Day followed day as the party continued to drift down the river, past awesome sights to be seen nowhere else on earth.

After the night around the campfire, the dynamics of the group changed. Vance and Audrey became rather cold, quiet, and distant; it was clear that no minds had been changed, even though the facts had been presented. Dick and Steve also seemed rather subdued; the dirty stories and the boisterous joking seemed to melt away in the face of the reality that Jennlynn had presented to them. It was if she’d challenged them to put up or shut up, and when push came to shove they weren’t going to put up.

So be it, Jennlynn thought when she reflected on it. It sounds good to talk about but when it comes down to the reality, it’s different. At least the party was quieter, less obnoxious, and in that sense she enjoyed it more. Al and Louise, on the other hand, seemed rather more interested, perhaps because they had a different perspective, perhaps because for most of their lives they too had been in a business to help people have a good time, to enjoy themselves.

In the long run, it didn’t matter – most likely she wasn’t going to be seeing anyone on the trip again except Will.

Finally, after fourteen days on the river, they drifted around a bend 226 miles below Lee’s Ferry, and found the Canyon Tours crew bus and a flatbed trailer waiting for them along the left bank of the river. It was with more than a degree of sadness that the trip was over, that they had to leave the Canyon. All in all it had been an enjoyable, memorable experience, days filled with the colorful scenery, the adventurous rapids, with plenty of stories to be told in the future.

The crew bus carried most of the passengers back up to the top of the Canyon, where they would be loaded onto a tour bus to take them back to Las Vegas; Will and Jennlynn stayed behind to help with the derigging and loading, then rode back with the crew to Flagstaff. With sadness, the trip came to an end, and Al loaded them into the Canyon Tours pickup to drop them off at the airport in Flagstaff. "I just want to thank you for coming along," he said as Mike taxied up in the 310. "You worked as hard as some of the people we pay, and I think we all learned an awful lot from you."

"I’m sorry we had that scene the one evening," Jennlynn told him. "But it needed to be said. Usually I keep it pretty quiet, but for once, I just couldn’t."

"I’m glad you said it," Al told her. "Jennlynn, I learned an awful lot from you and Will, even after all the time I’ve been in this business and all the people I’ve seen go through here. I guess what I want to say is that if you ever want to run with us again, you’ll be more than welcome."

"Thanks, Al," she told him. "We’ll talk it over, and maybe we will some time."

* * *

Jennlynn had been getting to the point where she had needed the vacation, but two weeks was more than enough, and the last few days she had been chomping at the bit to get back to work. Beautiful though the Grand Canyon was, it was just a little too peaceful and quiet for her to take that long, so she was grateful to be back at her desk on Monday morning, dealing with the pile of stuff that had accumulated while she had been gone.

Over the next few days she made a big dent in the pile. On Friday morning of her second week back at work, she heard a tapping on the open door of her office, and saw Stan standing there. "Are you relaxed enough to be interrupted?" Stan asked.

"Pretty good, you hit me in a seam," she smiled. "God, it’s good to be back to doing something."

"You’re taking off for the Redlite this afternoon, I presume?" he smiled.

"I’m getting out of here around noon," she told him. "Assuming nothing comes up."

"It seems strange to have you heading out of here again, since you just got back. Don’t you ever get tired of it?"

"Not really," she sighed. "It’s just about the degree of break I need on a regular basis. I’ve been doing it long enough that much more would be too much, but I realize that much less would be too little."

"You know, I need to drop by there some time, just to check it out," he said. "But Christ knows what Linda would say."

"Bring her along," she smiled. "Come in the morning, or at least before late afternoon, have lunch in the lounge. If I know you’re coming, I can make sure I’m up to give you the nickel tour."

"The day I get Linda into a bordello, even on a casual tour, will be the day that hell freezes over," Stan shook his head. "Maybe I’ll run it by her some time. Anyway, how’s your work schedule coming along?"

"Getting a little thin," she replied. "Any further word on the Butterfly?"

"Not yet," he replied. "I hear a couple favorable rumors, but they’re just rumors. If you’re not all that busy, I’ve got a couple small projects I’d like you to look into. Have you met the two new interns yet? Jon Chladek and Tanisha Blythe?"

