Rebecca finally "turtled up" and covered very well and let them hit her for a second or two. Once she got her breath she shoved, kicked, and punched Alisa into Jim, who was punching her in the headgear from behind and around Alisa with big slow looping hook punches. She ran to the other side of the room being chased and punched the whole way. This time she didn't stop running. She turned a long arc and threw a few kicks and punches and ran back the way she had come, fitness really becoming a factor now. The timer beeped.
"Stop!" I yelled.
She collapsed on the floor gasping for air.
Bob smiled as he looked around the room, "'Becca, die over there so we can start the next fight."
She crawled to the side of the colored-tape marked rings and sat with her back to the wall, gasping for air and sweating profusely.
"Don't sit still 'Becca! Keep breathing and keep moving. Get you a quick drink of water while you are at it." I told her.
Jim said something to her inaudible to me. She responded by kicking at his shin. Jim did a quick hopping two-step and decided he had better go get a drink of water and leave well enough alone.
A minute or so later it was Rebecca's time again. This time Bob and Keri (a one stripe brown belt that just wanted to fight another round) fought her. It looked pretty much the same except, Bob is much taller and can hold his ax kick up over his head and drop it at the most inopportune times. 'Becca found this out, the hard way. Defending Keri's attack of multiple kicks, she's kind of limber, 'Becca dropped her guard a little too much for Bob. He drove her to her knees with an ax kick on top of her head. Everyone gasped and paused for a split second to see if Rebecca was okay. She responded from her knees by reverse punching Bob just above the belt as hard as she could.
I think she was a bit mad. As she scrambled to her feet, Keri decided to give it to her with both barrels. Roundhouse kick to the midsection, hookkick to the head, another roundhouse to the head, she did all this balancing on her right leg and never sat her left foot down. Keri then followed up with a jab, cross, and a ridgehand. 'Becca took all this in stride and never stopped moving. With an amazing display of balance she bobbed and weaved into a spinning side kick and followed with an outer block to stop the ridgehand. By this time Bob had given her enough of a break and poured it on even harder. He raised his ax kick again. This time 'Becca was having none of it.
She ducked under his leg to avoid the kick and slipped to his back side and reverse punched Bob in the ribs following it with a left hook to the solar plexus and one to the side of the headgear. Of course, Bob wasn't there for the second punch and Keri had slipped to the side of Rebecca. Rebecca must have realized this and threw a real ugly half side kick half front kick. At the same time Bob was throwing a backfist to her headgear, Keri caught Rebecca's foot and pushed her backwards (our rules are that you are allowed to grab on blocks for one second or so). Rebecca was now falling backward with a backfist moving toward her head. Using the momentum of her fall she did a backwards handspring as Bob's backfist passed right through the air where her head had been a fraction of a second before. I'm sure she could see his fist go by her face. 'Becca rolled through the handspring and onto her feet into a traditional back stance with a knife hand outer block (I think by accident, but it looked amazingly cool). She side kicked Bob to hold him off as the timer beeped.
"Stop!" I yelled.
Every person present looked on in awe. I said, "Hell Yes! That was awesome." Jim applauded and whistled. Rebecca fell to the floor gasping for air, her mouthpiece falling to the floor as she threw her headgear off.
"That was impressive! You rock!" Alisa cheered and clapped.
I had never seen anything like that outside of a movie. I seriously doubted that I ever would again. I guess that I should mention that Rebecca did her undergraduate schooling on a cheerleading and gymnastics scholarship at Auburn University. She still tumbles every now and then at the karate studio, just to show off I think. Keri helped drag a gasping 'Becca to the side of the rings and Bob organized another fight. After about three more rounds it was all over. Everyone had passed.
An hour later we were sitting around a table at one of our favorite sports bars just off of University Drive. We were on our second pitcher of beer, waiting for our food. Bob and I talked about when I would be back in class and if I thought I could compete next month. I wasn't quite sure about either, so I lied about both. Eventually the conversation turned to the various topics that are covered after three pitchers of beer.
"Who sang that song?"
"Just how tall is the Empire State Building and what would happen if you dropped a penny off of it?" I actually make my freshman physics students work that one out every semester.
"Don't be silly," I say to them. "A raindrop weighs about the same as a penny and they fall from as much as forty thousand feet high during thunderstorms. You ever see a raindrop crack the sidewalk?" Terminal velocity is tough for some people to grasp.
And so the conversations continued. "If you were driving along at the speed of light and you turned your headlights on, what would you see?"
"Could Jackie Chan whup Bruce Lee?"
"Which Heinlein book was the best?"
"Was Kirk, Picard, Sisco, Janeway, or Archer the coolest -captain?" I always voted for "Q" myself, but didn't he always make himself an admiral?
"Who was the best guitarist of all times?" No contest there. Hendrix, period, exclamation point.
"Second best?" Stevie Ray Vaughn. Of course you can't discount Robert Johnson, George Thorogood, Jimmy Paige, Joe Perry, Slash, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Ron Wood, Kirk Hammett, and that new kid, what's his name, and of course our local great, Microwave Dave. But there is an order of magnitude problem between second and third best that I'm sure the other guitarists would point out.
A pitcher later and Tabitha came through the door. Rebecca waved at her and she joined us.
"Did you call her or something?" I asked.
"None of your business," she replied.
'Becca introduced her while I tried to figure out just how I was supposed to react. The group accepted her willingly and didn't quiz her too hard about being an astronaut. Alisa asked her a question that I never really thought about.
"Did you have to take some sort of self-defense stuff in the Air Force?"
"We had some training, yes. I'm sure it wasn't as involved as what I hear all of you do."
I responded to that, "Well, none of us have ever flown a Space Shuttle, either." She seemed to like that remark. I seemed to recall having used it the first time I met her. Maybe I just thought I did. That day is still pretty fuzzy.
Our food finally got to the table. Well, mine almost did. Some crazy drunk guy in the middle of a story made a big hand gesture and knocked my plate right out of our waitress's hand. I laughed at first, until I realized it was my food. It all went downhill from there.
I slept in a little Monday morning and got to the lab about eleven. Tabitha was coming by after her Space Camp thing later that evening to see our experiments. I spent some time explaining it to her, but without seeing it, it's hard to explain. Rebecca and Jim were already in the warp bubble experiment lab setting it up. We had never figured out why the electrons had completely disappeared on us, although, the experiment is actually kind of simple. There's a one-and-a-half-meter-long glass tube with an electron gun attached at one end. The tube has huge electromagnets situated along it to steer, accelerate, and focus the electrons. The other end of the tube is a larger vacuum chamber in the shape of a cube about a half meter on a side. In the middle of the chamber is a misshapen toroidial superconductor with coils around the upper and lower half—the device looked kind of like a squished and twisted donut with thousands of wires wrapped around it in random looking fashion. A few centimeters away is a second misshapen toroidial superconductor with similar coils around it. A high current is set up moving counterclockwise in the first toroid and clockwise in the other and a rather complex alternating current function is set up in the coils. It's in the region between the two toroids that the spacetime metric should change to allow for the warp bubble—if the field strength is large enough, and if the theory is correct, that is. We based the field shapes on approximations to the Einstein equations and numerical solutions, but there still hasn't been any real closed solution discovered. If I could only have that dream again, maybe I'd figure it out.