Junior Hero
Part 9
I was eating lunch in the cafeteria when Kate slipped into the seat beside me.
"Hey, boyfriend," she murmured, putting her hand on mine.
I blinked; I hadn't actually considered her to be my girlfriend, though the idea didn't strike me as a bad one. This meant we could go on dates, and maybe make out a little, if she was okay with that.
I was okay with that.
My friends were gratifyingly surprised. One of them, a guy I'd known on and off for years just as Kludge, summed up the expressions around the table.
"Holy shit," he blurted. "You never said you were going out with Kate!"
"I wasn't," I admitted. "Not till just recently. But I've known her for years, haven't I, Kate?"
Kate gave me a beaming smile and a kiss on the cheek. "That's right. But I've come to realise what a real manly man he is, so ... hey, boyfriend material."
The pitch and spin she put on those words broke the table up with laughter, but I didn't mind, especially as she slipped her arm around my waist about then. "Talk to you in private?" she murmured in my ear, then kissed me on the cheek again.
"Hey, hey," protested Lars. "You two get a room. Keep doing that, I'll be in my bunk."
The reference cracked us all up again, except for Kate. She looked puzzled; I quickly explained about the Earth Aleph show.
"Ooh," she observed, sounding intrigued. "I think I'd like to watch that."
"I got the DVDs at home," I boasted.
"Pirate DVDs, you horrible criminal pirate, you," Kludge accused me.
"I got them from you," I shot back.
Everyone laughed again, and we settled down to discussing Earth Aleph shows in general. Kate joined in where she could, although she hadn't seen as many as the rest of us had.
Later, about fifteen minutes before class was about to start, we made our excuses and got away to a quiet corridor.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
She pulled out the clutch purse and opened it. The KD-1 was showing a single blinking orange light.
"Ah," I noted. Taking the unit, I levered it partly out of its holder, and pressed a hidden button for a diagnostic. Text ran over the tiny screen, and I nodded. "Yeah, thought so. The quantum coils are starting to drift out of alignment. Nothing serious yet, but this indicates a crapload of use. You did the right thing, bringing it back." I looked at her. "What've you been doing with it?"
"Leaving my books at home," she grinned, "and popping home to grab them between classes. So much handier than carrying them, or leaving them in my locker." She indicated the KD-1. "Is it serious?"
I shook my head. "Nah. I can realign them now, tighten the mounts a bit. But you really shouldn't use it for such trivial purposes. This isn't a toy, you know."
"I know," she told me, such remorse in her voice that I forgave her almost immediately. "I'm sorry. I'll be more careful in future."
I smiled at her, pulled my pocket toolkit out, and gradually adjusted the mounts. Under the bright, steady light of the corridor fluorescents, it was relatively easy. After the third adjustment, the orange light winked out. I tightened the mountings a little, then snapped it back into place. "There you go," I told her, handing it back. "All yours."
She carefully stowed it in her bag, then grabbed me and gave me a gentle peck - on the lips, this time. "Thank you," she whispered in my ear.
Stunned, I watched her sashay off down the corridor.
Wow, I thought. I need to fix that more often.
After school, I got to fix D-1. Under Dad's watchful eye, I took it apart on the garage workbench. He was curious about how it worked, and I did my best to explain matters, but my incomplete knowledge of physics didn't help.
"But this doesn't make sense," he protested for the third time. "There's no way a wormhole could be held open long enough, or large enough, for a human-sized body to pass through, without a sizeable amount of exotic matter, or enough power to recharge a galaxy's worth of stars."
"And yet, it works," I pointed out.
"I have yet actually to see this," he retorted.
I grinned. Taking a break from checking over the components of D-1, I set down D-3 at the far end of the garage, and used D-4 to set coordinates. Standing clear of D-3 and the coordinates in question, I pointed at the unit. "Step on it," I invited him.
"I'm not so sure ..." he hedged.
"Okay, then, I will," I told him. Lifting my foot, I brought it firmly down on D-3. An instant later, I was across the garage, grinning at Dad as my vision cleared.