"Just when Griz introduced us," she said. "Interesting pair. What happened to the third one?"

"Got a last-minute job offer at home, Griz tells me," Stan said. "When that happened, I decided to rearrange how things are done a little. I figured to just have Griz oversee them, and I’ll stick them on a couple small projects with you, so you can get a feel for them without them knowing that you’re serving as an intern evaluator."

"Yeah, one on one would be a little silly," she agreed. "So, what is it you want me to do?"

"I need you to keep this quiet for now, especially from the interns," he told her. "Back when we interviewed Jon on the phone last spring, you’ll remember that he said he’d spent a summer as an intern at a place in Chicago named Hadley-Monroe Industries."

"Something like that. I don’t remember the details."

"That came down in a little bit of a hurry, and I didn’t remember the details, either. Last Monday, when Griz brought Jon and Tanisha around by my office, I found out that he had a little more experience with the company than I’d understood. Apparently his father is some kind of a wheel there, and Jon has been doing work for them as early as the eighth grade. He’s apparently some kind of whiz with AutoCAD."

"I remember something about him knowing more than the average bear about it," she nodded.

"I wasn’t real clear about it either," Stan admitted. "It seems that one of the big things the company has is a laser-controlled die cutter. That’s a deal to make machine tools. I knew that, but in talking to Jon, it turns out that his father was pretty much the one who invented it, back in the seventies. Apparently, the control unit is all integrated circuit chips, and obsolescent past the point of being obsolete. When something goes wrong, it takes a highly trained magician to fix it. According to Jon, it was groundbreaking work at the time, but they’ve clung to it for years, no changes. Even he can see that it would be an improvement to go back and rethink the whole thing, considering the advances made with the supporting technology in over twenty years. But, they’ve always done it that way."

"Ah-hah!" she smiled, getting the picture. "A paradigm waiting to be broken."

"Right," Stan grinned. "Except that this one is a little tricky, for a number of personal reasons. What hits you in the face when you first meet those two?"

"The fact that he’s whiter than I am and she’s about as black a person as I’ve ever seen?"

"Right," Stan nodded his head. "Not that there’s anything wrong with that in either of our opinions. You’ll remember that when we interviewed them, we knew that they knew each other, but we had no idea just how well, so it was a big surprise for them to show up here with her wearing his engagement ring. That turns out to be pretty new for them; it only came down since they left Georgia Tech this summer, and they’re still getting used to it. But that’s not the problem."

"I can see how it could cause problems," she nodded.

"It does, and we’ll get to that," he replied. "The problem is that Jon’s father is supposed to be a real controlling asshole, a grumpy old fart from the word go. Jon’s dad expected him to be at Hadley-Monroe this summer, but he and Tanisha decided to come out here instead. His dad blew up when he found out that his son wasn’t going to be at Hadley-Monroe, and Jon basically left town without telling him where he was going. So, we can’t just go waltzing into the company and say, ‘Hey, your kid told us that you need help,’ or he’s really going to get it in the ass."

"And it might screw up our prospects of getting the job, too," Jennlynn nodded.

"Exactly. And there’s enough bad blood between Jon and his dad already. Let’s just say that I don’t want him involved for now. The first step, as I see it, is to find someone, probably here in Phoenix, who has one of these things, get a look at the controller, and get a look at the docs. Once we have an understanding of the machine and what it does, we can put together an initial proposal. This is something right up our alley. If it works out, it could open up a lot of new business in that industry, both with Hadley-Monroe and elsewhere."

"Sure, doesn’t sound like a big job," Jennlynn said.

"I don’t think so, at least not that part of it. It’s an evaluation at the present, nothing more. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took us a year to actually sell them if we can do it at all. I’ll probably want you to help out with the sales team if it gets as far as a formal presentation, but we’ll cross the rest of the bridge when we come to it."

"Do you know any place that has one of these things?"

"I’m not real sure," he said. "You might ask that guy you know over at N&J. He might know of somebody. Beyond that, I’d guess that you’re just going to have to ask around."

"I can’t go to Jon at all?"

"Maybe surreptitiously," Stan told her. "If you ask him right you might be able to get a lead or an insight without giving yourself away. But that leads to the other thing I want to ask you to do. Have you seen that Baldwin Tank and Faucet project?"

