Chapter 2: Circle 101

Nikky was flying around the office wearing a cellphone headset and talking to someone while she arranged notes and papers on Dave’s desk. He waved at her and blew her a kiss. She held up a finger urging him to stand still for a moment as she ended the call.

As Dave heard her end the call, she tore the headset from her head and came into his arms for her morning kiss and hug. “I love you.”

“And I love you, Nikky Thomas. What are you going to do with me today?”

“I’m going to have you meet with JR and Connie for fifteen minutes before the three of you meet the science editor from the New York Times, who will interview you about the Lithium-Thorium battery in the car Connie drove round-trip from here to Baltimore and back with only one overnight charge. He’ll be with you for up to ninety minutes including a photo op with the car.

“Nat is going to join you to also talk about the Aluminum Ion battery he’s been working on that looks even more promising for automotive applications. In the pre-meeting, he’ll tell you about the testing of one of those batteries in a couple of ultralight aircraft. I’m learning to fly one of them and am going to fly home from here in one with an instructor and land at the Circle airport tonight.

“After that, Morse Jacobs is coming to talk about the progress on the factory in the back of this parcel of land. Basically, he thinks you can get it online in six months – equipment and all, but don’t tell him I stole his thunder. The size is limited but everyone will be able to start thinking about manufacturing rather than development. I think he has some other news about the Apple order.”

Dave looked surprised, “That’s great.”

“JR has some contract and sales news, too. We’re seriously over-subscribed right now. We need more manufacturing capacity – MUCH more.”

Dave nodded, “EneRG needs a shitload of money and a lot of leverage to obtain staff and contractors to build manufacturing plants around the country.”

Nikky smiled, “Do you want me to solve the problem?”

Dave looked suspiciously at his aide. “You can do that?”

“I believe so,” Nikky said. “Do you want me to tell you how?”

“No. I do believe in delegating. Just don’t get in over your head and don’t give away too much of the company to anybody.” He shooed her out of his office and picked up the pile of phone messages and mail on his desk.

JR, Nathan, and Connie came in a few minutes later. They briefly talked about how to handle the interview with the reporter from the Times, and then Nikky escorted the man into Dave’s modest office – Horace Whittaker. Introductions were made, and then Dave set the stage for the anecdotal test that EneRG had run with a modified electric car.

Connie talked about how she drove the vehicle up to Baltimore before staying overnight, plugging the car into a regular house outlet, and then driving two more days back to Sarasota, Florida, without any further recharge. The roundtrip was just over two-thousand miles. At that point, any other electric car would have needed at least seven to ten recharge stops that would have taken much longer to do and possibly extended the trip by days.

Whittaker quizzed Connie about her driving habits and speed. She confessed to having a ‘lead foot’ and consistently driving around ten miles per hour over the limit unless traffic limited her progress. JR commented that higher speeds usually meant that batteries were depleted at a more rapid rate, a point that further distinguished the feat.

JR also mentioned that Connie had driven most of the way with the lights on, even during the day, the AC cranked up, and the radio blaring away with local music stations along the route. She mentioned there was also another female and child in the car and that Erin had written a short piece for the local paper on the trip. JR provided him a copy of that article and offered to introduce Erin to Whittaker. He demurred but did take her contact information.

Whittaker got into the properties of the battery at this point, and Dave was on less solid ground there. He deferred to Nat who fielded most of the engineering questions, and talked about the Lithium-Thalium or LTBs that had been put in the car, their weight compared to traditional auto batteries – they were lighter, and then got into the energy density that they could store, and a bit about their charging potential.

Whittaker declared in an awed tone, “These are revolutionary! Why aren’t more people writing about these and knocking down your door?”

Dave shrugged, “They haven’t hit a commercial product yet. I can tell you that very soon they will, and it will be a major marketing point and differentiating feature from others in the market space when it hits.”

Whittaker said, “Cellphones?”

Dave just smiled by way of an answer.

“How soon?”

“Maybe six months. The decision isn’t ours at this point,” JR stated.

“I’d appreciate a call as soon as that’s headed for market. I’ll do a follow-up piece to this one. I can assure you that you’ll get great coverage from what I plan to write. There’s no downside to any of this, as I see it.”

JR chucked, “There’s more coming. I recommend that you plan a trip back here in about six months. We’ll probably have some more ‘show ‘n tell’ for you by then. I’ll also try to get a release from our large customer to talk about their product launch if it hasn’t happened yet.”

Whittaker left and Connie waved goodbye to head back to her workstation in the marketing department.

Dave commented, “Having Connie make that trip was well worth it. You had your finger on the pulse of the nation when you thought that one up.”

JR hummed, “Production capacity, please.”

“Nikky is working at it as we speak and I’m meeting with the young man that’s worrying about making stuff out back in a few minutes. We’re trying to do the equivalent of going from the launch of our first rocket a few hundred feet in the air as Goddard did directly to a moon shot without any intervening steps. I hope we don’t screw this one up.”

JR stood as Dave did. They both headed for the door, but JR put her hand out and stopped him. He came a little closer to her than he expected. He turned to her, and she turned in front of him and kissed him.

The second kiss was much better since he was more attuned to her.

As they parted, he said, “I figure you’ll tell me what that’s about when the time comes?”

JR just gave him an enigmatic smile and walked ahead of him out of the conference room attached to Dave’s office. He could have sworn that there was significantly more wiggle in her posterior region than he’d ever seen.

