Chapter 5: Hammer Time

I spent a good bit of time Friday evening and Saturday morning babbling to Serenity about my date. She seemed amused, and I hoped that she wouldn't tease me too much over my behavior.

While I babbled, we worked, both in the simulator and out of it, and by Saturday afternoon Serenity had seen enough.

"Okay Iron Man, I think its time we let you try and take a swing at something. You game?"

"We're going to fight?" Serenity only laughed, a rude snort of a laugh too.

"You would be more likely to hurt yourself than to hurt me," She said with a little more seriousness. "No, you're going to do some standing punches against something a little more predicatable, okay?"

So I got to punch things. Specifically, I got to punch a curious construction made of a series of truck axles mounted on swivels, each on top of a heavy pole. The pole heights varied so that some punches were chest high, some head high, and some low, in what would have been the bread basket if I'd been punching at another copy of my suit.

The swivels were obviously built with different levels of resistance, and I could hear Serenity in my ears as I worked.

"Feel the punches landing? That's feedback from the suit. It's letting you know how much resistance your blow has encountered. That should allow you to decide whether you need to ramp up the power, or dial it down, as the situation demands."

I did feel it too. I felt the weight of the axles, saw the speed with which the axles spun on their swivels, and after a dozen punches, tried my first one-two punch, trying to connect with the other wheel housing as it spun towards me.

I missed gloriously. My only consolation was that I didn't spin myself into the ground when I did.

"Your own reflexes betrayed you there," Came Serenity's voice. "You threw that second punch with the timing your own body would have used, and it was too slow."

I visualized it in my head for a moment, and could see that it wasn't a matter of speed, it was simple mechanics. I was wielding a much longer mechanical lever, with a much different moment of force. As my mind shifted into that sort of thinking, Serenity interrupted.

"If you begin to think of this as an equation to solve, you loose the genius of it. The beauty of this design, and the way it is implemented is that you don't have to think about those things." She paused then, motioning me back to my most recent target. "Its just going to take practice and time."

By the time I was feeling some confidence in my ability to throw a one-two combination, we were done with punching for the day. We ate lunch and then I got to do a little kindergarten gymnastics. Forward rolls, jumps, hops and squats. Cartwheels and handsprings would have to come later.

Saturday night I got two presents from Serenity. I got an odd telephone that I could carry with me. If the phone in my apartment rang while I was out, the little pocket phone would ring and I could answer it.

"You'll have the same capability built into the suit, but most of the time when you're in the suit, Wing will be your answering service when you're busy. She'll take calls just like an answering service would."

I got to play with it a little, made easier by the second gift, an interestingly odd goo that got squirted onto my bedroom door jam like caulking a boat. When it was done, I had a permanent passage between the Iron Man fortress and my apartment. Instantaneous, in-the-blink-of-an-eye transportation between the two.

"We'll have to see what we can do for the two weeks you're in Hartford," Serenity told me.

Saturday night I called Becka and we talked for over an hour. Sunday was a study day and again I spent the day with my nose buried in the technical manuals. Some of the manuals seemed to be getting written as we worked. The stuff dealing with the fusion power core in particular seemed to have been recently written and designed to explain the unexplainable in layman's terms. It was kind of like discovering that your Indy 500 race car came with a Harley Davidson manual that had been heavily edited with white out and a marking pen. I paid attention to what were the obvious alterations and insertions, knowing that what I was really learning here was that if that part of the suit broke, I wouldn't be able to fix it. For minor things, the manual gave step-by-step instructions on what to do to correct the problem. The key was going to be really knowing the steps for the things I could do.

Fortunately, the power core itself seemed almost foolproof and unbreakable. It, like the pocket phone and the transporting door goop, were things I was never going to be able to duplicate on my own. It made me wonder how long term Serenity saw her commitment. A question I meant to ask her when I was a little closer to being ready to become Iron Man publicly.

Serenity and I ate dinner together at the Fortress and then I walked through my new doorway and into the bedroom of my apartment. Her parting words, just before I did were encouraging.

"You did well this weekend. I think that next week we're going to go out into the desert and do a little running and jumping. Some serious running and jumping."

With a promise like that, it was a good thing I had Becka to get me refocused on the rest of my life come Monday morning. Actually, she should have come first as far as that went, but I had a letter sitting on my desk when I got in. It was a company envelope, the kind you get when someone at corporate headquarters has something important to share with everyone, such as a pay freeze, or an increase in our insurance deductible. In this case, I didn't see its duplicate on anyone else's desk.

I opened the envelope and found a letter from the corporate personnel office, an itinerary for the training in Hartford, and a business card for Keith Graham, the corporate liaison who would be our point of contact in Hartford. The letter encouraged me to contact Mr. Graham if I had any questions in advance of the training. We were now officially scheduled to start the session two weeks from today.

I checked my in basket for the day, even though I knew what my schedule looked like. Monday's were not the best days to make cold calls, so I usually limited myself to follow-up calls and requests-for-contact calls.

I had a pretty small return list, and the RFC list was long only because everyone tended to route them to me because they knew I didn't mind doing them. Only two of the follow-ups were marked as urgent, so I called them right away, and those conversations took up the first half hour of my morning. The second call was the longest, with a poor retiree who was complaining that his delivery had stopped coming. I checked my copies of the paid up sheets and couldn't find him on it. When I told him this, he said he should still have two months credit, because he had suspended his delivery while he had been in Florida for the winter, and he wasn't going to pay twice for anything.