He snapped his fingers at the tuxedoed figure gliding by. "Two martinis, dry. With olives," he barked.
The snappee paused in mid-stride. He moonwalked the six feet back to the snapper's table, then did an elaborate pirouette to face him. "Did you snap at me?"
The snapper was also dressed in a tux. He was in his mid-60s, balding but still clinging to a horseshoe of short-cropped white hair, and a matching, closely trimmed, white beard. His wife was dressed in a sequined gown of purple and blue, with silver highlights. While not exactly dripping with pearls, she was adorned with a fair amount of jewelry. She was neither gorgeous nor ugly, and an honest man would have to say that she was aging well.
The snappee was much younger, about 30 or 35, rather on the slim side but not scrawny. He was wearing an annoyed look, as you would expect from someone who had just been snapped at.
"Yes, I did," said the older man. "We've been sitting here for a half hour already. Now get us our drinks. Two martinis, dry, with olives."
The young man sighed deeply. He looked left towards the maître d', then right towards the kitchen doors.
"First of all, don't you ever snap at me. I'm not a dog or a trained seal. In fact, because you snapped at me, I'm going to walk away from your table — I'm sorry, ma'am," he said, with a nod to the woman, before turning back to her companion, "— and ignore you for the rest of the night, you entitled snob."
The older man started to get angry and rise from his seat. "You can't talk to me like that! I make more money—"
But the younger man put his hand in the old man's face to stop him. "Yeah, I know," he said, "You make more money in a day than I do in a year. Hell, the way you tip waiters, it's probably more like ten years."
"Second," he continued, "do you see that pretty lady in the red dress, the one that looks like Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings?" He gestured to a woman wearing a red strapless gown, sitting at a table about 15 feet away, who did in fact resemble the Australian actress Miranda Otto. "That's my date. I'm not a waiter. I don't work here, you stupid, braying jackass."
The older man again started to stand up, and this time he was stopped with just an index finger. "Sit down! Third, I just got back from the restroom, and you weren't even here when I went in. You haven't been here for 30 minutes. You haven't even been here for five minutes. Not only are you a snob and a jackass, you're a liar and a bully. You oughta just get up and leave now, because you've set yourself up for a night of terrible service."
The young man spun on his heel and glided back to his table.
Friday, May 8, 2020
Saturday, January 11, 2020
The Presidents' Club
The massive front door opened, and a Secret Service agent, acting as doorman, receptionist, butler, and guard, examined the pair through dark glasses. He nodded at them and stepped back, and they stepped into the foyer. A second secret service agent appeared, offered Melania his arm and a smile, and escorted her to a room on the left. A chorus of female voices welcomed her as the door opened, and then closed, leaving Donald and the guard standing in the foyer.
The guard stood there, impassive and alert, staring at him through the dark glasses with barely furrowed brows and a stone face.
Donald wasn't used to being kept waiting. He tried to match the guard's impassive stance, but he got restless after less than a minute, and found himself rocking back and forth slightly. He frowned, and made himself stop. He had a great urge to pat his pockets, or put his hands in them, but instead he decided it was time to intimidate the guard. He folded his arms across his chest. He tucked his chin down and inhaled to inflate his chest. He rocked forward slightly and stood on tiptoe inside his Armani loafers to stand taller. Then he glared at the guard without saying a word, trying to give the impression that he was glaring down at him.
The guard didn't move. Didn't even change expression.
Donald breathed shallowly, trying to keep his chest puffed up. He wasn't about to lose this game of chicken. Soon, his calves started burning from the effort of staying on his toes. He was getting seriously pissed off, at the guard and at the rest of them for keeping him waiting. This gave him the strength to hold the pose, but only long enough for him to get dizzy. His shallow breathing was making him hyperventilate, and he had locked his knees, the one thing they had told him not to do when he was in the military academy.
"How long are they going to keep me waiting here?"
"Until they're ready for you." The only thing that had moved were the guard's lips, and those no more than was necessary to form the words.
Donald could hear the sounds of animated conversation from the women in the other room. The library? The parlor? The den? What would you call a room like that in this house? As their Escalade had pulled up the long driveway, he had thought it looked like more like a small mansion than a lodge. His properties were bigger, of course. And more ornate. And more expensive.
He finally gave up on the pose, exhaled, and sunk into his shoes. Now he really did glare at the guard. The jerk had beaten him, without even playing the game, and they both knew it. That pissed him off even more.
Finally, the black walnut double doors at the opposite end of the foyer swung slowly open. Barack filled the opening, and stared across the foyer at Donald, the way a teenager looks when he's trying to entertain his friends and opens his bedroom door to find his baby brother standing there. "It's him," he announced sullenly to the room behind him, while still staring at him.
A high-pitched voice in the room drawled, "Do we really have to let him in?"
Another Southern tenor answered, "Maybe just this once."
With a sigh, Barack moved to one side and gestured, with a graciousness that his words did not convey. "Come in," he growled.
The guard stood there, impassive and alert, staring at him through the dark glasses with barely furrowed brows and a stone face.
Donald wasn't used to being kept waiting. He tried to match the guard's impassive stance, but he got restless after less than a minute, and found himself rocking back and forth slightly. He frowned, and made himself stop. He had a great urge to pat his pockets, or put his hands in them, but instead he decided it was time to intimidate the guard. He folded his arms across his chest. He tucked his chin down and inhaled to inflate his chest. He rocked forward slightly and stood on tiptoe inside his Armani loafers to stand taller. Then he glared at the guard without saying a word, trying to give the impression that he was glaring down at him.
The guard didn't move. Didn't even change expression.
Donald breathed shallowly, trying to keep his chest puffed up. He wasn't about to lose this game of chicken. Soon, his calves started burning from the effort of staying on his toes. He was getting seriously pissed off, at the guard and at the rest of them for keeping him waiting. This gave him the strength to hold the pose, but only long enough for him to get dizzy. His shallow breathing was making him hyperventilate, and he had locked his knees, the one thing they had told him not to do when he was in the military academy.
"How long are they going to keep me waiting here?"
"Until they're ready for you." The only thing that had moved were the guard's lips, and those no more than was necessary to form the words.
Donald could hear the sounds of animated conversation from the women in the other room. The library? The parlor? The den? What would you call a room like that in this house? As their Escalade had pulled up the long driveway, he had thought it looked like more like a small mansion than a lodge. His properties were bigger, of course. And more ornate. And more expensive.
He finally gave up on the pose, exhaled, and sunk into his shoes. Now he really did glare at the guard. The jerk had beaten him, without even playing the game, and they both knew it. That pissed him off even more.
Finally, the black walnut double doors at the opposite end of the foyer swung slowly open. Barack filled the opening, and stared across the foyer at Donald, the way a teenager looks when he's trying to entertain his friends and opens his bedroom door to find his baby brother standing there. "It's him," he announced sullenly to the room behind him, while still staring at him.
A high-pitched voice in the room drawled, "Do we really have to let him in?"
Another Southern tenor answered, "Maybe just this once."
With a sigh, Barack moved to one side and gestured, with a graciousness that his words did not convey. "Come in," he growled.
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Band Candy
"Nine-one-one, please state the nature of your emergency."
"Um, hi, there's a black man going up and down the street, knocking on doors. He has a grey hoodie, and a baseball cap, and a backpack on one shoulder. I think he's looking for a place to rob."
"What's your address ma'am?"
"We're gonna get robbed! Send someone! Hurry!"
...
The address she gave was on New Haven Drive, a dead-end street in a 20-year old suburban neighborhood, full of modest, single-family homes. Most of the owners were retirees or empty-nesters, who had bought homes there when their families were young. All of the owners were white and middle-aged, members or former members of the local medical and high-tech communities.
The black man in question was hardly a "man", more like a "young man." He was six feet tall, but he didn't even tip 160 pounds on the scale. He was indeed going up and down the street, knocking on doors. At one house in the middle of the street, one of the white retirees answered the door.
"Yesssss???"
"Hello sir, my name is Anthon Williams, I'm with the high school marching band, and I'm selling candy bars to raise money for our competitions this season."
One eyebrow went up. "Marching band? What do you play?"
"Trombone, sir! Well, right now I'm second chair second trombone, because I'm just a freshman, but I want to challenge for first trombone before the end of the season."
That eyebrow went down, and the other eyebrow went up. "Who's your band director?"
"It's Mr. Hoffman. He's an old German guy. Well, not old old, but old enough to be my dad. We make fun of his accent sometimes, but he's good—"
The sound of a siren in the distance got gradually louder. The homeowner looked up the street, saw nobody, but knew that a black-and-white car would come around the corner any minute. He made a quick decision. He stepped back, opened the door, and waggled his finger at the kid. "Come in the house, quickly."
