Chapter 46: Back to School and Off Again

Tamara’s resort vacation was about to end; the coming weekend would be their group’s last and the whole family would be closing up the cabins that Sunday. And no further “exciting” encounters occurred involving unauthorized photographers, drones, or any other unusual event. Peter had assured her that problems like those were rare and to have two in the space of a week was unprecedented.

During Tamara’s final week, most of the resort’s volleyball team members were present and they spent the mornings practicing. Tamara and Barbara joined them for many practice sessions. The team captains told them that if they joined the team, then the resort would be able to field a women’s “B” team for the Superbowl, instead of a coed “C/novice” team, plus a men’s “B” team. With Barbara and Tamara playing, there would be eight women; of the six women currently on their team, only one had superior offensive skills and adding the two friends would produce a competitive team.

The girls spent several days learning the team’s offense and rotations and between the team members and resort guests, there were enough good volleyball players available to organize a few games. Tamara was extremely strong at the net as either a middle blocker or opposite hitter, and Barbara was a good all-around player, having good serving and defense skills, and was a strong outside hitter. Again, Tamara and Barbara told the team members that they couldn’t commit until they could arrange their college schedule to allow them to go. They all exchanged their contact information.

On their last Friday, Ron gave Peter and Tamara an update about Sommers’ arrest. One of the resort’s members, Nancy Givins, was an attorney and had represented the resort in the past, usually pro bono. Givins normally worked as a corporate tax lawyer but Ron had asked her if she could represent the resort’s interests in their complaint. They decided that they would see if they could persuade the prosecutor to offer Sommers a reduced charge if he gave up his drone and compensated the resort for lost business.

It was a sad farewell on Sunday for all the cousins; Tamara had gotten close to a number of them and they all promised to stay in touch with a weekly video chat. After the cabins were packed up and cleaned, they were closed up. Family members would still be coming out to the resort as long as the weather permitted, but it would only be for weekend stays, and they would mostly use the main house. Then it was back to the real world for Tamara and her friends.

Baltimore, Maryland: end of August

Late Sunday afternoon, Tamara was back at her apartment; classes would begin in two days and she had just spent a busy time putting everything from her vacation away. She picked up her postal mail, looking for anything from the university about any schedule updates, to see if going to the Superbowl could be arranged. Even though much of the scheduling was now done on line, the courses that she was enrolled in were so specialized and had so few students, that most of them were arranged the old way, manually. For Tamara to be able to go to the event, first, Barbara would have to be available to drive because Tamara didn’t intend to go without her. If Barbara wasn’t able to drive, then the only other option would be for them to take a flight to Pittsburgh and get a car service from there. Tamara had nixed that idea in her thoughts.

Tamara checked her class schedule and reconfirmed that her class schedule had not changed. The issue was one of her classes: a two-hour special topics class in applied quantum electrical engineering principles which, in prior years, was held on Tuesday afternoons, but for this fall, it had been moved to Thursday afternoons. The Thursday after Labor Day would be its second meeting. Peter was also enrolled in that class. She couldn’t miss that class. After reviewing the rest of her fall schedule, she called Peter.

“Hey, you available? And is Barbara there?”

“We’re here. Barbara’s emailing her advisor to get an appointment. She wants to add a research topic to her schedule. You wanna come up here? Is it about the volleyball event?”

“Yep. That Thursday’s gonna be a problem. I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

She got to Peter’s apartment and he let her in.

“So what’s the deal, sweetie?” he asked.

“Did you look at the quantum engineering class schedule?” she asked.

“On Tuesday afternoons?” Peter said.

“No, this fall they switched it to Thursdays,” she said, giving him a sharp look. “Didn’t you check your schedule at all?”

Peter shrugged his shoulders sheepishly. “It’s always been on...”

“ ... except when it’s not. You’re so careful with your work, Peter, but this other stuff? Jeez. Anyway, the Thursday after Labor Day will be the second class meeting and there are only twelve sessions in that course.”

“Oh yeah. I know, it’s intensive. We can’t afford to miss a class. So we can’t leave Thursday.”

“Right, and we need to talk to Barbara about her driving there too. I’m almost ready to can the whole idea—just when we’re getting back into school, we’ll be off again. She wants to add a research topic?”

