Although she had set the alarm for an hour later than usual, 
she hadn't expected to actually sleep through until it went 
off.  At first, she was startled by the chiming, and then 
pleasantly surprised to feel herself well rested.  She 
stretched languorously, and burrowed into the warm, nappy 
sheets and dense pillow to enjoy the sensation for an extra 
few minutes.  The sun angling in from her bedroom window had 
moved from the tip of her toes all the way up to her knees 
when she finally threw back the covers.  The room was warmer 
than it was at her usual awakening time in the pre-dawn 
twilight, and the birdsong was merely melodic, not the 
raucous frenzy of daybreak.

No dreams last night, she realized, not a one.

She'd forgotten how buoyant a normal night's sleep could make 
you feel, and was a little surprised to see her reflection 
smiling softly back at her from the bathroom mirror.  A major 
scientific breakthrough was a pretty effective mood enhancer 
as well.  Feeling indulgent, she engaged the house's music 
system, humming along to the melodic, energetic old songs 
she'd chosen.  She edged the volume up while she took a 
shower, and edged it up again while rummaging through a 
rarely used storeroom to find the hat she wanted to wear 
today.  The smell of cedar and camphor floated up from the 
old trunk as she lifted treasured items out one by one.  She 
paused when she came to the threadbare baseball jersey.  As 
carefully as she'd kept it, it was still almost too frayed to 
wear, the black piping lifting away from the gray material 
where it edged the placket.  She ran her hand over the collar 
and yoke, reminiscing for a moment over other times and 
places.  She hadn't planned on wearing this old thing today, 
but she pulled it out anyway, and slipped her arms into the 
sleeves.  They came to her elbows, the tails nearly reached 
her knees, and the same feeling of comfort settled over her 
that always did when she put on the tired old shirt.  "You 
are far too old for a security blanket," she chided herself, 
but she decided to wear it anyway.  It seemed appropriate to 
share today's celebration with the memory of her old friend.  
The hat she'd wanted was right below, along with another more 
recently acquired.  She hesitated only a moment, then pulled 
it out as well.  

"Little darling, the smiles returning to their faces," she 
sang along softly with the music as she carefully repacked 
the case.  "It feels like years since it's been here.  Here 
comes the sun... Here comes the sun..."  

The front door slammed solidly and she heard David call out 
for her.

"Volume.  Down," she instructed the audio system, then called 
out "Back here, David!" She closed the lid on her keepsakes, 
and rose, turning, just as David came into the doorway.

"What?" she said, responding to his pinched expression.

"I guess I should have known you listen to classical music," 
he said, rolling his eyes.

"It's got a lot more heart than that flutey drifting sap you 
youngsters listen to," she retorted, in the age-old dispute 
of the generations.  For her part, she still had trouble 
applying that word to anything that didn't involve a 
symphony. 

"Hold still," she ordered crossing to him, "and bend down a 
bit."  

He complied, and she settled one of the two hats on his head 
adjusting the angle of the bill.  "There," she said with 
satisfaction. He straightened, and immediately pulled it off, 
turning it to look at the insignia on the front.  "New York?" 
he asked

"So you know which team to root for," she said.  She gestured 
with her chin and he put the cap back on.  It suited him, she 
thought, the rolled bill casting a roguish frame over his 
face.  Maybe she'd let him keep it.

"Root for?" he repeated stupidly.

"I told you we were taking a field trip, didn't I?  Yankees 
vs. Red Sox.  The two oldest remaining teams, in the oldest 
remaining pre-war stadium.  A real treat."

"That's a two hour tube trip," he pointed out.

She shrugged.  "It's an afternoon game.  We've got plenty of 
time."  She misinterpreted his discomfitted look.  "Don't 
worry about the credits, David, it's on me."

"Oh, no, it's not that," he began.

"You don't want to go?" she asked, feeling the first twinge 
of disappointment.  She'd really been looking forward to the 
excursion.

"No, wait.  It's just, uh, I don't want to presume, but I 
brought a friend with me today."  She nodded for him to go 
on.  "You said we wouldn't be working today, and he's kind of 
a fan of yours.  I didn't know you had something so 
extravagant in mind, and..."

