Worse, Karl didn’t own this air car. At sixteen T-years, he had dreams of owning one, had even admitted that he was saving towards a used model, but this air car was “his” only because he needed to get to his job as a provisional ranger with the Sphinxian Forestry Service. His parents considered use of the car fairly compensated by the time they saved shuttling Karl back and forth from Thunder River, which was about a thousand kilometers away-an investment of a couple hours each way, even at the speeds an air car traveled.

Since Karl and Stephanie were the only probationary rangers in the Sphinxian Forestry Service, they were regularly assigned to work as a team, allowing only one ranger’s time to be taken up with supervising them. Since Stephanie couldn’t pilot, this meant that usually they worked in the vicinity of Twin Forks, the town nearest to the Harrington freehold and where Richard Harrington had his veterinary clinic. There was plenty of room in the Harringtons’ sprawling stone house, since Stephanie’s parents definitely planned on additional children. That was one of the reasons they’d emigrated from their heavily populated homeworld of Meyerdahl, and Stephanie was looking forward (guardedly) to the novel experience of siblings. In the meantime, Karl often stayed with the Harrington family, taking advantage of all that currently unoccupied space, although sometimes he stayed with friends in Twin Forks.

They were coming into an area where the forest giants were more widely spaced, so Stephanie hazarded talking in addition to piloting.

“I think I’m getting better,” she said, “but I’ll admit, I never thought handling an actual air car on ‘manual’ would be so hard. I mean, I was getting perfect scores on the simulator, even in the ‘auto-pilot-off’ setting.”

“Wonder-girl,” Karl retorted with a grin. “You always get perfect scores on everything. If you hadn’t, I would never have let you try this. Reality is different than a simulator. What I don’t understand is why you can’t wait until you have a learner’s permit like everyone else. Your fifteenth birthday isn’t that far off.”