I saw it on the internet – it has to be true!

Thanks to one of my readers – Tobiko is not a flying fish in Japanese. It is the roe of the fish which is great for sushi. Tobiuo is the fish. I’ll change my books to reflect this next edit.

A snippet of the next April book – title still undetermained.

Chapter 1

The sun baked all the way through, to the warm deck beneath her. April felt she might melt, and slide off the arch of the bow into the sea at any moment, like a pat of butter on a hot roll. She was in serious danger of fully relaxing, physically and mentally. The latter being far more difficult of course. She’d been sleeping that deep dreamless sleep, from which she’d eased so subtly, she wasn’t aware of waking up. Nothing jolted her awake. Perhaps the steady breeze had shifted bearing a bit, or the rigging had whispered against the mast.

The tightly woven hat over her face had a pleasant scent when hot. She had never smelled a field of straw being cut, to know it’s richer form. The drift of fine salt spray, from the breakers outside the atoll, added a sharp note to the earthy odor. But the wind wasn’t blowing enough to make the ship roll, sheltered inside the ring of coral.

“Dummmm, dumm…dumm, dumm…dumm, dumm,” sounded low and ominously to her left. She should never have shown Jeff that stupid old movie. She refused to reward him by responding, but he must have sensed she was awake. When the strike came it was just above her hip on the left. Teeth far less savage than a Great White nipping her, right where he knew it tickled.

The first time he’d done it yesterday, she’d shrieked so loudly, the man on deck watch had run from the cockpit to see what was wrong. She wouldn’t give Jeff the satisfaction today.

“That’s a one-time funny joke, Jaws,” she said from under the hat. “Go away and find some other prey.”

“Heather got hungry and went below for a bite. I think I’ll have mine right here,” Jeff teased.

“I’m hungry too. Let’s go down and see what’s on the cold buffet.”

“You’re always hungry,” he accused. Which was pretty nearly true. He wasn’t gene mod, and didn’t eat near as much as April. “I’ll go the long way,” he declared. By the time April took her hat off and sat up, she just saw his feet disappearing over the edge of the deck, followed by a >sploosh < and a few drops of spray that managed to climb back this high. She got up, considered diving in herself, and just wasn’t in the mood. She just sauntered back along the rail of the ketch, on the narrow deck along the cabin, to the rear deck and sunken cockpit. Stepping down onto a bench that ran along the side behind the wheel.

Jeff’s wet footprints said he’d beat her to the cockpit and companion way below, despite having to climb up from the platform lowered off the transom for swimmers. She went in their stateroom and rinsed off with fresh water, stowed her hat, and put on a pair of shorts. Her mom had always been a bit formal about behavior at the table, and April just couldn’t bring herself to sit and eat totally naked, French boat rules or no. Jeff had no such problem, he had just splashed his face and hair with fresh water, and was drying it with a towel when she caught up to him.

April got to the food first, lifting the clear cover on the chill table and taking a cold plate. There were some cold salads, bean salad and potato salad, a pea salad with diced tomatoes and nuts, egg salad and ham salad, a beef roast and a block of white cheddar. Jeff caught up with her and started making a cold beef sandwich with horseradish and a pile of sweet pickles. April got a plate full of chilled prawns, with a cup of creamy hot sauce to dip them, a big dip of the pea salad, and a glass of the iced coffee.

Heather was already at the table, with the ship’s owner and one of the crew, eating a sandwich of some sort of fish salad. Not of canned tuna, rather leftover from the grilled fish that had been supper last night, pleasantly smoky. April hadn’t caught it, so she wasn’t sure what it was, except tasty. Heather was looking at the big flat screen, turned around to face the small upper galley from the main lounge. The atoll was a crooked circle in the middle of the screen, with white trim a couple places where surf broke on it. The Tobbiko was a white comma, off center inside. So small it was hard to tell bow from stern. The water varied from pale blue to green turquoise, and fell off into deep dark water outside the atoll.

“I’ve been sitting, watching the waves,” Heather informed them. “They aren’t simple. They especially aren’t just parallel, driven by the wind. There are interference patterns, just like you see with a laser in different modes. I had the drone open up the angle of view, and you could see there is a pattern of waves from the northwest and a weaker one from the south that mix with the main pattern of wind driven ridges from the west. I wonder why? Can there be wind on different bearings, off pretty far away, and the waves from that reach way beyond the wind?”

The owner, Lin, looked at Heather surprised. “The old Polynesians, so long ago we’re talking open canoes, used to read the waves to navigate. The islands both interfere with waves coming from behind them, and reflect waves striking the side near to you. A big storm far over the horizon can also send big rollers through the whole pattern, just as you thought. But the interpretation of them is complex. I’m shocked you’d see the patterns so quickly, and you with no experience as a sailor.”

“Oh, I don’t understand them,” Heather quickly demurred. “And I have the advantage of a viewpoint from above they didn’t have. But I can see there are patterns. I’ve looked at quite a bit of ocean from an orbital perspective, looking for ships, and the patterns disappear when you back off the view that high. You’d have to look closely at a bunch of different locations to start to understand it at the level you’re talking about. Those old sailors were pretty smart.”

“They had incentive,” Lin agreed, “The ocean is big, and the islands they were looking for pretty small. They couldn’t move against wind or current as easily as we can, and if they missed their landfall they might starve in the open ocean, or at least never make it back to where they were hoping for, driven to a strange land.”

“A fate we seem to be avoiding, happily,” Jeff noted. He took a bite of roast beef, piled so high on his sandwich he had difficulty fitting it in his mouth. “This is so good,” he said after chewing awhile. “I’ve had vat grown beef. They try to pass it off as better than beef on the hoof. It has good flavor, I admit, but there is something about the texture that is too uniform. It’s weird to say, but might be better if they actually made it a little tougher,” he decided.

“If we grow our own beef at Central it will have to be vat raised,” Heather reminded him. “I can’t imagine having enough cubic to raise cattle. With grass, like wheat, you can stack trays on conveyer racks, five or six layers deep, with lighting on the bottom of the trays above, high carbon dioxide levels, and grow it pretty efficiently. A cow is just too tall to layer. It isn’t the volume of rock you have to remove and seal, it’s the volume of air to fill it that would be extravagant.”

“When restaurants advertise beefsteak down here, they always stress it is tender,” April reminded them. “I bet they used the tenderest tissue, from the very best kind of cattle for that quality, to seed the vat. Maybe you should look into acquiring an inferior line, to give some of it a little more bite, for when you don’t eat it as a steak. My grandpa said he had some Argentine beef back, when he was in the USNA military, that had to be cooked to death, and still was pretty chewy. I bet it’s cheaper too,” she predicted.

“That’s a chuck roast,” the crewman Able informed them. “It runs around thirty dollars a kilo out of Australia. The same thing out of Japan costs four times as much. The filet mignon off the same animal tastes just like vat raised, but costs twice as much as the chuck, Australian or Japanese either one. The off the hoof filet is so much pricier than vat raised, just for the snob appeal. Rich people like to think they are gourmands, and know wine, even if they abuse their palate with hard liquor and smoke. They might be hard put to tell something is from grapes, but they will pay for prestige.”

