by Laer Carroll
"I don't rush into anything this important. I'm enormously flattered, and interested, and will give it serious consideration."
"Want you right away. Rather have you onboard and happy, though. Take your time. Meanwhile, have a good tour and I'll see you at the party tonight. A bit of warning. It'll get pretty raucous later, though not enough to upset the kiddies. Tonight we're celebrating what we think of as a family event. Culmination of years of work and sacrifice."
He rose, shook their hands all around, and escorted them out into the waiting room area. There he introduced her to several executives who came out of the several smaller offices just off the room, most greying men but one woman who looked as if she fully belonged with the other execs—as well she should, being the second in command of Space Island.
Mission Control: Landing was a large room elsewhere in the building with several semicircular rows of chairs before consoles, familiar the world over from the several national space organizations with launch facilities.
It was sparsely populated but busy for all that.
"Our main job, of course, is during landing," said the chunky man in a white shirt and tie over rumpled pants. He looked as if he'd be more at home beating up other gangsters, but Attilio Horowitz was a double doctor in math and electrical engineering.
He pointed at a large flat TV screen on the wall at the focus of the arcs of chairs. It showed the black background of space. In its center was an image of the Earth. Around it was a pale yellow circle displaying the roughly circular motion of the Moon around the mother planet. Smaller blank screens were positioned on each side.
"That will display the overall view, the smaller screens details echoed from these consoles."
He patted the flat upright computer screen at the desk beside which they were standing, then leaned over and hit a single button on the console. A red X appeared straddling the yellow Moon-orbit line a third of the way ahead of the Moon.
"This is from our first commercial mission. It returned from the Lagrange 4 point." He looked at her questioningly.
"I've a double bachelors in physics and chemistry. I needed them to prepare for my masters in marine biology. I understand the background."
A display began to animate on the main screen. A green X separated from the red X and began spiraling inward, trailing a curved line behind.
"This is moving several times faster than real-time and here—" He pressed the button again. The scene on the large screen jumped to show Earth larger and the green X closer to it.
"—here is where it hits the atmosphere, slows, and skips back out into space." The result was a wavy shrinking spiral around the Earth.
Dr. Horowitz continued with a compressed overview to the point where the spaceship had slowed enough to use its wings to lower to a splashdown in the Caribbean a couple of hundred miles westward.
Then a video replaced the space display. It showed the spaceship, looking like an arrowhead with its dart-shaped body and fat delta wings, from a chase plane above it and the ocean. Twin vapor trails streamed behind the spaceship from the tips of the wings.
This video was followed by one from a ship on the ocean surface, catching the last moments of flight and the splashdown. The spaceship actually skied along on its flat wedge-shaped bottom for quite a distance.
"I saw this on the news, Doctor."
Horowitz jerked slightly and smiled at her. "Sorry. We actually only saw it then ourselves. We were too busy with numerical displays and coordinating efforts. This is the first time I've seen the full-resolution images."
"I understand, but I want to see the spaceship before a meeting I have in, ah, an hour's time."
"Quite. Quite."
He switched off the displays and pulled a comic book from somewhere.
"Ah, would you autograph this for my daughter?"
She took it and reached under her jacket for a pen but was forestalled by the engineer, who gave her one.
She glanced at the cover to find a good spot for an autograph. It showed her swinging out of a tree grasping a vine with one hand, wearing a snow-white skin-tight jungle outfit and white boots. The contrast with reality always amused her. She'd not swung on vines, though she had jumped thirty or forty feet into and out of trees. And she'd been completely naked and her skin 'changed to camouflage colors, mostly dull but with some triangular red, orange, and purple spots.
The large white JUNGLE JANE title made a good spot for her looping scrawled SYLVY.
"Thank you, Doctor. My daughter has studied your life exhaustively and plans to be just like you."
"God forbid! I expect you'll exert some tactful common sense."
He said dryly, "Since she's seven I expect she's safe from foolishness for a good long while."
"I hope so. I had to jerk my biographer around twice to keep in the bare mention of safe practices, and then threaten the publisher with a law suit to get them put back in."
More long halls and several twists and turns brought Sylvia and the two men out onto an echoing metal balcony above and to the side of the docking bay. The bay was the size of a soccer field filled with water. In the center floated the spaceship.
Close up the slightly scorched-looking silver arrowhead was overwhelming. It made her think of a sleeping whale the size of Leviathan. She wanted to shed her clothes and dive in and swim around it. The image of her escorts' response to those actions made her chuckle.
"What?" said the PR man while the assistant looked on puzzled.
"It makes me think of a giant whale."
"Oh."
Apparently giant whales did not strike the men as comical.
They had to take stairs down to an openwork metal catwalk raised a couple feet above the spaceship and walk on it above the pool of water. At intervals bridges crossed over the back of the ship. Mid-afternoon of the day of the splashdown celebration no one was about.
At the hatchway into the spaceship Sylvia had a pleasant surprise. Three men in blue space pilot coveralls awaited her. She recognized the lead astropilot from the spaceship and guessed the other two were 'pilots also.
