Phil, Erik, Lisa, Becky, Steph, Jen and Stan are all lined up, shivering in the predawn air. I can’t tell how much of it is giddiness from anticipation, and how much is the chill of the desert night air. Andrea and Evan are much calmer. I’m proud of Louise, she seems to have really gotten her panic attacks under control. They used to get triggered every time she left the campus, but she’s showing steady vitals as she waits. Valerie leans against Evan, one of his arms wrapped around her. From her face, you’d never know she was nervous, but her pulse and blood pressure tell me that she is. Marc is pacing anxiously, his forehead wrinkled with worry.
“It’s all right,” I tell him quietly. “Mrs. Hastings can hold down the fort without us. The kids will all be fine.”
His face relaxes a little. I guessed right.
“I know, I know,” he replies. “I just haven’t been away from them all since Father died. What if they need me? Walter is struggling with his coursework, Charlotte and Fiona couldn’t get along if their lives depended on it, and Michael is wondering if he’s been assigned the wrong gender. And that’s just the issues with class three.”
“I understand,” I tell him, “but Mrs. Hastings has been at this for a long time. She’s got this. And you’ll have the sat phone even when we’re in the middle of nowhere. You can check on them every day if you want to.”
“I know,” he says, glancing back towards the campus. “I’m just nervous for them. I’ll be OK.”
The jet appears on the horizon from the west, right on schedule. We watch the slow descent in silence. Eventually it touches down. The ground crew starts checking things and loading luggage. I form a set of stairs up to the boarding door. I could have let them wheel over the regular stairs, but this is faster and I’m as anxious as anyone to get on board. Cindy opens the door from the inside and the rush to get in begins. I head in last, right behind Marc, and let the stairs disperse behind me.
“Well, hello again, Marc,” Cindy says. “I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age. You still sweet as sugar?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replies, “and you’re still pretty as a blooming rose.”
“You are such a sweet talker! And you,” she says, sweeping her gaze across the Geologists getting their bags stowed. “I haven’t met y’all yet. I’m Cindy. I run the Butler family jet. I’ll be taking care of everything you need while you’re on board.”
I make the introductions as everyone gets settled into their chairs. Evan and Louise help me to get everyone’s bots shut down. With Valerie along, we fill all of the seats in the main cabin. We’ll have to make other travel accommodations when class three is ready to do another one of these big group projects. I don’t think we’ll be able to afford another jet by then. Maybe we can lose the table and reconfigure the cabin with more chairs. I create a task to remind me to look into it later. Cindy runs through the safety spiel and we’re on our way. With the flight time and the time zone difference, we should get there in the early afternoon tomorrow, local time. The time adjustment will be fun.
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“So what does everyone want?” Marc asks. “Movie, games, cards, stories from our last trip, what?”
After some argument, we settle on a movie to start with and a promise of games later. Then everyone argues over which movie for a while. I can’t tell if the Geologists are more argumentative than we were, or if I just didn’t record the arguments during the Africa trip. I’ll have to ask Evan later. I wish I had our telepathy capability up now, but it’s better to set a good example for the younger crew and keep our bots off during the flight. Somewhere around the time we hit our cruising altitude, they all settle on a comedy. I’ve seen it, my index tells me I didn’t love it, so I close my eyes and do some work, making sure all my notes are up to date with all my recent logs and adding some extra cross-references. It’s easy to lose myself in my electronic brain. My memory is wrecked, but in lots of ways, the index can be better—as long as I keep it current. Sometimes I just pop open random entries to see what I used to know and get surprised.
“Hey, Noah, you in for poker?” Marc asks, rousing me from my dive into my non-memory.
“Sure, yeah.”
I glance around and notice that Evan and Valerie are absent from the cabin. They must be having some alone time in the back room. I instinctively reach out with fingers I don’t have right now to check whether they locked the door, but since I don’t have them, I can’t without getting up and making it obvious. It’s fine. Evan knows to keep his pants on, and last we talked about it, Valerie still wasn’t making it easy for him to get them off.
Marc dominates the game. Within an hour he owns all the jelly beans we’re using as poker chips. Stan outlasts the rest of us by a good fifteen minutes, so I grab another deck of cards and get a game of gin rummy going on the other end of the table with everyone who’s out of candy money. Andrea sits out from the games. She’s been staring at her hands again, flexing those long, slender fingers, working on something.
Another movie goes up on the screen. This one is better and I don’t have any record of seeing it. Evan and Valerie come back sometime in the middle of it. They look too presentable to have been up to too much trouble.
Lunch is good. Cindy makes a mean sandwich.
I hit the bedroom and take a nap. Cindy wakes me after an hour like I asked her to. Back in the main cabin, the Geologists are talking about all the stuff they’re excited for. They start asking me questions and I end up mostly dumping facts on them from my index for the next couple of hours.
Another movie, action and adventure.
Dinner. Fine, but not worth remembering.
Erik fires up the game console and we take turns on a brawler. Andrea surprises me and pulls out the win for the ad-hoc tournament we set up. I didn’t realize she was into these games, but her manual dexterity is incredible, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
If I sleep again now, and wake up in four hours, I should minimize the impact of the time change. Louise recently worked out a routine that stimulates the suprachiasmatic nucleus in a way that should induce sleep. I copied the technique when she told me about it, but haven’t tried it yet. This seems like as good a time as any to give it a shot.
SLEEPYTIME
Oh, yeah. That works.