He could die of boredom here, Jay thought. Or worse, start laughing so hard he’d spray milk out of his nose.
Brett Lee said, “He’s not queer, he’s just smart, is all. He got us that trip to the Debate Finals in Washington, D.C.”
“Pro’lly had to give somebody a blow job to do it,” Safety-Pin said.
“I’m tellin’ you, he’s not queer,” the second boy said.
“Hell, Hayworth, maybe he was lookin’ at you instead of Sissy when he got the hard-on,” Jessie said.
“Your ass!” Hayworth said.
Jay shook his head. Oh, yeah, he was gonna learn a lot here. Jesus.
“So,” Jessie said to Brett, “you going to the debate thing?”
“Yeah. There’s gonna be people from all over the country there.”
“Mostly Yankees,” Hayworth said. “ ’N’ queer Yankees, at that.”
“I’m goin’,” Lee said. “I’m not gonna live the rest of my life here in Hickburg. I’m gonna meet people, make friends, get myself a job where I can make a shitload of money and retire by the time I’m forty.”
“Your ass,” Hayworth said.
Jay shook his head. He’d heard enough of this.
Then, as he was about to leave, he had a thought.
Maybe Zachary George had been interested in debate in high school?
Hmm. Well, he could take a little run up to Montpelier High and check that out. Easy enough to do when you were Jay Gridley, master of virtual space and time.
18
Michaels walked into the Columbia Scientific Shop, not expecting much from the small size of the storefront. An error, he quickly found.
The place didn’t have much frontage, but it opened up once you were inside. It wasn’t the size of a Costco or anything, but it was a lot bigger than he’d expected.
There were racks and racks of items, ranging from Van de Graaff generators to home dissection kits to chemistry sets to huge telescopes.
Lord, he’d wander around in here forever.
“May I help you, sir?”
Michaels turned to see a woman who looked as if she might be the perfect TV grandmother smiling at him. She was short, slight, wore her gray hair in a bun, a pair of cat’s-eye reading glasses hung from a string around her neck, and she had a white sweater draped over her shoulders. The blue print dress she wore went almost all the way to the floor. She looked to be late sixties.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’m looking for a stereomicroscope.”
“Ah, yes, aisle nine. What kind of working distance would you need between the lens and object?”
Michaels didn’t have a clue. “I don’t know.”
“Perhaps if you told me the purpose?”
“Um, it’s for my wife. She’s pregnant and has to stay at home, so she’s taken up scrimshaw.”
Granny beamed and nodded. “Congratulations! Your first child?”
“Yes.” Well, it was his and Toni’s first child. And their last, too, according to Toni.
“If you’ll follow me.”
He did, and in due course, they arrived at aisle nine and a rack of optical equipment, most of which he couldn’t put a name to. None of it looked cheap, however.
Granny said, “Your wife will need a focus distance at least the length of her inscribing tool, eight or nine inches. This unit here will give her a foot, so that will do it. It’s a Witchey Model III, and it comes with ten times and twenty times. Much more power than she needs, but if you put an oh point three times auxiliary lens on it, right here, that will give you three times and six times, which should be sufficient for scrimshaw. Just to be sure, we can add in another lens that will ramp it up to five times and ten times.”
Michaels nodded, not really understanding what she was talking about.
“We could use an articulating arm, but probably a standard post mount would be fine.” She looked around and leaned a little closer toward him. “My supervisor would just as soon I sell you a fiber-optic shadow-free ring light to go with it, but frankly, you can get a gooseneck lamp and a hundred watt bulb and save yourself three hundred dollars.”
Michaels blinked. “Uh, thank you.”
She gave him a perfect grin, full of smile wrinkles and dimples. “The basic scope is eight hundred dollars, and the two lenses normally retail for about one hundred dollars each, but I can knock a bit off that. Say, nine hundred and fifty dollars all total? And I’ll throw in a gooseneck lamp at a discount, too.”
Michaels blew out a small sigh and nodded. The profit he’d made on the Miata rebuild was pretty much shot after the honeymoon and the Chevy, but he had a thousand or so left. Toni wanted this but wouldn’t buy it for herself, and the truth was, he was feeling guilty about not being more supportive about the pregnancy. It was his son she was carrying, after all, and the least he could do was try to make her enforced inactivity more bearable.
“I’ll take it,” he said.
Granny laser-beamed another smile at him. “Excellent. If you’ll follow me, I’ll have one brought up to the checkout counter.”
Michaels followed her toward the front of the store. On the way there, a pair of small boys ran past on the cross aisle in front of them. A second after they passed, there was a crash, yells, then what sounded like glass shattering.
Granny said, “Shit! You little bastards! You’re not supposed to be running in here!” Whereupon she herself took off at a good sprint. The long dress’s hem kicked up enough for Michaels to see that Granny wore a pair of flaming red Nike SpringGels, high-end running shoes that went for almost two hundred bucks a pair.
He had to smile. Another example that things were not always what they appeared to be.
John Howard, in shorts, a T-shirt, and his old sneakers, was working up a pretty good sweat on the obstacle course near Net Force HQ. There were a few Marine officers he recognized running the course, a few FBI types, and there, just ahead on the chinning bars, none other than Lieutenant Julio Fernandez.
Julio saw Howard but kept doing his chins, palms forward and hands a little wider than his shoulders.
Howard stopped and watched. He counted eight before Julio gutted out the last one and let go, then leaned forward and started rubbing at one bicep.
“How many did you do?”
“Twelve,” Julio said.
Howard raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, I used to do fifteen, sometimes twenty on a good day. I haven’t been getting out here as often as I should.”
“The joys of family life,” Howard observed.
“Yes, sir, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but it does change things some. Before I met Joanna, if I woke up in the middle of the night and felt like it, I could suit up and hit the gym or go run a couple miles, whatever. Now when I wake up in the middle of the night, it’s to the sound of a crying baby. Changing a diaper full of gooey yellow poop at three in the morning was never in my flight plan. I don’t think I’ve had three hours of sleep at any one stretch for three months.
“How’d you do it, John? How’d you live through a tiny baby?”
Howard laughed. “I stopped working out. I stopped going to have a drink with the boys after dinner because I
