The door to Stan’s office was standing wide open; through the door Jennlynn could see that he was digging through a stack of papers on a table to the side of the room.

Stan’s office had become even messier in Jennlynn’s nearly six years at Lambdatron. Occasionally he declared a reform and started to clean it up a little, but it hardly ever got further than the purely superficial, removing just the uppermost layer of the collection of soft drink empties and obvious trash. Well, some of it.

But Jennlynn had known that sometimes sorting though the stuff, looking for something, was how Stan ruminated over things, just like she went out to the airport to wax and polish an airplane. She’d learned a valuable lesson two years before, on her week’s horse-pack trip with Will: sometimes it helps if you just stick the problem in the back of your mind and let it sit there – until either an obvious solution falls out or it goes away. "Cleaning his office" was Stan’s short-term but ongoing answer to Jennlynn’s horse-pack trip. Sometimes it was all right to bother him, other times not – he could be about as intolerant of interruption as she was.

So rather than just knocking on the door, she stood in the doorway looking until he happened to notice her. "What’s up, Jennlynn?" he asked casually, obviously not irritated at this interruption. "Are you about ready to get out of here?"

"Pretty close," she smiled. "Just thought I’d check in and see if there was anything else I needed to get done before I go."

"Not really," he laughed, setting the stack of papers down and turning to her. "For once, things are halfway quiet, and there’s a good chance they’ll stay that way for a few days. I can’t believe that we could ever have managed to get you out of here for two weeks, but this is a good time for it."

"You can give credit to your prayers to St. Dismas," she laughed. "Seriously, this is something that I’d never really given any thought to ever doing until Pete came in and said I’d won the trip. I even forgot what trip he was talking about. But once I thought about it, it sounded like a pretty good deal, so now I’m looking forward to it."

She didn’t bother to add that she probably wouldn’t have considered it if Will hadn’t been able to go along with her. Even his existence was just about unknown at Lambdatron, and no one knew he – or any guy – was going with her. While she liked Will in a special way, she didn’t want someone around the office assuming something that wasn’t there.

"You’ll have a ball," he told her. "I’ve done it. It’s a different world down there. Expect to come back seriously hooked."

"I expect to come back and be ready to tie into some serious work," she snorted. "That’s why I’m taking a vacation, remember?"

"You’re still a workaholic," he charged. "But given any kind of luck, there might be some work for you to do when you get back."

"The Butterfly, maybe?" she asked. "Have you heard anything?"

"Butterfly" was a code word that had been coughed out of some computer in the Pentagon to describe Stan’s wild-hair idea of a couple years ago about using a high-power radar beam as a weapon itself, rather than just for target acquisition. Jennlynn’s very preliminary study, much of which she’d worked out with Mike Hanneman, looked promising enough that when the opportunity arose on a trip to the Pentagon a couple months later, Stan had raised it with a contact in the Navy. He’d been told that it would have been a hell of a good idea if it had come up ten years before, but with the end of the cold war the Navy was nowhere near as concerned about a flock of Russian Backfires launching a load of Kelts at a convoy or carrier group somewhere in the North Atlantic.

But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t merit in the idea. Nobody had ever come up with a good idea for dealing with surface-to-air missiles launched at aircraft. There had long been special anti-radar missiles used to take out the control sites; they worked with a margin of success, but actually taking out the SAM itself was a different story. "If you could boil that down to an underwing pod, say, ten feet long and one or two feet wide," he’d been told. "Then you might have something."

With a little campaigning around the Pentagon, Lambdatron received the funding for the study, about a quarter million dollars – which was nothing much; it was just a little bigger envelope to draw on the back of. The resulting study said it was possible but there were obvious problems that would have to be solved. It had gone back to the Pentagon a year or so ago and seemed to have gotten lost. Three months ago, without warning, Lambdatron had received another RFP, this time to develop the Butterfly’s core, which seemed to hold the toughest problems. If a working core could be developed, everything else was subsystems that seemed to be doable with off-the-shelf answers.

Sobered by the obvious problems brought out in the feasibility study, Lambdatron had answered with a high enough dollar figure that they hoped there would be some room for error and still make out on the deal. The proposal was well into eight figures, a big deal for a small company like Lambdatron; there were plenty of mixed emotions about it. It would be a heck of a deal if it worked, but it could be a real pain in the ass if it didn’t. The proposal was knocking around in the Pentagon somewhere, but Stan really wasn’t campaigning for it very seriously.

