The Cardinal of the Kremlin - Tom Clancy [40]
"Don't you ever stop?" Candi asked.
"Well, what are we supposed to do in between?" He smiled up from the keyboard.
The housing development was called Mountain View. It wasn't a rousing bit of originality. In that part of the country the only way not to see mountains was to close your eyes. Gregory had his own personal computer-a very powerful Hewlett-Packard provided by the Project-and occasionally wrote some of his "code" there. He had to be careful about the security classification of his work, of course, though he often joked that he himself wasn't cleared for what he was doing. That was not an unknown situation inside government.
Dr. Candace Long was taller than her fiance' at nearly five-ten, willowy, with short, dark hair. Her teeth were a little crooked because she'd never wanted to suffer through braces, and her glasses were even thicker than Alan's.
She was thin because like many academics she was so enthralled with her work that she often forgot to eat. They'd first met at a seminar for doctoral candidates at Columbia University. She was an expert in optical physics, specifically in adaptive-optics mirrors, a field she'd selected to complement her life-long hobby, astronomy. Living in the New Mexico highlands, she was able to do her own observations on a $5,000 Meade telescope, and, on occasion, to use the instruments at the Project to probe the heavens-because, she pointed out, it was the only effective way to calibrate them. She had little real interest in Alan's obsession with ballistic-missile defense, but she was certain that the instruments they were developing had all kinds of "real" applications in her field of interest.
Neither of them was wearing very much at the moment.
Both young people cheerfully characterized themselves as nerds, and as is often the case, they had awakened feelings in one another-feelings that their more attractive college fellows would have not thought possible. "What are you doing?" she asked. "It's the misses we had. I think the problem's in the mirror-control code."
"Oh?" It was her mirror. "You're sure it's software?"
"Yeah." Alan nodded. "I have the readouts from the Flying Cloud at the office. It was focusing just fine, but it was focusing on the wrong place."
"How long to find it?"
"Couple of weeks." He frowned at the screen, then shut it down. "The hell with it. If the General finds out that I'm doing this, he might never let me back in the door."
"I keep telling you." She wrapped her hands around the back of his neck. He leaned back, resting his head between her breasts. They were rather nice ones, he thought. For Alan Gregory it had been a remarkable discovery, how nice girls were. He'd dated occasionally in high school, but for the most part his life at West Point, then at Stony Brook, had been a monastic existence, devoted to studies and models and laboratories. When he'd met Candi, his initial interest had been in her ideas for configuring mirrors, but over coffee at the Student Union, he'd noticed in a rather clinical way that she was, well, attractive-in addition to being pretty swift with optical physics. The fact that the things they frequently discussed in bed could be understood by less than one percent of the country's population was irrelevant. They found it as interesting as the things that they did in bed-or almost so. There was a lot of experimentation to do there, too, and like good scientists, they'd purchased textbooks-that's how they thought of them-to explore all the possibilities. Like any new field of study, they found it exciting.
Gregory reached up to grasp Dr. Long's head, and pulled her face down to his.
"I don't feel like working anymore for a while."
"Isn't it nice to have a day off?"
"Maybe I can arrange one for next week "
Boris Filipovich Morozov got off the bus an hour after sunset. He and fourteen other young engineers and technicians recently assigned to Bright Star-though he didn't even know the project name yet-had been met at the Dushanbe airport