“Will do.”
Vanessa got into the car and closed the door, then lowered the window. “Oh, and if that woman calls again about wanting me at her sorority dinner or whatever it was, could you tell her it clashes with a prior commitment? I just don’t have time or very much inclination for these sewing-evening get-togethers.”
“I’ll take care of it. In fact, I’ve still got her number. I’ll call her. It’ll sound better that way.”
“Good.” Vanessa agreed with a quick nod. “I’ll probably be back sometime late on Sunday, then. If anything changes I’ll let you know.”
“Fine. Have a good time.” Harriet stood back while the Jaguar pulled away, then turned to walk back to the house.
She had never been able to make up her mind about Vanessa—never quite knew if she admired her for taking on the burdens of filling the gap in Eric’s and Kevin’s lives, or resented her for not bringing more warmth and involvement. But then, she thought, who was she to criticize a professional contending with expectations and responsibilities that somebody like Harriet had no personal experience of and could know next to nothing about? Maybe a person like Eric needed intellectual companionship in the home as much as some husbands needed someone to criticize TV shows with and tell politics to over breakfast—although for what her opinion was worth, Harriet didn’t see much evidence of intellectual companionship to a degree that she’d call stirring, in any case. Eric was always wrapped up in the lab, and Vanessa was always wrapped up in . . . well, Vanessa.
But that was their business. Harriet’s concern was more about Kevin. After her own two grew up and left home, she had missed the unique ingredient that having young people around, even with the mess, emotional penduluming, and perpetual impecuniousness kids bring to a home. So when she and Frank separated, she had answered an ad and moved in to manage the domestic scene when Kevin’s mother died, before Eric moved to Olympia. Although she had never known Patricia, she pictured her, from the things Patricia had left behind and the way Eric and Kevin sometimes talked, as someone who would have gotten involved and messy when Kevin and Taki painted their boat, and been more curious about where they were flying the plane from.
In fact, something like the lady lawyer in many ways, now that Harriet came to think of it. And she was a busy professional with responsibilities too, wasn’t she? It would brighten up the place a lot, Harriet reflected as she went back inside through the front door, if just a little bit of Michelle would somehow rub off on Vanessa.
Michelle was getting more used to the idea of a factory workshop small enough to sit on a tabletop. She stood with Eric in one of the production areas at the rear of the Neurodyne building, looking down through a magnifier into one of the glass-topped shoe boxes, where two fly-size mecs were working at a bench surrounded by tool racks and trays of parts. The technicians operating the mecs, helmeted and collared, were in coupler chairs nearby, talking intermittently to each other in the way that Michelle still found disconcerting. The object they were assembling was a scaled-down mec a tenth the size of themselves. Even through the magnifier, Michelle was unable to make out any detail. She found it almost unbearable to try and imagine the scale at which it was happening—the mental equivalent of eyestrain.
“A misconception that many people have is that making things small automatically means being very precise,” Eric commented. “In fact, it works the opposite way round. Suppose that your technology sets a limit on the tolerances that you can work to—a micrometer, say, which is forty millionths of an inch. Suppose that gives a snug fit between parts for a mechanism when it’s built, let’s say the size of a salt grain.” Michelle nodded that she followed. He went on, “Now, if you make your mechanism ten times smaller, the same tolerances would result in a relative precision that’s ten times sloppier. So it’s not just a question of making everything smaller. You have to achieve correspondingly higher precision as well.”