by Chloe Garner
Jesse was watching Troy with playful eyes. Troy sighed.
“Fine. Conrad, this is our resident nuisance, Jesse. Jesse, this is our potential new recruit to my lab. Okay? You’ve met him.”
“What do you do?” Conrad asked.
“Everything no one else can do,” Jesse said. “But only when they can catch me.”
“Leprechaun then, are you?” Conrad asked. Jesse brightened.
“I like him.”
“Jesse’s Jalnian,” Celeste said. Troy could have elbowed her.
“Really?” Conrad said, sitting quickly at the small table. “I didn’t realize. I read your contract. I’ve been studying everything they put in the news about you, but it isn’t much. What’s the hardest thing about being on Earth?”
“How dumb everyone is,” Jesse said. Conrad nodded and Troy felt his eyes pop out of his head a bit. No one ever took that well.
“The subtlety in that contract…” Conrad said, shaking his head. “I wrote papers on it in four different classes, and every time I found new things in it. It’s like literature, but pointier.”
Jesse laughed, standing.
“Hire him,” he said.
“Just because he likes you…” Troy started, and Jesse waltzed by.
“I said hire him. You don’t need the formality of an interview. I’m better at it than you, anyway.”
He grinned at the three of them, then opened the door and left.
“I thought you said those doors lock from the inside,” Conrad said. Troy sighed as Celeste went over and tried the knob.
“How did he do that?” she asked. Troy frowned at her.
“You really haven’t spent enough time around him, have you?”
“Oh, no,” she said warningly, holding up a finger. “No you don’t.”
He grinned.
“I’m getting him assigned to you.”
She shook her head.
“Not in a million years. I carry stuff around. I don’t need a top asset like that to get stuff out of storage and put it back.”
Troy sucked on his cheek and nodded, going to sit down across from Conrad.
“Oh, yes. We’ll find something.”
Celeste glowered at him for a moment, then came to sit next to him. Troy struggled for a second to collect his thoughts, then he drew a deep breath.
“So, Conrad,” he said, focusing attention into the space between them. “Tell me about the classes that you enjoyed most at school.”
*********
Conrad sparkled.
He didn’t just play rugby, but he also surfed and understood the rules to cricket.
“I’m not very good,” he’d said of cricket. “Too slow. But it’s a fascinating technical sport.”
He’d grown up everywhere, the son of an active navy colonel that Troy had heard of. Conrad had his mother’s last name because she was a ‘liberated woman’.
“Americans just don’t get kimchi,” Conrad said of his time in South Korea. “It’s not like tofu. You don’t use it to replace something because you’re being virtuous. It’s so good.”
He was adept at puzzles and problem solving, even when Celeste got a bit mean about it and started proposing situations Troy had never even conceived of.
“Prisoner’s dilemma,” Conrad answered quickly to one of them.
“What?” Celeste asked. Conrad laughed.
“They don’t have any emotional attachment to each other. You offer both of them the best deal for turning on the other one, they take it.”
“Why?” she pressed.
“Because, even though their net outcome is worse, the individual outcome is better. With two of them, you’re virtually guaranteed that one of them will act in his own self interest. Your worst outcome is if neither of them take it, and your best outcome is if they both take it. They destroy each other and you don’t even have to pay.”
“You don’t have any leverage,” Celeste said. Conrad gave her an easy grin.
“Yes you do,” he said, then proceeded to lay it out.
Troy was impressed.
In the end, they were surprised by Benji knocking on the door.
“Lunchtime,” he said. Troy looked at his watch as Benji let the door fall closed.
“Is it that late?”
“I could eat,” Conrad said, standing. Benji shook hands with him, introducing himself, then nodded toward Troy.
“I’ll get him back to you after the base tour.”
“Have you got the new lot of artifacts to catalogue?” Troy asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m going to come with you for lunch, and then I’ll do the base tour,” Troy said. “Will you go let anyone else in the lab right now know that we’re headed out, and they’re welcome to join us if they want?”
“Jesse’s down there,” Benji warned.
Troy sighed.
“He’s supposed to be in metallurgy today.”
Benji ducked his head.
“Scuttlebutt is that they sent him back.”
Troy shook his head.
“Fine. He can come, too.” He turned to Conrad. “I just need you to keep your distance until we finish our security checks.”
Conrad shrugged.
“I can do that.”
“All right,” Troy said “Wanda’s?”
Celeste grinned.
“Are you buying?”
“This is base business,” Troy said. She grinned wider.
“I’m driving,” she said.
“Fine,” Troy said, knocking on the door. The guard arrived a few minutes later and opened the door.
“Hate this place,” Benji said. “They turned you down for the conference rooms in the officers’ building?”
“You think I didn’t ask?” Troy answered. Benji grunted.
“We’ll see you there.”
Troy led the way back outside.
“The lab is actually a nice place to work,” Celeste promised as they walked. “It isn’t all containment and control around here.” She paused maliciously. “Just mostly.”
“Why weren’t you in the jumper program?” Troy asked. Conrad shrugged.
