Chapter 12

Dana’s turn:

I’m lying in bed in that wonderful cusp between awake and asleep at the end of a very good day. Cindy’s done her presentation at NASA, and to my knowledge, they haven’t yet recruited her for a space mission.

Nikki’s been, well, Nikki, and she’s a superstar in her own right, maybe a little more sane than Cindy, but those two are a binary system, both bright in a way I never witnessed until I found her sitting across the table from me and Ed one night at dinner.

And pTerridactyl. In so many ways, Terri has it worse than I did. When Ed showed up in my life, it’s like all of a sudden I knew. I had to be careful, though, to make sure that Ed came to the realization on his own, a little at a time. It was inevitable, though. Terri tells me that Jerry’s inevitable, too. I believe Terri. I worry about Jerry.

Terri doesn’t have Gramma like I did. Gramma didn’t take long to understand what was going on, and in her own way she saw what Ed and I became as a lot better than any consequence of NOT letting us be together.

Terri, on the other hand ... Alan and Tina are great parents, but honestly, how would YOU like to wake up one morning and find that you were the parent of a mind like Terri? Somehow, though, I don’t see them giving her free rein with Jerry like Gramma tacitly did for me and Ed.

For one thing, Terri’s only twelve. Don’t get me started. I’ve seen Terri in front of a conference room full of engineers, programmers and designers, calmly laying out ideas and directions and assigning tasks and setting goals. I’ve seen her dad doing much the same with the 3Sigma staff. I didn’t know that such things were heritable.

What I’m saying is that the reality of Terri is not in line with the numbers on her birth certificate. At one time I thought the same thing about myself. I’ve looked around the community and I see several others of whom that observation would be properly made.

Terri, though ... A part of me leapt with her yesterday when she ran across the parking lot to meet Jerry, the first time she’d seen him in months. I think the poor guy thought he was going to get a hug and a little girl kiss. What she laid on him, a leap up into his arms, wrapping her legs around him just in case he didn’t get the idea, her arms around his neck, and that KISS.

If he hasn’t figured it out by now ... Because she’s done it to him four times.

We let ‘em have a table to themselves both nights. They handled that quite well, the only physical contact being fingertips across a table.

The smiles, his and hers, though, were unmistakable, if you know what to look for. I know what to look for. Been there myself.

I wish she had a couple more years of age. If she was in Cindy’s range. Or mine. Or Nikki’s...

Tina and Alan just can’t turn her loose on Jerry. With Jerry. At Jerry.

Oh, he’s in Houston, she’s in Auburn, Alabama, right?

Only for a limited time. You see, she hired him. Yes, he’s a couple of years younger than the usual ‘fresh out of college’ engineer, but he’s Jerry Stengall, and he seems to fit in with US so well because in so many ways he WAS one of us, at least academically, a clean sweep of every advanced placement class he could get in high school, along with on-line courses, not waiting after high school graduation and spending a summer flopping around before starting college in the fall semester like everybody else. He used every avenue to get to his goal. Yes, he’s a graduate engineer with a bachelor’s of science in mechanical engineering. And he’s only twenty. Or, as Terri puts it so many times – ALMOST twenty-one.

I understand, too, though, that he was more closely aligned to the normal college male’s propensity to dip his wick in a lot of all too available places, but that seemed to stop when he started showing up, first at the greenhouse, then the lab, and finally on the official research project facility.

I honestly don’t know who connected first, but I do know that Terri started asking questions.

Oh, if only she had a few more years ... Just isn’t happening, though.

Jerry’s going to get a moving company to box up his Houston life and bring it to the last available apartment in the 3Sigma complex. He’s going to drive back over here. I assume these to be true. I haven’t heard them specifically addressed. Terri said that part of his hiring included us paying for his relocation.

I’m thinking of the distance from the lab at the old office building to those apartments. I remember how many evenings I skipped across the alcove from Gramma’s apartment to Ed’s.

I’m also thinking of the conversation I’d had with Terri, the ‘How did you know Ed was The One?’ conversation, and I told her of the vast risks posed if she pushed the physical side of her relationship too far. And that too many people knew about her and how she felt for Jerry.

I drifted off to sleep. I dunno, maybe it was a dream, maybe just my imagination – Jerry holding Terri’s hand with a wedding band on it, and she didn’t LOOK eighteen at all.

