SImp

It is impressive that large amounts of time, where nothing happens, are punctuated by brief flickers of action. Considering how event filled our first week back in time was, you would think that I'd never be bored. However,…

We found a cute house in upstate New York by Middletown, it was kind of in the middle of the action, somewhat between Annhurst College in Connecticut and Murry Hill in New Jersey. Plus it was close to Rochester, New York where the Haloid Photographic Company started out. Edwin Land who started that company was going to be a critical inventor for some of the technology that we would need, and it would also give us links to Xerox PARC research center in Palo Alto, California in the future. Yet at the same time, it was far enough away from our daily operations area that we would not be suspected of any ties to weird things. We picked it up for just under eight-thousand dollars in Bridget's name as she was of legal age. It was on a three-acre lakefront property, with seven rooms for those times when we had one or more of the girls overnight. And if you can believe it, it had real hardwood floors cut from actual trees!

I was spending a lot of my time playing wife, and interior decorator. Bit would go pick up the five girls every night that they could escape. He was a great tutor as well as a chauffeur. Evenings and well into the night we taught them self-defense which also helped us stay in shape. Turned out we had some great cooks amongst the girls, and between them, everyone got better. I really liked learning how to cook from scratch. Home cooked food is entirely different than what a typical meal would be in the future. Somehow it just tasted better doing it yourself.

With the girls tutoring Lance and me on how to blend into the nineteen-forties it did not take long to look like a native. Shopping trips to New York City for clothes made all six of us girls as excited as could be. It seems that shopping for clothes is just something that is in a girls blood. Luckily the little black dress is a classic, so there were no questioning looks on our first trip. Lance seemed appreciative when we would meet up at night, and we all gave him a fashion show of our latest finds. Levi's and a button-up shirt was what Lance liked best of what we brought him back from our first trip. I don't think he ever really adjusted to having to wear sports coats and ties. Eventually, Lance gave up the battle and went with us to shop for a suit and hat for him. The girls appeared to get as much excitement out of watching him trying clothes on as he did from our fashion shows.

Lance was spending most of his time trying to find some of William Shockley's team at Bell Labs. He was haunting the breakfast coffee and lunch hot spots hoping to slip some key thoughts into the typical talking shop informal gatherings. Yes, they had created a transistor a year ago or so, but it needed help to send it on the right path to handle the power that we needed. When he was not in New Jersey with Bell Labs, he was trying to do the same thing In Rochester and meet up with Edward Land.

Back in those days, (Ummm—Now?) it was not all that hard to create a fake background and the legal papers to support it. We used our real names as there was no connection to them at this point in time. We tried to blend in, and Lance picked us out a brand new cream-colored Jaguar XK 120 for about half of what the house cost. I mean to me three-thousand six-hundred was cheap, but the girls about freaked out. But each one had to be taken for a spin with Lance at the wheel.

The house had all the modern conveniences; oil fired furnace, refrigerator, and telephone. And we set up delivery with the local food store to have a delivery boy bring us fresh food whenever we called in an order. The local bakery dropped off a fresh loaf of bread on the days the milkman did not stop by with a quart bottle of whole raw milk. Even the dry cleaner would pick up and deliver.

That first year I was as happy as I had ever been. I had really close girlfriends who looked like we were all of the same age and would open up and talk to me about anything. My husband was even more attentive to me than I had ever dreamed of or could have wished. My only sorrow was that I could not get pregnant. You see I had had my fertility offset when I entered the Marines. It was SOP (standard operating procedure) for men and women. The technology to turn that off, so I could get pregnant, did not exist in the here and now.

Lance kept me up to date on his attempts to assist with improving transistor technology. He thinks they all think he is part of Bell Labs, just not in their department, as he can talk the talk and sling their lingo. As a result, they talk over their troubles and Lance gives them guidance. If they only knew he was a bug-eyed monster….

Lance loved to talk over a dinner prepared by my own two hands. To be fair, he studied cooking just as much as I did, telling me that there might come a time when he stayed home and took care of the household stuff but at the moment the burden had to be his. We now had a stockbroker, or I should say our corporation did. Yes all seven of us owned an investment company. Under the umbrella of that company, we made small investments into Mr. Lands company and the bell companies.

Three hundred thousand plus is a lot of money now, I mean 1948 now, but it all of our investments are very long-term investments. We could never determine why those bikers always had so much cash on them, was it money from the leadership or did they 'creatively' acquire it using less than legal means? The one thing we were very sure of after our investigations, was that they had not received it in any lawful manner.

We did have in our database inside Bit a very complete record of every horse race and sports game ever played. Neither of us had any issue taking unfair advantage of the bookies that let people bet on these games.

The girls had no idea of how to go about betting, but if you think any ordinary red-blooded young man could stand there while they pulled their helpless act and batted their eyelashes at them you had better think again. If you have ever seen that old 2D movie 'Puss in Boots' you would know what I mean by Puss in Boots eyes. If not, just trust me on this one. No One, let me repeat, 'No One' could deny those girls anything if they pulled their beautiful young girl eyelash-batting helpless routine on them. And Lance was no exception.

We thought it would be best to spread our bets out, so the girls slowly acquired a task force of other late teenage or college co-eds who used similar techniques to gather a team of guys to place those bets for them. We always won, we always picked the long odds, and we always paid off our operators. We estimated that we could run this racket for about a year before the organized crime lords figured out that they were being hustled.

During that time we all became most excellent cooks. The core team of girls became masters of the martial arts. Our core group of girls were the best dressed, most beautiful (and smartest) you could find—we increased our base operating capital to around a half million. Majorie moved to New York City and became a librarian there which was very helpful. Even with Bit's historical database, there were lots of details that had not made it into the digital age records. Ashley and Barbara started at Cornell University, and Bridget and Caitlín transferred. They all lived in the same dorm room.

Then we heard that the Mafia were looking into their losses.