“Eileen was a long distance runner?” That fact caught Trumbull by surprise. Although he was already seeing a good deal of the commander’s great capabilities in many areas, the idea of a woman being an accomplished athlete and the physical equal of a man was still somehow a strange concept.
“Not ‘was’ — is. In her spare time she was running the occasional marathon or ten kilometre race right up to the point we left for 1940: I don’t care how fit the bloke is in the field… unless Kransky’s been training for the Olympics, she’s going to kick his arse!”
“Poor fellow,” Trumbull agreed after a long pause, a faint smirk crossing his features as they walked on. “Poor fellow indeed!”
“Good mornin’, Richard,” Eileen called out cheerfully as the American approached, the man now feeling rather dubious about an idea that’d seemed far more appealing the day before. He wore a pair of loose-fitting combat fatigue pants and long-sleeved shirt, along with the only pair of shoes he possessed — his well-worn army boots — and he was feeling the cold of the morning more than he’d have liked. He was used to cold climates, but that didn’t mean he was altogether happy about being out in one any more than necessary.
“Morning to you… Eileen…” he said with a little hesitation as he took a good look at what she was wearing for the first time. Her dress was, as Trumbull had suspected even from a distance, far more revealing than was normal for a woman of that period when engaging in sport or otherwise. The fluoro-green shorts she wore over a skin-tight black pair of thigh-length, Lycra pants were very brief and left not a great deal to the imagination, while the plain, white T-shirt above them clearly showed off a grey sports bra beneath.
Being quite cold that morning, Kransky couldn’t help but notice that her erect nipples were showing quite clearly through the sports bra and T-shirt, and as he made a valiant attempt at not staring directly at her breasts, he discovered there was almost no part of her body he could look at that wasn’t showing either far too much bare skin or showing off undergarments far too readily. In the end he stared down at her feet, trying to ignore her toned and shapely legs and instead studied her unusual running shoes for a few moments. He wondered if ‘Nike’ was the surname of perhaps someone from whom she’d borrowed them, although it occurred to him that if that were the case, the person in question had to be very poorly sighted if they needed their own name emblazoned across the shoes in such large letters.
“It’s quite all right, Richard,” Eileen laughed lightly, noticing his consternation and embarrassed inability to look directly at her. “I’m sure this is probably ‘more’ of me than you expected to see.” She carried out a final five set of toe-touches as she spoke which did nothing to help Kransky’s mental state at all, before rising to stand completely once more, legs slightly apart and hands expectantly on hips. “We’re going for a run, for goodness sake, not a formal dance!” The grin on her face was sympathetic and showed some understanding of the man’s ‘plight’.
“I do know Max had a chat with you yesterday about what’s going on here at Hindsight,” she noted, changing the subject a little.
“It was a lot to take, I have to admit,” Kransky nodded slowly, the remark bringing curiosity to his expression and taking his mind completely away from her body for a moment or two. “It took an awful lot of convincing.”
“Well under those circumstances, perhaps you can understand that we do things a little different at the start of the 21st Century.” She held her arms out at her sides in indication of her own attire. “For a start, male or female, we tend to wear things for practicality rather than purely for modesty. Shall we…?” She added, making movements that suggested they get started on their run. “I was thinking we could head east along the perimeter fence and then down to South Walls and back.”
“What would that be…?” Kransky began, drawing on what he’d learned of the island’s topography and working it out in his mind “…maybe six miles each way…?”
“Perhaps a bit more than that, but not by much: thought we’d go easy for your first day.”
“Nah, that’s okay, Eileen: just go as far as you want — don’t worry about me,” he countered, not outwardly displaying any of the smug confidence that suddenly resurfaced at the back of his mind. “I’ll be fine.”
“Okay then, mister: let’s be off!” She stated simply as she turned and began to jog away toward the northern side of the runway and hangar buildings and the nearest set of gates beyond that led out through the two-metre-high fence surrounding the installation. He hesitated just a moment or two before taking off after her retreating form, thinking that despite his own ego, leaving his pack and equipment behind mightn’t have been a bad idea after all.
Almost two and a half hours and more than twenty kilometres of solid, paced jogging later, Richard Kransky had given up all thoughts of ‘going easy’ on anyone and was concentrating on nothing more than keeping up. As they made their way back along the perimeter fence toward those same gates once more, Donelson was a good ten metres ahead and he no longer regarded the shapely figure running before him as anything more than an incentive to keep going, despite the constant protests of his back, feet and legs… and the rest of his body for that matter. The bright, fluoro-green shorts were all he could focus on, and he used them as a beacon to drag himself onward as his ego forced him to continue, determined to at least finish the run with her, even if it killed him.
He didn’t turn his head as he passed a group of Australian SAS troopers, engaged in setting up equipment on the open ground beside the runway on the other side of the fence to his left, but he could hear their laughter and less-than-sympathetic remarks regarding his worn-out appearance. He wasn’t entirely sure what a ‘Septic’ was, other than the obvious dictionary definition, but he was fairly certain it wasn’t complimentary. The few Australians he’d come across in his life had proved to be excellent fighters and hard workers, but they were a strange lot into the bargain and were possessed of a sharp and caustic sense of humour that perhaps reflected the harsh nature of the country they’d grown up in.
Invariably behind Donelson for the entirety of the run, he’d spent the time thinking about many things, not the least of which was the incredible story Thorne had told him the day before regarding the origins of the Hindsight Interception unit. It’d been difficult to accept what Thorne had revealed to him initially, but the man had produced enough evidence — in light of the existence of those four jet aircraft particularly — to eventually convince him. He was looking forward to getting the chance to work his way through some of the files and information that Hindsight had brought with them: to learn more about the world that the unit had left and the way the one he lived in should be.
In retrospect, he did wonder why Thorne had been so quick to trust him with the true nature of the Hindsight unit — it was something that was obviously of the highest security after all and should be — and he had the distinct feeling that perhaps Thorne somehow already knew him, or at least knew of him… something that wasn’t at all impossible considering they’d all come from the future. The man wouldn’t elaborate the few times Kransky had asked however, and it was a singularly bizarre and unnerving feeling for the tall American that someone might well know his fate. He’d later decided that Thorne was right not to volunteer any information… it was better perhaps than a man never know what the future had in store for him.