It was after midnight when Jackie heard the dogs barking to greet Mark’s pickup truck pulling in. She wasn’t sleeping, just lying awake. She’d been doing a lot of that the last couple of weeks, with Mark gone, so she got up, pulled on a robe, and went down to meet him. She got there just as he got in the back door. “I didn’t expect you to drive back tonight,” she greeted him. “It’s good to have you home.”

“Why waste the money on another night in the motel?” he replied. He was tired; it had been a long evening, and he’d been driving since 4:30, with just a couple of pit stops, one of which included burgers. “No point in it.”

“You did it, huh?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “After all these years, it’s finally over.”

“You like something to drink? Maybe something to eat?”

“Might as well,” he said. “I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open, but I think I’m still too frazzled from driving to sleep. A sandwich or something, I guess. Do we maybe have a beer in the house?”

“There’s a couple, I think,” she told him. “I’m sure there’s none cold. There are some wine coolers, and I could put some ice in one.”

Mark nodded and sat down at the kitchen table. “That’ll work as well as anything. I can leave the rest of the stuff in the truck till morning.”

The wine coolers were in the cupboard. She got one out, then took a glass and filled it with ice, and handed it to him. “Well, it’s not like we didn’t know it was coming, I guess,” she said. “It’s just hard to believe it’s here. There’s some roast beef. Is that OK?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Mark replied, his mind still out on the road. “The dogs all OK?”

“They’re fine,” Jackie told him, getting out some bread. It was nice to get off the subject for a moment. “I really haven’t done much with them, but Josh and Tiffany have been over here taking care of them every night, getting them out for exercise, doing some obedience training.”

“Boy, they sure have taken to it, haven’t they?”

“Yeah,” Jackie said, getting out a butcher knife to cut some beef slices. The two kids spent a lot of time together – maybe too much, considering their age difference. Mark had won the 100-mile race out to Warsaw and back the winter before last, the first time it was official, but he’d barely beaten Josh, who’d had a dog go lame. Tiffany had wanted to do the Warsaw Run too, but Mike had thought she was a little young, and only let her run the Pound Puppies – a 40 miler, restricted to refugees from the Humane Society. Mike had run it too, with the intention of keeping an eye on her, but that proved to be futile, since the last time he saw her was at the starting gate. This last winter, Josh had been in railroad diesel maintainers school down in LaGrange, and didn’t have time to do much training, so Tiffany had taken the best dogs from his team and her team, and at the age of 12 had blown everybody away on the Warsaw Run. Mark had been second, a good hour behind, and Mike an even more distant third. There’d been quite a bit of press coverage about that, not all of it favorable – the animal rights crazies had gone nuts.

“Wouldn’t be surprised to see either one of them take off and do the big one up in Alaska some year,” Mark smiled. “Any word on the expedition?”

“Mike and Kirsten sent in another visa application, but no word, yet, not that it’s very surprising,” Jackie said. “You’re not going to believe this, though – Binky actually let her name be put on the list.”

“No shit?” Mark brightened. This was news. “She’s actually planning on going?”

“Well, softening a little, maybe,” Jackie smiled. “I heard about it from Kirsten. Binky heard through the boat people network that there have been some people go back and actually be let out again. The guy who you guys had lined up to be a backup interpreter bombed out on them for some reason. Steve and Binky hadn’t been able to come up with another one, so she said if a visa came through and it was a gotta, she might be willing to think about it.”

“We weren’t too crazy about him, anyway,” Mark said, shaking his head. “Didn’t seem to have a lot in the brights department, and didn’t seem to understand the problem. It would be nice if Binky could go – she’s sat through so many Expedition meetings that she knows as much about the situation as any of us. In some ways, maybe more.”

Jackie slapped some mayo on the beef, put a slice of bread on top, then handed it to Mark and sat down across the table in front of him. “So, what now? What we talked about?”

“Well, I thought about it a lot on the way home,” Mark said. “That’s the nice thing about a long drive, there’s not much to do but sit there and drive and think. Actually, we’re not in too bad a shape, but it’s just hard to think about being out of a job after this long.”

Mark had started work for the Spearfish Lake Telephone Company nineteen years before, and had pretty much figured on retiring from there, although that was still probably twenty years off or so. But earlier that spring, Spearfish Lake Telephone had been bought up by Metro Communications, a huge conglomerate that had developed out of the Bell breakup. Mark hadn’t really thought about it too much, at first, figuring his job was secure after all that time.

And, actually, it had been secure. Just not in Spearfish Lake. The local phone people soon discovered Metro didn’t like to keep the people from local operations together – it “interfered with building a corporate unity” or some such garbage. Mark had fought getting transferred for a while, along with some of the others, and finally lost – they’d shipped him to the Stutzmanville office, way south of Camden, replacing a guy there who had gotten shipped hundreds of miles away.

Mark and Jackie didn’t like it one bit, and neither was anxious to give up the home and friends, and Jackie’s business they’d worked twenty years to build up, just to satisfy some corporate whim. He was not a corporate slave and didn’t plan to become one now. Mark had been tempted to tell them to jam it on the spot, but at the last minute thought better, until he could take another look at the retirement package.

It was a good thing he did – although he was already vested in the package, he was only a few weeks from reaching a significantly higher plateau. Although it would be many years before he could actually draw retirement, it would be money when he got there. With that thought in mind, he’d driven down to Stutzmanville, gotten a room at the motel, and gone to work with some sullen employees that who could see the handwriting on the wall. This past Monday, he’d filed for two weeks vacation starting next week, to get his affairs in order, he told the local manager, a Metro stooge, and it had been approved. Just eight hours ago, he’d given two weeksweeks’ notice, effective immediately, then hopped into his truck and drove away from the telephone business.

