Airspace over Titan Village was busy with weekend campers coming down from AMV Anuraga, so much so that a local air traffic Oma refused a request to land in front of the Fowlkes campsite.
Mason put down at the airfield; a slow, careful descent allowing time for Marie to admire row upon row of identical clover habitats, the presumptive model for Disneyland’s Monsanto House of the Future attraction, Anaheim, 1957.
In Titan Village parlance, ‘Smurf Castles’. Mason said, “I was a plebe in the shipwright guild when they started bringing these down.”
Erin added, “He and I worked the build-out. That’s how we met Glenn and Arya Mehrenholz.”
Marie made eyes at her. “You were 10.”
“I can carry stuff.” She led them out the aft hatch, gesturing north. “The missile silos are that way; full of diamond dust.”
Mason brought up the rear. “It was like, a couple of months before the Disclosure. Damik Balusek and his co-investors wanted out of the project, dumped the reservation and the merchandise on Glenn for a price he couldn’t refuse.”
“And he made a campground out of it.”
He pointed south. “See the roof sticking up over there? That’s a separating plant. Diamond dust goes into 40-pound bags. Coal dust goes up in smoke.”
There was a golf cart traffic jam at the main entrance, where a maroli grounds attendant served the wicked eye-dot to bad drivers, tertiary tentacles curved to mimic hands on hips.
Mason high-fived him on the walk past. The maroli told them, “Watch your step. Rattlesnakes are active.”
The warning spooked Marie. She said, “I’ve never been any place where I had to watch out for snakes.”
When Tim and Myra Fowlkes came to fetch them in a golf cart, Marie was high-stepping.
Tim was amused. He asked, “Do you have a rock in your shoe?”
Myra was emotional, processing missteps that might have permanently estranged her children and yet, miraculously, did not.
She lurched out of the cart, wrapped Mason and Erin in a frantic embrace, and cried her eyes out.