Creative Camp

Nifty, bless them, posts this in Fantasy/Sci-Fi. Not so. Politics, religion, social this and cultural that, plenty of it, but, honest, no sci-fi, and, if it's a Fantasy, so is most fiction. (However, I will readily agree that it is fantasTic.)

The story so far? Long, convoluted and complex, with more on the way. I offended a reader by suggesting earlier chapters were for those over forty, but then I probably cheesed readers for lots of reasons. Many of these will be found in Chapt. 11, which, just to be sure the chafing is complete, has no sex. In my inimitable style I make up for this perversity in Chapt. 12, which includes, for the first time on these pages, a young female and her teen brother.

The caveats and restrictions covering this manuscript are listed on the title page.

These chapters were delayed because I upgraded from a 350 to a 500 and to ME/XP. Also new sound and graphics card and 128 ram. Anyone who would waste (lots of) electricity by running a more powerful system has developmental problems.

My other postings are "Jimmy and Frogger," "The Flyyy," "Dennis the...," "Ropeyarn (Act I)," and the first ten chapters of this epic.

Creative Camp 11 -- 13 (M/t, M/b, t/b, b/b, t/f, b/f) by Feather Touch

Chapt. 11

Was Jeff Bezos less interesting than Billy Jean King, or vice versa? The nation was being run by klootzes and dunderwinkles. Exceedingly low-grade mentalities diminished by the media, leaving King winning her fabulous victory for women over a small man of fifty-five, twenty years her senior. Amazon seemed to be writing new chapters in its defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory saga with every close of the market. And it was all so boring; so hollow, vapid, sterile and monotonous. A cult of lesser heroes minimized to the point of a pair of giants as champeens over normal women in the classic game of inches.

Helter skelter.

Of course there was a bright side when one considered the great fun for Manson types as the King/Bezos nitwits tried to avoid the rather pungent fact that Touchstone, et al, had discovered it is substantially easier to raise electric power rates by punching a keypad than going through the trouble and inconvenience of building big-bad generating plants. Ah, the helter-skelter of ever growing blackouts. No lights, no alarms, no lack of opportunity for no future..

Was it a Star Chamber? Many millions thought so: an actual conspiracy in which the Touchstone schmoes would create blackouts so the media schmoes would profit from the story, with the media returning the favor by stirring up the knee-jerk NIMBY envirowackers to block new power plants in the first place. Seemed far-fetched, but the NEA schmoes had dumbed down the schools to the point their tribal cousins could peddle Ricki and Jerry to an ever-expanding and rapidly deteriorating audience of the masses, so anything actually was possible..

One thing about schmoes; history's absolute lesson: let them dominate and the casualties quickly become colossal, in a word, holocaustic. Of course, that was ancient stuff and had taken place in relatively primitive, agrarian times. In a society totally entangled in complexities beyond comprehension would not the wage of the rampant schmo, and his creed of absolutely mindless adversarial nitpicking, simply be death, for all?

To Charles the situation amounted to wheels within wheels: Was there a real god, after all, or at least a facsimile engendering a stage of intellectual perfection indicative of a global imperative in favor of the massed monolith of the east, China? If there was, mightn't it read something like this: Since the Chinese are the hardest workers, they, in the long run, which is the only run that counts, deserve the planet for their own? This brought up the philosophical question of the age: Would it be worth the loss of the Anglo Saxon race so long as the loss of schmoery was complete? The answer was: Probably. Charles thought so, and he was as WASP as it was possible to be.

Two hundred years? No schmoes, guaranteed, and, perhaps, a world restored to health. The Chinese, with Anglo input, had an ultimate imperative amounting to a doubly manifest destiny (size and focus). They'd need it, gamblers that they were, but, at the same time, if they could slay McDonalds, Wal-Mart and the calculated, lowest-common-denominator homogenized banality of Madison Avenue, displayed with identical pride in every mall, they had the potential to genuinely and permanently raise the mass standard of living beyond dreams that are already beyond the dreams of a decade ago. It just required playing by a few rules and keeping at least a two-finger grasp on the obvious.

Live small, live modestly; most importantly, live with a book-based intellect in an electronic world. Your resources should go to the modern gods, the content providers, instead of corporations which sell you gigantic cars and houses and closets full of silly clothes; three times the food you need, and one-tenth the intellectual calories thought to be essential to sustain life. Extremely dangerous to think against this, because you are betting your future, and, indeed, your very life, if not your entire species. To win, society had be completely right in whatever wacko nonsense was running through its malnourished collective brain, and Charles had to be completely wrong. Otherwise, it was just talking ticks of the clock and he felt he might do everyone a favor by busting a nap. After all, if folks were going to scare themselves to death over every bomb and bullet CNN sold them, how was he going to hold their attention with a camp full of obnoxiously smart alecs?

The yellow-ribbon age. The cotton candy age. And the one hero? The pornmeister who built the video industry on top of major contributions to the film industry, and, in the last two decades, had been the underlying force of the computer and Net revolutions. Kept the very country, and all within, alive, even as four or five schmoes in a row hit the cameras with their heavy-bellied urban socialism on the Sunday morning talk circuit.

Nifty, alone, was probably responsible, at least as a secondary motivating force, for the sale of many millions of computer systems as well as countless millions of hours of tailored, high-value bandwidth usage. In sum, porn was a thirty percent factor in US (seventy percent in Germany!) computer usage; without it, the critical mass for volume pricing never would have been reached, Bill Gates or no Gill Gates.

But now came the hard part. Sustaining the whole fandango once the shine had worn off. The CB-radio craze lasted scant years, because it provided little beyond a novelty. With gaming and communications ability, the computer had a stronger inherent staying power, but, at the same time, it was vastly more expensive than the little fad radios, and had to perform at a nearly extreme level to be allowed to perform at all. And the ultimate extreme was content, itself. Gutenberg figured that out. No one was going to buy into his printing scheme until he arranged his moveable type into a story, then many would buy, even if it was the tired old bible. ("Pity I wasn't around at the time," Charles mused, "the world would have boasted one hundred percent literacy by 1655.")

As writers provided content, printers distributed it; the second utterly useless without the first, and the first with several options, as long as the story was good (it would practically tell itself). Games were a perfect example. Frame rates. Resolution. Shadow detail. Anti-aliasing. and the only innovation was fang form-factor. Since Sierra in the early nineties, little wit, little charm, less story value and no human value, whatever. Preposterously, they were largely sex free. It was a seeming paradox that they sold until it was realized they were toys and toys have always sold in Visa-ville.

America had been dumbed down to three-page status. It was seen everywhere, and little else. Children's television with the endless yipping puppets, beloved of the schmo, teaching page one, page two, page three, page one... over and over, for forty years, and more, because it was cheap to find a few camera wallopers and turn them loose under the lights with three pages of script. Very, very, very cheap. Exactly the same on the news. Three pages on a subject, reiterated ceaselessly. (On CNN, two-and-a-half, unless it was Report-Filing Blitzer, at which time it approached zero due to the patent cringe factor engendered by the generic repulsiveness of a hard-wired, motor-mouthed beard factory.)

Film. Three pages from the socialist/populist manifesto outlined virtually every script produced. No anti-socialistic message was ever included and non-liberals were uniformly portrayed as chrome-dome freaks or pinhead zealots. Three pages from the government. Social Security, Social Security, Social Security.

Parallel to this there was an odd notion heard from time to time; sort of an urban legend. Words to the effect that everybody had a million good ideas; all that was needed was the organizational structure to execute them. This was exactly wrong. A million people, in all likelihood, had not a single good idea. Easy enough to prove. Out of two-hundred-eighty-plus million, how many good ideas came along in an average year? The last Charles had seen was a novelty product; a big plastic panel that held nine compact discs; could be hung on a wall. Previously, there had been a pool-size paddle boat with heavy-duty squirt guns mounted like little cannons on its decks. Everything else was evolution; incremental improvements, and many of these had reached their limit. Popular motorcycle engine designs had not changed in some twenty years; the boom box of 2001 was little changed from its ancestor of twenty years; ditto, the television receiver. The facts were cold, the facts were hard; a million rainbows and rarely an ounce of gold.

His fortune based on one heavyweight cash cow, Charles had winnowed the thinking of his campers and presented it, anonymously. He felt works of art should be tendered in like manner. If it was good, it was good, irregardless of its pedigree -- an iron rule that could be reversed with impunity. But now the rubber-faced nitpickers ruled. Create all you want, at the highest level imaginable, and approach any corporation. If you're of the box, by the box, and for the box, especially any ivy box, they gave you the billions for Iridium. If not, it was a form letter noncommittal enough to please a dozen lawyers, and often enough just enduring silence and the quietest phone in town.

It was onerous to compete in the field of the madcap tinkerjohn inventor. A pooper-scooper and fruit-peeler joke. One fellow had even patented a set of miniature snow plows for use on light vehicles. The driver operated a lever on the dash, and the little plows descended in front of the driving wheels to clear the snow. How well they'd clear potholes and railroad tracks was not discussed in the marketing proposal, nor was a remedy suggested for the danger of broken-off plow blades hurtling through traffic. On the other hand, such an idea could be reviewed, and, even with a chuckle, dismissed in a matter of seconds. Undoubtedly, it would take a year or more to read through a million e-mailed suggestions, but, if the good one made you a billion dollars, who would ever notice the tiny little salary for the reader, or even the one or two percent royalty due the inventor? Certainly not the customers, the investors, the employees, nor society at large.

In the United States there are thousands of literary agents; for inventors, one. Arthur D. Little, Enterprises, associated with Arthur D. Little, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. This company, as the one be-all, end-all authority; is a specialist in the boilerplate letter, its general staff apparently unfazed by the greatest disaster in the history of civil engineering bankrupting the state scant miles from its campus. To Charles it was a dangerous symbol: the trogs of Cambridge, busy digging their own grave, at a cost of fourteen billion dollars, to be posted against the future income of a small, poor, state, legacy of the leftists and their unions. A pair that would beat five of a kind. And this was the only home choice the inventor had.

Of course others parade before the lowly tinkerbrain, sidekick of a rat named Pinky, as some kind of Agent. One listee credits himself with marketing a set of reindeer antlers for dogs, and promises to evaluate an idea for a couple of hundred bucks, and Get on a plane. It takes less than thirty seconds to evaluate an invention. This skel had invented himself a rip-off, carefully crafting his pitch to warn the reader of the perfidy of other players, and was presumably starving under a cloud of opulent dreams funded by other peoples' money..

By the same token, Charles gloried in spam. The stuff was delicious. He didn't even have to open the can; just the thought of so many lazy, greedy people so desperate for money they would deliberately cheat their fellow man smacked of the rich flavors of real life. Vicariously, he sat on their shoulders as they keyed their hopeless scheme strokes, finally clicking the button of their despair. It was Tony the Tiger's greeaat! Half the fun of virtue was delight in the suffering of the evil. He sometimes wondered if you lashed these morons hard enough, would they reform before they died of the lashing? (Would anyone want them to?)

Joseph Wambaugh had sketched a Tijuana dog in one of his novels. A mangy, half-starved wreck of a mutt. A human character had carried the animal home; fed it, treated it, and found it, a week later, down Mexico way. If there was no hope for the dog, then how about the pup? Did he, Charles, best in the world though he was, have the skill to so horrify young readers with the cost of ignorance and laziness he'd goad at least one in a dozen to the library, to the books store, and one day to a life half worth living? Could he get across, just using a keyboard, the horror of thousands of shifts at the stink of the grill in a cheap-meat burger franchise; the hundreds of calls a day required of the tele-marketeer?