She actually chuckled then, half at the improbable notion of 
having a fan, and half at the idea that going to a ball game 
was extravagant.  "If he'd like to come with us, he's 
certainly welcome," she offered generously.  "Where is he?" 
she asked, crossing past David and exiting the small 
storeroom into the hallway.  Jerry stood quietly at the other 
end of the hall, just inside the front door.  Dr. Charles 
stopped in her tracks, a flicker of regret at her hasty 
invitation flashing through her, before she reprimanded 
herself for the intolerant impulse.  She was torn between 
wariness that any of the aliens fostered a fascination with 
her intense enough to be described as fandom, and curiosity 
over what gems of knowledge she might be able to coax from 
him over the course of a day.  At any rate, he was David's 
good friend, so she would repress any urge to rush to 
judgement over him.  In reality, her hesitation lasted only a 
moment, and she finished crossing to him, her hand extended.  
"It's a pleasure to meet one of David's friends, Mr. Smith," 
she said sincerely.

He grasped her hand earnestly.  "The pleasure is mine, Dr. 
Charles.  And please call me Jerry." 

When David had reached a point in their private studies where 
his progress was beyond the material being presented in her 
regular lectures, she had relieved him from attending them, 
in favor of his growing duties as her teaching and lab 
assistant.  She had not seen Jerry since David had stopped 
attending, but she remembered his solemn manner.  He 
continued his unwavering regard of her after their hands 
parted, and she found his scrutiny faintly uncomfortable.  
Breaking eye contact, she turned to look over her shoulder at 
David, who had come softly up behind her.  He had pushed the 
hat far back on his head, and she couldn't resist the urge to 
reach up and correct the position.  "I'm sorry I don't have 
another hat, Jerry," she said, while she adjusted it, "but 
would you like to join us for a baseball game today?"

When she turned back, Jerry's face was cracked with an 
awkward but unfeigned grin.  Maybe she could learn to like 
him after all.

-------------------------------------------------------------

She had paid for the roundtrip for all of them, and passed 
out the small, digitally encoded tabs that represented their 
return fares, as they boarded the waiting tube.  It eased 
forward into the first lock, and was closed off from the 
station by powerful doors.  Their ears popped as the car 
pressurized, and the vacuum forming in the tunnel system was 
heralded by a loud, but gradually decreasing, hiss.  Dr. 
Charles opened her mouth wide a few times, working her jaw 
from sided to side, in order to clear her ears.  David 
swallowed and pinched his nose.  Jerry appeared unaffected.  

They traveled some way in silence, the presence of a third 
person unbalancing the fragile camaraderie that had built 
over the previous months.  David was amused to find both 
Jerry and Dr. Charles each studying the other, when they 
thought they were unobserved.  Finally, though, the silence 
began to feel awkward to him.

"My father was an engineer," he offered.  "He built a lot of 
the major tubes."

"Was he?"  Dr. Charles seemed genuinely intrigued by his 
revelation.  "That's a rather unusual profession."

"I suppose.  I never really thought of it that way, though.  
He was just my Dad."

"It seems we have so few hard engineers.  The bio fields have 
undergone amazing advances in the last hundred and fifty 
years, but it seems that hardly anyone builds anything 
anymore."

"It's not like we need all that much new building, though, is 
it?  There are still an awful lot of cities that aren't 
full."  David noticed, not for the first time, the brief look 
of mourning that passed over Dr. Charles' face at any mention 
of the losses from the old wars.  Unrealized by either of 
them, Jerry also noted her response with interest.

"Even so," she continued after a beat, "there are things that 
have been lost.  Airplanes, for instance.  If we had lived 
200 years ago, we would have flown to New York for the day.  
I've often wondered why there are no aircraft anymore."

"Well, I'll admit that it would be very interesting to have 
the experience, but they were terribly inefficient, weren't 
they?  The conversion to tubes is probably just an outcome of 
how efficient they are to run.  That's important when you 
consider how seriously the Earth's resources were depleted 
before the war."

Dr. Charles grimaced a little.  "Flawed reasoning, David.  
Everything was less efficient when it ran on fossil fuels, 
including the underground rail systems of the time, which 
would be the closest analogy to the tubes.  So it stands to 
reason that flight could have been made every bit as 
efficient as the tubes, but it hasn't.  It's been completely 
abandoned."

"Not completely," Jerry interjected.  "The Grays have 
flight."

