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Chapter 37 - A Discovery and a Resort Visit

Early July

The next two weeks passed in a blur. After her visit to Emma’s, Tamara began working on her chip fabrication. She spent four days at Emma’s lab at the APL and used the APL’s engineering facilities to build several double-sized prototypes of the patient coil’s signal-generator and receiver circuit assemblies on a chip. She started by preparing the IC chips’ base substrate, thin slivers of material cut from an ingot of pure silicon, and polishing them to receive the first layer of superconductive media. She then photoetched the first circuit layer, the base layer of the array of SETs, and continued the fabrication steps to build several dozen small RF emitter-receiver coils on each chip. By Friday, she had the somewhat crude prototype coil chips completed; then she mounted the sets of coils-on-chips on a circuit board affixed to a testing jig. The jig was set up so that she could measure the device’s RF output and the received return signals.

She spent a quiet weekend since Peter and Barbara had gone with their parents to visit an out-of-state aunt and uncle who couldn’t come to the August gathering of the whole clan. Terence had gone to his home in Austin for two weeks and would be returning in time for their visit to Peter’s resort.

On Monday, she was back again at the lab and testing her device; by midweek she was getting very odd results and it took close to a day to track down the problem. If she was correct and if what she had seen was a result of her chip design, the implications could be far-reaching. By noon on Friday, she had completed her calculations and was thoroughly confused by the results. She had to speak to Emma. Gathering up her notes, photos, and printouts, she called Emma to be sure that she would be in her office, and then called her car service; she couldn’t wait an hour or more for the scheduled shuttle.

“Well, hello there, and what’s the bleedin’ hurry, Tamara?” Emma asked as Tamara came bursting into her office.

“I ran into a really weird problem, Emma. I was running the coil device setup through several different discharge patterns, firing individual coils and then groups of coils, watching the RF output, and look at this.”

She laid out several graphs on Emma’s desk, showing the signal intensities from the device.

“This is RF output versus time. See the dropoff?” she pointed. “And then when I checked the single-coil operation again, those measurements were really degraded from the initial runs. I looked for the reason on the chips themselves with that magnifying viewer that we use to examine chips and checked the alignment of the RF coils in the device. Here are the photos.”

“So tell me what I should be looking for here,” Emma asked.

“Here’s the ‘before’ image. It’s from when the chips were finished. Now look at these ‘after’ images. See, the entire substrate area surrounding these coil pairs is disturbed. The coils actually tried to move out of place, even though they were embedded in the substrate.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible. That silicon substrate isn’t at all elastic. It would fracture if disturbed,” Emma said.

“So here are a few photos through a microscope. Those coils did move; they kinda pushed the substrate away, and they twisted a bit too. You can see that here.” Tamara pointed. “And here. All the coils where that happened were adjacent to each other and were energized at the same time, and you can see that the coil movement happened in pairs, each moving away from each other.”

“You mean that those coils were repelling each other?”

“Uh huh. There’s more than just RF being generated here. There’s some kind of very strong repulsion and there’s no force in the electromagnetic spectrum that can repel that strongly. That’s actually a misnomer, electromagnetic, because there’s no ‘magnetic’ frequency, it’s just that the passage of an electrical current creates a magnetic field. But those coils, when they create a magnetic field, it would be toroidal according to the Biot-Savart law, and the magnetic field would be strongest in the coil’s center. These coil pairs are oriented side-by-side and when I used the Biot-Savart law and Lorentz force law to calculate the resulting magnetic fields and electric fields, there’s nowhere enough force being generated to move those coils. The coil orientation is wrong too, to generate any opposing force.”

Emma was listening to her and nodding as she was looking at the calculations and photos.

“I don’t see anything wrong in your calcs,” Emma said. “And as well, you’re correct about the coil orientation.”

“Emma, I had to race to get here because I couldn’t think of anything else to explain how such a tremendous force was produced by such a tiny source. ‘Cause the only thing that could explain it is magnetism; that’s the only force with sufficient strength to have the effect here. But see, the force is acting as a point source and all magnetic forces are aligned between the poles of a dipole. There’s no dipole here; the force is radially oriented and that implies a magnetic monopole. But at a macro scale; that’s impossible! Monopoles are only theoretical fundamental particles, aren’t they? But the calcs I did show that if a monopole existed, it could have that effect.”

