“Do it tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll take you to dinner.”
“We just had dinner.”
“I’ll take you home then.”
“Let’s go.”
The Director of Computer Systems for Marine Visions Unlimited braked her Oldsmobile Festiva in front of the main entrance of the Sea View Tower.
The Chief Structural Engineer pushed open the passenger door. “Thanks for the ride, Kim.”
“You know, Ingrid, I was thinking,” Otsuka said.
Roskens brought her legs back inside the car. “That’s a problem with most of the people I work with. What are you thinking?”
In her mid forties, Roskens was the only member of the MVU team who did not know how to swim, and she had no intention of doing so. Her auburn hair was peppered with gray, and she had large green eyes, the kind that saw beyond lines and shadows into the underlying foundations. She was responsible for the basic design of the structures for Harbor One, the mining and agricultural complexes, and Ocean Deep. Her husband, Jake, ran a student counseling center at San Diego State University.
“I was thinking about the visually impaired. The museum at Ocean Deep could be adapted for the sense of touch.”
“You could do that landside, Kim.”
“Ah, but you could not capture the feeling of depth, the smell of salt water, the sense of detachment from the dry land.”
“The clamminess, you mean?”
Otsuka laughed. “All right, the clamminess.”
“But you’re right, Kim. We’ll have to convince the museum subcontractor to deal with it. He might just go along, if Dane gives him an incentive in his lease.”
“We will need to adapt the submersible and perhaps the domes. Braille signs will be necessary, for one thing.”
“Okey and I will put it in our proposal. Dane and Kaylene will buy it, and Adrienne can find the bucks somewhere.”
“We ought to hire a consultant who is blind.”
“Dane loves adding people to the roster,” Roskens laughed as she slipped out of the car and hurried up to her building entrance.
Otsuka slipped the shift lever into Drive and pulled away from the curb.
There were currently eighty seven people working for MVU, in one capacity or another, at one site or another. There might even be more; Otsuka found it difficult to keep up with all of the new operations Brande founded. Graduate students from Georgetown University, San Diego State, Rice, Miami, Washington, and other institutions spent a semester’s internship with MVU, swelling the employment rolls, then ebbing. People appeared, shifted to new endeavors, or disappeared.
Otsuka was part of the cadre of the company, as were the boat crews and most of the fabrication personnel. Others came and went in proportion to the contracts they were working on, but she was permanent, and she was grateful for it. She was a Japanese national, having been raised and schooled in Tokyo. Stanford University had admitted her to its doctoral program, and after she obtained the degree, she had assumed she would work as one of the computer science cogs in a giant conglomerate, a Sony, or an IBM. Indeed, that had been her goal until Dane Brande showed up at her apartment in Palo Alto the day after she graduated. Now, she had over nine years with the company, conducted largely in jeans and swim suits, as often below the surface as above it. The business suits of an IBM had never materialized for her, and she did not miss them at all.
The atmosphere of MVU was so casual and so bereft of infighting and job competitiveness that she had learned to laugh. Humor in her family had been in short supply as she and her siblings devoted their teenage years to study, to achieving coveted positions in school.
With short blue black hair that was frequently damp and crusted with salt, Otsuka was tiny at five two. She was agile and peppy, and she could take thirty hour stretches of work without blinking her brown eyes.
It frequently happened that way. A project on deadline, or just one of intense interest, might demand days long effort. No one complained about it, and no one punched a clock, and no one drew overtime pay.
Which was another reason she was happy; she liked her colleagues.
When she arrived at her home in Bay Park, she left the Oldsmobile in the carport and unlocked the side door into the house. It was a small house, but it was hers, a possession she had never dreamed of owning.
She dropped her purse on the counter in the kitchen and went through the house turning on lights. From her living room windows, she could see the lights of the developments around Mission Bay. In the front bedroom, which she used as her home office, she also had a view of the bay. She also had three computer systems, one of them dedicated solely to the design of computer systems. In her backyard, a satellite dish gave her instantaneous access through communications satellites to some of the world’s finest supercomputers. She had hard disk drives and tape drives stacked against the back wall, and they contained encyclopedias of information, ranging from atlases to oceanographic maps to arcane electronics reference works.
Otsuka loved her work, and her work was also her hobby.
She crossed the room to the wide conference table she used as a desk and flicked the switch to turn on the monitor. She did not have to initiate the computers since they operated twenty four hours a day.
Using the keyboard, which she could switch between the three computers, she first called up her stock portfolio and updated it with the stock quotes that had been collected at the closing bell in New York. Otsuka was trying to learn the stock business. In six months, she was twenty four dollars down on an investment of two hundred dollars.
She was not trying to learn the business of investment the hard way.
Then she checked her incoming messages and found one from Dokey:
YOU GET HOME OKAY?
I’M WORKING UNTIL AROUND MIDNIGHT,
THEN I’LL GET A COUPLEHOURS SLEEP.
CAN I PICK YOU UP IN THE MORNING?
SAY AROUNDFOUR A.M.?
Otsuka keyed in the automatic dialer, selected the number for Dokey’s home computer, and typed in the response:
YES. YES.
She felt like Molly, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, starting with “yes,” and ending with “yes,” but avoiding the forty five substantial pages in between.
But then, she had a new hobby in Maynard Dokey, and she would learn the new pages, one by one.
Thomas and Brande stopped for a drink at a neighborhood bar they had come to like. She had wine, and he had a Black Label with a whisper of water.
She didn’t want to rush him, but she was eager to get him home.
“Is something bothering you, Rae?”
“Bothering me? No. Why?”
“You seem fidgety.”
“I’m always fidgety,” she said.
He shook his head, like he always did when she mystified him. His eyes were dark, drawing her in. His smile was a minor lift of one corner of his mouth. She could imagine him at ten years of age, smiling that way for Bridgette, probably after he had broken a prize vase.
He finally finished his drink, left some bills on the table, and they slid out of the booth. Outside, the air was balmy, and they walked down the quiet street to her Grand Am. He opened the door for her, and then took the driver’s side.