"The one about the voice-activated faucet? It seems simple enough."

"It is simple enough; it’s cookbook stuff. An intern-level job. It strikes me as just about the perfect project to get these kids started in how we do things from a full-project viewpoint, and a good way to get a look at their thinking. It shouldn’t take more than a week or two, even part time."

* * *

Jennlynn got out to the airport in plenty of time to make it to the Redlite, to discover that Mike wasn’t back with Songbird yet; it had been out on a run to the Lambdatron field office in Los Angeles, she knew, but he ought to have been back by now. Finally, he showed up with the plane and was rather apologetic since he knew what she had scheduled. "A meeting went over, and that was about all I could do about it," he said. "Hope this doesn’t make you too late."

"Not really," she said, as they stood by the nose of the plane while it was being fueled. "So long as I get there by dark I’ll be all right, except it usually takes me a little while to change gears mentally. I hate having to rush in, scramble into work clothes and then party with someone while I’m still thinking engineering. It isn’t fair to them, for one thing. But no harm done this time. If I’d known, I could have stayed at the office another hour."

"The one good thing about you taking the plane all weekend is that I know it won’t be available if something else comes up," Mike told her. "That way, it doesn’t cut into my golf time."

"See, there are advantages," she said. "You know, there are times that I’m a little sorry I decided to sell the Mooney."

"Right, once in a while having a second plane available would be nice," Mike agreed. "I don’t think we’ve reached a critical point with it yet, and I’m not sure something like the Mooney would be the aircraft of choice. We may decide we want to think about something with more capability when that time gets here."

"It’s growing more quickly than I thought it would," Jennlynn told him. "The people around the company are getting used to the convenience, rather than having to fight with the airlines. But I agree; I don’t think it’s anywhere near a critical point yet."

The seat had barely cooled from Mike’s backside when Jennlynn settled into the plane, cranked it up, and pointed it toward the Redlite Ranch. What with the trip to the Grand Canyon, it had been more than a month since she’d been there, and she’d been getting to the point where she had been missing it, no matter how much fun she’d had partying with Will. There was no doubt that he was a cool guy, but as much as they both liked each other, two weeks had been starting to push it, both of them agreed. But they agreed to get together again in a year or two or whatever it took, and spend some more time together, maybe out at the ranch, maybe somewhere else.

It felt good, if a little strange after all the time away to set Songbird down on the old bomber runway in Antelope Valley and tie it down on the line not far from the building. In a way, it felt like going home for the weekend. She had friends there, friends of a different sort than her Lambdatron friends. It seemed like her world was coming back together.

In the time she’d been gone, the latest phase of expansion had been completed. This one didn’t involve any new rooms for the girls, but some amenities – a pool, a euphemistically termed "rec room" that could be used for various group activities, a couple of bungalows, and an expansion on the lounge. This place was getting to be quite a deal; the next step, she knew, would be an addition of ten rooms to the east wing of the building, but that probably wouldn’t come for another year, perhaps two.

It was good to see Shirley again, to tell her some of the stories from the trip, good to get into work clothes again, to change gears from engineer and executive into a courtesan whose only worry was to make her clients happy. It was almost like a fantasyland for her, a welcome change of pace.

She remembered back to the discussion around the campfire there in the Grand Canyon. This was a part of her life that she enjoyed very much, and she wasn’t sure how well she’d made that point to Audrey – but it was only part of her life, part of the whole. She wouldn’t wish this life on anyone else because there were a number of downsides, some of them potentially ugly. But it was who she was, and she was glad she’d discovered it.

* * *

As always when returning from a weekend at the Redlite, Jennlynn felt relaxed and mellow. Sam could see all the signs, even though he’d known it – he and Maureen had dropped by the Redlite on Saturday, and there had been a terrific party with a woman whose work name was Frenchy. She was older than Jennlynn but had started in the business even earlier. Somehow, she and Sam had never crossed tracks before, but Sam had reported a memorable party while Maureen tried out the new pool and played cribbage with Shirley. Jennlynn had never gotten around to mentioning the story of Sam and Maureen that night in the Grand Canyon, and wondered what Audrey would have thought about it. Some people get it, and some people don’t.

