TUMBULAR 26

Helen of Troy was all I ever wanted.   Helen of Troy was not yet even very real.   This was the code name for my very first tumbulation.   I had grandiose notions that this would be the first of the airships I would set aloft, the first of thousands.  I wanted to make her mechanisms as sensitive as possible, so that she would not falter, being able to read the sudden redirections of the winds and adjust effectively to even violent weather.   She/it would represent the height of my engineering prowess.  I was in love.   But Helen -- the real Helen not her namesake -- had other ideas.  Her epilepsy threw her around.   In many ways she was precisely the opposite of my ideal, and still in some strange way her inspiration.   If an epileptic could survive in here, along with the political poison, anything was possible, and so I loved her dearly. But Helen had a way of blaming me for all of her mistakes and one night all the computers were trashed and she told the Athenians that this was down to me.   She said I respond too quickly and too agitatedly to the weather.  I was in fits about it.  All I knew was that I had to focus harder on the screen to conjure up my imagery.  But now the CAD/CAM had all broken and I had to build another software system from scratch.  Helen had become my nemesis.