The former professor picked up a half-filled two-liter bottle of soda, shook it vigorously, opened up the cap to listen for a hiss, squeezed the sides in, shook it again, then took a swig. “I need to find out if we can drop a probe.”
He went through the ritual a second time, took another swig and then got up and headed out of the room.
“Julia,” Miriam said, waving to Mimi. “This is Mimi Jones.”
“And what is a young lady like you doing on a spaceship like this?” Julia said, her eyes narrowing. “Does your mother know where you are?”
“My mother is dead, Miss Julia,” Mimi replied politely. “But my Aunt Vera knows that I’m doing something with the government. And I’m here ’cause Tuffy says I’m supposed to be here,” she continued, lifting the arachnoid off her lap.
“What is that?” Julia asked, backing up.
“That’s Tuffy!” Miriam said, chortling. “You never saw Tuffy on the news?”
“You’re that girl survived the bomb,” Julia said, much more gently. She sat down at the table and nodded. “I suppose there might be a reason you’re here. But the Lord sure do work in mysterious ways.”
“That he does, Miss Julia,” Mimi replied. “Dr. Weaver thinks that Tuffy might just be an angel. Even though he doesn’t look like one.”
“Not sure just what an angel would look like,” Robertson said, considering the arachnoid carefully. “But I wouldn’t say he’d be a big ole terancheler.”
“I don’t see why not,” Miriam argued. “If Mimi went around with some glowing guy with wings on her shoulder it would cause more problems than something that looks like a stuffed toy.”
“Good point,” Julia admitted.
“What do you do, Miss Julia?” Mimi asked.
“Biology,” Julia replied. “So till we get to a planet, if we find any rocky ones, I don’t have much of a job. You know what biology is, miss?”
“A science that studies living organisms,” Mimi recited. “I wrote a paper on punctuated evolution in the… second grade. I proposed that punctuated equilibrium only appears punctuated because of gaps in fossil data that are inherent in periods of rapid change.”
“Really?” Julia said, impressed. “I don’t suppose you’ve done any study since then?”
“Miss Julia,” Mimi said, carefully, “I think that at this point, if I went to a university, I could probably get a doctorate in about any hard science you’d care to mention. I will admit that part of that is with the help of Tuffy. But he tries to just make me think… better, harder. He doesn’t do it for me. You can feel free to quiz me on anything you’d like in regards to biology, geology, planetology, physics, astronomy or astrophysics.”
“Interesting,” Julia said. Her rather pronounced southern black accent had nearly disappeared. “What’s the definition of species?”
“Ask a dozen biologists and you get a dozen answers,” Mimi said. “According to Ernst Mayer, groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups. I still say it doesn’t explain tigers and lions, though.”
“Damn, girl,” Julia said, whistling. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen,” Mimi replied. “But Tuffy says I have an old soul.”
“Just one of those definitions I really like,” Julia said, grinning. “I loved to trot it out for juniors that thought they knew it all about biology then point out ‘species’ that don’t meet the definition. And I don’t know what to expect on other worlds, just want to get there is all.”
“And who is this young lady?” a man said from the hatchway. He was tall and broad, with a thick, neatly trimmed beard.
“Everette Beach, this is Mimi Jones,” Miriam said. “Mimi, Everette. Everette is the mission specialist commander. I think that makes him your boss.”
“Hello, Mr. Beach,” Mimi said, standing up and shaking the man’s hand.
“You’re Mimi,” Beach replied. “I was briefed on your presence, but only today. And this would be Tuffy. You are both welcome. I’ve actually heard of you from sources besides the news. I think you supplied Professor Johnson at Caltech with the answer to his string node dilemma.”
“Yes, we did,” Mimi said shyly.
“I have to ask…” Everette said, his brow furrowing.
“I can’t tell you if it was me or Tuffy,” Mimi interjected. “Not will not, can not. I’m not sure myself. There are times when I don’t know if I’m really really smart naturally or if it’s Tuffy. Simple as that.”
“Does that bother you?” Miriam asked gently.
“No, it really doesn’t,” Mimi said. “Tuffy has told me that we’re going to be together until I die and I think we’re gonna be together after. So it’s not like I’m going to lose my smarts like Algernon. And being smart lets me help people. And make lots of money.”
“You won’t make lots of money working for the government,” Julia said. “Oh, it pays well enough, but…”
“I’m not, actually, getting paid for this,” Mimi said. “And while I know I fall in the mission specialist category, even if I don’t have a specialty, I’m going to be staying close to Commander Weaver and Chief Miller.”
“Any particular reason?” Beach asked.
“ ’Cause Tuffy says they are the causality point,” Mimi replied. “And that’s about all I can get out of him. He’s shown me the math but string nodes is two plus two compared to that. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out.”
“Oh,” Beach said, glancing at the other two. Julia raised her eyebrows but Miriam just smiled.
“I think you’re going to fit right in here,” Miriam said, patting Mimi on the leg. “You know, I read your paper on Yang-Mills Theory. Did you take into account the Looking Glass bosons connection through a virtual dimension when you worked out the mass gap? I have a hard time understanding how the LGBs enable a quantum particle with positive mass to travel faster than the speed of light. I mean, haven’t we decided that the LGBs are not wormholes or even Higgs fields of the classical sense?”
“That’s right,” Mimi said, smiling slightly despite the leg pat. “Dr. Weaver’s original assessment that the gauge bosons created were simply the Higgs field gauge particles was…”
“Congratulations, Lieutenant Commander Weaver,” Commander White said, grinning. “You have successfully navigated us out of Norfolk Harbor.”
The sub had reached the two-hundred fathom line, the traditional dive point for the subs coming out of Norfolk. From there to England, more or less, there wasn’t anything in the way of the sub. Oh, if they dove deep enough they could hit the bottom, but it would be tough. SSBNs were designed to be quiet swimmers, not deep ones.
Unfortunately, the newly named Vorpal Blade wasn’t even particularly quiet. Various concessions had had to be made for the sub to be spaceworthy, the most important of which was removing every scrap of acoustic tile from the surface of the boat. Without the acoustic tile, which muffled internal noise, it “radiated” like a rock band.
What the Vorpal Blade was, though, was fast.
“Sound dive warning,” the captain said.
“All hands!” Commander White said over the enunciator. “Dive, Dive, Dive!”
“The board is straight,” the chief of boat said, indicating that all the various hatches were shut.