'That seems to be in order, Mr. Avery,' said the check-in clerk as she handed Justin his photo ID and the freshly printed boarding pass. 'The Honolulu flight leaves from gate C9. Have a pleasant flight.'
'Thank you,' said Justin. 'I'll try.'
The clerk frowned; Justin winced at his unintended sarcasm. 'Sorry, I didn't mean... that is, I... ah, right.' He picked up his traveling bag, hitched it over one shoulder. 'Sorry,' he concluded, redundantly.
The destination board showed about an hour before his flight boarded. Time enough, then, to find somewhere in this overpriced rabbit warren to get something to eat and to get his head in order. The last two weeks at the project had been rough; and the steady flow of Justin Avery's life was becoming a maelstrom.
Now that the project was over, and his mind wasn't focused on the minutiae of the work, things about his time with the Ararat Foundation were coming back to him, things that somehow didn't stack up. In every research facility he'd ever been at, there had been funding problems, shortfalls, meetings with the people who held the purse strings. Every tech type knew the drill; it was a different angle, but the same 'civilians just don't get it' mentality that he saw in his brother (and he wasn't relishing the fact that Thad was coming in from the air force base at Hickam to meet him).
With Ararat, it had been different from day one. No request was too difficult, no equipment too esoteric or too expensive. Everything he'd asked for, he'd got, often within 24 hours. Yes, he'd had to report progress, but only in written form, and there'd been no arguments. For a scientist, it was a dream environment, but in budget terms it made no sense. Yes, he was well respected in his field - immunology - but he wasn't a Pasteur or a Salk by any means. He didn't rate that kind of carte blanche. And only now, after eighteen months of hard labor, was he being summoned to Honolulu to meet Ararat's secretive paymasters. It defied logic; he and Betty had talked about it often, and come to the same conclusion each time.
Yes; Betty. How had he screwed up so badly?
He'd thought she was kidding when she said her name was Betty Cooper, given that she'd pegged him as a ringer for Archie Andrews (that had annoyed him a little; he'd have called it as Jimmy Olsen). It had given the two of them a hook on which to hang a relationship outside work; and they'd passed the time in long late-night shifts when things weren't working out in happy comic geekdom. Who was your favorite Green Lantern: Hal, John, Guy or Kyle? How many ways did the X-Men movies differ from canon? Betty even admitted to crying at the wedding of Wonder Girl as much as if she'd been there.
Even that last ugly scene last week had had a fanboy tinge. The final accusation, as she stormed out of the lab, stuck in his mind. 'You know your problem, Justin?' she'd yelled. 'You have the face of Archie Andrews and the people skills of Reed Richards.'
Nervously, Justin felt in his pocket for the boarding pass; instead, he felt the outlines of a folded piece of paper. That shouldn't be there... He withdrew it, unfolded it carefully.
The image on it was one of Archie, in his late Sixties guise as Pureheart the Powerful. Underneath the picture, in Betty's cramped and spiky handwriting, was a one-line message: 'Sorry I was so hard on you. Good luck in Hawaii.'
Justin looked at his watch. Lord, where had the time gone? They'd be calling his plane for boarding. He grabbed his bag and headed for the gate; but to his right he noticed a bank of pay phones. Did he have time to call Betty?
And did he want to take the risk?
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