“Well, I appreciate your cooking,” April assured him. “I don’t know enough to critique it, but if I had something I didn’t like, I wouldn’t choke it down to avoid hurting your feeling. So far everything you’ve sat in front of me has been good, even a few things I had my doubts about, until I tried them.” That visibly pleased Abe. Lin had added him to his crew from their new base in the Aci Castello marina on Sicily. He’d been chef at a nearby hotel, but the long hours in the kitchen, away from the sun, had turned something he enjoyed doing into a burden.

April and her friends had never seen the Tobbiko’s new home port. They might never, if the political climate was tense. Their space habitat nation, Home, recently removed itself from Low Earth Orbit, and took up station in a halo orbit, between the moon and the far Lagrange point, L2. They’d been attacked repeatedly since independence, by both the Earth Super Powers, and removed themselves from being a close easy target. Once relocated, they had announced no Earth power would be permitted to lift armed ships past L1 on the Earth side of the moon. The Earth powers were still sorting out their reactions to that announcement. April wondered how long it would be until one of them tried to test their resolve, and ability.

They’d made a water landing in the shuttle Dionysus’ Chariot to meet the ketch Tobbiko, waiting three days to do so, because their shuttle was heavily loaded, and they wanted very calm seas to unload, and transfer expensive cargo to the ketch. In the ship’s hold, down below right now, was a great deal of electronic chips, some specialized crystals that needed microgravity to form properly, and a number of drugs that benefited from the same environment. Those same products could have come down on returning supply shuttles from Home. However there were markets for these items, at well above normal prices, in several countries that embargoed trade with Home, including the two largest markets in the world, China, and the USNA. Jeff, and some of his associates, were happy to sell the items at a hefty markup, added for their skill in avoiding customs seizures.

Gunny and Barrack finally crawled out of their cabin. They had been up very late stargazing. It was funny that it was easier to view the heavens directly here, than Home. On Home they could see better, but it would be on a screen, remotely controlling a telescope outside in vacuum. There was a huge element of enjoyment that was missing, if you didn’t point the telescope at what you wanted to see, and focus it, peering in an eyepiece. Something near impossible to do in a pressure suit.

If you were going to view it remotely on a video screen, you might as well just take a feed off a professional telescope, that could see much more. There was more of those sort of fantastic images on the ‘net than anyone could sit and view. Looking at a speck of light in the sky and then aligning a scope on it, and seeing Saturn’s rings and the moons chasing around it real time, had a completely different immediacy and enjoyment, unrelated to image perfection.

Gunny made a face at the cold buffet for breakfast, and went to the tiny main deck galley. He waved Abe back to finish his own lunch when he started to get up. “I can scramble a couple eggs just fine, Abe.” But he actually scrambled half a dozen, and dumped a couple spoonfuls of salsa in them too. Barack made do with cold beef and hard boiled eggs, on a bed of pea salad. Good thing, because Gunny wasn’t sharing.

The cabin was cooled, but not too deep a chill. They wanted to be able to go in and out without too great a shock, from cabin to deck and back. It was maybe twenty-nine degrees. The boat had a generous surplus of power available, since it carried a fusion generator, designed and made by Jeff, but promised for past service by April. The fusion power package gave them a competitive edge on other boats that relied on Diesel for propulsion when there was no wind, and every sort of fueled generator, solar cells or wind turbines for auxiliary power.

“Do you enjoy taking the boat out like this for yourselves, or is it just work, and you are anxious to get back home?” Barak asked.

Lin and Abe exchanged a significant look. Abe gave Lin a nod that said it was his to answer. “We don’t talk to you about port life, because you are on vacation, and we didn’t want to bring up unpleasant things. Things are getting rough on land. We have to post a watch overnight if we are at dock. There are people from other countries where things are even worse, who come to Italy, English and Germans and Romanians who can’t find work. At least in southern Italy or Greece, they aren’t going to freeze to death in the winter. But they will steal anything that isn’t bolted down. They’ll steal that too, if you leave them alone ten minutes with a wrench.”

“Doesn’t the government give them a little something to survive?” April asked.

“A little is right. Most of them are young men, and fewer young women. The women tend to stay home. They get a small allowance deposited each month to an account. But if their card gets used outside their home area for more than a week they get cut off. It’s the place they moved to that’s now responsible for them,. There’s usually a six month legal waiting period to get new benefits in Europe, but if not, there is usually enough bureaucratic red tape and indifference to delays it as long or longer,” Lin explained.

Abe changed his mind and joined in. “A lot of them leave their card at home for their parents or their own family to use. They don’t bother to DNA lock them. Some families may send a little of it to them in cash, if they don’t desperately need it, but some have nothing but what they can steal or find work for cash. Such work doesn’t pay much, because there are more workers than there is work for them. Some will work in a restaurant just to be fed a meal on their shift, and maybe a sandwich to take home.”

Lin nodded agreement. “We could have a dozen hands on the boat for practically nothing, but finding them who have any boat handling skills, or even who are trainable for such things as a cabin steward is difficult. They will lie about their experience, and unless you try them out at dock, you won’t know it until you are a hundred kilometers offshore. I couldn’t send them into your cabin in good conscience, because they’d likely steal your things, and I’d be afraid if we had two or three of them, they might cut our throats in the night and steal the boat.”

“Sorry,” Lin said, seeing Barak feeling his throat and looking entirely too thoughtful. “It’s bad enough we tend to anchor off in the harbor at night rather than stay at dock. We still put a watch out, but it’s much harder to sneak up on us in the open water. The watch can see an approach and call for help much earlier than at dock. When we are offshore we are freer to use the laser you gave us,” he said glancing upward, since it was mounted high on the main mast. “It would raise entirely too many questions if we used it at dock, and it left visible damage,”

“There have been two different weeks this season we weren’t able to get a charter, and we all agreed it was better to do some open ocean cruising, instead of staying at dock. Once we were in Florida, and it saved us marina fees anyway, but another time it was in Sicily, where we pay to keep a permanent dock, even if we are not there. Standing a watch at the wheel at sea is much less stressful than watching the dock for boarders, or small boats sneaking up to us,” and we can do some serious fishing to fill up the larder.”

Abe spoke again, “Since we have plenty of power, thanks to you,” he nodded at April, ” we put two commercial freezer chests down in the hold. We are able to catch more than we eat usually, and we have arrangements with a couple farmers. We buy a bunch of chickens, and pay them to raise a pig or calf, and buy the whole thing, slaughtered and cut up. Sometimes we trade some of the frozen fish instead of all cash, it cuts our expenses and adds a little variety to both their diet and ours. On land there are a lot of areas now where it is too risky to keep a big freezer, unless you can generate your own power. If the public power goes down and you lose a freezer full it’s a huge hit.”

