Lieutenant (An Ell Donsaii story #3) (7 page)

***

Watching Ell wolf down lasagna, Amy wished she could eat like that. She said, “Ell, before we talk about your research, Janey has a question she would like to ask?”

Ell said, “Sure,” and put another forkful of lasagna in her mouth. She turned questioning eyes on Janey, who’d been sitting patiently on the couch.

Janey kicked her legs, “Mom!
You
ask her.”

Ell looked at Amy but Amy was focused on her daughter. “Janey, you’ve got to learn to ask politely for the things you want. You can’t always have me ask for you.”

Janey kicked her feet back and forth a moment longer, then said, “Ms. Donsaii? Would you come to my class for show and tell?”

Ell grinned crookedly. “You want
me
to be your show and tell?”

Janey nodded emphatically.

“Sure. But remember, at work, and in your classroom, I’m Ell Donsaii. Here at the apartment, and any time you see me in my brown wig I’m not Ell Donsaii. Who am I then?”

“Raquel Blandon.”

“OK, and when I come to your class, you won’t say anything about me, as Ell Donsaii, living close to you, correct?”

“Yes, Ms. Blandon.”

Ell grinned at her. “Just in case you might forget, we’ll talk about it again just before I come to your classroom, OK?”

“OK!” an excited Janey exclaimed.

Amy said, “OK, Janey. Now you need to wait until Ell and I are done talking. After that I’ll take you home.”

Amy and Ell discussed how to arrange the date and time for her show and tell. Finally Amy said. “I think you may be excited when you look at your new experiment. Looking in the microscope I think I might be seeing a teensy, tiny bit of blue where the ‘port’ is supposed to be.”

Ell’s eyes widened and she leapt up from the table to run into her “office.” She looked like a little girl who’d just been told she could open a Christmas present in the other room. Feeling like a mother chastising her child Amy called after her, “You didn’t finish your beans!”

Ell excitedly stared at the screen of the microscope which was focused where she’d calculated the other end of the port she thought she was creating should be. The primary or near portal was supposed to be centered in a pressurized chamber full of methylene blue. The secondary or far portal was supposed to be centered in the drop of water beneath the microscope. If she had really created a portal from one location to the other using the 5th dimension predicted by her math, and the portal was large enough to pass methylene blue molecules with their molecular weight of 320, she should be seeing some bluish discoloration as the blue leaked through the portal into the drop of water.

Amy stepped into the room. “What do you think?”

Excitedly Ell said, “I think I see a little bit of blue too. Could it be diffusing away from the port into the drop and turning the whole drop faintly blue?” She leaned to the side, “Do you think the light leaking out of the sides of the drop looks a little blue?”

Amy looked dubiously at the light leaking out of the side of the drop under the microscope, “Maybe? I don’t remember what it looked like when we started.”

Ell said, “Allan, bring up an image of the microscope when we set it up. Put it on the big screen next to a current image.” A moment later side by side images of the microscope yesterday and that evening appeared on the wall screen. The two women looked at it, “What do you think?”

Amy shrugged, but Allan spoke in Ell’s ear, “Your AI camera is not calibrated for such work but the chroma of the pixels in the image
is
slightly bluer on the current image.”

Ell pumped her fist excitedly, “Yes!”

Amy said, “So what does it mean?”

Ell said, “It means we’ll let this experiment run until tomorrow to see if we get even more blue. We want to be sure!” When she turned to talk to Amy, she saw Janey standing in the door. Ell leapt to her feet in enthusiasm, picked up the seven year old and spun her around in a little dance. Janey participated exuberantly in the dance despite not understanding the root cause.

When Ell put Janey down, Amy rolled her eyes, “Now, one of my children has gotten the other too excited to do her homework!” and gave Ell a mock frown as she shepherded Janey to the door.

Ell was still bouncing on her toes when Allan said, “You have a call from Roger Emmerit.”

Buoyantly Ell said, “Put him on!” as she waved “bye” to Amy and Janey. “Roger! You getting’ any Physics done back there at NCSU?”

“A little. My paper got accepted at the APS meeting in Las Vegas.”

