“Six,” Jodi said absently. Mamma blinked and stared at her, then bent over the board with renewed concern. I repressed a snort of laughter, as I could see the little twitch at the corner of Jodi’s mouth that she always got when she was having someone on.
As that game was probably going to last a while, I went and joined Evangeline and Jonah at the entertainment center for a bit, taking turns beating the heck out of each other in the latest Virtual Fighter game. Just as Evangeline kicked me out of the ring, I heard Mamma’s clear voice: “Well, now, I know when I’m beaten,” followed by the clicking sound of her king being tipped over.
“Well, if that don’t beat all,” Marlon muttered from his armchair.
Evangeline finally spoke. She generally was even quieter than Father. Turning to me, she said, “You keep her.”
“Oh, believe me, I mean to.”
3. Night Movements
“Usually I’m up for a nosh before bed, but your mamma stuffed me so much I think I’m like to roll down the hall.” Jodi stared at the three-decker BLT I was eating. “Clint, you keep eating like that and you’ll look like Elvis.”
“Thank yuh. Thankyuhverramuch,” I said, with the proper accent. “I’ve been eatin’ like this all my life. I exercise a lot, you know. And I know we’ll be doing a lot of luggin’ equipment around tomorrow, right?”
“Right. This is actually a good place to test. The New Madrid zone runs right through part of this county.”
Jodi’s current project was based on acoustic engineering research funded partly by NYU and partly by some interested commercial firms with some government backing. My main skills lay outside of that—I was a dual major, geology and compsci—but they intersected perfectly with the intent of the project, which was actually what had brought us together. It’d long been noted that some animals can apparently sense approaching earthquakes, and some work had been done showing that the Earth emitted varying levels of sound at different wavelengths ranging from infrasound—acoustic waves below about 20 cycles—and up to a bat-level ultrasound in the hundreds of thousands of cycles. Our team had modeled a number of possible interactions of the layers of soil, stone, and so on involved in fault systems, and it seemed to indicate that you should be able to detect both the main movement of an earthquake, and some of the precursors to it, through sound waves (rather than the related shockwaves recorded on seismographs). If the precursors could be detected, we’d have a possible way of actually predicting earthquakes. So if Jodi’s sensor packages seemed to be getting reasonable readings, she’d probably just leave a set of them operating here; it was, as she said, a good potential location, with the fault system responsible for the greatest quake in the history of the United States passing by this very area.
“I notice,” she continued, “we’ve got separate rooms.”
“You had better believe it.”
She grinned. “Hey, I’m not really kvetching; you wouldn’t be getting the same room as me if we were staying at my house either.” She looked out into the darkness. “Your family seems really nice, Clint. Okay, they are kinda weird, with this strange combination of hick and twenty-first-century gadget freaks, but they’re trying to make me feel welcome, and I can tell they love the hell out of you. So why didn’t you bring me here earlier?”
I looked down. Part of it of course was that problem, but it wasn’t the only thing. “I guess I should’ve had more faith in them. I wasn’t sure how they’d react to you. I mean, let’s be honest, you’re a—”
“JAP. Jewish-American Princess. I know, you can’t say it because I’d knock your block off, but I can say it, because it’s true. But I’m not like some of the others, and you know it. We work good together as a team, and did before we started dating. You do the modeling work and I do the tinkering and we and the rest do the brainstorming. So what’s to worry about?”
“Some of the family’s still pretty . . . fundamentalist. I didn’t know how they’d take a Jewish daughter-in-law.”