“We all live a little better than we could landbound,” Lin asserted. “Although we lost a crewman because he was married, and he worried too much about his wife and son when we were gone. He finally quit and moved them all up in the hills to his parent’s house. It’s not as comfortable as in the city, but it’s safer. There was no way I wanted to start letting crew keep family aboard. Pretty soon it would look like a refugee boat, with laundry in the rigging.”

“So, none of the crew is married?” Barak asked, thoughtfully.

“No, and the rate of marriage has gone down on land too. At least official, legal marriages. When the economy is bad enough people don’t want to make the commitment. Does that seem strange to you?” he asked Barak.

“Not especially, I’m just thinking about the crew from Home, who went out to Jupiter not long ago to capture a snowball. They are six unmarried crew, the oldest twenty-seven. They decided to either do all singles, or a crew of couples, but they couldn’t find three qualified couples who would agree to a three year voyage. They’re getting ready to send a second expedition already, before the first has returned, but it will be the same, all singles, and I thought I might apply if I can get my mom to agree.”

“How old will you be when it leaves?” Abe wondered.

“I’ll be fifteen, near sixteen,” Barak told him. “But the next mission will go faster.”

“In the Age of Sail, young gentlemen might be sent to serve as midshipmen, training to be officers at thirteen, sometimes even twelve years of age,” Lin informed them. “By sixteen they might be close to taking their lieutenant’s exam. They had to pass an oral examination before three captains, to demonstrate they knew how to handle a ship and command. It wasn’t easy, some never passed it to advance.”

“I didn’t get the sense things were so rough down here,” April said, concern written on her face. “I’ve done research for Jeff for our bank, and I’ve seen the numbers for sales and margins turn down, but employment has stayed steady, and pretty much everybody has the same thing as negative tax like North America, even if they call it something else.”

“They also all have price controls,” Lin said, “even if they don’t call them that. It always leads to shortages. Your negative tax may let you apply to the government distribution warehouse, but if you want oil it may be canola, instead of peanut or corn oil, and if you want milk it may be powder instead of Ultra. They may run out of wheat flour or rye and you have to take corn meal. It’s still listed as available, but they run out early in the month. If you get the prepared meals like in North America, then they can sneak the cheap stuff in even easier. It just slowly gets a little worse each year,” he said, frowning.

“It spills over to the commercial sales too. Last time we wanted to buy Diesel, when we were picking up some guests in England, it was fifty-seven EuroMarks a liter, priced higher for anything considered recreational use. The marina was limiting boats that weren’t based there to fifty liters. We were fortunate we had your generator and could beg off the sale at that price.

We made a show of waiting the tide, and taking her away from the dock under sail. There isn’t much on the water moving under power only, but military, and big freighters. A lot of the freighters now are fitted with sails or wings of some sort for auxiliary propulsion too. They’d rather come in a couple days later if the wind will let them save fuel.”

“But isn’t a lot of Diesel grown from waste bio-mass now?” Jeff asked.

“Yes, but if you add up the acres, there just isn’t enough waste to meet the demand. Even if you don’t factor in the energy costs to chop it up, take it to the tanks, and then to separate and filter it. Then you still need to transport it to where it is needed, although a lot is reused for agriculture, and never moves far,” Lin explained.

“Now, you can get a lot more feedstock in tropical areas. You grow directly for fuel feedstock, not just waste from food crops. But the Amazon basin, and Africa both seem to be in a perpetual state of unrest. You spend a fortune guarding your processing plant from attack, or paying protection money to every local thug and warlord, as well as the central government in power. You may guard the plant, but they can keep the growers from bringing the feed stock to the plant. I don’t see any changes to that very soon either.”

“How long can it keep getting a little worse each year, like you are describing, before it doesn’t work at all?” April asked. “I don’t want us to get caught by surprise. There are still things we need from Earth that would be very hard to do without.”

“Like what? Lin asked.

“Copper wire,” Heather spoke up for April, right away. “Especially the sort reinforced with bucky tubes. Solder and fluxes, anything with silver or fluorine or boron in it, plastics, lubricants, cloth and paper of all kinds,” she looked at Jeff.

“Anything with big glass. Ports and rigid display screens, a lot of medical things like dressings and instruments. Needles, gloves, and IV bags. A lot of those things we could make, but people who make few hundred thousand units a month can make them much cheaper than we ever could. Big pieces of steel, especially the high end stuff that has to be high strength. Anything with beryllium in it, and yeah, silver like you said.”

“They know techie stuff better than me,” April admitted.

“I don’t think it’s going to be one big dramatic crash,” Lin suggested. “Prices will just keep creeping up, and selection and delivery will keep getting worse. You’ll just reach a point eventually where you’ve had to wait for wire a couple times, the price is really a hardship, and they will finally quote you a crazy price, and tell you that you have to wait months for delivery, and it will kick you over the edge, to make dies and draw your own wire.”

“That means we still have to find sources of copper, and other scarce materials in the outer system,” Jeff concluded. “We already have iron and a few other metals, and soon all the volatiles we could want. Nobody can stop us from scooping nitrogen from Earth, but a lot of these things we have no idea where we’ll be able to find them, out past Mars.”

“What about Mars itself?” April asked. “Has the joint expedition found any serious ore in their explorations?”

“The participants appear to have quietly come to some sort of a gentleman’s agreement to not publicize any such finds,” Jeff informed them. “I have word searched every public document about Mars, with particular attention to multiple word searches of any dealing with geology, and field trips to volcanoes, and prominent dikes. Not a single one gets specific about any minerals, except generic descriptions of rock class. Indeed the only useful data is about the large number of iron meteorites to be found on some of the plains. I’m sure they mention those, only because they would consider it a desecration to see them as ore. A robot vehicle to follow a search pattern and scoop them up would be easy to do though. How many iron meteorites do they really need for scientific research? They’ll never cut and examine one in a thousand, but they act like each one is precious. It’s silly.”

“Well, couldn’t we go look for ourselves?” Heather wanted to know. “They don’t have any claim on the whole planet, do they?”

“There is a general treaty, signed back in the sixties, which basically says everything off Earth will be held in common. The moon has shown it is pretty much defunct. In particular trying to apply it to other star systems would be silly, and if we find planets with owners it will look as arrogant and short sighted as the Pope dividing up the western hemisphere of Earth, without a thought to the fact it already had indigenous owners. Mars base has sent out drones, but the furthest anybody has been from base is about two-hundred kilometers. They won’t take a flier beyond the distance they could be rescued in a rover.”

“You’d support prospecting there then?” Heather asked directly.

“I’d rather see if perhaps the pickings are better among the asteroids and satellites of the gas giants first, before we look for what we need on a planet with inhabitants. It is after all at the bottom of another gravity-well, even if not as deep as Earth. In particular I’d rather none of us make a commitment to Mars, one way or the other, as Spox for any of our companies, before we discuss it again. Is that agreeable?” he asked very mildly.

