Today is a work day away from the computer. Enjoy the weather, whatever it is, wherever you are!
Give a treehugger a nail, he’ll spike a tree. Give him a gun and a vest and he’ll think he’s SWAT!: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/09/05/gold-miners-in-remote-alaska-town-reportedly-miffed-over-epa-raids/
How to maximise the local resources?
That question dogged us for many years as we planned our electromech construction crew that would “set up house” on Mars before we got there.
The mechs were fully capable of building adobe houses on Earth.
Water, though, was a key missing factor.
That encouraged us to find liquifying alternatives because we wanted to minimise the material we sent with the mechs.
We could have sent tonnes of sandbags and had the mechs build dry adobe huts under which our habitation modules would fit, providing extra protection in the Martian atmosphere, like parking an RV or caravan in a garage.
We challenged ourselves to create a solution that was both energy-efficient and easy to build.
Then, one day, after we had received the list of common chemical elements in Martian soil samples tested by the first wave of mech probes sent in the early 21st century to find suitable colonisation sites and entered it into our lab network, our semi-autonomous 3D printer on a mobile robot base started constructing an extruded Martian home.
Watching the 3D printbot create its own construction scaffolding was fun as it built a two-story structure that hinged and opened up to accept our current working version at the time of the habitation module that also served as transportation ship and landing craft.
Our Test and Evaluation department set to work calculating the wear-and-tear on the 3D printbot, estimating how many spare parts would be needed as the bot coordinated with the mechs to excavate Martian surface for the right ingredients, processing the Martian soil and then feeding the bot or its future equivalent the “right stuff” for habitation module protective shells.
To verify their theories, they drove the printbot and several prototype mechs out into the high desert, skipping a Martian landing simulation in order to focus on the printbot/mech adobe house construction techniques.
One of our lab personnel proposed commercialising the process, which later helped fund many of our side projects that we encouraged in case a crazy idea panned out and led to better procedures and/or understanding of settling Mars — whole desert communities were 3D-printed, followed by sustainable neighbourhoods in temperate zones around the world.
I must say it’s pretty darn difficult to erase the use of labels when I use labels as a means of label-erasing.
For instance, the press reports that the “Chinese” are launching a probe to the Moon by the end of the year.
Who is this person (or who are these persons) called the “Chinese”?
Is it people labeled because of their genetic likeness?
Their geographical space?
Their registered identity with a government?
Wouldn’t it be better to say that our species is launching another probe to the Moon?
Only by removing labels associated with local conditions on Earth can we as representatives of the planet say we are going to move life back out into the solar system and beyond.
There’s always a small chance that a stray bacterium will survive a trip to another celestial body and be the first Earth-based living thing to establish a colony, using us as its transport medium.
In this moment, I recall the story of the children in an orphanage of wartorn Yugoslavia, before war broke up provinces into countries.
One boy had lived in a crib for the first few years of his life and no one taught him a language.
He had his own logical babble that included a few words he had picked up from overworked caregivers.
He had a broken arm, they said, because he beat on the crib walls to get any kind of attention he could, unceasingly, never giving up hope that someone would pay attention to him, having broken his arm before and seeing it gave him temporary attention.
They also said he was unadoptable because he was so far along in his formative years he was unlikely to appear and act normal enough to appeal to a young couple looking to raise a child of their own.
By now, that child is an adult, if he is still alive.
Does he still have hope?
What does he do?
Did he ever learn a useful communication system such as a formal, common language with which he can express himself to others?
If not, what goes through his thoughts?
What is his physical/emotional support system?
Does he understand the concept of having a reason to live?
Keep anyone, any living thing, in a cage long enough and normality is such a skewed condition compared to the rest of the world that making comparisons is unuseful.
How am I like that boy? What walls hold me in but also provide a protection against my own naive actions in the bigger world? What do I perceive as normal that is far from normal to most of the rest of our species or to large subcultures or even to the local, smaller subcultures around me?
Morning meditation time is over. It’s after 8 a.m. Time to work on my business plan, such that it is.
“What story, Mom?”
“Well, Amish pirates are not known for subtlety. They’d rather kill you and turn you into fertiliser than negotiate with you.”
“But we’re not like that, are we?”