Of course the irony of the situation was that youngsters were not meant to read his copy. Since about the only thing a modern kid had available, while mom and dad were out making enough dough to pay for all the stuff, was stuff they weren't meant to do, he wrote with a tiny song in the recesses of his heart. If he came across a kid in a car wreck, he might work diligently and take considerable risk to free the child. By this logic, it was worth the effort of writing his long, complex, and sometimes brooding stories, in an abstract hope one actually would drive a kid or two to reading. It was him, or Hooked-On-Phonics. (All three pages of it.)

As a writer, Charles regarded himself a parallel to Steve, Marcy's first husband in "Married With Children." He was played by the acknowledged best actor in the world; the guy could rip Gilbert and Sullivan, and that was all but impossible. Yet, he was disagreeable to watch; annoying, irritating, smarmy, abrasive and every synonym of yech there could ever be. ABBA, the world's best rock and roll band, was doormat to the hipster. Charles, in his turn, was preachy, judgmental, sarcastic, sanctimonious and half the time just plain old pissed off. Writing took him from the cozy world of his outpost to an atmosphere fully toxic to some third of contemporary children. Fat ones by the untold millions; sniffers, smokers, rock heads grinding their tiny ear bones to dust with the screech of their headphones. Gamers who'd sit on the end of the bed until four a.m., plugging and unplugging cartridges. Zoids of a hundred hues and stripes; even the ones who read seemed to crave the art of the airbrush ten times over any personality that might interfere with a gargoyle mutant's ability to zonk or be zonked. Interestingly, it was a generation that excelled in punishing itself and was home to a really small number of happy campers over age ten. Unappealing as he was when he took to the keyboard, Charles did amount to the rattle on the snake and had no reticence in reminding his audience of the peril and suffering inevitable if they fucked too vigorously with themselves. From his keyboard the conceited know-it-all tried to prevent problems. His teams at Creative Camp tried to solve them.

The night with Blissy and Timmy had been twelve hours of reinvention and rejuvenation: "Almost rebirth, itself," he sighed to himself as he watched one of his charges take the podium to sketch a concept he'd been developing for some months. As the boy talked, Charles contemplated a return to the real world of heightened carnality that was a secondary reason for the enterprise in the first place. He had let the place simmer long enough; the boys were lazy. Only the good stuff would have survived the atmosphere of lassitude undermined by incessant hormonal distraction. It was good to be back.

The boy, Allen Larkin, by name, launched into his presentation.

[Author's note: For those joining midstream, the usual disclaimers are on the cover page of this manuscript. The author restates his ownership of all ideas and concepts not the property of others. Think of it this way: If I don't own this intellectual property, nobody does, nor can. No one will ever develop it. If I do own these concepts, they may be developed by licensees along traditional patterns while applicable copyrights, trademarks, and patents, if appropriate, are formalized.]

Allen was a twelve-year-old camper; run of the mill which meant cute enough not to scare anybody, quiet, and absolutely brilliant. His presentation was, typically, for the camp, a bold use of existing technology. It concerned automotive safety. His lecture started with a preamble considering the light vehicle, in toto, then focused in on a glaring design compromise, no longer necessary considering the state of the art. It could have been posed as a riddle; had he been a clever speaker he could have bejiggled his fellow young inventors for an extended period of time. He didn't milk his presentation, but did give his audience a few moments and three clues. The first was a single word. Armor. The second, also, Bismark. Even the third, which was the word `Robin.'

Out of the hundred, it was Blissy that got it first. Hood. Fort Hood was home to two division of armor; "Bismark" sunk the "Hood," and, of course, Robin Hood. So, where did that leave everyone?

"Think of it," the young Larkin boy explained; "the prosaic, boring automotive hood. The only thing good about it, at this point, is that we don't call in a `bonnet,' as the Brits do. Other than that, it's an engineering waste, because it has to be opened to check and service the engine.

"What if it didn't? What if it almost never had to be opened?"

Sensing the question was more than rhetorical a boy raised his hand. Allen pointed to him, and he stood, as the boys were wont to do in the semi-formal atmosphere of a Presentation Evening.

"If it never had to be opened," the boy suggested, "it could complete a truss that would reinforce the whole front end of the vehicle."

Allen stood silent for a minute while ninety-nine minds, plus staff, reviewed the concept. As the moments passed the standing boy began to grin. He'd got it right. He saluted the podium and sat, as eager as the rest to hear the development of the idea.

The speaker reviewed the reasons one would ever need to raise the hood on a car. New batteries were sealed and had non-corroding terminals; no problem there. New cooling systems only needed attention in the event they were damaged. New drive belt technology meant these items rarely needed to be inspected or tightened. In fact, it was apparent that there was almost no reason to open the hood the modern car as it came from the factory. "But," asked the boy, "can we eliminate the `almost'? If we can, the hood can be welded shut and become an integral part of the front chassis. This would save substantial weight in the most critical of areas and also make the car ride and handle better because of the added rigidity. It would be a major safety factor in all frontal crashes.

"So let's hear the obvious problem," he concluded, eyeing the boy that had recently spoken.

"Checking the oil," the boy responded. He'd nailed it, and Allen flicked him a thumbs-up.

"Checking the oil," Allen repeated so all could hear. "Adding oil; also, the transmission fluid, if it's an automatic

"My idea is this: Measure the temperature of the engine with a super sensitive thermocouple, and apply the readings to an algorithm based on engine mass. The only variable will be the quantity of oil in the engine. Start the engine and you get an accurate readout of the amount of oil. Only three inputs need to be indexed, assuming the thermostat is closed, as it is on a cold start. The first is ambient temperature, the second is wind-chill, if any, and the third is volume of fuel delivered to the engine. If these are posted against time, the only variable remaining is engine mass, as I said, and the only variable to engine mass is the weight of installed oil.

"The tricky thing," the boy continued, "is to try to design it so it works on the fly; I don't think that can be done, because with the thermostat open, the cooling system enters the formulae, making the equation to complex to be processed by a cheap set of sensors. Maybe, someday.

"Now, once we've solved the problem of measuring crankcase oil quantity, we must have a provision to add oil. This would be done through an access door in the hood; also ATF and windshield-washer fluid.

"In summary," Allen concluded, "I calculate that a vehicle can be operated three years without opening the hood. When the time for service does come, the hood can be opened merely by cutting a few welds around its perimeter. This could be done in any small shop in a few minutes and even on the road with a hammer and cutting chisel. The car could be driven with the hood in an unwelded condition as safely as on an emergency spare tire.

"I estimate widespread implementation of this concept would save several thousand lives a year, somewhat reduce both weight and cost of manufacture of non-van light vehicles, and generally result in a stronger, safer, cheaper and more fuel-efficient vehicle with minimal inconvenience and even some new aesthetic options.

"Are there any questions?"

A hand went up and a boy asked: "Is this just for new vehicles, or can it be retrofit?"

"You'd get the largest improvement if it were a factory design; as an after-market installation, you'd get the safety. The temperature monitoring device used to report oil quantity could be retro-fit on any late-model vehicle; it uses a voice enunciator, so it is flexible as to installation.

Indian name: Bare Market Basket

"Have you come up with a name for the concept?" a boy asked.

Allen gave a shy grin. "The best I could do," he said, "is `Beefy Hood.' It's easy to remember, it describes the product, and it's really dumb."

"It's the thought that counts," Blissy shouted from his seat. It was, indeed, and there was an outburst of applause for Allen. Charles was thrilled to see how his protege simply fit in. Timmy grinned at his seat mate and punched him in the shoulder. The next boy took the podium

Henry Watson waited a moment as Allen took his seat amongst back slaps and high fives. Then he began his presentation:

"It's called Operation Black Feather," he began.

"If someone get lost in a remote area, or if there's a military unit you need to locate, you pull a Hitchcock and send in the birds.

"The birds are trained to seek out humans in remote areas, for food, from the time they are fledglings. When they are needed, they are taken to the area and released with GPS transmitters. An operator monitors them, and when they flock to a target, well, Game Over."

"What kind of birds?" a voice asked.

"Ravens; they're big and fast. Maybe pigeons. I'm not sure; don't know squat about birds."

The boys laughed. "What happens to the birds after they find the target?"

"That depends on the situation," the boy answered. "Not to put too fine a point on it, if they were on a military operation they might be blown up when their target was located. In civilian situations, they might revert to the wild, one reason I thought of ravens; they're pretty much a go-anywhere breed, or, possibly, they could be trained to circle back to their release point."

"How would they be released?"

"In civilian situations, from a chopper, truck or even a squad of first responders. In military situations, they would be dropped in protective capsules that would eject them, say a thousand feet in the air."

"How about at sea?" a boy asked.

"You'd probably lose the birds; on the other hand, you would need to release only two or three at a time because of the particularities of searching an empty ocean."

"How about at night?" the same boy asked.

"Good one. Maybe owls could be used. As the saying goes, it's just an idea."

"Dr. Atkins would like it," Charles pointed out to the boy at the podium; "all protein."

Timmy giggled, nudged Blissy and whispered in his ear: "like sperm." Both boys blushed as Charles read their gibberish thoughts from twenty feet away. Everyone was grinning as the next child stood behind the microphone.

"This is kind of after the horse has escaped from the barn. I mean, the lawyers have left Napster as one might reasonably expect, based on the precedents of OJ and Elian Gonzales and the ongoing harassment of Microsoft. This is what they should have done: sort of a retro business model, as it were.

"Their first VC dollars should have been used to run an ad in the trade papers and urban dailies. It should have read: `Napster Sucks.' The copy should have gone on to explain that over-the-Net music downloads were of very, very low quality. That such downloads, played at 128-Kbps, sounded good on small computer stereo speakers, only. Sounded terrible on any larger high-fidelity system. That the service was similar to thumbnail representations of artworks; everything was there, but in a highly degraded form. In other words, samples only, like getting one or two of each color of an M&M from a bag.

"Additional points they could have made," the boy listed, "include the value of the system to national defense. If nothing else, the free music download service showed a raw potential for basic file sharing that surely must have military applications. Also, along this line, are the diplomatic aspects of having a site bringing at least some kind of free music to more isolated and less affluent areas of the world.

"Other advantages of the system are more personal. Anyone downloading music with a conventional modem is forced to learn patience, strategy and tactics. The download screen must be watched like a hawk; concentration. Personally," the speaker said, "I never concentrated on anything until it came to downloading fifty of my favorite songs. The thing is, the payoff was so great. For a few hours of patience, focus and number juggling I'd get two or three successful downloads. It changed my life. It's why I'm here today. I wrote Napster again and again, but they're just like Arthur D. Little, Enterprises; generic in their effusive thanks and wishes for good luck, elsewhere.

"So," the speaker concluded, "I just wanted my comments entered into the minutes. Napster should be a permanent source of musical reference and allow individuals to explore music they could never afford to buy and try; instead, much like the nation at large, they are a lumbering corpse, if a twelve year old can be permitted an oxymoron."

"If they'd just hold their breaths," the senior wit of the camp interjected, "they'd lose the oxy and end up ordinary old morons, but who ever heard of a lawyer holding his breath?"

The boys laughed as the speaker, grinning, took his seat, to be replaced by another. This boy spoke on China.

"The way they go at it," he began, "they'll be feeding their entire population from the fish they get out of the lake created by Three Gorges Dam, five years after it's completed. The worst thing that's happened in modern politics was electing a trailer-trash president who had little concept of the extreme bond formed between any groups of Chinese and Americans who came together in World War II. He was also ignorant of the essential work done by Chinese laborers in complete the route of the Northern Pacific through the northern mountains. In the end, he had not the power or interest to steer the 2000 Olympic Games to this nation, which exceeds our own population by almost one billion people.

"The media schmoes found big bucks in selling the Tienamen Square incident."

