How Zebadiah John Carter Pimped His Ride

The car I’ve most wanted to own since 1980 (when I read its specifications in Robert A.
Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast) is a nicely customized two-door four-seater nicknamed
“Gay Deceiver” by her owner. Intriguing hints and partial descriptions abound in this Heinlein
novel of a vehicle that combines the most desirable traits of an SUV, a sports coupe, a fighter jet
and a short take-off and landing (STOL) transport. Only recently (since the turn of the century)
have some of “Gay Deceiver’s” unique capabilities become imaginable to the average person;
some of them are on the drawing board, some in advanced testing… and some are awaiting
technical advances which we haven’t made yet.

It may be helpful to an enhanced understanding of The Number of the Beast to visualize this
major character perhaps a little more clearly. Even if this article doesn’t do that for the reader, I
certainly hope it adds to the fun of reading TNOTB.

The Basics

“Gay Deceiver is a very nice girl, Deety.”

“And talented. Zeb, I have never before been in a Ford that can do the
things this car – Gay Deceiver? – can do.”

“After we’re married I’ll introduce you to her more formally. It will
require reprogramming.”

“I look forward to knowing her better.”

“You will. Gay is not exactly all Ford. Her external appearance was
made by Ford of Canada. Most of the rest of her once belonged to
Australian Defence Forces. But I added a few doodads. The bowling
alley. The veranda. Little homey touches.”

“I’m sure she appreciates them, Zeb. I know I do. I suspect that, had
she not had them, we would all be as dead as canasta.”

“You may be right. If so, it would not be the first time that Gay has
kept me alive. You have not seen all her talents.”

Chapter III, TNOTB

This bit of dialogue is central to our deliberations on how Zebadiah Carter put his personal car
together. We know from elsewhere in TNOTB that Zeb was a fighter pilot with some experience
in flying larger aerospace craft (at one point he’s said to have piloted a “shuttle” – whether this
corresponds closely to our Shuttle is conjectural). While he served with the United States
Aerospace Force (Reserve), Carter’s service seems to have been largely in and around Australia
(accordingly, his casual speech is seasoned with Strine expressions).
Over the years, hobbyist pilots with military flying experience have restored military aircraft in
order to fly them recreationally. Organizations such as the “Confederate Air Force” center
around the fun of buying, restoring and flying old military aircraft both for personal recreation
and for public exhibition. (No, the CAF is not dedicated to providing air support for to a
rematch of the War Between the States… it’s apolitical and non-racist.)

The economics of military aircraft have limited hobbyists’ ability to own and restore recent
generations of high-performance fighter aircraft sharply. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a few
people were able to purchase older Soviet fighters (MiG-19s) and ship them to the United States,
a situation which no longer exists and may have had more to do with corruption in post-Soviet
Eastern Europe than the economic facts of life.

The character “Zebadiah John Carter” is independently wealthy (his wealth accruing from a
contrived tale of socioeconomic Darwinism) and certainly an example of the hobbyist in our own
“real life” universe who can ride a war-surplus aerial hobbyhorse with his own money.

But Zeb goes beyond restoring an old warbird – he took a civilian vehicle, gutted it out himself,
filled it with old military hardware, and custom-programmed the onboard computers until he got
a vehicle that completely suited his needs. This makes Zeb a much more interesting character
than some fellow who, say, buys an old fighter plane intact, restores it or has a licensed airframe
and power plant mechanic restore it, and flies it a few times a year at air shows.

The “Duo”

Heinlein, of course, was writing science-fiction and needed to blow our minds from the get-go,
so he put Zeb, the other characters and the reader in a universe like that of “Methuselah’s
Children,” where personal transportation included cars that fly – “duos” (for “dual capacity” –
road and flight).

Some will remember that over the years there have been many attempts to create “duos,” all by
entrepreneurs, not large corporations. The idea has been to create a car light enough to fly after
detachable wings, aircraft engine and propeller shaft are attached at the airport (or in one case,
unfolded from the rear of the vehicle). The history of flying cars in real life has been seriocomic,
with occasional deaths as some of them came apart or otherwise broke down in mid-air.

