Chapter 7

We spent two hours sipping on drinks, dancing, and talking. The drinks were just enough to relax us, without us getting drunk. The dancing was slow and intimate, with us both holding each other close. The feeling of the physical contact between us led to us suppressing our sexual desires that were amplified by our personal attraction. At a couple of points, I think we would have been in bed with each other if a bed was readily available. Our conversations took place at our table with each of us keeping enough distance between us until our level of arousal faded to a manageable level. We talked about ourselves and our general feelings about relationships, politics, religion, and a few personal topics.

Charles didn’t make an appearance that night. We left fairly early, so I could drop Mary off at her apartment before the midnight hour. She had to go to work in the morning and a really late night would not be good for her. She explained that she would like for me to come in for a while, but she really needed to go to bed and sleep. I accepted her comment at face value. After we kissed each other goodnight, she went in and shut the door, while I floated back to my car. My status as a single man was definitely at risk.

When I arrived at my hotel, I called Tom to let him know that I was back. He had asked me to call regardless of how late it was when I returned.

“Evening, Tom, did I wake you up?”

“No, I was just watching a movie on the holo. How did your evening with Mary go?

“Nice, Tom. Supper was great, and we had a lot of fun dancing and talking. I don’t think either of us is ready to commit to being more than just friends right now. However, I think that ‘more’ is a strong possibility in the near future.”

“Well, I knew you were leaning that way, Sam. It also sounds like there may be some interest on Mary’s part also. Don’t push her too hard, Sam. She likes to take her time in starting a relationship, so she can see where the relationship is going before she dedicates herself to one person. I think she was close to fully committing to Charles, but she started seeing him for what he is before she was totally committed.”

“I sort of got that impression, Tom. We talked about a wide range of things over drinks tonight. We didn’t agree about everything, but the areas we strongly disagreed on were not critical to a relationship.

“As far as Charles goes, I think we should just drop it. It seems like Mary is done with him, which is what we wanted to accomplish. I think she is capable of handling anything he might do to get her back as his girlfriend.”

“You are undoubtedly right, Sam. However, I think we should keep looking into his background in case something we aren’t expecting happens.”

“Did you have something specific in mind, Tom?”

“No. It’s just that people like Charles have a history that they usually want to keep hidden. You remember what Amy said about him claiming to be a member of the Archer Family. For some reason, that bothers me. He may be just saying that to impress people, but if there is something more to those claims, I would like to know what is going on. We only know what he told you about the problems he is having at work. I think whatever actually happened was related to his claiming to be an Archer Family member, but I can’t figure out how the two things might be related.

“Oh, well. I think I will just put my concerns down to paranoia for now. But ... if I find out something that may be a problem for Mary, I’ll let you know.”

“Okay. Night, Tom, I’ll see you downstairs at eight for breakfast.”

“Sounds good to me, Sam. We can talk more then.”

The next morning Tom and I started our breakfast conversation, which quickly evolved into him giving me a description of the comm call he received from Mary this morning.

“Morning, Tom. Did you sleep good?”

“Real good until a couple of hours ago. Mary called and we are in trouble with her.”

“Oh, what did she say?”

“Well to the best of my recollection, our conversation went like this:

“And that is what I woke up to this morning, Sam.”

“Oh, boy. After I left last night, she must have started thinking about my accidentally running into Charles. I know you said she is smart, and she must be very smart to reach the conclusion that she did that quickly. I didn’t really think she would make the connection.

“Tom, my Dad has always told me that in any type of relationship between two people, it was important to be honest with each other. I felt like I’d gone behind Mary’s back. We had been talking about Charles coming into the club she took me to, so it only seemed right for me to tell her about what I did in order to be honest with her before she found out from Charles. I didn’t mention you or our planning that encounter, and I was hoping she wouldn’t come up with four by putting two and two together.

“I’m sort of glad she intends to collect on whatever it is she feels I owe her, Tom.”

“Oh! Why would you think that, Sam?”

“Well that means she knows what was going on, and she is still interested in seeing me. I will have some explaining to do, but I think she will forgive the both of us for we had her best interests at heart.”

