“Well, all right then. I’ll meet you there. Wear your Class As.”
“Yes, sir.” I hung up. Jump wings or not, this guy was not what I would call a ‘winged warrior’. More like a body bag waiting to be filled!
Marilyn was standing in the doorway watching me, still in her Hilton robe. She started saluting me. “Yes sir, no sir, thank you sir…” I jumped up and chased her until I caught her and then gave her butt a smack.
“We need to get dressed and go downstairs. This press guy wants to meet us for breakfast,” I told her.
Marilyn pulled out some nice slacks and a blouse. “Good?”
“Good. I don’t know what this guy wants, not completely yet, but I know he wants me looking like a recruiting poster,” I replied.
“Well, you recruited me.”
“I still haven’t finished recruiting you yet. We can talk about that this week, too.”
“You bet!”
We got down to the restaurant by 0735. Nobody else in a uniform was present, certainly not Captain Summers. We waited about five minutes and then ordered some breakfast. The captain showed up closer to 0750. “Oh, good, you didn’t wait for me. Sorry about that. I had to clean a spare pair of boots. Mine aren’t back from the concierge yet. I needed them polished.” I looked sideways at Marilyn, and found her laughing eyes. He sent his boots out?
“Yes, sir. May I introduce my fiancée, Miss Marilyn Lefleur.”
“Pleased to meet you. We’ll have to work you into our story, too.” I rolled my eyes at her, but he never noticed.
“Yes, sir.”
Our waiter returned and took the captain’s order, and then the captain turned back to me; he wanted to go over the agenda for our trip, and his plans for the story. By the time our breakfast actually arrived, I had to make the time-out sign.
“Sir, let’s see if we can’t simplify things. This is a scientific conference. I’m here to present a paper tomorrow.” I sorted through the schedule for the conference I had with me. “That will be tomorrow morning at 1100. I’ll need to be there all morning. After that, I will be having lunch with Professor Rhineburg. I’ll need to coordinate things with him, but expect me to be tied up all day tomorrow with the conference and the professor.”
Captain Summers didn’t look happy, but he seemed to understand. His plans were for pictures of me doing something both military and scientific for the next two days. He actually wanted to see if I could give a lecture at the Pentagon, for Christ’s sake! To whom, it wasn’t clear. “All right.”
“Tonight, the professor comes into town. I’ll need to be here to greet him, and at least offer to take him to dinner. If he accepts, that ties up this evening. He’s the only reason I’m here, Captain, so we have to offer and do this. He could be difficult otherwise.” Okay, professor, I’m throwing you under the bus a bit, but what you don’t know won’t hurt you. Anything to keep me away from this publicity idiot.
“Okay.”
“And there are several lectures this afternoon that I would certainly like to attend. Some of them may even have application to future artillery and military computer needs.” In a pig’s eye, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Well, when will we be able to shoot you running and lecturing? This is the reason we’re here!”
“Captain, I’ll be up at 0600 tomorrow morning. If you want me running along the Mall in front of a monument tomorrow, that’s fine. Just meet me in the lobby and have a taxi ready to take me wherever you need to. I’ll even have an official Army tee shirt on for you and the camera.”
“0600?” he asked, protesting.
“Excellent, sir,” I agreed, even though he didn’t like the idea at all. “Also, I’m sure you’ll be able to hang around the rear of the lecture hall with your camera while I’m delivering the paper. I’ll be in uniform and looking good, sir.”
“Well, certainly we’ll be doing that.”
“I was figuring to just keep things simple, sir. This morning, I can explain to you my paper and we can talk about computers and the military. That will fill in that blank in the schedule. Okay?”
“Then you don’t plan to talk to the appropriate people in the Pentagon about your paper?”
“Sir, I know I’m pretty junior and all, but it’s been my experience that if the Pentagon wanted to speak to me, they’d let me know. In the meantime, let ‘s stay out of their hair and they can stay out of ours.”
He gave me a smile that was a touch condescending. “It sounds like you don’t approve of the Pentagon, Lieutenant.”
“Not at all, sir. It’s just that my work is with the troops at Bragg, not at a headquarters.”
“Really? I’ve been hoping to get transferred here, to the head Public Information Office.” His eyes were practically gleaming at the thought.
Wow, that would be the last thing I would want! Washington DC is one of the most expensive cities in the country to live and work in, and PIO captains must be a dime a dozen here. “Line over staff, sir, line over staff.” He just laughed at that, and then we both had to explain to Marilyn what line and staff meant.
After breakfast we moved out into the lobby and found a corner to sit in. The Hilton, like most high end Washington hotels, had a significant amount of conference room space. There were quite a few mid-sized rooms for individual math disciplines (Discrete Math, Number Theory, Topology, Graph Theory, etc.), a few larger rooms for group discussions and dinners, and even a small press room for all those great math related press releases. The professor and I would be in the Discrete Math room, although we could have justified speaking in the Applied Math division as well.
Already, the morning conferences were starting to fill, as mathematicians gathered and moved from the lobby into conference space. “All these people are mathematicians?” commented Captain Summers.
“We’re just like everybody else, Captain.” Marilyn started giggling at that.
The captain looked over at her. “Are you a mathematician, too?”
“God, no! I’m going to school for elementary ed. I want to teach kindergarten.”
The captain nodded. That he could understand. First he set a small tape recorder on the table in front of us and switched it on. Turning back to me, he asked, “So, explain this paper to me.”
I nodded at him. I had given this some thought, since the captain probably hadn’t had any mathematics beyond a semester of calculus that he forgot five minutes after the final. “Well, the paper is actually about providing the tools to network computers together. Professor Rhineburg and I developed a system of equations that will allow future system designers to design computer networks.”
“So it’s not about computers?”
“It’s about how to link computers together, into grids and networks of computers. Within a few years they will be cheap enough that most middle and upper class people will be able to afford a computer of their own. The real power will come when people start linking them together.”
“People will own computers?” he asked, a look of astonishment on his face.
“You probably already do and don’t even know it.”
“Impossible!”
I reached into my briefcase and pulled out a Texas Instruments calculator, one of the more expensive programmable models. “This is a calculator. Do you have one?” The captain nodded and said he did, for balancing his checkbook. “Seven years ago these didn’t exist. Five years ago, when I started college, they were phenomenally expensive, and the school banned them in tests because they were an unfair advantage to rich people. Three years ago the price had dropped so that this wasn’t a problem. Now, every college student in the country has one. This is a computer.”