In Heinlein’s “Future History,” the major automobile manufacturers get into the flying car
market. As a consequence, flying cars become affordable, efficient, safe and commonplace in
the stories set in this universe.

In real-life, computing capacity both at the traffic control centers and inside the vehicle has
increased so that the US Federal Aviation Administration has found it desirable to sponsor a
program called “New Pathways in the Sky” aimed at harnessing all of this computing power to
make flying safer and simpler (and shift passenger volume toward the air). What we see in
TNOTB is a universe where flying has been made as simple and safe as we hope driving will
become when it becomes more fully automated.

In the TNOTB universe, the “duo” is so common that Heinlein doesn’t devote a great deal of time
describing the concept to readers of the novel – in large part, TNOTB is a book “written to”
RAH’s older readers – part of the trend which started with Time Enough for Love of resurrecting
(sometimes literally) older characters such as Lazarus Long and Andy Libby in new works of
fiction. But the reader who is new to RAH’s fiction (or science-fiction in general) may find a
discussion of the “duo” concept useful.

Both in “Methuselah’s Children” and in TNOTB, duos have their wings and other lift surfaces on
the car at all times, and can go from “ground” mode to flight very quickly. The technology
involved may be similar to the “swing wing” on many second and third-generation (and later)
fighters and multirole aircraft, with the wings raked close to the fuselage/chassis while the duo is
operating on the ground (see later quotation).

When I first read “Methuselah’s Children,” the James Bond novels and movies were very
popular and gimmicks like cars that could fly or swim were common to point that they were
being satirized. I knew that “Methuselah’s Children” pre-dated all of the high-tech gadget spy
novels of that day, but the scene in which Lazarus Long and Mary Sperling escape pursuit by the
proctors in a “duo” that turns out (to Lazarus’ surprise) to be a “trio” - capable of traveling on
the ground, flying and traveling underwater gave me a thrill of recognition. (In real-life, the
Swiss custom car design group Rinspeed have developed an open roadster with SCUBA gear for
driver and passenger which can travel underwater for thirty minutes or so.)

We discuss what a duo would look like in the next section:

“Her external appearance was made by Ford of Canada,”

which covers a good deal of ground. Many people don’t realize that many “American” cars are
actually built in Canada or Mexico. “Detroit Iron” has included products of Canadian factories
for decades before NAFTA.

And the fact that the characters refer to Gay Deceiver as a “sports car” doesn’t tell us as much as
we might think. “Sport Utility Vehicle” as a euphemism for “upholstered and fully-enclosed
truck in which to drive your kids to private school” came after RAH wrote TNOTB. In 1980,
someone might have been forgiven for thinking a Sport Utility Vehicle would be lighter and
more maneuverable than, say, a Ford Excursion (for non-USians, this is the huge, one-ton
payload, Super Duty truck chassis version of the large Ford SUV – discontinued a few years ago
in favor of a stretched-wheelbase version of the next-larger Expedition).

In a thread on alt.fan.heinlein a few years ago, I posted that I had imagined Gay Deceiver being
somewhat of a cross between a Ford Taurus station wagon and a Ford Probe coupe, with added
fuselage/chassis toward the back of the vehicle to accommodate the folded wings and storage
space where things like loaded firearms, food, the two “magic space warp” bathrooms added by
Glinda the Good in Oz, and passengers over and above the three seated in addition to the
driver/pilot in the cockpit are stowed.

Reading around in the book, we find (from a running commentary by Hilda):

“…Dora’s radius nine-oh hold has been modified for Gay Deceiver…
your wings are raked back, are they not? Hypersonic?”

and

“This car operates in several modes. As a roadable, it is fast,

comfortable, easy to handle, rather hard to park, and usually parked
with wings raked back as they are now, in hypersonic configuration.”