Emma was looking at her in amazement. “Bloody hell, Tamara, that’s a blindin’ brilliant interpretation! But we really don’t know if macro-scale monopoles are impossible, even though Gauss’ law of magnetic fields says that monopoles don’t exist. And you’re correct in that the existence of monopoles has only been theorized. In fact, Dirac suggested that the reason that electric charge is quantized and only comes in discrete units could be explained by the existence of just one single magnetic monopole in the universe. The quantization of electrical charge is still one of the major problems of physics. You’re also correct in that the monopole is theorized to be a fundamental particle, carrying a unit of magnetism, analogous to the electron, which carries a unit of charge.”

“But where did the force that moved those coils come from?” Tamara rejoined. “The silicon has a compressive strength of 3200 megaPascals and an elastic limit of 165 megaPascals. That’s about 33,000 kilograms of force per square centimeter in compression. That’s almost a half-million pounds per square inch! And the deformation showing in those photos needed more than 1600 kilograms per square centimeter of force.”

Emma grinned at her. “Remember what I told you last year? Sometimes when physics can’t explain an experimental finding, we need some new physics.”

“Yeah. But here we’d need some pretty weird new physics. So, on the way over, I tried to think of what could be happening. I know that superconductors can do weird things, like their ability to expel an applied magnetic field—when exposed to the magnetic field, superconductors induce a countercurrent which completely opposes the magnetic field. You know, the Meissner effect. Superconductors showing the Meissner effect behave like a perfect diamagnet and repel. But I could easily rule that out in this case.

“So I had this crazy idea. That kind of force doesn’t exist with the known elementary particles in the universe. So maybe somehow, the coils opened a portal to—like, the universe’s dark energy? Maybe some of the 95 percent of the universe that is dark energy and dark matter is monopoles? Possibly something in the superconducting coil circuit, when it was powered, let a monopole send a huge repulsive force through and it repelled the force coming through the adjacent coil. So that’s what I fantasized—that’s my overall picture. It’s just missing a few technical details.”

Emma stared at her in disbelief and then started to laugh. She began laughing so hard that tears began to form in her eyes and she almost fell off her chair, alarming Tamara greatly.

“Emma, did I say something wrong? Are you okay?”

Emma, laughing, just waved her hand feebly at Tamara.

“Just... ha ha ... a bloody... ha ha ... second...” she gasped, trying to catch her breath, but then broke out laughing again.

Tamara “pushed” a calming taste to Emma, who caught her breath, giggled a few times, then wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

“Crikey, I haven’t had a laugh like that in donkey’s years. No, my dear, you just quoted something that happened way back years ago involving Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli didn’t like something Heisenberg had said in an interview, so he wrote letters about it to some of his physicist friends. I read the quote in a book. Let me find the book... um ... ah, here. It’s a quote in this book, ‘The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-century Physics’; it’s by Crease and Mann. I so loved this quote that I tabbed the page. Here, page 411. I’ll read it.”

Heisenberg launched, two decades later, a unified field theory that started as a collaboration with Pauli. When Pauli withdrew, Heisenberg pressed on. To Pauli’s fury, Heisenberg claimed during a radio broadcast in February 1958 that a unified Heisenberg-Pauli theory was imminent, and only a few small technicalities remained to be worked out. Rumors swept the press. Pauli responded by mailing his friends a letter consisting of a blank rectangle, drawn in pencil, with the caption, “This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. Only technical details are missing.”

Then Emma began to laugh again and Tamara giggled.

“Emma, don’t make me out that I can paint like Titian too, please,” she said, and Emma began laughing harder.

The laughing attracted a few faculty members, including Dr Montern, who popped his head into her office.

“What’s so funny, Emma? Everyone’s out here in the hall wondering.”

“Get in here, Chet,” Emma ordered. “See what our resident genius has done now.”

“You mean besides her circuit that has the rest of us trying to figure out why water can sometimes run uphill?” Montern chuckled while Tamara blushed.

“Yeah. Why that oddball circuit of hers allows electrons to flow against a charge gradient. That’s easy compared to what her new circuit here does. Look at these numbers,” Emma said, giving him Tamara’s elastic limit calculations.