"Not really," Stan told Jennlynn. "It’s still a little early. Hell, you know the Pentagon; it could lie there for a couple years or even longer before someone decides to make a decision. Then they have to find the money to throw at it."

"Do you think that there’s any chance it’s going to get approved and funded?" she asked. "Maybe we ought to think about taking a little time and doing some preliminary stuff, sort of lean in the direction a little."

"It probably wouldn’t hurt," Stan conceded. "But any time and money we put into it on our own is time and money that we’d be taking away from something else, and it would come out of our pockets. Now, if we hit a flat spot, and we have people hanging around with time on their hands, I wouldn’t be opposed to doing some preliminary work, but I can’t see that happening in the short run."

"I suppose you’re right," she shrugged. "Anything else on the horizon?"

"Did Griz tell you what happened with the interns?"

"Something else?" she frowned.

Lambdatron handled interns a little differently now than they had when Jennlynn had started six years before. Nowadays, they were assigned to a special office, and parceled out to various projects where a little extra help was needed, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes longer periods. There was a committee of veteran engineers to oversee the interns and monitor their progress, usually two or three interns to one engineer. The committee currently consisted of Stan himself, Griz, and Jennlynn.

Back around the first of the year, they had held interviews, using some of the same techniques used on Jennlynn, and had invited four new first-year interns to spend the summer, along with two promising second-year interns that who had been invited back. But then, one of the second-year interns had been killed in a car wreck, and the other, within a day or so, announced that she’d been hired at a job close to home. Two of the first-year interns had bombed out for various reasons as well.

Since Lambdatron needed a constant flow of fresh talent, both to make up for people who got burned out by the pressure and to handle the steady expansion of the company, the prospect of only two interns was disturbing. It was late in the cycle now to be finding someone, but Griz made a phone call to an old professor of his at Georgia Tech, and Dr. McDermott suggested two sophomores who had shown unusual initiative in dealing with a very tough problem that he’d assigned them and had also impressed him in other ways.

There wasn’t time for the usual recruiting or onsite visits, so after a little investigation, the committee had interviewed them both by phone – and liked what they heard. That at least got the interns up to four, and they were still trolling for the possibility of another one. Not just any set of hands would do; they were looking for some fairly specific things in terms of skill sets and mind sets, and not a lot of college kids qualified.

"We lost another one," Stan reported. "The Harbaugh kid. Car wreck, again. He might be able to get here later in the summer, maybe not. I told his folks that if he couldn’t make it this year, the offer was still open for another year."

"Darn," Jennlynn frowned. "He was about the smartest one of the bunch, not that the rest of the bunch didn’t seem pretty smart, too."

"Yeah," Stan sighed. "It’s probably going to change how we handle the interns this summer. Maybe while you’re gone, I’ll get together with Griz and think about reorganizing things a little, but I haven’t firmed up my thinking yet."

"Whatever you decide to do is fine with me," she told him. "We’re probably going to wind up working the remaining ones pretty hard."

"We don’t want to overdo it and scare them off," he nodded. "That’s probably why we’re going to do some reorganization. But don’t worry about it. You worry about having a good time ‘three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth,’ as Major Powell said."

"It should be interesting," she smiled, and thought of Will. "And I don’t think I’m going to have trouble having a good time."

* * *

Jennlynn didn’t have the slightest bit of concern as she flew the Cessna 310 north to Ely with Mike at her side not long after sunrise. It wasn’t often that Jennlynn flew with Mike, but she liked to once in a while, just for some criticism of her own flying skills. Although it was going on two years that she’d owned the bigger Cessna, and she now felt comfortable with it, it was enough of an airplane that it wouldn’t do to pick up some bad habit or get complacent with it. Much to her amazement, though, sometimes Mike had her fly a checkride for him. While he had many times her experience, a lot of it was military, and sometimes there was a point or two about operating in a civilian environment that she could pass along.

Tripping across Mike Hanneman had been about the luckiest thing that had happened back when Stan encouraged her to start Skyhook Aviation. It would have been a great deal more difficult without him.