Interesting. So those wings are out all the time. This gives us a “sporty” vehicle that is long in
the tush because of those raked-back trailing wings (farther back than even the supersonic
configuration of the F-111), not unlike a luxury sedan of the very late 1960s/early 1970s (think
an old Cadillac Eldorado or Chrysler Imperial LeBaron) and long rear fuselage – huge by
modern standards, and considered excessive even then by many people both inside and outside
the United States of America.

But the proportions of the chassis probably would be different – a lighter chassis than the worst
extravagances of old Detroit Iron with aerodynamic qualities, and light, sturdy wings which
would probably (along with the rest of the duo’s body) be made of carbon-carbon or other
advanced composites so that when stowed the effect would be similar to a beetle’s or cockroach’s
wings when flat – racy but long in the back.

And all of that would be the “stock” configuration, indistinguishable from any “Ford duo” you
could buy from the dealership by outside inspection. What makes Gay Deceiver a really hot
sports duo are the non-stock components, which we’ll discuss in the next section.

Interestingly, NASA studies show that making a supersonic aircraft’s fuselage slightly bulbous in
front reduces the intensity of the sonic boom as experienced by people on the ground below…
Gay Deceiver wouldn’t have to have a needle-nose to fly faster than sound.

A Ford Windstar-like shape with more headroom (to allow the cabin acrobatics RAH mentions in
the text) would be a good starting place. From there we must edit, starting with the doors, which
must be larger - both longer and higher - to allow faithfulness to the text. The fenders and door
sills would have to close tightly to a smooth plate which covers the chassis' bottom for
aerodynamic reasons.

To be faithful to the text, the body probably should taper dramatically towards the tail - imagine
the body of a Ford Windstar pulled and stretched by a giant hand so that its front doors are larger
(coupe size), the windows behind the door abolished and its end compressed to a point - perhaps
with control surfaces as with an aircraft from our universe. My recollection of the text supports a
wing-over or mid-fuselage swing-wing design similar to that of the F-111, with wings which fold
back more closely to the centerline of the duo than the F-111.

The book mentions specifically that the car is hard to park, suggesting possibly that the wings get
in the way when you try to park her. Gay Deceiver’s folded wings could fold UP at the tips
when the car is in “roadable” mode to make the car easier to park, but that elongated tail would
be a problem in parking in any case (I speak as the former owner of two Volkswagen
Transporter/”minibuses,” one of which was a Westfalia conversion, and a long bed Chevy
pickup).

The wheels would swing up, I assume, during flight to reduce drag – especially during
supersonic flight. After the wheels were retracted the wheel wells would be closed by panels
which swing over the wheel wells for the purpose. I don’t believe the book mentions anything
about this; it just follows from observations regarding the design of supersonic aircraft.

In a similar vein, I assume from how military aircraft manufacturers handle the issue of weapons
on fast aircraft that the laser cannon was concealed by doors set flush in the fuselage and swung
out from the fuselage for use, so it would not ordinarily be seen. The laser cannon would
probably be on the centerline of the duo as close to the vehicle’s center of gravity as possible
unless it were light enough for the weapon’s weight and moment arm not to be a significant
factor in operation of the vehicle.

All of this is speculation about the outward appearance of the “stock” Ford duo which Gay
Deceiver was before she was modified by her owner into the vehicle we see in TNOTB.
“Most of the rest of her once belonged to Australian Defence
Forces… “

…which leaves quite a bit of leeway when we speculate about what might have gone from the
Australians’ equivalent of the “boneyard” (the acres of retired military aircraft parked on or near
Davis-Monthan AFB and elsewhere, including “museums” scattered all over the United States)
into Zeb’s car “Gay Deceiver.”

Most fighter aircraft are slim beasts with one row of seating going front-to-back. Among the
exceptions, the General Dynamics (now Boeing) F-111 “Aardvark” is a prominent exception to
that rule – it seats two crewmen side-by-side. There are others, such as the A-6 “Intruder” and
the EA-6B “Prowler” – that last airframe seating four crewmen (pilot, navigator, and two
“systems specialists”).

