Dear Frank,



Thank's for the copy of Science Probe with the picture of old times.  Here's a
more recent vintage, a self portrait with the phallactite in Hanging Well Cave.

This got me to reminiscing about the time that you and I and Dianne and Ida
were in the back section of Son of Beechtree Cave.  I was telling you what
great toys digital computers were, and how it was nearly as much fun as caving,
tho in a different sort of way.  The latest sport was to survey the caves and
draw the maps with the computer.

"Someday in The Future," Frank said, "the instruments, data book, computer, and
plotter, the 'hole bag, all of it in a thirty caliber box." That half made
sense, I suppose, since I had just seen a pH meter shrink from a two graduate
student load into something that I could put into a fifty caliber ammo box.

"No, really.  This is the same technology as what guides a guided missle, and
Uncle Shit is spending quite a bit of money on it." But what I really remember
about it is what Dianne thought of the notion.

"Yeah, and there'll be a Polack in The Vatican and a Deke in The White House
too," she said.  "Frank, you've had about two too many hits of hydroxylic
acid.  Just curl up on a rock and it will soon all be over." Dianne was the
cultural anthropologist from U Mass, who was ever fond of explaining how 99% of
it is irrelevant.

I thought that Ida was going into epilepsy.  When she finally was able to talk
in English, the first thing she said was, "Not me."

"Not me.  I don't care who is The Pope, and I don't care if she is in Mount
Olympus.  But I don't want any part of anyplace with any Dekes.  I grew up next
to the Deke House at RPI, and I wouldn't live in a future run by a Deke." Ida
was the eldest daughter of Prof Giragoshian, RPI's prize
nuclearmicrobiohydrogeochemist.  Peggy Pease had told me about how the
radiation in nuclear ractors was transmogrifying the bugs in the cooling
water.  "The Dekes are the worstest of the worst.  I used to pick up at least
two garbage pails full of beer cans and whiskey bottles from our front lawn
every Sunday.  A few times there were a couple garbage cans full of Deke too,
we even found a dead one once.  We kept a spare room just for girls who escaped
from Deke parties.  I just wouldn't want to live in Deke country."

I didn't have any opinions about the Dekes.  I did know that they were banned
from the Union campus.  Their wild drunken parties had not been the problem.
What finally had gotten the attention of the college was when three Skidmore
women had named Union Collge as an accessory in a rape suit.  Of course they
couldn't make it stick, but it scared the right people.