"It's up to you, ma'am. If you don't want to, just say so."
"I don't mind, Ed. I can lift eight gliders at once."
"Go for it, then. I'm sure they'll appreciate it."
A reporter from the Orlando paper eagerly approached me as I pulled a Dr Pepper from my cooler. I told him only that my kite was a demo unit and that they'd be commercially available at a later date.
He then tried to approach Susanne, but before he could reach the flitter it lifted. Eight gliders had assembled together as she'd instructed. She hovered above them and field-slung them underneath, then headed skyward.
Keying my implant, I said, "Steph."
"Yes, Ed."
"There's a reporter here. You could probably pick up some good pre-publicity if you dropped in to talk to him."
"Thank you, Ed. I'll be right there."
She appeared between two vans and walked toward me in her usual shades-of-green business outfit, looking a trifle formally-dressed for an outdoor event.
Somewhere around three thousand feet Sue began releasing her passengers one at a time during her ascent. When the last one dropped free she brought the flitter down for another load of gliders. Again the reporter tried to reach her.
Steph and I stepped aboard the flitter and I told the reporter to join us, then I indicated Steph as the flitter began rising and we all sat down. The nervous reporter's attention was split between us and watching the ground recede.
"This is Stephanie Montgomery," I said. "That's Sue at the console and I'm Ed. Ms. Montgomery will be answering your questions concerning PFM's."
The reporter shook our hands as he introduced himself as Steve Wright and asked if he could take some pictures. I looked at Steph and she nodded. Sue shrugged.
"Okay, then," I said with a grin, "As long as the pictures are flattering, of course."
Steve grinningly looked at Steph, then at Sue, and said, "Not to worry. Any pictures of these ladies will be flattering."
As he aimed his camera at Steph, I said, "The glider you saw me flying is a product of Ms. Montgomery's expertise with field technology."
We angled toward Tiger and Sue said something to him in cat. He answered and his wings disappeared as Sue fielded him aboard the flitter. He proudly took his usual place on the dash and began washing himself, probably as a way to relax.
As Wright's attention was diverted with Tiger, Sue and I sprouted field-manifested PFM's on our arms.
Steph pointed to them as she said, "Portable Field Manipulators such as these will soon be available to the public, Mr. Wright..."
"Steve, please," said Steve, apparently not realizing that we hadn't been wearing PFM's before he boarded the flitter.
"...Steve," continued Steph, "The PFM units will have several functions available upon verbal commands and each unit will be keyed to an individual owner. Only the registered owner of a PFM will be able to command it."
She paused and gestured over the side, then asked, "Will you want pictures of those gliders being released?"
Steve glanced at a kite slipping away from us and aimed his camera that direction as he said, "Yes! And thanks for reminding me."
He snapped several frames of the release event. When all the kites had been launched he turned to snap more pictures of the flitter, Steph, and Sue. I was standing at the other end of the deck, and when he turned my way I set my Dr Pepper bottle on the deck and said, "Glider on green."
My kite snapped into being above me and Steve nearly dropped his camera, then he reorganized a bit and took several quick pictures as I turned and dove off the end of the deck and beyond. As soon as I had air under my wings I cycled the glider through red, yellow, gray, black, and back to green, then keyed my implant to call Steph.
"Well, milady, he's had a PFM demo. Unless you need me for something else, I'd just as soon float around up here for a while and let you handle the press corps. What are you going to tell him about your upcoming company?"
"That it's upcoming, of course, and to expect a formal press conference later. I suppose I should leave with you and Sue rather than simply vanishing."
"Yeah, probably so, unless you want to try to sneak off to someplace fairly private and disappear. There are some portapotties behind the parking lot..."
Steph laughed. "I think not."
"Steph, I've been thinking about how I might be able to use my implant to push or pull air. I was thinking of trying to make a field turbine."
"Would you like me to add one to your implant's capabilities?"
"No, but thanks. I'd like to see if I can come up with this item on my own. If I can't, I'll holler later or get with Sue about it. How's that?"