He looked for a minute, then, “Okay, that’s a force of 16.8 kilograms per square millimeter. Tamara, what’s the area of the force application?” Montern asked.

“The coil is about 4 millimeters in diameter, so, um, 12.6 square millimeters.”

“That’s ... ah ... over 200 kilograms. Are you saying that somehow this tiny coil circuit developed over 200 kilograms of force? Where was it applied?”

“Yeah, repulsion actually, but it was probably closer to 100 kilograms each ‘cause those two adjacent coils pushed against each other,” Tamara said. “The range of action seems to be small—these are small coils. Look at these photos. See how the areas around the coils are deformed? The coil pair’s combined force was about 212 kilograms for their sizes, acting against each other.”

“Are you sure there wasn’t anything nearby—electrical or magnetic—that could have contributed to their forces?” Montern asked.

“Nothing nearby,” Tamara confirmed.

“As well, she told me that she had ruled out the Meissner effect,” Emma put in.

“Yeah, that’s right. But diamagnetism is really weak anyway. So, at the macro scale, the only forces which act at a distance are electrostatic, gravitational, or magnetic. At the atomic scale, the strong and weak forces. Leave out the weak force; that doesn’t apply. The residual strong force, which binds hadrons, would be powerful enough to explain what happened but of course it’s only active at the scale of an atomic nucleus. Electrostatic forces can’t produce a field strength of this intensity but gravitational forces can, if you’re near a supermassive object like a neutron star or black hole. Otherwise not. That only leaves magnetism, right?”

Montern nodded. “Okay. Go on.”

“So I calculated the field strength produced in the coils when current was flowing; it was in the nano-tesla range. To cause the coil to deform the substrate it was embedded in, I calculated that a field strength of at least 17 teslas would be needed to develop the necessary repulsive force.”

Emma broke in, “Tamara, are you aware that the world record, as of 2019, for a continuous magnetic field, is 45.5 teslas? That was an electromagnet about the size of a toilet-paper core. A magnet, even at a third of that field strength, would need to be bigger than four millimeters.”

“Sure. That’s why I conjectured what I did. Since you love quotations, Emma, how about this one? ‘When you’ve eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ I probably don’t have the exact words Arthur Conan Doyle used, but I think somehow that circuit somehow generated a monopole.”

“And, Chet, when she told me that, she said it was ‘just missing a few technical details,’ just like Pauli wrote when he said that ‘I can paint like Titian,’” Emma chuckled.

“I know that quotation,” Montern grinned. “Tamara, you do know that producing free elementary particles, and the monopole is conjectured to be one of them, takes extremely high energy?”

“Sure. But I told Emma that possibly my circuit opens a portal or somehow enables dark energy or dark matter to interact with the physical universe. Maybe monopoles and gravitons make up some of the dark matter.”

Montern got very thoughtful. “Well, absent this physical evidence, Tamara, I’d say you were talking science fiction. But to explain this? Maybe science fiction has the answers. Emma, I know you’ll want to explore this new crazy finding of Tamara’s. Hell, I’m still trying to figure out her electron flow problem.”

“As we all are,” Emma laughed. “Can you imagine if we could develop that much magnetic power with the use of so little energy?”

“Sure,” Montern said. “A science-fiction world. Magnetic levitation vehicles. Frictionless motors and turbines. More efficient frictionless bearings, in fact. Well, I’m sure I’ll hear about what you find.”

He left and Emma turned to Tamara.

“I’ll need to get out to the APL with you and have a few of my boffins from the battery project work with you on examining that circuit. First, we’ll need to replicate your findings. Then we’ll need to dissect those IC chips to analyze how their layers were deposited. When we have that information, we can figure out how to proceed. Now show me how you built that chip.”

They spent several hours discussing the chip’s construction and doing further calculations; then Emma had to leave. During the following weeks, Tamara was busy with Emma’s engineers, working on the circuit design and chip structure. They found that the composition of the superconducting coil wires was one critical factor; another was the configuration of the SETs comprising the RF generating circuit, and a third was the thickness of the tunnel junctions in the SETs. They were able to reproduce the extremely strong repulsive field that Tamara had first observed, but the fields they generated were transient and erratic. Both Emma and Tamara knew that more theoretical work would be needed to show how to stabilize the effect, and Emma spent a lot of time with Tamara going over the further testing from the lab and working out ways to isolate the individual subsystems of the device. At this, Tamara showed that she was a master, having an intuitive grasp of the behavior of the circuits she worked with.

