He paused, staring out into space as if reliving some scene in his mind’s eye. “I know about those kids—because I was one. I am probably still one.” He chuckled. “Man, I used to love stuffing one down some four-star general’s shirt. He thought he knew everything—I couldn’t wait to blow him away. Every tactic, every procedure, every concept he had, I had a response or an alternative that he never thought about. I used to cream the big corporate CEOs daily. They wouldn’t give me the time of day— until I showed them a design for something they absolutely had to have. I was a third of their age and had bank accounts and portfolios bigger than theirs. I... was ... the greatest.”

“Kelsey has done all that stuff too,” he said softly. “She’s built companies, lectured at Cornell, given presentations in front of the National Science Foundation and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. She has almost as many patents as I have and she’s a fourth my age. But you know the difference between Kelsey and those other Generation-X nerds? The other bozos tell you all the stuff about themselves—myself included. I had to go out and find out all the stuff about Kelsey. She doesn’t brag about all her accomplishments.” He looked at Cheryl and smiled. “Maybe that has as much to do with you as it does with her?” For the first time in a very long time, Cheryl Duffield smiled.

Jon smiled back, then looked around. “Where did she go?”

“Bathroom.”

“That was a few minutes ago,” Jon said. “Uh-oh. If I know Kelsey, she’s not going to come back here right away. I know where she is.” Jon was correct: He walked directly to the AL-52 laser lab and found Kelsey with her laser goggles on, punching instructions into a computer beside the large mounting racks where the components of the plasma laser were mounted. Kelsey wore only a pair of socks on her feet, and her Top Secret ID badge was pinned to the tops of her underwear peeking over the top of her pants.

Jon was simply and unabashedly dumbfounded whenever he walked into this lab. In an amazingly short period of time, he and Kelsey had managed to build a full-scale working model of a laser that had been virtually unheard of. The bench that the laser was mounted to was the same size as the interior of the B-52 aircraft; the laser waveguides were mounted in an adjacent room, and the power capacitors and other support equipment were mounted in other rooms as well, networked here for the tests.