by Scott Rhine
“She kicks butt. I’ll try to live up to her image and find a place to display it in my living room.” He seemed adequately flattered when she temporarily stuck it on the freezer with a magnet.
****
At 1730 that night, after Herkemer had his third entrée and second dessert, Red said goodnight to the other girls of the pod.
“He has appetites,” whispered Risa to Red as they led the two men into their sitting room. However, it was too crowded. The Latina had to open the bedroom door and sit on the bunk. Sojiro sat on the study chair.
“On,” Risa said to no effect. “Darn, I’m used to voice-command circuits.”
“I could rig one,” the Polish hero bragged. “Even a little girl could manage that.”
“Watch it,” said Red, playfully. “Sorry it’s so cramped, Mr. Herkemer.”
“Call me Herk,” he said, picking up the freezer and setting it on the built-in desk.
Sojiro gasped and Risa echoed with a hushed, “You know it.”
“That works, thank you,” said Red, losing her original planned speech.
“Look, I owe you for wonderful meal and much female company. Three phone numbers they stuffed in my pocket. But I need to be getting sleep soon. I have class at 5:30. What is real purpose for meeting?”
Red closed the door to the common area. “Sit. I have a proposition for you all. You can accept or not, but I ask that you keep what we say here in strictest confidence,” said the girl in the blue flight suit.
They all agreed. Sojiro got out his pad and began sketching Herk in a loincloth.
“I’m forming the Sirius team.”
“Why so early?” asked Herk, thickening his accent. “Is plenty of time.”
“No, the team, the one that’s going.”
“Impossible, they’d never let us do that,” said Herk.
“I didn’t say I was going to ask; I said I was going to do it.”
“How?” asked Risa.
“I can’t share all the details yet; I’m still planning, including who’ll be on the team. But if I could prove what I’m saying, would you all join?”
“Of course.” “Por supuesto.” “Yeah,” they all agreed at the same time.
“Swear your silence, even to teachers and your own governments,” insisted Red.
“By the Virgin,” promised Risa.
“May my manuscript be burned if I talk,” said the Japanese man.
“I don’t swear by anything; I mean what I say. Ask anybody.”
Red scanned him with her empathy—mashed potatoes with just a hint of salt. “Good enough for me. How many talents does it take to make first contact?”
“All twenty-seven, one of each kind,” said Risa, and the others nodded.
“We can contact the aliens with only two-thirds of the pages. They planned for destruction and loss. Even the UN doesn’t know, and I don’t plan on telling them,” Red stressed. “We can make the run at the artifact with only eighteen pages and no one will suspect because we don’t have the magic number.”
Everyone remained silent for a full minute. Herk cleared his throat. “Amazing theory. What is proof?”
“I can’t tell you the direct evidence without endangering lives. But I can prove that Fortune Aerospace was convinced. They gave me the Half-Pint to train in.”
“Half-sized means only fourteen seats, seven on each side,” argued Sojiro.
“Plus the rumble seat for extra pilot or faculty on training mission,” said Herk, who’d been inside the new craft.
“Plus the three crew members. They aren’t counted because the cockpit is detachable from the cargo pod, not that anyone in NASA would ever leave their passengers behind. But the bureaucrats signed off on it. We turned half-scale into a full mission—eighteen. QED.”
“Holy Toledo,” said Sojiro.
The invitees glanced at each other, and then broke out in smiles. “We’re the team,” said Herk.
“And no mention of the two-thirds rule to anyone. If I hear wind of a leak, I’ll scrap the whole team and start over. None of you will go.”
“Why are you the leader?” asked Risa. “Isn’t there supposed to be a team election, tests, and stuff?”
Red shrugged. “I started the team. I get things done, and there’s a whole world of secrets I haven’t told anyone. Tonight was just the tip of the iceberg.”
“You scare me a little, but I believe you, too. I follow,” declared Herk. “What you need me to do? Build bug sweeper?”
“No, I’ve got those. Just go to class like normal. Keep your eye out for strong candidates. Have dinner with us every once in a while,” said Red. “For now, it’s all about building our team in secret and learning to work together. I figure we’ll add about four members a year. The copilot role will be hardest to fill.”
Red paused, joined hands with the people on each side, and looked each one in the eyes. “The important thing is that from now on, if anyone needs help, we’re there for each other like family.”
“Family,” they repeated.
She had everyone enter the other members in their phones with the ICE—in case of emergency—designation and remove time-based blocks on their calls.
Chapter 7 – Workout
Monday morning, at six on the dot, Zeiss arrived at Professor Sorenson’s pod in the faculty meta-pod. He was waiting in his wheelchair outside his room, as usual.
“Morning Daniel,” the TA said as he pushed his professor to the faculty gym.
“How’s it hanging, Conrad?” The professor’s sandy hair was thinning and had a hint of gray, but his face looked a decade younger when lit with a wide, irresistible smile.
“Same old, same old.”
“Come on, you’re wearing yesterday’s clothes and looking a little rough. Do a little sheet surfing last night?”
“Huh?”
