Chapter 3

Despite her reputation, Jennlynn considered her real life to be in Phoenix and she was happy to be back there that evening. It had been coolish and on the verge of chilly up in Nevada, but Phoenix was its usual winter nice, comfortably warm and only occasionally needing a jacket. She had grown up in the Midwest in the “lake effect” snow belt of Lake Michigan and she’d had enough winter there to hold her well before she left for college in southern California. Her real-life job occasionally took her into cold country in the winter despite trying her best to avoid it.

It was cool but not uncomfortable when she used a powered dolly to back Songbird into its normal parking spot in the hangar. Jennlynn owned Skyhook Aviation strictly as a sideline to her main job; it had come about more or less by accident, but she enjoyed it immensely and it had unexpectedly proved to be relatively profitable for her although not a huge money maker. Space in the steel building was tight for the three planes normally stored there, so Songbird had to be parked with its wheels just exactly on three painted marks or there wouldn’t be room for Skyhook inside. The jet was out on a charter with one of the part-time charter pilots she employed, but she knew the jet would be back later that evening and it was never a good idea for Skyhook’s pilot to have to juggle the other planes around to get the hanger door closed.

Jennlynn was careful and meticulous about the care and maintenance of her planes. If she wanted time to think and do something mindless, much like other women would work on their knitting, she had a habit of taking a can of expensive paste wax and an armload of rags out to the airport to work on the polish jobs of her planes. It soothed and relaxed her from the sometimes high pressures of her day job, which was being a senior executive and engineer with Lambdatron Corporation, a rather quirky but innovative company dealing in high-tech research and development in various fields. Security was tight, since either their clients or the government classified much of what the company did.

Many of the people working for Lambdatron were on the quirky side, as well, and Jennlynn was one of the quirkier ones, especially when her former hobby of spending the occasional weekend at the Redlite Ranch was concerned. But her car, a rather beaten and battered ’79 Chevrolet Monza, showed another oddity. It was the only car she’d ever owned. She hadn’t had much money to spend on a vehicle when she first went to Caltech and her parents had been unwilling to help her since they didn’t want her going to California on her own at all. She’d gotten a good deal on the car, then nine years old, from a high school classmate, and it had given her good service in the years since.

Unlike her planes, Jennlynn never spent a cent on the car she didn’t have to, and that made it notorious for being far and away the junkiest car on the Lambdatron parking lot. It was a point of pride in an eccentric way, not only for Jennlynn but for her co-workers, so she had no intent of giving it up until it fell to pieces under her like the parson’s legendary one-horse shay. When pressed, Jennlynn had been known to claim that she kept the car because no car thief would ever want to steal it, and she probably had a point on that.

Ironically, the Monza was a dozen years younger than her newest airplane.

Much as she had done all the way from Nevada, Jennlynn’s thoughts were on the discussion she’d had at the Redlite Ranch. She was not satisfied with the outcome, although it had eased her concerns a little. It still felt like she’d somehow made a mistake, but there didn’t seem to be any way of correcting it. She wished she could talk this one over with Will, whose perspective on things was often different than her own. But Will was far away, both in time and in distance; while she could call him on the phone or send e-mails back and forth, it wasn’t the same thing. Maybe her feeling of being so powerless about the whole situation was actually a reflection of missing him.

Considering how independent Jennlynn had been over the years since leaving high school and what had been her home, it was amazing how dependent on him she had become, and in a very short time. She had known Will for a long time, since he’d been a young cowboy, still in high school in those days when she had been a junior in college, working on the weekends for Shirley up at the now long-closed Bettye’s Ranch near Beatty. He had been near death from a rattlesnake bite when she and Shirley had found him using her old Cessna 150, Magic Carpet, and she’d flown him to the hospital. She hadn’t seen him for a couple years after that until the two of them spent a memorable weekend in a motel room across the highway from the Redlite, which was still being built in those days.

Jennlynn could look back now and see that she’d actually fallen in love with Will a couple of years later, when they took a horse-pack trip of several days around the perimeter of the Bar H Bar. By then she’d had hundreds of men, but in some way she could never explain she was more comfortable with him than she had ever been with a man before. After that they got together every year or so, sometimes for just a day or two, sometimes for longer, but Jennlynn knew in her gut somehow that he was her man. They’d occasionally discussed getting married but shied away from it since they both knew they were pretty independent, but the inevitable had finally happened only a couple months ago. Now, as she drove into the parking lot of her little condo, she was missing him more than ever. How had that happened? She didn’t know.