Arundel Nature Society, Davidsonville, Maryland: early August

Tamara’s visit to Peter’s family’s resort would be a welcome break during August. All of Emma’s APL research group members took off at least two weeks in August; the European members customarily took off a month. Tamara would be spending about three weeks with Peter and Barbara and Terence would also be there.

The four friends had decided to take Jay’s advice and get to the resort two days before the rest of Peter’s family arrived; they all would arrive on the first August weekend. Peter’s great-grandparents had been among the resort’s founding members; his grandfather, along with his grandfather’s three children, were minority part-owners. Their family’s “cabin” was actually a rustic four-bedroom house and the site their house was on also contained three small cabins, each having two small bedrooms—each just large enough for a queen bed and a bunk bed, attached to a common area with a kitchenette, sitting area, and tiny bathroom.

The four friends arrived at the resort about 10 a.m. on Thursday, and when Barbara drove the car through the security gate and past a small but dense belt of trees which hid the grounds from prying eyes, Tamara gasped at the sight that lay before her. The landscape was dominated by a broad field of lush grass surrounded by a stand of beautiful mature trees. She could see a playground close by, and further past that, volleyball courts, a tennis court, and a group of picnic tables. A large, low building stood to the right and sounds of splashing water could be heard coming from that direction. To the left, Tamara could see rows of camper trailers and RVs; further away she saw some large tents and a number of small cabins.

But what really caught her eye were the people. There were people everywhere. Playing on the courts, sitting at the picnic tables, walking across the lawn. A teen group was tossing a frisbee around over there, and a number of young kids were using the playground equipment closer by. All were nude. There were men and women of all ages. Children, tweens, teenagers, all were here, and not a scrap of clothing could be seen. But, Tamara noticed, all the walkers were carrying towels.

Barbara stopped the car in a parking space to the side of the low building.

“This is the clubhouse and the resort office is over there on the right,” Barbara told Tamara and Terence. “Peter and I’ll bring you to the office and get you registered, so you’ll need your IDs.”

When they walked inside, Tamara saw that it looked just like a motel office, except that the people behind the counter were nude—there were two women, one middle-aged and another about 20 years old.

“Barbara! Peter!” The girl exclaimed. “We thought you wouldn’t be here till Saturday!”

“Hi, Michelle,” Peter answered. “We came early to get our friends used to the place. They’re first-timers. Hi, Aunt Vicki.”

The older woman answered, “Peter, I told you, it’s just Vicki. You’re an adult now,” she grinned. “How’ve you been? College keeping you busy?”

“Yeah. Too busy even for getting here weekends. Let me introduce you. Vicki, Michelle, this is Tamara and Terence. Tamara’s my girlfriend and Terence is Barbara’s boyfriend. This is their first resort experience, but they’ve had some prior experience being nude at a friend’s pool and backyard. Tamara and Terence, Vicki Allerman and her husband Ron and their daughter, Michelle, are the resort’s owners. Michelle has a brother but he’s in the Navy and deployed now.”

They all shook hands.

Vicki told them, “We’re just the majority owners, actually. Peter’s and Barbara’s family own about 20 percent and the rest of the Winsbergs, another 20 percent. Ron’s grandparents and Peter’s family’s great-grandparents built this place back about a hundred years ago. Ron’s family also came from Germany and they were naturists back then. The Allerman and Winsberg families met on the ship coming to the U.S. and settled in this area. They went into business together and prospered; they bought this property very cheaply—there was nothing here then—just woods, and through word-of-mouth in the German immigrant community, got enough other investors to help build the first facilities. All of our families—all the old timers—had many good times here. We have many third-generation members, people who grew up here are now members here too.”

“So this place is a hundred years old? Wow,” Terence said.

“Not quite yet,” Vicki told him. “This is the 94^th year. Okay, let’s register you guys. I need a photo ID to start.”

Terence gave her his driver’s license and she entered the information into their computer. Then Tamara handed her the passport card.

“Don’t you have a driver’s license? That makes it much easier,” Vicki told her.