Between them, they’d checked out and flown half a dozen older Cessna 310s, and on several of them, Mike had turned up something that caused them to reject it. But his patience eventually led them to a real deal, a 1967 Cessna 310 in excellent condition, low hours on both engines, and an avionics package that was so good that they didn’t even bother to negotiate on the asking price of $87,500.

Like Magic Carpet, the 310 came with a name painted on it, this time under the pilot’s side window: Songbird. Jennlynn commented to Mike that it sounded sort of dumb to her, and it could be painted out, and maybe replaced with Skyhook. "Over my dead body," was his response. "That’s the best name you can put on a Cessna 310." He went on to explain that he’d first gotten hooked on flying back in the fifties by watching a TV show named Sky King, about an Arizona rancher with a Cessna 310B, named Songbird. "It was on reruns on Saturday mornings forever," Mike explained. "Friend of mine got a copy on VHS a while back and I watched it. Terrible. But when I was a kid, I wanted to be Sky King. Or I at least wanted to date his niece, Penny."

"You win," Jennlynn grinned. "Songbird it stays."

Mike also managed to make the contact for the sale of Soiled Dove – a group of four military retirees who were looking for something like it as a joint-ownership deal to run around with. It took a little money juggling with the bank and her stock market accounts to cover the cost of the twin until the money came in from the sale of Soiled Dove, but it all worked out. And, Mike gave her a fair amount of dual instruction until she felt capable of flying it on business trips by herself.

These days, it worked out that they each did about half the flying, and over two years, the use of the plane had built up to the point where they were each flying about all they wanted to, considering her job and his pastime of fleecing suckers on the many golf courses around Phoenix. Sometimes, neither of them were available to take a flight, and Mike turned to one of the guys who had purchased Soiled Dove, a retired army colonel named Joe Brockway. Brockway had about as much time in helicopters as Mike had in jets, but he also had a good chunk of time in the U-3, so Jennlynn had little to worry about on that account.

As Jennlynn had predicted, Nancy Hanneman just about had a cow when she found out what her husband’s new part-time employer did on her part-time job – but Mike was wise enough to refer her to Stan, who sat down and explained a number of realities to her, including the fact that Jennlynn was concerned enough about Nancy’s reaction that she’d laid her cards on the table right from the beginning. Jennlynn’s first meeting with Nancy started out very much on the awkward side, but it ended warmly when Jennlynn suggested that someone was needed to handle the scheduling and to occasionally answer a phone. Skyhook Aviation still had no formal office, but part of it was now run out of the Hanneman kitchen; Nancy no longer worried about keeping close tabs on her husband, and she’d become a real plus factor for the business. For the next two weeks, it was going to be Mike and Joe handling the flying with Jennlynn down in the depths of the Grand Canyon.

It was still early; they were supposed to meet someone from the raft company in Flagstaff at nine, and they wanted to leave a little room for error. Doing that meant that they had to leave Phoenix before dawn and meet Will and Ellen and Duane at the Ely Airport before it opened.

Will and his parents were waiting on the pavement by the operations building when Mike and Jennlynn taxied Songbird up. There were a few minutes for a warm kiss and hug with Will, not caring if Mike was watching or not, and a few minutes talk with Duane and Ellen, who she hadn’t seen since she and Shirley had flown up to meet them at the Ely airport back at Thanksgiving. They firmed up their arrangements: Late on the twenty-third, after Mike picked up Will and Jennlynn at Flagstaff, they’d circle the ranch buildings to let the Hoffmans know they were back, and his parents could drive into town to pick him up.

A few minutes later, they were in the air, heading southeast for Flagstaff, with Will in the right seat and Mike in the back, leafing through a magazine left behind by one of the passengers the day before. About an hour out, they swept out over the north rim of the Canyon and watched it open like a huge red rock chasm below, stretching as far as they could see off of either wingtip. "Good grief, that’s almighty big," Will commented. "The river looks tiny."

"It ought to," Jennlynn smiled. "It’s a mile down, or thereabouts."

"That’s really something," Mike agreed, looking up from his magazine. "You two are going to have a great time."