“The horizontal mambo, beast with two backs, Gumby meets Pokey—”
“Whoa, I get it. And, no I didn’t . . . uh . . . get any. I just had an amazing break-through on my dissertation and kept writing until I crashed.”
“You need to get out more, dude,” Daniel said as they reached the gym door.
“Do you want to start with the whirlpool after two idle days?”
“Nah, just the usual PT—pain and torture.” He used the same physical therapy joke at least once a week.
Lifting the professor onto the floor in a vacant corner of the gym, Zeiss started the routine, flexing, stretching, and pushing the man’s body in ways his own muscles couldn’t. “I admire your commitment,” the TA said.
“The price of space. My bones need to build up again or when I get old, they could snap when some young groupie jumps my bones.”
Zeiss just laughed and massaged the tight muscles.
“So what was all the excitement over in your pod Saturday?” asked Sorenson.
“A new student . . . had low blood sugar.”
“So you dispatched the chief medical officer and a guard? Ouch! Sadist.” Daniel complained as he was force-stretched. “You’re not going to dish? I thought we were friends?”
“Sir, you’re probably my best friend here.”
“And you’re still not going to talk?”
He shook his head and carried the paraplegic over to the weight machine, setting the weights and confirming the amount.
Daniel worked on chest muscles first. “I saw that you over-scheduled the new girl.”
“It’s for the best. Hopefully it’ll keep her out of trouble. Her guardian angel must be a chain-smoking wreck.”
The professor laughed. A few minutes later, he asked, “So have you ever done the deed? A bachelor is someone who’s supposed to walk to work from a different direction each day.”
Zeiss put another weight on. “I got close once.”
“Come on, I’ll tell you a secret if you tell me.”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“The first time we worked out, you had to carry me to the toilet, du
de. I have a high bar for embarrassment.”
Looking around to make sure no one was in earshot, Zeiss whispered, “It was the only time I ever went to the hospital.”
The professor whooped. “Now you have to tell me the story.”
“I was necking with this model, one of my sister’s friends from work.”
“Whoa, your sister’s a model?”
“I showed you Claire’s picture.”
“Yeah, but I thought that came with the frame.”
“It did. That was her first paying job, barely enough to buy all of us a copy. She travels all over the world, earning just enough to eat and party.”
“And you were tapping the models she worked with? Sweet!”
Zeiss grinned sheepishly. “Just the one. She must have been vision-impaired to date me. Vanessa wore flavored body gel and these fancy diamond earrings still on from the shoot. She was supposed to turn them in to the property master; they were really expensive, but she couldn’t part with them.”
“Enough about the ears, what was she wearing?”
“By the end of the evening, that was about it.”
Daniel wheezed with laughter. “You dog!”
“I was seventeen and hormones were raging. The last thing I remember was working my way down her neck, nibbling. Then she looks in the mirror . . .”
“Ouch.”
“And asks where the left earring went. We spent the next twenty minutes ruining the mood and searching for it.”
“You could turn that around,” Daniel said as they switched to the bench press.
“We found the back of the earring on the floor and my lip was bleeding. I remember swallowing something, but I thought it was just glitter.”
The professor started laughing so much that Zeiss had to grab the weight. “You ate the diamond? Hah!”
“And spent the rest of the night in the emergency room,” the TA confessed, “with that shrew and my sister badgering me the whole time.”
After he got done chuckling, Sorenson said, “You can’t give up because of one failure. You’ve got to get back on that horse.”
“No more sex analogies, please. When’s the last time you had a date?”
Daniel remained silent. Zeiss nodded at Professor Horvath in the Pilates class. “I see you looking at her every day.”
“She has a truly magnificent ass and legs like a thoroughbred.”
“Shh.”
“Aw, she hears it all the time, a great-looking woman like that.”
“For her age.” Zeiss shrugged. “Okay, any age. I hear comments about her all the time from the male cadets. You’re not just in it for the sympathy lay? You really like her?”
“There are no words. Why?”
“Because she has a huge heart and I wouldn’t want to see her hurt.”
Daniel turned to face the young man. “How would you know? Everyone else says she’s Cruella de Vil.”
“A lot of my students complained about her, so I checked her out. I watched her teach, even when she wasn’t in her class. She’s doing everything she can to make sure those kids don’t get hurt, now or later. She helps them even if it means missing lunch; you can’t fake that kind of dedication,” Zeiss said, increasing the weight. “Ask her out.”
“You think I could?”
“I think she’d be lucky to get you.”
“That’s a big risk,” Daniel complained. “What are you going to put on the line?”
Zeiss sighed. “What did you have in mind?”
“One more secret. You talk a lot about your mom but not your father. His name wasn’t on your application.”
“He divorced my mom when she was diagnosed.”
“That tells me he’s an ass, not his name. Why did you choose to take care of her instead of go with him?”
“When I refused to play hockey, he didn’t take it well. He disowned me.”
“Harsh. Why? You like hockey. You wear that Snoopy shirt with the Zamboni.”
“I like the comic strip and it’s a funny word. Any sport where they put on cups fifty years before they required helmets has its priorities out of whack. I had friends with missing permanent teeth and memories.”