“Sure,” Heather agreed. April was nodding her approval.

Lunch had progressed to cold drinks on a bare table. It was the hottest part of the day, everybody was full, and nobody was in a hurry to go back on deck.

“What are our options to get materials, beyond the out system moons and asteroids, assuming Mars is out, and Earth no longer can lift what we need?” Heather mused.

“Well, Venus is useless at our present tech level. We don’t know much about Mercury. It’s been mapped, but the only rovers examined a tiny area at the poles. The solar flux there should make processing ore on site easy. Eventually, I think we shall visit other stars. If our technology is good enough to do that, then I expect high value cargo will be worth shipping, organisms if we find living worlds, things like gold, and indium, and iridium. It’s going to be awhile before we can synthesize them in quantity,” Jeff conceded.

“How about separating out the trace quantities of elements, like a few parts per million, in asteroids?” Barak asked.

“That might be possible, if we can vacuum distill an entire asteroid, or concentrate all the trace elements in one end of a bar by zone refining. That’s how a lot of semiconductors were first refined. Then there is mass spectroscopic separation, or chemically changing everything to various gasses, and reducing them by vapor depositation. Melting a free-floating asteroid shouldn’t be that difficult, but if you remove volatiles by raising the temperature past the boiling point of each element in stages, how do you capture the boil off?”

“Put it in a big ball and let it vacuum deposit on the walls?” Barak suggested.

“Possibly, but you have a dynamic system of a molten ball of metal that has to be kept at the center of a much lighter shell, or at least kept from touching it. And when do you harvest it? Do you stop after every major element is depleted and clean it off the shell? Or do you let them build up in layers and try to separate them later?” Jeff smiled at Barak’s look of concentration. “Think on it. If you come up with another obvious solution I’ll be delighted, and make sure it earns you some money too.”

“There’s all sorts of resources in Antarctica the Earthies aren’t using,” Gunny reminded them. “If they can’t challenge you militarily, and you need them bad enough you can just go take them.”

“As tempting as that is, I suspect it would precipitate a war, and not a short easy one. Getting a foothold is one thing, but conducting mining operations when you might get bombed at random integrals would be pretty tough. One hypersonic cruise missile every few months would be plenty to neutralize any profits. I’m not ready to be the monster who reduced the USNA and China until they couldn’t mount that much of a response. It would have to be a last resort, and it should be a matter of our survival before we even considered it.”

“We could do a lot to adapt new tech, based on different elements,” Heather said. “We have lots of calcium, which is just fine for structural use and wiring in vacuum. But here’s no legacy engineering data. We just need experience using it because the metal corrodes so easily. So does iron, but we have a couple thousand years of experience working around that. I’d love to know what we could do with say calcium – scandium alloys, or calcium – aluminum.

“There’s just one thing I want clear,” Barak spoke up at a lull in the conversation.

“Yes?” Jeff prompted him.

“If you are going to go out there and land on moons of Jupiter or Saturn, and see all kinds of interesting stuff, maybe get crew shares on big mineral finds, I want a berth on that trip!”

“Nothing is certain, we’ll just have to see,” Jeff told him.

“Well, if you know you are going to do that when I’d be away getting Snowball II back to Home let me know. I’d much rather do a real landing trip than a snowball. I’d die to get back and find out I’d missed out on a trip like that.”

“I promise, I’ll let you know the very same day I do.”

#5 coming up

I’ve got 23k words of a new April book started. A floating chapter I’ll have to plug in somewhere. And no solid ideas for a title yet. I have not intended to start another April book, but I keep getting these ideas that I need to write down and dreams…Meanwhile I have four other books started and can’t get an idea for a short for anything right now. I guess that doesn’t matter as shorts don’t seem to sell anyway.

Another snippet of “Conspiracy Theory” for you.

Chapter 6

Jack dropped all his gear off at his apartment. There were no marks around the lock or anything disturbed inside. Mrs. Hanson sometimes napped in the day, so he didn’t bother her for his mail. The rental agency informed him his refund would come in the mail as a gift card in six to eight weeks. Anything to put it off, and hope he never used it. It didn’t surprise him.

He didn’t have anything to carry so he took the bus back to his neighborhood instead of wasting money on a taxi. Carrying nothing it was pretty safe mid-day. The rental was with one of the cut rate places that didn’t do pick up or drop off, but a bus was cheaper than a ‘free’ ride from a fancier rental. He made sure to sit where the surveillance camera was behind him, so it would show anyone’s face who bothered him. Some people sat where the camera could see them, which the criminals had long ago figured out was useless, just like the cheap store cams installed to look down on robbers that get a great shot of the top of their hat.

He logged on the SF chat group and was pleased to see the new user FANattic had posted a few times. Since some real life extension therapies had become available a wave of new fiction was exploring the ideas of people living hundreds of years or forever, and was being discussed heavily.

The reality was the latest tech was projected to add fifty percent to a person’s life span, if the studies on smaller mammals carried over as well to people. Nobody would know for another fifty or sixty years. It didn’t matter to most folks because the work all involved creation of custom treatments tailored to your specific genome, driving the price into the multi-million dollar range.

It might work, but it wasn’t a sure enough thing that a bank would loan you money for the treatment based on extending your wage earning years to a hundred and forty or so. In particular the treatments might become much less expensive, resulting in a person owing a five million dollar bill for something that could now be bought for a half million.

The reality of a number of economic bubbles in recent years had driven the lesson home that those sort of loans tended to default. There had been a wave of home owners with loans for million dollar two bedroom bungalows who suddenly found themselves working for the new greenbacks at one tenth the Federal Reserve note pay rate. A lot of them became roomers or went directly to cardboard boxes.

He was so far from being able to afford life extending treatments that he didn’t worry about it. You might as well worry and fret because you didn’t own a private jet or a Greek isle.

There was one day remaining of his vacation, and he’d have to return to work. Tomorrow he’d just do shopping and buy some perishables he’d used up or took along with him. Not too many because in about a week he’d get a box of vegetables and fruit from somebody with whom he had an ‘arrangement’. He didn’t want to make it a hectic day, and have to report back to work frazzled.

A tentative little tap at the door told him Mrs. Hanson knew he was home and had his mail. He invited her in and asked if anything interesting happened while he was gone, putting the bundle of mail on the table to sort later. He made tea for them without asking, and sat giving her his full attention. Mrs. Hanson was not a resource to be taken lightly or ignored while he sorted his mail.

The news was all benign as far as he could tell. The Mexican family in number seven sent their daughter back home to take care of an aging relative, and the fellow in apartment 12 had two lovely young women living with him now. The super was going to change the bushes at the front of the building to low water plants and decorative stones. The apartments two doors down had a burglary, and a nearby liquor store had a hold up. That was hardly surprising.

The nearby supermarket had stopped carrying the kind of food her cat liked. She was upset with herself that she found an site online who would ship her a case cheaper than the store had charged, and she wondered now how long she’d been throwing her money away. Mrs. Hanson had a keen nose for a bargain.