Stan had asked Sam to sit in on the faucet project with Jennlynn and the new interns at their staff meeting Monday afternoon, just so he’d get a chance to look at them. Other than the first brief meeting a week before, she didn’t know these two at all; both were short and a touch on the overweight side and not particularly good looking, but both seemed rather intense. Unlike most college kids, they seemed personally conservative, and they weren’t slobs; they’d both already picked up the slacks/white shirt with pocket protector uniform that the older, more conventional engineers favored.

There were brief introductions, and then Jennlynn explained the purpose of the project.

"You’re kidding!" Tanisha frowned. "Why would anyone want something like that?"

"Ours is not to reason why," Jennlynn smiled. "The customer wants it, and they’re willing to pay for it, so I’d guess they think they have a market for it. Actually, I can think of a number of uses, especially in places where biological or chemical hazards could be transmitted on places people commonly touch, like faucet handles. Hell, that’s how colds and some other diseases like hepatitis get passed around."

"OK. Makes sense, sort of, I guess," Tanisha nodded. "It doesn’t appear to be a terribly big deal to actually design it."

"Not really," Jennlyn smiled sweetly. "But it involves a technology that the customer doesn’t have the expertise to develop themselves. Oh, they could develop it themselves, I suppose, but if they’re not already set up for it, it’s cheaper to just farm the job out to us."

"Makes sense when you put it that way," Jon said. "Have you figured out how you want to go about this?"

"Actually," she replied. "I’m curious about how you would go about it."

Jon and Tanisha looked at each other for a moment. "Well, to begin with," he said. "It would be pointless to go for a full voice recognition software package."

"Right," Tanisha agreed. "All you really need is a vocabulary of half a dozen words."

"You could probably do it with an 8008," Jon said.

"But if they’re going to be having a large production run . . . " Tanisha said.

" . . . then it might be worthwhile to come up with a dedicated chip," he finished.

Jennlynn and Sam just sat back and watched, trying not to show their awe. In five minutes the kids worked out features that it had taken the two of them half the morning to develop, and the interns had a better, more versatile, and possibly less expensive approach. What was more interesting was that they seemed to be on exactly the same wavelength, feeding off of each other. Many times one would start a sentence and the other would finish it. A few times, one would say a word or two, and the other would refute with a word or two, then the first would agree. They were amazingly in tune with each other, heterodyning one idea on top of another.

After some discussion, with Jon and Tanisha doing most of the discussing in their own seeming shorthand, Jennlynn told them to go ahead with some developments on some likelier parts of the deal, and the two took off for their desks in the intern office.

"Jeez-oh-peet," Sam said after they left. "Did you see that?"

"I saw it," Jennlynn said. "I don’t believe it either. When it comes to engineering, those kids are positively hardwired to each other. There’s no other way to explain it."

"How the hell do you suppose that happened?" Sam shook his head. "When you get right down to it, they’re pretty different."

"No they’re not," Jennlynn said with an insight of her own. "They’re pretty much the same, except for their sex and skin color. But I’ll tell you one thing. We don’t break them up for anything."

The faucet job turned out to take only a few days. Some of the work might have been considered innovative in some places, but it was mostly just standard packages pulled off of the Lambdatron shelf. It was a good example of how Lambdatron did things, and the project allowed them a better chance to get to know some of the usually brilliant, often quirky people who inhabited the place.

As the project went on, Jennlynn and Sam got to know the two interns a little better and discovered many more things. She was a little surprised to find out that they really didn’t even know each other very well and had only seriously gotten together since the first of the year. She’d known that Jon had had to sneak out of Chicago to get away from his father, but only recently found out that Tanisha had also had to sneak out of St. Louis to get away from her family. Perhaps "sneak" wasn’t the word to use; the mild, nonathletic Jon had to deck her brother to buy them time to leap into his car, which had been idling at the curb.

Jennlynn found herself in deep sympathy with them over their relations with their families, for they were nearly as bad as she had with her own. Jon’s family didn’t even know that Tanisha existed; he’d been afraid to mention her, due to his father’s racism. Tanisha’s position was hardly better: "Most of my family thinks white people are the devil incarnate," she said. "My father said it in so many words from the pulpit any number of times."