“Shadowgrass, let me tell you the quick version of what happened when one of your great-great-uncle’s cousin’s boy’s father’s cousin’s nephew’s cousin’s uncle’s father’s boy’s cousin’s uncle burned the house down. It started one day when the two of them were clearing a field…”
“How big was the wasp?”
“Bigger than the farmhouse.”
“Bigger than our Martian habitat module?!”
“Yes.”
“What did they do?”
Bai popped into their thought trail. “Hey, guys! I’m back!”
“Hi, Bai. How did it go?”
“Great. But boy, am I mentally wrung out. Alek advanced me to the next level of dancing. I’ll tell you something funny. He said, ‘You know the way a guy keeps pestering you to dance with him and you aren’t interested? He keeps asking and asking until you are giving him the look that says ‘Get away from me!'” I told him, yeah, I’ve made that look. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘stop giving me that look. Act like you want to dance with me. Flirt with me!’ Me! As if I don’t know how to flirt.”
Guin and Shadowgrass laughed with Bai.
“Hey, can you believe Stephane only drank water last week? And he’s accusing me of finally growing up!”
“When are you coming over to our colony?”
“I don’t know, Guin. Depends on my schedule. I’m booked for the next two marsweeks.
“Okay, I’ll see you when you get here.”
“Sure thing.”
Guin turned to Shadowgrass. “Where was I?”
“Jersey and the Frenchman were about to battle the great, big, gigantanormasaurus Wasp.”
“That’s right. But it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. You’ve got work to do.”
“Ah, Mom. I thought you said that you and Dad brought your electromechanical design wizardry to Mars so no one would have to work again.”
“We did. But then we found that we liked to share time with our creations. Nothing like getting your hands into the soil yourself.”
“Must be the Amish pirate in you, eh, Mom?”
“Well… I don’t know…”
“Stabbing giant worms with your sabre! Slashing through deadly grass blades!”
“That’s right, son. You can imagine what all we faced on Earth and why we wanted to start over here. Just make sure you get plenty of nightmares letting your imagination run too wild. And remember to tell us about them tomorrow.”
“Mom, you’re being facetious, aren’t you?”
“Am I?” She smiled at her little genius and scrunched her nose. “Maybe just a little bit.”
A spider web fluttered in the sticky, hot summer afternoon breeze, covering the entrance to a tan plastic storage shed, its doors ajar, exposing the once dark and dingy cube, where spiders, centipedes, millipedes, roaches, and prehistoric creatures which vied for a small environmental niche scattered behind, out, above, below weak beams of sunlight cutting through the tree canopy.
The promises of a backyard writer’s shack — molded cardboard form tubes, roll of asphalt roofing, mylar insulation sheets, University of Tennessee stained plastic lampshade — lay piled up, flowing out of the shed like dried lava, caked mud holding the writer’s shack construction pieces together like a old jigsaw puzzle box lost in a flood.
A granddaddy longleg loped across the algae-covered driveway on which the shed sat.
The UPS delivery guy smiled as he, too, loped up the driveway, handing the homeowner a nondescript cardboard box and looking at the shed. “You got your work cut out for you this afternoon, dontcha?”
Lee nodded.
Like a rubberband that had snapped, Lee was suddenly, suddenly, suddenly!!! pulled back from Mars, back from the latter part of the 21st century and dropped in the middle of 2013.
Lost were the android sheep that he and Shadowgrass had released into the wild moments before, sheep designed to eat Martian soil and convert it to edible protein for Lee, his family, his research team and the consumption-focused tourists.
Lee thanked the delivery man and cut open the box.
Two revolving camping lanterns with 30 LEDs each.
Oh yeah, his yard sculpture project he had abandoned decades ago.
Lee put his left hand on the garage doorframe, leaned to hold his balance and breathed deeply.
He felt the chipping paint through the nerves of his fingers and palm. He wondered how many bacteria were transferring from the doorframe to his body through his sweaty hand.
How many hundreds of thousands?
How many million?
He heard, almost felt rather than sensed through his eardrums, a tune by the Squirrel Nut Zippers playing on a computer system inside the house. Or was that the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies? The Side Street Steppers? Could just as easily be a 1940s big band or its modern equivalent.
He looked at the sky, clouds passing overhead, clouds he hadn’t seen on Mars.
Lee shuddered.
