Variation on a Theme, Book 6
Copyright© 2024 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 87: A Significant Delay
Sunday, January 26, 1986
If the morning was a bit crazy, it was only because Amy joined us and Cammie and Mel were trying to tease me without teasing her. It didn’t work that well, but they figured it out and backed off before anyone’s feelings were hurt.
Jas supporting Amy probably helped with that. Monique hadn’t spent the night, so she was free to ally with Amy. Not that we were really at the level of Amy needing allies, so much as that she had very limited experience with friendly, loving teasing, while the rest of us were long-time veterans of it. It takes a certain level of trust to know that no one is laughing at you — at least, not in a bad way — even if it might sound that way.
Church was different only because Amy was there. She seemed to have a good time. I was surprised that her generally flat voice sprang to life when singing hymns (exactly the opposite of what seemed to happen to a lot of people).
In the car, on the way back, she said, “I enjoyed that. It felt ... less different than I expected. But still different.”
“There’s a lot of ... um ... spiritual comfort food,” Angie said. “Hymns people know, with words people know. The meaning may be a little different, in context, but it sounds the same.”
“My parents like church,” Amy said. “I did not. But you like this one, and I see why. I ... will consider more.”
“I like it,” Paige said, “And I’m not much of a churchgoer, really. This is good, though.”
I stopped outside Mosher and walked Amy up to her room, carrying her suitcase in one hand and holding hands with her with the other. She turned, hugged me, and kissed me at her door.
“I had a wonderful time! I ... guess we’ll see when our next big date is?”
“That makes sense. Darla has next weekend and you have your group.”
“Which I will enjoy! But yes. We will do something, though?”
“I can’t imagine we won’t, unless something unexpected happens. We will have to go to Houston sometime soon, but that will be at least a couple of weeks. Before our next exams, though.”
She nodded.
“I will look forward to it. Thank you!”
“Reminder: it’s always the guy who thanks the woman, especially after something like last night.”
She grinned a bit.
“Fine. Then ... you’re welcome.”
I grinned back and gave her one more kiss. Then she headed in, and I could hear Meg talking to her. Meg hadn’t been expecting her, but I imagine she wanted some updates.
We were getting down to the wire. The newspaper reported that Challenger had been postponed one day, until tomorrow. Tomorrow was still warm enough, I thought. Tuesday would not be, and was probably the date of the original disaster.
If we saw a delay tomorrow to Tuesday, we would be on pins and needles Tuesday morning. We might be going to class, or we might be driving frantically to payphones to call in bomb threats. And the only way we might know whether we needed to do that would be to call the NASA switchboard, most likely.
That might well give them the information that their mystery caller was in the College Station area. We weren’t going to drive two hours to place the call, most likely.
Fingers crossed that tomorrow’s update put us at least out to the 30th. The 29th was still too cool for my tastes when following the freezing lows of the 28th.
Monday, January 27, 1986
Darla was out of class. I called her and she said she was actually doing worse, but was hopeful it would let up soon.
No news was no news on Challenger. We checked the print media. Nothing. There was also nothing on the network evening news.
I was getting ready to head to the mall to use their payphones (no cameras was a plus) when Paige ran in, looking excited.
“I ... I think we did it!” she said.
“What happened?”
“CNN just reported that the launch is delayed to February 2nd!”
Angie and Jas followed. Angie had tears in her eyes.
“I ... I can’t believe it!” she said. “We ... maybe ... Paige is right. I think we really did it.”
Cammie and Mel followed.
“Okay,” Cammie said, “Something is up. And ... I’m assuming we don’t know because we shouldn’t know. Which is fine.”
“But we’re really curious,” Mel said.
“Um...” I said. “It’s ... yeah. We made the call to not involve you, mostly because...”
“Because if we somehow got busted, you shouldn’t get busted,” Angie said.
“Yeah. That,” Paige said.
“So...?” Cammie said.
“Um ... can we table this until February 2nd?” Paige said. “Because ... just in case...”
“Nah,” Angie said. “We made it obvious. We should just share it.”
So, we did. Both of them were stunned, but Mel — befitting her mechanical engineering focus — was both horrified and also immediately deeply engaged in pondering the materials, stresses, and everything else involved.
“So, with the delay...?” Cammie said.
“We always allow for multiple possibilities,” Jas said. “I think ... it could be that it worked. That’s the likely conclusion. But it could be that this universe was different and the 28th would never happen.”
“And it could be that freezing screwed the O-rings and no delay will help,” Angie said. “That’s my pessimistic side acting up.”
“But, if the delay was because of us, and not the universe, I imagine there’ll be teams all over the O-rings,” Paige said. “That only makes sense.”
Mel shook her head. “So, pretty much, we’re going from one person alive thanks to you to ... eight?”
“At least,” I said. “It’s probably higher.”
“And no one knows,” she said.
“Curtis. Gene Thomas. That’s two,” I said.
“Well ... true. Curtis ... who knows what he thinks? As for Gene Thomas? I didn’t hear the call, but I have to imagine ... he’s an engineer, right?”
“Pretty sure yes. A facts and figures, hard science kind of guy.”
“Man is going to drive himself crazy trying to figure out how you knew in July that it was going to freeze in Florida in late January,” Mel said.
“Definitely!” Cammie said. “But ... he’s also going to feel like he did the right thing.”
“If it works,” Angie said. “If it still blows up, then...”
“Then it was going to blow up,” I said. “We can’t win them all. Most of the time, we won’t even play the game. This one we played.”
