He’d been remembering his early days in nasa, the parties in sprawling, tasteless mansions along Memorial Drive, the perfumed and tinted society wives with hairline surgical scars on the undersides of their breasts, the cable interviews and charity luncheons and expensive scotch in plastic motel glasses.
“You come out here a lot?” she asked him.
“Just restless,” he said, and offered her the mescal.
“That’s awful,” she said, tasting it.“Like a bile-and-vodka cocktail.”
He literally could not remember the last time he’d been alone with a woman. Even the professionals had avoided the Hotel Casino and its deserted bar, and before that he’d just been traveling aimlessly, by bus and train, hardly speaking to anybody. He felt a sudden, familiar stab of desire and chased it with the mescal.
“Were you looking for me?” Reese asked.“Or just passing by?” The words came out more dismissively than he’d intended, but he let them stand.
“Wandering. I don’t sleep much. I’m out a lot at night.” She leaned back, her mane of dark hair catching the moonlight, tension bringing out the clean lines of the muscles in her neck.“I heard somebody over here and thought it might be you. So it seemed like a good chance to talk to you about something, something I didn’t want Morgan to overhear.”
“You don’t think we’re going to make it, is that it? I don’t blame you. I feel that way myself about half the time.”
“It’s not that. It’s something I found.” Her eyes were nervous, her mouth a thin, hard line.“Like I said, I’m out a lot at night.There’s a lot of history here, stuff Morgan keeps locked up, stuff I wanted to look at. Like the moon rocks over at the Lunar Receiving Lab, and that big padded room—”
“The anechoic chamber.Where they test the communication stuff.”
“Yeah.And Mission Control. He’s got some kind of recorder there, and it’s still running.”
“What?” Reese could still taste the bitter oiliness of the mescal, but his brain was suddenly clear.
“A tape recorder, it looks like.You want to see it?”
“Show me,” Reese said.
She led him across the courtyard to Mission Control. She looked good, wearing loose trousers and a delta top that left her sides bare instead of the baggy coveralls from training, but Reese’s heart was no longer in it. She hesitated at the corner of the north wing, and Reese walked past her, eager to get inside.
“Wait!” she whispered, and he stopped.
“What’s the—”
“Camera!” she said, and he looked up to see the eye of a video recorder sweeping toward him. He ducked back out of sight, wondering if he’d been quick enough.
“This way,”Walker said, and took him around the side to a fire exit. She pulled a folding knife from her pants pocket and slid back the tongue of the lock.“Watch your step,” she said.“It’s dark in here.”
Every fifty feet or so a single fluorescent light burned; fire regulations, Reese remembered.They took stairs to the second-floor mission operations room, and Reese switched on a single bank of lights by the door.
The outlines of the continents were just visible on the darkened mission board, navy blue against a black-on-black grid.The rows of crts were gray-faced and silent, the film of dust on the floor hardly visible.
Except, Reese noticed, where a path was worn through it, leading to the communications station at the back of the room. He hurried to the console, afraid to hope, staring at the frequency on the digital display, the band reserved for incoming broadcasts from Frontera Base, not sure if he was really seeing it or just imagining it so strongly that even his eyes were deceived.
“Do you know what it is?”Walker asked him.“What does it mean?”
“It means,” Reese said, ejecting the cassette that was locked in the mechanism, already half recorded,“it means maybe, possibly, somebody is still alive up there.” He put a fresh cassette into the receiver and fed the other one into a playback unit in the next console. He backed it up, pushed play, listened to the tape shriek and squeal.
“From some satellite?”Walker asked.
“It’s from Mars,” Reese said.“From Frontera. It has to be.They’re using some kind of high-speed dump.” Reese found the dial that controlled the tape speed and spun it down from 1-7/8 to 5/16 ips.
The scream dropped to a woman’s voice:“need to change our schedule on the reply to fit with the new shifts up here...” Reese pushed the rewind button and wound the tape all the way back. He knew the voice, the soft, breathless whisper. He shut his eyes and could see her face, lean and tanned, with hair a colorless shade between brown and blonde.“Dian,” he said. She was one of the physicists working with Molly, with engineering expertise that let her turn abstract ideas into physical reality.
“You know her?”
“Yeah. She’s one of them.They’re alive, and Morgan knew about it!” He forced down his excitement and started the tape, pulling up a rolling armchair and easing down into it.
The tape ran for nearly fifteen minutes.
There were six different transmissions, probably boring to Morgan and barely comprehensible to Walker, who paced back and forth tirelessly while it played. But to Reese they were maddening glimpses of a world he’d given up for dead years before, enigmatic references that sent his imagination spinning.And the names—names he’d thought he’d never hear again.
“Molly’s alive,” he said.“I can’t believe it.”
“Who’s she? Old girlfriend?”
“No,”Reese said.“She’s my daughter.”He looked up at her quickly.“Jesus, that slipped right out, didn’t it? It’s not something I ever told anybody before. Except Molly. Her mother was married to somebody else.”
Not just somebody else, of course, but to one of the other astronauts, compulsively unfaithful while Jenny, with her physics degree and her national recognition, her red-gold hair and freckled shoulders, had nothing left but an empty Houston apartment and a stable of quarter horses in a pine forest outside Clear Lake.
That was where Molly had been conceived, on a red plaid blanket spread over pine needles, a thick Gulf mist dripping from the branches overhead, a week before Reese’s first shuttle flight.Their hot, guilty desire had built through an afternoon of riding and gentle, brushing contact, culminating in the electric touch of her fingernails on his nipples, the smell of leather and horses still on them as he buried himself in her body, promising himself that this first time would be the last, not dreaming the promise would come true.
Jenny’s husband had transferred out of nasa, and Reese found out about Jenny’s pregnancy in a scrawled note on the bottom of their Christmas card, a note that told him the child was his.There was no return address.
It had taken him two years to find them again, another year of phone calls to persuade Jenny to let him see the child. In stolen meetings, he had watched Molly grow up, a chubby little girl with calm eyes and an amused tolerance for the affection of this large, awkward man that her mother watched on television.And through it all Jenny had been cold, distant, with no more for him than a tired smile or the gentle pressure of her arms around his back.
Molly was thirteen when Jenny and her husband died in the fire in the Gerard K. O’Neill orbiting colony. He didn’t see her again until she showed up at nasa ten years later, transformed somehow into graceful womanhood, applying for a slot on the next colony ship to Mars.
That first meeting was an uncomfortable mixture of Molly’s childhood memories and Reese’s guilty search for traces of Jenny in her daughter. But within days they found themselves locked in a sudden, genuine friendship that surprised them both.They’d flown to Mars together on that colony mission, a crowded, hectic nine months that were the happiest Reese ever spent in space.