The young lead pilot stepped forward to shake her hand. "Dr. Connelly, Jason Bardi, senior pilot." He introduced the other two men. The younger was the spaceship copilot. The third and older man was the one she'd come to interview—the pilot from the party from four years back where she had been drugged, kidnapped, and later murdered.
"I figured I'd come and personally escort you, Dr.," said the older 'pilot, Victorio Villoldo, "before we spoke together."
"I appreciate it much, Captain Villoldo."
Villoldo led the way into the spaceship and led the tour but not without plenty of help from the two younger pilots who were not about to let a beautiful blond be monopolized by another man. She got a quick tour of the cargo hold and large self-contained passenger sections with three rows of seats, each of which was well-cushioned and ‑padded and had its own air supply and emergency beacon in case of a crash.
She also got to sit in the pilot's seat and have three good-looking men leaning over her and vying for her attention. The seat was a bit snug for a 5'10" woman with generous bones and solid though well-padded muscles.
The tour over, the group retired to the large cafeteria and selected a corner of the room with a big round table surrounded by metal chairs topped with brightly colored plastic seats.
Everyone got drinks and the PR man managed to convince or bribe a cook or some such in the back to get him a couple of big pastries. Sylvia sat sipping her carbonated soft drink, wondering idly how her magic/supertech purity filter passed complex molecules that were safe and rejected those which were poisonous. Would it classify artificial sweetener poison if she didn't prefer sugar?
The last of the men sat down at the table. "Now, what was it you wanted to see me about, Doctor?"
"Captain Villoldo—"
"Perhaps you'd feel comfortable if you'd call me Victorio."
"Sylvy."
"Jason!" said o
ne of other space pilots.
"Carlitos, Sylvy!"
Her two escorts maintained a dignified silence.
She looked around the table and hesitated. "It's a personal matter. Nothing embarrassing. But I wonder if the rest of you really want to waste your time on something boring."
The two other pilots weren't about to abandon a beautiful woman, and the two escorts were duty bound not to.
"Well, do you remember, Victorio, four years ago when you brought a test flight down here and had a big party in one of the clubs?"
He nodded.
"One of the men in your party, maybe a hanger-on, stole an heirloom from me. It was a necklace with a cameo of my grandmother on it. The clasp came loose and the necklace was picked up by one of the men. He started to hand it to me when I got very sick. Oh, 'stole' is the wrong word. He just kept it when I went to the hospital. Then it was a month before I was well enough to look him up, and my memory was poor."
"You got sick?" The assistant leaned forward, concerned. "Were you, ahh...?" He avoided her gaze.
Sylvia pretended not to understand. Then to understand. She raised her hands before her face for a moment, wishing her vaunted powers could make her seem to blush. But no warmth washed her face.
"You think—! Oh, no, nobody harmed me. Except a strange intestinal virus. Other people from the club got sick..."
The astropilot looked thoughtful. "You know, I remember someone getting sick. I just thought she'd had too much to drink..."
He looked at her closely for moments, then slowly nodded his head. "It was you. You've changed. Not your face..."
A moment's scrutiny more before he nodded again.
"You grew since then, and put on muscle."
"I had a late growth spurt. And when I was recovering from my illness I got hooked on physical therapy and body building. Feel that muscle."
She bent her arm, relaxing her muscles as much as she could. Even relaxed they were hard slabs which felt as if she was tensing them the way body builder's did.
The two young men felt her bicep and agreed she had done a good job. Carlitos, the copilot, who had a short, straight black pencil mustache, said, "Hey, I remember. You're the Everglades Champ! No wonder you won, with muscles like that."
The other 'pilot looked at him. "It's skill that wins those matches."
They turned to look at Captain Villoldo.
He smiled. "I don't remember actually seeing you. But my future wife was there that night and she took pictures. I know she still has them. I can't give you names, but I can give you photos."
Her face fell. "And those pictures are home."
"And home has been here for the last two years! She can dig the pictures out of the den tonight."
"Could we meet at the party tonight?"
He could indeed and they set a time and place.
Chapter 8 - Party
The hotel on Space Island was sized for the future like everything else there and was over-large for the present. It seemed near-abandoned and the skeleton crew was even more skeletal when her two escorts helped her get checked in. Half of the hotel staff were getting ready to go to the island-wide party planned for the evening. The other half were finishing preparations for the part of the party to be held at the hotel.
"We wanted the Presidential Suite on the top floor for you, but it's still being worked on. I hope this will do."
The PR man was too serious to be joking, but he might well have been. One fourth of the eighth, next-to-top, floor was all hers and it was a large suite.
She entered the bedroom, crossed to the king-sized bed, dropped her go-bag onto it. Then she retraced her steps and went to a corner of the living room. There two huge picture windows butted together. One window looked south where she could see the spaceship hangar standing tall against the southern tail of Space Island. The other looked west toward the approaching sunset. Fluffy clouds westward were turning gold and acquiring faint purple highlights.
"I think this will do." She turned back and approached the two men. She shook hands with both of them.