Startled, the young man obeyed. Sure enough, a police car raced up the street, coming to a stop across the street, just as the older man was closing the door. Behind the door, in the entry, the two strangers stood looking at each other.
"Kid, you're guilty of fundraising while black. That's not a crime. In fact, it's actually a pretty brave thing to do. But one person in this neighborhood thinks it's a capital offense. Let me see what's going on. You stay right here."
The old man opened the door and stood on the threshold. Across the street, he could see the police officer conferring with a pudgy, middle-aged woman with dyed black hair. The old man couldn't make out the words she was saying, but the agitated tone of her voice carried clearly. When she finished speaking, she reached out and pointed her finger at him, across the street.
The policeman looked at where she was pointing, then started across the street. Thinking fast, the old man said to the boy, "Come with me. I need to explain a couple of things to the officer." The boy followed him down the front steps, to the sidewalk and the curb, where they met the policeman. The older man stuck out his hand, introduced himself, and asked the same question everyone asks a cop: "Is there a problem, officer?"
The policeman looked from the old man to the young man and back again, and said, "We got a report of a black man attempting to burglarize this neighborhood."
The older man stood a little straighter, got a sour look on his face, and asked with a note of disdain, "Did you get that report from Catherine Rogers?"
"I can't tell you that."
"Oh, come on, officer, it's a matter of public record."
"Well then, you can come down to the police station and look it up later today."
"If you got it from Catherine Rogers, then I would suggest you don't give it an ounce of credibility."
The old man put his hand on the boy's backpack and pushed him forward a step. By this time, several of the neighbors had come out of their houses and were coming closer, wanting to hear the conversation.
"Officer, this is Antwon Williams—"
"Anthon," muttered the boy.
"—a freshman in the Fisher High School marching band, and he's selling candy bars to raise money for the marching band season. He's well within his rights to do this, as canvassing door-to-door by public school students is legal under the city statutes."
The officer cut him off with a half-wave. Then he turned to the boy and asked, "What kind of candy bars?"
"I've got milk chocolate," he started tremulously, "dark chocolate, chocolate with almonds, white chocolate with macadamia nuts," his presentation warmed up as he went on, "raspberry chocolate, cherry chocolate, salted caramel with dark chocolate, and hazelnut white nougat milk chocolate!" he finished triumphantly.
"Let me see them," the officer said in a businesslike voice.
The young man dropped to one knee, slid his backpack from his shoulder, opened it and pulled out an assortment of candy bars as evidence.
"How much do they cost?"
"Four dollars each."
The officer whistled quietly. "How many do you have in your bag?"
"A hundred and sixty."
"Wow. Where did you get them?"
"The band boosters handed them out this morning. You can check with Mr. Hoffman!" he added nervously, worried that the officer didn't believe him.
The officer reached behind him, where he kept his handcuffs. The boy's eyes went wide with fright, and the dozen or more spectators held their breath. The officer paused, held out his other hand with the palm facing the boy, and said, "Relax, kid. It's not what you think." He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, took a twenty-dollar bill out of the wallet, and said, "Can I have five?"
The air on the street changed instantly, as fear and anxiety were replaced by relief and enthusiasm. The boy's protector pulled two twenties out of his wallet and said, "I want ten." Suddenly, everyone's wallet was open. The crowd grew as other people were coming outside and walking up the street. One lady asked, "Will you take a check?"
As the boy responded "Yes ma'am, as long as it's made out to 'FHS Band'," the old man and the officer looked at each other and shared a nod and a quiet smile.
Within ten minutes, the boy's backpack was empty and his pockets were full of cash and checks worth over $600. As the neighbors drifted back to their houses, the officer, the boy and the old man stood together, across the street from the patrol car. The policeman reached into his breast pocket, pulled out two business cards, and gave one to each of them. To the boy, he said, "Now, if you need anything, or if you get into trouble on the way home, you call me, okay?"
They all shook hands. Then the boy floated, almost danced, up the street. The policeman got back into his car, made a radio call, and slowly drove away. The old man turned and went back into his home. And across the street, a dumpy-looking woman with dyed black hair peered out through the front curtains, a look of disappointment and outrage on her face.
...
"Nine-one-one, please state the nature of your emergency."
"Um, hi, that black man is back in our neighborhood. He's blocking traffic on our street and disturbing the peace. He's making a horrible racket!"
"What's your address ma'am?"
Across town, on New Haven Drive, a young black man in a high school band uniform marched smartly down the middle of the street, lustily belting out a John Phillip Sousa march on a trombone. When he reached the end of the street, he lowered his trombone. He blew a few blasts from a whistle as he performed an about-face in perfect form, then raised his trombone to his lips and resumed playing as he started back up the street.
"We are aware of the situation. There's an officer at the scene, ma'am."
At the head of the street sat a black-and-white patrol car, its red-and-blue lights flashing, almost in time with the music. A policeman leaned against the front-left fender, arms folded across his chest, smiling as he watched the young musician march towards him. In the back seat of the patrol car was an open trombone case.
A "ROAD CLOSED" sign sat in the middle of the street next to the patrol car, but its words had been changed to "THANK YOU, NEW HAVEN DRIVE."
"Oh, yes, ma'am. The gentleman has a duly-authorized parade permit. The officer is there to keep the streets safe for members of the community, especially high school students and band members. Have a nice day, ma'am."
The dispatcher disconnected the call and removed her headset. She swiveled around slowly in her chair, tore the wrapper off the end of a salted-caramel-and-dark-chocolate candy bar, twirled it in a salute to the other occupants of the command center, and took a big bite.
"Um, hi, there's a black man going up and down the street, knocking on doors. He has a grey hoodie, and a baseball cap, and a backpack on one shoulder. I think he's looking for a place to rob."
"What's your address ma'am?"
"We're gonna get robbed! Send someone! Hurry!"
...
The address she gave was on New Haven Drive, a dead-end street in a 20-year old suburban neighborhood, full of modest, single-family homes. Most of the owners were retirees or empty-nesters, who had bought homes there when their families were young. All of the owners were white and middle-aged, members or former members of the local medical and high-tech communities.
The black man in question was hardly a "man", more like a "young man." He was six feet tall, but he didn't even tip 160 pounds on the scale. He was indeed going up and down the street, knocking on doors. At one house in the middle of the street, one of the white retirees answered the door.
"Yesssss???"
"Hello sir, my name is Anthon Williams, I'm with the high school marching band, and I'm selling candy bars to raise money for our competitions this season."
One eyebrow went up. "Marching band? What do you play?"
"Trombone, sir! Well, right now I'm second chair second trombone, because I'm just a freshman, but I want to challenge for first trombone before the end of the season."
That eyebrow went down, and the other eyebrow went up. "Who's your band director?"
"It's Mr. Hoffman. He's an old German guy. Well, not old old, but old enough to be my dad. We make fun of his accent sometimes, but he's good—"
The sound of a siren in the distance got gradually louder. The homeowner looked up the street, saw nobody, but knew that a black-and-white car would come around the corner any minute. He made a quick decision. He stepped back, opened the door, and waggled his finger at the kid. "Come in the house, quickly."
Startled, the young man obeyed. Sure enough, a police car raced up the street, coming to a stop across the street, just as the older man was closing the door. Behind the door, in the entry, the two strangers stood looking at each other.
"Kid, you're guilty of fundraising while black. That's not a crime. In fact, it's actually a pretty brave thing to do. But one person in this neighborhood thinks it's a capital offense. Let me see what's going on. You stay right here."
The old man opened the door and stood on the threshold. Across the street, he could see the police officer conferring with a pudgy, middle-aged woman with dyed black hair. The old man couldn't make out the words she was saying, but the agitated tone of her voice carried clearly. When she finished speaking, she reached out and pointed her finger at him, across the street.
The policeman looked at where she was pointing, then started across the street. Thinking fast, the old man said to the boy, "Come with me. I need to explain a couple of things to the officer." The boy followed him down the front steps, to the sidewalk and the curb, where they met the policeman. The older man stuck out his hand, introduced himself, and asked the same question everyone asks a cop: "Is there a problem, officer?"
The policeman looked from the old man to the young man and back again, and said, "We got a report of a black man attempting to burglarize this neighborhood."
The older man stood a little straighter, got a sour look on his face, and asked with a note of disdain, "Did you get that report from Catherine Rogers?"
"I can't tell you that."
"Oh, come on, officer, it's a matter of public record."
"Well then, you can come down to the police station and look it up later today."
"If you got it from Catherine Rogers, then I would suggest you don't give it an ounce of credibility."
The old man put his hand on the boy's backpack and pushed him forward a step. By this time, several of the neighbors had come out of their houses and were coming closer, wanting to hear the conversation.
"Officer, this is Antwon Williams—"
"Anthon," muttered the boy.
