|
Page 31.
The truck drivers efficiently—obviously, from much practice—set up the new entertainment center in one corner of the large room. It consisted of an eight by eight foot floor plate and a matching ceiling plate on fine, tubular matte-gray pillars that blended against the walls. They ran a 220 volt line to a power unit. The electrical circuit had been inactive, just waiting in the main breaker box around the corner outside. The rest of it was a matter of setting up speakers, which could flow sound to each other so it appeared the viewer was in the midst of the action. The image flickered, rolled uncertainly, about three times as many fine flickering laser lines than there were cathode gun sweeps in a standard TV. The laser beams made aurora borealises between the floor and ceiling plates. Soon there was a news program. For a moment, the presenter’s head was in the air to the left of his elbow as he spoke. After some fine tuning, and signing of receipts, the image came together correctly. It was your same old Channel 12 evening news with Eddie Krafchik, except it looked as if Eddie’s rear end was parked near Janet’s vase of roses. And Eddie needed a new suit, because his current brown antique had visible runs in it.
The drivers packed up the stray cartons and left. Last that one saw of them, as the sun drew lower on the horizon, was their truck lumbering back the way it had come, herded by a pack of bounding, yelping dogs.
"Those are happy dogs," Janet said as with wiry arms she mixed up a large bowl of salad.
"What are we having?" Mark said. He was a compact, tough looking man with sunburned skin, who spent much time physically on oil and gas sites rather than in offices, despite his Ph.D. in Geology. Jack thought that Mark and Janice made a splendid match, and the kids liked Mark as well. The living room was full of snapshots of past family life—an array of photographic smiles in all combinations of persons. Among them were a few of Jack and Catherine, with the girls as babies.
Adults and kids sorted themselves out at separate tables. The family had form, order, and rules. Everyone understood their place in the game. It was the pecking order of family love.
Gail, Marcia, Tommy, and Bobby, along with Roberta, ate together at a long kids' table in the great room. Their table was jumbled at one end with piled school work, lunch boxes, crayon boxes, pencil cases, and wax fruits.
Mark, Janet, Jack, and Molly sat together at a square table under a low-hanging lamp. They shared salad, wine, and a promise of desert. They chatted while eating. Jack felt himself still decompressing. The day's hard work outside had done much to soothe away the stresses he carried with him 'in the City,' not that anyone really knew what he did, except that he was a security executive overseeing cyber defense and other important business for a conglomerate called Camelback Consortium. This well-known cartel was nominally headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, but with big glass buildings sprawling across the world's twenty largest cities. Their working headquarters was at Langley, VA just outside Washington, D.C. Camelback's yearly operating plan was larger than the government budgets of many smaller nations. The world was dominated by a few hundred megakorps like Camelback, which employed a significant segment of the skilled and educated human work force. Jack's comings and goings were easily swallowed up in the immensity of Camelback, even to his family. It was just as well.
"That's really nice," Mark said, about the holo. "Glad you sprang for it, Jack."
"We must be the first private home to have one in this area," Janet said.
"I might have broken down and bought one in another year or two," said thrifty Mark.
"Cool," the boys screeched as Third-World people rode atop a tank in another of those interminable civil wars far away.
"Yeah! I want a tank like that.”
“Nah, I’ll take the funky bandolier and the RPG with the dents in it.”
Molly ate quietly, using her fork with her left hand, while with her left hand she held Jack's hand under the table between them. This worked out splendidly, since Molly was left-handed, and Jack was right-handed. "Next time, call me," Molly said under her breath.
"Sorry."
Molly let go abruptly, and reached across the table for a hunk of crusty French bread. She tore this in half to dip into her oil and vinegar, peppered salad dressing. She had said to him a few years earlier, one time, and one time only: "One day I may not be here when you call." Those words always hung in the air between them, even now.
