Tiona (a sequel to "Vaz") (18 page)

Nolan’s eyes had found Tiona. To his astonishment she had on some stretchy, clingy pants that fit her like a glove. They belled out at the bottom so he couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought she might even be wearing heels. She wore a silky long sleeved blouse with a few spangles on it. Her hair, so short this summer when she’d started in the lab, had grown out a couple of inches and she had it standing spikily out from her head somehow. Described, it sounded weird, but on her at looked great. She looked… gorgeous!

So different from how she looked in what she wore at work!

Susie shook Nolan’s elbow, “Are you even listening to me?!”

Startled, Nolan tried to replay whatever Susie had just said to him, but it wouldn’t come to mind. “Sorry,” he said loudly to be heard over the music, “thinking about something else. What did you say?”

“We need to get a table! There aren’t very many left.”

“Okay,” Nolan said, tearing his eyes off of Tiona. He looked around, saw an open table and started leading Susie to it.

“No! We won’t be able to see Ronnie from over there!”

Nolan grinned a little to himself as he realized that his criteria for choosing a table—that it would have a good side view of the open floor where Tiona was standing—wouldn’t jibe with Susie’s requirements. “Where?”

Susie dragged him across the floor to a table more in the center, though a few rows back.

As they walked that direction, they passed near Tiona. For a moment, Nolan thought she might see and recognize him. He tried to think of something to say, but then her glance slid over him and onward without any evidence that she even noticed him.

Nolan suddenly realized that Tiona didn’t have one of the stupid party hats on. Turning only his eyes to the side to be sure Tiona wasn’t looking at him, he pulled off his visor and broke it, while trying to make it look like he was just trying to stretch it because it was pinching his head.

“Oh!” Susie said, having glanced back at him to see the plastic visor in two pieces. She leaned back to him to be heard, “What happened?”

“It was tight, pinching my head. I thought I could stretch it,” Nolan shrugged. “Guess not.”

“Well, that’s no good!” She said, standing up, “I’ll go ask them if you can have another.”

“No!” Nolan said restraining her with a hand on her forearm, “It’d just be tight too. I’ll be fine without one.”

Susie made a disappointed face, “Okay.” She sat down and focused her attention on the band. Ronnie had been joined by someone playing percussion.

Nolan turned his eyes back to Tiona.
I should offer to go buy some drinks,
he thought,
but I think I’ll wait. Maybe Tiona will go back to get herself a drink and I can bump into her back at the bar. If Susie complains because I haven’t gotten her a drink, I’ll say I’ve been waiting for a waitress.
For a moment, he looked at Winters up on the stage. As opposed to the calm demeanor the man had had when he played at the Cat’s Cradle, he did look a little bit wild tonight. Nolan wondered why. He turned his attention back to Tiona.

As the songs went by, Nolan began to get a little bored. He did like the music, but Susie just sat there staring at Winters. It wouldn’t have been easy to talk over the loud music anyway, but it felt to Nolan like he was there by himself. He enjoyed watching Tiona, but even that seemed unfulfilling. He wanted to be talking to her.

There was a waitress, but she was apparently working the large crowd solo. At first, Nolan was irritated that she wasn’t coming by to provide any service. Then he started to worry
that she
would
come by to take their order right before Tiona headed back to get herself a drink, thus blowing Nolan’s chance to meet her back at the bar.

Thus it was with some relief that Nolan saw Tiona turn and start to thread her way through the crowd back towards the bar. He leaned to Susie and called over the music, “The waitress is never going to get here. I’m going to make a bar run. What would you like?”

Susie tore her eyes away from the band for a second. Nolan could tell she had to replay his question as she hadn’t been paying attention. Then she smiled, “Thanks! I’d like a rum and Coke.”

Nolan stood and headed for the back of the room in Tiona’s wake. However, Tiona turned into the ladies bathroom. At first, Nolan felt a little adrift, feeling like his plan had been derailed. If he went to the bar now, Tiona would be behind him. She might choose a different part of the bar from where he was standing and there wouldn’t be any opportunity to “accidentally” encounter her.

With a snort at his own dimwittedness, he turned into the men’s room. Knowing that women usually took a long time, he dawdled a little bit. The volume of the music dropped, suggesting that the band was taking a break. To Nolan’s dismay, when he stepped out of the bathroom his eyes found Tiona already standing at the bar. Nolan tried not to rush across the room. He stepped up into the spot behind Tiona.

The bartender was fawning all over her, chattering inanely as he drew her a beer from one of the taps. Nolan smiled over his own irritation that a pretty girl was getting so much better service than he knew he would be getting when he stepped up to the bar.
If I were that bartender, I’d be acting like an idiot too.

Tiona took her beer and turned away from the bar. Nolan put a surprised look on his face, “Tiona!”

She blinked in surprise; then her eyes narrowed, “Nolan! What are you doing here?”

Nolan panicked for a second,
Does she somehow know that I planned this whole night on the off chance that I’d encounter her? No! She’s just surprised and making conversation!
“Ringing in the New Year. I’ve been dating a girl who loves Ronnie Winters… Um, he’s the lead vocalist and guitarist in the band.”

“Yeah… I know,” Tiona said drolly, her eyes going over Nolan’s shoulder.

Suddenly a guy shouldered past Nolan. Irritated, Nolan opened his mouth to bark a protest.

The guy threw his arms around Tiona, “T!”

It was freaking Ronnie Winters himself! Keeping an arm around Tiona, Winters stepped up to the bar and raised his hand in the air. A second later one of the bartenders handed him a beer and Winters stepped away from the bar, towing Tiona behind him.

Nolan heard Tiona say, “I thought you’d quit drinking?”

“Hey babe,” Winters said, “it’s New Year’s Eve!”