“No, I don’t drive, so I never needed one.”

“Well, I need it for your address.”

Tamara gave her Baltimore address.

Vicki told her, “Ah, that’s your school address. I need a permanent address.”

“You mean, like my parents’ address? I don’t live there anymore; after I graduate college, I’ll won’t be moving back. I can give it if you want.”

“It’s okay; it’s just that we do background checks on our guests. But you were a minor before starting college, so I doubt there would be any public record for you. Let’s finish up these registrations. ... Okay, here are your campground IDs; take one of those wristbands over there and slide the strip in, with the barcode showing. You can use your code to charge purchases at the restaurant, lunch stand, or at our little convenience shop. When you leave, you can settle the charges with us. You’re staying with the Winsberg clan and they told us that they will cover the daily guest fee for you. Now comes the last step; you both need to sign these forms. It says that you agree to abide by all resort rules and it also contains a liability waiver. When you leave, just check with us to settle any charges. Okay?”

“Sure,” Terence said.

“Got it,” Tamara nodded.

Meanwhile, Peter and Barbara were talking with Michelle, and when Vicki finished, Michelle pulled several flyers out of a rack.

“Guys, here are the campground rules, a map, and our activities schedule. Usually we take our first-time guests for a tour, but Peter said he’d do it. He and Barbara know as much about this place as I do,” she chuckled. “We all grew up here.”

The group left the office after saying their goodbyes and Peter brought them into the clubhouse.

“This is a pretty extensive setup,” he told them. “There’s the games area. Pool table, foosball, air hockey, and shelves with board games. That room over there has some video arcade games and next to it is the studio. We use it for crafts, yoga, small classes. Those bookshelves have paperbacks people donate or leave behind. There are DVDs too if you want to borrow one to watch a movie.

“Through that door over there is the restaurant; they have breakfasts and dinners. Let’s go out here. Okay, over there, obviously is the pool and on the other side is the lunch stand. Around behind the lunch stand is the spa; the convenience shop is over that way too. They sell snack food and other stuff as well; you can check it out on your own. But before we go any further, we’ll need to strip off. We allow clothes in the clubhouse, but anywhere else, no clothes. This is a nudist resort; not clothing-optional. Back this way, there’s a changing room with lockers, but we’ll just go to the car and strip there; is that okay?”

“Ah guess.” ... “Uh huh.”

They went to the car and had just finished getting undressed when a stocky guy of medium height walked up.

“Hi, Uncl... um, Ron!” Peter called. “These are my friends...”

Peter hugged the newcomer, as did Barbara, and then he introduced everyone.

“How’s school?” Ron asked. “They treating you okay?”

“Sure,” Peter answered, and Barbara said, “It’s good. Starting our last year.”

Tamara had wrapped her towel around herself, tucking a fold in her cleavage, while Terence had wrapped his around his waist.

Ron smiled at them. “Yeah, Vicki said you guys are newbies. Doing the towels like that is okay for now, but I’m sure that Barbara and Peter told you that we’re a nudist resort.”

“They did,” Terence told him. “We’re still gettin’ used to it but we’re okay. Why aren’t y’all clothing-optional like other places Ah heard about?”

“Yeah, we’re asked about that all the time. That’s how the resort started; the founders insisted on total nudity, weather permitting, and my grandpa said it was because they didn’t want clothed gawkers joining when they opened. Now Vicki and I have visited a lot of nudist resorts, clubs, and campgrounds that say that they’re clothing optional but we noticed that, except for their pool or spa requiring nudity, those places can be as ‘textile’ as any other resort. We don’t want that happening here, so the nudity rule remains. Michelle gave you some flyers about the resort, our history, our rules, and our philosophy. Hey, Barbara and Peter, why don’t you folks walk around the grounds; show the facilities to your friends, and then head off to your family’s cabin? I’ll drive your car over there and park it. Is that okay?”

“Sure, good idea,” Barbara said. “Keys are inside. Let me grab our beachbags so we can put on some sunscreen.”

Ron drove the car off and the four friends helped each other to apply the sunscreen.