Much like the Monza, the condo wasn’t a reflection of her wealth. It would even be hard to call it low-key because that was too grand a statement. It would also have been a reach to say that she actually lived there, since mostly it was a place for her to eat, sleep, and leave her dirty laundry until she could get around to washing it.

It would be unfair to say that the place was barren, but there was no more furniture than necessary and almost nothing to decorate it. This had been her residence ever since she left Caltech and it served her purpose; she hadn’t had guests to the place more than half a dozen times and those were mostly working visits – Lambdatron working, that is; she’d never had sex there, even with Will. That, however, was mostly because the opportunity had never arisen.

These days she didn’t even consider the place to be her home. As far as she was concerned, her home was a snug little vacation cabin in the far northern reaches of the Bar H Bar, a place that Will had had built and given to her a couple of years before. She rarely made it out there, partly because it was a long way away and partly because the only reasonable access involved flying in. But it had been where she and Will had been married in a small ceremony back before Christmas. Though it was a nice little place for them to call home, it was really rather primitive. There was no electricity, no phone, no Internet, no running water, no indoor toilet, no central heat, no neighbors within many miles – but being there with Will was about as close to heaven as Jennlynn could imagine.

Jennlynn admittedly wasn’t much of a cook, and for years she’d lived on frozen tray meals and carry-out pizza or Chinese when she bothered to eat at home at all. She conceded that it probably wasn’t a good eating habit but she seemed to thrive on it – and there was little preparation involved and even less dishwashing. Without even thinking much about it she grabbed a box from the freezer at random, peeled off the packaging, and pondered over calling Will.

Since there was a ten-hour time difference between Phoenix and the Persian Gulf, calling him was a little complicated. It was too early to call him now; he wouldn’t be getting up for hours yet, but if she waited until nine or so it would be seven in the morning where he was. The alternative was to call him from Lambdatron in the morning, when it would be his evening. They had done it both ways and it was about equally awkward either way.

In the end she decided not to call him this evening since she wanted to think a little more about what had been said up at the Redlite before she talked to him. Although she felt a little better about herself after having talked to Shirley, Yvette, and Justine – Norma – she still seemed frustrated.

She wanted to do something, not just accept the way things were. At heart she was an engineer, and when she saw something wrong she wanted to fix it. One of the unwritten mottoes of Lambdatron was, “Break the Paradigm,” and somehow, in some way she didn’t quite understand yet, she could feel that there was a paradigm laying there waiting to be broken. It might not break easily – that often was the case – but the attempt deserved to be made.

The next morning Jennlynn was sitting in her office at Lambdatron going over a progress report on a project she supervised. It probably should have been called a “non-progress report” since that was a better description; the project was stalled for some reason she didn’t quite understand, and it looked like she was going to have to get directly involved to get things back on track. There was something in the report that wasn’t adding up, and she was concentrating on trying to figure out what the ambiguity was when she heard a tapping on the door frame of her office.

Jennlynn was notorious at Lambdatron for hating to be interrupted while she was concentrating on something; it was part of the reason she had a reputation for having a furious temper. Over the years she’d tried to keep it under control, even though the interruptions were no less irritating to her than they had ever been.

She looked up to see Stan standing in the doorway. “I hope I’m not bothering you Jennlynn,” he said mildly; she was pretty sure he knew better but was trying to put a good face on it.

Stan Warshawski was one of the founders of Lambdatron and its top executive, although he carried the rather odd title of “Senior Shareholder.” He often explained it away by saying, “That’s what you get when you let four hippie engineers organize a company on the back of an envelope while they’re busy designing something else.” Jennlynn was a Vice-Senior Shareholder, which in Lambdatron’s case didn’t translate into being in charge of vice among the shareholders despite her long-time hobby. There were other Vice-Senior Shareholders, and although it was hard to say for sure, she was probably somewhere around fourth or fifth in the company pecking order.

Stan had a habit of going to other people’s offices rather than asking them to come to him, at least partly since he had what may have been the second-messiest office in the Western Hemisphere. It might have been in the top spot, since Jennlynn thought the leader was the office of the editor of the local paper in the town where she came from, but as far as she knew he had retired. Presumably the new owners had brought in a backhoe and loader to make the place presentable.

“Not really,” she replied. “In fact, I’m grateful to have something to take my mind off of this piece of crap.”

“Pretty bad, huh?” Stan said as he came in and took a chair next to Jennlynn’s desk.

