Jack wasn't just whistling "Dixie"—he was working flat out while he did it. "Dixie" was, he reflected, a song that could still get you in trouble, despite Lincoln's blessing, but sometimes he just felt so good he couldn't help it. He didn't know when he'd been happier. The times with Natsu were great, but that was a teenage thing. Adults had more to give each other. Certainly the best times with Carol weren't nearly as good, and the end of that relationship. . . . He shuddered.
He ran over the final specs for the drive housing. The MULE had even more kick than Rhea had predicted, and he needed to add some extra reinforcement without changing the center of thrust. He spun his chair away from his workstation and picked an envelope off of his desk. He sketched rapidly on the back with a pencil. The pencil-on-paper approach was archaic, but sometimes he needed something hands-on to think about a problem—besides, writing on napkins, envelopes and tablecloths was an engineering tradition.
He drew in some vectors and tagged them with ballpark magnitudes, then leaned back in his chair and looked at the drawing. Nothing came to mind immediately. He concentrated, and the Domino's Pizza delivery number popped into his head. It was a good thought, but not timely. Apparently whistling took too many brain cells—he stopped, tapping the pencil against his chin instead. Finally his mind wrapped around the problem, and he drew a countervector that felt right. A few minutes' checking on the workstation confirmed it, and Jack entered the changes as pending in the specification database. Three other engineers would check behind him, but he knew he had the fix right. He hadn't created a bad change; the builders down in Manteo wouldn't have to tear anything out to add the new bracing and the revision would only add a few days to the schedule.
He considered printing the revised blueprint, but decided against it. The gremlin was back in his printer; no telling what it would do to his layout. It had gotten more sophisticated once it lost the element of surprise, and had come up with a little cold suit from somewhere that protected it from his freezing spray.
Just to keep it on its toes, he keyed up a couple of pages of one of C. S. Lewis's essays on Christianity and sent it down the line. The resulting noise from inside the printer sounded like a chipmunk with indigestion and gas: his gremlin was not a happy little Hellspawn at all. The pages came out almost blank—apparently the monster had felt compelled to eat most of Lewis's thesis.
Jack looked at the time and decided that stray phone number that had bounced into his mind when he'd been trying to solve the reinforcement problem had been a sign. Like a motion to adjourn, pizza was always in order. Not Domino's, though. Something authentic. He saved his work and headed for the hall. Behind him, as he closed the door, his printer burped.