“Really! That’s great! You know that I’m at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas now don’t you?”

“Um, yeah. That might have had something to do with my submitting the paper to that particular meeting.”

“Aw, shucks, you really know how to impress a girl! When will you be out here?”

“Five weeks, will you be in town?”

Ell’s heart bounced a little at the sound of hope in Roger’s voice, “Sure, and I’d be delighted to buy a ‘broke ass grad student’ dinner while you’re here too. What’s the exact date?”

They spoke a few more minutes about the details, and then broke the connection. Ell danced excitedly around her room a little more, then went back to examine her experimental setup again.

***

Millie smiled at her class, “OK, now you know how to fall. So, this week, we begin some throws. First we line you up by size, eh? Tall ones over at this end, short at that end.” She worked her way through the line until she was satisfied with their alignment then had them count off in twos.

To her relief, despite being nearly the same height Amy and Ell had managed not to stand next to each other. Ell found herself paired with a slender redheaded man, just a little taller than herself. “Hello, I’m Raquel.” She put out her hand.

They shook, “Gary,” he said, wondering what it was going to be like throwing a girl?
Lord, she’s pretty! And so slender! What if I hurt her?

Millie brought one of the smaller women out and demonstrated an O Goshi throw in slow motion, then had the woman throw her, demonstrating the landing. Soon her pupils were throwing one another as she went around giving critiques. “Raquel! You mus’ not treat Gary like expensive dish! Throw him, throw him!”

Gary found himself flying through the air. Then it was his turn. “You OK with this?” he asked thinking she was so slender she surely would be easily hurt.

She grinned at him. “Sure, do your worst, Gar’.” He heaved her over his right hip, dismayed when she landed with a loud thump.

Millie’s eyes narrowed as she watched.
Raquel lands perfectly, but she slaps her hand down very hard. It is as if she wants to make it seem like she is coming down harder than she really is,
Millie thought. After a moment she shrugged,
no rule against that.

***

Bemused, Ennis said, “She did what?”

Axen said, “Fixed nine bugs in the flight control software. I only knew about four of them. Issues where we’ve ‘worked around’ a problem for so long that no one really thinks about them as bugs anymore. But it turns out that part of the problem with crosswind takeoffs has been a software bug that has a feedback loop in it that doesn’t damp aileron control properly. Now I can easily get the simulator’s AI to take off in crosswinds above tolerance. We’ll have to try it on a real bird to see if it works outside of software, but she says it will… and I believe her.” He snorted, “She did all this during lecture time over a period of three days. All while, of course, answering any questions the instructor posed to her in class while she was working on the software and still scoring higher by far than her classmates on both the tests and the simulated flights.”

Ennis leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling. “Damn,” he mused quietly, “I wonder what else we could get her to fix?”

***

Ell looked at the drop of water under the microscope on her experimental setup. It still had that very faint blue appearance but it didn’t seem any bluer than it had the day before. Allan confirmed that its chroma hadn’t changed. Her shoulders sagged and she began disassembling the setup. As she took the cover off the electronics her nose suddenly twitched at the smell of something burned.
Yes! The power supply had a blackened spot on it.
She leaned back, musing
. Could the power requirement for a molecular sized hole be higher than she had calculated? Or was it just a bad power supply?

Amy came in the room behind her, “Time to go out and celebrate?”

Morosely, Ell said, “No!”

Amy took in the slumped shoulders and the screws and covers lying on the table. Ell had been pretty frustrated about her research before the recent breakthrough. She hated to see her down again. “OK. It’s time to go out for some Friday night R and R then.”

Ell cast a squinty eye back up over her shoulder at Amy. “I don’t
feel
like going out.”

“How would you know, you never go out! My assessment is that you’re a girl in serious need of a social life.”

Ell hunched her shoulders sulkily and peered back down at the power supply, thinking that she did miss her Friday nights at West 87. “What did you have in mind?” she asked without looking up.

“My favorite local band is playing at “Tres Locos” and, thanks to a kindly employer, I can afford a babysitter again!”

Ell scratched at the charred area on the power supply. “I don’t have anything to wear!”

