Usually when Jon and Tanisha considered a problem, they did it straight on, applying their unique brand of mental synergy -- but that was for engineering, and this was something different, which involved lots of half thoughts interspersed with long, thoughtful silences that lasted most of the way back to Phoenix.

It wasn't as if Jon and Tanisha hadn't thought about getting back in contact with her brother Kwame before, because they had talked about it, numerous times -- even if a lot of that talk had been more in terms of how to avoid doing it.

The problem was that re-contacting Kwame was literally as different as black and white compared to re-contacting Pete. They had gone to Chicago knowing that a meeting with Jon's father was possible, if perhaps unlikely, but they'd also gone there with the knowledge that the worst that could happen was it would be unpleasant. Even as bad as Pete had been before the rest of the family left him, he wasn't likely to reach out and try to hurt them -- they expected that he would have been just as glad to have the rest of his family out of his life, and that was how it turned out.

But Kwame Blythe was a different story, and they knew it: he was arrogant, obnoxious, and vindictive -- like his father had been, but even worse. It had been hard to reach the conclusion, but Tanisha had come to understand he was more racist than the people he railed about repeatedly in and out of the pulpit. "All whites are devils," was his credo, but according to him, that wasn't racist, it was just the way of the world, something the black man had to endure. The church -- Bethel African Baptist -- was very political, and had been for a good many years, and the politics were pretty radical and separatist in more ways than one. The church had a reputation around St. Louis for getting involved in racial incidents and inflaming them, rather than trying to smooth things over -- and Kwame had been in the center of that, even more so than his father.

Kwame was capable of violence -- especially violence that aided his political ends, but on a personal level, too. Indeed, Jon and Tanisha were together only because Jon's unskilled but ultimately lucky and successful attempt at a karate move bought them time to get in the car and burn rubber out of there. They'd been expecting more trouble from him after that day, their first as a couple, and had good reason to: the last thing they'd heard from him, clear back in their days at Georgia Tech, was his announced intention to drag Tanisha back to her family and church where she belonged. In fact, he'd announced bluntly, "I will no longer allow you to wander the wilderness without supervision, ruining my reputation in the church in the process." Knowing him, those words had been enough to send them fleeing through the night away from Georgia Tech, skipping their graduation ceremony as a result.

Back when Jon helped her escape from her family, both her father and her brother had been busy trying to set her up with a guy who she couldn't stand, a loser from the word go. He was one of her brother's sycophants who she knew wasn't above violence and dirty work allegedly "for the people," which meant the church, or, more exactly, her family. It wouldn't be fair to call what her father and brother had in mind a forced or arranged marriage, but they were both pushing her pretty hard, and it was clear that the pressure would have increased even more if she'd stayed around. Her brother had been pushing harder than her father, who was very controlling, especially with his own family, and that would have extended to her if Jon hadn't helped her out. To say that she escaped was not exaggerating.

Ever since Jon and Tanisha had left her house in a cloud of rubber smoke, they'd been looking over their shoulders, worried that Kwame or some of his cohorts might show up and make trouble. Only the fact that they'd hidden from him pretty well, leaving some false trail, had given them much feeling of security, but neither of them were comfortable with that level of threat hanging over them all the time despite the precautions they had taken.

They were on the northern outskirts of Phoenix when Tanisha came up with a new thought: "We ought to run this one past Ben and Joy."

"Yeah," Jon replied, his mind starting to run in tandem with hers again -- the same idea had occurred to him. "I mean, they know we've got the problem, but they might be able to take a fresh look at it."

"I was thinking about their gaming skills," Tanisha explained.

"So was I," Jon agreed. "They know how to prepare before opening a door when there might or might not be something behind it."

Neither Jon nor Tanisha were the kind of people who made many friends. Both of them had been computer and study nerds in school and had been equally happy to be alone before they met each other. Both had people they hung out with occasionally in high school, but not many; in addition, contacts or friends outside the church were actively discouraged for Tanisha, and being part of the minister's family, she had even been expected to stay a little aloof from people in the church.

With all the security needs and everything else, things hadn't changed much, at least in terms of making friends outside the company. Oh, they had Lambdatron friends like Angela, Stan, Griz, and Jennlynn, and Jon's family in Flagstaff, and until the previous spring that had been just fine with them. But then, on the same Grand Canyon trip where Jon's mother married Al, they'd met Ben and Joy Russell, and the two couples clicked, a little to everyone's surprise, especially their own.

There were several reasons for that, one of them being they lived close to each other, only about a quarter mile apart. Ben and Joy were as much computer nerds as Jon and Tanisha, although with a somewhat different flavor. And, on top of that, they shared an interracial marriage as well. Ben was of more or less English extraction, while Joy was a mixed-race Vietnamese orphan who had been flown out of Saigon as an infant in the last days before the city fell, enduring a plane crash along the way. Her build and features were slight and Oriental, if a little on the stocky side, but her skin was much darker than a typical Vietnamese. That didn't stand in the way of the older childless couple in Tucson who had raised her and loved her.