Jennlynn said nothing; she didn’t like to make the non-existent relations with her parents public around the building, although most people knew shreds of the story. But she couldn’t help but feel for Tanisha; after all, she knew what it was like to have an intolerant minister for a father.

"You know," Sam commented in a private discussion along in the middle of the week. "Those are two nice kids. Sharp as hell individually, and really sharp when they work together. But they’re still coming to grips with being on their own, and the race thing is still scaring them to death. I mean, they’re comfortable with each other, that’s clear, but they’re scared of what people think of them."

"I could loosen them up," Jennlynn said thoughtfully. "I wonder if I should."

"I think it would be a good idea," Sam told her. "And I can’t think of anyone better to do it."

Nothing more was said, but Sam and Jennlynn also had great minds that often thought alike, and they were doing so this time.

The next morning was Tasteless T-shirt Thursday. Jon and Tanisha were already starting to get into the company tradition; Tanisha was wearing one, obviously from a garage sale or something, that said Miller Beer – Breakfast of Champions. But Jennlynn was impressed with the girl’s cool when Tanisha saw what she was wearing.

"As much as I think that this Tasteless T-shirt thing is fun," she smiled complacently when she saw Jennlynn wearing the infamous Come Party With Me At The Redlite Ranch Bordello T-shirt that she’d taken out of retirement, "I have to say yours might be pushing it a little far."

"Oh, no, not really," Jennlynn laughed. "It’s just advertising, after all."

"You wouldn’t catch me dead in a T-shirt like that," Tanisha shook her head.

"A lot of women wouldn’t," Jennlynn smiled. "Even here at Lambdatron. It’s a little different for me, since I do moonlight there some weekends."

"You . . . you . . . " Tanisha sputtered, unable to get any more words out. She’d known prostitutes before, sure, considering the neighborhood she’d grown up in, but as obviously brilliant a woman as Jennlynn, with a job like hers, and in a place like this . . . it was unbelievable.

"Oh, yes," Jennlynn smiled. "I was there last weekend. I hop in my Cessna, fly over there, and work Friday and Saturday nights, usually twice a month."

"But . . . but . . . "

"Jennlynn," Jon piped up. "Can I ask just how in the hell you wound up working in a cathouse?"

"Pretty straightforward," Jennlynn smiled. "I like sex. I used to sleep around a lot when I was in college, mostly because I wanted to party with a lot of different men. It was kind of a hassle and could get dangerous. After I came here, it caused me some problems. Stan got me off to the side one day. I’ll give you one guess what he said."

"Break the paradigm?" Tanisha smiled, shaking her head.

"You got it," Jennlynn laughed. "He pointed out that I might as well kill a number of birds with one stone. I only work in the house in Antelope Valley, and not in Arizona at all, so it’s perfectly legal. It’s a heck of a lot simpler, and a heck of a lot safer, since we always use barriers and condoms, get regular checkups, have bouncers on the place, and like that. I get as much as I want, and it keeps my Cessna twin in payments and aviation gas. That’s my other passion. It’s no secret around here what I do, and anyone from the company who wants to come visit me up there is welcome."

Sam joined in the discussion. "She’s not fooling," he told them. "If either or both of you decide to check her out, take money, lots of it. She doesn’t give Lambdatron discounts. Worth it, though. I learned that years ago, before she joined Lambdatron."

"But . . . but . . . " Tanisha stammered.

"There’s a lesson in this for you," Jennlynn said. "Have you heard any comment about it from anyone else?"

"Not a word," Jon said. "I mean, I can’t believe it! Nobody said a word!"

"I prefer not to rub people’s noses in it, like with this T-shirt, which is why I’ll change it as soon as we’re done," she replied. "The point is that you’re at Lambdatron. We care about what people can do for the company. We do not care about things like sex, race, color, religion, or what people do on their own time, so long as they don’t do it in the driveway and block traffic at quitting time. Now lighten up on the paranoia, you two. I fought the tolerance battle around here years ago, and I won it."