“There is a paradigm there that they’re not breaking,” she shook her head. “I’ve given them enough rope to be able to work this out, but I suspect I’m going to have to stick my nose in to shake up their thinking a little. So what’s on your mind today, Stan?”

“Oh, nothing much,” he smiled. “I’m just wandering around trying to see what trouble I can stir up. So how did your day off yesterday go?”

“It went,” she replied, a little dejected at the thought. “It was just personal stuff, Stan.”

“I thought you might be ducking out to avoid the press because it was the first anniversary of your landing that airliner in Biloxi.”

“It was?” she replied, a little surprised. “Yeah, I guess it must have been. It sure seems like it was a long time ago. Did we get any media activity?”

“Nothing that I know of, surprisingly enough,” he replied. “I would have thought there would be something.”

Jennlynn’s landing of the hijacked airliner had brought a storm of media attention to her, and some of it had slopped over onto Lambdatron. It was attention Stan and the company did not want and did not appreciate, but Stan had realized that things happen and there wasn’t much that could be done but to ride them out when they did, and try to protect his loyal employees along the way. For a month or so there had been ongoing media harassment of the company, with reporters seeking interviews with her, or just to make some kind of story over her involvement there. Three times there had been arrests of media for trespassing, and one reporter managed to get deep enough into a federally classified area that there had been discussion of espionage charges, a matter that still wasn’t settled.

“Maybe it’s just as well,” she shook her head. “Stan, you know I never wanted any of that to happen.”

“I realized that from the beginning,” he replied. “But it happened, and you did the right thing, so the only choice I had was to do my best to shield you and the rest of the company. Of course, you helped out by keeping a lower profile than usual.”

Because of the media hassles, and not just those around Lambdatron, Jennlynn and Will had been forced to hide out at home – their cabin on the Bar H Bar – for a couple of weeks until things had died out a little. When she did make it back, hardly anyone outside the company knew she was there, and she’d actually spent some nights on the couch in her office so she would have the company security guards between her and the outside world.

Although she tried to keep from blowing her horn about it, and the general public hadn’t been aware of it until the hijacking, Jennlynn’s hobby at the Redlite Ranch was well known and surprisingly well accepted among the rest of the Lambdatron employees. That was at least partly because she had been remarkably up-front about it right from the beginning. At that, it may have not been the most unusual off-time diversion among company employees, or at least that seemed to be the general opinion around the Lambdatron lunchroom. There were employees who had interests that at least Jennlynn thought were even weirder – sometimes much weirder. Stan and the rest of the Lambdatron management, which included Jennlynn now, actually welcomed that; it was community opinion that unusual and creative activities off the job often translated into creative and innovative solutions on the job. It had worked well over the years, even though some of those free-time interests might have made the people involved unlikely to be hired elsewhere – a point that Stan also appreciated since it helped employee retention.

Jennlynn was acutely aware of that. She understood that her hobby would have made most employers show her the door as soon as they heard about it. But, at Lambdatron, it had been Stan himself who had suggested years before that Jennlynn go back to it to reduce her tensions after hanging up her spike heels to try to turn respectable. It had worked remarkably well for years after she resumed her occasional weekends at the Redlite – at least until the hijacking a year ago.

“It wasn’t just for the company,” Jennlynn protested. “Even before I landed the plane I realized it was going to touch off a media firestorm. I wasn’t looking forward to being harassed by reporters with their brains in the gutter asking trick questions and then bending my responses to fit their own prejudices. I wasn’t trying to deny the fact that I occasionally was a prostitute in my free time, but I did think it was my own damn business.”

“But you agreed to do that WNN Newsmagazine story.”

“That was a little different. It wasn’t a feeding frenzy in the middle of a pack of crazed media people who were looking to trash anything they could to get a story on the air. It was a one-on-one deal where I could control what I said and how it was interpreted, at least a little bit. Looking back on it I think Brenda was remarkably fair. There were some things I said that I wish now that I hadn’t, but at least they were reported accurately.”

“I’m glad you asked me before you did it,” Stan admitted. “I guess I hadn’t seen that it was going to cement your Learjet Jenn reputation as well as set the record straight. Well, what’s done is done.”

“I suppose. Stan, I’m trying to hide from my Learjet Jenn reputation. I am not her anymore and I never really was in the first place. In fact, I have not been to the Redlite Ranch to work since Fast World went on the air and I don’t plan on doing it again. I just want to keep working here pretty anonymously and put all that stuff behind me.”