“I agree, but I think you’re exaggerating about your dad.”
“He had me genetically tested to make sure I was really his son.”
“You win. Major sphincter. I’m sensing more to this story than wearing a cup.”
Conrad weighed the silence for a moment. “During tournament semi-finals, he told me to check the other team’s lead scorer, slow him down. Our coach told another boy the same thing. We both hit their star player. No one knows which shot injured his spine. But I was always big for my age. I had to have done more damage.”
“Oh, shit.”
“The old man disowned me the day I sat with Ulrich in the hospital instead of going to the finals. He didn’t understand that I could never hit another human that way again.”
“That’s what made you a pacifist?”
“What followed did. I prayed a lot that week. Ulrich was approved for that new nano-nerve stimulation treatment based on alien technology.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Daniel said, voice laden with irony. He’d been among the first test subjects. “The shot repairs recent damage in about 60 percent of the cases, but you can only use it once.” By this time, Daniel had stopped any pretense of working out.
“While I held his hand, praying, Ulrich moved his feet. He never played again, but we went hiking together a year later,” Zeiss said, choking a little. “You don’t ignore a miracle.”
The wording made Daniel pause for a moment. “The cure explains why you gravitated to alien sciences. So that incident is why you didn’t put your father’s name on the application?”
“I didn’t write my father’s name because he would have influenced your choice. I wanted to make it on my own merits.” After a pause, the TA admitted, “My dad’s Heinrich Zeiss.”
“He won a Nobel Prize for physics.”
“Only because Jezebel Hollis died a month before the judging.”
“Okay, I’m going to embarrass myself publicly for our friendship. I hope you’re happy.” Professor Sorenson looked at the martial arts instructor and shouted, “Hey good-looking; I’ll bet I could bench press you.”
She strolled over to the bench, sizing him up. Her voice was frigid. “Really?”
“If I put my hands in the right places. And from what I’m seeing, they are all the right places.”
“How many times?” challenged the platinum blonde.
“It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.”
“So, just once and then you’ll have to take a nap, old man?”
Zeiss winced. Ballbreaker one, nerd zero. “Um, we still have forty-five minutes in your workout.”
Daniel whispered, “She’s two years older than me.”
“No way,” exclaimed Zeiss.
Trina smiled. “Thank you.”
Daniel hissed, “I won’t tell anyone if you go out on a date with me.”
She considered for a moment. “There’s no place good to eat around here. Could we just go to your room instead? Then you could prove that stamina thing.”
“Okay,” Sorenson agreed. “Get me back in my chair.”
Zeiss blinked as he complied. “What just happened?”
When they were outside, with the woman following, Daniel whispered, “Meet my wife, Trina.”
Distracted, the TA stepped off the path into the uneven grass, almost falling.
“Hah! Babe, this is my new friend, Conrad,” said the man in the wheelchair. “He thinks my jokes are funny.”
“He never left eighth grade?” she chuckled.
“He also checked you out to make sure you were good enough for me and his kids.”
“How did I do?” she asked.
Daniel crowed, “He said you’re the most loving parent he’s ever met, and we’d be a good match if I ever worked up the cou
rage.”
“Dangerously perceptive,” she purred.
Zeiss was dying to ask questions, but had to wait for more privacy. When they got to Daniel’s pod, Trina badged them in. They had the whole floor—an unheard-of luxury on the island.
When the door closed, Zeiss guessed, “You’re keeping the marriage a secret because she’s the head of anti-terrorism? If the enemy knew, they could use you against her?”
“That’s part of it,” Daniel admitted. He struggled to ease into the next topic. “Conrad, it’s a good thing you were a gentleman when we talked earlier, because my wife and I have no secrets. What I know, she knows.”
“Good policy,” Zeiss approved.
“Not a policy, it just is. Trust me; there were some woman things I wish she didn’t share so much. But she sees and hears everything eventually, from my point of view. We’re pair-bonded.”
“Wow. No window shopping.”
“You get used to it.”
“I’m honored that you’re telling me.”
“Don’t be,” said Daniel, getting serious for the first time since they’d met. “She wanted me to ask you some things as a friend. You’re good at keeping secrets.”
“I’d never betray a trust.”
Trina said, “That’s why we invited you here.”
“Your secret’s bigger than mine,” Zeiss admitted.
“That wasn’t the secret,” Daniel explained. “I wanted to let you know that I own this school. Dean Stanton just runs the place because I can’t stand paperwork.”
“Whoa. And you’re telling me because?”
“We need your help,” Daniel said. “Funny thing you mentioned Red’s guardian angel.”
“Please, sir. No.”
“She’s very important,” Trina stressed.
“Because she’s a world class Quantum Computer and off the scale on Simplification?”
The couple looked at each other. “Yes.” The wife took the lead. “We need you to get her to be a little more discreet.”
Zeiss snorted. “Pull the other one.”
“I told you he was no slouch.” Daniel smiled. “She needs someone to cover her while she acclimates.”
“You mean till she bends the school to her way,” joked the TA.