It turns out that the Australians in real-life (the Royal Australian Air Force) do operate F-111s –
the RAAF are shown on some databases as the only current operators of that aircraft. So
assuming that Zeb’s universe is the equivalent of one somewhat in our future, F-111 or a similar
airframe’s parts would be on offer at a surplus aircraft parts dealer shop somewhere.

Just to show the reader what a

small four-seat combat aircraft
looks like, I have included a
photo of the EA-6B “Prowler” to
the left. The “Prowler” isn’t
supersonic but its “greenhouse”
canopy shows the sort of space
required by four crewmen packed
tightly into ejection seats.

If I were kit-bashing a model of

Gay Deceiver, I would strongly
consider using the EA-6B
cockpit as a place from which to
start for the passenger area of the
vehicle. The wings, tail
stabilizer, etc would not be used
in such a model because the book
tells us “Her external
appearance was made by
Ford of Canada.”

Thinking about it, there’s no compelling need to put the airplane canopy in such a model, if the
model were large enough (say, 1/32) to show how much of the interior cockpit/passenger area
came from a military aircraft. The seats and front control panel would be sufficient to show what
ejection seats and aircraft instrumentation look like. .
What else from Australian Defence Forces might Zeb have found worth putting into Gay
Deceiver? How about that laser cannon? I can’t count the times I’ve wished for one, just while
in traffic.

There would be other things, most of them mentioned in TNOTB:

- radar (in 1980, with digital displays still in their infancy, RAH had the radar being a
green monochrome analog sweep screen – and who knows, maybe that’s how mil-spec
radars are built in that universe… );
- ejection seats. Early in the novel, Zeb tells Hilda that she’s sitting in an ejection seat, but
it’s unclear whether this was fact or banter. Hilda was twitting Zeb while he was trying to
make good their escape from the aliens who’d just tried to kill them with a car bomb –
cause for threats (at least) of ejection from a vehicle as far as I’m concerned… ;
- various bits and pieces of computer hardware, which, along with the autopilot eventually
become “Gay Deceiver” under Zeb and Deety’s programming and tutelage;
- a chaff dispenser (“chaff” is the military slang term for packets of metal foil strips ejected
by combat aircraft to distract anti-aircraft missiles; there’s no mention of flares, which are
used for the same purpose, in TNOTB);
- bulkhead doors, solenoid locks and other of Gay Deceiver’s structural elements
mentioned in the book as having been built by Australians;
- specialized navigational equipment not supplied by Ford.

Juice…

…in The Number of the Beast refers to the fuel which powers Gay’s propulsion plant. It is
specifically described as an “isotope” which is unstable and releases much energy when it
decays. It is also described as “unfriendly to those who don’t understand it” and prone to
causing large explosions if carelessly handled.

- Obvious candidates for “juice” are fissile isotopes; usually odd-numbered actinide isotopes like
uranium-233, uranium-235, plutonium-239 and plutonium-241. Unfortunately, using these
nuclear fuels creates a large amount of neutron and gamma radiation which will harm living
things unless heavy shielding is used to stop the neutrons from striking living tissue. This makes
it impractical (to say the least) to use fissile fuels to power small manned vehicles due to the
weight of the shielding materials required;

- nuclear isomers might (the jury’s officially still out) be stimulated into decaying much more
rapidly (hence more energetically) than usual by bombardment with x-rays or gamma rays; for
example hafnium-178m2 can, when bombarded with the proper wavelength of gamma rays,
release roughly 10,000 times the amount of energy per gram as TNT. So far, however, nuclear
isomers release their energy as gamma rays (which can then induce heat or other energy by
vibrating atoms of matter through which they pass), so that the same objections to the use of
nuclear isomers in a small manned vehicle exist as for fissiles;

- nuclear fusion has been proposed as a source of energy more intense than fission; not seriously
regarded as a practical energy source until a research team led by Dr. Robert W. Bussard (of
Bussard ramjet fame) developed the “polywell” inertial electrostatic confinement fusion reactor.
The advantage of this fusion reactor over the huge thermonuclear fusion reactors (such as the
ITER demonstration facility under construction in France at this time) is that it is
much smaller and can also be made to work without generating neutrons.