“Missed the test.”
“How did your father let that happen?”
“I didn’t really want to go, anyway,” Conrad said. Celeste made a noise behind them.
“Don’t let him hear you say that,” she said. Troy shrugged it off.
“Why is that?” he asked Conrad.
“You married, sir?” Conrad asked.
“No,” Troy answered. Conrad gave him a wise look.
“The marriage rate among jumper school graduates is in the middle single digits. The addiction rate is four times higher. And that’s just diagnosed addicts. The arrest rates for graduates, once they’re off base, is four times the national average. And the rate at which you take careers in the portal program is approaching ninety percent.”
These were all stats Troy knew.
“We didn’t know any of that, when you were a kid,” he said.
“Yeah, but you knew, didn’t you?” Conrad asked. “When you got your envelope and you checked the ‘yes’ box. You knew that you were giving up your shot at a normal life.”
“I suppose I did,” Troy said. Conrad nodded.
“I wanted normal. I wanted to surf and play rugby and date pretty girls.”
“Oh, he dates them,” Celeste murmured.
“Ms. Harris,” Troy warned.
“Sorry,” she said.
“So why enroll in the portal training program at Duke?” Troy asked. Conrad grinned at this.
“Because you do the coolest work in the country.”
“Alex, Dean Waters, was willing to ride the reputation of the entire program on you,” Troy said.
Conrad laughed.
“I bet he was,” he said. Troy nodded.
“They didn’t make you into what you are,” he said. “I’d wager it was your dad that did that. Tell me about the program.�
�
Conrad sighed.
“I only went to college once, so I can’t compare it to anything else. It’s tough. A lot of my friends gave up and went to engineering school. But you get the sense that they’re still trying to figure out what they’re trying to create.”
“That’s not unexpected,” Troy said. “It’s a new program. What did you get your BS in?”
“Language, for one,” Conrad said. “I lost focus and answered a bunch of Portuguese questions on a final in Portuguese rather than Brazilian. Handicap from having lived there for a year. And fluid dynamics. Just never could get it to stick.”
“Bad teacher?” Troy asked. The corner of Conrad’s mouth pulled up, but he shook his head.
“Still my job to get it.”
“Sure,” Troy said. “But fluids are fun. You’ll need to have a firm grasp of the fundamentals, here.”
“I’m sure I’ll get it,” Conrad said.
He excused himself to go to the bathroom while Troy and Celeste waited for the hostess to come back and seat them.
“So that’s who’s going to replace Olivia,” Celeste said.
“It’s not done, yet,” Troy said.
“That’s your guy,” she said. “I told you.”
“I think he’s done very well at the interview phase,” Troy said. Olivia nodded, her jaw cocked sideways.
“Yup. And if there’s one thing we definitely need more of, it’s big personalities.”
“Am I wrong?” Troy asked. She shook her head.
“No, you probably won’t find a single person better qualified or a better fit for the team. I’m just saying. You’ve got a type, sir.”
“The portal program has a type,” Troy said.
“Yes, it does,” she agreed, then let it drop. Benji and Sally arrived a moment later with four other people from the lab and Jesse.
“You get yourself kicked out of another lab?” Troy asked him.
“It was only a matter of time,” Jesse answered amicably.
“Yeah, but you chose today to do it,” Troy said. Jesse grinned at him.
“Be happy. You’ve got your new guy, Olivia is moving on to her new job, everything is good.”
*********
They interviewed three other candidates, as per policy, but all they did was reinforce how clearly Conrad was the right choice. His staff started to pester Troy to know when the offer would go to Conrad and if he had heard back yet. He took his decision to his commanding officer, the overworked supervisor of three large lab complexes, Colonel Jamie Oliver.
“Colonel?” Troy asked. The man waved Troy in.
“Come on in, Troy. What can I do for you?”
The man’s desk was scattered several layers deep with paperwork, and Troy felt bad that he was about to add a folder with about a hundred forms in it for Jamie to sign.
“I’m ready to start the rest of the background work on my candidate,” Troy said, sitting.
“Oh, that,” Jamie said. Troy gave him a sympathetic smile.
“Sorry.”
“No, you’re short-staffed, I know. You need to get Olivia’s spot filled as fast as you can. How are you feeling about it?”
“Conrad Leal,” Troy said, putting the folder in front of Jamie and opening it. Conrad’s resume and photo were on the top. “I can’t think of anyone I’ve ever met outside of the jumper program that I have more faith in with this little time.”
Jamie sighed.
“From portal school.”
“You’ve heard of it?” Troy asked. “I hadn’t. I had to call Alex Waters about it.”
“They’ve been trying to get face time here for years. General Thompson put them off because he was so busy, but General Donovan loathes them.”
Troy felt his head drop, and he forced himself to sit up straight again.
“He’s the man for the job,” Troy said. “I’m sorry. What has Donovan got against them?”
Jamie rubbed his face.
“I think you’re going to have to figure that one out on your own,” Jamie said. “I’ll try.”
