Chapter 27: Making Connections

Tuesday, October 16, 1984

Carl Jefferson caught up to me on the way out of my programming class.

“Hey, man,” he said. “I wanted to thank you again for the help a month ago.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, shaking hands.

“Look,” he said. “You seem to know this stuff. I don’t want to presume or anything, but ... I don’t get some things at all, and the prof can’t explain it.”

“I can help,” I said. “Let’s grab a seat and you can tell me what’s going on.”

“Thanks!” he said.

We found seats in the atrium area outside the classroom and sat.

“Okay, look,” he said. “I do great in, like, BASIC and stuff, and I actually know some C. It’s just this assembly stuff. We barely had any computers in my high school, and...”

A guy from our class, wearing a Corps uniform, came over. The nameplate on his uniform said ‘Carlson’.

“Howdy!” he said. “Sorry to interrupt, but I overheard and ... look, I’m lousy with this stuff, too. Mind if I listen in?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Carl?”

“Nah,” he said, grinning. “The more, the merrier!”

He pulled a chair, saying, “Hank Carlson.”

“Steve Marshall,” I said, shaking hands.

“Carl Jefferson,” he said, also shaking hands.

“So, what’s up?” I said.

Carl shook his hand. “It’s how to deal with local storage. Like, I get the stack pointer, sort of, but it’s not clear how you manage it when you jump to another routine.”

Hank said, “I think it’s that you always think of your routine as the routine, and don’t try to look outside your piece of the stack.”

I nodded, then said, “That’s true, but you have to account for parameters being passed in. That is, if you’re passing them on the stack and not in registers.”

With that, we were off to the races. I drew up some diagrams, Carl and Hank started getting it, and I even showed them how a recursive function would look. Once you get that, the rest is pretty easy.

As we were wrapping up, Carl said, “You must have had a good teacher before.”

I shrugged and said, “Eh. My high school computer math teacher never explained this stuff, but I’ve learned from some friends.”

True enough, if one ignored that those were friends I would never meet in this life, and had not met by this point in my first life.

“We didn’t have computers in school,” Carl said. “Well, that’s a lie. Some kids had them, but we couldn’t use them, mostly. We just had a couple of big, loud teletypes. I worked with one of the teachers and read a whole lot, and just barely got a good enough score in the Computer Science AP to skip intro classes.”

“We didn’t either,” Hank said. “I thought it was just us. I did the same thing, only using my parents’ Apple IIe and a bunch of reading.”

“Where’d you go?” I said.

“Beeville,” Hank said. “It’s a little town not too far from Corpus Christi.”

Carl shrugged. “Never been there. Closest I’ve been is maybe Galveston. I went to Booker T. Washington in Houston.”

This was definitely one of those ‘It’s a small world after all’ moments. Sure, Carl was black, but for him to be from the one predominantly black high school that I was somewhat familiar with? He was the only black guy in my CS course, and I probably only had a dozen or so across all of my classes. A&M was mostly white, and after that there were probably more Hispanic students than black students.

I blinked, then said, “So you mean the HSEP kids had the computers? Oh, and I went to Memorial, so you’ll both kid me for being from the rich school.”

Carl chuckled. “Yeah, you are! You know HSEP?”

“A friend of mine went there for a year, then bailed out.”

“Funny,” he said. “I’d have killed to get in there.”

“What’s HSEP?” Hank said.

“I should’ve spelled it out,” I said. “High School for the Engineering Professions. My school was in a different district, but I wouldn’t have gone there anyway.”

“Well, heck, if you could go to Memorial, that’s the place to be,” Carl said, grinning.

“Did you know Marshall Briggs?” I asked.

“Everyone knew Marshall!” Carl said. “How do you know Marshall?”

“Two ways, I guess,” I said. “He was in competitive Drama, and I did that for a year. Plus I hung out with drama people for three years. And also, my friend Cal Preston — who’s redshirting with the Aggies — knew him from football.”

“Marshall’s the man,” Carl said, chuckling. “He likes to pretend he hates me, though. We were neck and neck on class rank, and I finally edged him out. He got that scholarship to Tulane, though, and I got one here, so it all worked out. I was all set for Prairie View right up until I got the offer to go here. I wasn’t expecting it! Oh, I’d have gotten in — that top 10% rule really helps Booker T. Washington! — but scholarships? That’s a whole different ball game!”