“Yeah. She has a bug about that Avery Program thing; it fits into what she wants to do in psych, and she already has some subjects—those who were in it and those who will be going into it—the cousins and our friends’ cousins. And that gives her an easier access to the teachers who are running it. That’s what she thinks. Anyway, I’m assuming you can miss classes on Friday?”

“I hate to do it, ‘cause Fridays I’m at the APL. It’s a research day. But right now, Emma’s got me working on the math that supports my circuit design, so I can do that anywhere, except when I need to run a simulation. No way can a laptop handle those calcs. Oh, I think I hear Barbara finishing up. You’re okay on Friday too, right?”

“Yeah. So’s Barbara. I think she’ll like going on Friday better, come to think about it.”

“What about going on Friday?” Barbara asked as she came out of her room.

Tamara told her about the Thursday class.

“Ah, okay then. Peter’s right, actually leaving Friday works lots better for me and it means that Terence can come too. He’s got something on Thursday that he says he can’t afford to miss. So the trip there is about 300 miles, about five hours’ drive. I looked it up; it’s interstate most of the way.”

Tamara pulled out her phone. “Let me see what we’ll miss at the Superbowl by not getting there on Thursday afternoon.”

She looked at the Superbowl schedule.

“Actually we don’t miss much, Barbara. A dance on Thursday night, and a v-ball clinic and practice sessions on Friday morning. There’s a pool party mid-day. The opening ceremony isn’t until after dinner.”

“I spoke to Robin when we got in just before,” Barbara said. “She confirmed that she and her husband have room for one more couple in their RV. They’re getting there on Tuesday. She wants to play in their Threes Tournament. And she told me that Anne’s camper is a bunkhouse type and she can take one more couple. They’re gonna get there Tuesday also. Everyone else is coming Wednesday.”

“What about meals? When they were pushing us to come, we didn’t think to ask about the details,” Tamara said. “Does the place have a restaurant?”

“No, Robin said they have a snack bar and do breakfasts there and have a limited dinner menu. They also have a huge cookout for the lunches. When I told her we could come, after she stopped squealing, she said she’d let me know about how their group handled dinners. They like to do group dinners with everyone contributing dishes. They all stay together in one area—our resort team’s been going there for so many years, that they have a reserved area that they park all their rigs in.”

“Okay, so next thing. What do we bring? Besides food. Do we need to bring our own bedding?” Tamara asked.

“Hmm. Good point. Probably not, but I’ll ask. She did tell me that we needed warm clothes—even though we play nude, it can get chilly there. So sweat clothes and warmups are what people wear when it’s chilly, like in the nights. Some years it’s hot, though, she said. Next, bring drinks. They do sell bottled water but it’s not cheap. She also advised using the thicker types of elbow and knee guards. Lots of gals wear visors; the sun can be bright on the courts. Sunglasses, sweatbands. Oh yeah. Folding chairs for when we’re not playing and in the evenings at the campsite, and lots of towels.”

“Lot of stuff to remember,” Tamara remarked.

“There is. Oh, right, there are dances on Friday and Saturday nights too. I’ll find out more.”

“So when should we plan to leave?” Peter asked. “Lunch and dinner on the road?”

“Maybe,” Barbara answered. “Let’s think about it. Should we aim to arrive around 6 to 7 p.m.?”

“Sure,” Tamara said as Peter nodded. “Hey, dinner? You guys just treated me to three weeks of fun. Let’s go eat out, my treat.”

The others agreed, so they closed up and left.

“Peter, Barbara, do you feel weird like I do?” Tamara asked as they walked to the restaurant they had chosen. “It feels so strange wearing clothes and even stranger seeing everyone dressed.”

Barbara laughed. “Yeah, I used to feel that way but now, not as much.”

Peter agreed with her. “Maybe it’s because we’re so used to living in those two different worlds. We switch mental gears more easily now.”

After dinner they returned to their apartments. Peter stopped outside her apartment to say goodnight.

“I’m gonna miss sleeping with you, sweetheart,” Tamara told him after they kissed. “That was so nice. Especially the other stuff we did in bed.”

“Me too. But I agree with what we decided; to concentrate on school and keep the romance for the weekends.”

The next day, Monday, Tamara went to Emma’s office early. In the few emails they had exchanged, Emma had assured her that little was happening in the APL or in Cambridge; all the essential people were on holiday. But Tamara was eager to put together her fall research schedule.

She greeted Emma and they briefly described their vacations.