"—a freshman in the Fisher High School marching band, and he's selling candy bars to raise money for the marching band season. He's well within his rights to do this, as canvassing door-to-door by public school students is legal under the city statutes."
The officer cut him off with a half-wave. Then he turned to the boy and asked, "What kind of candy bars?"
"I've got milk chocolate," he started tremulously, "dark chocolate, chocolate with almonds, white chocolate with macadamia nuts," his presentation warmed up as he went on, "raspberry chocolate, cherry chocolate, salted caramel with dark chocolate, and hazelnut white nougat milk chocolate!" he finished triumphantly.
"Let me see them," the officer said in a businesslike voice.
The young man dropped to one knee, slid his backpack from his shoulder, opened it and pulled out an assortment of candy bars as evidence.
"How much do they cost?"
"Four dollars each."
The officer whistled quietly. "How many do you have in your bag?"
"A hundred and sixty."
"Wow. Where did you get them?"
"The band boosters handed them out this morning. You can check with Mr. Hoffman!" he added nervously, worried that the officer didn't believe him.
The officer reached behind him, where he kept his handcuffs. The boy's eyes went wide with fright, and the dozen or more spectators held their breath. The officer paused, held out his other hand with the palm facing the boy, and said, "Relax, kid. It's not what you think." He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, took a twenty-dollar bill out of the wallet, and said, "Can I have five?"
The air on the street changed instantly, as fear and anxiety were replaced by relief and enthusiasm. The boy's protector pulled two twenties out of his wallet and said, "I want ten." Suddenly, everyone's wallet was open. The crowd grew as other people were coming outside and walking up the street. One lady asked, "Will you take a check?"
As the boy responded "Yes ma'am, as long as it's made out to 'FHS Band'," the old man and the officer looked at each other and shared a nod and a quiet smile.
Within ten minutes, the boy's backpack was empty and his pockets were full of cash and checks worth over $600. As the neighbors drifted back to their houses, the officer, the boy and the old man stood together, across the street from the patrol car. The policeman reached into his breast pocket, pulled out two business cards, and gave one to each of them. To the boy, he said, "Now, if you need anything, or if you get into trouble on the way home, you call me, okay?"
They all shook hands. Then the boy floated, almost danced, up the street. The policeman got back into his car, made a radio call, and slowly drove away. The old man turned and went back into his home. And across the street, a dumpy-looking woman with dyed black hair peered out through the front curtains, a look of disappointment and outrage on her face.
...
"Nine-one-one, please state the nature of your emergency."
"Um, hi, that black man is back in our neighborhood. He's blocking traffic on our street and disturbing the peace. He's making a horrible racket!"
"What's your address ma'am?"
Across town, on New Haven Drive, a young black man in a high school band uniform marched smartly down the middle of the street, lustily belting out a John Phillip Sousa march on a trombone. When he reached the end of the street, he lowered his trombone. He blew a few blasts from a whistle as he performed an about-face in perfect form, then raised his trombone to his lips and resumed playing as he started back up the street.
"We are aware of the situation. There's an officer at the scene, ma'am."
At the head of the street sat a black-and-white patrol car, its red-and-blue lights flashing, almost in time with the music. A policeman leaned against the front-left fender, arms folded across his chest, smiling as he watched the young musician march towards him. In the back seat of the patrol car was an open trombone case.
A "ROAD CLOSED" sign sat in the middle of the street next to the patrol car, but its words had been changed to "THANK YOU, NEW HAVEN DRIVE."
"Oh, yes, ma'am. The gentleman has a duly-authorized parade permit. The officer is there to keep the streets safe for members of the community, especially high school students and band members. Have a nice day, ma'am."
The dispatcher disconnected the call and removed her headset. She swiveled around slowly in her chair, tore the wrapper off the end of a salted-caramel-and-dark-chocolate candy bar, twirled it in a salute to the other occupants of the command center, and took a big bite.
Saturday, December 1, 2018
The first mission to Proxima Centauri b
Be forewarned: this story may not exactly match the scientific facts. I read a cool article about Proxima Centauri b, and this story is based on that article. But I can't find the article right now, and my muse is screaming at me to write the story. I've checked my facts against other sources, and they look solid. But in case they aren't, I take my cue from the Prezzynited States, who never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.
Proxima Centauri b was discovered in 2016. It was a planet a whole lot like earth, orbiting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri itself was involved in a slow and intricate dance with a double star called Alpha Centauri, and for the next few thousand years, they would be the closest stars to Earth. Proxima was the closest of the three, hence its silly name.
The three stars were in the constellation Centaurus, visible only in the southern hemisphere. To the naked eye, the Alpha Centauri twins appeared as one bright star, the brightest star in the constellation; hence, they received the designation Alpha. Proxima, being a red dwarf, was not even visible to the naked eye. Astronomers had discovered it in 1915 by very carefully examining photographic plates.
The planet was discovered by astronomers using the radial-velocity method of planet-hunting. It was given the designation "b" because, in exoplanetary exploration, "a" is always reserved for the parent star.
Being only four light-years away from earth, Proxima b excited the imagination of amateur space explorers all over the world. Three billionaires, two of whom happened to own rocket companies, decided to pool their fortunes and sponsor a take-pictures-and-return mission to Proxima b.
Warp drive and hyperdrive were still just science fiction when they got started on it. They approached the directors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, with bags of money and their crazy idea. JPL did a preliminary design and came back to the billionaires with a schedule and a price tag, and the billionaires said, "Okay, let's do it."
And so, after seven years of design, construction and testing, two unmanned probes were launched atop giant rockets from a spaceport in Odessa, Texas. By the time the conventional rockets burned out, the pair were aiming for a rendezvous with Jupiter, and then with Saturn, counting on a slingshot boost from the gas giants to augment their ion drives and give them enough velocity to escape the Sun's gravitational pull and follow their ancient brethren out into deep space, directly towards Proxima b.
The two probes were named Lewis and Clark. The first probe, Lewis, was larger and heavier. It contained more instruments and had a more powerful computer. It would be used on the journey to take pictures of the Centauri trio, solve the four-body problem involving three stars and one planet, calculate a navigation solution, and transmit the solution and some of the star pictures to the second probe, Clark. As the pair approached Proxima Centauri, Lewis would do an extensive analysis of the star (or stars, if the Alpha twins were in the right place), transmit its data to Clark, and then go shooting past, in the general direction of the Andromeda galaxy.
The second probe, Clark, was lighter than Lewis. Its instrument suite included cameras and filters, a gravitometer, a magnetometer, and not much else. Its computer wasn't as powerful as Lewis' computer, which is why they would travel in formation, never more than a hundred kilometers apart, all the way to the Centauri cluster. But while the bigger, heavier Lewis would continue in a straight line, Clark would use the navigation solution downloaded from Lewis to swing in a tight parabola around Proxima Centauri, then buzz the planet Proxima b, taking pictures like a mad tourist, and then fly home.
Instead of a massive instrument cluster, the largest part of Clark's payload was a nonvolatile memory bank. Constructed of copper and cobalt, its memory density was somewhere between a 1990s-era hard disk and a 2020s-era flash memory, but it was indestructible: once it was written, the only thing that could erase it was an oxidizing flame hot enough to melt the alloy. Not even a fiery re-entry through Earth's atmosphere could damage it. And that was the plan.
Although there was a throttle on the ion engines, they were designed to run at full blast for up to 80 years. Mission planners had calculated that it would take Lewis and Clark 38 years to reach the Centauri cluster, and another 38 years for Clark to complete its solo trip home. By then, the billionaires would be long dead, as would the scientists at JPL who built the probes, and their children. It would be up to the grandchildren of the billionaires and the rocket scientists to welcome Clark home.
* * *
Like a fisherman's wife waiting on her balcony, a small and select group of astroscientists waited for Clark's return. The billionaires had commissioned a radiotelescope near Montevideo, Uruguay, to do nothing but stare at Proxima Centauri for 80 years. They had endowed a whole department at JPL to stand vigil. For the first ten years, the radiotelescopes would call out "Marco" to the heavens, and the probes would reply with their "Polo" responses. As the years passed and the ion drives pushed the probes faster and farther, the interval between "Marco" and "Polo" became longer, and the signals became fainter, until finally, when the interval was 2.3 years, the explorers were more than halfway to their destination, and their signals were too faint to pick up anymore. The department at JPL shrank to one endowed chair.
Lewis and Clark were on their own. If things went according to plan, Lewis would never be heard from again. But the dish would keep calling "Marco" to the heavens. And a succession of interns at JPL would sit at a desk, working on their intern projects, which would include babysitting the waterfall display which would one day signal the return of the interstellar fisherman.
