Chapter 2
"Jacob, Jacob, JacJac," said her aunt Joyce in a sadly amused tone, when Samantha came to her with the story. "The greatest diplomatist since Attila the Hun. I wonder if he even realized he was being hurtful." She shook her head.
"But he does have a point, you know." Joyce saw the flash in Samantha's eyes, and went on quickly. "Nobody says you had to compromise. Your father least of all. I know that two years ago, when a colleague made a lecherous remark about you, he invited him to "step out and repeat it" and beat him black and blue."
"Oh, is that what it was about?" Samantha remembered that episode well – except that she had never been told the cause. She had been annoyed at the time, thinking her father was just letting his temper get him into hot water for no reason. "I had no idea."
"I suppose he didn't want to hurt you – to know that people spoke of you in those terms. He is very, very protective of you, Sam.
"But your reaction was just... Look, you have to make up your mind to the fact that you're beautiful. It doesn't matter how short you cut your hair and how often you wear BDUs and boots, men WILL look at you. And you have to make up your mind that some men are going to be lechers. You should live with it, because you will have to. Just think of it as one of the stupid facts of life, like bug bites or unpaid bills."
Samantha snarled inwardly. Unfortunately, Aunt Joyce was another inheritor of the family curse of blonde beauty, and she must have known what she was talking about.
"All right, so the man is a creep. He is also a four-star general. And in his creepy little mind, he is doing nothing wrong – just doing what comes natural with a pretty woman. In his creepy little mind, it's you who've done the ugly unexpected thing, making him look bad in front of his own colleagues. Your father was right.
"And, you know, there are ways of dealing with these people. That's why there aren't rows and beatings and murders every time a lecher puts out. There isn't a waitress or airline stewardess alive who couldn't have managed it better than you did."
"Maybe I should have taken more holiday jobs," said Samantha with a bitter smile.
…...
That had been the beginning of a dreadful year. First – as her father had foretold – her career had been demolished. For no reason that made any sense, she had been shifted from the training program for space and high altitude pilots, commonly known as the Astronauts' Nursery, to Deep Space Telemetry, a unit known across the Air Force as Losers' Lane or End Of The Line. Set up to accommodate a couple of senators who joined a nutty belief in space aliens with considerable ability to manage pork, it was pretty much a holding pen for officers with no further career prospects. The first thing she found out about it was that it was supposed to look for space aliens and to consider strategies for first and subsequent contacts. The second was that somebody with sarcasm had seen fit to locate it in Bird City, North Dakota – a place that seemed designed to define the expression "middle of nowhere". The third was that, in a tiny detached unit with less than three dozen members, there were no less than five lieutenants-colonel on strength. A couple only showed up often enough not to be dismissed for good. LTC Budyenny hung around with the more shiftless of the privates and NCOs, telling and listening to dirty jokes and being generally great company, and doing less work than an office paperclip. LTC Evans Durward was aide to the CO, doing work that a senior NCO would be doing in most similar-sized units.
And then there was LTC O'Neill, who, according to what story she heard, had been sent here for losing his nerve as a Special Operations operative after his son had died in a gun accident, or for mouthing off at one general too many. She desperately clung to a defensive rudeness towards him; for she had fallen for him virtually from day one. And a relationship within one's chain of command, even if she had wanted one, was apt to be a career-ending no-no if discovered. Given the reason she was here, Samantha found this a totally hypocritical rule, but it was there, and she really did not want to destroy what was left of her career. No, not even for an older man with a rock jaw, kind eyes, and killer abs.
And then she went home on holiday – and she and Buffy had a row.
Well, not exactly a row. Buffy started going on about things that just turned Sam off, and going on without even any sense that her sister would not find them interesting. In a sense, it was the same enthusiastic personality as before, but turned to what were, to Sam, emphatically the wrong things. Sam suddenly broke out "Look, I don't really want to know about your shoes, and I don't give a damn what other girls at school wear." One second later, she would have given anything to call that back – but it had gone. She saw Buffy's face fall into an unhappy pout, almost to the point of tears, and then suddenly compose itself into an attempt at ladylike frost. Buffy's still childish oval made her attempt at ice queendom rather absurd; but perhaps it would have been better than tears. Perhaps. But Buffy said something about these things being below Samantha, and it was obvious she was hurt and angry.
The visit did not recover from this blow, and when, the next day, Sam left to go back to work, she did so, for the first time ever, not with regret but with relief.
...
Sam could never have realized that Buffy's growing desire to be normal and popular was the instinctive reaction to something that was stirring in her being as she grew, something that she unconsciously resisted and denied.
...
When she came home, she found a letter from Professor Kallender, her main professor at UC-Boulder, asking whether she had given up on her PhD. That startled her, and she realized that, in her misery, she had not been in touch in weeks. She wrote back, giving a brief account of the changes in her career, and explaining that she would love to continue if conditions allowed it. These were the early days of the World Wide Web, and a rather dubious Professor Kallender proposed that they should use the new technology to keep in touch.
It began by being messy and slow, but once again Samantha found herself acquiring useful new skills without realizing it.
...
As for her new post, it had at least one advantage. Due to its mission to look for life outside Earth, it had access to all the space-borne telescopes that had begun to be launched into orbit after the success of Hubble. Samantha Carter had not started as an observation specialist, preferring theory and computation, but having to deal with observational data as part of her ordinary work drew her attention to them. One year after receiving her assignment, while she was working on her thesis with Professor Kallender, she suddenly had a bright little idea about the spectrometry of a particular star, and wrote a paper about it. It was accepted.
But three days before she was informed of that, her father told her that he was dying.