"Okay. This should be rather interesting, I think."
For a moment I thought there might have been a humorous poke at me in her words, but in reviewing both the words and her tone, I couldn't find it.
"Yeah, that's partly why I'm doing it, Steph."
Steph apparently noticed my hesitation in answering.
"Ed, that wasn't any sort of jibe at all. You tend to do things that interest me fairly often."
"Understood, Steph. Sorry the thought even crossed my mind, milady. Could it be that you've become so humanlike that I'm having trouble differentiating? A human might have taken that shot, though, just for a giggle."
There was definitely humor in her words this time.
"Oh, I was quite aware of the opportunity, Ed."
I fussed with various designs until one of them moved a sufficient volume of air and propelled me forward well enough to negate the usual descent ratio. I'd lost a considerable amount of altitude and Tiger wasn't far away.
A bit of tinkering improved the design until I was able to actually gain altitude slowly. I felt pretty good about my accomplishment as I climbed slowly into the sky without having to find a thermal. When Tiger yelled from below and behind me, Sue said that he wanted me to take him up, too.
Extending a tendril to Tiger, I towed him upward and released him when I leveled off at around five thousand feet.
After two more hours I began to wish I'd bothered about lunch as I circled the event at about two thousand feet. It was nearly four, so I asked Sue if she'd had enough of hauling people into the sky for the day.
"Ed, are you implying that you're ready to leave?"
"Yeah, but if you and Steph are having fun I'll just grab a burger and stand by a while."
A full second went by before she answered, "We can leave anytime, Ed."
"You sure?"
"Yes, Ed."
I banked sharply to spill altitude and said, "Well, then, I'll land and grab the cooler. We'll head home so I can clean up, then I'll take you lovely ladies to a nice restaurant if you want. How's that?"
Laughing, Steph said, "Oh, golly! Oh, gee! Such generosity!"
Sue said dryly, "Maybe he forgot that we don't eat."
I nosed the kite downward, aiming at the line of dealer tents as I said, "Well, one of us has to eat. Do you have a better idea that involves food, milady?"
My kite streaked past the flitter on an angle of about forty degrees. A hundred feet or so from the ground I leveled off, then pulled the nose up a bit to slow down as I approached the tents. Dipping the nose again, my feet came within perhaps a yard of the grassy field. I flared twice to kill speed, said, "Glider off," and dropped about two feet to the ground almost directly in front of the tent that held our cooler and chairs.
"He's an exhibitionist, too," said Sue.
"Hey," I said, "The idea is to make 'em want their own PFM's isn't it? Bet we could sell one to just about everyone here in the next thirty minutes."
"Thanks, but not today," said Steph. "I want my company in place first. We now have Tiger aboard the flitter."
We said quick goodbyes and lifted as soon as I had the cooler and chairs aboard. Sue and Steph silently faced each other by the console for a couple of seconds in what seemed to me to be a meaningful manner, then took seats.
No soon
er were we out of sight of the airfield than Steph said, "I think I'll skip dinner, Ed. Goodbye for now," then she vanished.
As I sat down beside Sue I asked, "Did she really have a place to go and thing to do, or is she just ducking out of dinner plans?"
Sue seemed to study me for a moment before saying, "Watching people eat has never particularly fascinated Steph."
"How do you feel about it?"
She shrugged and smiled slightly.
"Oh, about the same, really."
"Then take the evening off if you want. I'll find a way to get where I need to go and it'll be good practice."
Raising an eyebrow at me, Sue asked, "Are you suggesting that you want some time alone?"
Looking her up and down once with a raised eyebrow of my own, I said, "Surely you jest, ma'am. I'm just saying that you don't have to sit and watch me eat. Disappear for a while if you want. I'll get by." With a deep sigh, I added, "I'll suffer, of course, but I will get by."
Chapter Sixty-One
Laughing, Sue leaned to kiss me, then vanished. I called up the flight characteristics and console of a P-51 and played with the flitter a bit on the way home, wondering whether home was where I really wanted to go until I spotted a sign for a Ryan's restaurant between Brooksville and Spring Hill.