* * *
Math! I needed to put this here so I could keep my dates straight
2016 - Proxima b descovered
2028 - Lewis and Clark launched
2038 - radio contact lost with Clark
2066 - Clark reaches Proxima b, but humans have no way of knowing
2094 - radio contact reacquired with Clark
2104 - Clark returns
* * *
In 2094, JPL was still around. It was still ostensibly a research laboratory, as it had been in the days of the old NASA, but now it was making good money, sending unmanned spacecraft scooting along the convoluted pathways of the Interplanetary Transport Network, and parking its deep-space communications relays in the same solar orbits as Mars, Jupiter, and the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt. But the billionaires' endowed chair for the Proxima b Watch was still there, and in the summer of 2094 it was manned by an intern, a bored aero/astro student who, once a week, connected with the dish in Montevideo, ran the diagnostics that ensured the system was still working, stared at the waterfall display for an hour, and then gave up and went back to more interesting work.
Then, one day, there was a blip.
Twenty years earlier, in 2074, another intern (who, by sheer coincidence, was this bored aero/astro student's mother) had mounted a big red incandescent light bulb on a pole, and screwed the pole to the side of the Proxima b Watch desk. She had added a few lines to the Watch program so that the light would blink if the dish in Montevideo detected a "Polo" signal. Since then, the computer running the Watch program had been replaced several times, but the red light was still there, still in good working condition - and it had never blinked.
So in 2094, our bored intern was sitting at her desk, calculating trajectories for the mining equipment JPL was going to ship for Ganymede, when suddenly, the red light turned on.
The reactive, instinctive part of her brain caused her to look at it in annoyance, assuming that it was a malfunction.
Then the slower, more deliberate part of her brain announced that the Watch program had never malfunctioned before. She opened the waterfall display.
And there was a blip, right where the Polo signal belonged. She screamed. Clark was coming home.
* * *
As on the outward journey, the signal was very faint - but it was strong enough for the JPL scientists to calculate that Clark was still over 2 light-years away, and even at its amazing approach speed, it would be another ten years before it got to earth.
But there was a problem. The probe was going so fast that it would shoot past the earth, past the sun, and right out the other side of the solar system. They had to find a way to slow it down, and either capture it in space or crash it onto Earth, someplace where they could find it.
The old mission documents were dug up, dusted off, and the math rechecked. According to the documents, the re-entry was all preprogrammed. Clark would flip, end for end, about the time it crossed the Kuiper belt, so that its ion engine, still firing full blast, would act as a retro-rocket. About the time it crossed the orbit of Mars, it would be crawling along at Earth-capture velocity. However, the JPL scientists reached out and reprogrammed Clark's reentry sequence, so that as long as the Earth was in the right place, Clark would slip into orbit around it, and space technicians could pull it out of the sky and gently carry it the rest of the way home, instead of following the original mission plan and letting it crash clumsily into the planet.
* * *
Finally, in 2104, Clark was perched in a clean room at JPL. Its leading surfaces were pocked and pitted from the space dust that had smashed against it, like bugs on a cosmic windshield, as it had flown through space at 74 million miles per hour. Compared with modern unmanned space vehicles, it was an antique. The JPL scientists looked at it and wondered how it had ever managed to stay aloft, it was so primitive - so heavy - so ungainly. The fact that it had performed flawlessly, continuously, for its full 76 years, left them in awe of the skills of their forefathers.
The copper-cobalt memory was reverently extracted from the chassis. The scientists looked upon it the way their grandfathers had looked upon Thomas Edison's wax phonograph cylinders, knowing that in this ancient storage device were the first close-up pictures of another world.
It contained more than that, however. Lewis and Clark had kept a careful log of more than just pictures, and Clark had faithfully brought it all home. Connected to a modern computer, the memory bank gave up its secrets, and hour by hour, day by day, the world was amazed by the new data that streamed from Pasadena.
Lewis had taken enough photos of the dance between the three stars for scientists to put together a time-lapse animation of it. Lewis had gotten photos of the surfaces of all three stars, pocked with sunspots and laced with ribbons and arches of incandescent gas. Lewis' spectophotometric analysis of the stars had confirmed some theories, blasted other theories, and given astrophysicists a lot more to chew on - the first close-up photos of another star, times three!
As astronomers pored over Lewis' images, they discovered that Proxima b had siblings, and so Proxima Centauri c, d, e, f, and g were added to the family. Two were rocks, and three were gas giants whose orbits were strongly influenced by the Alpha twins.
Lewis had fed Clark navigation data so exact that Clark had passed within 200 miles of the planet Proxima b's surface - a near-collision. Clark's stereoscopic cameras had taken pictures at a prodigious rate. Its radar and its magnetometer had mapped three fourths of the planet in its single flyby. Its spectrophotometer had detected some sort of red-light photosynthesis on the surface, and its mass spectrometer had captured a few stray molecules from the planet's atmosphere: heavy in CO2, O2 and argon.
Proxima b is tidally locked with its star, meaning that the same side always faces the star, just like earth's moon. But the dark side is not really "dark", since the Alpha Centauri twins light up the dark side for half of every planetary day. Clark was therefore able to get some pictures of the dark side, a mosaic of starlit twilight and classic inky blackness.
Some of the JPL staff were disappointed that, while there were clear signs of plant life on the sunny side, there was no sign of animal life anywhere, or of the artificial light that would serve as a sure sign of animal life or an advanced civilization. One technician posted a sign above his desk, saying: "Fermi is still right."
* * *
And that was the end of the first Proxima b expedition. Launched in the hiatus following the first International Space Station, it ended during the heyday of the planetary mining period, when robotic mining colonies were operating profitably around the solar system. Like a wagon train pulling into a modern city with skyscrapers and electric lights, Lewis and Clark were the bridge between two different eras of space exploration.
POSTSCRIPT: In January 2020, scientists announced that they had found a second planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. I could add this to the story, but I won't.
Proxima Centauri b was discovered in 2016. It was a planet a whole lot like earth, orbiting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri itself was involved in a slow and intricate dance with a double star called Alpha Centauri, and for the next few thousand years, they would be the closest stars to Earth. Proxima was the closest of the three, hence its silly name.
The three stars were in the constellation Centaurus, visible only in the southern hemisphere. To the naked eye, the Alpha Centauri twins appeared as one bright star, the brightest star in the constellation; hence, they received the designation Alpha. Proxima, being a red dwarf, was not even visible to the naked eye. Astronomers had discovered it in 1915 by very carefully examining photographic plates.
The planet was discovered by astronomers using the radial-velocity method of planet-hunting. It was given the designation "b" because, in exoplanetary exploration, "a" is always reserved for the parent star.
Being only four light-years away from earth, Proxima b excited the imagination of amateur space explorers all over the world. Three billionaires, two of whom happened to own rocket companies, decided to pool their fortunes and sponsor a take-pictures-and-return mission to Proxima b.
Warp drive and hyperdrive were still just science fiction when they got started on it. They approached the directors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, with bags of money and their crazy idea. JPL did a preliminary design and came back to the billionaires with a schedule and a price tag, and the billionaires said, "Okay, let's do it."
And so, after seven years of design, construction and testing, two unmanned probes were launched atop giant rockets from a spaceport in Odessa, Texas. By the time the conventional rockets burned out, the pair were aiming for a rendezvous with Jupiter, and then with Saturn, counting on a slingshot boost from the gas giants to augment their ion drives and give them enough velocity to escape the Sun's gravitational pull and follow their ancient brethren out into deep space, directly towards Proxima b.
The two probes were named Lewis and Clark. The first probe, Lewis, was larger and heavier. It contained more instruments and had a more powerful computer. It would be used on the journey to take pictures of the Centauri trio, solve the four-body problem involving three stars and one planet, calculate a navigation solution, and transmit the solution and some of the star pictures to the second probe, Clark. As the pair approached Proxima Centauri, Lewis would do an extensive analysis of the star (or stars, if the Alpha twins were in the right place), transmit its data to Clark, and then go shooting past, in the general direction of the Andromeda galaxy.
The second probe, Clark, was lighter than Lewis. Its instrument suite included cameras and filters, a gravitometer, a magnetometer, and not much else. Its computer wasn't as powerful as Lewis' computer, which is why they would travel in formation, never more than a hundred kilometers apart, all the way to the Centauri cluster. But while the bigger, heavier Lewis would continue in a straight line, Clark would use the navigation solution downloaded from Lewis to swing in a tight parabola around Proxima Centauri, then buzz the planet Proxima b, taking pictures like a mad tourist, and then fly home.
Instead of a massive instrument cluster, the largest part of Clark's payload was a nonvolatile memory bank. Constructed of copper and cobalt, its memory density was somewhere between a 1990s-era hard disk and a 2020s-era flash memory, but it was indestructible: once it was written, the only thing that could erase it was an oxidizing flame hot enough to melt the alloy. Not even a fiery re-entry through Earth's atmosphere could damage it. And that was the plan.
