“Mine,” Michelle said.
Eric nodded. “Taki, do you want to ride with us or go with your uncle and Michelle?”
“Oh, I’ll stick with Kev.”
“Of course he does,” Ohira said. “What boy wants to listen to us talking about money and business?”
They began moving. “Do I need directions?” Michelle asked Heber as he held open one of the plate glass doors leading out of the building.
“Just follow me. Mind you don’t fall down a hole in our local lunarscape outside the gate.”
The road along from Neurodyne was being torn up by backhoes cutting trenches; bulldozers were leveling the adjacent lot.
“We saw it on the way in,” Michelle said. “What’s happening?”
“Oh, they’re expanding the office park—they call it a ‘corporate campus.’ We were one of the first companies here. It’s to be expected, I suppose.”
“What’s the place next door going to be?” Kevin asked.
“Some kind of management training facility, I think.” Eric waved a hand vaguely as they crossed the parking area. “That’s another of the advantages of microengineering for you. With us, a factory floor is the size of a regular office. Nobody who’s into any conventional kind of manufacturing would get a lease anywhere near this place.”
“I still can’t get over how nice it is to have my own legs back again,” Michelle said.
With Eric’s maroon Jaguar leading, they followed Interstate 5 west for a little over fifteen miles, exiting north when they had passed Olympia. The road became single track, and soon they were descending across thickly wooded slopes toward water, with occasional homes tucked among firs and pines. Kevin could see Michelle’s white Buick in the passenger-side wing mirror, following them about a hundred yards back.
Cars were another subject of extreme significance for him right now. He was at the age where his visions of the unbounded freedoms that would come with a driver’s license had grown to be matched only by the unendurability of having to wait another year to get one. Most unfair was the thought that he could probably handle a car as well as most adults that he knew—at least, he would if he could only get traffic experience.
Eric had been taking him out to unused lots and other deserted places since Kevin was ten. It was part of the way in which Eric had tried to compensate and keep life as full as possible after Kevin’s mother died. The way he allowed Kevin and Taki to come into Neurodyne and use the equipment there was another instance. All the same, Kevin was conscious of an increasing distance between them since the times when they had built model airplanes together and gone out to the flats to fly them, or set up a telescope out on the deck at the house on a frosty night to marvel at Saturn’s rings or the color bands of Jupiter. He told himself that with Eric running his own company now, and everything else that was going on, that was only to be expected. And Kevin himself was getting older. Perhaps he was being allowed to learn that the world was not his alone; that others lived in it too and needed to do things for their own reasons. If so, it seemed a good thing to be made aware of.
“Did you two get that driver routine sorted out—the one that was hanging up?” Eric asked as he drove.
“Yes, finally,” Taki answered from the back. “There were a couple of glitches.”
Kevin added, “We cleaned it up so it’ll run faster, too.
Maybe we can check it out later, after Michelle leaves.”
“What’s all this about we cleaned it up so that it would run faster?” Taki challenged. “I was the one who spotted it. You were too busy watching Michelle get out of the car.”
“Ah, the truth tumbles out,” Eric murmured, grinning.
“I just said she was something different to be showing up with Ohira,” Kevin insisted defensively. “Besides, you only shortened the loop. Who was it who saw that we could replace the whole thing with a conditional sub?”
“And then attached the wrong interrupt. . . .”
“Only because you didn’t update the device table.”