“Yeah!” She gave him a strange look. “But you got the stability in less than an hour. It would have taken me days to set up the simulations.”
“It’s easy with the right tools.”
She looked disbelieving.
“Hey, I’m near failing at bonehead math. Look Dr. Xu, if you learn to search and use the right packages, you could do all this.” He was beginning to sound like Chumlig. And this fits with the affiliance! “I-I could show you. There are all sorts of joint projects we could do!” Maybe she would always be one of those deep resource people, but if she found her place, that would be more than he could ever be.
He wasn’t sure if Dr. Xu really understood what he was talking about. But she was smiling. “Okay.”
MIKE was late walking home, but that was okay. Ralston Blount had signed onto the affiliance. He was working with Doris Nguyen on her project. Xiaowen Xu had also signed on. She was living at Rainbow’s End rest home, but she had plenty of money. She could buy the best beginner’s wearable that Epiphany made.
Big Lizard would be pleased, and maybe some money would come Mike’s way.
And maybe that didn’t matter so much. He suddenly realized he was whistling as he walked. What did matter… was a wonderful surprise. He had coordinated something today. He had been the person who helped other people. It was nothing like being a real top agent-but it was something.
The Radner twins were almost home, but they showed up to chat.
“You’ve been scarce, Mike.” They were both grinning. “Hey, we got an A from Williams!”
“For the Vancouver project?”
“Yup. He didn’t even check where we got it,” said Jerry.
“He didn’t even ask us to explain it. That would have been a problem!” said Fred.
They walked a bit in companionable silence.
“The hole we put in the Pyramid Hill fence is already repaired.”
“No surprise. I don’t think we should try that again anytime soon.”
“Yeah,” Fred said emphatically. His image wavered. The slime was still messing his clothes.
Jerry continued, “And we collected some interesting gossip about Chumlig.” The students maintained their own files on faculty. Mostly it was good for laughs. Sometimes it had more practical uses.
“What’s that?”
“Okay, this is from Ron Williams. He says he got it firsthand, no possibility of Friends of Privacy lies.” That’s how most FOP lies were prefaced, but Mike just nodded.
“Ms. Chumlig was never fired from Hoover High. She’s moonlighting there. Maybe other places, too.”
“Oh. Do the school boards know?” Ms. Chumlig was such a straight arrow, it was hard to imagine she was cheating.
“We don’t know. Yet. We can’t figure why Hoover would let this happen. You know those IBM Fellows they were bragging about? All three were in Chumlig’s classes! But she kinda drifted out of sight when the publicity hit. Our theory is there’s some scandal that keeps her from taking credit… Mike?”
Mike had stopped in the middle of the path. He shrugged up his record of this morning, and matched Big Lizard’s English usage with Chumlig’s.
He looked back at the twins. “Sorry. You… surprised me.”
“It surprised us, too. Anyway, we figure this could be useful if Jerry and I have serious grade problems in her class.”
“Yeah, I guess it could,” said Mike, but he wasn’t really paying attention anymore. It suddenly occurred to him that there could be something beyond top agents. There could be people who helped others on a time scale of years. Something called teachers.