However, kids who are a little different are often ostracized any place in the world, and thus it was with Joy. She grew up very shy and soft-spoken, a loner who would rather be with her computer than with others her age.

Ben was different from his peers as well, but for a different reason: he was asthmatic and suffered from severe allergies all through his growing up in a Cleveland suburb. Even with the help of the best available medical care, he didn't have the breath to be an active kid, so like Joy he grew up with his nose to a book or a computer screen, resolving to move to the dry, relatively allergen-free Southwest at the first opportunity.

Like Joy, like Jon and Tanisha, he'd never really had the opportunity to develop the skill of making friends. In fact, it was both a miracle and an oddity that he and Joy had managed to get together at all.

Somewhere along the way, both Joy and Ben had become addicted to an early multi-user text-based online computer game called "Dragonslayer." Both admitted the game was hopelessly obsolete in terms of modern computer games and graphics, but the game still had its partisans, mostly because it was written by the gamers as part of the game. Though they'd both played more modern games and were even good at them, they both still persevered with the old standby, along with a relative handful of others. They had one battle royal after another in the confines of the game, but over the years they became good friends in the game's associated online chat room -- with limitations: they had gone years before discovering they were of opposite sexes. They had only discovered that interesting fact in the past couple years, about the same time they discovered they both lived somewhere in Phoenix.

Though good friends online, they were very reserved and tentative about meeting face to face, and their first date with each other had work friends along. They went to a concert, had a good time, went home, and spent hours discussing it with each other through the familiar anonymity of the chat room. It was still some time before they discovered they lived in the same apartment complex, across a courtyard from one another -- they could literally look across and see the other in their living room as they typed at each other!

After that, they started hanging out with each other a bit more, still friends, but not boyfriend and girlfriend, still tentative with each other but getting closer. Then, Al Buck and Canyon Tours inadvertently got involved.

Though there was a waiting list to get on Canyon Tours trips in the summer, spring and fall trips were often under-booked. That irritated Al and Louise for a long time, until Louise came up with the idea of donating a few off-season trips each year to charity to use as fundraisers, usually through drawings. It cost Canyon Tours little since the trips were going to be run anyway, but the charitable contributions counted for the full price when tax time rolled around, so everyone came out happy. Al had, in fact, met Jennlynn because her Grand Canyon trip was won at a Catholic school drawing.

It cost ten bucks for Ben to buy his ticket in a different charity raffle; when he won the trip for two, there was really no one he could ask to go with him but Joy. With a little trepidation on both their parts, they decided to go. Not knowing that they could have made the trip out of Flagstaff, they drove to Las Vegas to spend a day and night before taking the early-morning charter bus out to Lee's Ferry for the start of the trip. Somehow, as they spent the day among the glitz and glitter, the subject of quickie weddings came up, mostly as a joke. Somehow, their discussion turned to the fact that the two of them liked each other a lot and were moving toward getting married; in fact, they were both so shy it seemed unlikely that either one of them would be brave enough to try to find someone else. One thing led to another, and six hours later they were married.

When they got on the charter bus the next morning both of them were thinking real hard about just what the hell they'd gotten themselves into, but there wasn't much they could do about it then. By the time the trip was over with, they'd gotten used to the idea and liked it, so much so that Preach married them again, this time in front of God and the rafting party, and there were no second thoughts this time.

While they were on the trip they met Jon and Tanisha and found they had gone through a few bumps of their own. Jon and Tanisha discovered that Ben had done graduate work in high-energy lasers, which had a lot of application to a classified work project they were working on at the time. A couple of off-the-cuff discussions with Ben solved a couple of thorny problems for them, and both Jon and Tanisha resolved to recruit him for Lambdatron, especially since Ben was currently designing sewer systems for a civil engineering firm and hating it. Both Jon and Tanisha knew they had to talk to Stan about it first. Stan gave them the go-ahead, only to find that Ben had found a job offer in the mail when he came back from the trip, working on adaptive optics for very large telescopes at Arizona State. That job sounded fascinating enough to Jon, Tanisha, Stan, and Jennlynn that they wouldn't have minded being involved with the project if they weren't working at Lambdatron.

Even though that failed, Jon and Tanisha resolved to remain friends with Ben and Joy, and for more reason than to just pick Ben's brain when needed. The four got along well together; Ben and Joy introduced them to attending a series of eclectic concerts, sometimes in smoky blues bars, sometimes in auditoriums. Jon and Tanisha returned the favor by getting Ben and Joy to do a little outdoor exercise, good brisk walking since Ben still didn't have the lung capacity for an honest run. They'd even taken off on a ski weekend together earlier in the winter; all of them enjoyed it and hoped to get in another one before spring, though none of them were more than rank beginners. These days the couples got together once or twice a week, sometime more often, sometimes for exercise, sometimes for concerts, sometimes for just sitting around and talking computers and whatnot.

Though it was an unexpected friendship, the two couples had become fairly close in the last few months, and all of them thought they were better off for having the friendship.

"It's too late to call them tonight," Tanisha said finally, "But I don't see any reason we couldn't call them in the morning."