“Okay, let’s do the formal tour,” Barbara said. She pointed to the lawn where the frisbee kids were now playing with a wiffleball and bat. “We call that ‘The Meadow’ and people like to sunbathe and play lawn sports there. Some days you’ll see a mean game of croquet going on. One year there was even a group here that played lacrosse. Sometimes you’ll see flag football or even a pickup soccer game too. Let’s go to the other side of the clubhouse.”

As they walked, Barbara had to stop twice to talk to the people who greeted her and Peter; they introduced Tamara and Terence, who received very enthusiastic welcomes from everyone. Continuing, Barbara pointed out the basketball court, tennis court, and volleyball courts.

“They made one of the tennis courts into two pickleball courts last year,” she commented.

“Funny name, pickleball,” Tamara remarked. “What’s that?”

“You can see from the game they’re playing now that it’s a bit like tennis,” Peter said. “The court’s much smaller than tennis, the ball’s plastic, not rubber, and they use solid paddles instead of stringed racquets. The game’s like badminton, ping-pong, and tennis in many rules.”

“Way over there,” Terence pointed. “That looks like a minigolf setup?”

Barbara nodded. “It’s a nine-hole course. Ron plans on enlarging it. There’s a putting green beyond that.”

“What are those long lanes that look like a pathway but don’t go anywhere?” Tamara asked.

“Yeah, those are the pétanque courts,” Barbara said. “That’s like the Italian bocce game except the balls are tossed at the target, not rolled. But they play bocce on them too. Okay, around the corner here, we’re obviously back at the pool. That block building there is one of the bathroom-shower houses. There are indoor showers and you can see the outdoor ones—people going in the pool mostly use the outdoor showers. There are three other shower blocks around the grounds, nearer to the cabins and campsites.”

She was about to continue but was interrupted again by another group of enthusiastic friends of their family and had to go through the introductions again.

When they were alone again, Barbara said, “Whew, I’d like to have an introduction card to pass out to everyone; save time.”

They laughed.

She pointed to the area beyond the shower house.

“Right behind there, see the roofed structure, no walls? That’s the Pavilion. We have live music there and DJ music a lot of nights and weekends. Beyond that is the community firepit and a large barbeque area. You can see some of the RV and trailer sites over there and tent sites to the right. The convenience store is over there on the far right. Over on the left are the guest cabins; there are fifteen of them. They built cabins here because not all of the guests want to stay in tents or have RVs or trailers; they prefer their accommodations to be more ‘civilized,’” she giggled as she made finger quotes. “And beyond the cabins are the permanent resident sites. We have ... um ... 63 sites? Peter?”

He answered, “Yeah.”

“Our own site is back there too and that’s where we’re headed now. See that other blockhouse? Another shower and bathroom.”

They continued walking toward the wooded area and met a few more friends of the Winsberg family, who were also effusive in greeting the newcomers. As they went on toward the Winsbergs’ cabin, Tamara was thinking.

Jeez. I’m astounded at how friendly and welcoming everyone is; they all wanted to make us feel at ease immediately.

During the walk, she saw that Terence had unwrapped his towel and now had it folded and slung over a shoulder while he and Barbara were walking, hand-in-hand. He noticed Tamara’s glance.

“Hey yeah, Ah did it. Anyway, it felt weird, wearing it like a kilt.”

Barbara chuckled, “Yeah—it was rubbing the end of his big little head as he walked, to tell you what really happened.”

Terence muttered something to her inaudibly; then he said, “Ah was watchin’ for how folks looked at me. Ah’m still a bit sensitive, y’know? Hard t’ forget that crap. Everyone Ah saw, they looked at me down there maybe once but not after that and had no reaction to my size—well, Ah take that back. One guy, after he asked if Ah played football, said, like, ‘Man, you must have needed a custom cup when y’all suited up; that probably wasn’t any fun,’ and another, who told me, ‘Ah’ll bet kids in the locker room gave y’all plenty of grief.’ No one acted like Ah was a freak; what a damned relief.”

“So you feel a lot better now, right?” Barbara asked. “You can relax; you saw that no one made a big deal about your endowment.”

“Sure. Ah guess Ah knew that mature folks wouldn’t make fun of me—or be shocked—but with dealing with it for so many years, Ah guess Ah was still gun-shy.”