The boy went on to state that the only clear video of the incident showed Chinese soldiers burning alive inside an APC engulfed in flames from Molotov cocktails thrown by students. He pointed out that the students had been allowed to demonstrate freely, for months; enough time to build a large-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. "Tienamen Square, however spelled," he said, "was a vital confluence in Beijing; the students were meant to be in class. They were given repeated advisories, suggestions, pleas and warnings. The reports the media schmoes could make the most money off of, the fastest, were the most lurid reports. On top of that, we've sent over noisy agitators who want it all, yesterday, and the fine points of jumping one point two billion people through the leftist hoops and bright ideas, be damned.

"There is no relationship with China," spoke the boy, warming to his subject, "other than joined-at-the-hip. We should acknowledge Taiwan is theirs just as much as Monhegan Island is ours, or Key West, or, dolorous as it is to say so, Catalina.

"China has enough problems without having to deal with Jesse Jackson's noisy pipsqueak nation, which is entirely dependent on vast amounts of flawless technology every hour of every day and in no shape to give advice to anyone higher on the food chain than Cuba.

"In their words, we are a paper tiger. Given massive amounts of time and an unlimited budget, we are able to so array ourselves that we can potshot enemies with losses running as low as zero. If our troops are deployed for more than ten days, we turn transport aircraft over to carrying greeting cards from school children and mom's cookies from home. If the Chinese knew how lifestyle dependent we really are, they'd call us toilet-paper tigers."

"Sweet, sweet young savage," Charles thought to himself as the audience embraced his joke. The boy continued.

"Twenty-something prisoners and the jitterbugs are out with twenty million yellow ribbons, or so the schmoes would have you believe, and, of course, there is nothing more beloved of the schmo than a twist of fabric; nice material. Well, the color sure fits finer than the finest fuck."

The audience howled at this. Pink skinned savage, indeed. It brought to Charles's mind the invulnerability of the writer. Critics could challenge all others, but he was above any word from them. Since their arts were parallel, a critic would have to be better than he was to open his mouth, otherwise end up back in his condo in a literary body bag. Criticizing his campers would put the analyst in an even worse fix; leave him begging for a body bag; literally, of course, so long is it's understood as a liter-ary body bag. Imagine trying to top English like that? Few will be called, none will be chosen. Charles was like Moses' cobra that ate two of Pharos'.

"We should fully acknowledge the Chinese heritage. Tell the story of the old bronze gong that can be heard nine miles away, then point out that the same bronze was never used to build a bicycle, or a gear train for a water wheel, or much of anything beyond bells and incense burners.

"If ever two entities were fated to spend eternity together, they are The United States of America and China. The relationship can range from the scratch and yowl of alien cats, if the inferior hearts and minds of today are allowed to obscure the big picture, to offloading a boomer in the South China Sea, if a nutjob gets loose, to undreamed of intercultural challenges and opportunities if the thing is pulled off in the good old American way, rarely realized in perfection, but with enough chapters of success for large enough groups to exceed all alternative systems other than absolute monarchy.

"I think what should be done is for China to open itself to the world. Get friendly, and stay that way. Invite tourists to come in and finance digs along the banks of the Yangtsze as the lake rises. Let them keep their finds, after they have been documented and registered with a DNA based tag. When China gets rich, not if, it can buy back its treasures. My business plan is titled: The Great China Rip. The child it saves could be me."

It goes without saying that all c-campers wanted Charles to be king. They were that smart. The cost of slithering and dithering and everlastingly being nit-picked by the legions of schmoes was not endurable. Boston was spending fourteen billion dollars on a tunnel complex of little value to small numbers of people, because Joe Moakley had learned how to treat a union, and treat it right. Gray Davis joined Billie Jean King and the other one as the most uninteresting people who have ever ambulated; was so head-over-heals with balancing this interest against that reality the only politically correct answer was gray matter against his toilet wall. Charles chuckled to himself; remembered how his father, a merchant captain, hated to pick up a West Coast crews. These union-mad freaks drove the American fleet off the seas the very minute the war emergency was over. Now the power mad schmo lovers had taken over the environmental movement; delayed everything until sundown, and were doing unto the state as the state had allowed to be done unto its sailors.

Charles always assumed it was his severe abuse as a child that made him giggle over total unified assholes working in dedicated coordination to make everyone horribly miserable for the longest possible period of time. On the other hand, the liberals had bullied the state into empowering consumers by mandating nutritional disclosure on soy sauce.

In denying the Chinese, these ignorant advocates of human rights were putting their little soccer players in extreme danger for their entire lives. Degrade and demoralize a dragon that's doing its utmost, and building the first wonder of the world in the process, and that dragon might not yield placidly to even hundreds of Cheyenne chopper machines. In addition, there was supreme irony is the US trying to preach anything much to anybody. We were right when we blocked Marxist terrorist intrusion in Southeast Asia, as Britain had been right in the Malaysian emergency, but this amounted, more or less, to the exception that proved the rule, because our incursions in other places were nothing to write home about, civil or military. Our neglect of our southern neighbors while we gamble ourselves half to death is worthy of a severe sentence, of and by itself. Africa is quietly reestablishing its reputation as a slaughterhouse because our media schmoes found a cheap sell in a couple of camera wallopers who were exactly the right color for the job. They do love their puff and frippery, you know.

None of the camp boys were parrots, chauvinists, party-line aparatchiks, toadies or anything particular except Smart. Most of them were white; a cultural reality based far more on thousands of dinner table conversations than any factor of genetic potential. Charles was lightning quick to point out that a Zulu raised in Buckingham Palace would be indistinguishable, on the telephone or on paper, from a prince or a princess. He'd also point out that The Prince might not fare quite as well in a race against his adopted Zulu brothers, and that's about all the difference that could be measured. This said, it was a cradle to grave issue, or the next thing to it. Efforts to duplicate an enriched childhood in a community college classroom were no more likely to succeed than would trying to make a kid with a sweet mom into an A-list humorist.

The camp leader decided to pack it in early; let his staffers provide a little wit and by-play for the rest of the meeting. He wanted to get back to his computer and write about his night with Blissy and Timmy.

Chapt. 12

Timmy's epic with his cousin, Carl, had left all three of them well imbued with lust. No fancy speak could lessen its affect, and when Blissy added his story the mood had spontaneously tensed. The young red-head's tale of Ireland had gone on to delineate his first night in green pastures, where he'd lain with boys and young men, one of whom had a tag-along sprite, gamin, of tender years, and female.

She was the secret within the secret, there because no one wanted Timmy to grow up bent. There was boy stuff and girl stuff and a happy child learned it early in life; in parallel to the Masai who packed the nippers off to a communal hut at the age of six. Several thousand dark nights of freedom yielded one of the few perversion-free tribes known, with the data tainted because young women were routinely semi-castrated. Had this not been the case, the statistics would likely be much the same. Toiling against nature had to hurt just as much as yielding to it. Being human simply meant possessing an ability to carve a path across a slope. Shepherds did it every day, and this was but another path.

"How old to I have to be to do that," Timmy had asked as they worked leisurely at licking up Carl's sperm and swapping it tongue to tongue. The child's voice was slightly blurred from the slickness in his throat and he gasped and giggled a bit before the words came out clearly.

"Thirteen, lad, would be a guess," Carl replied.

"What happens in the meantime?" the boy queried, five long years on his young mind.

"Truth of the matter is it ye want?" Carl said, "well, you've come to the right place bairn. And it's a wonderful truth I'll be telling you. Hear it from me; you are at the luckiest age; now, and for years to come.

"Well, there, now my tongue's slipped half way to Blarney, leaving you, at an age when a minute is an hour and an hour is a day, biding your time and waiting to hear the best of it. For the fact of the situation is as follows: what just happened to me, well, for at least a wee bit, but not for ever so long, mind you, is, not to put to fine a point on it, done and over.

"Not for years to come, thanks be.

"Now a phrase like that can have two meanings in a conversation like this, and I'll be needing to ken you to the both of them right here at the beginning. You see, there's the word with `ome', like a chant, ome, ome, ome. Then there a shorter version, and its spelling is um; um, um, um. That's what came between us so quickly just the while ago. C-u-m. It's known by a dozen English names, one would suppose, with variations on either side of the Atlantic. Porn writers have a dozen more; to the extent it might be charged, with some perspicacity, that these writers are, in reality, frustrated gourmands or nutritionists.

"Being more gently born than our tawdry American cousins we tend to eschew nouns like sauce, load, spunk and a number of others. In the meadows, we hold a Victorian view of the thing; use the old fashioned, more polite words. In theory and in practice one does not climb thousands of feet into the mist to hear the talk of the town."

"You lost me before we even got to the mist," the boy piped up. "What's the wonderful truth?"

"Now wasn't I just getting there at my own speed in my own way?" Carl quizzed. "Remember, along with fine talk, your visitors will be well pleased with a modicum of patience and deportment. Perhaps two modicums, should ye be mid-August high. And that means no hurry; no a-jolting and a-jerking of the reins and trying to rush things along half askew and cock-eyed.

"Remember how fast it was over, with us? That's just something that will happen with a child so fair as yourself, make no mistake, but, all the same, one should try to draw out the experience with a little teasing, but no tormenting, mind you; our writers are fair enough at that game, thanks; rather, a friendly play that goes on for a bit, then, perhaps, two or three more bits, before anything grand happens."

"What happens in the cottage," the boy said in a patently phony steel voice, "will be nothing less than a grand old bloody murder if you don't loose off with you faldercating and fusturations and answer me. What - is - the - wonderful - thing?"

"I'll allow your haste and ignore it, Timmy me lad," Carl replied. "But flirt ye not with the fast way of the whore, not with others. Promise that, lad. If you're going to be big, you've got to be big all the way through; mature, mature all the way through. You've been picked by the whole shepherd body, every boy and jack of them, as first of your age to wend this season; note it is your very birthday. Now, so as not to torment I will impart to you such as you appear so eager to learn, for a wonder it truly is.

"The truth of the matter is that after a mature bloke such as myself spends with a loving and lovely partner it rather takes him out of commission for the odd moment. A lad your age has no such limitation. Aye, you might not be able to wet your partner's chest with your hot young sperm, not for a few years, but you can have your own internal experience again and again, same as a girl, it just so happens to so happen."

"Whose the girl?" Timmy asked, apparently finally satisfied with his Irish luck.

"Beck-beck Fallon," Carl aid.

"She's only six," Timmy said, a bit horrified.

"Well there nothing overly scientific about the way we carry on, you know," Carl explained, "but be that as it may, it seems a good idea to give you a wee taste of what a mature male will be feeling when he has your naked young self against him. When you know how good you feel to your partner, you're half way to being a lover, and, if ye posses the wit of a common fly, half-way from being any kind of fast moving slut. Remember, my son, there's many a street where a boy as fair as yourself can be had for a few small bills. Beauty is absolutely nothing without strongly focused and gently patient ways. Way of the world, wot?

"Is she up in the hills, now?" Timmy asked.

"Yes, with your mates.

"Is she a good choice? Remember, that's yours and yours, alone; the choice. Always. Thus the knife and the stick. Something ugly comes your way, be damn sure it is indeedy ugly, then crouch to a low stance, balanced, mind you, and set yourself a wall of pain and blood. It will probably never happen that way, but it's best to be prepared."

"Is it wild up there, really?" the boy asked, his eyes sparkling.

"No child; heaven forbid," Carl said. "Think what mites your age have to endure to keep their flocks from tigers in a land of snakes. Just the wind here, and her old friend, the weather, which she likes to have join in her play over the moors and crags. But who could be better dressed against a bit of breeze than a boy with a sharp knife and a thousand dim-witted wool walkers. That, with St. Patrick and his herpophobia, and it should be safe as houses, most particularly when it comes to the pleasure of special friends, where it's far safer than any rude house cheek and jowl with lane and alley filled with twitching noses."

"All the better to be done with them," Timmy agreed, nodding his head.