She seemed more relaxed just now. Maybe she had made a better peace with certain facts in life. Jack tried not to, but he could not take his eyes off her exotic features, framed in a ball of dark hair, with café-au-lait skin soft as butter. Her features were an optimal mix of lean Caucasian and rounded Asiatic, with delicate cheekbones set far apart under almond eyes. Her forehead was high and intelligent, and leaned toward Jack when she spoke, while her dark blue eyes regarded him seriously with stacks of eyemail messages. Beside each corner of her mouth was a faint, delicate prominence that made her face appealingly symmetrical. These two points were the first to dimple when she smiled. It was a face he could wake up to every morning for the rest of his life.
Only—
"Delicious," Mark said as he helped himself (again) to salad with cobbed eggs, ham, cheeses, shaved carrots, bits of bacon and potato, and sprigs of parsley. "Good job, Jan."
"Thanks, " Janet said. "I never know when I'm going to have a full house, so salad is a safe thing I can make at the drop of a hat."
"It's a modular lunch," Jack agreed. "Take out, put away, whatever you need, when you need it. Very clever."
One of the boys added: “Yeah, put in bullets, pull trigger.”
“Dude, check it out,” said his alter-ego. “Rapid fire. Goo-oo-oo-oo…”
The three teenage girls looked ready to gag, and rolled their crossed eyes up.
“Boys, focus on your dinner,” Janet said.
Now in holovision—horrible people were doing horrible things in various places, as was the usual content of the news. With Jack's latest purchase, the family could watch in three dimensions. In the shadowy corner, as darkness fell, you could watch schools of fish swimming and tacking left-right, as if you were in the ocean. You could get vertigo flying with an eagle over snow-capped mountain peaks. Jack had promised the boys they'd enjoy the 'funnest' movies ever.
Seeing a row of men in straw hats pleading for their lives in some dusty hinterland, Mark waved his glass, belched loudly, and said: "Wouldn't you just like to go there for an hour or two, shoot their dictator, and be home in time for dinner?"
"That would be splendid," said Jack, whose job description rather matched what Mark had just said, but a lot messier. It was the human element that made everything complex.
"No fuss, no muss," Mark said, still holding up his glass as if he'd forgotten it. Ideas rippled like auroras across his face. "You just pop the top dog, their people will be free from terror, and we can keep our army home. Ideally, you’d be home in time for dinner."
"There are laws against murdering foreign heads of state," Janet said. "Wasn't it Ford and Reagan back in the 1970s or 80s who issued presidential directive against it?"
"Yes," Mark admitted. "We made some mistakes knocking off our own allies in South Vietnam. The feeling was that murder didn't pay. On top of that, we'd recently lost another president of our own, JFK, and didn't want a repeat."
"What's good for the goose is good for the gander," Molly said.
Jack ran his hand over the provocative curvature of Molly, where her slender rear met her chair. Feeling her softness, he closed his eyes. Molly demurely kept eating, and gave no sign, either of pleasure or disapproval, but Jack knew she would push him away if she did not want him to touch her. So he stroked her with his hand, back and forth, gently and subtly. The language of their touch was electric.
"Don't you think?" Mark said insistently in Jack's direction.
"What? Yes," Jack said as his brother-in-law's insistence snapped him out of his reverie.
"One of those fast new suborbital cargo planes," Mark said. "Strap in at any large airport, jet away anywhere on earth in less than an hour, drive out in a hummvee with plenty of cannons and ammo, and clean house. Be back in time for the evening news, and nobody needs to know."
Jack nodded. "Like the Mesolithic man—enjoy your campfire with the wife, but escape to the manly freedom of hunting sabertooth cats totally unencumbered by women and their nesting instincts."
"Sounds ideal," Mark said as he drained his glass. "We can dream, can't we?"
"Who would do your laundry or make your bed?" Janet said chidingly.
"It's the Walter Mitty in all of us," Jack said. "Strap on your rocket pack, fly to the asteroid belt to catch some uranium rustlers, get back in time for a home cooked meal."
Molly ran her fingertips electrically over Jack's belly, not accidentally. "My friend here is fresh out of rocket fuel, from what I gather."
"Flying on my last breath of atomic fuel," Jack said. "But Molly will fix."
TOP
Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
|