They had reached the Winsbergs’ site now and Tamara looked around. She was impressed; the photos she had seen didn’t do the place justice. The house was a modified log structure; the front was made of fieldstones and logs and the sides used logs for the ground-floor walls. There was a second floor which had apparently been added later; those walls were made of wood cut to look like the logs below. Inside, the first floor had a great room with a fireplace and doors leading to bedrooms and a bathroom, she supposed. One quarter of the floor was devoted to a kitchen and dining area; the rest contained a variety of seating. Above the ground floor, a second level ran around two walls with a balcony overlooking the great room and she could see doors up there too.

Peter saw her looking up at the second level.

“There are two bedrooms up there—no bathroom, though. Two bedrooms over there. This was my second home, growing up. It was also my refuge and where I was able to recover from my high school problems. Let me show you where we’ll be staying; it’s right out back.”

He led her out the door and over to a much smaller cabin about a hundred feet away from the main house. There were two other similar cabins close by. When he unlocked and opened the door, they were greeted by a blast of hot air.

“Whoo,” he grunted. “Gotta air it out. Please help me open some windows—there’s no a/c here, just ceiling fans. Look at the bedrooms and pick one; Barbara will have to make do...”

“That’s not fair...” Tamara started.

“Ha, the rooms are almost identical,” Peter told her. “So no problem. How’re you doing so far with the clothes-free bit?”

She thought for a few seconds. “I’m good. I feel happy that I had no further self-conscious twinges after we stripped at the car—even after I unwrapped the towel after Ron spoke to us. I’m glad we’re getting this private ... that’s probably the wrong word ... maybe ‘limited’ ... public exposure experience under my belt... ha, imaginary belt, that is... before your whole family arrives, though. Jay had a really good idea there. So what kinds of activities will there be?”

Peter put down the beach bag he was carrying and dug into it, coming up with a little folded flyer.

“August’s activities,” he read. “Okay, they have a couple of interesting ones. Next Saturday eve is Polynesian night and they’re having a mini music festival with two bands coming in to play. There will be body painting and a glow party with dancing that Saturday night. Um, there’s a volleyball clinic this Saturday and next.”

“What’s that about?”

“Oh yeah. It’s a skills session to learn or brush up people’s volleyball game. The resort has a couple of teams that go to play at the nude volleyball Superbowl on Labor Day week up in Pennsylvania. They do that every year.”

“Really? Nude volleyball?”

“Oh, sure, it’s a really big event. Some years, more than a thousand people go. The thing runs for more than a week but the competitions themselves are only on the final three or four days. There are NCAA collegiate champions who go; sometimes pros and Olympic players show up. And people from other countries go there too—mainly Canada, but last year some people from Europe, Brazil, and Argentina were there, Rick told me. He’s our team captain.”

“You ever go?”

“No, it’s the week following Labor Day and I’ve always been in school then. But the clinic they do here is fun. I learned to play a bit; they have games following the clinic. It’s loads of fun. Barbara is a really good player.”

“Okay, what else will there be?”

“Stuff to do every day. I’ll read the list. There are the sports you saw out there, tennis, basketball, pickleball, péntanque, minigolf, and of course volleyball. In the pool they have water volleyball games and water aerobics. There’s a nude 5-k cross-country run coming up in two weeks; that’s open to the public to come in and run. Oh, they added an orienteering game too—that’s where you get a map and compass and you try to find all the checkpoints all around the resort’s grounds. And there are yoga sessions and massages. Sometimes they have a couples-massage session too. They also have a crafts schedule; every Friday there’s some kind of crafts project, like decorating flower pots, making concrete stepping stones, sometimes a baking project. It varies. Lots of things to do.”

“So I won’t get bored?” Tamara joked.

“C’mere,” Peter said as he reached for her.

They hugged and were kissing for a minute when Barbara and Terence came in.

“Okay, break it up, kids,” Barbara joked. “We wondered where you guys went. The car is open; get your stuff and bring it in. Oh, thanks for opening up here and starting the fans. We need to do that in the other cabins tomorrow; we got Uncle Dave and Aunt Shelly and their crew coming tomorrow evening.”

Tamara went out to the car with Peter.

“Tonight, honey, when we’re alone, we’ll talk about my own abilities. I’ve hinted about them and I’ll tell you what I can do with them.”

Peter looked at her. “Um... sounds ominous?”

“No. It’s all good, sweetie. You’ll see.”

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