“A cruise, then?” I asked Marilyn. She nodded excitedly. “So, it’s a cruise. I’ll take care of it.”
“How?”
“By calling a travel agent.”
“Oh,” she said.
“See, another thing off the list. I fail to see why this is so difficult,” I replied.
That got Marilyn going again. There was the dress and the bridesmaid’s dresses and the tuxedos and limos and the reception and all sorts of things.
I waved her to silence again. “You live in Utica. You don’t have to do this by yourself. Your father sells millions of dollars of trailers…”
“Homes!”
“… every year. There are plenty of limo companies he can hire. There must be a dozen banquet halls around the city to hire. Harlan, Joe and I will be wearing mess dress, not tuxedos. The only tuxes will be your father and Tusker. We’ll tell them basic black.”
“What’s mess dress?” asked Professor Rhineburg.
I turned to him. “It’s nothing but an Army tuxedo. Very formal.” Marilyn had decided on a relatively small bridal party. Tammy was her maid of honor, and she had two bridesmaids, my sister Suzie and her brother Mark’s fiancée, Lauren. On my part, Joe Bradley had agreed to be my best man, and Harlan and Tusker were going to be my ushers.
“As for the dresses, just get Suzie to have Dad send her up there spring break, and you girls go shopping. There has to be a bridal shop or two in Utica.” Marilyn has a habit of making things way too complicated. When Maggie got married, she and I ran it, and we had all the details ironed out inside of three months, even including custom tailoring on a third generation wedding dress that both my mother and Suzie had worn.
“I don’t know. You make it sound too easy! I don’t trust you!”
I laughed loudly at that, and kissed her hand. “Trust me! Would I lie? By the way, I have this delightful little bridge in Brooklyn…”
She turned to the professor. “See what I have to put up with!?”
“I am not about to get involved in this,” he replied, laughing. “Have fun on the cruise!”
After dinner, we all took a cab back to the Hilton and separated until the morning. I told the professor we would meet him for breakfast at eight, the same time I had told Captain Summers. The captain had postponed our jogging down the Mall until the last day, which simply meant more time with Marilyn for me.
Back upstairs, Marilyn and I sat down and watched a little television, with me in an armchair and her on my lap. Not much was on, so we ended up fooling around instead, and then headed into the bedroom to finish what we had started. Afterwards, we went to sleep.
The morning of the presentation I woke up at my usual 0600 time and did my normal morning workout. I ran up and down Connecticut Avenue for a few miles and then pumped some iron in the Nautilus room. Afterwards, Marilyn and I fooled around for a bit and then cleaned up. I was in uniform, and Marilyn was in a nice dress, and we were down in the lobby at 0800 exactly. Captain Summers joined us on the elevator, and we found Professor Rhineburg waiting for us at the entrance to the restaurant.
The captain immediately tried to organize how the conference would be run. I just rolled my eyes as I looked over at my old boss. Fortunately he knew how to handle overambitious underlings, and he basically told the captain (in a polite way) he was just to keep his mouth shut and stand in the back and take a few pictures. The presentation would go the way he and I had planned and written it. We discussed a few last minute technical details, such as how the slides were prepared and hoped the technical staff had loaded them properly. It was 1978 and years away from the wonders of PowerPoint. When we said slides, we meant real photographic slides! You would draw or use various graphic arts tapes and ribbons on paper to create the graphs or formulas, and then send them out to be photographed and turned into slides. You could easily spend hundreds of dollars in 1978 money on each slideshow.
We dawdled over coffee until 0900 and the start of the conference, and then proceeded in. The symposium we were involved in had been moved to one of the larger conference rooms, and there seemed to be a fair sized audience in attendance. We were towards the back. The professor and I sat there with our copies of the presentation, and also with the schedule of speakers and abstracts of the other presentations. We enjoyed ourselves, Marilyn not so much, since this was incredibly boring to her, but she was there to see me speak. Captain Summers very quickly found himself lost, but he was more worried about getting a picture of me in action in any case.
It was about 1100, or maybe a few minutes before that, when it was time for me to present our paper. I stood and walked to the front of the room and moved behind the podium. From the back of the room I could hear the clicking as Captain Summers took my picture. As directed I was in my Class As. I noticed a few members of the audience looking at me curiously, but after I introduced myself and put the first slide up on the screen, they concentrated on the presentation.
The beginning of the presentation simply introduced a few basic concepts in information theory and the calculations of entropy and information loss. Then I went into some basics of network topologies and the effects the specific topology would have on entropy. After that I introduced the formulas and algorithms that the professor and I had developed to calculate and then minimize the effects of the topology on the entropy.
In general, I thought the presentation was well received. There were a few questions asked, especially about second and third order effects, so I flipped back through the slides to one that listed the most common ones and discussed them some more, including ways they cancelled each other out, which I had thought was a mathematically elegant solution. The only odd part was towards the end of the questions, when this round little man in the front row disdainfully asked, “Just how much of the taxpayer’s money was spent on this research?”
Well, that was certainly out of the blue! I glanced back at Professor Rhineburg, but he looked as mystified as me. He just shrugged and held up in hands in a look of confusion. It was all up to me. “Excuse me? I don’t understand.”
“It’s a perfectly straightforward question. How much has the military invested in this research, and for what purpose?”
I glanced back at the professor, who now looked really confused. He just shook his head. “None that I know of. Why?” Okay, that second part was really stupid on my part. Never let an asshole get a free question. I should have known better.
“That is patently false! Why else would the military be presenting this topic?!” He was now standing there and pointing a finger at me.
“The military? You mean — me? This had nothing to do with the Army. This was my doctoral thesis.” I knew it, but every time I answered I was digging my hole deeper. I should have just ended this whole thing. If I had been looking to the back of the room, I would have seen Captain Summers trying to wave me down and cut me off.
“You mean to say the Army paid for you to do research at taxpayer expense? This is outrageous!”
“No sir. I went to college on an ROTC scholarship. This was all done before I was sworn in. I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand what the problem is. This work was done while I was still a civilian.”
“Then why are you here in uniform?”
“Sir, you’re here in a suit. I’m in the Army. This is my suit.”
“And your job in the Army? Is it to develop computers to kill people?” There were a few gasps around the room.
I was too pissed to think straight. “No, sir, I do my own killing. My job is to keep your children and grandchildren from having to grow up learning Russian!”
“THAT WILL BE ENOUGH, LIEUTENANT!” barked Captain Summers from the rear.