“Sam, you are using male logic. That doesn’t apply to a woman like Mary. It won’t matter why we were doing what we did. All she will think about for the next month or so is we did something she told us she didn’t want us to do. Mary is going to make us pay for doing what she told us not to do, and then she will collect on what she feels we owe her. And, you my friend are going to be the closest to her, so you will get the majority of the shit she gives us. I plan to stay away from her for a while until she calms down. You on the other hand don’t have that choice if you want to continue seeing her.”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of it that way. What you said reminds me of the times my mom got upset with my dad. What made it worse for him was he was out fishing most of the time, so Mom just sat at home building up a head of steam until he came home. She would really let him have it then. I remember one time it took him two fishing trips before she calmed down.”

“You’re lucky, Sam. I don’t think Mary will stay mad at us that long. It should blow over in a month or so. Maybe sooner if you and she see a lot of each other.”

“Well, since we can’t work on our Charles project, what do you want to do today?”

“What do you mean we can’t work on the Charles project?”

“Well, Mary will be very angry with us if we intrude on her again, and I think we should avoid that at all costs.”

“That’s true, Sam. However, Mary ended that relationship from the sounds of it. I’m still concerned about what might happen to her because she has been involved with him. So the way I see it, we can continue looking into his background. That isn’t intruding in what happens between her and Charles. Besides, what we did do didn’t involve coming between them. Yes, I know that is a rationalization for what we did, but it also happens to be true.

“Now what I’m suggesting we do is, for me to just ask a few questions about Charles. It may be best for your relationship with Mary if you aren’t with me when I ask those questions. But I will tell you what I find out, and then you can use your computer to check the MultiNet for whatever you can find out about what I come up with about Charles. If nothing comes of our looking into Charles’s background, then we don’t have to mention it to Mary. However, if we do come up with something that might be harmful to her, then we will decide on what to do then. How does that sound to you?”

“Seems like a good idea, but if Mary asks me if we dropped it, I’m going to tell her the truth. She may not like you looking into Charles’s background, but at this point their relationship is over. I will be sure to tell her that we won’t step into her handling any final details of ending their relationship, unless she asks us for help. I will also let her know that we are worried about what might happen to her if Charles was into something illegal, and that is why you are looking into his background.

The next morning, Mary was at work, and Tom was out asking questions.

I decided to work on our plan for creating our new business. I accessed the map of Shilling that I had been marking up with hopping routes and the latest census data for Shilling, which I had downloaded from the Multinet. Downloading data from the Multinet can take a long time, when the source files are on a server in a different Universe. Twixt data link transmissions can sometimes take a day or longer to complete, so I always save any off-planet files that I download.

Tom and I had come up with the idea for a new market in the field of hopping that apparently no one had considered. We started out with the idea of providing a private shuttle service for high profile people to wherever they needed to go. As a general rule, D-Hoppers worked for the government, commercial businesses, or themselves. Almost all of their professional hopping was between planets in the same universe or between two universes.

Then our idea morphed into a public shuttle service between the bedroom communities and major population centers of Shilling. Tom and I researched our idea and we couldn’t find any business that made hops between cities on the same planet. For some reason, all transportation between population centers was by Transfer Tube. A Transfer Tube System is a high-speed train that travels in an underground tube. In addition to the train’s propulsion system, air is sucked out of the tunnel from in front of the train and blown back into the tunnel immediately behind the train. The air vents and fans are all computer controlled, and the timing has to be ‘just so’ for the train to reach its maximum speed.

We knew that once we began our business, there would be numerous new businesses doing the same thing we would be doing. We knew we would lose a portion of our market share, but hopefully, we would be able to move fast enough to capture the majority of the business on Shilling, before the other businesses started cutting into the market. If we moved fast enough when we started the business, we might even be able to limit competition on Shilling. After all, why compete with us when it would be far simpler to start a similar business on another planet where there was no competition.