“The ripples,” Mel said. “Seriously! A shuttle disaster. I can just see that going everywhere.”
“Incalculable,” I said. “Imagine the flip-side ripples. The first teacher in space actually in space, instead of dying dramatically on TV.”
“Damn!” Mel said. “That could inspire a whole generation. Or not — kids are pretty cynical — but still...”
“It’ll inspire some,” Cammie said. “It’s ... this ... yeah. I’m glad you didn’t tell us, just because we would have been on pins and needles, too.”
“It’s been good until the last week,” Angie said.
“So ... tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow I’ll probably double-check,” I said. “Just because ... paranoia.”
“Don’t,” Angie said. “Let it be. I know how much you’ll kick yourself, but ... I mean, if they pull in the launch date after moving it out, there’s something just ... meant to be about it.”
“I will grudgingly agree,” I said.
Tuesday, January 28, 1986
The news was entirely quiet. An entire generation — an entire nation — had stood glued to television sets in horror on this day forty-something years ago for me, but also today. In this world, life just went on.
Oh, I couldn’t prove it was today, but it was the only day with freezing temperatures in central Florida for weeks around. This had to be the day. And, now, it wasn’t.
Even if we had failed, it would not be today. We had, presumably, moved the needle. Maybe that was enough.
Darla was out again, but said she was feeling much better and should be back tomorrow. Amy, on the other hand, was feeling great, and was mostly concerned with making sure I didn’t die anytime soon. Since I wasn’t planning to, I hoped that would be something I could accomplish.
Amy did inadvertently remind me that we had totally dropped the ball on planning for the unexpected. I put that on my list of topics for Kyle. He should be over Angie’s bombshell by now.
Probably.
I called Kyle after classes and caught him as he was getting ready to leave. He made it clear that he always had time for me, though.
I went over what we needed, which would be a significant amount of legal work. Wills, powers of attorney (durable and medical), advance directives, and an entire gamut of documents and contracts gay people need that straight people do not.
Technically, Jas and I could wait a year and a half and get much of that, and more, for the cost of a marriage license. In practice, my appendicitis and repeated occasional brushes with death had me thinking we would all be much happier if this was settled now.
Kyle wasn’t the guy for the job. Oh, he could have done it, probably, but he pointed me back to Elizabeth Crawford. She might not be the best either, but this was solidly ‘family law,’ and if she wasn’t the right one, she would know who was.
I should have thought of Elizabeth right away, but Kyle was my go-to guy. I thanked him, then left a message with Elizabeth outlining what we wanted. It wasn’t urgent, certainly. Mostly, what we needed now was either a recommendation or a list of things to bring to her office. The hope was that we could get all of this kicked off on the same trip with the jewelers.
I didn’t use the word ‘fiancée’ or otherwise spoil the proposals. My guess was that Elizabeth was going to be pleased as punch to find out Cammie was getting married. The rest of us, too, but she’d been personally involved in Cammie getting to the point where marriage to Mel was even an option.
Even without Elizabeth, there was no way I would have let the Clarkes win. If I’d had to go on a two-week Thelma and Louise roadtrip with Cammie and play keep-away, I would have done so, consequences (academic or debate-related; Mom and Dad would have been behind me 100%) be damned. Fortunately, none of that had been necessary.
Wednesday, January 29, 1986
Darla was back and feeling much better. As part of that, she was also ... well, frisky. Not just ‘horny,’ but ‘horny and showing it quite a bit.’ At least to me, anyway. I had to tell her twice during our lunch to ‘be a good girl.’
Admittedly, that might have made things worse — I knew what the phrase did to her — but it felt like the right thing to do, anyway.
Part of it was that she wanted more direction on playing with herself. I gave her two tonight, zero tomorrow, and a date Friday. She pouted considerably — and very cutely — about tomorrow, but agreed it would almost certainly make Friday better.
I also warned her that we would be heading to Houston on some weekend soon. And that she shouldn’t expect the Wolf to manage her orgasms most weeks. That got a bit more pouting. It was still quite cute.
I might reverse myself on that one, but I wanted it to remain completely Darla’s decision. And, in this case, explicit, not implied. Some things she could pretend were ‘my idea’ and she was ‘just going along’ — that was fine, and I supported it — but control when I wasn’t even present needed to be something she consciously acknowledged she wanted, not just accepted.
For one thing, she could only ‘grandma’ herself, not me. Well, she could phone or page me, but the principle remained. If she was going to be administering ‘my’ control, she had to be fully on board with it all.
What we were doing on the ‘date’ part of Friday was up in the air, but there would be one. The ‘sex’ part — Darla’s real priority — would involve Jas, but likely less than Darla feared. We weren’t intentionally ‘easing her in,’ though that might work out to be the case, but rather doing what we wanted and thought was best for us, not just her.
On the other hand, the three of us would literally sleep together. That would be totally new for Darla, and I wondered how it would go. That might well be a bigger step than anything else with Jas.
Oh, she’d slept with other girls in bed plenty of times. Just ... not naked, and not after sex. Those make a big difference.
Elizabeth left a message on our machine, but it just said she would call back tomorrow with a recommendation. The delay made sense when she mentioned checking College Station and Bryan lawyers. She had several candidates in Houston, but felt that it would serve our needs much better if we had a lawyer local to us.
She was almost certainly right, really. Elizabeth was still the best for issues with the Clarkes, but Kyle being in Houston might be an annoyance or worse over time. Still, I really liked Kyle and didn’t want to move on. But that was a pre-existing relationship. This new family lawyer would be new, and we could start with someone local to us.
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