Hey, all! Sorry about the shortness of these last two entries, but they pretty much mark the end of . . . the short entries. ;) And I figured out where my lost reviews went! FFN stuck the reviews at the bottom of the page. :P Don't know why . . . So, thanks Marblez and Kazaa, I found them. :)
Marblez, have to agree with you, but I'll take Scott if you don't want him. ;P
Thanks toeveryone who has reviewed so far! I really appreciate the feedback, it gives me the inspiration to start editing the next 40,000 or so words of this story. :) Enjoy! Once again, sorry 'bout the shortness.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own, and do not claim to own, the rights to Thunderbirds. This piece is for entertainment purposes only, and is not meant to make profit. Please don't sue, I'm in college and have no money.
A Dream Realized
April 2013
Six months after he had been issued the project, ten minutes from the exact deadline date to be precise, James Wilson returned to Jeff Tracy's office with a large metal box. He carried the object protectively in his arms, and stumbled the entire way down the management hallway much to the amusement of the senior staff.
Jeff was waiting at the door of his headquarters, holding the wooden oak piece open so that James could stumble in and slam the container down on the mahogany desk.
Brushing his hands off in a clumsy manner, James turned and grinned sheepishly at his employer. "S-s-s-s-s-sorry about the mess, sir. It's been sitting in my office for months n-n-n-n-n-now."
"That's quite all right," Jeff assured the stuttering engineer, taking the man's arm and guiding him over to a plush chair beside the desk. "Now, sit, and show me what you have."
James nodded, and silently keyed in a password into the keyboard input on the box. The lid opened with a hiss as the inside once again regained room pressure.
"Ah." Jeff's eyes lit up as James withdrew several large booklets. Each one was colour coded, and was labelled simply as either one, two, three, four, or five. There was no other identification on any of the packages at all.
"I think we can manage with f-f-f-f-five in all," James began, his eyes immediately clouding with worry. "I hope that's all right . . ."
"It's fine," Jeff interrupted, trying to keep the man calm in order to stay his stutter a bit. "Whatever you think works will work."
During the six-month period of the project, Jeff had spent a fair amount of time having coffee with James in an attempt to get to know him better. He had quickly discovered that his engineer was a very gifted individual - as long as he could manage to keep his cool and finish his sentences. Whenever he felt nervous or threatened James had a habit of degrading into a horrible repetitive drone.
"No expectations," Jeff said humorously, the phrase that had become James' mantra while he had worked on the project. "Remember?"
James met Jeff eye to eye, then slowly nodded. "Of course."
"So." The older man folded his hands in front of him and settled in for what he knew would be a very long time. "Proceed."
Five hours later found Jeff Tracy standing in awe, his eyes locked on a set of diagrams that he had tacked to the message board in his office. Each page was scrawled with symbols and graphs, but his attention was on the carefully crafted picture in the centre of each page.
"Five ships," he muttered under his breath, excitement building in him with every word. "Five wonderful beautiful ships."
And they were wonderful, just as he had expected them to be.
James had been brief with his overall summary, simply stating that he had come up with a few answers to Jeff's proposed problem. He had then taken several hours out to go into each component in detail, outlining its purpose and its general functionality.
Each ship fulfilled a vital part of the whole, bringing its own unique design to bear against an infinite range of missions. It had all seemed surreal, and through the entire talk Jeff had trouble keeping his mind from daydreaming up obscure situations for the virtual ships to resolve.
But when at the end of the session James had folded back the folders' cover to reveal a simple coloured sketch of each craft, Jeff truly had become excited; the ships were real, not a figment of his imagination any longer. Though they were different from what he had always pictured them to be, he knew that - being crafted from James Wilson's mind - they would work.
And they would work brilliantly.
"Mission is a go," Jeff whispered, his mind turning back to the days that he had spent as a NASA astronaut. "We are good to go."
His fingers absently traced the outline of the first ship, a sleek ramjet powered craft that James claimed would be able to travel anywhere in the world in under an hour. Someday this ship will fly, Jeff thought with a small smile.
Someday they all will.