nice body. Like a twenty-year old’s. He never thought of himself as
a tit-man but hers were enough to convert anyone.
“Want to come to the lab, see what I do? It’s mostly boring.”
“I’d like that.” So he took her to his ‘shack’, which was his own private bit; what went
on in the main lab he could show her later, if she was still interested. Test out basic
procedures in the shack, than give the results to the wiz-kids in Development
Engineering.
“So we probably need a removable protective skin over the unit. Maybe a skin we can peel
off to get at the innards. You can’t make a jacket-like thing – far too difficult because
of all the irregularities, the plumbing and so forth on the outside of the unit. So what
I’m trying – it’s the opposite of ‘space-engineering – is to take a plaster-mould from
this prototype-unit, cast a flexible skin in the mould. Have to be a thick-ish skin –
micrometeorite absorption – and come up with something like a thick butadiene bag, the
inside exactly conforming to the unit’s surface. The outside with relief-texture to
increase the surface area.”
“Ok, question. What’s butadiene?”
“Material something like a soft plastic – a synthetic elastomer. A synthetic rubber.
Look, over here. This was a test to see if I could get crisp enough detail using standard
butadiene.”
“It’s a hand. Wait a minute, it’s a hand with very odd skin ...” He took hold of the
thing and turned it inside out with a soft flup sound.
“I made a plaster cast of my hand, using dental plaster. That gives me a hollow form – a
female mould exactly matching my hand. Theoretically I can do that with the Unit over
there. Then I take a male mould from that – I get a perfect cast of my hand. So I then
want to change the skin-surface: I can do that how I like, add scales if I want a
horror-movie talon, that sort of thing. Anything. Take another cast of that and I have the
original inside and the new outside. If I want the skin for the Unit to be a thick layer
of butadiene, I dip the original until I get the skin, take another cast, add the scales
or whatever and there you are, a final cast gives me a glove that exactly fits my hand
internally but can be anything I like externally. You see, not state-of-the-art wizardry –
people have been making things in this way – different materials of course – for
centuries.” He showed her an early try, a section of an old car tyre with a prominent,
complex tread. His thick butadiene replica had an entirely different tread, one he’d cut
into the thick synthetic skin.
“Is that how they did that girl in the tyre advertisements on TV? The one with the black
tyre-tread skin?”
“No, that was probably a computer-generated graphic laid on an image of the girl.”
She was sniffing the butadiene hand. “Doesn’t smell like rubber.”
“You’re thinking of natural rubber. This doesn’t smell, it’s artificial.”
“You could make a whole sci-fi monster like that. As a skin on a real person, I mean.”
“Big job, but yes you could. Not economic, though some of the Batman costuming was done
like that.”
He showed her some of the previous-project stuff, much more like ‘space-engineering’ and
she was encouragingly interested, asked sensible, percipient questions. It was as they
were getting into the car to leave that she sprang it on him.
“Just out of interest then, you could make someone – a girl say – look like the girl in
the tyre-ads, with a skin like the tread of a tyre. Me for instance.”
Charlie Atherston chuckled. “You want a rubber skin?” The response immediately became
far, far more important than making skin-suits for imaginary females; she said:
“I like rubber. It turns me on, wearing it.”
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