"Don't be too hard on the biddies," Carl said. "They're the ones that end up with a lifetime of work over a moment's passion out of control. If ye broths lie about all day, fornicating, then it's hard to see how you might miss every wrath in the bible, and, aye, some new ones to boot. So you listen sharp, and mind yourself anywhere a long ear or sharp eye could reach. That's the bargain; we don't fool around, as the Yanks say, in town, and they do not climb into the hills to find out what's going on. They don't ask and we don't tell. Close to perfect, when you think about it; the work gets done, timely and well, and no one has reason to complain."

"Well, I'll be the first then," Timmy said, again using his mock steely voice, "if we don't get a move on, as they say."

"Right," the older cousin said to his eight-year-old understudy, "a move-on it is then, coming right up."

Half an hour later the eighteen year old red-headed athlete was being pushed up the first of a long slope reaching to the upper valley. "The rule is, three walls from town, and a good look, and then we can hold hands."

"I like pushing," the boy responded with a giggle. Then he grew a bit serious. "Carl," he asked, "why didn't you make me cum back at the house?"

"What?" the older boy responded, "and cheat your mates, what loves you as well as your mum, today, and your wife will, one day, if you're indeed a lucky one, out of sharing your first time? Cheeky boy!"

Timmy giggled. "Better than being a poof like you," he said, repositioning himself in front of Carl, and grabbing a hand, the better to tow him.

"I think you'll find," the older boy responded, a serious note to his voice, "that we're so poof free we might petition the courts to certify us as such. We have nothing against dreamy fags, should they actually be artists or contribute, somehow; even prancing-waiter will do in a pinch; no, laddie, me bucko, we're far from fag city where we're going. We're gay and happy; greet the dawn with a smile and lay our heads on our pillows reluctantly and with sorrow we have to sleep at all. Style mean nothing to us; hair, clothes, shoes, syntax: meaningless to such a degree they are not even worth studied avoidance or calculated rebellion."

"What do you talk about... we talk about?"

"Ideas," Carl answered, "calm, bloodless dissection; that's the lot of us. Like a bunch of bleeding boffins in a lab, looking down through the lenses of a microscope, and prodding the jellied mass on the slide with a pin, calmly, mind you; intellectually, just to see what the hell happens. "

"And what does," Timmy asked, "happen?"

"We arrange the world very much to our liking, and since we do it; come up with our great schemes and plans, based on long nights spent with high-mountain hikers from all over the world, we get pretty good at it. Even if things were spinning along on a righteous axis, as they have from time to time in history, we'd still improve things. With socialism carrying us rapidly the only place it can, our ideas actually become a matter of life and death.

"Mind you, we don't take it serious like; it's just the way things are; little we can do but laugh, when one gets right down to it. But it's physically impossible to make love all night long for more than three days in a row, leaving some time to talk. What separates us from the masses is who we talk to. Now there's a quality that has improved. The little left-wingers are all wagging the dog for a lazier lifestyle, so the high pastures are free of them. It works. They have their delicatessens, salons and furriers; we, our mountains, our hikers, our sheep and our shepherds; our good works with the inner boy and the outer boy. It's all very white; very superior and creative. We have more fun in a day than will be found in a dozen temples in a year, and, into the bargain, supply copious quantities of wool, not the mention the occasional rack of lamb. We are better than they are; much, much better, even though we send to market that which abides on cloven-hooves."

"So we get taught to hate everybody?" the youngster queried.

"It's a good place to start. The underlying rule is to hold no prejudice against the good man or woman, while maintaining a realistic perspective on the likelihood of exceptions to stereotypes. While this is a gross winnowing process, it saves gross amounts of time, allowing one to commune with those who matter, the more."

Timmy was growing more excited by the minute. To actually talk to people who were real. Seven was not to early to begin to have a thorough understanding of the bleak banality of standard-issue thinking. What those fools missed with their desperately stale churches and athletic fanaticism! Narrow old worlds; diversions not selected in a meaningful manner but rather activities that amounted to an expedient palliative to sitting around doing absolutely nothing from sundown to sunup. The Chinese kids could speak, understand, read and write Mandarin by age six. His mates had vocabularies of a few hundred words and their skills were limited to button mashing. There had to be something better, now that he was no longer seven.

They climbed slowly, steadily. Carl was impressed at how well his understudy kept up, hour after hour. The languorous homosexual in his urban lair, police all around, was going to have to go some to beat this, Carl thought to himself as they tramped on. Not that a nude kid on black satin sheets would necessarily be a bad lover, but what did you talk about afterwards? Music? Sports? Fashion? What the fuck was wrong with the wretched dons in Mexico or the underlying forces which drove Germany mad and plunged the world into a fifty-five million-life blood fest? Was a drape of fabric or guitar riff really more interesting? Or was it more fun for three little shepherds to lie with a tall Nordic trekker, and talk of astronomy while looking at stars hardly dimmed by terrestrial lights.

Carl thought of Travolta be-bopping down the street, mad for a shirt, with his can of paint. It got one's attention, like a leaking toilet, but could more be said? The actor had made a fortune sort of by flapping his big lips; flew a little jet with enough power for an airliner, and, having likely never read fifty mainstream books since the day he was born, was a devotee of Scientology, the ultimate and vastly expensive final level of which amounted to the tale of a visit from an interstellar female. [It was always the author's belief that the highest level of Scientology was the conversion of fleecee to fleecor, which would make it profitable, if not exactly spiritual.] Well, it had worked for him, or maybe it was the girl-transfixing pucker smackers; anyway, the question of the moment was, was there to be more beauty to be found in Timmy in the grass with his camp partners, or in lips, a jet, a foolish cult, and the entire industrial city of Hollywood, California?

One thing for sure in life; there were right paths and wrong paths and it was the right ones that were worth the effort. Theirs was coming to an end, for the time being, and the end was signaled by whistles and shouts from on high and the rapid appearance of a charging band of renegades, perverts, all.

"You're early!" was the common cry as the six novitiate shepherds gathered around. The commotion yielded up the phrase Happy Birthday, and the chorus was entered into with more enthusiasm than the average eight year old was likely to experience in a decade. Beck-beck had instigated the embarrassment and Timmy couldn't help but regard the half-feral female child with a tender look, macho company notwithstanding. The look was not lost on any of the group, and a bolt of excitement raced through the little throng.

"What if he loves her?"

The thought ran through six of the eight minds gathered. (To two, oh-so suddenly, it was not a question.) Real lovers of their ages, six and eight, were the stuff of mighty legend. It was whispered that watching such a couple actually made what happened in the night tents, better. Few believed such a thing was possible, but it would be nice to know. And a one-second glance said they would know, plus, the little girls remembering the boy's birthday in all the excitement of simply meeting, and meeting early, at that.

Beck-beck pulled Timmy, Timmy pulled Carl, and the five young novitiates sort of pushed and pulled as chance provided opportunities. As always, the youngsters were thrilled to have a mature male among them. It was wild, depraved, lewd and carnal, ah, but no more sinister than a stag with his harem.

In ten more minutes of hauling and shoving the new arrivals, the group reached an outcropping of stone that sheltered their camp from the north.

Two flies were already in the web; a hiker in his early thirties accompanied by a boy of around ten. The little shepherds were surprised to see Carl greet the newcomers, who'd arrived just half-an-hour earlier, by name. "Frank!" the senior shepherd exclaimed, "you did make it. And this must be Kenneth."

The ten year old smiled and held out his hand. "This is too good," Carl said. "You said you'd come, but we were only together a short while so it was too much to hope for."

"Well," said Frank, "I never did forget about your telling me you'd be bringing a new boy to the high country; I wasn't sure, either, but wanted to get my son here into the swing of things; he's just the age to appreciate a secret or two; ergo, here we are, on speculation as it were, and we've still got wind for a few miles if this is not the right time."

Frank Fitzwilliams had been a rare one-night-stand. Carl remembered him arriving, end of season, lucky to have made it at all after an explosive growth spurt at his design studio. As the little boys felt about him as a leader he felt about the unexpected arrival. Older men could be utterly cool. Carl blushed to think that, one-night-stand, or not, they'd not had sex. Frank's studio had been in final development of a radically improved light vehicle power system; the talk, with a few kisses, had gone `till dawn, and that had been the end of it. The man had mentioned his son; Carl had mentioned bringing his little cousin on the particular date, and both had returned to busy lives.

That was then, this was now. With a slow look around, Carl took in a scene of particular order and merit. That would be Frank; sensed more than seen. Actually, it could have been most any adult. Just a senior presence was often enough to focus a small group of children, at least for awhile, and thus the camp had a swept and tidy look he was not expecting; the plunder laboriously carried aloft in backpacks was already stowed in the A shanty, while even the B shanty looked freshly tended. Arriving early at a well set camp; what could be better than that?

"Dad's told me ever so much about you," Frank's ten year old said to Carl. "He says you're wicked smart; strange, you know; you must be, because normally he doesn't exactly go all goose bumps over anyone between fifteen and twenty five. Worst of the bad years, he calls them."

"Well," Carl replied, "your dad's a lot wickeder smarter than I am, so I'm glad to hear it. Glad you could make it, too."

Ken grinned and was off to join the others his age as they scrambled together a high birthday tea. Both the A shanty and B shanty were monuments to how much work it took to stay alive, way back when. The buildings were of stone and wood assembled high above where any draft animal or vehicle could pass; the very shingles, a compromise over the regular roof tiles, had been brought up, fifty pounds at a time. Each board represented an arduous two-hour climb from the nearest road; each stone had been carted hundreds of yards from a hidden outcrop where it would not be missed. As word had spread during the last century a certain kind of tourism had developed, and these tourists had embellished the stark, primitive shepherd's hut with comfortable furnishings and even a modest collection of luxuries and gadgets. To these Carl added the heavy battery and solar charger he'd lugged from the valley while Timmy displayed his two MP3 players to appropriate oohs and ahs.

They were almost cloying, Frank thought, watching Carl, his son, and the others around the trestle table that dominated the front yard, if thousands of acres of pasture could be called a yard. They all got on so. They even took turns looking at the little music devices, then, apparently by mandate, made sure Beck-beck ended up in possession of on player. It took getting used to. Surely someone was not being treating fairly, it was someone else's turn to do this and someone else's to do that. But no, cloying it was.

Frank had briefed the crew he'd met on arrival at the camp while they'd waited for Carl and Timmy to arrive; now, here they were discussing his invention, some doing this and others doing that as they bandied about his scheme; the camp running as smoothly as the Flying Scot. Yes, Frank thought, cloying it surely is, then, remembering a look Timmy had given Beck-beck, he added Cloying it is not likely to remain.

Carl, for his part, was delighted to hear the kids talking about Frank's project. Keeping their intellects busy; keeping them on the prod, in general, during the day, made for explosive contact when bed-time finally arrived. The senior shepherd knew from experience it was all a little bit like a cat. Keep piles of buttery fish in front of a pussy, it would never enjoy a meal in its life. Leave a bunch of kids loose to do it, at will, they'd reduce themselves to roosters and hens; never quite losing interest, nor taking much interest, like the hippie kids of the sixties. It was the Christmas-every-day syndrome wherein the kids get sick to death of early rising and clouds of wrapping paper on about the fifth day. Only it wasn't. That's the kind of place it was; lots of focus and not a little fun.

Tea served and a stew set simmering for late supper, the campers broke into groups. Several of the boys gravitated to Frank, while Ken seemed especially taken with Carl. From his first visit, brief as it had been, Frank knew the two shepherd huts at the camp site were there so fathers and sons, if hiking together, could be separated by a hundred feet, at night, if they wished. They always wished, it was the way of the high country, and so with the washing-up complete and six hours until dinner the camp took on a tense atmosphere. Two virgins out of the ten gathered, a father and son, and a female.

