I've been setting in my cabinet in the right wing of the S.A. Power Company design bureu, looking upon a bunch of AA tank drawings. That was not accepted by the General, so we sold twenty prototypes as fishing systems. Since last Friday the whole neighbourhood had been filled with explosions and enormous amounts of fish blasted in the air. Well, the fish prices declined rapidly, and we sterted using fish instead of regular meat in our cafeteria. This little economic trick helped us to save enough money to build a new assembly line with a dock and a few crates of black caviar. Artem is not a perfect finance director, but we had no alternatives - the previous director had been so nervous, so he could write his firing documents only after his fourth attempt. It is thought that he became mad about the way we spend money on the SA-3. He didn't like this 300-m fuel-guzzling beaty. Strange guy.
I took the drawings and put them into my table, when someone had knocked the door three times.
- Artem?
- Me.
- Come in.
Artem, the director of S.A., the inventor of the weirdest planes in the world, opened the wooden, well-made door and quickly went to me.
- Comrade, I want to finish the work which was the reason to create the S.A. I want to rebuild SA-4...
I poorly stopped him.
- Are you mad? You are going to build these planes? The planes, for whose pilots and mechanicans two asylums were built? Sure?
- But the new plane will be more stable...
- Please, understand me. I can build two planes for you and Ivan, but no more! I love the design, but I don't want any victims! Do you remember the accident with the monument?
- Ah, the Garrison statue? But it was rebuilt very qickly! Who could know that my phone will explode and lauch the catapult, which will destroy my plane?
-...
A minute of uncomfortable silence occured.
- Ok, let's go to the assembly line. Show me your lov... Ideas.// accidentally remembered the song.
We passed by a big shelf with some models of our planes, set on wooden postaments and protected by solid glass. There was the SA-1, the goddamn SA-1, our first creation, which crashed the "Jolly Tentacle" bar a few minutes after takeoff and demoluted the bar to it's fundament. There was the SA-3, a long, no, looooooooong plane built for tube delivery. It could drop a tube and it woupd be long enough to cross river Thems three times. We have sold this saus... Technology wonder to Sweden, and I've never heard anything more about our flying masterpiece.
We entered the assembly zone, where a group of mechanicans have been assembling a self-propelled gun. Right that time they were connecting track shields. But we continued to the plane.
The SA-4 was lying in the end of the warehouse on several yellow struts and stapels. Burnt and broken, it was hardly damaged and looked unlikely to ever fly again. But Artem wanted to make it rock.
He went to the cockpit, explaining me his modernisation ideas, talking about catapult upgrade, gyroscopre stabilization system, new safety standarts... And i liked the idea. We'll se, maybe, something fantastic can be made out of the SA-4...
P.S. it's a translation of my fanfic - maybe the first SP fanfic? - originally written in Russian. It's a single chapter out of ten translated by memory, so that's not an exact translation.