Despite the heat, he felt a chill. He had lost 12 pounds in a week, the same amount he had lost in the previous eight months.
Something wasn’t right.
He stood up and walked over to the 1995 BMW 325i parked under a party tent for cover from dripping mimosa tree sap and black mold.
The distorted reflection in the car’s rear window pane told Lee he was who he thought he was back in 2013.
What about his older and wiser self? What about his son and Martian wife?
He shook his head.
He walked through his memory of history from 2013 to his present time — the first major Martian expeditions, the failures, the successes, the need for constant fundraising to send resupply ships to Mars, salvaging crashed tourist ships for parts, resorting to cannibalism at one point…yep, all the memories were there.
Where was his wife? Which one, for that matter?
Lee walked up steps inside the garage to the door that opened onto a back hallway.
Once inside, he looked down at the torn and tattered vinyl floor pieces covering what was left of a rotten wood subfloor.
Boxes and bags piled one on top of the other almost reached the ceiling.
He held up the cardboard box in his hand. It matched the boxes in the piles.
Was it possible his set of states of energy was caught in some loop?
Time does not exist but could space be warped such that you could travel from one condition to another almost instantaneously which made you feel like you traveled through time? A roller coaster that was really a Möbius strip of some sort?
He tried to open his thoughts to his subnodes on the ISSA NET network but only silence showed itself, tinged by the ringing of tinnitus that he thought he’d left behind many years before.
The woman walking her dog down the street did not seem to sense his presence inside the house.
A cat came wandering down the hall, its head turned sideways, meowing in a low guttural, nasally voice, “rarh.”
Lee felt a buzzing in his pocket. He reached in and pulled out a thin slab. Didn’t they used to call these smartphones?
He shook the slab and nothing happened. He touched the flat surface and images appeared, including a flashing number indicating something wanted his attention.
“On screen.” His voiced command did not change the image. He touched the surface again and the number disappeared, showing a series of boxes that looked like the old voice bubbles full of text that accompanied newspaper cartoons.
The bubbles he could see indicated someone had addressed him and he had responded not more than a few minutes ago.
The smartphone dinged and another bubble appeared, the text showing a response to his response. “Yeah, you’re right. That’s why Rigby danced in the showcase with me, because he wanted to get to know me better.”
A headache seemed to crawl out of Lee’s neck muscles and into his brain stem.
What was the matter with him? What about the lab experiment that he and Guin had planned for later that day? The genetically-modified plants they had nurtured to thrive in Martian sunlight were due to be harvested and analysed within a few hours, coordinated to occur in conjunction with a tourist visit to the greenhouses where every tourist was given the honour of helping the harvest and taking a leaf or stem home as a souvenir.
Lee tried to find a chair to sit on but every surface in the house seemed to be covered with more bags and boxes, envelopes, clothes and books. Lots of books.
He sat on the edge of the sink.
A piece of paper seemed to fly out of the cardboard box in his hand and float to the kitchen floor.
Lee couldn’t read the writing from where he was sitting so he bent down to pick up the paper.
It was a receipt for the lanterns, dated 7/21/2065.
He stood up and searched for a calendar on the kitchen wall. The first day not stricken through with a pen stripe was 8/22/2013.
Was today the 22nd of August in the year 2013?
The phone buzzed again, a new message appearing. “And Jersey hasn’t danced with me in a month. I still owe him lessons at the other studio. He’s been so busy volunteering for charities and mountain biking that we haven’t had time for a lesson. That means we can have our next lesson almost anytime.”
Dance lesson? Why did he need a lesson? He was already the ISSA Antigravity Sphere Dance Champion for the 22nd century.
Wait…what? The 22nd century? He was more confused than ever. He was supposedly in 2013, he had a box shipped to him from the year 2065 and he was a dance champion sometime after the year 2100?
The phone buzzed. He read the next message. “If the song I picked out by the Squirrel Nut Zippers is okay, I’ll go ahead and work out the choreography for the middle and end of our showcase, if the beginning is still okay with you, too?”
Lee pressed a box on the surface which had the word “REPLY” written in it. Several rows of alphabetic letters appeared inside tiny boxes. He pressed the “O” and “K” buttons and remembered to press the “SEND” button afterward.
He heard a roaring sound and realised it was raining outside.
