Then it was time to kiss the bride again.
As soon as the ceremony was over, the twin fiddles struck up “Brand-new Tennessee Waltz,” and we all drifted back to the tables in the shade of the Trimotor for refreshments. We found an unfamiliar Mayan-Chinese-looking dude eyeing the shrimp, and made him welcome. It was Wu’s pilot friend, Huan Juan. Ess and Em served the congealed salad, after shrieking and hugging their father, whom they hadn’t seen in six weeks.
“I should have known better than to worry, Wu,” I said. “But did you say Bozeman? I thought that was in Montana.”
“It is,” he said, filling his plate with potato salad. “It’s not on the way from eastern Quetzalcan to northern Alabama, unless you take the Great Triangle Route.”
I knew he wanted me to ask, so I did: “The what?”
Smiling proudly, Wu took a stack of ham biscuits. “You know how a Great Circle Route looks longer on a map, but is in fact the shortest way across the real surface of the spherical Earth?”
“Uh huh.” I grabbed some more of the shrimp. They were going fast. The twin fiddles launched into “Orange Blossom Special.”
“Well, in all my struggles with the Time axes for EMS, I accidentally discovered the shortest route across the negatively folded surface of local space-time. Local meaning, our Universe. Look.”
Wu took what I thought was a map out of the pocket of his tux and unrolled it. It was covered with figures:
“As you can see, it’s sort of counter-intuitive,” he said. “It means flying certain strict patterns and altitudes, and of course it only works in a three engine plane. But there it is. The shortest Great Triangle Space-Time Route from Quetzalcan City to Huntsville traverses the Montana high plains and skims the edge of Chesapeake Bay.”
“Amazing,” I said. The shrimp, which are as big as pistol grips, are grown in freshwater ponds in western Kentucky. I couldn’t stop eating them.
“Numbers don’t he,” said Wu. “Not counting fuel stops, and with a Ford Trimotor there are lots of those, it took Huan Juan and me only 22 hours to fly 6476.54 miles in a plane with a top speed of 112 mph. Let me try one of those giant shrimp.”
“That’s great,” I said, looking through the thinning crowd for Candy. “But it’s almost 12:20, and Candy has to be at work at one.”
Wu looked shocked. “No Honeymoon?”
I shook my head. “Candy traded shifts for the trip to New York, and now she has to work nights, plus all weekend.”
“It’s not very romantic,” said Candy, edging up beside me. “But it was the best we could do. Huan Juan, have you tried the giant shrimp?”
The pilot nodded without answering. He and Wu were consulting in whispers. They looked up at the clear blue sky, then down at the calculations on the unrolled paper.
“They are intimately entwined,” I heard Wu say (I thought he was talking about Candy and me; I found out later he was talking about Time and Space). “All you have to do to unravel and reverse them is substitute this N for this 34.8, and hold steady at 2622 feet and 97 mph, air speed. Can you fly it?”
Huan Juan nodded, reaching for another giant shrimp.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Let’s take a ride,” said Wu, snapping his leather helmet under his chin. “Don’t look so surprised. This Trimotor’s equipped with a luxury Pullman cabin; it once belonged to a Latin American dictator.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, pulling Candy to my side.
Cindy handed Candy a bouquet. Hoppy and Bonnie and all our friends were applauding.
With a shy smile she pulled me aside. While Em and Ess tied shoes to the tail of the plane, and while Huan Juan and Wu cranked up the three ancient air-cooled radials with a deafening roar, and while the rest of the guests polished off the giant shrimp, Candy opened the top button of her tunic to give me a glimpse of what she was wearing underneath.
Then we got on the plane and soared off into the clear blue. But that’s another story altogether.