The Multiverse Government was located in Timson, which was the largest city on Shilling. That is where Tom and I planned to locate the hub of our hopping network. From Timson, we defined primary hopping routes between all of the major cities on Shilling. We also had secondary feeder routes from the major cities to many of the medium-sized cities, which were mostly bedroom communities that were large enough to warrant a route. We didn’t worry about limiting the secondary routes to cities that were close to the major cities. A zero-universe hop could go anywhere on the planet, so we focused on distributing the number of routes equally between Timson and our major city destinations. Hopefully, we could locate our stops within easy walking distance of the cities’ Transfer Tube stations. If not, we may have to offer hover bus shuttle service between the Transfer stations and our locations.

Just before we arrived on Kottel, Tom pointed out that a zero-universe hop could go to another planet within the Lockwar Universe. He said we could capitalize on that by also setting up passenger transport terminals on neighboring planets. So today I was looking for planets within the Lockwar Universe that had major population centers that do business with Shilling. Hopefully, the data I needed would be available on Kottel.

I defined my search criteria, submitted separate requests for the worlds we might be interested in doing business, and started waiting for responses to the requests. While waiting for the first response, I thought about the different levels of stress imposed on a hopper by the type of hop he made, which is what would make our business possible.

When I was at the D-Hopping University, our training had been focused on hopping between universes and those types of hops are what the public and we D-Hoppers usually think of when thinking about hopping. But there are other types of hops.

A D-Hopper is rated on maximum hop distance and on Hop Recovery Time. People in general and almost all D-Hoppers have brainwashed themselves into believing that a hopper always needs a long rest after making a hop. That is true when hopping between universes, but not exactly true when hopping within a universe. Hopping between planets within a universe is far less taxing than hopping between universes. Almost no one thinks about hopping from point-to-point on the same planet, which is even less taxing than hopping between planets within the same universe. What that means in energy expenditure is, point-to-point hops on a planet only require about fifteen percent of the energy expended when hopping between universes, and planet-to-planet hops within a universe require about forty percent of the energy expended when hopping between universes.

For Tom and me, we can staff our business with hoppers who have a one-universe Hop Rating and a one-hour Recovery Time, which will reduce labor costs significantly. Such a hopper will only need about twenty minutes maximum for recovery time for a point-to-point hop on Shilling and about thirty-five minutes for a planet-to-planet hop. We won’t push it if someone feels they need a longer recovery period, but that should be the average.

Ahh, the data from my first search request came back; the data from the other requests should be here shortly. I had requested a listing of all the Twixt messages made between businesses on Shilling and the businesses located on the other planets within the Lockwar Universe that we were interested in, during the past week. The data I requested each Twixt included the Twixt Reference Number, the business and location initiating the Twixt, and the Twixt’s destination and recipient, but not the content of the messages. I knew it would be a long listing, but the number of Twixt messages was truly amazing. It was going to take days to break this data and the data from the other requests down into meaningful numbers. I’m just glad that I didn’t ask for a month of data.

I really wasn’t expecting the sheer volume of Twixt messages sent between Shilling and the other planets. It took me several minutes to figure out how to break this much data down into meaningful segments. I decided to keep the files as multiple files, one file for each of the planets that did business with Shilling, instead of merging the files into a single file. I ended up with nineteen files, and most of those files were very large. My main interest was how many hopping terminals would be needed on each planet. So I sorted each of the planetary files according to the city that the Twixt was sent to with a sub-sort of where the Twixt came from. The files were still too large to handle easily, so I started breaking them down into one file for each city. That was going to be a lot of files, but I could see a pattern starting to develop.

I decided that once I had all of the files created, I would create a database listing each planet, city, business, and the number of Twixts sent and received by the businesses. Then I would need to download maps of the planets and plot the cities on the map. This was going to take days to complete and I would definitely need Tom’s help. About that time, Tom came home for lunch.

We went over what I had worked on before we ate lunch. During lunch, Tom told me Charles Stafford had a gossipy neighbor. The guy didn’t like Charles and when Tom explained his situation with Mary, the guy unloaded everything he could think of, about Charles. It was a lot and most of it was bad. Tom had surreptitiously recorded everything that he had been told on his pocket recorder, so we listened to the recording.

