Scavengers: The Novel by JaneLebak
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Scavengers--Part Four
Heroes

Dear Professor Sanders,

I know you'll think it's dumb to send you a card, but happy Father's day. I took your advice and sent one to the Chief, too, but I chickened out, it's a funny card. He'll probably hate it.

I really like it here. Florida's totally different from New York, at least the parts I've seen. I've been in the dorm area and at the test lab most of the time, but Cassie and some of the others have cars and take us places. I'm not really thrilled by joyriding the way they are because remember the side effect of the medicine the Chief makes me take? Blech. But they go "scouting" and then come back for the rest of us. We go to the beach a lot, and I go in the pool really often, and I swim for part of the workout time the Chief makes me do. 2 hours is a long time! I bike to the lab every morning, too. There's a gym right here on campus, and a lot of the time I'm the only one using it, so I can bring my walkman and play whatever. I like that D.M. tape you gave me, even if that type of music is cornball, but it's pretty fun stuff. I wear my walkman when I jog, and I do that in the morning, real early before it gets hot. You wouldn't believe how badly I roasted the first few days, but now I'm just tan. They're all older than me, so they all made a fuss and everything when I got sunburned, like I was the first one ever. You know what's funny is that after I'd been here about three days, I got a dull headache and it was hard to breathe, and I thought I was sick, but Cassie got it too, and this girl Caroline said it was just our bodies recovering from the pollution in New York City because it had finally got out of our systems. That's pretty scary, I mean, you can't not breathe when you go home, right?

Everyone else here is in college or grad school. There's twelve guys and three girls, which I thought was odd, but the coordinator said he was glad so many girls got in. Maybe he said "women." They're real sensitive about that here. They talk about why there aren't enough women in engineering and what they can do to encourage them and so on. I guess I figured science was a guy's subject and English was for girls. History's kind of like both.

Anyway, I'm really glad I got the internship because I'm involved in a real neat project they're doing to improve electric cars--why not use the brakes to help recharge the battery? It'll give the cars 15% more battery life, which on such a low-range vehicle means a lot. The hardest part is integrating that system with the ABS because the electric cars are all rear-wheel drive so they tend to skid more and you're relying on the ABS system to pick up if that's happening (bored yet?) but the supervisors and the real engineers are thrilled at "saving" the "wasted" energy. The classes we're taking are really hard, I can follow the concepts, but I'm totally lost on the math. No one warned me it'd be all calculus. Richard, he's my roommate, helps me a little, but I'm never going to get it. Richard doesn't like studying either, and he's just graduated college, so that ends my theory that studying gets easier when you get older. I guess when Mark likes it, it's really a character flaw. I talked to everyone at home a few times last week, and they said they missed me, but I don't believe it. Mark's learning to drive too, and he's taking airplane lessons! Now the only safe place will be underground. I wonder how he managed to get that out of the Chief? He's got an office job for the summer. Tiny does too, data entry. He said it's boring and all you do is type numbers with one hand and hit tab with the other for eight hours. Princess is taking music lessons, and Keyop's going to daycamp on Long Island.

Have you thought about that terrorist business the Chief told me? I've had a few dreams about that rose-woman, only I can't hear her voice. It unnerves me when she talks, but I don't understand what she's saying, so am I dreaming in Italian so I can't understand? It's freaky. I didn't think a detail like who killed my father could change what I thought of him, but it has. I can't remember what I used to imagine, but now I get a picture of a man dabbling in the underworld, a James Bond type, a fugitive from the people he's investigating.

Anyway, I think that's it. It's hard to write letters. I may just call you sometime. Did I tell you they're paying us to be here? We get paid for the time we work, and the room and board and classes are all full scholarship. I had no idea, I mean, I'd have paid to come here. The Chief's taking everyone for a visit soon, by the way. July 4th weekend, they're going to Washington and act like tourists, and then they'll come here. I'm not sure what they want to do, although Keyop wants to go to the amusement park, which'll be massively fun if the Chief makes me keep taking the medicine, right? Oh well. This letter's too long and it's late already. Bye!
Jason

The Chief took the kids by train, a private cubicle on the Metroliner, a trip under three hours to Union Station in DC from Penn Station in New York. They had booklets and pamphlets and maps spread on their laps and on the spare seats. Tiny had fallen asleep by the window, but Mark and Princess had circled lots of monuments and exhibits. Keyop had buried himself in the Florida tourism book.

The train rocked side to side in spite of its forward motion. Anderson read the Times, folding the paper in quarters, subway-style despite his having seldom ridden the subway.

"I want to see dolphins," Keyop said. "And seals and penguins and killer whales and manatees because they say manatees are what sailors used to call mermaids--"

"All right," Mark said. "We heard it the first five times."

Princess rolled her eyes at Keyop. "Ignore him. I want to know where you want to go."

"Washington's first," Mark said. "Let's make plans for that."

Keyop looked out the window. "The National Air and Space Museum. That's all--not a bunch of old dead men."

Princess squinted.

"Lincoln," Keyop said. "My friends said he's pickled in a glass case."

The Chief unfolded his paper to hide the grin that suddenly overcame him.

"Dork," Mark said. "That's Lenin. The Lincoln Memorial is a statue--bigger than Lincoln ever got."

"Not as big as your ego," Princess said.

"Well, anyway," Keyop looked out the window, "I don't want to see all that stuff. I didn't want to go to Washington. Government's stupid."