“Did anyone coming looking for me, or knocking on my door?”

Mrs. Hanson was relaxed sipping her tea, and her face changed abruptly, painted with concern. “Are you in trouble Jack?”

“I don’t think so. Why the sudden concern?”

“I had two husbands and three sons and not a one of them could lie to me worth a damn. You just tried to keep your face neutral and keep the fear out of your voice. You’re a nice man and a good neighbor, but you better never try to make your living playing high stakes poker.”

“I did have some young fellows follow me, and I was worried how much they know about me. We had a little confrontation, and I don’t think they’ll be eager to come find me again, but their bosses might insist, or they might send someone else.”

“You didn’t make it a permanent solution then?”

Jack sat silent a bit, wondering what to tell her. If he lied she’d probably know it. That might be the end of a useful friendship. “No, I left them restrained. I shot out their tires, and took their papers and burned most of them. These people might have something I want. If I made myself their enemy there might be no way to fix it. They are hiding some things, probably from the government, and even if it is criminal, I might actually approve of what they are doing. If it’s what I think, it’s bigger and more important than me as an individual, and I don’t want to ruin it for others.”

“My first husband was pleasant like you. He didn’t hold a grudge. If you did him wrong he’d shun you but never seek to get even. I often wondered if he died young of a heart attack holding it all in. My second husband was very nice to me, but to people in general he was a son-of-a-bitch. It depends on what these people are like. Some people you can get what you want from them being pleasant. Some view it as weakness and will actually punish you for it. Do you know which sort these folks are?”

“Not yet,” Jack admitted. “They didn’t just send somebody to put a bullet in my head. That speaks well to being moderate. But I heard the young guys talking, and they were willing to rough me up. They were themselves subject to conditioning, so their bosses were pretty ruthless with them. I don’t think I could accept that as a condition of employment.”

“And yet you allow your boss to make you show up every morning by operant conditioning.”

“How so?” Jack asked, visibly upset.

“He rewards you with a paycheck, and you are certain he will punish you by withholding it if you stop coming to work, even though you have not experienced that.”

Jack looked at her like she had started speaking a foreign language he didn’t know.

“You’ve never asked what I did before retiring, dear. I was a psychologist, and had an active practice with all sorts of patients. When you say these young men were conditioned you don’t mean the simple classic conditioning like a cult or an isolated family use, do you? You are talking about the sort of drug induced deep conditioning that intelligence agencies or some armed forces employ.”

“Yes, I don’t know if I mentioned it before, I served briefly in the air force as a young man. I thought I might stay in until I had a retirement, but I found out it wasn’t for me. People strongly hinted that some of the agency people we worked with had that sort of conditioning. We were encouraged not to ask questions that might provoke it. I never really knew the details of what made it work.”

“I won’t try to cram six years of psych instruction in your head over a cup of tea. If you want I have some texts that will start you understanding how it works. Let me know if you want them and I’ll send them to your phone. The point I’d make now though, is that you can’t expect to reason with someone like that. Their normal responses may be impaired. The drugs and the conditioning tend to make them both Obsessive Compulsive and to a lesser extent Manic/Depressive. They will fail to display normal responses to things outside the object of their conditioning. Some start to neglect personal hygiene. Others will lose their sex drive or lose weight because they neglect eating. You may think they are unintelligent when they are not, because complex reasoning suffers.”

“Would a person seem unusually defiant when it wasn’t reasonable, and then when they do see their situation is untenable break entirely and start crying? The one young man was telling me how I was in trouble while tied up and helpless on the ground, but when he saw me retrieve a locating beacon off my truck he suddenly saw I was aware of them long before he’d thought it possible, and he was immediately reduced to tears.”

“Yes, what you are describing is entirely possible.”

“I think I’d like those texts then. I might not have time to know them before I have to deal with these folks again, but it’s something I want to know now.”

“I’ll send them, but for right now I’d like you to go across the hall to my apartment, and behind the front door my shotgun is propped in the corner. I want you to have it here. It has five rounds in it. The shot are hard tungsten pyramids with concave faces and very sharp apices. They’ll go right through body armor except the stoutest plate. If five rounds won’t fix any problem at your door then likely fifty wouldn’t either.”

“I can’t leave you defenseless,” Jack objected.

“Really Jack, do you think that’s the only protection I have?” She smiled wickedly.

* * *

It felt funny to fast forward through the video from his dash cam before going out the door of the super market to get in his little car. It would take a few times to find out the optimum speed to run through it. He had to stop and back up twice the first time when the car next to him left, and when some people walked past the car on their way through the parking lot. Neither had touched his car or stopped or leaned over, but their image had flashed by too quickly the first viewing to be sure.

Nobody paid any attention to him looking at his phone. So many people stopped and stepped out of the way to text or talk with spouses over what to buy in a store that they were invisible. Or didn’t step out of the way, just blocking the aisle totally oblivious in some cases.

Putting the food away, it seemed this normal activity was strange to be doing now, with the action at the campground replaying in his mind frequently. Nothing was going to seem right or important until it was resolved.

The next morning he found everything normal at work. There was new work waiting for him, and even one of the files he’d not finished when he went on vacation. It was hard concentrating on the mundane. The office seemed a little shabbier and the work less important since it wasn’t space related. Who really cared about a new clamshell case for designer eyeglasses? Why was a new design even necessary? Had anything changed about them in the last fifty years?

At lunch a couple people wanted to know how his fishing trip went. He found it easy to smile, because he imagined how they would react if he told them the truth. He refused to lie however, telling them he hadn’t caught anything worth keeping. If one was a six footer that weighed a good hundred and sixty pounds, well, he’d still been a catch and release.

After lunch his boss came by looking serious, and asked him to come talk with him. They didn’t go to his office, but his bosses office. He was looking pretty grim too. Jack reached in his pocket and started the little recorder he always carried at work. His boss took a seat so he did too. He wasn’t invited, but he wasn’t going to stand at attention at the desk either.

“Jack we just had two FBI agents visit and ask about you. They asked if you were a problem worker, and if we had any concerns. We’re very concerned now. If you are involved with anything that is going to embarrass the company we want your resignation.”

“I’m not aware of anything that should make the FBI have any interest in me. If you tell me the agents names I’ll ask them directly. They should have come to me directly instead of casting a cloud on my name here. Do you have their cards?”

“They were Heinemann and Jefferies, they didn’t offer a card.”

“Did they leave a number?”

“No they didn’t offer a number. I suppose the local office is listed…”

“Did you at least see their ID? They surely at least offered their shields for you to see?”

The two bosses looked at each other, uncomfortable.

“So two strangers walk in with no ID and bad mouth me. But they offer no way to contact them if there is a problem? Kind of like an old lady gossiping across the back fence? If they’d asked to see the company books would you have walked them down to bookkeeping?”