“Yes you do, I’d suggest those snug Western jeans and boots of yours.”

Ell frowned, “I don’t have Western jeans or boots.”

“Yes you do. Move away from the machine Ma’am, nothing to see there. Look at this instead.”

Ell slowly looked around, Amy grinned as she held up jeans in one hand and boots in the other. Ell frowned, “Do you think your clothes will fit me?”

“You’d better not say that my clothes would be baggy on you! I bought these for you, they’re a size 2 like the rest of your pants.”

“Hmmm,” Ell arched an eyebrow, “did I authorize clothing expenditures?”

“Yep.” Amy grinned, “It’s right there under ‘whatever you need to buy to keep me happy.’”

“Humpf, OK. I guess I could use some socializing, what time do we leave?”

“As soon as you’re ready, Tres Locos has great Mexican food too.”

“OK,” she glanced upward, “Allan, order a replacement power supply train, see if you can boost all the tolerances by 100%.”

Ell spent some time doing the Raquel Blandon look in full. The wig, skin bronzer, darker makeup, pencil to cover her light eyebrows, a beauty mark on her cheek and her nose prosthetic. She didn’t look anything like Ell when she was done but the nose prosthetic wasn’t big enough to make her truly unattractive like her old “Ellen” prosthetic had.

Tres Locos turned out to be laid out in a very large space with a band on a stage at one end and a large dance floor around the band which was itself surrounded by tables. There were various stalls around the walls of the huge room selling food, drink and mementoes. Amy got a beer and tacos, while Ell picked out a grande burrito and a Coke.

Cody watched the slender brunette with the long legs walk around Tres Locos choosing her food and then walk with her friend over to a table. She moved smoothly with a fluid grace. He thought to himself,
that girl’s a dancer.

Ell pulled out a chair at a table but Amy said, “Oh, no! We’ve got to sit near the dance floor,” she raised an eyebrow, “so the boys’ll know we want to dance.”

“We do?” Ell asked, not sure whether she queried the table location, or their desire to dance. She’d only danced a few times in her life, and those times were slow dances with people she knew pretty well. She really didn’t feel like she knew how to dance.

“We do.” Amy responded definitively, without making it clear whether she spoke of the location or the dancing either.

While they ate their Mexican food a band warmed up on the stage, then began playing. The music was fast, bluesy and pleasant. Ell found her foot tapping to the beat. Out on the dance floor a few people wandered out and begun dancing in a variety of styles. A small group of five was doing some kind of line dance. One couple whirled around the floor and several other couples seemed to be freestyling whatever movements they felt like to the beat. She wondered what in the world she would do should a man actually come and ask her to dance? She would be terribly embarrassed if he expected to whirl around the floor like that one couple—Ell had no idea how to do such a dance.

Ell had wolfed her burrito down and sat entranced, watching the dance floor. When Amy finished her tacos, she cleared the food off their table and carried it to a bin. Returning she saw a handsome young man bend down near Ell and ask her something. Ell drew back, looking panicked and shaking her head. The young man stood, shrugged and moved on. Amy sat back down and said over the music, “What just happened there?”

“He wanted to dance!” Ell said in astonishment.

Well,
of course
he did. This is a dance place. You’re sitting near the dance floor. Why aren’t you out there dancing with him right now?”

Ell looked stricken, “I don’t know how!”

Amy laughed, “Well then, just tell the young man that he’ll need to teach you. He would have loved that.”

“He
would
not!”

“Ell, Ell, Ell. He would much rather have taught you to dance than have been ‘shot down’ asking you to dance.” Amy leaned closer, “I’ll let you in on a little secret. Most of these guys don’t
really
know how to dance either. They’re just here to meet girls.” She leaned back and raised her eyebrows as if she had just revealed a shocking secret. “Especially pretty ones like you.”

Ell looked embarrassed again. “I hadn’t thought of how it would seem to him if I said ‘no.’ I’m sorry.”

“Well don’t tell
me
you’re sorry, go tell the guy. He’s standing over there with his buddy trying to pretend his feelings aren’t hurt.”

Ell buried her face in her hands, “Oh, I can’t do that!”