"Congratulations." Mark crossed his legs and shifted in his seat. "You're ready to vote."

"Oh, now you sound like Jason." Princess stuck out her tongue. "Is this what our educational system did to you?" She looked across the compartment to the Chief. "Where did you want us to go?"

The Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Viet Nam Memorial, Congress, and the Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington monuments.

"In three days?" Keyop shook his head. "That's a lot."

Tiny woke up as the train hit a rough spot of track, stretched, and blinked at them all. "Where are we?"

"Delaware," Princess said.

"Welcome to Delaware!" Keyop laughed. "Pay toll three hundred feet!"

"Welcome to New York," said Mark. "Now leave."

Princess snickered. "Welcome to New Jersey. Take a deep breath and try to hold it for five hours."

"Welcome to Pennsylvania," Keyop said, then paused.

"Construction ahead," Tiny finished.

"I thought it was `Deer crossing next four hundred miles,'" Princess said.

"You're thinking of the other New York one--rough road next four hundred miles."

"If only you retained your schoolwork as well as stand-up comedy," Anderson said, turning a page.

"It's summer," Tiny said. "We don't need to think now."

The Chief sighed. "That does it." He put down his paper. "Lesson time."

He asked them what they knew about terrorism, and the mixed-bag response made him cringe--what do they teach in school nowadays? He took them back in time a bit, explained the traditional terrorist strikes, the traditional sources, and then paused. Mark had an intent expression, but Anderson could look that way himself when the situation called for heroic efforts in order to stave off boredom; the other three actually displayed their disinterest. Anderson upped the ante. "It's how Mark lost his father," he said.

That had all four rapt. "The plane crash--" Mark said.

Anderson nodded. Mark's eyes dropped. "Why?"

"He'd studied one terrorist organization for a long time and discovered a number of their plans. He knew the risks--knew what would happen if they discovered him." Anderson paused significantly. Mark beside him had turned to look out the window.

"Tiny's parents weren't killed by them," Anderson said, "and to the best of my knowledge, Princess' and Keyop's parents had no connection at all. Jason's parents did, though--they had information to turn over to me, only the organization heard about them and took preventative action."

Tiny's face hardened. "So?"

Mark glared at him.

"The organization is from a planet called Spectra," Anderson said, "and its name is Galactor."

He told them why they'd been trained as they had, how in five years they might be needed to stop these terrorists, since giving in to their demands would create only more demands and more terror.

"Us?" Keyop laughed. "It's my famous karate chop, striking fear into the heart of the multitude!"

Mark might not have heard the youngest. "How?"

"That's for later," Anderson said. "I wanted you to have this to think about when you see the monuments of all the great individuals in this country's past, all the soldiers who died to preserve their freedom and the freedom of others. There's more to your lives than living. There's also living for."

They toured Washington in the sunlight, shorts and t-shirts no protection from the heat, shade welcome and air conditioning a blessing. The humidity dampened their skin, drained their spirit as they walked through waves of boiling air. They all had sunburned noses and arms by the end of the first day; Princess in her tank top had burned her shoulders pretty badly.

They said nothing as they walked through the Viet Nam Memorial. The Wall, with its steady accumulation of names, names, names, a few on the first panel, a dozen on the next, hundreds on the middle slabs of marble, massive and black, gleaming the reflected faces of the living with names etched through their foreheads and eyes. At the bases of the slabs, flowers and other mementos, letters, photos, one guttering candle. Keyop squatted to read a letter, but Princess pulled him away, past more names, toward the Chief and Mark, who had paused before one slab to hunt down one of the Chief's relatives.

They walked to the Korean War Memorial, stood staring at a platoon forever frozen in their march, looking to one another or else trudging ahead with their massive packs, their rain gear spread over their shoulders and arms to render them shapeless as they marched in a wedge. Mark found himself meeting the eyes of the statues and trying to figure out their thoughts based on their expressions.

"Why are they spread out like that?" Keyop said.

"So if someone stepped on a land mine, they wouldn't lose everyone." Mark rubbed the sweat on his neck, looked at the heavy boots on the statues. "They did what they had to just to survive."

Parallel to the march of the iron soldiers stood another wall, highly polished, nicks taken from the polish to create pictures, faces mostly, from every stage of the war, every type of soldier, the different sorts of weaponry, from both sides. Faces that stared you back. Keyop stopped looking after a while and went to examine the souvenirs. Mark and Princess stayed longest by the wall, ignoring the crowds that hurried through.

"If the Chief is right," Princess said.

Mark said, "He may not be."

Mark hadn't spoken too often on the phone with Jason. Jason belonged in the room next door, just as Tiny belonged at the end of the hall. Saving up the day's events felt too unnatural--better to talk them out in spurts. Mark found himself on the phone with little to say to the disembodied voice in his left ear. Jason, on the other hand, chattered about the people he'd met, the other Ford interns, life in a college dorm during summer session, his project, his classes. Mark handed the phone to Princess, and she told Jason about Washington with similar enthusiasm.

They took turns on the phone, trading places to sit in the corner of the hotel room by the desk. The Chief did a lot of listening, then went over the plans for their arrival. "No, we'll rent a car at the station," he repeated a couple of times, and, "We'll wait until you get back, then." Jason's work didn't end until five, and he wouldn't have biked back until 5:30. They'd arrive earlier, check into their hotel, then go get Jason.

"You're going to like it," Jason said. "I like it a lot."

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