“I can’t believe somebody would be so bold as to present themselves as FBI with no documents. That would be a serious offense. I’d seem some sort of an anti-government rights nut to demand ID.”

Jack pulled his phone out. “Speaker on. Number look up – Los Angeles office FBI,” he asked the phone. “Dial that please.”

“Uh, Jack, I don’t think…”

“I know you didn’t. I’m trying to fix that now.”

The ring was loud in the quiet office. There was none of the hum and rumble he had to deal with in his cubicle. “FBI, Los Angeles field office, agent Howe speaking. How may I help you?”

“My name is Jack Thompson and I’m calling you from Midwest Molding in San Marino. I’m in conference with my supervisor and the owner. We just had a couple gentleman stop at our business making inquiries about an employee, and they did not show ID or present a shield. Could you tell us if you sent a pair of agents, Heinemann and Jefferies to this business as part of an investigation?”

“There are no agents of that name in our office. We take impersonation of a Federal agent very seriously. Do you by any chance have security video of these men so we can investigate them further?”

Jack lifted an inquiring eyebrow to the owner, holding the phone out toward him.

“No, we don’t have the sort of a high security business to need that. We have some cameras on the loading dock area for theft, but our offices keep no cash or anything to attract trouble.”

“I’m not sure what we can do then. If these men solicited some sort of charity or asked the company to do something it was bogus. Was there anything unusual or distinguishing about them? Were they of unusual size or height or displayed tattoos or scars? Anything odd about their dress or demeanor?”

“Now that you mention it both wore glasses, not sunglasses, but regular glasses. You don’t see that much anymore except older people. Otherwise they were unremarkable white males in average business suits. Perhaps a bit on the young side, but I’m not sure how old you need to be to finish FBI training.

“We have some agents that are qualified before they are thirty, so they can look pretty young, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen an agent with glasses either, now that you mention it. Corrective surgery is so cheap now, and they do a marvelous job with it. I’ll make a report on this to my supervisor. I’m not sure if he’ll send someone to try to do a drawing or show you some known impersonators. If he wishes to do that we’ll call ahead, and our agent will display credentials to you. I do thank you for reporting the matter. It’s just as well you didn’t confront them while they were there. They might have become belligerent with you.”

“You’re welcome agent Howe. Thank you for your help.” Jack disconnected.

“Well it’s your call,” Jack concluded. “If you want to let me go I’ll take my coffee mug and not darken your door again.” He forced himself to look merely irritated, not scared. “You had a couple strangers in here. We have no idea what their agenda was. They might have picked me or any other of your employees and used our name just to get into your office. I’d certainly have the place swept by a good company, for bugs left behind, whatever you do.”

The owner looked around like he might see one stuck on the middle of a wall some place. “You don’t know somebody who does that?”

“Nope, when I worked for NASA we had in house guys who made sure everything was kept clean on a regular basis. I never even talked to them. In a town this size there has to be a ton of them.”

The owner looked rattled. His own supervisor spoke up. “Well I hardly think we want to let you go on the say-so of a couple criminals impersonating government agents.” He was talking to Jack but looking at the owner, who nodded agreement. “We’d appreciate it if you kept this to yourself, and don’t give the other employees something to speculate about needlessly.”

“Absolutely,” Jack agreed. “I really doubt anyone has any useful information. Nobody watches the parking lot either, to know what sort of car they came in or get their license plate. They’d just waste time on idle chatter.” It seemed the perfect time to assert himself to make an exit so he rose. “Since my name was involved, I’d appreciate it if you tell me, if you ever do hear anything about who they were.”

“Certainly, though it looks unlikely,” his boss agreed.

Jack just nodded and left unescorted for his work space. A thousand bucks says they were in a Honda Portage, Jack thought. And if it wasn’t my two idiots, I know who employs them… Jack was honestly irritated. How could these people possibly be doing space work if they were this inept investigating one seni-retired designer?

A new snippet – Chapter 5 of “Conspiracy Theory”

Jack had a few days to kill now, somehow. He didn’t think running straight home was a very good idea. Certainly not back down the same route he’d come. He didn’t have a tent anymore, but the truck wasn’t so bad to sleep in he’d found out, and he had almost seven hundred dollars from the security goons. He decided a loop further west, down through the center of the state would work. Following the coast back would have been fun, but everything there was touristy and expensive. The middle valley was agricultural land, what still could get water, and there were cheaper rooms and places to eat that served the less glamorous business trade, or even the pickers of crops that still hadn’t been successfully automated.

A robot could be trained to judge the ripeness of a avocado or a melon, and pick it without bruising it, but they had yet to program anything to pick a green bean without breaking the plants, making the other beans inaccessible, and costing more in the end than nimble hands.

Jack wouldn’t bet on any of the picker’s grandchildren having a job in the fields, but for now there was still the odd shaped or extremely delicate item, or things of such limited market it wasn’t worth making special machines for them.

If he was home, Jack had a friend Albert outside Los Banos, tucked up against the coastal range. He certainly didn’t want to call him, especially now that he didn’t know who might be watching, but the fellow was very good with electronics and computers. The man was retired from NASA like him, but they’d kept in sporadic touch for years. Al was Jack’s favorite sort of people, smart. He’d know what to do with the cell phones.

He’d planned on getting a room near town and driving to see his friend, but when he got into the little city there was some sort of tomato festival. He inched along, tied up in traffic, and once damn near ran over a bright red tomato that jumped out in front of him when traffic slowed, waving it arms to direct him into a paid parking lot. All the possible headlines that would have generated kept him amused for miles.

He didn’t want to put his battery back in and check for rooms. The rental agency might reveal where he was from tracking the truck if these Tangent people had the right connections, but using his phone was just making it too easy. The traffic for a few blocks was as bad as being back in LA. The few places he saw had no-vacancy signs up, one place even posting a big A-frame sign at the end of their driveway. He turned west at the first street that his map said would connect on further west, and traffic dropped off quickly.

Jack had never been to Al’s house. He didn’t have to look it up because he had an anachronism, a little pocket address book. It was worn rounded on the corners, but it had near thirty years of entries, many of them slashed out and updated. It worked along with his big state atlas just fine to substitute for GPS and online maps.

Al’s house was in a tiny subdivision, tucked between the flanks of a steep hill to the west. A bit more than a dozen homes on a cul-de-sac, the paved street wider and nicer than the county road that led to it. A few had tiny lawns, more the size of an area rug right by the front door than what easterners would consider a lawn. The rest went with native plants and stone gardens. There was a ham radio tower uphill from one place, and as he expected that was Al’s place.

Jack drove all the way to the end and turned around where the end expanded into a circle twice as wide as the two lanes. One house was boarded up and another looked empty, the tiny lawn brown, and leaves and debris on the driveway. Jack parked in front of the empty place and walked down three houses to Al’s

He didn’t have to knock. Albert was standing behind the screen door, inside door open, waiting for him with a tall glass of cold water. It wasn’t terribly hot, but it sounded good.