The cat meowed louder, walking in a figure-8 pattern inside and around the outside of Lee’s legs.
There was that roller coaster/Möbius strip shape again.
He placed the box and phone in the sink, then picked up the cat and rubbed its back, causing it to purr. “What is your name, little kitty? You were always a sweet guy, if I remember correctly.” The cat stopped purring and struggled in Lee’s arms, trying to get out. “Oh yeah, the one that didn’t like to be held.” He set the cat down and looked at his feet.
He wore bright socks, mismatched, one with stripes and one with circles.
An old memory came back to him. He was standing with his wife and Guin…but wasn’t Guin his…? He let the thought drift on by, recalling the memory.
Guin stepped closer to him, talking into his ear, his wife feeling ignored and turning to Kross, a dance instructor a few feet away. “I was wearing pink socks earlier tonight but decided not to wear them with these jazz practice shoes.”
They both looked down at Guin’s ankles while Lee’s wife, Karen, struck up a conversation with Kross about the four major spin moves she wanted to master before entering another competition or showcase.
The first time Lee had met Guin was two years before, at a picnic on the local Army base sponsored by the previous dance studio they attended. Her skin was walnut brown and her personality exuded the confidence of a successful college student. She had walked under the picnic pavilion and sat right next to Lee, her white camisole accentuating her dark skin, showing off the Celtic cross tattoo on her left shoulder blade and another tattoo on her lower back.
She had hinted about taking a walk around the woods not far from the pavilion and maybe having her boyfriend and their third-wheel friend coming along to take pictures.
Seated across from him at the picnic table, Lee’s wife wasn’t interested, plus there was a football game between the University of Tennessee and the University of Florida football teams on the portable TV they brought.
Thus, Lee waved off the offer and stayed in the pavilion.
Looking down at Guin’s ankles in his newer memory, though, her ankles were white, her ankle and back tattoos clearly visible, as if she hadn’t been out in the sun for a long time. Just like on Mars…hmm…
Guin shrugged her shoulders and lifted her legs in a kind of marching motion, a habit of hers that Lee imagined went with her nerdy/geeky teenage years, a pretty girl with tomboy tendencies that helped her out.
Like the time, she said the other day, when she was a freshman in the high school marching band and, after practice, the band supervisors had walked away, leaving the band members, cheerleaders and football players to perform their yearly hazing ritual during their orientation cookout at the local park.
Some of the band members had tried to pick up Guin to throw her in the lake but were unsuccessful. Some of the football players were able to pick her up but by the time they tossed her into the water she had given one a black eye, another a bloody cheek and a third a hefty kick in the balls. They respected her strength after that.
Lee looked up from Guin’s ankles to her eyes. She raised her eyebrows and smiled, putting her hands on her hips.
He looked from her eyes to her hips and back up to her eyes. “Did you used to wear contact lenses?”
“Well, yeah, as a matter of fact up until I was thrown in the lake. One of the contact lenses actually spun around to the back of my eye and I haven’t worn any since.”
Karen turned to them and nodded. “Yeah, and I bet that was back when the contact lenses were like pieces of glass.”
“Kinda.”
Karen nodded and returned to Kross, who was about to kid all of them about their talking too much and not practicing enough but he tossed his head and laughed, the proper satirically pretentious behaviour of a dance floor primadonna, getting the message across the same way.
Lee nodded his head at Guin’s hands on her hips. “Like I said, you’ve lost your saddle bags.”
Karen spoke to both Kross and Guin. “Don’t mind Lee. He’s liable to say whatever’s on his mind.”
“That’s okay. Rigby” — Guin saw Kross’ questioning look — “my boyfriend, or as the state of Alabama calls him, my common law husband. He saw me walking up the stairs in front of him and told me I had a fat ass. I told him I could pick up a lot more dancing if he wanted me to have smaller hips. Or he could deal with it.”
They all laughed.
The cat kept meowing. Lee opened the refrigerator door, found a plastic container of cream cheese, stuck his finger in and wiped a dollop on the Cornish Rex’s thin fur.
He was losing track of which contiguous string of memorable moments was real.
He walked around the house until he found the main bedroom, the bed free of boxes, thank goodness, and crawled under the covers. Within a minute, two cats had curled up under the covers with him.
Lee could just barely hear the phone buzzing in the stainless steel kitchen sink as he fell asleep, a clap of thunder jarring his thoughts briefly.