Things rarely, if ever, got that complicated in the normal run of summers; usually it was a few boys with a senior Carl's age, and anywhere from no hikers to three or four at the most; possibly a dozen father/son combos in a season, with perhaps one or two virgins, and no females. "In it's hundred of years of existence," Carl wondered, "has there ever been such a group?" No one knew, of course; maybe the dark ages had seen even more variety and greater numbers; druids, witchcraft and Satanism on a large scale, even mass orgies, which never occurred in modern times. Fauns, Sartres, alchemists and bubbling pots high in the private folds of summer grazing meadows. Too bad the scriveners of old had not been honest in their tales; a lot more kids would be reading in the current age. Well, Carl supposed, today they had Pokemon. Seemed sort of synthetic and thin blooded; sold and bought; lame, in a word. Whatever had happened to real pocket monsters?

The deck was quickly shuffled. In the Alpha hut, Carl, Timmy, Ken, Beck-beck, an eleven year old named Fritz, and Jason, a strapping fourteen year old, Becky's big brother. Frank had tried valiantly to piggy back the remaining four boys for nap-time at the Beastie hut, `Beastie' seeming to fit the venue more than the name Bravo, which normally went with Alpha, and ended up being hauled and shoved by two, with two tykes, both ten, still clinging from his shoulders with their legs twined around his thighs.

As much as the shepherding system picked the best and the brightest and as much as it went for the mind over the back (or loins), it was also a scheme based on reality. A reality as old as the business was that sheep died; very few, but, inevitably, a few each season. These were not wasted, and while the boys were never expected to eat mutton, an export for England, they were expected to harvest and dress the pelts of any fallen animal. As a result, the inside of each hut was a sheepskin bazaar; a floor of thick wool, undulating like moguls on a ski slope, with benches at the side of the single room, also richly padded. An emergency kitchen occupied one corner, and another held a highboy for storage of light blankets as well as the scant clothing and kit of the summer residents. Pegs on the walls completed the furnishings. They held belts with knives, walking sticks, and odds and ends.

No windows. Moss plugs could be removed from chinks between the stones, letting in a little light; otherwise, the interior was illuminated by lamps as old as the bible. Timmy was almost reluctant to take off his new boots to enter, but a soft look from the little girl, who had almost become a limpet during tea, got the young male to work on his laces. In moments, his little feet were naked of boot and sock, and Beck-beck dragged him through the door.

Both children tackled Carl, dragging him to a woolen mound. Ken came close and watched, fascinated from two feet away. Carl fell to his back, bringing the eight-year-old boy and six-year-old girl onto his powerful chest. He hugged the wriggling kids to himself, and they fought to both get their arms around his neck while simultaneously fighting to kiss him on the lips. As Ken stood, still transfixed with the sight before him, Jason came gently behind the ten year old and put his hands on the boy's slim waist. Fritz, the little nine year old, took a position adjacent to the male couple, his groin pressed lightly against Ken's right hip. As his eyes adjusted to the dim interior light, Ken became more excited by what was happening at his feet and he leaned against the powerful teen standing behind him. He was a complete virgin; had never experimented, never had but the vaguest carnal thoughts even when showering or as he lay abed waiting for innocent sleep. Now, for the first time, hormones raced through him making him intensely glad he was having this experience, whatever it was going to be, with such cool people, in such a cool place, and at such a cool age. His racing thoughts were interrupted by a whisper in his ear. "I want to touch you under your shirt," Jason said, "is that okay?"

Ken could find no words; his mouth was dry as paper. He leaned more firmly against the boy holding him, and the hands at his waist tightened gently and began to wander lower to his belt-line in the classic manner of child molester and boy child.

On Shoot Rocks Candy Mountain, the somewhat rude name given the woolen love mound that swelled over half the floor of the hut, Carl had maneuvered his children on their backs, and was holding them to him with a hand against each flat young stomach. As Jason's big teenage hands crept to the silky boy skin under Ken's shirt, he bent forward, gently lowering the new boy to his knees on the luxuriant wool. Fritz joined at the rear and the six-legged caterpillar inched forward with Fritz's arms locked around Jason waist. Beck-beck stared adoringly at her big bother as he slowly approached with the handsome new boy in his arms. His fingers were under Ken's shirt by now and the ten year old glowed with his first lust. "Unbutton her blouse," the teen said to Ken, as he got within inches of the little girl's arching chest.

"He is so perfect," thought the female first-grader as Ken, half supported by her big brother, approached. Her beautiful Timmy, cuddled safely beside her, was too young to be a man to her, and Jason wouldn't until she'd grown. "It's not natural for a girl your age to walk around stiff-legged," he'd said, refusing gently to mount her while giving her a long hour of climaxes using his fingers and tongue. She'd whispered her forgiveness and made do with watching him intently as his climaxes wracked his powerful male frame and he spread his hot teen seed in syrupy puddles over her thighs and her stomach, finally allowing her to hold the tip of his spurting penis tight to her vagina while he made a final spurt or two of cum into her belly.

That exercise had not made her sore; changed her gait, but had put her in a dreamy mood all the next day -- as her thoughts drifted free of endless spelling and to the lusty little sperms swimming deep inside her. As Ken's fingers reached to her top button, with Timmy staring from inches away, the little girl had a series of private thoughts: They were up here for three days. They'd be getting lots of exercise; the more, because there were not yet any sheep to worry about; therefore, well, not to put too fine a point on it, by the time she again reached the valley floor, and passed through the village, it was likely she'd be walking just fine. Maybe even fine and dandy.

As Ken bent to expose the girl's chest, Carl removed his left arm from Timmy's soft belly and braced the shoulder of the young stallion. Ken turned his face and nibbled Carl's arm in appreciation for the support, then went beck to the slim female now almost directly underneath him. Jason's hands were now both well up on the ten year old's naked chest and the boy was feeling urgency in his need to see Beth-beth's tiny nipple.

"Rip it," Jason coached, adding: "she love's to sew."

Ken giggled along with the little sister. He looked deep into her eyes and she nodded vigorously. Touching her throat, touching the almost baby soft skin at the base of her neck, the boy laid his hands on the fabric just above the first button and fisted the cloth. Walking his hands in opposite directions, he met the strain and mastered it; with a pop the button blew off, landing soundlessly at the base of Shoot Rocks Candy Mountain. More of the little freckle-face's creamy skin; he bent to kiss it, the neck, and the candy curve, base of neck to inner shoulder.

Carl missed having Frank present, but understood his reluctance to share carnality with his son. That was probably the most unusual and problematic of all possible relationships, father/son, but a handsome man to treat him as a child would have added to the experience of all these children and a fourteen year old. On second thought, he mused, that might be a better tableau for the long hours of a night without sheep and responsibilities other than nominal cooking and cleaning. He wondered what the young father would think, should he part the heavy curtain which made a fair-weather door. Would he like seeing the six-three redhead, arched back on the woolen mound, holding a leggy six-year-old girl and tall eight-year-old boy against his powerful chest as Jason, mostly likely boy in the county to put the teen in libertine, held the rugged ten year old from the back while the tyke named Fritz watched on? Since Ken could be exchanged for one of the boys currently at the Beastie hut, it was a scenario to keep in mind for later.

Ken had come to a standstill on Beck-beck's chest. One button and he was shuddering in Jason's arms and against Carl's bracing arm as he bent to kissing and licking the immature female underneath him. Fritz, veteran of a summer in the camp, began to play an active role. He reached between the panting children, and unbuttoned Carl from top to bottom, peeling the red-heads shirt aside as Beck-beck and Timmy wriggled to allow him room to work. Timmy took the boy's example and quickly unfastened his own shirt, baring his chest. Ken's right hand went to him, gentle fingers tracing, then taking up the lascivious fondling of molestation. As Jason and Carl supported him he had full will of both the children arching to his touch. Felix worked quickly on Beck-beck's remaining buttons, and in moments her chest was also nude to the trembling boy being held by her big brother. This second mission complete, Fritz fell next to Carl on the sheepskin mound and whispered urgently in his ear. "We've got to get naked or it will be too late."

Intellectually, Carl agreed. At the rate things were proceeding there were going to be six pairs of soggy underwear at any moment, and that would not be the best outcum. He knew, yes he knew; his entire brain knew; but his entire body was an agony of reluctance to stop until after the end; to keep fondling the wriggling panting children on his chest as he watched the virgin in Jason's arms become a slack-jawed caricature of lusting boy.

It was Fritz that saved the moment. In his search for pecknowledgy the precocious child realized in an instant that action, not words, was called for, and swiveled his lithe young body in such a way that he could reach Ken's shirt. Where the new boy had gently popped a single button on the little girl Carl was holding, Fritz simply ripped from throat to navel and belt-line. Jason played along, pulling the sundered shirt completely free of his child lover the moment the last button went spinning to the floor, and then he hauled him free of the children and arched him as his hands now fully and wantonly explored the milky skin the chick-breasted child. With Ken's chest raised clear, Fritz attacked the boy's belt and zipper. The girl and boy, taking the cue, rolled off Carl and went to work, removing his shirt, entirely, then tackling the thick leather belt.

Jason took over the responsibility of getting Ken naked, and Fritz worked at the fourteen year old; shirt, then pants. It all took less than a couple of minutes, including Fritz stripping his own shirt as Beck-beck worked on his hiking shorts, for them all to be naked. Carl wished, son or no son, that Frank would make an appearance at the door and help slow things down. Yet, even under his tutelage, things did not deteriorate as much as they might have. In his logical mind it almost seemed gravity was an order above depravity. Almost.

The seventeen-year-old boy and his children stood, now naked other than their gold crosses, looking at each other as Fritz maintained a position in the center of a ragged circle, gently pushing various wannabe combinations apart. When he had things under control, the nine year old took his place at the perimeter and they all spent minute after minute standing stock still except for their heads which followed their eyes, spectacle to spectacle. Ken's boner was enormously swollen, and Beck-beck gazed on it in wonder. Timmy, although enchanted with Beck's tender female chest, could hardly take his eyes from Carl; in his minds eye he saw again and again the huge gushing explosion which had sprayed and splashed from the big hard log of a penis that very morning. While Timmy was watching Carl with special interest, it was Timmy that Jason was watching. He sensed he'd have a special time leading this particular child to his first fully male experience, and he felt certain of being able to take his time with the tall eight year old simply because it was obvious that Ken was going to be inside his little sis time and again for an hour or more. When opportunity cocks, he groaned to himself, his gaze never leaving the frame of the red-headed birthday boy whose boner was fully long and thick for his tender age.

Arms at their sides, they continued staring at each other, somehow realizing this was one of the very best parts. Beck-beck finally broke the spell by reaching for her brother. She pivoted Jason with a gentle touch to his swollen penis, then guided him back against the woolly mountain, lowering him to his back and wriggling aboard the teenager with a beckoning look to Ken.

Jason hitched himself up and over the top of the little woolen hill, slightly arching both his own body and that of the female child in his arms. Carl took Jason's place behind Ken, molesting the boy freely as he lowered him to the girl. Beck-beck, who had never been laid, yielded to Fritz's coaching and spread her legs wide apart for the approaching boy's big penis. The child in his arms was so small, Jason was able to reach under her thigh and cup his hand over his sister's vagina. Ken, looking down, used the fist as a target and Carl helped maneuver him into position, fondling the young stallion's balls and gripping the extended penis at its base. Fritz made up the third leg of a tripod, bracing against Carl as he lowered Ken home. Beck-beck stared down over her tummy in fascination. Ken's penis stood from Carl's fingers like a rod as Jason gently masturbated her with his right hand reaching up from underneath. Fritz guided her left leg even wider with his left hand while using his right to encourage her to raise her hips to the approaching phallus.