“How long have you been running, and are they very far behind you?” Al asked, observing how he parked well away and pointed back out of the street. He didn’t seem all that concerned despite his frank assessment, just interested. In fact he held the door open.

There wasn’t any point in denying it with Al. “Just today, and I’m not sure they’re even on my tail yet. They’re kind of slow.”

“That was good you parked down on the curb. We’ve had trouble with the empty houses like you parked in front of getting stripped. If you’d backed up flush to the garage doors somebody would be calling the cops. That’s why that other house is all boarded up. Somebody came in at night and stripped all the pipes and wiring. They won’t even put up a for sale sign any more, ’cause it attracts the looters. Of course if somebody comes looking for you it won’t take them long to figure out you aren’t there.”

He led Jack into a sparsely furnished great room with a mix of Mission Style furniture and odds and ends of Southwest and Indian stuff. There wasn’t a lot of it, but what there was looked to be good quality. A small fireplace was just big enough to cook at, with a iron arm swung to one side that would hang a kettle, and ample bookcases on both sides. He reclaimed a chair that had his own glass on a table next to it, and waved Jack to pick a seat.

“I’d think that radio tower would attract attention. Has anybody ever cut down your feed cable?”

“I’ve got a cable conduit buried five feet down, and my antenna mast is inside my garden fence. I kind of have a reputation with the locals too. They tend to leave my stuff alone.”

“I can leave if you’d rather I don’t attract trouble.”

“Not at all, but I was getting hungry and ready to go get some dinner. I know a repair place far enough out of town that the festival traffic shouldn’t be bad there, and I know the owner. If I ask he’ll let you park your truck out back, and you can come back and stay the night here.”

“If you let me buy dinner,” Jack agreed. Dinner was a bargain compared to a likely hotel bill. Al took his time drinking the water and asking about Jack’s work and living in LA. He didn’t immediately press for an explanation of who he might be avoiding or why.

Jack followed at a distance until they reached the outskirts of town. Al pulled in behind a low white building with a fenced lot in back and a couple tow trucks parked on the side. He pointed in the fenced lot but parked outside himself, and went in the office.

He had his small suitcase on the pavement but hadn’t locked up before Al joined him with a numbered card stock repair tag in his hand.

“Hang this on your mirror. It lends a little authenticity.” He thought that was it, but when he turned back Al had a little black plastic half bubble in his hand. “If you want to leave that on the dashboard Frank runs a wireless net as part of his alarm system, and this will record any activity around the truck overnight and stream it to my house. If the net goes down it retains what it sees in memory too.” Jack was happy to accept that, and positioned it carefully in the exact middle of the dash so it might be taken for a hard wired installation.

Al opened his trunk for the suitcase without comment and waited until Jack was seated and belted in to start the car. “You like Mexican OK? I have a place I favor at least once a week.”

“That’s fine with me. There isn’t much I don’t like if it’s well prepared. You can order for me.”

Al didn’t go further into town, turning and heading south. The restaurant when they got to had a metal carport running the length of the front, giving you shade for your car. There were only three vehicles parked there. It was a little early yet for supper. The building itself was stucco, windowless, and mostly hidden behind tall shrubs. It had a stout plank door so low Jack ducked a little worried he’d clip his head. The outer wall was so thick it was almost like a short hallway. It was dark inside, and surprisingly cool given the rear door was propped full open. The inside had a handful of tables, and if there were two chairs of the same kind he couldn’t see them. The smell of meat cooking was strong.

Albert didn’t break stride marching across the dining room and out open rear door. There were a half dozen tables out there under a metal awning, and a stucco wall on each side made it like a courtyard, but open to the north side. Wicker chairs with green cushions pulled up to round tables with a green plastic tablecloth. It was much nicer than inside.

The land rose slightly away from the patio, and a few hundred meters away were a couple modest homes, just before a respectable hill went up sharply behind them. The day was far enough along the shadows were starting to get long.

The waiter was in a long sleeved white shirt, and brought Al a tall lemonade without asking.

“Mis pedido habitual, por favor. E lo mismo para mi amigo, Juan.”

The waiter just nodded and went away, he hadn’t bothered to bring menus.

“What is your usual order?” Jack asked, able to follow that much.

“Fajitas, but with pork instead of beef. They do it right here, and a big guacamole.”

Juan brought another tall drink and a pitcher of it without ice. Jack took a sip and found it was lime instead of lemon, with something else, he wasn’t quite sure what. Something sweeter. They didn’t serve chips, which was pretty standard down in the city.

“How much do I want to know?” Al finally got around to asking. “Are you screwing around with some government agency? Or is this some private enterprise?”

“No, not agency. They are too inept even to be a letter agency, they are private, but big, and I can’t figure out what they are doing. It’s none of my business really, but I’ve always cared about space, and whatever they are doing is all about space, and they are trying to cover it up. I don’t appreciate when people lie to me.” He stopped and thought a bit. “OK, maybe lie is too strong a word. I don’t appreciate when people try to deceive me, even if it might be benign personally. You want to know more? I have a couple cell phones from these folk’s security professionals, and I intended to ask you what to do with them.”

“You stole their cell phones? I hope you at least yanked the batteries.”

“Oh sure, and I’m paranoid, so I wrapped them in foil from my cooking stuff just to be sure. They might have some sort of backup power in them, enough to let them be pinged.”

“Yes, this is interesting, and you’ve displayed enough caution so far. I’d like to hear as much as you’re willing to tell me.”

The fajitas came then, steaming on cast iron grills, marinated strips of the loin with char lines and sweet onions and peppers. The odor of cumin was strong, and the waiter sat plates of warm corn tortillas and a bowl of chunky guacamole with sides of chopped tomatoes and a sweet corn relish. There was a hot salsa verde and red pepper sauce if you wished. Juan inquired if he’d like flour tortillas, but he stayed with the corn. Jack usually had sour cream with Mexican, but since he’d invited his host to order he decided to try it as is. He stuffed three tortillas and downed them before he was sated enough to talk again.

“It started with a print I was given at work,” Jack started, and related the whole thing. By the time they had sweet egg custard and little cups of strong coffee Al had heard the whole story. Other than a detail or two he’d kept silent, just betraying amusement with his expression.

“It’s unlikely I can get anything out of the phones. I’ll try, but most companies know to encrypt everything, and all the decent phones wipe their memory if you keep trying to unlock them and don’t know the password. That doesn’t mean they have no value. They’re a significant bargaining chip if you threaten to give them to the government, because they will have a backdoor to read them.”

“I’m not sure I want to damage them that badly yet.”

“After they threatened you directly? What do you owe them, and why wouldn’t you give them back a bit of their own medicine?” Al asked, looking very skeptical.

“I feel like I already gave them back about as bad as I got. I’d really like to know what they are up to. They may not be guilty of more than unwisely choosing some horribly incompetent security people. The government has totally screwed up space travel, even if they are not as evil as the government I’d like to know what they are doing to need space suits. It’s not like I demand anybody to be shining heroes to leave mind my own business at this stage in life. If they are doing an end run around the law, well, I’ve done that a time or two myself when I had reason.”