Good enough. A no-brainer buffet would be fine. Returning the controls to standard mode, I told Tiger I'd be back in a bit, set down in the parking lot and hopped off the flitter, then sent it up to park and wait.
As the flitter rose and I suddenly became visible, the woman at the cash register inside seemed to freeze and stared at me. I headed in and gave her a twenty as I told her I wanted the buffet. For a moment she simply stared at me, then she rang it up and handed me my change.
I had an odd sense of... lightness, I guess... as I loaded my plates and found a booth, and soon realized that it was the first time in quite a while that I hadn't had company of some sort or at least the sense of it.
When Sue had vanished, she really seemed to vanish completely. Oh, I realized that I was being monitored -- loosely by her standards, but likely as closely as any astronaut had ever been monitored -- but still, I had no sense of her presence at all.
After dinner I stepped outside and looked around. Wal-Mart across SR-50. People ambling to and from their cars. A couple of pigeons foraging on the sidewalk near me.
I put the bits of steak I'd saved for Tiger on the flitter deck, then asked Elkor to take Tiger home. He agreed and the flitter lifted away from the parking lot.
Stepping sideways and backwards a bit, I leaned quickly down and pinched a brown-and-white pigeon's tailfeathers, holding the bird carefully as I tried to quiet it. No way in hell. The pigeon fairly exploded in panic and kept thrashing even as I contained its wings to keep it from hurting itself.
Its fearful little eyes looked up at me and I said, "Sorry, little guy. I'll let you go now," and tossed the bird upward. It flapped to the roof and stood staring balefully back at me.
Some guy in his twenties, approaching with his big-eyed girlfriend, said, "That was a smooth move, dude."
I laughed and said, "Ranger school. They didn't want us to starve when the rations ran low."
The house was maybe seven miles away. I formed a field platform, stepped onto it, then turned on the juice. The platform instantly became a pillar, and when I'd shot what seemed a reasonable distance upward, I said, "Glider on," as the field pole began to topple in the breeze and disappeared.
Riding on the lift of residual heat from parking lots and roadways, I made my way to the house. A few people spotted me and stared or pointed. More might have seen me if my wings had been visible, but I had this idea that I might actually be able to arrive more or less unnoticed.
Nope. Kent Meyer was sitting with his parents on their screened back porch as I drifted over in a course designed to avoid power lines and such. They all stood and went to the corner of the porch to watch me land.
Someone had tossed a beer can out of a car at the corner. As I walked over to retrieve it from the shallow drainage ditch, I remembered what happened to beer cans in campfires. They heated up, then disappeared.
Sending a field to envelop the can, I jacked up the field's temperature until the can suddenly seemed to vanish. An almost unnoticeably tiny blot of aluminum lay on the street where it had been. Hm. Kinda thought there'd be more. It would take a dozen or more of those little blots to make an ounce.
"Ed," said Sue, completely evaporating my illusion of solitude, "Kent Meyer may have seen you do that."
"He's a hundred yards away and I'm standing between him and the ditch. What could he have seen?"
"You may find out. He's heading toward you now."
Sighing, I said, "Thank you, ma'am," as I heard Kent's footsteps on the street behind me.
I turned to meet him and we shook hands. He was wearing his PFM and he noticed that I wasn't.
"Hi, Ed. Where's your PFM?"
"I wear it where it doesn't show, Kent. They invite too many questions in public."
Nodding understanding, he chuckled and said, "No doubt. You gave my uncle and aunt quite a start, but all's okay. I thought I might ask you a few questions about that job."
"I can't help you, but I can call Steph for you."
Turning, I headed us toward the house and away from the little blot of aluminum as Kent said, "Well, I really don't want to be a pest. I just thought you might know something about her plans?"
"Couldn't tell you if I did. Sorry. That's how she wants it."
Even as he nodded agreeably at my respect for Steph's privacy, he seemed slightly confused.