Although there was a throttle on the ion engines, they were designed to run at full blast for up to 80 years. Mission planners had calculated that it would take Lewis and Clark 38 years to reach the Centauri cluster, and another 38 years for Clark to complete its solo trip home. By then, the billionaires would be long dead, as would the scientists at JPL who built the probes, and their children. It would be up to the grandchildren of the billionaires and the rocket scientists to welcome Clark home.
* * *
Like a fisherman's wife waiting on her balcony, a small and select group of astroscientists waited for Clark's return. The billionaires had commissioned a radiotelescope near Montevideo, Uruguay, to do nothing but stare at Proxima Centauri for 80 years. They had endowed a whole department at JPL to stand vigil. For the first ten years, the radiotelescopes would call out "Marco" to the heavens, and the probes would reply with their "Polo" responses. As the years passed and the ion drives pushed the probes faster and farther, the interval between "Marco" and "Polo" became longer, and the signals became fainter, until finally, when the interval was 2.3 years, the explorers were more than halfway to their destination, and their signals were too faint to pick up anymore. The department at JPL shrank to one endowed chair.
Lewis and Clark were on their own. If things went according to plan, Lewis would never be heard from again. But the dish would keep calling "Marco" to the heavens. And a succession of interns at JPL would sit at a desk, working on their intern projects, which would include babysitting the waterfall display which would one day signal the return of the interstellar fisherman.
* * *
Math! I needed to put this here so I could keep my dates straight
2016 - Proxima b descovered
2028 - Lewis and Clark launched
2038 - radio contact lost with Clark
2066 - Clark reaches Proxima b, but humans have no way of knowing
2094 - radio contact reacquired with Clark
2104 - Clark returns
* * *
In 2094, JPL was still around. It was still ostensibly a research laboratory, as it had been in the days of the old NASA, but now it was making good money, sending unmanned spacecraft scooting along the convoluted pathways of the Interplanetary Transport Network, and parking its deep-space communications relays in the same solar orbits as Mars, Jupiter, and the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt. But the billionaires' endowed chair for the Proxima b Watch was still there, and in the summer of 2094 it was manned by an intern, a bored aero/astro student who, once a week, connected with the dish in Montevideo, ran the diagnostics that ensured the system was still working, stared at the waterfall display for an hour, and then gave up and went back to more interesting work.
Then, one day, there was a blip.
Twenty years earlier, in 2074, another intern (who, by sheer coincidence, was this bored aero/astro student's mother) had mounted a big red incandescent light bulb on a pole, and screwed the pole to the side of the Proxima b Watch desk. She had added a few lines to the Watch program so that the light would blink if the dish in Montevideo detected a "Polo" signal. Since then, the computer running the Watch program had been replaced several times, but the red light was still there, still in good working condition - and it had never blinked.
So in 2094, our bored intern was sitting at her desk, calculating trajectories for the mining equipment JPL was going to ship for Ganymede, when suddenly, the red light turned on.
The reactive, instinctive part of her brain caused her to look at it in annoyance, assuming that it was a malfunction.
Then the slower, more deliberate part of her brain announced that the Watch program had never malfunctioned before. She opened the waterfall display.
And there was a blip, right where the Polo signal belonged. She screamed. Clark was coming home.
* * *
As on the outward journey, the signal was very faint - but it was strong enough for the JPL scientists to calculate that Clark was still over 2 light-years away, and even at its amazing approach speed, it would be another ten years before it got to earth.
But there was a problem. The probe was going so fast that it would shoot past the earth, past the sun, and right out the other side of the solar system. They had to find a way to slow it down, and either capture it in space or crash it onto Earth, someplace where they could find it.
The old mission documents were dug up, dusted off, and the math rechecked. According to the documents, the re-entry was all preprogrammed. Clark would flip, end for end, about the time it crossed the Kuiper belt, so that its ion engine, still firing full blast, would act as a retro-rocket. About the time it crossed the orbit of Mars, it would be crawling along at Earth-capture velocity. However, the JPL scientists reached out and reprogrammed Clark's reentry sequence, so that as long as the Earth was in the right place, Clark would slip into orbit around it, and space technicians could pull it out of the sky and gently carry it the rest of the way home, instead of following the original mission plan and letting it crash clumsily into the planet.
* * *
Finally, in 2104, Clark was perched in a clean room at JPL. Its leading surfaces were pocked and pitted from the space dust that had smashed against it, like bugs on a cosmic windshield, as it had flown through space at 74 million miles per hour. Compared with modern unmanned space vehicles, it was an antique. The JPL scientists looked at it and wondered how it had ever managed to stay aloft, it was so primitive - so heavy - so ungainly. The fact that it had performed flawlessly, continuously, for its full 76 years, left them in awe of the skills of their forefathers.
The copper-cobalt memory was reverently extracted from the chassis. The scientists looked upon it the way their grandfathers had looked upon Thomas Edison's wax phonograph cylinders, knowing that in this ancient storage device were the first close-up pictures of another world.
It contained more than that, however. Lewis and Clark had kept a careful log of more than just pictures, and Clark had faithfully brought it all home. Connected to a modern computer, the memory bank gave up its secrets, and hour by hour, day by day, the world was amazed by the new data that streamed from Pasadena.
Lewis had taken enough photos of the dance between the three stars for scientists to put together a time-lapse animation of it. Lewis had gotten photos of the surfaces of all three stars, pocked with sunspots and laced with ribbons and arches of incandescent gas. Lewis' spectophotometric analysis of the stars had confirmed some theories, blasted other theories, and given astrophysicists a lot more to chew on - the first close-up photos of another star, times three!
As astronomers pored over Lewis' images, they discovered that Proxima b had siblings, and so Proxima Centauri c, d, e, f, and g were added to the family. Two were rocks, and three were gas giants whose orbits were strongly influenced by the Alpha twins.
Lewis had fed Clark navigation data so exact that Clark had passed within 200 miles of the planet Proxima b's surface - a near-collision. Clark's stereoscopic cameras had taken pictures at a prodigious rate. Its radar and its magnetometer had mapped three fourths of the planet in its single flyby. Its spectrophotometer had detected some sort of red-light photosynthesis on the surface, and its mass spectrometer had captured a few stray molecules from the planet's atmosphere: heavy in CO2, O2 and argon.
Proxima b is tidally locked with its star, meaning that the same side always faces the star, just like earth's moon. But the dark side is not really "dark", since the Alpha Centauri twins light up the dark side for half of every planetary day. Clark was therefore able to get some pictures of the dark side, a mosaic of starlit twilight and classic inky blackness.
Some of the JPL staff were disappointed that, while there were clear signs of plant life on the sunny side, there was no sign of animal life anywhere, or of the artificial light that would serve as a sure sign of animal life or an advanced civilization. One technician posted a sign above his desk, saying: "Fermi is still right."
* * *
And that was the end of the first Proxima b expedition. Launched in the hiatus following the first International Space Station, it ended during the heyday of the planetary mining period, when robotic mining colonies were operating profitably around the solar system. Like a wagon train pulling into a modern city with skyscrapers and electric lights, Lewis and Clark were the bridge between two different eras of space exploration.
POSTSCRIPT: In January 2020, scientists announced that they had found a second planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. I could add this to the story, but I won't.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
How to tell if you're too fat: a rule of thumb
Look: I'm not judging fat people, okay? Some very cool people also happen to be fat. It doesn't make them any less cool. So DON'T use this rule of thumb to judge other people. Only use it to judge yourself.
Here's the rule of thumb.
Get buck naked, like in the shower. Stand up straight. Now bend your neck and tip your head down, so your chin is touching your chest. Look straight down.
CHICKS: If your belly sticks out further than your tits, you're too fat.
DUDES: If you can't see your (relaxed) dick cuz your belly is in the way, you're too fat.
This works for all body types, and all sizes and shapes. All of the exceptions you can think of? They don't matter. If this rule of thumb tells you you're too fat, and you disagree, then go try the Body Mass Index (BMI) Calculator at http://www.bmi-calculator.net/. It'll tell you the same thing - every time.
Here's the rule of thumb.
Get buck naked, like in the shower. Stand up straight. Now bend your neck and tip your head down, so your chin is touching your chest. Look straight down.
CHICKS: If your belly sticks out further than your tits, you're too fat.
DUDES: If you can't see your (relaxed) dick cuz your belly is in the way, you're too fat.
This works for all body types, and all sizes and shapes. All of the exceptions you can think of? They don't matter. If this rule of thumb tells you you're too fat, and you disagree, then go try the Body Mass Index (BMI) Calculator at http://www.bmi-calculator.net/. It'll tell you the same thing - every time.