Al had a wave of surprise flash on his face. “You’re hoping to get a ride out there aren’t you?”

“Nah, I’m sixty eight. No damn way somebody is going to give me a lift, even if they are sneaking off the planet. If they are it’s going to be a handful of people who actually launch, and a whole lot more supporting them to do it. But I may very well approve of it once I know what they are doing.”

“Leave the phones with me. There has to be someplace you post regularly online isn’t there?”

“I post to a science fiction readers group every few days. I have a few writers who I read everything they publish, and they post about conventions and related topics like astronomy and different technologies, and the writers post to promote themselves too.”

“Show me back at the house, and I’ll join up and start posting a bit, if you don’t show up online for a set period I’ll see the phones get to the right people. What is a reasonable period?”

“Three days. I’d go longer, but if I had something rough happen, like these people snatch me, I’d rather not be sitting knowing it will be a week before they have any pressure put on them.”

Al got a slow squinting smile that wasn’t pretty.

“What? I can almost hear the wheels whirring. What devious thing are you thinking?”

“If you get disappeared, what better way to deal with it than to post the whole story on your science fiction group? The authorities might not believe it, but these folks have the capacity to believe a great deal of outlandish things. Am I right? How many in the group? Enough it would be very hard to shut them all up?”

“Al, it’s a very popular genre. There’s a good thirty-thousand people who follow it worldwide.”

“Excellent. Write out a file tonight and I’ll hold it back as a serious weapon. I won’t keep it on a computer attached to the net either. I have a free standing box you can use and I’ll put a copy on a thumb drive and stash it away.”

Jack refrained from asking him why he needed a free standing computer with no net connection.

“I’ll do a little research and find out who owns the real estate for these companies,” Al volunteered. “There are other public records, and I may drive by and drop off some surveillance modules to see who comes and goes, and get some license numbers of the cars and trucks visiting their facility.”

“Don’t get yourself in trouble,” Jack worried. “I think that’s how I drew their attention, because I drove around their place once and turned around and drove back around it the other way. I showed way too much interest in them.”

“If I drive past on the actual street out front I won’t be displaying my own license plate. I have a list of plates for my color and model of car, and can check and see if they are in their usual locations. But I don’t need to even get that close. The sort of bug I have in mind I can throw out the window without stopping on the next road over, and it will walk in overnight, or fly over and position itself where it can watch the place. It can even go inside their perimeter and attach to the building or parked vehicles.”

“Is this something I can afford?”

“Come on Jack. It’s my hobby. I’ll do it for fun.”

Al’s guest room was nicer than Jack’s apartment. He turned in early after composing his story and getting Al registered to the science fiction group. He suggested a few books to read if he wanted something to post. It turned out Al had read quite a few of the same books he had. “I’m just not much of a joiner, and anytime you have more than about a half dozen people, you know somebody is going to be a jackass everyone else has to tolerate. I don’t have much patience I confess.”

In the morning Jack was up before Al. He considered starting the coffee, but felt shy given what it cost now. He didn’t know if Al made it strong or mild and a full pot or half. He decided to wait.

Al had a lot of interesting books in the living room. He examined them, but didn’t pull any from the shelf. It gave him a slightly deeper insight into a man he knew at work for years, but never was the sort of friend to pal around with and do things together after work. He’d been the competent sort at work, one of those they took a mess to after somebody else failed at it and it needed cleaned up.

“Would you like some breakfast?” Al called from the large arch into the dining room and kitchen.

“Sure, can I help?”

“Pull a stool up to the counter and talk to me. That’s help enough. Can you eat napolitos OK?”

“Probably, I have never had any food allergies. Do you grow them back in your garden?”

“No, there’s plenty to be had growing wild, and they do fine here with the natural rainfall. I grow stuff in my garden that wouldn’t be able to survive here on the natural rainfall. Tomatoes and onions that I’ll scramble in our eggs too. I have peppers and squash and dwarf fruit trees. I’m cultivating some vines too, not for wine but just for table grapes, but they’re not very mature.”

“You irrigate them?”

“No, you can grow stuff if you space the plants out and treat the surface to minimize evaporative losses. The soil has to be loose enough to let the roots go deep where the water is. Some of the fruit and the grapes are really superior. They are smaller, but have higher sugar content and very intense flavor, but it’s not usually a profitable way to do commercial agriculture. That will still need water until it gets too expensive to bring it in.”

“I put some delicate things under an arch that protects them from the sun at its peak. And my back lot running uphill is paved with flat stones on top of metalized plastic. When we do have rain it all runs down hill and is directed into a couple dry wells that take it down a meter to keep the water table up in the garden. It doubles the effective rainfall which is only about eighteen centimeters a year.”

Breakfast was good. Al knew just when to pull the eggs so the vegetables were still firm, but not crunchy. He passed on the fiery hot sauce though. He was starting to think Al didn’t make coffee in the morning, but he started it late, so they could enjoy it after breakfast.

“Do you want to be taken back to your truck today, or do you want to kill another day here? I’d imagine you have several days you planned to be fishing before those two messed your schedule up?”

“I rented the truck prepaid for six days. I can turn it in early, but they only refund a quarter of the fee if they get it back early. I’m not sure you should have me two days. It marks us as closer associates than just bumming a one night stay from an old friend. It turns it into a destination visit. And I’m also kind of worried and want to see if anyone messed with my apartment while I was gone.”

“If they went in your apartment I predict they did it before your encounter with the guys at the campground. After that they should leave you alone if they have any damn sense at all.”

“I looked at the police report for my neighborhood when we registered you last night. I doubt they went in my place unless they could do it very quietly. The widow lady across the hall knows I’m gone. I have her get my mail instead of the post office holding it. She’s eighty two, but sharp as a tack, and has my door keys as well as the mail box key. If she heard anybody trying to get in she keeps a big Mossberg twelve gauge propped in the corner by her front door. She doesn’t look terribly frail with that leveled across her hip.”

Al thought that was laughing out loud funny. “I reviewed the security cam we left in your truck on fast forward this morning. If anybody checked it out they were not clueless enough to come up to the fence. And I watched specifically for any Honda Portage to cruise by, even if it didn’t slow down. There wasn’t one all night. Do you have a cam watching your car at home?”

“No you can’t see my parking spot from my apartment.”

“Then I suggest you keep that cam in your truck and put it in your own vehicle when you get home. I’ll give you the address to track it on your phone. That way you can be safe at work or out shopping and such. I suggest getting into the habit of checking it each time you are away.”

“Thanks Al. I appreciate your help.”

“You’re welcome, but I expect to be filled in on what these guys are doing, once you know.”

“Agreed, that’s the least I can do for your help.”

“Good, then we are co-conspirators,” Al told him, and offered his hand to shake on the deal.