"Thank you for an excellent job, gentlemen. Perhaps I'll see you at the party tonight."
"Not me," said the assistant. "The ambassador and I are on our way to San Juan this evening. There're still a lot of details to wind up for his permanent move here. But Hector—" He grinned down at the little round man.
"Hector," that man said with a big smile, "never misses a party!"
"Beware," the assistant said as he ushered his companion out the door, "Hector is a dancing fiend. Accept one dance from him and you'll wish you were back at the Everglades doing something restful like airboat contests."
Sylvia hung up the clothing from her go-bag and her body. Then she wandered the suite naked, her skin adapting easily to the over-chill of the air conditioning. There was a mini-kitchen that opened into a generous dining nook in one corner of the room. There were two small bedrooms each with TV, one with a double-decker bunk bed for smaller children, and a small enclosed bathroom between them that could also be used by everyone else.
There was also a huge cleverly designed bathroom that could be enclosed but also opened, via sliding frosted-glass doors, onto the room or the balcony or both. It had a bathtub big enough for two to sit atub sipping drinks and watching the sunset.
Sylvia left the sliding doors closed and took a long shower, washing away the day's sweat and breathing in water from the full-flow nozzle. She was more at-home in dry country than a Bedouin could be, having discovered a desertform in addition to her seaform, but when possible she felt better each day if she could breath water for a bit.
Afterward she lounged on the huge bed near the window in a luxurious hotel bathrobe, reading the festival itinerary by the bright light from the window, now touched by red from the setting sun.
Every institution on the island seemed to be getting in on the act, even hospital workers, fire fighters, and police workers, who must be virtually shutting down except for acting as hosts and keeping a few vigilant eyes on their duties. She would bet there had been a good deal of shift-splitting and bargaining and swapping duties in earlier weeks!
There were dances in four different places, all of them with avenues or other routes marked on a map to let people wander from one to the other. The cineplex she had visited earlier with the Argentine ambassador had been converted into a central child-care center with two screens showing free movies, one for tots and the other for subteens. The elementary schools and the one high school were open in the early evening and something put on at the high school.
She noticed with a mixture of resignation and laughter that she had a part in that—which, come to think of it, she had agreed to when she accepted the invitation. Signing her Jungle Jane comics, it was.
Well, it was for a good cause. She got no profits from them. Those were evenly split between the comics creators and an organization for research to help children sickened too long ago for her juvenile-Alzheimer's cure to help them directly.
She didn't need the money. Her modest trust fund from her father's legacy was enough for most of her needs. On top of that she got some modest income from pharmaceutical companies selling her cure at (she'd insisted before licensing it) low-profit prices. Then there was the ghost-written book about her three jungle forays and the research for her cure, "Life From the Jungle." It had been a surprise best-seller and, even more surprisingly, continued modest but steady sales.
With her "riches" Sylvia had done little, the biggest being buying the summer home she'd been renting when she'd been killed. She splurged from time to time on small luxuries and clothes—she was still a girl despite becoming a weremonster. Her biggest continuing expense was travel. Her minor celebrity gave her chances to attend premieres and such and charity events where she could make some difference.
It also gave her chances to look for her killers, though all the leads she'd found so far had been unlikely ones. Despite that, a slight chance was better than none,
and who knew what accidental discovery she might make while trying?
The sun was quite low and its light quite red when she finished her leisurely look at the itinerary. It was time to dress and go to the celebration.
She dressed in shorts, sandals, and a tee shirt over bare skin; her weremonster boobs needed no support. A glance at her face and hair and they took on flawless appearance without make-up or conditioner. Fifteen minutes later she strolled into party organizer headquarters.
It was a medium-sized not-yet-open department store near the plaza with the anonymous heroic horseman in the center and the cineplex. A few parents were already arriving at the 'plex with infants and older children. Both it and party HQ had bright banners on their fronts, mostly colored strips but also a few white ones with black spaceship silhouettes adorning them.
"Dr. Connelly!" The HQ speaker—squeaker, actually, she was so excited—was a tiny thirtyish woman in a voluminous colorful something perfect for the cooling but still-warm Puerto Rican summer evening. Though red/orange/yellow didn't strike Sylvia as being very psychologically cool.
From just inside the HQ door Sylvia turned to her and grabbed her hands to arrest an onrushing hug.
"I will be highly annoyed if anyone tonight calls me Dr. Anything. Pass the word that it's Sylvia."
"Of course—Sylvia! Oh, I'm so excited. Let me introduce you!"
It took several minutes for her small guide to pull her to several groups and introduce people whose names Sylvia had no chance to memorize, so quickly was she rushed to the next group. Every third introduction her guide announced that Dr. Connelly was to be addressed as Sylvia.
She was finally rescued when she was turned over to an older mature woman with grey hair and a youthful face, who was introduced as a head party organizer. Like everyone else in the room she was dressed in one or another popular version of native Indian P'Rican dress. In her case it was sandals and a red and green bra and wraparound skirt, not a bad choice for a woman with a tight belly and smoothly muscled limbs, not surprising in a woman who was a girl's coach as well as history teacher.