The course and rap sessions about the history, philosophy, and behavior of the Circle got the shorthand description ‘Circle 101’ as its title because so many of those attending would be college students or recent alums that had courses with similar numerations.

Joan had volunteered to head the effort to pull the class together assisted by Kat and Dave. The first meeting in Joan’s living room one evening rapidly devolved into a beautiful lovemaking session with lots of orgasms. The second and subsequent meetings were more productive.

The small group outlined a curriculum. Joan showed it to a few others at dinner one night and got some further suggestions that were incorporated. One suggestion involved collecting photographs from the early days of the Circle and the founding members as they loosened up.

Dave volunteered to give the first session provided that the others on the committee helped. They agreed to start class on a Wednesday evening after dinner in the core living room.

Dave assembled a few PowerPoint slides and added a raft of photographs from what they laughingly referred to as the ‘old days’. The photos took up most of the slides, but there were a few with talking points on them.

While that was going on, the Circle again accepted an invitation to travel north for a Halloween party at The Meadows in six weeks’ time, so the Circle could join Mark Worthington’s clan for some fun, games, dancing, meals, and partying for a long night.

The first class of Circle 101 had twenty-two ‘students’ in attendance. The couples attending included Chris and Jessica Thomas – Nikky’s parents; Juan and Ann Carlos – Bill Lewis’s ex-wife and her new husband; Adam and Jill Timms – the jet instructor that Alice and Pam used so they could fly Mark’s Citation up to Maine for a week; and then a group of singles: Cookie Carson, Nikky Thomas, Joyce Myers, Gene Volker – Taylor’s brother and lover; and then four of the five fraternity men that some of the girls had seduced at the recent toga party: Alan Lauer, Cord Jenkins, Barry Sykes, and Wes Madden. Elton Cleats would have attended but he had an evening class in his major that night. Some of the existing but newer Circle members also asked to sit in: Athena, Bill, Taylor, Alec, Carolyn, Wolf, Ross, and Gabe.

The room had been arranged classroom style with the seats and portable tables facing a wall with a large projection screen on it. Dave had set up the computer projector just before dinner. Everyone filed in and took seats, looking at him expectantly as they sat. There were mutual smiles all around the room.

Just before he was about to begin, Alice escorted JR – Jean Randolf – from Dave’s work into the room. Dave was surprised and went over to her. He asked, “Are you sure you’re in the right place?”

JR nodded. “Yes. I’ve had some long talks with Nikky and then Alice. I’m here to learn at this point. Other things might happen later – maybe.”

Dave shrugged and went back to his table with the projector. He put the first slide up. It was a panoramic view of the cul de sac where he used to live. His house and Dori’s home were in the view. The next shot was of the parking lot at Knightsbridge Manufacturing where Alice had caught Dori fucking one of the salesmen as she went into work one day. Dave told the short story.

Dave started, “About nine years ago Alice and I lived a couple of doors down from Dori and Ty in this neighborhood. Dori and Alice worked together at Knightsbridge Manufacturing and were best friends, Ty was a manager for BOA, and I worked at Florida Power and Light.”

He shifted to the next slide, which showed four couples posing on someone’s patio. “Besides the four of us that I just mentioned, we were also very close friends with Sean and Kat, and Dev and Wendy. The eight of us met at least once a week to socialize and party.

“By today’s standards, our parties were initially staid, prim, proper, and probably boring. Nonetheless, we had great affection for each other and loved to be together. What I’m about to tell you is my perspective on what happened back then that led to the creation of the Circle. I urge you to talk to some of the others to obtain their perspectives.

“In my work for the power company, we used outside consultants for some of our work. Pam Hodge and I started to work together, she became a frequent guest since she was traveling here from Minnesota on her own, and over time we fell in love with each other.

“Simultaneously, Dori apparently got fed up with how stuck-in-a-rut and how prim and proper Alice and I were. We were disgustingly regimented, including about our sex lives. There was no spontaneity, and what we did do adhered to some rules we never spoke about or chose, but just unfolded unconsciously over time.

“After being discovered getting her morning fuck in the company parking lot, Dori revealed much about her life to Alice, and embarked on a campaign to get her – and through her me – to loosen up. Those words – ‘Loosening Up’ – became a hallmark phrase for us, and ultimately led to our turning our deep affection for Pam into a loving physical relationship.

“Many of the ‘Loosening Up’ challenges that Dori gave Alice led us in the direction of sex with others we loved. Our weekends with our friends became increasingly physical, and over several months even became intimate. I led the way in our family mainly because I was unsure how I’d react to seeing or even knowing about Alice making love with another man.

“At Alice’s urging – and spurred on by Dori – I became sexually intimate with Pam and then the other women in our social group. We were often together, as a group, at someone’s home, and usually outside around a pool. Eventually, I felt I was ready and urged Alice to engage in sex, and she did that first time with Dev.

“I can remember every detail of watching her that first night as she engaged in extramarital sex with him, and then Sean and Ty. I was making love to Dori for the first time that night. All the bad things that I’d been fearing would happen evaporated and left us with good feelings and love for everyone concerned.

“To some people, all we’d started to do was become swingers. We all felt there was so much more to it because of the genuine love we felt for each other. Personally, I got to the point where I could have been married to any of the other women, although I wouldn’t have wanted to lose Alice – and by that point Pam.”