Ken was sweating and panting from his first touch by Carl. The ten year old had never masturbated and now a spectacular seventeen year old was not only touching him there but guiding him to a wet six-year-old girl. Like Beck-beck, he stared down between their childish bodies, watching as his boner moved to Jason's waiting hand and the virginity it shielded. Realizing the boy would be on overload, Carl played out his role by tightening his grip on Ken's waist; yes, to prevent a stabbing. The last inch was gone-by, the tip of Ken's penis touched Jason's hand, by now wet and slick from what he'd been doing to his little sister. With a guttural grunt the boy tried a frantic thrust at the first touch to the tip of his swollen penis. Carl's athletic right arm absorbed Ken's lunge and tamed it to a gentle laying into the girl. Jason whispered "It will just sting for a minute," and moved his hand clear of his sister's groin, leaving only Carl to guide the children together.

"Timmy!" Becky squealed, then panted the name repeatedly as Carl lowered Ken against her hymen. The eight year old, lying on Jason's chest beside his little girlfriend, watched in awe as the union of the two young bodies became unstoppable. Jason's hands, now free of her pussy, roamed the flanks of his sister, and Timmy joined in, twining his fingers with Jason's as they molested the girl, keeping their fondling fingers from blocking her view down over her white belly. Carl held Ken by his hips, now that the boy's penis was in position, and let him sink with short-stroke urgent thrusts, inch-by-inch, into Beck-beck's body and soul.

This couldn't last, and didn't. Fritz slightly loosened his grip on Beck-beck's left knee. Instantly sensing freedom, the vixen broke her limb free, planting her heel just above Ken's knee and pulling him with all her mountain girl strength. Simultaneously, her hips sprang to her lover and in a second he was shuddering and gasping, buried to the hilt in the hot, wriggling young girl. Carl and Jason made a kiddie sandwich, wrapping their arms as best the could around each other and pulling the children tight together, so Beck-beck could get used to Ken without being fucked. As this tableau transpired, Jason began manipulating Timmy to bring his hard penis to his mouth. Timmy cooperated and Fritz stayed out of the way by taking a position between Jason's legs. At a touch the fourteen year old spread wide, and Fritz moved forward. This put him in position to again play the coach, and he whispered in Carl's ear: "Ken's never seen it happen. If you hold him from the side, I can do it to you onto Beck-beck's breasts, with masturbation, so he can see what happens before he cums, himself."

Carl moved as bidden. Fritz scuttled in amongst the twined bodies to whisper to Jason that he'd be back, "Soon." Timmy braced Ken's right shoulder, making up for the imbalance caused by Carl's new position on Ken's left side. Together, they slowly raised the ten-year-old stallion from the chest of the little girl. The moment there was sufficient room between the young male and female, Fritz mounted Carl from the rear, penetrating him gently but fully with his nine-year-old's boner while reaching under the powerful teen's waist to his big man's cock. Timmy could feel his big cousin shuddering even through Ken's body. In seconds this kid was going to know it all. And seconds it was. Ten, fifteen, and at twenty Carl's ejaculation began with a massive spurt of semen discharged all over three of his young partners. Working by unspoken signal, Timmy ran his fingers through the stream of white fluid and found Fritz's hand, transferring the sperm in a low-five. With a slippery and slightly sticky right hand, Fritz went back to Carl, quickly stroking three additional long ropes of sperm from the teen. Beck-beck had seen Jason's sperm several times, but Ken had no idea. The sight of the big white snakes appearing as if by magic all over the breast of the little wild-child left him groaning and shaking like a leaf.

"Ask him, sis," Jason whispered in Beck-beck's ear.

"It's okay to fuck me now," the little girl said to Ken. "Please."

Carl loosed his grip on Ken and the boy took his weight on his own shoulders. As he lowered his face to Beck-beck she whispered: "Only Timmy can kiss me. Not you or my brother."

"Are you sure," Ken whispered back. "This would be a terrible time to make a mistake."

"Half sure," the girl said.

"Okay," said the boy, "I'll make love to the other half."

With that he schtooped the little shiksa, big time. He fucked her, slowly at first, then the feeling of her sperm-wet belly against his own tight boy stomach pumped a super dose of hormones all through his virgin body. He pumped into her less gently, then less so. Beck-beck had both ankles locked just under his butt, and she pulled him to her, matching his thrusts with an urgent will. Fritz completed Carl's emission by messaging the last of his semen from his swollen purple tip, and when the source was finally exhausted, returned quickly to his position between Jason's now frantically spread legs. As he began masturbating the young teen his spermy hand rubbed firmly in Ken's crack, driving the boy from the ecstatic depths of full penetration of a tight six-year-old vagina to a wet pumping fist against his anus. In a frantic effort to experience both stimulations, simultaneously, Ken drove Beck-beck, headlong, into her first total, absolute, eye-rolling orgasm.

Jason held his bucking, yelping sister, and Carl did his best with the young male beast in his arms, slippery though the boy was. After something of an eternity, the girl lay gasping and still. Ken slowed to the gentle, methodical thrusts he needed and tried lowering his face to the child pinned beneath him as he felt the warm animal glow at his waist focus and finally refuse denial. He tried to look into her eyes. "That's like kissing, only for Timmy," she whispered, kindly.

"What do you want me to do when it happens?" he asked the little princess.

"Jason bites me on my right shoulder, that's his signal if I'm not in a position to see for myself," the girl replied, adding: "Maybe you can bite my left; suck a little when you do it so it will leave a mark."

"Are you ready," Ken whispered.

"Yes," said the girl.

He lowered his mouth the child's shoulder and nibbled and sucked to the pulses that raced through his body as his orgasm carried him long and hard into the leggy, sixty-pound girl. Jason, sensing Ken's release through his hands at the ten year old's waist, let his own climax start, and soon Fritz was stroking off a fountain of spraying sperm. The added slick wetness on Fritz's pumping hand redoubled Ken's spending just as he thought he could not last another thrust. Beck-beck shrieked as his new urgency spiked her with a bolt-from-the-blue climax. The excitement caused Fritz to fist Ken's ass crack yet more vigorously, setting off a second cycle that was so erotic Carl began to ejaculate spontaneously all over everybody. Some of the flying sperm landed across Timmy's big boner, and Jason chased it with his tongue, finally getting the boy fully into his mouth for a tender, gentle suck. Fritz re-mounted himself on Carl as the older teen slumped over the spent bodies of Ken and Becky. The little boys instinctively reached for each other and were holding hands, locked and ridged, when Timmy was wracked by his first climax, deep in Jason's mouth. Even Fritz had never mounted a mature male teen, so his experience was co-equal. As the after-glow hall of fame closed its doors, everyone focused on Ken as he slowly pulled his penis from Beck-beck. His tip came free of the child's vagina dripping thin semen liberally laced with the white of sperm. "Is it yours?" she whispered. "I think so," Ken answered. "It felt like something like rusty when it was coming out. I didn't know I could."

"Jason," Becky whispered to her brother lying underneath her, "that bad boy sprayed live sperms into me. Wayy into me. What are you going to do about it, eh?"

"I think we're wanted," Jason whispered to Timmy.

Carl's little cousin got the message and as Ken scrambled clear so Jason could mount, he lowered his eyes to Beck-beck's and stared at her. "You can kiss me, too," the girl whispered, and he lowered his mouth bashfully to hers. For the girl, it was her first real kiss, for Timmy, the first with a wanton child. To both it was a tender tongue swirling fantasy, with Beck's mouth and lips translating the thrill to Timmy as her strapping brother eased his big penis into her. In moments he groaned, Oh, sis, and went to her shoulder as Fritz and Carl watch his white sperm leak from the point of incestuous contact. Fritz had a second jolting orgasm inside Carl and then the little mountain of sheepskin was covered by inert but sweating and sighing youngsters, crosses askew.

Chapt. 13

"I guess that was a nooner for the ages," Carl thought to himself as he emerged back onto the high Irish meadow. In moments Frank joined him at the trestle table, eyes rolling. "How's the kid?" he asked of his son.

"Happy," Carl replied.

"Right time and right place. Hard to get that combination in today's world."

Carl agreed. Even freshly spent, repeatedly, he was in semi-awe of Frank. Being a boy with a gentle man was the greatest of the great, and he was closing his years of any such opportunity. It was kind of neat that guys could actually be just friends, when one thought about it. Lessened the trauma of final endings, and the heights of such a relationship were not half-bad, either.

The conversation of the two men covered the year they'd been apart. Frank's design project had entered the prototype stage He'd brought drawings and spread them on the table as one by one and in pairs the shepherds and Ken gathered around to kibitz.

At first glance, the Six-Pac Pac system seemed overkill. A car with two engines? Didn't one burn enough fuel? As time went on, however, a miracle occurred. From the drawings emerged a practical alternative and the first significant upgrade in light vehicle propulsion since the days of Henry Ford. What others tried to do with overhead cams and fuel injection; electronic ignition and variable valve timing, Frank had done with steel pushrods and a design that rivaled the earliest in the history of the internal combustion engine.

Of course Porsche used the boxer. VW. Chevrolet Corvair. Subaru. Light aircraft of all descriptions, including helicopters. A boxer engine was, technically, a horizontally opposed design. It was relatively flat and exceptionally smooth, as the essential forces of its design worked in relative opposing harmony.

The Six-Pac Pac design used two boxers. Each had six cylinders in the basic execution. The larger of the two displaced two-hundred cubic inches and was unremarkable except for a design slant which favored longevity over outright performance by virtue of its no-belts execution. The miracle was the second engine. Six cylinders and twenty inches, displacement. It looked for all the world like a big model airplane power plant. A husky guy could jerk it off the floor and walk off with it stowed under his arm. Mounted in a vehicle with its big brother it served as an auxiliary power unit putting out twenty horsepower.

Frank's drawings showed a long, slim generator mounted directly to the crankshaft of the small engine. This served three functions. It was a flywheel, a starter motor, as well as being a powerful generator. On the electrical schematic were four gel batteries, of automotive size, wired to provide 24 volts. Two ten horsepower electric motors completed the basic schematic. These were clutched into the rear wheels for use either independently to power the vehicle or in combination with the driving front wheels to provide four-wheel-drive capability.

While the mechanics of the system were straightforward, however innovative the particular treatment, it was the logic boxes that made the design actually work.

The primary problem in fulfilling the concept had been to perfect a seamless joining of the three power plants and two power sources. Tillie Deadbolt had to be able to drive her soccer routine, month in and month out, at all seasons and in all weather conditions, using the generator, the batteries, and the electric motors, yet, if she had to pull out in front of a truck, have the full 220 horsepower available at the touch of her foot. Here the answer had turned out to be a variation on the world's smartest simple idea. This brilliant flash had occurred during the Berlin Airlift when plans were being formulated as to how best to work a plane back into the landing sequence if it missed an approach, a common occurrence in German weather. Under the circumstances, the timing was crucial and distances were measured down to the fractions of a mile. What was the formulae to circle a plane back and shuffle it into the conga line?

The answer was stove-bolt simple. Don't. Don't have them re-enter, have them return, safe and sound, home, to try again, later. By the same token, the secret to the transparency and overall usability of the small engine was to have it run at a single r.p.m. It was either off, or it was purring along at 2,100 r.p.m., [Author's note: all figures are for illustrative purposes, only.] running itself and its attached accessories at max efficiency.

Carl reminded himself that there was more to older men than what they likdgftr54e to do with a cute kid in the shower. Indeed. This thought took him to sports. If he'd watched a close football match with his gang of Shoot Rocks Candy Mountain their blood pressure would have been higher, they would have made more noise, and, at this point, they'd be pooped from jumping and cheering. Instead of glowing and waiting for the second half. "Hell," he thought to himself, "even if it's just something to do whilst in bed with nothing else to do, it's still pretty good."

