“I’m decided,” Captain Hall interrupted the silence.
“I’m going outside.”
Five
Until eleventh grade in San Francisco, Eleanor had played baseball, not softball with the girls, but hard ball on the high school baseball team. Helluva’n arm, is what people would say about her. She got the nickname Jane Beam for her fastball. Then, her junior year, some jerk from Arvada High, her school’s rival, had made it his personal mission to point out that girls didn’t belong. He plunked her during her first at bat with a heater that would’ve broken a rib had she not turned in time. Furious, she dug in to take the guy’s next pitch into the seats. She struck out.
She rushed the mound. Standing over the asshole pitcher, bat in hand, her teammates making a show of holding her back (but secretly wanting her to take a swing), she paused. She dropped the bat and she walked off the field. It had zero to do with being intimidated. It had to do with the fact that she’d really only liked the throwing part of baseball. She wanted to pitch. But that wasn’t realistic; she lacked the arm to throw even another year. She knew, then and there, as she stomped off the field, that she didn’t ever want to be in the position of defending an activity she didn’t give a damn about. She wanted to do something affirmative.
Right now, she felt like she needed to do something and have it not be stupid or indefensible. Going outside was the least stupid thing she could think of.
“Of the two options, going back there”—she gestured with a jerk of her neck to the passenger area—“or going out there, my gut tells me that I’d rather be in a space that’s not confined.”
“You?”
“I’m the captain. At least we know that it’s safe in here, for the time being.”
“Why not all of us?”
“Because we need to hedge our bets.”
“So you’ll take one for the team,” Jerry said. It was hard to tell if he was being generous or confrontational or maybe neither, just thinking aloud. “I don’t think so. You’re just going to slide down the window? I don’t think so.”
Eleanor clenched her jaw. Without her quite realizing it, Jerry’s attitude reminded her why she was single. Men had no idea how to talk to her, not since Frank had died. Frank, the love of her life, his body never returned from a crevasse on Annapurna. That was years ago and Eleanor recovered and kept looking. But, in addition to Frank’s memory, the challenges were manifest. She’d inherited a gorgeous house from her parents in a gorgeous San Francisco neighborhood and had self-sufficiency oozing from her pores and most men couldn’t figure out their play, what they could give her. The harder they tried, the more she turned off.
Jerry embodied the worst of it. Internet dating had been a boon for him. The virtual medium paved over the nuances such that what translated to potential bedmates was: pilot and tall. He’d never had it so good. Eleanor privately named him the “Résumé Cowboy.” He laid plenty of waitresses and aging midlevel marketing executives and started to believe his own profile hype. But they all caught on after a few dates, often the morning after. On some level, he understood that Eleanor’s outright lack of romantic interest in him was telling him a truth about himself he hated. On the other hand, Eleanor did have a soft spot for Jerry, maybe the kind of affection she’d have had for a neighbor’s dog. He was reliable, reliably Jerry.
“Through the cargo hold. I’ll be able to get a radio, cell phone, get to the communications network. We need help.”
“You have no idea what’s out there—or who.”
She chewed on this and he poured it on. “If it’s terrorists or crazy people, they may just be waiting in the weeds. It’d be a suicide mission.”
“We don’t know there’s anyone there. It seems… It seems like, I don’t know, a syndrome, to borrow Dr. Martin’s word.”
She stood, turned left, facing away from Lyle and Jerry and opened the door to a head-high cabinet mounted beside the flight deck door. She pushed aside coordinate books, logs, thick books of technical jargon, looking for something behind them. One of the tomes fell out and hit her toe. “Shit!”
Lyle tensed. He recognized what was happening: Captain Hall was unreeling. In her shoes, who wouldn’t? If he hadn’t abandoned everything in the world he once cared about, he might be freaking, too.
He almost leaned over to pick up the book and realized it would be deeply patronizing. She yanked another couple of books onto the floor, her intensity laid bare.
“Eleanor…” Jerry said. He walked to the flight deck door. “Be practical. We’re thirteen feet off the ground, even from the hold.”
“Where’s the medical kit—not the first aid kit, the one with more stuff?”
“Now you’re planning to do field surgery?”
“Jerry, I don’t like your tone.”
“I’m not letting you go out there.”
Eleanor turned. Instinctively, Lyle stepped backward. Eleanor looked like a Spanish bull turning on a circus clown. Fury. Then, just before she was about to say something, she zipped it up. Controlled again.
Alex gripped the wall of the door with a prurient fascination and horror. The tension on this flight deck threatened to blow these last survivors apart.
“Can anybody offer me better logic?” Eleanor asked.
She stood and looked at Lyle. He was a touch over six feet, just shy of tall, and she was only a few inches shorter and the quarters were so tight that he could smell the residue of mint on her breath.
“I think I should go,” Lyle said.
Eleanor studied him for the briefest moment.
“An even worse idea,” Jerry said.
“I have some experience—”
“In the apocalypse?”
Eleanor looked at Lyle, really studied him.
“What’s your game, Dr. Martin?”
He shook his head, like What do you mean? But he sensed that she, rightly, understood he wanted off this boat.
As the pilot talked, Lyle noticed for the first time the way the first officer looked at his boss. It wasn’t quite adoring but not far from it. He was absolutely letting her know that he was really listening, the way a man might on an early date. And Eleanor was using that by questioning the other man; smart, thought Lyle. She’s trying to keep together her alliances before this place turns into Lord of the Flies, or Lord of the Fliers.
Lyle had a habit of watching people’s reactions. In fact, he sometimes watched movies on silent and focused on how characters moved and gestured, what looked human and what looked forced. It was something he even encouraged med students to do to help them understand what is normal. He would tell his students that a good clinical exam could usually predict the outcome of a blood test.
What’s your game, Dr. Martin?
Curiously, in another setting, that language might be the seeds of, if not attraction, flirtation, an invitation to fire back. It was the kind of thing Lyle could invite, even if he never fully realized that he had an allure or why. Most basically, he was attractive—even before his business card said doctor. He kept fit, rangy, by rowing a kayak on Lake Merced, where he did hours of thinking, sometimes in pouring rain. He had a movie jaw and a full head of hair that showed no signs of abating. But mostly his magnetism owed to a set of dark brown eyes that had the rare quality of being able to paralyze both in groups and, more so, in intimate conversations. Melanie told him that most people communicated at a frequency that allowed them to captivate one or the other—individuals or groups—but that Lyle could do both. And, especially when he was in one-on-one settings, his potent gaze had the effect of causing people to stutter or even to go on the offensive, make jokes, keep it light. They would start the conversation with a defense mechanism.