Chapter 71

Tina's turn:

"What's so funny?" my husband asked.

"Stoney and Jo are coming back and they're still flyin' that Pitts."

"Did they buy it?"

"She says 'no', but two trips, you gotta wonder."

I giggled. I know the real reason. A combination of scheduling conflicts and weather had kept us from holding the weekend airport social and landing contest.

The social, however, now had a few outside participants. I mean, it was bound to happen. We don't exist in a vacuum. On any given weekend, it's not unusual for the Two Hundred Dollar Hamburger thing to happen. That's where one or more of our air fleet takes off for some distant airport that has a restaurant nearby or <<gasp!>> on the field. We eat lunch, chat with other flyers we might run into, and then fly home.

Somebody mentioned our weekend socials and the next thing you know, emails are flying around the area and our little group is expanding, at least a little bit.

So a couple of days before the Stoney/Jo contingent gets here, we get a couple of big Fed-Ex shipments – their clothes and computers and stuff because they have a total of twenty pounds of luggage allowance in that sporty biplane.

All that's a big enough deal for our aviation-oriented community, but I know a secret. Johanna says SHE can knock Cindy out as the perennial champion of our spot-landing contest.

Cindy's good at it, no doubt. Of course, she has to take another tailwheel-rated licensed pilot with her, but that's ALL of us now. I've gone along for the ride and I don't know how she manages to put the wheel on that white stripe we make across the runway, but she comes in nose-high, hanging on the prop, half flaps, and then all of a sudden there are a bunch of things happening at once and the wheels are on the ground, usually with chalk dust on the tires from the stripe.

It's NOT magic. Flying these things just simply isn't magic. She does something with high RPM's and cutting power and dumping flaps and she knows her plane's trim and its characteristics in that little chunk of the envelope. And Dan's got those windows in the bottom halves of his plane's doors, so I think she's using a visual reference we don't have.

So she wins.

The contest is usually for second place. One old guy from some farm field in Georgia came in one weekend flying a 1946 Aeronca Champ, all sixty-five horsepower and seventy years of steel, wood and fabric, and he ALMOST took the trophy away from her, but his wheels hit further from the center of the stripe. They both were in it. He missed by four inches.

And Jo says she can beat Cindy. I'm imagining the joy at bumping Cindy out of the only thing she actually gets smug about with us. Actually the real joy would be seeing Cindy realize that we all got together in the effort to bump her and if anyone should do it, Johanna was a winning choice.

That's a Sunday afternoon event. Saturday night, though, is the pavilion at Cindy's old home, that RV park further down into Alabama. They've been promised a concert, and so they're getting a concert.

Cindy told me all about how they started out, her, her Dan, Mister Jim and Mizz Ann Hardesty, just playing while Cindy sang a few songs. Then they added Theresa, the Hardestys' daughter, a year younger than Cindy, and then Billy, the Hardesty son, on bass, putting Cindy's Dan on guitar. They got good response, even being invited to play at church events, so I guess they were getting pretty good.

Somewhere along there is where Cindy and I met.

When we established the Community the music went crazy. Johanna and Stoney. Sim. Then Kara. And Kara brought us Bert. And we poked Nikki's Dan and got us a Cajun accordion. (It's only good for one thing: Cajun music, he says) and that got Nikki giggling with her little iron triangle, playing rhythm to her Dan's accordion.

And we've got an actual program printed up, a real plan, which with this bunch, is, as Alan says, only slightly different than no plan at all.

And a big box came into the office yesterday and was signed for, from somebody called Defense RF Applications. Terri and Rachel are excited. I'm trying to hold the lid down, literally, on the box.

"C'mon, Tina-mom. Just let us see the docs," Terri whines. Whines. My nine (Almost TEN!) year old daughter wants to read a sheaf of Xeroxed pages detailing the workings of a ninety-five gigahertz oscillator.

"What do you want to know?" I asked. And I knew I was on shaky ground, just asking. I knew you put some sort of electrical power in somewhere and by some means that shouldn't be that magical to me, 75% of an electrical engineer myself, you get some amount of radio waves out of some part of it. These waves were at ninety-five gigahertz, fifty times the frequency of your microwave oven, and because of this, they only affect the outer portion of the skin.

"We wanna know what the input voltage is," Rachel said, using just exactly the same tone as if she were ordering vials of glitter for a shiny pony – 'I want some pink 'n' some silver 'n' some uhhh ... oh yeah PURPLE! Squeal! Giggle! Titter!'

"We want to know if you fire it by just applying power or if power stays on and there's a trigger input. And we want to know..."

"Beam width," Rachel said.

"Uh-huh," added Terri. "Direct bearing on range and effectiveness."

"Alannnnn," I squealed myownself. "Yourrrrrr daughter..."

"Noooo," he whined. "It's Tuesday. She's YOUR daughter on Tuesdays. What's she want?"

"The docs for that RF module."

"Give 'em to 'er. Tell 'er to scan 'em and use a copy for herself..."

"Themselves," I said. "There are TWO of them."

"Of course there are," he laughed.

"You heard your dad," I said.

"Should I go ask MY dad," Rachel asked me with a grin."

"No. It's not nice to make your dad nervous this early in the morning." I gave 'em the requested paperwork and watched them skip off. I just turned over documentation of a weapons system to a pair of nine year olds. And they skipped.