It was nice that there was more to life, and Frank was more, personified. He was describing the operation of his design in heavy traffic. "It tails the vehicle in front, automatically. If the vehicle ahead creeps up twenty feet, it does so. It the weather is hot, the auxiliary engine runs to power the air-conditioning; if they weather is cold, it runs, along with the big engine, in extreme conditions, to provide cabin heat, but, in many situations, neither engine runs under stop-and-go conditions; the car just moseys forward on it's electrical power, maintaining an interval, uphill or down, and alerting the driver of any change in circumstances."

"So you could read in traffic?"

"Definitely," Frank said.. "Just look up once in awhile to adjust the steering if the vehicle is actually creeping, and otherwise you can read until the road ahead is clear, using no fuel, at all, just so you'll feel doubly smug about the situation."

"You could use the little boxer engine for other applications, too," Carl pointed out.

"Quite a list," Frank agreed. "Jet skies, snowmobiles, generators, garden tractors, and on and on and on. The only small engines built today are one and two cylinder monsters that would shake the molars out of a mastodon. The market for a smooth, quiet replacement about defines colossal."

"So, what has been the biggest problem, so far?" Carl asked.

"Mating," Frank replied, wincing for half a second at the unintended extra meaning the word might have at the present elevation. "Joining the two engines under the hood. The induction systems. I mean how do you get fuel/air to an engine with a big scrap of aluminum sitting directly on top of it?"

"How, indeed?" Carl replied.

"Bloody great plenum chamber, that's how," Frank said. "The small engine uses an updraft system, same as in aviation, only with a throttle body and injectors rather than a carburetor. Since it runs in a very narrow power band, it's throttle control is about as complicated as an Erector Set. In retrospect, it was easy once we'd figured it out; heat resistant plastics with water cooling, snapped together, click, click, click, then the intake for the top engine is lowered into a slightly conical receptor and a big wing nut on a shaft is turned, sealing the connection. It's actually quite impressive when you clap eyes onto it."

"It must be nice working with 24 volts," Carl pointed out.

"That helps everywhere; smaller motors for the wipers and glass lifts. We're even toying with the idea of wiring all four batteries in series for 48 volts. Think of the stereo you could run off that much power. Safe, too, with modern wiring harnesses and fuse links."

"There must be some disadvantages," Carl said.

"It's for urban use," Frank pointed out. "On the open road it's less efficient than a normal car because of the auxiliary engine and three extra batteries. Runs fine, plenty of power for trailers, but it drinks fuel like an SUV. On the other hand, if you have solar access you can sit in traffic for two hours and it will not cost you a single dime. Also, with solar access, you can do light duty local driving in clement weather and never start either engine for days at a time. Yet, over two hundred horsepower are always a split second away."

"Can the big engine start that fast?" Carl asked.

"About a third of a second to full throttle. We get that with a combination of mechanical design, fuel injection, electronic ignition, and a huge starter motor, which, of course, becomes the generator once the engine is running, adding its power to that of the big engine. Since the electric motors draw on four batteries, simultaneously, and produce their maximum torque at zero r.p.m., the combination is well tuned for emergency bursts of power, again, nearly as strong as a 350-inch V-8, which weighs almost as much as the dual installation."

"How about cost of manufacture," Carl asked.

"The engines are so small they can be run on a highly robotic line. What we're going after now, is to ultimately scale the project. Set it as a global standard, license it cheap and wide, and go for economies of scale. We just produce the Six-Pac-Pac as a crate of bits, and let GM and the gang worry about form factor."

Carl sat musing. Pictured from an overpass a sea of cars standing in traffic, not a single engine running as they crept toward their off ramps. Drivers relaxed, half dozing behind the wheel to the tune of a gentle chirp of data reassuring them all was well or alerting them if it was time to take action. Reading. Social problems. People so involved in making love, when traffic broke they'd stop the chain, unresponsive to the most alarmist chirping in the computer's vocabulary. Even in blistering heat, a car with 24 volts could run several strong fans for hours, reducing the need for air/conditioning by more than half. Cell phones would be more powerful, lights brighter; the anti-lock braking and related systems could use smaller, lighter, more powerful motors. And the end loss was the storage space taken up by the extra batteries. Frank pointed out that once the Six-Pac Pac system was implemented, the extra battery storage could be built into the vehicle in the form of trusses under the back seat and at other locations where they would serve double-duty by stiffening both the frame and cab structure. The only limitations were the forms in which gel batteries could be economically produced, and even a collection of six or eight smaller batteries could be designed into a vehicle.

"How about the other alternative systems?" Carl asked.

"A lot of people are paid a lot of money to develop projects along this line," Frank responded, slowly. "They have to do a dog and pony show or perish, thus you get Rube Goldberg fuel cells and putt-putt hybrids. Toys for very rich experimenters, and products of cliquey academics and flower-brained environmentalists. It's the same syndrome as life-in-space. It's a great problem and will take billions and billions and billions to solve. I honestly don't know whether it's a sort of sincere stupidity such as is found in the clergy or vulpine manipulation and empire building, pure, simple and disingenuous to the core. In either case the outcome is boxcars of witless science -- all tactics, no strategy; all trees, no forest. Socialism. I am qualified, therefore, I am, conveniently ignoring the fact that the truest definition of infinity is the distance between someone who is qualified and someone who is excellent -- at damn near anything. A perfect example is NASA's attitude toward the first space tourist. One of the first experiments the space agency should have tried was taking Joe Doe off the street one day, and launching him the next. If the space program were ever to mean anything it is inevitable experts would have to visit space stations. How would they stand up?

"Tell me more about the car," said Carl.

"Okay," Frank responded. "Our dilemma now is perfecting a front-wheel electric drive to go with conventional rear-wheel drive. We all like basic conventional drive by far the best, because CV joints are an insurmountable weak point on any axle. On the other hand, rigging dependable electric power to the front wheels is no joke, either. The only good part is that it's a fail-safe situation. If the electric motors don't work, you can still get home safely and easily on the main engine. That's given us some flexibility to use belting and various clutch arrangements. What we need to do is lighten the front structure of the vehicle, then we can use composite suspension parts and integrate the electric motors without degrading the handling to any serious degree.

At this point Charles and Blissy were both brought with a twang back to the here and now. Timmy's grin as he melded his story of Ireland seamlessly into his first night at C-Camp brought frowns from his two bunkmates. Had they been set up? How much sparkle was there in the grinning boy's blue eyes? Too much for innocence? Duh'uh. But how could anyone stay mad at such a tyke? Blissy was first to respond and began a mini group-hug. They way to a master-mind's heart was through his brain, and Timmy had made the trip as quickly and surely as Blissy. The two of them in a single day was overpowering to Charles. Was he that smart; had he worked that hard; was it fair that the very hostility of his personality, in driving off the mentally unfit, left him astonishingly open and vulnerable to the extremely select few able to pass the wholly unwritten process of testing? Both boys had accomplished this by the simple device of proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that no test was needed; indeed, the effort in creating any worthy exam, in the first place, would be better spent elsewhere. Proof of the pudding came as the three lay together on Charles's bed, each combing in his mind the Six-Pac Pac system and the Beefy Hood concept and coming up with the first intelligent upgrade of automotive design since Henry cast the V-8 block.

"Add solar panels on the roof," Blissy pointed out, "and you'd have the closest thing to a magic carpet this side of Addis Ababa."

"Aye," Timmy said. "With this kit, you have several solar options. Factory mounted in the vehicle's roof, as you mentioned, but also free-standing units for the top of the garage, or any convenient place. Drive up and it plugs in with bot arms. On multi-level parking structures, put voltaic cells on the roof, and wire the power to each stall. Even a booster unit that sticks on the trunk deck or hood with suction cups. Frank said you can go to near zero purchased fuel for limited use in most of the inhabited world for most of the year. In fact, if it weren't for the safety aspect, the car could run about missing the big engine and drive train, entirely. Throw in some extra batteries and a couple of extra motors and you have a reasonable all-electric, off the same assembly line."

It was an awesome though. Charles tried to calculate the amount of energy an owner would receive if he parked his vehicle in the sun and then parked in a garage which had stored power all day in a purpose-built batter, to be pumped into the vehicle overnight. With the auxiliary engine running, and fully charged batteries, there would be forty electric horsepower available, enough to get a Cadillac Fleetwood through a normal day of use. And the tagging thing, in traffic. How cool would that be? Nap or get connected in perfect safety as you inched along your merry way. He began to wonder about the recycle-ability of the latest in gel batteries and let the subject drop on the supposition that economies of scale would make any such effort feasible, at least in part. Since it took 800 pounds of conventional batteries to equal a gallon of gasoline, it seemed a fitting point to disengage and return his thoughts to the boys on his bed.

"What's your biggest deal?" Timmy asked Charles. Since Charles was senior to Frank, it should be a good one in the boy's logic. He was not disappointed.

"Picture it;" Charles responded, "functioning in the modern world. You need a computer, a cell phone, a PDA, a pager, music, radio, maps, papers and so on and so forth. So now what are they trying to do? Parallel your example of fuel cells and hybrids by miniaturizing everything to make an ever smaller bundle of pricey, easy to drop or lose accessories, when all the time there's a great big vacant space going to waste.

"Guess where?"

All either boy could think of was something like a shoe phone and neither dared mention it. They'd both seen the executive class about its business in airports, and in general, and neither could, offhand, think of a single square inch not already dedicated to keeping up to date and in touch. The laptop, briefcase, and cell phone, even if enhanced with paging and address book, left no spare room for anything. Of that they were pretty sure.

Charles didn't drag it out. If he ever pulled their underpants down, that, he would drag out, but there was little room for posturing and phony-baloney rhetorical questions in this particular ball park. He gave them a ten-second warning, and outlined his masterpiece.

"It's the laptop," he said, reminding himself as the words passed his lips of Timmy's translation of Frank's speech about the Berlin Airlift and its parallel to the constant-speed design of the pony engine. Dead, log on your foot, simple.

"The waste space is the external surface of the laptop computer," he explained to the boys. "A full useless square foot, or more. That's where everything should live, especially now that laptops are thinner than a deck of cards and weigh under four pounds. "Laptopper." That's what I use as a working title. Designed with a shoulder strap and to be your absolutely/always companion. It tops any laptop with an external monochrome screen with a touch-sensitive emulated keyboard and enough peripherals to satisfy a nerd on steroids. Phone, planner, maps, quick-memo pad, graffiti pad, all on a relatively huge screen, and backed by a battery that will last hundreds of hours if the laptop, itself, isn't booted. You can read a book on the thing, or write one, on a single charge; talk for ten hours; do both at the same time. Then, when you want to get fancy, pop the top, boot the mainframe, and knock yourself out. Even, the small screen is detachable and may be operated for several hours, independently of the mother computer. Dad can write his report and Jr. can play Quake or listen to MP3s, perhaps even have a shot at his homework."

"I want one," was all Timmy could think of to say, and Blissy chimed in with a Me, too. Charles smiled at his kiddoes. They'd missed the Sixties, and that was a fact. Pity. Otherwise, they were okay. If Timmy hadn't invented the Six-Pac Pac concept, he'd grasped it fully and almost instantly; seen the forest with an immediacy that was the first stage to a brilliant creativity either in the arts or in outright invention, for its own sake. The highest measure of a camper was his friends outside the camp environment. Timmy and Blissy again rewrote the chart by casually topping it, and if they set the bar impossibly high, no one who followed them was likely to jump the less high to reach. It was all a ripping source of psychic adrenalin and where George Burns sang of wishing to be eighteen again, he wished he'd grow to that maturity and stop thinking about the fact that Blissy was an outright virgin and what it would be like to slowly pull the willing child's underpants down and all the way off his little feet.