He might wake up in time to go dancing. Or he might wake up back on Mars. Which century he’d wake up in didn’t seem to matter in his dreams.
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“Muscle wire.”
“What?”
“Muscle wire. Do you have any muscle wire?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The man standing beside her looked at her strangely.
Guin sighed. She had temporarily accepted an assignment to escort a group of tourists off-base. During their excursion to the nearest overlook, nicknamed the Loch Ness Monster due to the group of humps that seemed to loom out of the landscape as you drove up to it but gave a sweeping view back to their research outpost when you turned around on top, a torsion bar was torqued out of shape.
“Oh, if only…well, never mind. I don’t think we’d have any in the lab. Back on Earth, though…”
Every now and then, Guin recalled her younger years. She smiled and laughed inwardly as a scene from her childhood, when she first had an inkling she wanted to be a mechanical engineer, flashed through her thoughts.
She was in the mountains visiting her grandparents.
Her father, who had grown up there, had warned her about the kind of folks that lived deep in the hills.
“Now, our family is mainly of the preaching kind, as you know. But the other families don’t take too kindly to strangers, being drug runners, mainly ‘shine, but some of them have been known to grow the wacky weed, especially Pennsylvania Pure, said to be a direct descendant of crops raised by George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.”
Even down in the valley, where Guin’s father had raised her, the drug dealers lived nearby.
Once, when Guin was out mountain biking, she blew a tire and hitched a ride home from a nice boy with a really cool 4×4 Jeep. The moment the Jeep pulled into the driveway, her father let loose two warning shotgun blasts in the air.
Guin yelled it was her so her father set down the shotgun, telling her to get out and the boy to take off.
“He’s one of those drug dealers I told you to stay away from. He’s bad!”
Guin shook her head. “No he’s not, Dad. He gave me a ride home.”
“Well, don’t go near him again.”
Guin kept this in her thoughts as she pulled up into her grandparents’ driveway, honking her horn long before she got to the house.
Her grandfather met her at the door. “Praise Jesus. I was worried about you, child. Your father said you’ve been hanging out with those bums in the valley. Don’t you know they’re the devil’s brood?”
“Aw, come on, Granddad. I just had a flat tire.”
“Well, you shouldn’t’ve. You need to learn to fix a tire yourself ’cause if you go out riding around here and get a flat, you will not be coming back.”
Guin wondered why her grandparents, who claimed to be good Christians, were so quick to dismiss the very people who they should be preaching to. Instead of asking, she noticed her grandfather had a can of of spray foam insulation in his hand.
“Whatcha got there, Granddad?”
“Oh, this? Well, your grandmother noticed bugs getting into the laundry room. I noticed a gap running along the line between the window and the wall, probably from the house settling all these years. I’m going to spray some of this and fill the gap, hoping that’s where the bugs are coming in.”
“Granddad, you’ve given me an idea.”
“Yes, dear, what’s that?”
“Well, that spray foam’d make a great inner tube for my mountain bike tires, don’t you think?”
“That is a great idea. I’ll save you some.”
“Thanks, Granddad.”
While Guin loosened the brake cables on her bike and removed the wheels, she looked at the brake cables and shocks.
Her thoughts wandered. What if…
She covered the inside of the wheel rims with a thin coat of oil to keep the spray foam from sticking but left a thin line of the rim clean just inside where the tires would touch the rims, allowing the foam and tires to stick together and bond with the rims. She slowly sprayed the wet foam along the inside of each tire and seated one at a time back on the wheel rim, letting the expanding foam dry out and form a fully-inflated tire tightly wrapped around the wheel. She didn’t know how long the foam-filled tires would last but surely long enough for her to have fun biking around the old home place in the mountains.
She dug through the mechatronic play set her grandfather had given her for Christmas and pulled out the muscle memory wire kit.
The heat generated by her bike could activate the muscle wire. With a tip actuator, she could use the heat generated by her brakes to…hmm…well, what exactly? A recoiling strand of muscle wire, as part of a nitinol heat engine, could turn a pulley. What would it take for the system to know if she was about to tip over her handlebars because the front brakes were locking up tighter than her back brakes and ease off pressure on the front wheel so she could still slow down controllably?
