working out.
He explained about the call from Presser. As he figured, she was eager to play.
“When?”
“You tell me, I’ll tell him. He’ll set it up. Probably in the big gym, the new one.”
“What does he have in mind?”
“He didn’t say exactly, but probably a short demo, then some hands-on stuff. Apparently some of the recruits are starting to think they are invincible.”
“We can fix that,” she said. “How about we set it up for day after tomorrow, about ten A.M.?”
“I’ll pass it on to Duane. How’s the boy?”
“Down for a nap at the moment. He had a big yellow poo, I changed him, and he conked out, so I did
Michaels smiled.
“What are you smiling at?”
“You. You’re so cute.” What he was thinking was,
He heard a thin squawk in the background. Toni said, “Oops. Gotta go. He’s waking up. You gonna be late?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll order in Thai tonight, that okay?”
“Great.”
The baby’s I’m-awake-cry grew louder as Toni broke the connection. Michaels smiled. Whatever was going on with work, life wasn’t so bad. The first time he’d become a father, he’d spent way too much time away from home. That had cost him his marriage, but it wasn’t all bad. Susie would always be his little girl, and he’d never have gotten together with Toni if he and Megan hadn’t split. His ex had remarried, she had a new baby boy, Leonard, and her husband was a decent guy.
Sometimes, things worked out for the best, though it didn’t seem like they would at the time. He couldn’t complain.
6
The evening was warm, the smells of too many sweaty people and too many spilled beers heavy in the damp air as Jay wandered into a bar named Curly’s on Canal Street, just outside the mobbed French Quarter. The floats were still rolling, various krewes throwing beads and coins and candy to the crowds packed shoulder-to-shoulder next to the streets, and the volume was turned way up.
Not that the bar was quiet or empty, far from it — but at least the patrons weren’t throwing hurricane glasses from Pat O’Brian’s at each other, and they all had their clothes on. A fair number of them were sailors, dressed in their whites, and while the atmosphere was festive, it wasn’t quite as manic as the bars on Bourbon Street in the Quarter had been.
Even though it was 1970, there weren’t a lot of long-haired hippie types in here. The sixties came late to the South, and a sailor’s bar was probably not the best place to find the counterculture in any event.
Tomorrow was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and the party would be over as good Catholics gave all this up — until next year, anyway.
Jay found an empty stool at the bar and slid onto it. The bartender, a woman of maybe thirty, with dishwater blonde hair and a harried look, spotted him.
“What can I get you, mister?”
“Beer.”
She nodded, reached into the cooler, came up with a cold can of Jax, opened it, and slid it to Jay.
In his research for the scenario, Jay had learned that Jax was a local brew, and there was a rumor (which was untrue) that the water they used in making it was drawn straight out of the Mississippi River, passed through a strainer no finer than needed to keep the crawfish out, and mixed with the other ingredients just like that. Given that there was a major petrochemical complex eighty miles upriver that used and discharged a lot of the water, and this was just before the days of OSHA and the EPA looking over everybody’s shoulder, the river would have been pretty vile for a whole lot of reasons. According to the locals, it was like the old saw about only mad dogs and Englishmen going out into the noonday sun, only in this case, only mad dogs would drink the water in New Orleans. They said that fishing was easy at night up over the levee, because the fish all glowed in the dark…
The can was icy, and the beer cold enough so it didn’t have that bad a flavor. Besides, even if it was poison, it wasn’t going to kill Jay in VR.
Next to Jay, a sailor, a petty officer, held a leather cup with a pair of dice in it. “Wanna roll for drinks?” he said.
Jay shrugged. “Sure.”
The navy man shook the cup a couple times, upended it on the scarred wooden bar, and lifted it. He had a four and a two.
Jay took the cup, put the dice in it, rattled them around, and poured them onto the bar. Six and a two.
“You win,” the sailor said. He held up two fingers so the bartender could see them, then pointed at himself and Jay. The woman came over, put two more beers on the bar. The sailor put a couple dollar bills on the bar, the woman took them, then hustled off.
“David Garret,” the sailor said, offering his hand.
Jay shook his hand. Davy in the Navy. “Jay Gridley,” he said.
“You… Korean? Japanese?”
Jay grinned. “Part Thai,” he said. “Born here, though.”
Garrett shrugged. “No offense. I just got back from duty in Southeast Asia, off the coast of Vietnam.” He pronounced the last part of the name so it rhymed with “ma’am” and not “mom.”
“Picked a good time for shore leave.”
“Hell, yeah. I been balling chicks left, right, and center. One big party. Had to stop and top off my tanks before I get back into it.” He waved vaguely at the door.
Jay took another swig of his beer and said, “So, you being a Navy man, you probably know about all that business with the minefields.”
“Minefields” in this case was VR scenario-speak for the problems with the net and web.
Garret finished his beer, put the can down, picked up the fresh one. “No more than anybody else,” he said, offering another shrug.
“What do you hear about it?”
“Usual stuff. Somebody seeded a whole bunch of the suckers where our ships would run into ’em. Nobody knows who, but I got a buddy in Navy Intelligence says it might have been CyberNation did it.”
Jay was surprised to hear this. “CyberNation?”
“What I heard.”
Jay thought about that. Why would CyberNation want to disrupt the web? With it down, that could only hurt their business.
Jay looked at the dirty mirror behind the bar, got a glimpse of himself looking thoughtful.
In the commander’s office, Jay sprawled on the couch, looking at the boss.
“And what exactly does this reference mean?” Michaels said. “Detail shop?”