This aneutronic fusion mode of operation is exciting in its implications because it can use boron
as a fuel. Boron is available in huge deposits in many places at low cost; it can also be separated
inexpensively from sea water. Also, much of the energy released by the boron-11 fusion reaction
in an electrostatic inertial confinement reactor can be recovered as electricity from the
confinement grid.

The only objection to boron (used in a compact inertial confinement reactor) as a candidate for
“juice” is that it is NOT dangerous if handled carelessly, nor is it prone to causing explosions in
its pure state or in most of its compounds, so it’s not a good match for “juice” in TNOTB.
Shame, because an inertial confinement reactor using boron-11 as a fuel is a good candidate for a
compact energy source in a number of applications.

It’s also unclear that a small polywell reactor would be energy-dense enough to supply power for
a supersonic aircraft. One way to power a small aircraft from such a power plant might be to
couple the grid to an electrically-powered turbojet. Since electric motors provide maximum
torque over their speed range, this is an efficient use of the power – but we don’t know if the
power to run a turbojet at useful speeds is available from a polywell reactor small enough to fit in
an aircraft the size of an automobile.

The power source for Gay Deceiver’s main propulsion unit (I don’t think it’s ever explicitly
described, even as to whether it’s a nuclear reactor-powered turbofan or a NERVA-type nuclear
rocket) should probably be as close as possible to such unit – to me that means the whole
assembly should be in the back of the vehicle, probably (for structural reasons) just behind the
area between the wings. The space under Gay’s hood is probably for her power packs and
ancillary hardware, as well as for the front wheels during flight.and for the steering gear.
Onboard Computing/Artificial Intelligence

“Gay Deceiver is a very nice girl, Deety.”

“And talented. Zeb, I have never before been in a Ford that

can do the things this car – Gay Deceiver? – can do.”

“After we’re married I’ll introduce you to her more formally. It

will require reprogramming.”

“I look forward to knowing her better.”

“You will. Gay is not exactly all Ford. Her external appearance
was made by Ford of Canada. Most of the rest of her once
belonged to Australian Defence Forces. But I added a few
doodads. The bowling alley. The veranda. Little homey
touches.”

“I’m sure she appreciates them, Zeb. I know I do. I suspect

that, had she not had them, we would all be as dead as
canasta.”

When RAH wrote TNOTB in 1980, not even mainframe computers could do more than simulate
a female human voice on the 300 kilohertz-wide audio channel of the telephone system, for what
we now know as “voice mail.”

Of course, as we all know, the capability of desktop and other microcomputers has doubled
roughly every eighteen months (“Moore’s Law”), leading to a situation in which the self-
awareness of Gay Deceiver’s onboard computer system is a plausible development.

In Texas a company appropriately named ai.com has set itself the task of duplicating the human
brain in a neural net some time in the coming decade. And some time after that, the steady
encroachment of Moore’s Law on capabilities once the exclusive domain of mainframe
computers will result in that model being duplicated in a machine a 13-year old can carry under
his arm up to his room, where he and his friends will do things we can’t really do more than
speculate about.

What might a computer with the information processing capacity of the human brain, but no
necessity to operate a human body do? Does self-awareness reside in the ability to process the
massive amount of data the human brain runs through as a matter of course? Or is something
else required (perhaps the incredibly complex interaction of the cerebral cortex with the parts of
the brain which run the body without being commanded to do so)?

What we do know in the age of “blade servers” is that the physical size of Gay Deceiver’s
computer system is probably not significant compared to the vehicle’s other systems.
In TNOTB one of the two “magic restrooms” placed in Gay’s cargo area by Glinda the Good is
taken up by a “Turing mod” installed by Dora. This implies that true self-awareness requires a
much larger physical size than our latest crop of multi-gigahertz-speed, multi-terabyte storage
computers which can run very well in enclosures the size of a large shoebox.
Again, though, when the book was written, significant computing capacity was regarded as
residing in mainframe computers; telephone booth-sized minicomputers had begun to make
inroads in the sort of computing capacity once considered the exclusive province of the
mainframe computer.

Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, which chronicled the development of a new mini-
mainframe by Digital Equipment Corporation, was a best-seller at the time. Desktop computers
were still 8 or 16-bit process controller chips married to miniature versions of mainframe
memory and storage devices and a slowly maturing range of input and output devices, not
optimized computing processors (the market for small computers hadn’t really taken off).

So the “conversations” between Zeb and Gay are not really much more demanding in computing
terms than the state-of-the-art technology for giving directions and directory information. The
AI program “Eliza” could simulate a typed conversation with a person so convincingly that some
secretaries at MIT where it was developed would spend significant amounts of time “conversing”
with it, and Eliza would run on just about any microcomputer designed after 1975.

It’s by no means inconceivable that a stock Windows Vista-equipped computer of recent

manufacture could be programmed to do for a driver what Gay does for Zeb at the beginning of
the book (it would have been even easier for Hilda and Deety to create new messages for Gay to
give Zeb if her operating system had been Windows Vista, because they could have just typed the
messages in – Vista also has very understandable voice synthesis in several voices).

Having said all of that, there’s no real way to model Gay Deceiver’s AI capacity visually. Since
ELIZA’s source code is written in BASIC, modifying it to reproduce the conversations in
TNOTB would be a straightforward programming job… I suppose you could hide a computer,
speakers or microphone near a model of the Smart Girl, run the program as modified and
reproduce some of the experience. I remember a guy who rigged tape recorders to his car’s
dashboard to nag him in his wife’s voice about running low on fuel, hot engine, etc.)

RAH should be given credit for prescience in his description throughout the book of how Gay
Deceiver goes from being an autopilot with relatively unsophisticated input and output by our
standards (the voice recognition in Windows Vista now works a lot better than expensive add-on
voice recognition programs did a decade before) to gain her full self-awareness.

The “Turing mod” reference applies to the “Turing test” – the milestone laid down by computer
theorist Alan Turing in which a computer could be considered to have human-equivalent
intelligence if it could converse from behind a curtain without being identified as a computer.

Some computers may already be meeting the Turing test. Certainly the free directory assistance
computer hosted by Google.com is capable of carrying on a seamless conversation, if an
obviously scripted (how spontaneous can getting a phone number be?). Millions of people all
over the world take spoken directions from pocket-sized GPS computers while they drive to new
destinations; numerous cell-phone providers offer spoken directions (since in the United States
cell phone providers are required to embed GPS chips in their cell phones to support mobile 911
emergency telephone calling).
First Approximation - Visual

Starting with a Ford Windstar, I sharpened and lengthened the nose a bit, lengthened the rear
quarter panels, raised the greenhouse and roof, and tried to convey some of the additional length
of the ship that might have made her hard to park as a roadable (according to Hilda’s talk to the
Boondock people in TNOTB). Considering that a guy the size of Zeb is supposed to have been
able to waft over the seat backs in free fall to change duty positions with the other crew
members, it didn’t seem reasonable to stay with the moderate-low roofline of the Windstar.

As far as the wing is concerned, I again tried to convey the “flaperon” trailing edge structure that
allows the B-2 bomber not to have a horizontal stabilizer. (I didn’t do a great job, either, I know.
Apparently advanced age withers the artistic judgment.) Not that I have a particular problem
with tailfins, I just thought a duo would probably be designed to be able to go most places other
cars could while on the ground. The wings are fully spread, as they would be when the car takes
off from the ground (for maximum lift).

This is how the car might look with the wings raked all the way back in supersonic/roadable
setting. I’m still working on conveying a furled swing-wing that would fan out large enough to
lift the car in powered flight.
Gay Deceiver in Flight

This time I think I got the flaperons on the wing’s trailing edge a little better. The wheels are
retracted into the fuselage and the wheel well covers are shut, leaving an aerodynamic fuselage.

I’m coming up with a rear view of the duo which would show the exhaust ducts for the turbofan
engine – the intakes are faired into the rear roof of the vehicle.