Titus Cain and Charlie Thrush were at the far half of the onemile course when they decided to stop jogging and walk the rest of the way back. They'd done three and a half miles, and the temperature was a hundred and two. It was six-fifteen in the afternoon.
They loped to a walk, sweat streaming from them, their athletic gray T-shirts and shorts stained dark with it. They strode through the misters flanking either side of the cinder track at fifty-yard intervals, head-high sprayers that formed a wet cloud of ten or twelve feet in diameter that Titus had installed for a distance of several hundred yards on the back half of the track.
Charlie, a tall, lanky man in his early sixties, turned and went back to the mister and stood in the cloud of spray.
“Damn, this's saving my life, ”he gasped, bending over and putting his hands on his knees as he caught his breath, the fine spray beading on his silver hair.
Titus, breathing heavily, too, paced back and forth through the cloud.
“We should've gone to the pool. This's brutal.”
There were nearly two hundred employees at CaiText now, and Titus had deliberately fostered a health-conscious environment by making it convenient for them to jog or swim or play handball without having to leave CaiText's twenty-six-acre campus. The roughly oval cinder track, situated at the back of the company's complex west of downtown, wound through an airy stretch of Hill Country woods dominated by oaks and elms and mountain laurels. It was a choice site, sitting on the crest of a hill and commanding an expansive view of the valleys that fell away to more hills to the west.
“We're gettin’old, ”Charlie said, straightening up and grinning.
“We?”
Titus had known Charlie since his early years at Stanford, when CaiText was just a dream in Titus's mind. At the time, Charlie was an electrical engineer and software designer doing research in microengineering. He was in the process of pioneering some of the early uses of computer-guided laser surgery, which he later patented. In the years since, the patents had made him enormously wealthy.
Over the years their friendship remained strong, and Charlie and his wife, Louise, regularly visited Titus and his wife, Rita, in Austin. Though nearly twenty years separated the two women, Louise's impulsive and exuberantly curious nature had kept her young and was a complement to Rita's commonsense practicality. They had become good friends from the moment they met.
During their visits to Austin, Charlie and Louise had fallen in love with the Texas Hill Country and eventually bought a four-hundred-acre ranch south of Fredericksburg about an hour's drive away. They built a retirement home there, and the two couples saw each other frequently. In fact, Rita and Louise were now on a three-week trip together in Italy.
Titus heard a lone jogger behind him and turned to see a chunky guy with thick black hair and a beet red face just shutting down from a jog to a fast walk. He was trying vainly to dry his glasses on the tail of his sweatshirt.
“Hey, Robert, ”Titus said as the guy approached. “You gonna make it?”
The guy shook his head. “Heat index's gotta be a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty.”
“It's the humidity, ”Titus said. “Don't push it too hard.” He slapped the guy on the back as he passed by. When he was through the mist he put on his glasses again, but he didn't pick up the jog. He just kept walking. Titus watched him.
“You ever meet Brister? ”he asked Charlie, nodding at the young man.
“Yeah, sure. In the R and D labs.”
Often when Charlie was in town, he would hang out at CaiText for a few hours, spending time in Research and Development exercising his curiosity. He was something of a celebrity with the researchers there, and they got a kick out of talking to him. His “no boundaries ”thinking was just as radical now as it had been when he was a young man, and everyone in the division had great affection for this eccentric and brilliant man.
The two men moved out of the spray and started back to the clubhouse, keeping to the shady side of the track.
“Poor guy's life's a horror story right now, ”Titus said. “His wife has brain cancer. The slow kind that takes your life away by moments and millimeters, leaving you breathing, but haunted.”
Titus paused. “I'll tell you, Charlie, it makes you count your blessings. I just can't imagine what I'd do…”
“Yeah, I know, ”Charlie said, running a hand over his sweaty face. “I've thought about it, too. Not exactly like that, maybe, but just from the point of view of us having done okay doing the kind of work we like to do. Not everybody's got that.”
“Not everybody's got someone like Louise, Charlie. Or someone like Rita. We're lucky about those two women, that's what I'm talking about.”
Charlie suddenly laughed, shaking his head.
“I got an e-mail from Louise yesterday, ”he said. “She said she was shipping something home, and if it got here before she got back, I wasn't supposed to uncrate it under any circumstances. Uncrate it!? What the hell's she done?”
They were both laughing as they walked through the long arcade of arbors into the palmy courtyard outside the club. CaiText employees were sitting around small tables in their swimsuits and jogging clothes in the shade of the oaks that covered much of the campus. The setting had a westward view of the hills.
Afternoon, Mr. Cain. Hot enough for you, Mr. Cain? The women smiled. Titus stopped and chatted with them a few moments before he and Charlie moved on, going through the club, past the swimming pool with its echoing voices, and on to the men's dressing rooms.
Titus Cain was an egalitarian. He shared everything with his employees. There were no special facilities for him or any of the CaiText executives. His locker was just one of the hundreds of lockers in the same locker rooms with everyone else. He swam with everyone else, jogged with everyone else, and worked as hard as everyone else.
But, like being the most beautiful girl in school, just being who he was naturally set him apart. After you get so far up on the food chain, egalitarianism is largely a symbolic sort of thing anyway. You're really never going to be buds with the men and women at the bottom. And in Titus's case that really didn't matter to them. But it did matter to them that he cared enough about them not to set himself apart in the day-to-day scale of things where they had to live out their lives.
Titus Cain might have a lot more money than they did- multimillions more-and most would probably admit that he was smarter than they were-in a certain wide-angle sense that the world seemed to reward-but the important thing was, he never acted as if he believed he was a better human being because of those things. And they liked him and respected him for that.
The two men went to their lockers, took off their sweaty clothes, showered, and dressed. A few minutes later, they were in CaiText's underground parking garage at their SUVs.
“You sure you don't want to stay over tonight and drive back tomorrow afternoon? ”Titus asked.
“Naw, I'd better get back, ”Charlie said, opening the back of his Pathfinder and throwing in his dirty jogging clothes. “I've got to do some stuff around the house tonight, and tomorrow I've got to cut down an old dead tree by the office. I've been putting it off. ”He slammed the back door. “But thanks for the invitation. Maybe I'll take you up on it near the end of the week. I've got to come back in and do some legal stuff downtown.”
“Give me a call, ”Titus said. “Careful driving back.”
He opened his Range Rover and climbed in. He started the engine to get the air conditioner going and flipped open his cell phone.
As he pulled out of the garage and circled up to the front gates of the complex, he waited for the only sound in the world that he really wanted to hear.