In spite of having to give up a secure job, there was a readily available fall-back position, and Mark and Jackie had been thinking about it from the first minute that the subject of a transfer had come up. For years, Mark had been the leading computer tech in Spearfish Lake, but it had been mostly an evening and weekend business, and sometimes a pain in the neck to have to deal with after a full daysday’s work. In the earlier years, when there had only been a handful of home computers around town, it really hadn’t been that big a deal, but the numbers had increased in the last few years and keeping up with that work had been a problem. Mark had actually hired a sharp kid that who was still a sophomore in high school to help him with the backlog that kept building up, and the kid knew some of the stuff even better than he did.

It had thus become increasingly clear over the last year or two that the time was getting ripe for a full time computer sales and service business in Spearfish Lake, and before the transfer, Mark had already been giving some thought to a very early retirement from the phone company. Metro had just nudged him along. But, it was pretty clear that he didn’t want to have the store out with Jackie’s sign shop in the barn behind their house; it was a little too far out of town, and the last mile was down Busted Axle Road, which could get pretty bad at times. For that matter, they’d talked about moving the sign shop into town, just for the same reason, but had never gotten around to it.

“I’ve been looking around,” Jackie said as Mark took a bite of the sandwich. “There are two or three options. The old bakery building has been available for a while, and the rent isn’t bad. We could get in there on short notice.”

“Not enough room there,” Mark shook his head, “And, the parking is lousy, down in the metered section, to boot. That’s why the bakery finally hung it up. It’d do in a pinch, I suppose. If we’re going to do this, I’d just as soon take a little time and do it right.”

“There’s another possibility,” Jackie added. “I talked to Kirsten, and I talked to Binky. Villa Romano Pizza isn’t going to open this summer. The place is up for sale.”

“That’d be a little better,” he replied. He took a sip from the iced wine cooler and continued, “There’s not a lot of parking, only six or eight spaces. It’d be a little small, but we’d have some room to expand in the back. We don’t need a lot of room for the computer business right now but we would in the future. Any idea what she wants for it?”

“Binky doesn’t own this one,” Jackie told him. “But she said she thought it’d go cheap for a quick sale. The guy wants out, bad, she said.”

“That’s less than a block from the phone company,” Mark told her. “That’d be very good. Let’s give her a call first thing in the morning.”

“Why would it be so good?” Jackie asked, curious.

“It’s kind of a long story, and maybe I’m a little too foggy right now. On the way back, I kept thinking about David, and I got an idea.”

David was the kid who worked with Mark on the computers. He’d done well with service calls while Mark was gone, even though he didn’t have a driver’s license yet and Jackie had to drive him around. He didn’t really want to work that bad at all, but he’d run up a two thousand dollar phone bill, calling long distance to Camden to get on the nearest telnet site to get on CompuServe. He’d managed to get home before his parents got home in time to throw away the phone bill for a couple months, but finally his parents became aware. To say he caught hell would be to put it mildly.

Mark had heard about it the next morning down at the Spearfish Lake Café, and worked out a deal with his dad for the kid to work off his debt. Mark paid him well, and the checks went straight across the breakfast table to his father – but Mark had a heart, and slipped the kid a twenty in cash every now and then.

“Yeah, so?” Jackie asked, as Mark took another bite of his sandwich. Sometimes Mark’s ideas could take the long way around, and she waited for him to finish chewing.

“So, I’ve messed around on CompuServe a bit, and so have a few other people around town, but no one very much, since it is a heckuva long distance call down to the telnet site. I keep wondering if there’d be a market for a telnet site here.”

“There’d be a few people,” Jackie said. “But, that’s still a phone company thing.”

“Right,” Mark said. “But you remember a few years ago when they laid the new fiber optic cable up from Moffatt?”

“Yeah, vaguely,” she smiled. “I know you had something to do with it.”

“Well, actually they laid two cables, side by side,” Mark said. “That way, there’d be room for expansion. But then, someone came up with a bandwidth compression arrangement, so just one of the cables is all that’ll be needed for years to come. The other one just sits there. Metro doesn’t own the cable, an outfit called Comsector does. I keep thinking that if they’re approached right, and as long as that dodo they put into running the local office here in town doesn’t know anything about the second cable so he could block me, maybe I could lease that cable on a long term for data transfer.”

“Any idea what it would cost?”

Mark shrugged. “No telling. It might be cheap, since the cable is already there.”

Jackie cocked her head. “It doesn’t seem worth it, just for a few people to get on CompuServe.”

“Oh, I think David would be happy,” Mark said with a broad grin. “I might not have him working for us, but he’d be happy. But, look ahead a few years. This internet thing is getting ready to explode. CompuServe and Prodigy are pretty popular where there’s places to get to them, and this new Online America, or whatever it is, outfit has big plans. Plus, the basic underlying internet has some neat stuff, too. Some one of these days, someone’s going to come up with a graphic interface, rather than a text interface, then it is just going to explode. When it does, if we lease that line, we’d have the only T-1 connection to town, and I think it ought to be upgradable to T-2. The only other way to get on is going to be by long distance.”

Jackie shook her head. “It could be a bust, too.”

“Well, it’s a risk,” Mark said. “Who knows? If I can get a long-term lease on the cable, and it doesn’t cost too much, it probably is a risk worth taking, even though it might take a few years. You’ve got to stick your neck out a little sometimes.”

“Well, maybe,” Jackie said. “You might want to look into it some.”

“Not a word to anybody,” Mark warned. He stopped, and took a long pull on the glass. “Especially Kirsten and Mike. If they know something, they might let it slip by accident. It’s only going to work if I can pull a fast one on this bozo Metro sent in here.”