Guin’s grandparents wished her goodnight but Guin got out of bed after she heard them quietly snoring down the hall.
She snuck outside with her gear and biked down the road to one of the moonshiners’ hangouts, loudly announcing her presence in the middle of the night.
Needless to say, she was met by flashlights and rifles with hidden voices behind the blinding lights demanding to know who she was and what she was doing in the middle of dadgum night.
Guin explained who she was and the guns lowered.
She further explained why she was there and the lights motioned her on into the barn and down into the hidden chamber where the moonshine was being cooked.
One good thing about being herself, Guin knew how and when to hide her geekiness just long enough for guys to warm up to her good looks. Most guys got a kick out of a preacher’s granddaughter saying that she liked a strong sip of good moonshine.
She passed on the bong of Pennsylvania Pure getting handed around.
After 15 minutes of shooting the bull, trading stories about high school and cruel principals who didn’t take a liking to mountain folk, Guin sauntered over to the moonshine still. She paid close attention to the welding, how neat everything was put together.
“You fellows sure know how to assemble piping. Any chance you have any soldering equipment I can use?”
One boy’s face lit up. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
“Nathaniel.”
“Well, Nathaniel, is this your handiwork?” She pointed at the temperature control gauge and electronic control board that was hooked up to the still.
“Yes’m. My daddy taught me. He went to trade school and all that. Was working at the steel mill over in Pittsburgh back before all that was shut down or automated.”
“Can you show me how to operate your equipment?”
“What fer?”
“I broke my bicycle and need to fix it but I want to make it better than before. Any assistance you could give me would be greatly appreciated.”
“You aren’t trying to steal my ‘shine recipe, are you? A purty girl like you?”
“No, Nathaniel, I’m not. I just want to get to know you and your kin better.” She looked around the group of guys, a couple of them in their teens, three or four in their 30s and two of them in their 50s or 60s. “Right now, I don’t see much difference between you guys and my brothers or my father and grandfathers.” She shrugged her shoulders. “They preach fire and brimstone. You make white lightning from fire and piping. Both of you want to make the world a better place from your point of view.”
The guys nodded in general agreement.
Nathaniel pointed toward the back of the room. “Over here, then.”
“Okay, I’ll get the rest of my gear.” Guin climbed the ladder and walked over to where she had been made to set her stuff down in the barn.
The memory seemed like yesterday. Had it been decades?
Guin looked at her reflection on the side of the all-terrain vehicle filled with antsy tourists, some who’d paid a life’s savings for this trip to Mars. She had paid dearly for a treatment of Syndrome X, “freezing” her body at the age of 40, more than a life’s savings, sacrificing some of her memory and all of her wealth on Earth in order for the biological parts of her body not to die of natural causes for many more decades, what her friends called the ultimate energy exchange.
She opened her thoughts to Lee and Shadowgrass who were leading a tourist group out to an old historic landing site.
Between the three of them, they mentally created a reconfiguration of the ATV to operate without the need for one torsion bar, recording a note to themselves to request an expedited repair bot not only for their domicile but one each of the latest generation bots for the tourist ATVs. Guin applied their fix and drove on, wishing for a new repair but wishing more that she’d had time to design one herself.
The new bots contained their own smelters which could forge hybrid parts from just about any chemical found in Martian soil, allowing Guin, Lee and Shadowgrass to expand their exploration and free up time for research after the tourista bots were allowed to go back into operation once the latest supply ship had landed with much-needed irreplaceable parts.
At the top of the ridge, the tourists oohed and aahed, recording themselves together in small groups, drinking water replacement fluids and eating spicy snack treats exclusive to this tour.
Guin virtually handed out commemorative electronic stamps that were actually coded algorithms once called apps that could only be sent and activated from the geolocation of the Loch Ness Monster Overlook, the tourists choosing the colour schemes, soil/clothing smells, wind/walking sounds, and 3D background scenes to include with their immersive experience video that was included as part of their tour package.
Guin sent a silent smile and hug to her two “guys,” which they returned within microseconds.
To get this far with their development of the Martian colonies had cost them many close friends on Mars and lost time with family members back on Earth.
But it was worth every sol (Martian day) and marsec (Martian second).
Whatever it took, even a week of giving tours instead of time devoted to pure research.
They always had each other.
treetrunkdings 