Feeling frustrated and disappointed Nolan turned back to the bar. Sure enough, it was forever before one of the bartenders deigned to notice him.

Tiona eyed Ronnie. She’d been worried that he’d had a few drinks when she’d been watching him up on stage. Things had been going so well between Ronnie and herself recently, something she had attributed to his recent sobriety. She’d felt dismayed when he’d commented over lunch two days after Christmas that he thought being sober was stifling his creativity. She knew he wrote more songs when he was drunk or had done other drugs, but the songs were crap. He’d only written a couple since he’d been sober, but Tiona thought their quality was much better.

She’d tried to convince him of this and thought he’d been listening. Then tonight he’d looked a little drunk and her heart had fallen. Tiona thought of Nolan as a pretty-boy, preppy nerd, but she still felt irritated that Ronnie had just shoved the guy out of his way, then thrown a sweaty arm around her. She’d thought she should introduce Ronnie to Nolan, but, oblivious to her thoughts, Ronnie had simply dragged her off. By the time she’d been able to glance back at Nolan, he’d turned to the bar to order his own drink.
Nolan might be a dweeby nerd, but at least he’s not a jerk like Ronnie.

Ronnie said, “How do you like the show tonight babe?”

Tiona crossed her arms over her chest and frowned, “You play better when you’re sober.”

“We talked about this babe!” Ronnie said plaintively. “
Technically,
I may play better, but the
spirit’s
not in me.
Artistically
I don’t play as well.”

Tiona shook her head, “You should listen to recordings of yourself playing sober and playing drunk. You just
think
you play better when you’re drunk. Actually, you play like crap!”

“Yeah…
technically
,” Ronnie said sourly. “You just don’t hear the
soul
in the music. You’re too… too,” he paused, searching for words, and then said exasperatedly, “You just don’t
feel
it!”

“Yeah,” Tiona said, her lip curling, “
that
must be it.” She turned and strode away.

Behind her, Ronnie called out, “Come on T. Don’t be such a bitch!”

The bartender finally gave Nolan his beer and Susie’s rum and Coke. He turned away from the bar and started maneuvering through the crowd behind him, his eyes scanning the room for Tiona. She’d just stalked away from Winters!
She looks really pissed! Could I make some points by “being there” for her at a trying time?
He started walking faster so that he might catch up to her.
Or could I just piss off and embarrass her by horning in on her private drama?
Tiona glanced back over her shoulder. She did
not
look like she was about to burst into tears.

Nolan felt glad that she hadn’t seemed to see him back there behind her. He had a feeling that she wouldn’t be happy to have a witness to whatever just went down. She certainly didn’t look like a woman who thought she needed some guy she worked with to come over and try to comfort her.

Nolan glanced back at Winters. The guy was back at the bar, sucking down the last of the beer he had in one hand and holding up his hand with two fingers for a couple more. Nolan looked back at Tiona just as she set down her nearly full beer and went out the exit.

With a sigh he headed back over to the table and Susie. For a moment, he contemplated telling Susie that Winters had a thing going with his lab mate. Susie was the kind of girl who’d be excited about even such a distant brush with someone of some fame, but Nolan really didn’t feel like capitalizing on it.

Winters dragged out the break until the crowd was pissed. By the time he got back to the stage he was visibly drunk. Nolan thought Winters was awful, playing a lot of sour notes and singing off key, but Susie didn’t seem to notice. When Nolan suggested they might want to leave early, Susie looked at him like he was out of his mind.

Eventually they stayed until the bar closed.

As he took Susie home, Nolan swore to himself that he would never go out with her again.

***

“Thrust is down to 425 Newtons!” Zack said as Ralph came out of the airlock and into their space capsule.

Ralph sighed, “It looks like it’s a gradual problem developing in all of the engines. At least they all
look
like they’re firing, rather than the problem being that a few of them have completely failed.” He nodded his head at the ion engine he had in his hand, “I brought this one in so we could have a look at it.”

Hours had passed. Ralph and Zack had partially disassembled the engine that Ralph had brought in. They’d sent photos back and forth to earth comparing different parts of this engine to an unused engine they still had in Houston. They’d done all the electrical measurements that they had equipment for and most of them seemed just a little bit off spec. The electrodes appeared to be discolored compared to the new engine, but it could have been lighting differences.

One of the engineers in Houston came on, “We don’t know. It’s possible that the ice you’re harvesting there on the asteroid contains some impurities that are depositing on or corroding the electrodes. So far we haven’t come up with a way to evaluate that with the equipment you have there in the capsule.”

Zack said, “But we’re running all of it through a filter!”

“There are a lot of molecules that will pass right through a filter, but might still be corrosive or could deposit.”

“There must be some way to better purify the stuff before we use it for fuel!”

“Sure. We could do it here on earth. But it would require knowing what the contaminant is and might require some pretty sophisticated chemistry.” The engineer shrugged, “We might have some better ideas if we knew exactly what the problem was.”

Once Houston signed off Zack turned to Ralph, a look of dismay on his face. “We’ve already filled Bellerphon’s tanks with that crap!”

“Umhmm,” Ralph agreed while still thinking about what might have happened to the engines and not considering how upset Zack had sounded.

“Ralph! Dammit, if the shit that’s in that tank ruins
Bellerphon’s
engines, we won’t get home!

Trying to keep Zack calm, Ralph said in an even tone, “We can pump the tanks back out if we can find a way to purify the ice.”

Zack tilted his head back and closed his eyes for a minute. They snapped back open. “What if we only heat the ice a little bit and then don’t pump the liquid? That way we’d only get the gaseous molecules that vaporize at low temperatures. We leave behind all the heavier crap. It’d be like we distilled it!”