Dr. Charles' eyes snapped in his direction, slightly 
narrowed.  She hadn't expected Jerry to make her point for 
her.

"Well, yeah," David said, "but they don't really do anything 
with it other than maintain the satellites."

"That we know of," amended Dr. Charles.  "And anyway, that 
just underscores the issue.  Not only has flight been 
abandoned, but so has any attempt at space travel.  There was 
a time when humanity launched and maintained its own 
satellites.  We weren't dependent on anyone for that.  People 
even went to the moon, once, you know.  We've lost an awful 
lot."

David seemed unimpressed.  "There was nothing there," he 
shrugged.  "Not much loss in not going back."

"There's something *somewhere*, though.  The Grays had to 
come from somewhere, and the Smiths, too," she glanced again 
at Jerry.  "Do you know where your home planet is?" she asked 
him.  "Could you describe it?"

Jerry bowed his head in her direction.  "I was born on this 
world," he said.  "I know no other home besides this."

It was something she hadn't considered about him.  She still 
thought of the alien races as newcomers, interlopers.

"Still, think about it.  If engineering and flight had 
advanced the way that biology has advanced, we might have 
discovered other worlds by now.  We might be beginning to 
emigrate humanity out into the universe.  Maybe enough that a 
disaster on a single planet wouldn't endanger the existence 
of the entire species."

The tube emerged into the light, then.  This particular line 
traversed the terrain that had once been the capitol of the 
United States.  The city had never been re-inhabited, but had 
been left as a memorial to lost lives and an earlier time, 
grandeur and destruction married in a surreal and vacant 
landscape.  They fell silent as the progression of broken 
monuments passed by.  It had taken a special feat of 
engineering to create a transparent tube of sufficient 
strength to maintain the vacuum required for the vehicle's 
speed.  Even so, the car dropped to a little more than half 
its previous speed for this segment of the journey.  The 
hushed conversations of passengers ceased entirely, until the 
car finally descended back into darkness, the hypnotic 
regularity of the tunnel lights gradually easing the mood 
back to normalcy.  Unlike the cities in the interior, 
Washington's location in the inhabited east and its 
historical significance meant that it was at least somewhat 
maintained, and had not been overgrown, making the 
destruction appear more stark.  So far, this was one city 
humanity was unwilling to have razed.

"I wouldn't want to leave," David finally offered, when the 
desolation had passed far behind them.  "Even if I could."  
He thought of the damp, salty air at his grandmother's house, 
and of the sharp, crisp skies reflecting off the mountains he 
so loved in the interior.  "I'm happy here.  And I'd miss the 
Earth too much.  I wouldn't go."

Dr. Charles regarded him thoughtfully.  "Do you think most 
people feel that way?" she asked.

"Yeah, I do," he confirmed.  "Most of the people I've ever 
known, anyway."

She shook her head.  "That's strange, too, in a way.  Think 
about the history that you knew from before the wars.  The 
ages of exploration.  People go.  They always go, or at least 
they did.  There have always been people that believed they 
could make a better life somewhere else.  It's not just the 
technology that's been lost, it's the ambition."

"Maybe it's not ambition that's been lost," he disagreed, 
"maybe it's poverty.  You can make a good life wherever you 
want to.  It wasn't always like that.  People have to be 
driven to go, I think."

"You don't think people would go just out of curiosity?"

"Not if they couldn't come back."

"Would you go to the Gray's world if you could?  Even if you 
couldn't come back?  If it meant you could learn everything 
about them that you've ever wanted to?"

David was silent a long time while he weighed the appeal of 
knowledge over place.

"I don't know," he finally answered, honestly.

"You wouldn't like it," Jerry said cryptically.  And though 
they each tried several times before they arrived in New 
York, neither David nor Dr. Charles could extract anything 
further from him on the subject.

-------------------------------------------------------------

The Yankees won, eleven to nine.  It had been tied eight to 
eight going into the top of the ninth inning.  The Sox had 
managed one more run, before a flawlessly executed double 
play had expended their two remaining outs.  The first man up 
for the Yankees managed a triple on an error by a dozing 
right-fielder, and slid furiously into home on a sacrifice 
fly by the second batter.  The next man up managed only a 
single, though he advanced to second while the fourth batter 
was tagged out at first.  With the score tied nine-to-nine, 
one man on and two outs, extra innings had begun to look like 
a real possibility.   The next player on the Yankee's lineup 
had been hitting inconsistently recently, and was down one 
ball and two strikes, when he clobbered the final pitch over 
the fence into the left-field bleachers.  It had been a great 
game, and David was converted.