Monday, March 5, 2018
Still another warning to women: Stop telling him what to do all the time!
Hello ladies!
Here I am again, with some more helpful advice on dealing with men.
I'm sure there's a man in your life who, for whatever reason, is very important to you. Maybe you're related to him. Or maybe you're in love with him. Or maybe, for some other reason, you find yourself emotionally invested in his life.
In his success, if you will.
Therefore, you feel justified in telling him what to do.
I don't mean dropping subtle hints, because you've already tried that and it doesn't work.
I don't mean gentle nudges, because you've tried that and it doesn't work, either.
And I don't mean crafty manipulation.
I mean outright telling him to do this, and to do that.
And sometimes getting frustrated with him, and yelling at him to do this or that.
Have you ever wondered how he got so far in life without your help?
The stereotypical view of adult males is that they're shallow, shortsighted, self-centered, superficial, and — oh, yes — forgetful. They need a woman's help to find their car keys, straighten their tie, decide what to do tomorrow, and decide what to do for the rest of their life.
Do you know who created that stereotype? Stereotypical women did. Do you know who believes in that stereotype, and who perpetuates it? You do.
You know, most men are deep thinkers. They just gave up trying to tell you what they were thinking, because you wouldn't listen. Or you wouldn't believe them. Or you belittled what they had to say. Or you tried to make it all about you.
Likewise, most men don't make decisions on the spur of the moment. They put a lot of thought into their decisions, weighing options carefully. They know that, whatever decision they make, it's going to make somebody unhappy. This causes them untold agony, which they must bury and keep hidden, and just move on with their decisions.
They shouldn't have to justify their choices to you. Why do you make them do that? They get enough of that shit at work. Who made you their off-the-clock bosses?
Moreover, when you ask them why, and they tell you why, their explanation (or justification, if you'd rather) isn't good enough for you. You keep wanting to go deeper and deeper and deeper. You don't know when to stop. Eventually, he realizes that no answer he can give you will be satisfactory, and so he stops wasting his time trying. He shuts up.
Let's put the shoe on the other foot for a paragraph. These men respect you and they (well, most of them) support you in the things you choose to do. Some of them even love you, unconditionally. They will go out of their way to make things easier for you and to make you successful. Why in hell can't you do the same thing for them?
Now take a step back and look at the Long View. These men have been making their own decisions for years: getting up on time, getting themselves dressed, going to the bathroom all by themselves, pouring their own breakfast cereal, getting a driver's license, registering for college classes, applying for graduation, hunting down jobs, buying cars and houses — and they did it all without your help.
1. Give the man some credit for having a brain.
2. Tell me why you think that the man needs you to tell him what to do.
Now, granted, there are some men who can't seem to do anything without a woman behind them, pointing them in the right direction. But do you know what would happen to one of those men if that woman stopped helping him? After a few moments of confusion and disorientation, he would figure it out himself! He'd be ecstatic! He'd be truly happy for the first time in his life.
Oh, he may need you, all right. Everybody needs somebody in their corner, somebody to support them, to build them up, and to cheer them on. That's what he needs you for.
Not to try to run his life for him, like every other woman in his life has been trying to do for years.
Here I am again, with some more helpful advice on dealing with men.
I'm sure there's a man in your life who, for whatever reason, is very important to you. Maybe you're related to him. Or maybe you're in love with him. Or maybe, for some other reason, you find yourself emotionally invested in his life.
In his success, if you will.
Therefore, you feel justified in telling him what to do.
I don't mean dropping subtle hints, because you've already tried that and it doesn't work.
I don't mean gentle nudges, because you've tried that and it doesn't work, either.
And I don't mean crafty manipulation.
I mean outright telling him to do this, and to do that.
And sometimes getting frustrated with him, and yelling at him to do this or that.
Have you ever wondered how he got so far in life without your help?
The stereotypical view of adult males is that they're shallow, shortsighted, self-centered, superficial, and — oh, yes — forgetful. They need a woman's help to find their car keys, straighten their tie, decide what to do tomorrow, and decide what to do for the rest of their life.
Do you know who created that stereotype? Stereotypical women did. Do you know who believes in that stereotype, and who perpetuates it? You do.
You know, most men are deep thinkers. They just gave up trying to tell you what they were thinking, because you wouldn't listen. Or you wouldn't believe them. Or you belittled what they had to say. Or you tried to make it all about you.
Likewise, most men don't make decisions on the spur of the moment. They put a lot of thought into their decisions, weighing options carefully. They know that, whatever decision they make, it's going to make somebody unhappy. This causes them untold agony, which they must bury and keep hidden, and just move on with their decisions.
They shouldn't have to justify their choices to you. Why do you make them do that? They get enough of that shit at work. Who made you their off-the-clock bosses?
Moreover, when you ask them why, and they tell you why, their explanation (or justification, if you'd rather) isn't good enough for you. You keep wanting to go deeper and deeper and deeper. You don't know when to stop. Eventually, he realizes that no answer he can give you will be satisfactory, and so he stops wasting his time trying. He shuts up.
Let's put the shoe on the other foot for a paragraph. These men respect you and they (well, most of them) support you in the things you choose to do. Some of them even love you, unconditionally. They will go out of their way to make things easier for you and to make you successful. Why in hell can't you do the same thing for them?
Now take a step back and look at the Long View. These men have been making their own decisions for years: getting up on time, getting themselves dressed, going to the bathroom all by themselves, pouring their own breakfast cereal, getting a driver's license, registering for college classes, applying for graduation, hunting down jobs, buying cars and houses — and they did it all without your help.
1. Give the man some credit for having a brain.
2. Tell me why you think that the man needs you to tell him what to do.
Now, granted, there are some men who can't seem to do anything without a woman behind them, pointing them in the right direction. But do you know what would happen to one of those men if that woman stopped helping him? After a few moments of confusion and disorientation, he would figure it out himself! He'd be ecstatic! He'd be truly happy for the first time in his life.
Oh, he may need you, all right. Everybody needs somebody in their corner, somebody to support them, to build them up, and to cheer them on. That's what he needs you for.
Not to try to run his life for him, like every other woman in his life has been trying to do for years.
Thursday, October 5, 2017
Philanthropy, chapter 2
Tonya sat nervously across the small table from Dennis Franks. Reverend Billy sat to her left. She sipped nervously at the grande frappucino latte Franks had bought for her. Reverend Bill was sipping a bottle of mineral water, and Franks thoroughly enjoyed his latte. He had bought the same kind as Tonya, in an attempt to make her feel at ease.
But his mannerisms were those of a businessman with a task to accomplish. He didn't waste a lot of time beating around the bush.
Reverend Billy was also there to put her at ease, and to provide moral support.
"It ain't often that a rich white man comes into south side Atlanta to have coffee wid' a black girl." She looked at her coffee cup as they spoke, stealing occasional furtive glances at him.
"Yeah, well," he said, sipping at his latte, "I've never done it before. Reverend, you ever seen it happen?"
Reverend Billy wasn't as quick on the draw as his two companions. He just looked blankly from one to the other.
"So," said Tonya, "why are you here, Mista Rich White Man?"
"First of all," responded Frank, "I don't want to hear any bullshit about white man's guilt or southern shame or white privilege. If you start throwing that around, then I'm out of here and you can finish that latte by yourself."
"I didn't --"
"No, but you were going to. I'm not here because of that. You're a smart girl. You graduated from Douglass High with a 3.43 grade-point average. You ran for three years on the cross-country and track teams, and lettered every year. You were on the debate team your sophomore and junior years. And you were in the National Honor Society for four years. You were planning to go to college. What happened?"
Tonya swirled the coffee in her half-empty cup and answered in a flat voice, still not looking at Franks. "I was gonna go to Yale or Harvard. You know, Ivy League schools. I had the grades to do it. My teachers loved me, and the counselors thought I was gonna be a real feather in their cap. Then, the week before school started my senior year, a boy talked me into sleepin' wid'im. He said he was wearing a condom, but I didn't see one. Anyway, before Homecoming came around, I found out I was pregnant.
"I talked to Reverend Billy about what to do. He convinced me not to get an abortion. I didn't want to give up the baby, so I decided to keep it. Because I was pregnant, I dropped out of running. And I was so busy trying to get ready for the baby and keep my grades up, that I had to quit debate. I wasn't gonna quit high school, though. That's the one thing I didn't quit."
She sighed, took a sip, and continued. "Little Sarah was born the week before graduation. I almost couldn't walk across the stage to get my diploma, but nothin' was gonna stop me. But after that, I had to take care of my baby, so I got a job at Waffle House and I been workin' there ever since. My mama watches the baby while I'm at work, but she's an alcoholic and so sometimes I get home and the baby's in the same diaper she was wearing when I left."