The next morning is what everybody calls ‘Dawn Patrol’. Cindy’s the pilot. She gets to say. We check out of the hotel, stopping at the front desk early in the morning, Bot-bot tootling happily along with us. Yes, he’s a robot. No, he doesn’t stay deactivated in the back of the rental car. I can only imagine the heartache that would result from him being stolen.

The conversations with observers as we transited the hotel parking lot and lobby several times were memorable.

Now we’re on the way out. A representative of the car rental agency is going to meet us at the airport. When we get there, he’s waiting with a second driver – older fellow, utterly amazed at the fact that four young women (and a robot) are getting ready to fly that airplane out of there.

Terri bounds up the stair into the plane and calls Bot-bot, who follows her. She ties him down while I follow Cindy and Nikki through on the preflight inspection. Since we’re in the middle of that big bit of airspace that surrounds Houston, Cindy’s in the left seat, being pilot in command and Nikki’s in the right seat, helping out with navigation and radio handling and such. Me? I’m itchy, but I get plenty of time in one of the ultralights and I’ve done hours and hours in the little Cessna trainer. Flying is neat. There’s this structure in it, like right now, Cindy winding her way through the restrictions of Houston’s terminal area, and there’s freedom, like when we just point the nose in a direction to see what’s there, or yank and pull the control yoke and feel the G-forces at work, and I really like it.

Not to mention that for this trip, we beat the airfare, we have our own schedule, and there’s scenery we can see a few thousand feet below us.

The conversation runs wild, from impressions of the conference, mostly favorable, to the new engineer for 3Sigma Robotics to flying, to the next direction that research will take.

“And I thought, hey! I’ll be an engineer like my Dan,” Cindy said.

“And now you’re doing robotics and our Dans are doing industrial and utility systems,” Nikki said. “We failed to account for the introduction of a pTerridactyl into our universe.”

Despite the fact that photos and videos have already been posted to the community server and nothing happens without phone calls and texts and Skype sessions, when we announce ourselves twenty minutes out from our home field, wheels get in motion, wheels on ATVs and Tina’s SUV, chosen because it’s Kathy-compliant and it has room in the back for Bot-bot.

I know that Terri has talked with her dad and Tina and because she did it while sitting in the bed next to me, I have a good notion of what they asked, based on her side of the conversation. I wonder if Terri will provide more explicit details of the ‘flying pTerridactyl’ move she put on poor Jerry.

‘Poor Jerry.’ I doubt that is an accurate descriptor. If those two can hang on until something happens and they can marry, he has a tiger by the tail. Of course, Jerry’s no fool, so I think he knows. I only hope he has the fortitude to hold on. I cannot imagine a Terri devastated by the loss of The One.

I think I’ll probably hang around here for a while until Ed can come get me, whether we stay here and be sociable or I force him under threat of bodily harm to take me home and see who ravishes whom.

Terri’s turn:

It’s official. I’m off the end of the scale weird. I’m a whole twelve years old and if I jumped up and down and threw a tiny little tantrum, Auburn would give me a baccalaureate in something technical. I’m all over things there. I’ve delivered formal presentations in big conference rooms at Google and I’ve done presentations in conference rooms at Auburn for military R&D guys who just can’t quite bring themselves to invite me to one national research facility or another.

Last time three of those guys visited, though, they brought two guys from General Dynamics who are very interested. I’m sort of taken aback by this. Basically, the DOD tells General Dynamics ‘we want to pursue this’ and General Dynamics talks with us about money. Cindy and Nikki are always party to these conversations, along with Cindy’s Dan. He spends a bit more time trying to be the adult face of 3Sigma Robotics because, heaven knows, some of those people just don’t feel comfortable seeing a couple of girls not yet twenty – Cindy and Nikki – and a pre-teen – that would be me – negotiating deliverables.

Deliverables. I have delivered an engineer. We ran along pretty good for a while, using the same mechanical platforms, but we lost MY favorite mechanical engineer when he graduated.

He knows how I feel about him. I know, at least I think I know, how he feels about me. I think he’s The One. That’s personal stuff, though, and I’m talking business here.

Jerry’s probably almost the mechanical engineering equivalent of my Tina or Susan, maybe just a little smarter, I don’t know, but Cindy says I could be a bit prejudiced. He does things with exotic composites that have helped us make our robots, starting with Bot-bot, a lot more efficient and capable.