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We kept up our constant push and pull on technology which had been going on non-stop since almost day one. Things like Lance asking me in the hearing of an actor named Bing Crosby if it was possible to record television on a tape recorder. Which idea would lead to the invention of the video tape recorder and then eventually, with a few more pushes here and there, to using a laser to encode massive amounts of data onto a small plastic disc. That way our investments into the entertainment industry would eventually bear fruit. There is tons of money there, and if you just happen to know what movies are going to be hits and which ones are going to flop,—well we did have an advantage.

Everything we did was aimed at the long term. It was all either aimed at getting us the technology we would need to get back home or at investments that would be small now, but grow to massive size in the future when we would sell our stock. Little things such as pushing the rediscovery of instant glue. All the way up to encouraging the discovery of the hydrogen bomb—as much as we hated to do so. Although its destructive ability was massive, eventually it would lead the world to safe power. Power that Lance and I would need to get back home.

One advantage that Lance and I had and one that we hammered into our girls was that things do not stand still. For instance, IBM was another company that Lance paid significant attention to. They had just created what one day would be a key technology in the computer industry, a hard drive. The first hard disk drive could hold a mere five megabytes and weighed over a ton. A far cry from a later hard drive, a microdrive that contained one gigabyte (there are one-thousand megabytes in a gigabyte. A byte, by the way, is eight bits—or memory locations whose state can be either on or off.) That microdrive was only about an inch square and was around as thick as a couple of quarters stacked and weighed about the same.

Given the advantage of that perspective, our girls would drop support for a hot technology as soon as a new disruptive technology emerged, rather than hanging on and thinking that whatever marvelous device it was would last forever. Nope, ride the wave, but be ready to swim back out and grab the next wave once your wave (almost) reached the shore. Companies often rose and fell with changes in technology, and as investors, our company had to be ready to pick up the next wave as it started, while jumping off at the peak of the old.

I mean think about it. A few years before we arrived IBM's president, Thomas Watson, stated, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." And here we are, just over a decade later, and IBM has just introduced a hard-drive. Eventually, a lot the world's population will have several computers each, all using hard-drives—further in the future, even that technology will go away and be replaced with technology that does not have moving parts. Until you have seen technology change literally in a year, you can't understand how fast things can change. Most people in the here and now are used to technology changes that take decades not days.

Another point of view that we had to get changed was when back in 1946, Darryl Zanuck—a film executive at 20th Century-Fox said, "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." Yeah, he nailed that prediction right on the head…. Needless to say, our company invested heavily in those television devices. Oh, and yes, Lance and I had hinted to the right engineers at IBM that a pseudo-randomly accessible memory device was readily available if they used a disk format….

Much of our time was spent in the day to day stuff. The mundane doing the laundry, playing with the kids. Merely being a family, even if that family was somewhat unorthodox, took time and effort. We were pushing the envelope of what was known in the here and now, and our girls needed lots of our help comprehending the new technologies. Plus we had two girls in college that needed academic help. With Bit to act as a taxi it was not a problem to live in New York and shuttle Betty and Erin back and forth from home to MIT. (FYI - Bit was an excellent tutor, even if both Erin and Betty preferred teasing Lance until he helped them.)

My biggest worry right now, while we waited for time to pass as technology matured, was children. That and secondary but coming on fast was that our original five girls were noticing that while they were looking older, Lance and I had not changed much. You see not only did we both have our anti-senescence treatment, the advanced kind that took significant money or significant political clout to get but also Lance had checked on the stuff that Beauty had given him in his last moments with her.

Bit's small but powerful lab had found nothing harmful in Beauty's concoction, so we both decided there was nothing to lose. If we took Beauty's gift and if it worked—great. If we failed and Beauty's treatment worked, we would still get back to our time the way Dad had, just live our lives until we arrived there. But if it worked and we succeeded, then we would reach our time no worse for the wear, but much wiser for the time that we had spent.

If Beauty's concoction didn't work and we were not successful, well it was a fun ride, and I hoped that we would leave the world a better place than when we found it. We each took one of the balls of Beauty's concoction of flower petals and whatever else was in it. (it did smell wonderful…) And we swallowed it. It had a strong minty flavor which Lance said matched that one plant that removed waste, but there was something else. In any case, we ate it and hoped.

As to children I knew baby-hungry women when I saw them. After all, I was one of them…. I knew that even if I gave Lance permission and encouragement that he would never get our girls pregnant the natural way. Also if he tried, I knew he would fail to perform because of his mental state. He had lived his life such that part of the warp and woof of his very being was that once he married me that only with the two of us would such things happen. He was wired that way, even if the Empire really did not care how a family was put together—as long as any children were adequately cared for. But then again when you consider the situation that they were in when we found all of them, our girls were understandably wedded to Lance in their minds. In actuality, Lance might be the only guy they could trust now.

The conflict was starting to show here and there. Little Larry and little Jane were helping, as everyone adored them. But was it enough? I was going to have to think more about this. Could I get them to go outside of the family and find even a one night stand? Or would that destroy what we had? What about in vitro? Bit carried the proper technology, but how would that affect our family. To be honest, how would it affect me? Was adoption an option? To be honest with myself I loved our family just the way it was—if Lance was willing, I think I would also be. (Or at least I kept telling my self that…)

Now we had been playing superhero a lot recently. The girls were a fantastic team. They were geniuses in finance and business management. So there was little for Lance and me to do in that direction. In all likely hood, if we stuck our noses in at this stage, we would probably just rock the boat. And with Bit as our Batmobile we could be just about anywhere we wanted in moments. The one nice thing about Bit's fields was that he could conform them so that a sonic boom would not happen until much higher speeds. So we did not have to go up so high to go unbelievably fast.

We have not talked much about our superhero exploits in our journals, but we had not ignored this aspect of our lives. In some regards, we had taken to heart the example of 'The Shadow' to create a network of people who we had helped, who would rather lose their lives than betray our secret. Not to mention that even if they did,—bug-eyed aliens in a flying saucer did what???? As this network grew, our ability to be a superhero increased. The more reporters we had, the more chances we had to help.

As we entered the early-nineteen-fifties, New York was starting to get more crowded. We could see the writing on the wall, and we started planning. One of the side issues this caused was that we could not go for our midnight runs at full three-gee speed anymore. Luckily Bit could create the proper fields so we could work out at three-gee on his deck, but that was not as fun. Besides although I really got a laugh from watching Lance try hard not to notice our stunningly beautiful girls it was hard on him, and accidents happened. Not the least they happened while Lance and I trained our family in the martial arts. I'll leave those incidents entirely to your imagination…. Betty was not the only one that Lance ended up on the ground with during our daily activities. Worse in his mind and contributing to the girls growing the love of Lance, with only one bathroom and an eight to one ratio of girls to boys, well incidents have happened on both sides. Which as I have total faith and belief in Lance is fine with me.