He looked at me, then at D-3, then back at me. Then he moved purposefully toward D-3. I stepped aside hastily - didn't Dad know anything about teleport safety? - and then he appeared beside me, blinking behind his glasses as the jump-dazzle faded.
"Okay," he observed. "I'm convinced ... for now. But I still say it makes no sense."
"What's to make sense?" I replied. "It's Tinker tech. Everyone knows Tinker tech is bullshit."
"So I am beginning to surmise," he sighed.
Given that the other QD unit had perished explosively along with D-5, I pulled the one I did have out of D-3 and set it aside. "That'll go for spare parts," I told Dad.
"Why is that?" he asked. "Can't you just build another one?"
I shook my head. "If you don't build them both at the same time, you can't make it work. Certain components need to undergo quantum entanglement at the subatomic level."
"Ah," he replied. "I think I almost understood that. How do you -?"
I shrugged. "I just do it. It works. I have no idea how or why."
Dad grimaced. "More Tinker tech bullshit physics?"
"You got it."
He watched carefully as I painstakingly reassembled D-1. Every component had been checked over, every connection tightened. I built in extra mounts so that it would be a lot harder to knock the Q-coils out of alignment; this seemed to be cropping up as a single point of failure in these devices.
The batteries had been receiving charge from a wall plug while I went over D-1 with a fine tooth comb; I snapped them back into place, then reattached the cover plate. Pressing the Memory and Return buttons together triggered a self-test. It came up all systems green.
"Excellent," I told Dad. "Good to go."
He shook his head. "If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it. You have trouble grasping anything but the most basic tenets of physics, but you obviously designed and built a hand-held teleport device. Two devices, counting that other one."
Three, I corrected in my mind, but I didn't think Dad would be happy about Kate having one too.
"It's my Tinker specialty," I explained. "Every Tinker gets something he can do better than anyone else. I do teleporting devices."
He watched as I picked up D-3, turned it off, then turned it over and opened the panel. Carefully, I began taking it apart and checking over the components.
"I wish I could take your devices into class, and demonstrate wormhole tunnelling with them," he mused.
"Better not," I advised him. "You'd give the faculty a collective aneurysm. Also, this stuff isn't PRT-approved yet. Use in public, on potentially non-consenting subjects, is a strict no-no. Armsmaster told me that."
"Makes sense." He watched as I pulled out the Q-coils and examined them closely. "I think I know a little bit more about how you feel, you know."
I stopped what I was doing and glanced over my shoulder. "What about, Dad?"
"When I'm trying to explain something to you, and you get that glazed look, even though you're evidently trying to follow on ... now I know how that feels. There you are, handling something I have absolutely no idea of the function thereof, or even the principles behind it, and you're not only fully aware of them, but you're able to make adjustments without consulting half a dozen manuals about it."
I snorted. "If there's gonna be manuals about this, I've got to write them up. Which reminds me; I'm going to need to get started on that, after I finish making sure that this one isn't about to fall apart on me."
He nodded. "A good idea. But I have to thank you, for the lesson in humility. Sometimes we need to learn that we don't know everything about a particular subject, or even most of it."
I looked up, startled. "I - I didn't mean to do that!"
His smile was gentle. "I know you didn't, son. But it happened anyway. And I'm grateful for it. For the insight. I suspect I may be a little more tolerant with the slower members of my class from now on." He paused, and put a hand on my shoulder for a moment. "And I won't be setting you any more physics problems. I think you know all you need to know on the subject."
He left then, as I continued to work on D-3. My thoughts were a whirl; my hands did the work more or less automatically, which was a good thing.
Wow, I thought. Wow. Did Dad actually say that?
As I finished the maintenance and reattached the cover plate, one thought was uppermost in my mind.
It didn't matter whether or not Hero was my biological father. Dad had just proven himself to be my Dad, once and for all.
And a pretty cool one, too.
End of Part 9