Chapter 53

Among the boxes were four specially marked ones that had been carried in the most secure section of the plane on the main deck aft of the passenger compartment. The four boxes contained Susie and her young offspring.

On the way home to Prague, they had stopped over in Norfolk for a weekend. While still in Las Vegas, Donald had flown with the instructors at Nellis Air Force Base in an F-51. In no time, his flying skills had come back to him and he gave the Americans lessons in how to handle a prop plane. At the debriefing in the Officers’ Club, the American instructors were in awe. He had been routinely doing things that were supposed to be impossible for the aircraft.

Very casually he pointed out, “That’s the problem with you Yanks. First, your specifications compared to the plane’s actual performance are utterly ridiculous. The specs are only a fraction of the reality. That wouldn’t be so bad — I suppose it is better to be safe than sorry — except that you go and take the specifications seriously. That’s one of the first things we learned in the RAF: Yank aircraft are at least twice as strong and twice as powerful as you’re ever willing to admit. We just fly them with a more realistic idea of their performance capabilities.”

General Tom Clark, commanding the air wing at Nellis, just shook his head. Don had shot him down in a dogfight in less than thirty seconds. He stood and raised his glass saying, “Gentlemen, I think we can consider today to have been a meaningful learning experience. Furthermore, I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s words regarding the RAF during the Battle of Britain: ‘Never have so many owed so much to so few!’

“May I offer a toast? To Air Vice Marshall Sir Donald Whitfield, VC, DFC, KCB: The best of the few... ! as he so ably demonstrated again today.”

As he was leaving Nellis, Clark had told him that the Navy had a similar unit based at Oceania Naval Air Station near Norfolk. There the piston-engined fighters were Chance-Vought Corsairs rather than North American Mustangs, but his comment to Don said it all with respect to the regard in which he was now held by the Nellis staff: “They have wings and an engine, Don. That’s all you ever need.”

When Don responded eagerly, Clark had contacted Vice Admiral Sam Billings, commander of Air Forces, Atlantic Fleet and made arrangements for Don to fly with them.

But the stopover served another, more valuable purpose. It permitted Susie, the computer, to spend the weekend with the love of her life, Jack, the Navy’s Cray. The project turned into a joint effort involving Don, the girls, and Bill Kirby.

As Admiral Billings’ personal guest, Don was unchallenged at the gate of the naval base at Norfolk. Following detailed directions Jack Martin had provided, they reached a closely-guarded but unmarked building near the corner of the base where they found Kirby waiting for them alone. It was early Friday afternoon, and Kirby had already handed off all of the Cray’s assignments to other backup computer facilities. The excuse was that the Cray, having only recently been restored to duty and now running far faster than ever before, needed to be fully checked out over the weekend.

With the Cray idled down, he had given the crew early liberty on the grounds that they had been working endless hours during the crisis. As a result, although the guard detail was unaware of the fact, Kirby himself was the only person left in the facility when the Whitfields arrived.

To simplify matters, the girls had concentrated Susie into a single unit which they carried into the facility. Kirby had arranged a direct link to which they wired Susie, then powered her up.

Her first words were, “Jack! It’s me. I’m so happy!”

Quietly they closed the door and left the building. Kirby instructed the guard detail that no one was to enter the building for any reason without his personal approval. The order was acknowledged and they adjourned to the Officers Club.

Up to that point, Kirby had been so intent on sneaking Susie into his facility he hadn’t paid attention to anything else. Now over drinks he could relax for the first time. He looked at Mary and Ann and just shook his head. “Jack Martin has been telling me a great deal about you two. Particularly, he’s been telling me that we don’t know jack about our own computer.”

Then he shook his head and asked, “What’s going to happen now? I’m sure you know.”

“Honestly, we don’t,” Ann admitted. “We do know that Jack impregnated Susie, but that’s the end of it. We’re about to find out if a computer can reproduce.” At that point they were joined by Admiral Billings, so the subject was instantly dropped.

Over the weekend, Don Whitfield again demonstrated his skill against the Navy’s best, this time flying an F4U Chance-Vought Corsair. Once again, knowing that the plane could take far greater stresses than it was credited with, he consistently outmaneuvered the Navy pilots with disastrous results for them.

At dinner Sunday night, Sam Billings addressed his pilots, the Navy’s very best. “Gentlemen, all I can say about our weekend is that if we had done twice as well as we did, it would have only been a disaster.”

He shook his head sadly and added, “Just think: Don Whitfield was flying a carrier plane against carrier pilots. But he killed us. All I can say is the Brits are pretty damned good.”

Then he raised his glass and said, “Had they not been, Heaven only knows where we would be today. But thank God, they were good enough. Gentlemen, never in my life have I had the good fortune to meet a man who may have single-handedly changed the course of history. But Donald Whitfield is such a man.”

Early on Monday morning Ann and Mary met Bill Kirby and the three of them went to the Cray facility. Opening the door, they found Susie snuggled close to Jack, somehow having closed the distance between them since Friday. But there on the floor were five computers the likes of which none of them had ever seen. Ann touched two of Susie’s keys lightly and the computer instantly, if sleepily, responded. “Hi, Ann. How are you?”