“That’s probably good from the company’s viewpoint, and realistically you’ve done well with it so far. But I’m afraid you’re going to be a long time getting shed of it.”

“I realize that. Stan, I don’t want Learjet Jenn to cause any more trouble for Lambdatron. I like working here, I think I’m doing well, and it’s what I really wanted to do with my life in the first place. But if it gets to be too much of a problem for the company maybe we’ll have to reconsider our relationship. That’s your call, Stan. You’re the boss, after all.”

“I appreciate that. Jennlynn, I don’t want to give you up. For all the trouble Learjet Jenn has caused for the company, your input on any number of things has been much more valuable to us on balance. Since this all blew up we agreed to keep your public presence representing Lambdatron to a minimum, and I think that part of it has worked well. You’re going to have to come out of the closet sometime, but I don’t think that time will have to be anytime soon.”

“That’s probably just as well. I didn’t care all that much for all the media relations and booth-bunny stuff anyway, so it makes a good excuse to get out of it.”

“I think we’re getting down to the real reason now,” Stan laughed. “And really, I don’t blame you a bit. I don’t like doing it either but since I’m the den mother to this pack of crazed maniacs, some of it is going to fall into my lap whether I want it to or not. It goes with the job description. But do you have any other ideas about how you can lower your public profile as it relates to Lambdatron?”

“I might have an idea or two,” she conceded. “I suppose if it blows up too badly, I could lower my public profile by not working here any longer.”

“Jennlynn, I just said I don’t want you to leave.”

“That’s not what I was talking about. Will brought up the idea back after all this blew up. He suggested I could become an off-site consultant, and maybe only work for the company by telepresence.”

“I suppose it could be done,” Stan nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t think it would be as effective as having you here at least part of the time, but it might work in a pinch. What would you do, work from your condo?”

“If it happened, I might be tempted to just move up to the cabin,” she smiled. “It wouldn’t be as much fun if I were there without Will, but it could be done. Oh, I’d have to make some changes up there such as putting in satellite Internet, and that would mean something like solar panels since there’s no electricity there, but that’s all off-the-shelf technology. But I don’t want it up there unless I have to do it, if for no more reason than I don’t want to be bothered with company business when I really want to enjoy what little time with Will the Air Force allows me to be with him.”

“I can’t blame you for that,” Stan agreed. “For now, I don’t think we’ll have to do it, but we can always retain it as an option if we need to. Any other ideas?”

“Well, yes, but I’m not sure how much effect it will have, although in the long run it might help out some. I think I’d better start being known around here, and officially as far as the company is concerned, by my real name, which is Jennifer Lynn Hoffman.”

“I thought your name really was Jennlynn.”

“Jennifer is the name I had on my paychecks, at least before we started electronic fund transfers,” she smiled. “My mother always used to call me that, but back about the first or second grade it was too much of a mouthful for some of the other kids in the class. It was far enough north that no one normally used the southern-style first and middle names, so it got rammed together into Jennlynn. I never fought it, so I’ve been Jennlynn ever since. Maybe it’s time I changed it back to what it was supposed to be in the first place.”

“It might help some,” he replied after a moment. “At least it might appear to some people like you’re trying to not be Learjet Jenn, even if they know the truth. I have to admit that it’s going to take me a while to think of you as Jennifer or even Jenny, and I suppose other people around here are going to have trouble with it, too.”

“If I’m going to do it, and the more I think about it the more I think I should, they’re just going to have to learn to use it,” she replied, a little of her legendary stubbornness showing. “I suppose it would help if we made a pretty strong announcement of it at the Thursday noon company-wide meeting, and even explain that it’s intended to distance me from Learjet Jenn a little. I think other people in the company will understand the logic behind it.”

“You’re probably right,” he replied. “People will remember all the hassles we went through around here last year. It may not help much, but at least will help people to get a little more separation between Jennifer Hoffman and Learjet Jennlynn Swift. I only have one question.”

“What’s that?”

“Are you going to be able to remember that you’re changing your name?”

“I think so,” she smiled. “At least up at the Redlite I was used to people being called by different names. It was something we learned to do, and with few complaints so long as the bookkeeper got the name on our checks right.”

“All right, Jennifer,” Stan laughed. “I can’t see any harm to doing it and it might help out a little. I’ll get a new set of tags made for your desk and office door.”

“And I’ll quit answering to Jennlynn, at least after we announce it. We might as well confuse people some more and keep life interesting around here.”

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