Hank smiled and tapped his name tag.

“This is my scholarship,” he said. “I’m actually hoping to be career. Preferably military intelligence, if I can get in.”

“Which branch?” Carl said.

“Planning on Air Force,” Hank said. “If I don’t make intelligence, they look like the one I’d like the best.”

Carl nodded, and said, “My brother’s Army. He’s hoping to make Sergeant soon, and would love to get into officer school.”

“And I’m just a civilian,” I said.

“Well, me, too!” Carl said.

Hank chuckled. “We have to be nice to non-regs. And civilians in general!”

We chatted for a bit more, then split up. As of right now, if I led a study group with Carl and Hank in it, I’d effectively be a TA. Still, I thought both of them were sharp and had potential. For one thing, they were clearly as much self-taught as not, and self-taught kids who had already overachieved probably had a lot going for them. It might be good to put things together now. Being an unpaid TA might be just fine.

Mel might study with them, too. She’d be in a lot of engineering classes. There would be overlaps there.

When we got home, there was a message waiting on the machine. It was from the College Station Police Department. They’d have an officer out here at or around 1 pm tomorrow, a time that we’d indicated we could have someone available.

All of us planned to be here. Everyone was still outraged, of course.

It had been way, way too long since we’d caught up with Meg and Steffie. Since (of course) we still knew the phone number for their shared mini-office, Cammie and I called right after our last class.

It worked, too. Meg answered, and Steffie hadn’t left yet, so we were able to catch up a bit. The others got home as we talked and joined in the call.

Things were going well. Not as well as last year, but well. They’d been to one ToC qualifier and gotten five bids, which sounded great to me. Megan and Anne had one in CX, Jaya had one in Extemp and another in LD (which ToC was finally recognizing), Danny and Penny had one in Duo, and Sierra had one in Humorous.

Roughly one-third of the active people were qualified for State in at least one event at this point. It’d been higher for us last year, I thought, but not by that much. Both Meg and Steffie were fairly confident that they’d be able to get nearly everyone who was active qualified in something.

There were four ‘dilettantes’ thus far this year. All four were new. I hoped that they’d get with the program. Debate and Drama do little for you unless you’re willing to get out there and do something. We were proof that, if you did, good things could happen — even if you weren’t the occasional oddball blessed with a second chance.

We promised again to catch up with them when we could. That would most likely be in December. We would finish with classes a full week before Memorial did, and that would give us ample opportunity to drop by and say hello.

Technically, we probably shouldn’t visit a high school campus during classes. That would’ve been a major faux pas by the time my kids were in school, certainly. However, in 1984, it was the sort of thing one could get away with. At most, if the wrong person spotted you, you might be politely asked to leave.

Wednesday, October 17, 1984

Watching out the window, we saw a sedan roll up to the house and park just before one. The guy that got out just screamed ‘police detective’ to us. Strongly built, wearing a suit, suspicious bulge that could have been a service weapon, and so forth.

He went right to the front door and knocked.

Our guess was correct. His name was Detective Mark Frederick (first name courtesy of his business card, one of which he gave to each of us), and he was a no-nonsense sort of guy. He wanted to know when we’d been gone, where we’d been (roughly), if we had any guesses as to the culprits, and so forth.

We mentioned that some neighbors had expressed negative views on gay people, and he said he would talk to them. He’d be talking to several neighbors asking if anyone saw anything, and they would be asked the same questions as everyone else.

I got absolutely no feeling on his personal opinion. He might have been outraged, or he might have felt like we got exactly what we deserved. There was no way to tell. He was a ‘just the facts, Ma’am’ sort of guy. He did express his regret that we’d been victimized by a crime, but that was it.

He asked after the property management company and I gave him the contact info. I almost told him that I’d pass his contact information on to my lawyer, then hesitated. Kyle was MNMS’s lawyer as well as mine, of course, and the house was owned by MNMS. That created an obvious connection between the two. I didn’t need Detective Frederick talking to Kyle right now, but I did want to keep it as quiet as possible that we owned the house.

The right thing to do would be to have the management company connect Detective Frederick to Kyle (as the agent for MNMS) if needed. That kept the connection between us and MNMS anonymous thanks to New Mexico’s LLC laws.