His voice sounded dry, even wearier than Troy was used to. Once upon a time, they’d been good friends, as close as a commanding officer could be with a subordinate officer without the perception of bias, but Colonel Oliver was well-loved by his staffs in the old days. He’d had a close hand in building up most of the labs, staffing them and supplying them. In his first years, all of Troy’s work had been routed through Jamie before it even happened. After General Donovan left, though, all of the protection that the General had represented to the technical side of the portal, protection that Troy had been blissfully unaware of, was yanked away, and Jamie had started having to justify his budgets line item by line item to the base leadership and, sometimes, to congressional committees. They were a profit center, for the technologies they teased out, but they still had massive budgets, and Troy understood the pragmatic urge to reduce the cost of creating those profits. The Senator from Kansas was always on their side, so long as it didn’t look like they were being fraudulently wasteful, but one man’s fraud was another man’s mass spectrometer.
Add in to that normal level of oversight the gotcha politics under Donovan, and Troy was all too aware that his commanding officer was the rapidly-eroding rock that kept them out of the river of power flow emanating from General Donovan.
He should have known that Donovan would resent the Duke program, Troy realized in retrospect. It was a separate power paradigm trying to influence the portal program, one that Donovan had no control or influence over.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Troy said to Jamie. “But he really is the guy.”
“He needs to be squeaky,” Jamie said, flipping through the forms with an air of resignation.
“I asked him,” Troy said. It was true. During the base tour, Troy had asked the very pointed, very personal questions that would come up in the background check. “I think he’ll pass without a problem.”
“He’s traveled?” Jamie asked.
“Yes, sir. Grew up on a different base every year or so.”
Jamie nodded as he ran his fingers through his hair.
“I thought we used to think that was a good thing,” Troy said. “Exposure to different cultures prepares you to see things from a different perspective.”
“Still true, but now they’ve started saying that it might make you a sympathizer with some of the extremists out there. Not that we don’t have them here. Leigh had someone rejected because he grew up in Alabama before he joined the jumper program.”
Troy sat back in his chair. He thought he’d done the hard part. He’d found the guy, he’d filled out the forest of paperwork necessary to start the process, and now he just had to hand it off and let the rest of the process work. There had always been the risk of someone getting in the way, making it more difficult than it had to be, but he’d never considered it would be that likely, or that petty.
Jamie looked up and gave him a tired smile.
“If he’s the guy, that’s what I’ll tell them,” he said. “Don’t worry about it too much.”
Troy nodded, but it didn’t help much.
“Yes, sir,” he said, standing. “Do you need anything else from me?”
“No, you can go back to actually doing things, now,” Jamie said. “I’ll let you know.”
*********
About a week after Olivia transferred and Troy put in the paperwork to start the background clearance on Conrad, Celeste and Olivia showed up at Troy’s desk. The way Olivia held her hands with the fingers woven and the palms down warned Troy that they had had a great idea and were here to sell him on it.
“Let’s go dancing,” Olivia said. He sat back in his chair, surprised.
“Okay,” he said. Going out dancing was hardly something that it was going to take two of them to convince him on.
“In Chicago,” Celeste continued.
“This weekend,” Olivia said.
“Ah,” Troy said. “I see
.”
“I’ll bring my boyfriend,” Celeste said. “I know when the flights are. We can get some hotel rooms, take off Friday, and make a weekend of it.”
“I’m not sharing a room with whatever tattooed biker you’re dating this week,” Troy said. Celeste laughed.
“No, we’d get our own… You two can do whatever you want,” she said innocently. Olivia clearly had not thought it through this far, and she blushed. Troy sighed.
“Why Chicago?” he asked.
“Because there’s life up there,” Celeste said.
“Celeste’s boyfriend was talking about a club up there where they have this DJ who is a love-him-or-hate-him kind of guy, and we wanted to go see,” Olivia said.
“And that,” Celeste agreed.
“This weekend?” Troy asked. He had been hoping to go on his first official date with Olivia on his own, but his evenings this week were booked with meetings and end-of-quarter paperwork on the progress his teams had been making, and Olivia wasn’t the kind of girl he was going to take out at ten at night.
“This weekend,” Celeste said. “Earl already asked off at work.”
Troy glanced over at Olivia with an eyebrow up and she bounced on her toes. He grinned.
“Chicago it is, then.”
*********
Troy spent the rest of the week trying to get enough done that he could actually leave on Friday.
“Taking a lot of vacations this year, aren’t you?” Colonel Oliver asked when Troy turned in his forms.
“This is my first day off this year,” Troy answered. Jamie frowned at him, then shook his head as he signed.
“Have a good trip.”
They hopped a flight at the small airport that had sprung to life surrounding portal commerce and they were in Chicago by midday. Troy and Olivia dropped Celeste and Earl off at the hotel, then spent the afternoon walking a museum.
“It seemed like such a good idea, when she told me about it,” Olivia said as they stood in front of a wall-sized painting in the Renaissance exhibit.
“Celeste is full of those,” Troy said with a smile. “Besides, what about this isn’t a good idea?”
She laughed.