Tom said, “According to the neighbor, last week Charles told him that Mary had talked him into doing something at work, and it backfired. Now Mary wants nothing to do with him.”

“Tom, it sounds like Charles is thinking of blaming the mess he is in, on Mary.”

“I know. That is what I thought when I heard the neighbor’s story.”

“Charles has to be crazy, Tom. There is no way for him to get away with something like that. If Merchon believes him and files charges against Mary, all she has to do tell the police she was not a part of his plan. Their veracity tester will tell them she is telling the truth.”

“I know, Sam. That is what is really worrying me. Charles must know she can disprove his story that way. The only way to get away with something like what he seems to be planning is for Mary not to be around to tell her side of the story. I’m going to comm Mary after lunch and set up a time this evening for us to talk with her.”

It took a few moments for what Tom had meant to penetrate my mind. I was dumbfounded by the thought that Charles might be planning to kill Mary.

After we finished lunch, Tom made his comm call to Mary. She invited the two of us to come for supper at her place, and Tom volunteered to bring a couple of bottles of wine. She let him know the vintage she would prefer. Then Tom helped me finish breaking down the Twixt data I collected into a file for each city on each of the planets. Once that was done, we started to build our database. That was actually less work than breaking the data into segments. We had to stop before we finished, for we needed to get cleaned up to go see Mary. We decided to start analyzing the files for each planet tomorrow, and once each file was analyzed, we could create a map of where we could locate our hopping stations on that planet.

The analysis of each city’s data was going to be a lot of work. We may know the names of the companies that sent the Twixts and who received them, but we knew nothing about their businesses. Many of those companies may not need to travel between planets to do business. However, if we were also providing freight service, then they may want to do business with us if our rates were lower than our competitors. Tom and I believed that what we made on the passenger service would more than pay our bills, and what we made on the freight service would be pure profit. If things worked out that way, we could offer very low freight rates.

Mary took off from work an hour early, so she would have plenty of time to prepare supper. We stopped at a wine store on the way to her place, and bought three bottles of the wine Mary preferred. We arrived earlier than expected and when we rang her door chimes, I noticed Amy Stafford looking at us around the edge of her window curtains. She gave me a knowing smile; she and Mary were probably talking about Tom and me.

As the door opened, Mary said, “Come on in. Supper will be ready in about twenty minutes. This wine needs to be cold to bring out the flavors, so I’ll put it in the bottle chiller.” Tom followed Mary into the kitchen as I closed the front door.

I could hear Mary tell Tom to go sit in the front room with me, while she finished fixing supper. Twenty minutes later, Mary called out to Tom, “Tom, can you come pour the wine?”

“Sure. Where do you keep the wine glasses?”

“They are in the sideboard, Tom. Use the glasses with stems that have the large bowls.”

Supper was excellent. Mary served us fresh steamed Shrum, which is a fish native to Kottle. It has white flesh that has a moderately strong, but pleasant flavor. Accompanying the main dish was a leafy salad and an assortment of the local fresh vegetables. Some were boiled, and others sautéed in butter. The food was so good that Tom and I overate, while Mary just smiled at us.

When I look back now on her smile, I’m fairly sure Mary had planned the meal, to show me how good of a cook she was. Earlier I said she wasn’t fishing, but I may have been wrong about that. It’s now seemed like she knew I was hooked, and she was starting to reel me in.

Tom and I had decided to defer mention of our suspicions about Charles plotting to murder Mary until after supper. Our supper conversation was mainly about the progress we were making in setting up our business. The wine and good food placed all three of us in a relaxed mellow mood.

As we sat in the front room after supper sipping on the last of the second bottle of wine, Tom carefully introduced the topic we wanted to discuss. I had decided to stay out of the conversation as much as possible. I was just there for support if needed.

Tom said, “Mary, you know I love you, and am concerned about your welfare. After Sam and my last efforts regarding your affairs, I agreed to not interfere in your relationship with Charles. However, I didn’t agree to stop looking into his background.”