"It’s . . . not easy," Tanisha admitted. "We’ve had some discussions about it. Thank you, Jennlynn. I guess we’re even luckier than we thought to wind up here."

"If you come across some problem, even in your own minds, that you want to talk out, come to me," she told them. "I have been there and I have done that, and as you can see I even have the T-shirt. Yes, you’re going to come across some disapproving people outside the company. I often do. I prefer to not waste time worrying about it. The hell with them; we’ve got other fish to fry."

* * *

"Those kids are something else," Stan commented after the faucet project was wrapped up a week ahead of schedule.

"Right," Jennlynn smiled. "The two of them working together is equal to about three or four of them working separately. What next, boss?"

"Griz has some other projects to throw them at," Stan told her. "But I want you to start leaning forward on the Butterfly."

"It got approved?"

"A little bird tells me it’s ninety percent. The funding won’t start until the next fiscal year, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get a running start. I want you to go ahead and figure on being the project director. Start thinking about who you want on your team, and anyone from outside we need to bring in. We’re probably going to have a year to get a core working. That looks to be the tough part. If we can make it work, then we can go ahead and start thinking about subsystems."

"I already have a pretty good idea of who I want to bring in," she said. "Those same two guys who helped us with the feasibility study. There’s several people around the shop, too. Can I have Jon and Tanisha?"

"No way," he said. "This is going to be a classified job, and they don’t have clearances. I’m already pretty sure I want to invite them back next year, but there’s no point in going through the rigmarole with clearances until we know for sure they’re going to be here. Unfortunately, it’s not a done deal."

"The color thing? I had a talk with them about that."

"I know you did, Sam told me, and you did the right thing," Stan agreed. "From what he said, it loosened them up pretty good. But it is a color thing with their folks, and I really don’t want it spread around the company for their sakes. They asked me if they could stay out here and go to Arizona State, and work part time. Their folks don’t know they’re here, but if they go back to Tech, they could be found out. They’re scared, and I don’t blame them, but there’s course work and instructors at Tech I’d really rather they have, so they’re going to try to live off campus and hide out when they’re not in class."

"That’s a damn tough row for them to hoe," Jennlynn said.

"I know it is and I hate doing it that way," Stan told her. "I already bumped up their pay to help them struggle through, since neither of them is getting any money from their folks. We’ll help them out more if we need to. If it falls apart, I told them they could come out here, but there’s some things they can get at Tech – especially from McDermott – that they just can’t get here."

"If I can help, let me know," she replied.

"Just try to support them, be friendly. They need a friend and they trust you more than they do others since they think you can see their problem through their eyes."

"Not totally, but I can understand. Maybe I’ll have to invite them over for jambalaya some night."

"Jambalaya?"

"A Cajun dish a Louisiana girl I used to work with taught me," Jennlynn shrugged. "I’ve sort of got the hankering for it. The only way I can have it done right is make it myself."

"Do it if you want, but I’ve been in that Spartan cave you call home, and it’s not very social," he grinned. "Besides, how long has it been since you’ve actually cooked anything? I mean, not opened a TV dinner and thrown it in the microwave, but cooked?"

"Touché," she shook her head. "But maybe I will anyway, I think they need a friend that bad. Anyway, where does it leave us on that Hadley-Monroe project?"

"For the time being, I want you to stay on it," he told her. "The big thing is that the whole deal could get queered right from the start if they find out Jon has been working here, so the fewer people to know and slip up, the better. I know I can depend on your discretion. If it proves that the Butterfly does really come through, then we’ll tail off some of your other stuff. But I want you to keep a finger in unclassified projects. The Butterfly could turn out to be a big deal for us if it flies, but it could turn out to be a big bust, too. I want us to keep enough contact with our civilian work that we’ve got that to fall back on. So, anyone from in-house who you bring in will also be assigned to some non-government work. The outside consultants we bring in as associates, we probably won’t do that, but they’re not Lambdatron people, anyway."

"I hope the hell it doesn’t fall on its ass, Stan," she said. "I know the consultants we brought in said it looked doable to them, but Mike thinks it’s too damn much power to piss around with in a small place like a pod."

"They know more about it than Mike does," Stan shrugged.

"Could be," Jennlynn nodded. "But I trust Mike a whole lot more."

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