The not-as-mad-as-you-are genius chuckled to himself over his relatively new-found love of writing Net porn. How total it would be to bury his verbal sketches, proofs of concept, in fantastically erotic guise. In the first place, they'd be massively read. He was flat-out and hammer-down good. Hundreds of thousands of readers in his first year, out. No flaunting, no floozy stuff; boozy stuff, much, either. Just the Japanese blade made the finer for being folded and pounded one million times. Hell, his mum had that little peening process well underway by the time he was four, and had added an extra hundred thousand foldings and beatings by six, possibly because she'd never gone past high-school arithmetic. It was good to give her the benefit of the doubt, but the experience had soured him on pretty much everything female. Should he thank his mum for the tykes with him now? How much of the product of a work-a-day genius was a direct result of the productive time that came as a byproduct of a whining, petulant personality? The most favored sentence in the English language is the description by an English master of how we pity the abused child but don't particularly want to have anything to do with him or her.

Totting it up, Charles was able, partly to take his mind at least for a moment off wrestling ten year olds on his bed, to come up with a satisfactory list of plusses to credit to his female parent. A world-class sense of absurdity, paradox and humor; that was nothing to sneeze at. A view that nothing could be worse than females, when it came to love, had provided a scenic route, in his case, though he was aware he'd approached the overall situation with prejudices that a professional could probably define as psychosis for pocket change. Humor, boys, and a personality that sliced and diced with all the indifferent abandon he'd been sliced and diced with from earliest memory to full adulthood. That, and the vast reading time it allowed, was probably the greatest gift, though funny boys were always vying for second place, and that was no joke. Current forensic psychiatry had it that intelligence was inherited through the mother. Charles thought he might be an exception to this rule as it was his father's family that held the overpowering intellectual credentials. He'd always felt he must have been born half-stupid, because of the female gene, not to have gone after mum with a sap when he was twelve, or strong enough to swing it home, whichever came first. This brought him back to the peaceful alternative he'd chosen, muy tranquilo, and the parallel that existed between Frank's Six-Pac Pac automotive concept and his own extension of the laptop computer design. In wide scale distribution, both could re-revolutionize a world that had become a bit revolutionary for its own good.

The factory for his Laptopper would have to be built near sand and deep water. Sand, for all the glass for all the screens, and deep water so they could be loaded from factory dock onto container ship. That's how many would be produced. A billion and more. In ten years, two billion. Even with the external touchscreen, the devices would cost less than three hundred dollars; would accompany every mainstream citizen from first ultrasound to funeral parlor. They'd be so rugged, kids would use them for base pads; so compliant, they'd update and synchronize every time they were turned on near any data port. In a way Bezos was right; theoretically, book sales would deteriorate as electronic distribution played rock and scissors over paper. That was the tree. The forest was that a topnotch bookseller stood hand-in-hand with the topnotch artists, who were always writers. A bookseller was a bookseller and a merchant was a merchant and their only common coin was money. Very different amounts of money, but money and nothing else.

Having refused to trade on his laurels, having worn out any hint of a welcome mat at Arthur D. Little, Enterprises, having likewise worn out mats at IBM, Purina and a number of other firms, he'd decided to pull a dish-eaten-cold stunt on the old mum and incorporate his ideas into internationally published stories of the seamiest and steamiest imaginable genre. A legitimate agent or VC and execution enabler could e-mail, and never have to hint at where he or she might have happened to see a particular idea.

No one could use Charles's material, because it would soon be known exactly where it had been found, and that would not be a good thing. Kiddie porn was at once public and private; disclosure, yet who would admit it, and so provided added layers to the international copyright customary on publication. The Net made for high readership, drop-of-the-hat communications, and, most importantly, allowed him to put his money where his mouth should have been, page after page, chapter after chapter, unceasing and unrelenting. Few would get it, but all it would take was one, or one small group. Reagan's kitchen cabinet were still power players; that's what it was like to get on early. For Charles's plans vastly exceeded revolutionary improvements in cars and computers, safety devices and business models, they constituted an entire political platform he called, simply, The Projects Party.

Project one was importing five hundred million select immigrants to clean up the god-awful mess his Yankee ancestors had made as they piled fortunes into the tacky showboat castles beloved of A&E's weekend producers. Clear scrublands and fruitlands for nutritious produce, bury power lines, vastly reduce signage. Big, big list for a big, big mess.

He ached with shame over each imported tapestry of his childhood. They belonged elsewhere and each granite block that belonged on a fair hillside was a testament to peasant greed in the very family that exceeded all royalty on earth. Each ponderous block represented the education of several children; each, books, and, most importantly, magazine subscriptions for dozens or even hundreds. All cast away on temporary jobs and useless to-and-froing over frippery and nonsense of scant interest to the modern world because of its cookie-cutter sameness. One million dollar staircase on which to display little Daphne looks very much like another. The nuevo riche, sick for the status he'd inhaled with his first breath and which could not be taken, even by god.

In recent years Charles's amazement with himself was that he was able simply to work so hard. He'd been castigated as a lazy slacker ceaselessly as he read his way through a small mountain of mainstream books, two-thirds fiction, one-third, non-fiction. Morons wanted to teach him algebra and geometry; chemistry and physics. From a book. And he'd read a hundred books and more for each and every one his teachers had read. College had been less than high school. Even in English, they docked you ten percent for each spelling error, and he couldn't spell his way out of a paper bag. Calculus, statistics, trig and perfect spelling. No wonder Lucent was following Iridium. You were ripped if you read and torn if you didn't.

He supposed it meant something. The ability to marshal and focus, grind on through the math or the dictionary, and cop parchment in the end. But if you only read twenty or fifty books in the process, wasn't it likely something essential would be left out? Wasn't that the reason for a greed that led to vast houses and vehicles paid for with vast credit and the early-rising monkey of relentless interest?

Folks, young and old, I never had anything but a silver spoon in my mouth until the day I went to school. Small, medium and large yachts, if thirty tons is large. Houses with elevators and a whole county of private beachfront between Newport and Martha's Vinyard. My great step-grandfather day-sailed, at the turn of the last century, in a 108-foot sloop with a 26-man year-round crew. Thirteen generations, in a row, at Harvard, and a rock-solid connection to the very dawn of the Revolution, as well as the man responsible for Bell Labs, Western Electric, and the invention of the transistor. A double-barreled connection to two Pilgrim governors who arrived on the Mayflower. Add the most quoted man in all of history and you have the skeleton of a dynasty of contribution, involvement and raw American money beyond Robin Leach's wildest imagination. And, sweet peas, all, not a happy camper in my generation, myself categorically excepted. No, not a single one. A virtual loony farm of privilege and opportunity consumed by popular liberalism until the whole sorry sweepings would add not a jot to Mark Vonnegut's epic of hippie uselessness and delicious misery, "The Eden Express."

Money means squat and status means less. Character means about as much as status.. Education means squat. Sober parents around the dinner table means squat. These values are as phony as half the tripe in the bible. See the house in the garden tractor ad? The one with three dormers standing on a wide lawn? That, friends, is a house. A beautiful box surrounded by a giant porch; simple as simple can be (except for the brilliantly hipped porch roof). Fill it with books, magazines, cats and kids, and never look back. Eat fried rice, potato, and vegetables, adding a little cheese once in awhile. Drive a nicely kept but not showy car, about twenty years old. Find a job that will never move you. Stay off the phone. If you find a willing kid to shower with, count yourself a lucky dog and do well by a dozen straight kids to balance the scales. Don't read too much. Avoid anything that even hints of cultism. Remember that Christian Scientists pay the same for life insurance as everyone else, so steer clear of the docs. Treat your underlings as you want to be treated as my underling. Remember the Pennsylvania babies. They prove that almost all is nurture and very little is nature, so stop arguing and nurture.

How long is this list? Well, with twenty-odd first cousins, and so on and so forth, the list goes on at length. That's why I'm into writing porn. The story of my own useless generation is so woebegone it would bring a lake of tears if I recounted it sans sex and a laugh or two. And it's your fault as well as theirs. The difference is, they can afford it; old money is that way, it actually goes up when everyone else's goes down. Get the picture? It's old. It knows how to act. It doesn't do fad hopping, nor does it sit molding endlessly in the bank. Should it come to a true prince, he uses seventy percent to benefit others, making him seven times a Christian, and the other thirty percent for his wants. It should be noted here that the real prince also realizes the best expenditure of money is to buy things and thus provide jobs; but true princes are different than the rest of us in that they need to find out the realities of giving fish and fish hooks, even though they know ahead of time what these realities are.

In any event, while my clan can afford it, it is very likely yours cannot. Thus you must do as I say; start by forgiving me for wandering around in my manuscripts, then listen up. De-materialize. Live small with loads of magazines, books and a slick computer. All else is stuff and nonsense; furniture, fashions, fantasies and fandangos of a hundred ilks and stripes. If you want a profound shortcut in educating yourselves, read Tobias Smollett. Baths, salts, vapors, herbs, rubs, muds, and the wackos in search of them. Date? Late 1700s.

Folks, these have been three hard chapters. My boy Friday ended up in jail and my foster son took it upon himself to joyride to both Mexico and Guatemala, I guess to be sure his mother had plenty to yell about. Then I lost my sounds, so no more Napster. Then my video, so no more Nifty. All this through the last ten thousand or so words which make up this post.

Let me add a note here on computers. I am a fifteen year veteran and wrote an eleven hundred page novel, and printed it, on a Commodore 64 with a cassette drive (ten minutes to load, ten minutes to save; twenty-two page files). I have spent something like thirty-thousand hours on clones at the 086, 286, 386, 486 and now K6-500 level. Although I once copied games from zeens, in Basic, no less, I now have nightmares over command lines.

Against this background, let me say that Word XP is a subtly dazzling upgrade to '97; cleaner, fresher, silkier than its predecessor, as is the whole ME environment. It's uncompromising beauty adds a happy hour to each work day, of and by itself. Importantly, if I may be so vein, I also upgraded my sound card and got a set of quality speakers with a ten-watt amplifier. Earlier I said that Napster downloads were suitable for the little, direct plug-in speakers, only. I will amend this, based on twenty hours of listening, to say that MP-3 sounds quite tolerable on this systems, but, if you listen even halfway carefully, you realize this is the limit, that any further amplification would merely show up the defects in the thin data stream, just as an expensive sound system would sound poorly if the input was a cheap microphone.

Whether vinyl, tape or digital, data source is paramount and essential to any degree of quality music reproduction. MP-3 is a brilliant compromise of transfer time and quality necessary for a very small hi-fi, and it fools you. Because the pitch and tempo are almost perfect, due to digital sourcing, the small stereo system sounds much better than it actually is. Heaven forbid, if you must go out and buy a fabulous ripping system, be my guest. Just remember the data stream from this format is about one-eighth that from an onboard CD. Sample MP-3 / Buy CD. And live happily ever after, or at least until you can afford a ten-thousand-dollar turntable for your pristine vinyl. (Don't knock it; I grew up on vinyl and I turned out to be a freaking prince.)

Writer's address is Thomas@btl.net. Further chapters should come at a brisker pace. So far Gee is still walking around loose, so my readers are showing an unsavory degree of lassitude. If you don't know what I'm talking about you might want to dig into the earlier chapters. I submitted a story called "Ropeyarn," but can't check Nifty and write at the same time. Has anyone seen it?

Yes, I have mainstream manuscripts; more polished than these Net freebies, and perhaps somewhat livelier. I don't write porn for money, but other projects might be of interest, and I don't respond to sexy letters, but other commentary can be very worthwhile. One problem is to say anything negative you have to have read and traveled as much as I have, and that's a row very few survive, rich or poor; and then, having survived, explain how my perspective is inappropriate in a culture in which one in five girls and one in seven boys is molested by a family member. xxx