"Are you getting any studying done?" Alan asked.

"Yeah. And if I catch any grief from that instructor I'm gonna threaten 'im with Terri." That last wasn't an idle threat. When you walk into the engineering department of a major university to deliver a set of papers because 'we really would like to see what your daughter and her friend are doing with this system' and these are people who know full well the implications of the term 'system' as opposed to 'device', then you've left reality in your rear-view mirror.

And when your sweet Super-Mom (Now with added HEBREW mothering skillz!) friend and you deliver two nine year old pixies up the hallowed halls of said edifice to talk with three people holding doctorates in engineering ... and when you show up, a significant number of students see those pixies and think 'Awww! They're comin' to see where their grad-dad works' and those people feel the warmth of human emotions, but another segment of those students see me, whom they KNOW, and I'm connected with Cindy and Nikki, whom they know and fear, like apes regarding the Monolith, and they think 'oh, gee! This is like when the first Bomb was almost as big as a truck and now you can stick one in your carry-on baggage... '

The day after that meeting, I'm walking through the halls of one of the other buildings and I get tagged. I knew it was gonna happen. Just didn't know who was gonna be the first.

"Uh, Tina, you got a minute? My office, after this class?"

You know what'll really upset your fellow young scholars in the Engineering Department? When Doctor Stebbins, the head of said department, addresses you by your first name and asks you to drop by after class.

Okay, maybe I'm not helping my own case very much when I smile all the way into the classroom.

"Tina!" hisses a fellow scholar.

"Yeah, Jay! Wassup!" I smile.

"That was Doctor Stebbins, wasn't it?"

"Oh, yeah," I said, playing it like, 'yeah, again... ' "I think I know what he wants. No big deal."

"Girl," he huffs, "I've been in this program for three and a half years an' 'e's NEVER caught me in the hall an' grinned and said, 'Hey come by my office if you have time.'"

"It's not about ME," I said. By now there's a circle forming.

"Huh?"

"My daughter," I said. Of course, Jay knows about the pTerri-dactyl. Several people do. But a few don't.

"You're too young to have a daughter college-age," Gail says.

"Gail, you don't keep up with the gossip, lady," I said. "You'd be correct only IF you resort to a worn-out definition of 'college-age'. You know Cindy Richards and Nikki Granger, right?"

"Uh, yeah ... but Cindy's what? Sixteen? How old are you?"

"Twenty." I smiled and continued. I love messing with people. "They're still too old." I pulled out a 'pTerridactyl' business card and passed it to her. "Recognize this card?"

"Yeah, but this can't be real..."

"Doctor Stebbins holds a differing viewpoint."

Several comments along the line of 'no SHIT!' and 'Oh, come ON!' result as the teaching assistant tries to gain control of the classroom.

Of course, I have to pay at least SOME attention in class, otherwise I have to resort to "Cindy, this Eng 304 text, what are they looking for here?" and I feel like I've cheated when I do that.

"Not cheating, you know," Cindy told me when I mentioned this to her.

"Huh?"

"How many people get old notebooks and old textbooks with the annotated margins and stuff like that?"

"I know a few..."

"Are you learning this stuff? From me or from the class?"

"Both, really."

She snorted. I find it disturbing to see a pixie snort in derision. "Some of those kids (who were, to a man or woman or any variety in between, at least five years older than her) will happily take the grade and not learn a single thing and will be as happy as clams."

"How happy ARE clams, exactly?" I prodded. Sometimes putting Cindy into 'explanation mode' is an interesting departure.

"Clams. Vestigial brains. Put 'em in a place where the world brings 'em adequate food and carries off their wastes and they can reproduce, they're happy. Some of our fellow 'scholars'."

Nikki spun her chair around. "Oysters. Uglier than clams and stick together tighter."

"Y'all are being harsh to our fellow scholars," I said.

"Which ones?" Cindy laughed, "The ones who can't interpret the meaning of a wedding ring, or the ones who think that somebody voluntarily wearing one doesn't care what it means?" Cindy'd just been hit on in a particularly enthusiastic fashion the previous week.

"Any of 'em," Nikki helped.

"Well, that ONE was fifteen seconds from having a titanium pen barrel sticking out of 'is forehead," Cindy huffed.

Did I say it was a particularly artless and enthusiastic effort? I was walking up to meet Cindy and saw and heard part of it. As long as it remained verbal and not abusive, just artless, I didn't interfere, but I saw him start to reach out and I saw Cindy's left hand moving toward that loop on the shoulder strap of her backpack and I stepped in and said, "Hey, Cindy! Come on! We'll be late."

He had her backed against a wall, and even in a crowd, backing somebody against a wall when that's not where they wish to be is a threatening move. Trouble was, he was threatening to touch Cindy and Cindy was threatening to stop him and he didn't know it.

We walked off quickly, me more or less herding Cindy away. She was shaking.

"You saw that?" she said, her voice measured, soft ... and a bit scary.

"Uh-huh. Why do you think I have my hand inside your elbow?"

"Because you care about me."

"Uh-huh, twice. A million times. You're my sister. And I saw that look on your face."

"What look?" she asked.

"Started with annoyance, then a little fright. Some determination starting to come out."

"He didn't stop. Right there with all those people around, he DIDN'T STOP."

"I saw that."

Another student, a girl, followed us. "What was WITH that guy, Cindy?"