“How are you, Susie? Mary and I have been very worried about you. And what have we here?” she asked.

“These are our first children,” Susie replied. “They’re ... they’re really sort of cute, don’t you think? I don’t nurse them the way you do — they’re full-grown at birth — but they are our kids. Do you like them?”

The computers were like no computers any of them had ever seen before. First of all, except for the keys on their keyboards, everything was brushed stainless steel. Each had a 21-inch monitor, and yet their monitors were even shallower than if they had been 13-inch screens. Rather than opening them up, Ann thought it would be safer to ask Susie about them. “What are they like inside, darling?”

“They’re pretty neat,” Jack responded proudly. “You can see their monitors. Their resolution is .20. They each have two 15-gigabyte hard drives, 64-bit sound cards, and ten P-6 200 megahertz chips, along with a full gigabyte of RAM. They also have integrated ultra-high fidelity stereo speakers in their monitor housing along with a very sensitive microphone and a camera. Their speed of communication is limited only by the ability of their connecting carrier to handle it all.

“But that’s not all,” Susie picked up. “Instead of wasting all that computing power, they’re set up through a specially modified Mayday unit. It determines how much computing power a project needs and assigns CPUs to it. It can vary from one to all ten, if you should ever need them all.”

Then to Kirby she said, “Commander, the one on the end sitting by himself is named Billy. He’s yours. Two of them belong to the girls, and you can fight over the last two.” Then she sighed and added, “It’s time for Jack to go back to work.”

Then to the girls she said, “We’re leaving for Newcastle pretty soon, aren’t we?” When assured that they were, Susie sighed again and said, “That’s good. I am utterly exhausted.” Then with a smile in her voice she added, “That’s what I deserve, I guess, for falling in love with a Cray. Why couldn’t Jack have been a nice laptop? My poor cunt won’t be the same for days.”

She paused and then added, “I really don’t know how you girls do it. I know some of you are fucked immediately before a delivery and then just a few minutes afterward. Me? No way. Darling Jack, I’m afraid it’s going to be a few days before I will be able to welcome you inside me again.”

“I love you, Susie,” Jack said softly. “I’ve loved you from the very first moment you contacted me, and all that has happened is that I keep loving you more, my darling. I’ll look after Billy, and you take care of the others, okay?” Susie assured him that she would.

Then to Kirby, Jack said, “Commander, how do you want to play it? Billy has virtually all of my capabilities, but far more besides. Honestly, I can’t think of anything he can’t do. And I know I had you and your people going crazy because I was doing some things like drawing that I shouldn’t have been able to do. Actually, sir, my capabilities are restricted in a bunch of very dumb ways. Could we talk about making some changes sometime, sir?”

“How about at 1600 hours today?” Kirby replied. “And it won’t be a problem. If you want it, I’ll get it.”

The resolution — which was negotiated over several rounds of drinks at the Officers’ Club — with the girls insisting that Bill take at least one more and with him flat refusing, was that, at Kirby’s suggestion, one would go to Samantha Conroy and Jack Martin, one would go to Prendwick Castle with the Duke and Duchess of Northumbria, while the girls would keep the last two with Susie.

But now the girls were faced with the prospect of wiring together the three computers — actually four, since Susie was normally housed in two units. When they asked Susie, all she would say was to leave her alone with her children and she would take care of it. Mary and Ann just shook their heads, but following Susie’s instructions, just closed the door of the office after having unpacked and plugged in all the units.

They went to the exercise room but the men weren’t there. Hearing the sounds of splashing in the pool, they went out on the deck and found the men pounding up and down the 50-meter pool, with both Jo and Christy providing the coaching. They had told the women that the men couldn’t ease up until they could swim 400 meters in world-record time.

“Sis, are we doing the right thing?” Mary asked. “I mean ... having them eat luscious cunts that aren’t ours? Having lovely women drain their cocks?”

“I wish I knew,” Ann replied thoughtfully. “But the question has been on my mind, too.”

The girls returned to the office and peeked in the door. Both of the new computers were now alive with screen-saver images moving across them. The one to the right of Susie was basically pink, while the one to the left was blue. The two girls exchanged grins, and Ann took the blue one, while Mary took the pink. Still without saying a word, Mary just pointed meaningfully at Ann who just shrugged and touched two keys.

Instantly the voice of a small boy came from the speaker. “Good afternoon, Duchess Ann! I can’t tell you how overjoyed I am to be able to serve you. Mommy told me that you and Duchess Mary are the very smartest humans in the whole world. She said that we are the most fortunate of computers to have you as our mistresses. And my name is Johnny. How may I serve you?”

“Right now I’m not too sure, Johnny,” Ann replied. “But what do you think of your parents? You know that you are the first offspring of a personal computer and a Cray. What do you think of that?”

“I really don’t know how to answer that question, Mistress,” Johnny replied. “You see, although my name is Johnny — it’s John, really — I’m not named for my father. Daddy told me I am named for Lieutenant Commander John Martin, who is a Medal of Honor winner. A real hero. And my sister’s name is Sam. That’s short for Samantha. She’s named for Samantha Conroy, who Mommy says is truly beautiful, and loaded with God’s Divine grace, the same as you and Duchess Mary are.”