"Sure. I just thought... Uh, that is, my uncle thought... that you, uh, well, that she was part of your flitter."
"History. I done freed the slave, Kent. Sue's my new pilot and Steph's her own person now."
He nodded again, although his expression said that he didn't really understand. Looking around, he started to ask another question, but I spoke first.
"Sue took some time off."
"Oh," he said, but that answer seemed to mystify him, too.
"For personal stuff," I said, just to compound matters.
Kent looked truly confused for a moment as he tried to figure out what kind of personal stuff might apply to a computer, then he shrugged.
"Oh. Well, anyway, Uncle Steve was telling me about how you two met; that he came over to give you the key that the previous owners of your house had left with him. You said something like, 'they must have had a good reason'?"
"Something like that. I asked him to hang onto it so they could let the cops or fire department in if necessary."
As I unlocked and opened the front door, he asked, "You weren't at all worried about letting total strangers have a key to your house?"
Glancing at him as I took a couple of cups from the kitchen cabinet, I said, "Not them."
Tiger silently joined us by hopping up onto the kitchen table as Kent asked, "Why not... If you don't mind my asking?"
Shrugging, I said, "The Brights told me your aunt and uncle had a key to the house, Kent. To me, that meant they were well trusted. During my years here nothing has happened to change my mind about leaving the key with them."
Kent took a seat at the kitchen table and patted Tiger as he asked, "Do you have a key to their house?"
"Nope. No point. I'm gone half the time."
He grinned. "They mentioned that; said you have a couple of girlfriends you visit every weekend. Is that true?"
"Were you here when they dropped by the other day?"
"The redhead and the brunette? That's them?"
Taking my assembled coffee to the kitchen table, I said, "It's your turn at the pot. Yeah. That's them."
Maybe he'd thought I'd been making two coffees; he seemed slightly startled and rose to go to the coffee pot, momentarily interrupting his questionings as he spooned coffee into the cup, then he turned to me again.
"Are they girlfriends, or just frien
ds?"
After a sip of coffee to generate a long pause, I said, "They're girlfriends. You'll have to ask them anything else."
Nodding, he said, "Yeah. Understood. Just curious."
He'd made his coffee and sat down at the table before he spoke again.
"You aren't really all that retired, are you, Ed?"
"I manage to keep busy, but you already knew that. Your transfer to Bragg and leave time here aren't coincidental, Kent. There were no personnel emergencies at Bragg and you weren't in trouble at the Pentagon, so you were sent here."
In the middle of a sip, he froze for a moment, then said, "Well. Down to the gritty, huh? Yeah. The ASA set it up. I didn't know that until a one-star called me in to tell me that I'd finally be going back to a helo unit, but that they wanted a little favor from me in return."
He sipped, then said, "I'd been agitating to get out of that office for months, any way I could. Anything, anywhere." Sipping again, he added, "Pentagon duty sucks."
"What did they hope to accomplish, Kent?"
"Contact, they said. A useable connection. I'm Army. You were Army. Both of us messed with helicopters. All that. More to come, probably."
"More how?"
"Well, they were kind of vague about that. I'll be XO of a chopper outfit again, so I guess I could have invited you to come up and see how things have changed. Maybe let you ride along during exercises or something like that. Mostly I think they just wanted to set things up so they could send someone else in later and use me as a reference."
Shrugging, he said, "It didn't matter to me. I was finally getting back to helos and I didn't think you'd be fooled too easily if they thought they had to go to so much trouble to create a scenario." He grinned and added, "I'd have probably sent a woman at you first, though."
I grinned back.
"They tried that. She was kind of cute, too."
"I'll bet she was. What do they want, Ed?"
"I'm still waiting for someone to tell me that."
He gave me a studious look. "They won't just ask you to drop by the office, huh? That can't be good."
"Could be worse, though. 3rd World's head of security knows what's been going on and she's looking into it. Sooner or later the sneaky stuff will stop and someone will have to sit down at a table with her."
3rd World Products, Inc., Book 4 Page 51