“I found that I love social nudism, Emma,” Tamara said. “Thanks so much for helping me get into it.”

“I’m delighted to hear that, my dear. Did you make many new friends? I certainly did when I began going to Andrew’s resort.”

“Many. Especially a lot in Peter’s family. What an incredible bunch of cousins he has; we all kinda bonded.”

Emma smiled. “That’s ace. It’s one thing about nudism, friendships seem to be more intense. Perhaps it’s because most social barriers are gone,” she mused.

“Oh, and I learned that I’m a really good volleyball player,” Tamara continued. “Barbara and I were recruited—actually arm-twisted—to go to that nude Superbowl thing in ten days. I’ll need to miss that Friday, but I’ve already started on finishing up the calcs that we scheduled to have completed by then.”

“Brilliant; I know about that Superbowl event. My resort sometimes puts together a team to go. Someone told me that its origin—that happened more than sixty years ago—was that it grew out of a volleyball league of three clubs and one of them was my own club. Their interclub competition gave the original organizers the idea to make it much bigger and open it to all who wanted to play, whether or not they were in a club.”

“Oh, that’s pretty cool,” Tamara said. “Anyway, it appears that our going is almost set. We’d leave before noon a week from Friday and be back Sunday evening.”

“I hope you’ll do well, then. And do try to visit my own club this autumn; perhaps you can get into some of the games they run on weekends.”

“Now that’s a thought. Maybe our two clubs could do our own league. We’re not far from each other,” Tamara said thoughtfully.

“Now then, let me tell you some news,” Emma said. “Not big, big news, but even so, it’s a nice step, innit. I heard on Friday that the long-term experiment on the scaled-up energy-storage system that uses your accumulator design was successful; over the 30-day quiescent period, the self-discharge rate was less than 0.01 percent; a comparable lithium-ion battery’s rate is 1.5 to 2 percent per month. But when they included the external self-charging circuit that you developed, the self-discharge rate went negative; there was a greater amount of energy at the end than at the beginning. You’ve got a lot of happy people over there, Tamara.”

“Wow, that’s so good to hear. What about the month’s cycle degradation test—the repeated charging cycles?” she asked.

“More good news; the best life cycle numbers from lithium batteries used for power storage is about 2,000 to 3,000 charging cycles before the storage capacity is reduced to 80 percent. The accumulator-based battery has now gone over 10,230 cycles and its storage capacity seems unaffected. There also appears to be negligible energy loss between charge and discharge. We want to improve battery efficiency; that’s the ratio of the useful energy available that can be supplied by the battery to the total amount of energy put into the system. The best ratio achieved is, once again, the lithium-ion battery and it’s 88 percent. The accumulator storage system has almost a perfect ratio—99.6 percent. Tamara, this accumulator you invented is revolutionizing energy storage.”

“I need to tell you something about that,” Tamara said. “When I was at the resort, there was a drone flying around and the resort owners couldn’t locate the owner. I knew I could bring it down with a device I made in a private side project I’ve been working on.”

“Uh oh. Do I want to hear this?”

“Ha. Maybe not. But the police detective they called in gave me the okay. I used all my own money for building the device and did the work on my own too. Except for one of the accumulators I had built for the battery project; it had a major flaw and we rejected it. I didn’t ditch it; I had an idea.”

“Oi. Oh shit,” Emma moaned. “Now I know I don’t want to hear this.”

“You really do want to, Emma,” Tamara smirked. “The flaw turned out to be in the layout of the circuit that prevents too fast of a discharge. It had a spot where the tracings came too close and the interference between the tracings in that particular accumulator didn’t let it discharge properly. I fixed that problem in all the other accumulators, but I kept the flawed one because a section of that circuit was damaged. So I replaced that circuit with one where I could vary the output and to test it, I thought of my very first project, an EMP device I made to zap RFID chips. Long story, but the short version is that I have a new toy for Dr Tarmson. My point in telling you this is that this accumulator—and all the others—appear to be able to deliver a huge amount of power very quickly. And the little modification I made allows the device it powers to be able to generate a rapid burst of strong EMPs. The thing can fry electronics within about 100 to 200 feet, even more, using what basically looks like a ‘C’-cell battery as a power source.”

“You never cease to astound me, don’t you,” Emma sighed. “I’m sure you know how dangerous a device like that can be.”