She sighed again. "Ain't no way I can go to college with that kind of life hangin' round my neck."
"Where's the father?" Franks asked quietly.
"You mean the sperm donor?" she retorted angrily. "Last I heard, he was hustlin' something down on the Gulf Coast. I ain't seen him since graduation. He tried to sleep with me again after a graduation party, but I told him, number one, I'm still healin', and number two, don't you remember what happened the last time we did that? He was never a boyfriend, just a boy." Her voice trailed off into sadness.
"So, are you planning to work at Waffle House for the rest of your life?"
"Yes, unless I can get a job at Denny's instead." She looked up at him through her eyebrows, smiling at her little joke.
Franks smiled softly in reply. Then he took a long drag on his latte and said, "What if you could get a second chance at going to college?"
She snorted softly. "Do I look like I got a fairy godmother?" she asked her coffee cup.
"You might. I have a proposal for you. Have you ever heard of the Pinecone Foundation?"
Franks waited for a response and, not getting one, continued. "In a forest fire, all of the trees are burned and die, right? Well, the heat from the forest fire causes pine cones to open up, and their seeds drop out and get buried in the ash on the forest floor. Then the next spring, after lying there and soaking up water all winter, they sprout and grow into new trees. It's like the forest gets a second chance.
"The Pinecone Foundation exists to give kids like you a second chance. Tell me: what were you going to study at Yale or Harvard?"
"Accounting," she muttered to her cup.
"They told me you were good at math. How were you going to pay for your education?"
"A lotta hard work." She chuckled sadly, even though it wasn't really a joke.
"I don't think you can work enough in four years to pay for those schools."
"Yeah well, it's all a mute point now. I ain't goin' anywhere." She leaned back in her chair and fixed him with a look of despair and apathy.
"Moot point," he said.
"What?"
"Moot point, not mute. It's a legal term. It means something that's fake, or something that doesn't matter anymore."
"It sure doesn't."
He caught the wit in the reply. "You've got a sharp mind. An accounting degree from Yale would serve you well. You could get a job as a CPA anywhere. Or you could go to business school, get an MBA, and get a job as a junior executive somewhere."
"Somewhere, like where?"
"How about Procter & Gamble, in Cincinnati?"
Her eyes sparkled. "Ooh! I ain't never been to Cincinnati!" Then the sparkle died, and she slumped in her chair again. "And I ain't never gonna get there, either."
He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. Although she hadn't looked at him much, his eyes had never left her during the entire conversation. Reverend Billy sat on the side, content to be a spectator in this exchange.
"I want - the Foundation wants - to pay for your schooling. We will pay for tuition, books, Internet access, rent, utilities, groceries, diapers for your little one, day care, a computer, even a cellphone. We'll even pay for you to come home and visit on the holidays, if you want."
Skeptical, Tonya asked, "What do I gotta do in return?"
"Get accepted. Pass all your classes. Graduate. And be a good mama to your baby. That's all."
"Uh-huh. And do you get to be my sugar daddy? Do I have to sleep with you?"
Franks smiled. He wasn't offended; in fact, he had been expecting this question. He shook his head and said, "You get your own two-bedroom apartment. The only person you have to sleep with is your own little girl."
"I ain't never had my own apartment. Hell, I ain't never even had my own bed."
"I'll introduce you to Charmaine. She's 25, and she works at the foundation. She'll teach you how to cook, and clean your own apartment, do your laundry, and do your grocery shopping - in fact, she'll go shopping with you until think you can handle it on your own. She'll take you clothes shopping before school starts, because you're going to need a new wardrobe."
Tonya's eyes started to glaze over, as she allowed herself to believe this was true. "Wait - wait. There has to be a catch. Nobody's this generous - not to a total stranger, and def'nit'ly not to a black girl wid' a baby from the South Side."
Franks stared at her, not moving. Then he asked, "So, is that a yes or a no?"
She looked to the preacher: "Reverend Billy?"
"Remember what Cuba Gooding Junior said."
She furrowed her brow, thinking hard. "What? 'Show me the money'?" She laughed, but the laughter was a mix of puzzlement and crazy hope. "Mista Franks, show me the money."
He smiled and waggled his eyebrows. "First, you get accepted at a school. Then I'll show you the money." He watched the crazy hope fade away. "Yes or no?"
Franks was rather disappointed. He had been expecting a more positive reaction. Tonya swirled her empty cup slowly on the table in front of her. "If I say yes, what happens?"
"Well, applying for college is hard work. So we'll help you do that. Tomorrow morning at 9, Charmaine will pick you up and bring you to the office. You can bring your baby if you want. We have several secretaries who are grandmothers, and they will fuss over her for hours. They'll pass her back and forth, and you won't have to worry about her for a minute. You and Charmaine can sit at a computer, decide which schools to apply to, and fill in the applications."
He paused, then said, "It'll take more than one day. You might need to quit your job."
"But I can't do that!" Tonya exclaimed.
"Nonsense. Getting into school is now your full-time job."
"But I need the money!"
"Tonya, let's talk for a minute about want versus need. Yes, you need the money. But do you want to go to college?"
"Well yeah, but I can't quit just for a couple of days of applyin', and then weeks of waitin'! What if they say no? Then I got no school and no job!"
Franks smiled gently. "You still don't understand. That's okay. You will have the money. We'll give you $120 for every day you spend at the Foundation, researching schools and filling out applications. We will pay you $120 for every day that you are out with Charmaine or someone else, buying clothes and supplies, and learning how to drive."
"Drive?"
"Well, if you're going to be independent, you're going to need a car."
The girl gasped.
"And if there's still time left over, we will offer you a job at the Foundation. We have a lot of work you can do."
Her eyes started filling with tears, and then she blinked them back. Her lower lip started to quiver, so she bit it. She stared at the logo on the coffee cup she was holding, as if it were the most important thing in the universe.
"So, yes or no?"
"I really don't have to sleep witcha?"
"Really."
She glanced at Reverend Billy. He finally spoke.
"Girl, what are you waiting for? Why are you even questioning this? Think of little Sarah! Don't you want something better for her? Think of all the dreams you had in high school, the ones you gave up on. What if you could make all those dreams come true after all?"
He continued, "Do you know how much MONEY they're offering you? This is tens of thousands - a couple hundred thousand - dollars! And all you have to do is be good, and do what you do best! Don't be a fool, girl! Say yes to the man."
Tonya looked past Franks and fixed her gaze on the windows on the other side of the coffee shop. Her eyes started filling with tears again, and this time she didn't blink them away. Her lower lip trembled, her chin seemed to disappear, and her eyes got lost in the flood of tears that poured down her cheeks and on to the table top. Unashamed, she sat there, shoulders convulsing as she wept silently, having realized what was being offered and the changes it would bring.
Franks didn't move. To move would have broken the spell.
Reverend Billy, taking his cue from Franks, didn't move either. When he started getting fidgety, he played Four Tops songs in his mind, taking care not to hum aloud. He had finished "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I've Got)" and was halfway through "Yesterday's Dreams" when Tonya's sobbing subsided, she dried her eyes and the table with a Starbucks napkin, and looked Dennis Franks in the eye.
"Yes," she said faintly.
One side of Franks' mouth smiled. "You're sure?"
She took a deep breath, smiled a huge smile, and almost shouted, "Yes!"
Then the other half of his mouth smiled. "Charmaine will pick you up at 9 tomorrow morning. Don't be late." He stood up, shook Reverend Billy's hand, and stuck his hand out for Tonya to shake. She looked at his hand, then slowly stood up, wrapped her arms around him and embraced him tightly.
She let go of him and whispered, "Thank you." He smiled at her once more, then turned and walked out the door.
But his mannerisms were those of a businessman with a task to accomplish. He didn't waste a lot of time beating around the bush.
Reverend Billy was also there to put her at ease, and to provide moral support.
"It ain't often that a rich white man comes into south side Atlanta to have coffee wid' a black girl." She looked at her coffee cup as they spoke, stealing occasional furtive glances at him.
"Yeah, well," he said, sipping at his latte, "I've never done it before. Reverend, you ever seen it happen?"
Reverend Billy wasn't as quick on the draw as his two companions. He just looked blankly from one to the other.
"So," said Tonya, "why are you here, Mista Rich White Man?"
"First of all," responded Frank, "I don't want to hear any bullshit about white man's guilt or southern shame or white privilege. If you start throwing that around, then I'm out of here and you can finish that latte by yourself."
"I didn't --"
"No, but you were going to. I'm not here because of that. You're a smart girl. You graduated from Douglass High with a 3.43 grade-point average. You ran for three years on the cross-country and track teams, and lettered every year. You were on the debate team your sophomore and junior years. And you were in the National Honor Society for four years. You were planning to go to college. What happened?"