Up in the front, both sets of eyes were trying to drink in the view. Jennlynn was used to looking down from the air, but only here had she ever seen anything as spectacular, as colorful. It took several minutes to cross the Canyon, even at the speed of the 310, and shortly afterward they started their letdown into the Flagstaff Airport.

As had been prearranged, at the operations building, they were met by a woman about Jennlynn’s height, but reminding her an awful lot of Ellen: they had the same strong, rugged build, the same weather-beaten face and skin, the same friendly, down-home smile. "I’m Louise Buck, from Canyon Tours," she said by way of introduction. "I take it you’re Jennlynn Swift and Will Hoffman."

"That’s right," Jennlynn said, and introduced Mike. "He’s got a golf date, so we’ll grab our stuff and let him get out of here."

"Just checking, ma’am," Mike said. "Pickup here about five PM on the twenty-third?"

"Should be about that time," Louise nodded. "Usually is, give or take an hour or so."

"Works for me," Mike said. "Jennlynn, Will, you have fun."

"Take care of yourself, Mike," she replied. "Take care of my plane and work on that backswing."

"You know, Jennlynn, some day I’m going to have to get you out on a golf course, just so you can say you’ve actually been on one."

"That’ll be the day," she laughed. "See you in two weeks, Mike."

Louise led the two of them, carrying their relatively small amount of gear, through the operations building out to a fairly new pickup truck with a redrock-colored Canyon Tours logo on it. "I hope it isn’t too much trouble to do it this way, Louise," Jennlynn told her. "Since Mike and I had to pick Will up in Ely, it just seemed simpler to come here than it did to go to Las Vegas."

"Not a problem," Louise smiled. "We almost always have someone do that each trip. Usually, it’s just leave their cars at the office, rather than meet them at the airport, but no problem. It just means that you have to ride out with the crew the day before and help us rig."

"Don’t mind pitchin’ in," Will drawled. "I’d rather do somethin’ and help out than just ride."

"I think we’re going to get along just fine," Louise grinned.

"You’re going?" Jennlynn asked."

"Oh, yes, wouldn’t miss it," Louise grinned. "My husband Al and I flipped a coin over who got to be trip leader, and I lost, so I’m leading."

"You’ve been doing this for a while, I take it?" Jennlynn asked.

"Since 1965," Louise grinned. "I was the second woman boatman on the river, and the second woman trip leader, after Georgie White. Started my first trip as a boatman on the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon."

* * *

They rode north out of the Canyon Tours parking lot in a redrock brown short-bodied former school bus, referred to as the "crew bus." It was a couple of hours’ ride through desert country that wasn’t all that different than what they were familiar with in Nevada. Eventually they turned off the main highway, crossed a bridge high over the river, then a little farther on turned and descended to Lee’s Ferry, where the trip would start, the last place that the river can be approached at water level by road for 225 miles.

Lee’s Ferry was not large, just a paved parking lot with a wide ramp to the river, which had a few green tamarisk trees alongside. There was indeed a lot of work to do; rafts to be unloaded and rigged, gear to be loaded in the right spots, and even though the crew was experienced, it was the first trip of the season, so there were bugs to iron out. As night began to fall, Louise called a halt, and she and her husband Al, along with the other rafters, broke out some dinner. They ate in the dying light, right down by the river bank.

By now, they were on a first-name basis with the crew. Louise told them that it was their last shot at civilization, and that the crew usually liked to head up to a bar in Marble Canyon to party a little before the trip, especially the first of the season, and they were welcome to come along.

"Afraid we’re not bar people much, ma’am," Will drawled. "I think Miz Swift and I’d just as soon stay here."

"Fine with me, if you can keep an eye on our stuff," she said. "That way we won’t have to leave anyone behind."

"You go have fun," Jennlynn told them. "We might just turn in early."

A few minutes later, they could see the tail lights of the tour bus heading up the road. "You know, Will," Jennlynn said. "That’s one thing I didn’t think about. We’re going to have trouble being alone as much as we might like."

"Figured that," Will said as she fell into his arms. "We’re just goin’ to hafta do the best we can, Miz Swift."

Within minutes, they had their bedrolls and sleeping pads unrolled near some tamarisk trees not far from the river and were using them. It had been nearly two years since they’d been together, and it was a long time for both of them, but after a few minutes it was as if they’d never been apart at all.

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