They had learned more about each other in the relaxed 
atmosphere of the ballpark than they ordinarily did in the 
course of several weeks.  Dr. Charles was slightly sunburned, 
in spite of her hat, and so David learned that she had never 
taken the commonplace genetic therapy that would have altered 
her tannins to prevent that small injury.  He had been 
surprised when she ordered three hot dogs from a roaming 
vendor, having assumed that she was vegetarian.

"I like to be self-sufficient," she had explained when he 
questioned her, "and I have neither the time nor the 
inclination to manage livestock."  But she appeared to relish 
the traditional treat, and when Jerry refused his, David and 
she had split it between them.

She learned for the first time that David, too, was an 
orphan, and that his mother had been a talented artist.  When 
she expressed interest in his mother's work, David lit up, 
and promised to bring a few paintings with him to the lab the 
following weekend.

They learned little about Jerry, except that he knew more 
about the intricacies of the baseball than even Dr. Charles, 
and certainly more than David had ever imagined, especially 
in light of the fact that he had known Jerry since birth.  It 
was Jerry's idea to linger in Monument Park after the game, 
and he seemed mesmerized by the sculpted bronze images of the 
game's great players.  In all of his memory of Jerry, David 
could recall him smiling only occasionally.  For the previous 
several hours, he had hardly stopped.

Things changed between them after that day.  The pace of the 
research exploded in the wake of David's discovery, and he 
began to spend several days each week in the lab, in addition 
to the weekends.  Dr. Charles was still obligated to teach 
her contracted course load, but they began to split the 
responsibility of grading student work, and after the first 
several weeks, she no longer reviewed his markups.  She had a 
second console installed, so that they could work in parallel 
on studying the hugely expanded genome produced by the 
decompression.  The new data meant that they spent a much 
greater amount of time doing pure analysis, and less time 
doing brute-force sequence matching.  Dr. Charles' drilling 
in functional and comparative genomics began to pay off.  The 
computer programs for genetic analysis were only as useful as 
the questions that were posed, and progress was dependant 
upon the ability to form the right questions.

Jerry began to accompany David to the lab from time to time, 
and after a while, found a role managing the manual tasks 
involved in assembling the strands of DNA that had originally 
been David's responsibility.  As he had once done for David 
alone, he gradually took on a protective demeanor toward Dr. 
Charles as well, sometimes having to remind them both to eat.  
David was genuinely enthused when Dr. Charles would suggest a 
short break to play some catch, now, although if Jerry were 
present, he would often drop out of the three way game when 
Jerry and Dr. Charles became competitive.  He watched with 
amusement as they fired fast balls at each other, daring one 
another to endure the sting.  She was far too stubborn to 
back down, even when David knew she'd be running the console 
exclusively with her right hand for the remainder of the day, 
and so he would sometimes interrupt with the suggestion to 
bring out the bats.  With three of them present, there was 
someone to field the hits, and David gradually learned to 
rotate his hips through the motion before following through 
with the bat.  He was mortified the day a solid hit crashed 
through one of Dr. Charles' upstairs windows, until he looked 
her way and saw her grinning so wide her face might split.  
It was breathtaking, and for the briefest of moments he 
wished that she were younger, or he were older.

Occasionally, now, when he had worked late into the night, he 
would steal a few hours sleep on the sofa in the study.  
Another of Dr. Charles impenetrable looks had passed across 
her face the first time he had asked, but she had allowed it, 
and it had become routine.  A few times he had woken to the 
sound of her crying out, carrying from the upstairs bedroom, 
but it was always followed by the sound of footsteps and 
running water, and so he had never felt that his desire to 
offer comfort justifiably outweighed his respect for her 
privacy.  He noticed, though, that her temper seemed just a 
bit shorter on mornings after nightmares, and learned to 
tread softly until the challenge of the day's research 
restored her equilibrium.

Relentlessly, inevitably, the weeks and months passed behind 
them, and when Dr. Charles' next breakthrough occurred, the 
second trimester was nearly ended.