Tonya swirled the coffee in her half-empty cup and answered in a flat voice, still not looking at Franks. "I was gonna go to Yale or Harvard. You know, Ivy League schools. I had the grades to do it. My teachers loved me, and the counselors thought I was gonna be a real feather in their cap. Then, the week before school started my senior year, a boy talked me into sleepin' wid'im. He said he was wearing a condom, but I didn't see one. Anyway, before Homecoming came around, I found out I was pregnant.
"I talked to Reverend Billy about what to do. He convinced me not to get an abortion. I didn't want to give up the baby, so I decided to keep it. Because I was pregnant, I dropped out of running. And I was so busy trying to get ready for the baby and keep my grades up, that I had to quit debate. I wasn't gonna quit high school, though. That's the one thing I didn't quit."
She sighed, took a sip, and continued. "Little Sarah was born the week before graduation. I almost couldn't walk across the stage to get my diploma, but nothin' was gonna stop me. But after that, I had to take care of my baby, so I got a job at Waffle House and I been workin' there ever since. My mama watches the baby while I'm at work, but she's an alcoholic and so sometimes I get home and the baby's in the same diaper she was wearing when I left."
She sighed again. "Ain't no way I can go to college with that kind of life hangin' round my neck."
"Where's the father?" Franks asked quietly.
"You mean the sperm donor?" she retorted angrily. "Last I heard, he was hustlin' something down on the Gulf Coast. I ain't seen him since graduation. He tried to sleep with me again after a graduation party, but I told him, number one, I'm still healin', and number two, don't you remember what happened the last time we did that? He was never a boyfriend, just a boy." Her voice trailed off into sadness.
"So, are you planning to work at Waffle House for the rest of your life?"
"Yes, unless I can get a job at Denny's instead." She looked up at him through her eyebrows, smiling at her little joke.
Franks smiled softly in reply. Then he took a long drag on his latte and said, "What if you could get a second chance at going to college?"
She snorted softly. "Do I look like I got a fairy godmother?" she asked her coffee cup.
"You might. I have a proposal for you. Have you ever heard of the Pinecone Foundation?"
Franks waited for a response and, not getting one, continued. "In a forest fire, all of the trees are burned and die, right? Well, the heat from the forest fire causes pine cones to open up, and their seeds drop out and get buried in the ash on the forest floor. Then the next spring, after lying there and soaking up water all winter, they sprout and grow into new trees. It's like the forest gets a second chance.
"The Pinecone Foundation exists to give kids like you a second chance. Tell me: what were you going to study at Yale or Harvard?"
"Accounting," she muttered to her cup.
"They told me you were good at math. How were you going to pay for your education?"
"A lotta hard work." She chuckled sadly, even though it wasn't really a joke.
"I don't think you can work enough in four years to pay for those schools."
"Yeah well, it's all a mute point now. I ain't goin' anywhere." She leaned back in her chair and fixed him with a look of despair and apathy.
"Moot point," he said.
"What?"
"Moot point, not mute. It's a legal term. It means something that's fake, or something that doesn't matter anymore."
"It sure doesn't."
He caught the wit in the reply. "You've got a sharp mind. An accounting degree from Yale would serve you well. You could get a job as a CPA anywhere. Or you could go to business school, get an MBA, and get a job as a junior executive somewhere."
"Somewhere, like where?"
"How about Procter & Gamble, in Cincinnati?"
Her eyes sparkled. "Ooh! I ain't never been to Cincinnati!" Then the sparkle died, and she slumped in her chair again. "And I ain't never gonna get there, either."
He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. Although she hadn't looked at him much, his eyes had never left her during the entire conversation. Reverend Billy sat on the side, content to be a spectator in this exchange.
"I want - the Foundation wants - to pay for your schooling. We will pay for tuition, books, Internet access, rent, utilities, groceries, diapers for your little one, day care, a computer, even a cellphone. We'll even pay for you to come home and visit on the holidays, if you want."
Skeptical, Tonya asked, "What do I gotta do in return?"
"Get accepted. Pass all your classes. Graduate. And be a good mama to your baby. That's all."
"Uh-huh. And do you get to be my sugar daddy? Do I have to sleep with you?"
Franks smiled. He wasn't offended; in fact, he had been expecting this question. He shook his head and said, "You get your own two-bedroom apartment. The only person you have to sleep with is your own little girl."
"I ain't never had my own apartment. Hell, I ain't never even had my own bed."
"I'll introduce you to Charmaine. She's 25, and she works at the foundation. She'll teach you how to cook, and clean your own apartment, do your laundry, and do your grocery shopping - in fact, she'll go shopping with you until think you can handle it on your own. She'll take you clothes shopping before school starts, because you're going to need a new wardrobe."
Tonya's eyes started to glaze over, as she allowed herself to believe this was true. "Wait - wait. There has to be a catch. Nobody's this generous - not to a total stranger, and def'nit'ly not to a black girl wid' a baby from the South Side."
Franks stared at her, not moving. Then he asked, "So, is that a yes or a no?"
She looked to the preacher: "Reverend Billy?"
"Remember what Cuba Gooding Junior said."
She furrowed her brow, thinking hard. "What? 'Show me the money'?" She laughed, but the laughter was a mix of puzzlement and crazy hope. "Mista Franks, show me the money."
He smiled and waggled his eyebrows. "First, you get accepted at a school. Then I'll show you the money." He watched the crazy hope fade away. "Yes or no?"
Franks was rather disappointed. He had been expecting a more positive reaction. Tonya swirled her empty cup slowly on the table in front of her. "If I say yes, what happens?"
"Well, applying for college is hard work. So we'll help you do that. Tomorrow morning at 9, Charmaine will pick you up and bring you to the office. You can bring your baby if you want. We have several secretaries who are grandmothers, and they will fuss over her for hours. They'll pass her back and forth, and you won't have to worry about her for a minute. You and Charmaine can sit at a computer, decide which schools to apply to, and fill in the applications."
He paused, then said, "It'll take more than one day. You might need to quit your job."
"But I can't do that!" Tonya exclaimed.
"Nonsense. Getting into school is now your full-time job."
"But I need the money!"
"Tonya, let's talk for a minute about want versus need. Yes, you need the money. But do you want to go to college?"
"Well yeah, but I can't quit just for a couple of days of applyin', and then weeks of waitin'! What if they say no? Then I got no school and no job!"
Franks smiled gently. "You still don't understand. That's okay. You will have the money. We'll give you $120 for every day you spend at the Foundation, researching schools and filling out applications. We will pay you $120 for every day that you are out with Charmaine or someone else, buying clothes and supplies, and learning how to drive."
"Drive?"
"Well, if you're going to be independent, you're going to need a car."
The girl gasped.
"And if there's still time left over, we will offer you a job at the Foundation. We have a lot of work you can do."
Her eyes started filling with tears, and then she blinked them back. Her lower lip started to quiver, so she bit it. She stared at the logo on the coffee cup she was holding, as if it were the most important thing in the universe.
"So, yes or no?"
"I really don't have to sleep witcha?"
"Really."
She glanced at Reverend Billy. He finally spoke.
"Girl, what are you waiting for? Why are you even questioning this? Think of little Sarah! Don't you want something better for her? Think of all the dreams you had in high school, the ones you gave up on. What if you could make all those dreams come true after all?"
He continued, "Do you know how much MONEY they're offering you? This is tens of thousands - a couple hundred thousand - dollars! And all you have to do is be good, and do what you do best! Don't be a fool, girl! Say yes to the man."
Tonya looked past Franks and fixed her gaze on the windows on the other side of the coffee shop. Her eyes started filling with tears again, and this time she didn't blink them away. Her lower lip trembled, her chin seemed to disappear, and her eyes got lost in the flood of tears that poured down her cheeks and on to the table top. Unashamed, she sat there, shoulders convulsing as she wept silently, having realized what was being offered and the changes it would bring.
Franks didn't move. To move would have broken the spell.
Reverend Billy, taking his cue from Franks, didn't move either. When he started getting fidgety, he played Four Tops songs in his mind, taking care not to hum aloud. He had finished "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I've Got)" and was halfway through "Yesterday's Dreams" when Tonya's sobbing subsided, she dried her eyes and the table with a Starbucks napkin, and looked Dennis Franks in the eye.
"Yes," she said faintly.
One side of Franks' mouth smiled. "You're sure?"
She took a deep breath, smiled a huge smile, and almost shouted, "Yes!"
Then the other half of his mouth smiled. "Charmaine will pick you up at 9 tomorrow morning. Don't be late." He stood up, shook Reverend Billy's hand, and stuck his hand out for Tonya to shake. She looked at his hand, then slowly stood up, wrapped her arms around him and embraced him tightly.
She let go of him and whispered, "Thank you." He smiled at her once more, then turned and walked out the door.
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