The thing Kathy floats out makes Gwendy smile. The Pocket Rocket is four feet long, or maybe a bit less. To Gwendy it looks almost exactly like the craft that brought Kal-El, aka Superbaby, to Earth. Her father gave away most of his old comic books (or lost them), but Gwendy found a box of old Supermans in the attic and read them eagerly, again and again.
Kathy floats the Pocket Rocket up between them. There’s a hatch on top, held by simple latches that look about as high-tech as the ones on the Scooby Doo lunchbox Gwendy carried to elementary school. Kathy flips them, reaches inside, and brings out a controller that looks like the one Gwendy used to release Boris in Adesh’s lab. Except this one is smaller, and there are only two buttons.
Another button box, Gwendy thinks. Those damn things are my destiny.
Kathy points to the drawstring bag floating around Gwendy’s waist, then points at the open hatch on top of the Pocket Rocket. Her meaning is clear, put it inside, but all at once Gwendy doesn’t want to.
Mine, it’s mine. This one really is my destiny.
Kathy raises her outer visor and Gwendy can see she’s frightened. Even though Kathy has never seen the button box in action, she’s scared to death. That expression is enough for Gwendy to free the bag from the carabiner holding it. She can feel the corners of the button box inside.
No, the thing called Bobby whispers in her head. Don’t do this. The Tower must not stand. Rule Discordia!
Then she thinks of Richard Farris’s weary face when he said How I loathe it.
“Rule my ass,” she says. She doesn’t just place the button box in the Pocket Rocket’s belly; she rams it in.
“Say again?” Kathy asks.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Gwendy says, and flips the latches closed.
Meanwhile, the controller is floating away. Gwendy reaches for it, but at that moment the sun comes over the curve of the earth’s horizon, blinding her. She forgot something after all—to lower her outer visor. She slams it down, panicked. If the controller is lost …
But Kathy has snatched it just before it can drift out of reach. She hands it to Gwendy.
“Last chance, hon. You don’t have to go with it.”
“No,” Gwendy agrees, “but I’m going to. I choose to. Give me a hug, Kathy. Probably ridiculous, but I need it.”
The two of them hug clumsily in their bulky suits, while the newly risen sun turns their visors into curved oblongs of amber fire. Then Kathy lets go, unclips the buddy cable from her waist, and reattaches her end to a D-ring on the Pocket Rocket’s rounded nose. Gwendy supposes that handy ring allowed some crane operator to lift the Pocket Rocket up to the F hatch.
Kathy says, “The engine is nuclear powered—”
“I know—”
Kathy ignores her. “And no bigger than a cigarette pack. Marvel of technology. Push the top button to power it up. You’ll start moving immediately, but very slowly—like a car in low gear. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Tap the lower button and you’ll speed up. Each time you tap it you’ll speed up more. Following me?”
“Yes.” And she is, but she’s looking at the stars. Oh they are gorgeous and how can anyone look at that spill of light and believe life is anything but a hall of mysteries?
“There’s no guidance system. No joystick. Once you start you just go, and you can’t come back. You can’t come back, Gwendy. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then.” Kathy reaches behind herself and grasps one of the handholds. Soon she will follow them back up, kicking her feet like a diver seeking the surface. Back to warmth and light and the companionship of her crewmates. “If you meet any ETs, tell them Kathy Lundgren says hello.”
“Roger that,” Gwendy says, and gives a salute. Six hours, she thinks. I have six hours to live.
“God bless you, Gwendy.”
“And you.”
There’s nothing left to say, so Gwendy pushes the top button on her last button box. A dull red ring glows in the Pocket Rocket’s base, a paltry light that’s no match for the sun’s splendor. Is it giving off harmful radiation? Possibly, but does it matter?
The slack runs out of the buddy cable, it pulls taut, and then Gwendy is moving away from Eagle Heavy and beneath the outer ring of the Many Flags station. She knows no one is watching, but she gives it a wave anyway. Then it’s behind her. She taps the speed control button twice, lightly, and begins to move faster, flying horizontally behind the Pocket Rocket with her legs splayed. It’s a little like surfing, but it’s really like nothing she has ever experienced. Like no one has ever experienced, she thinks, and laughs.
“Gwendy?” Kathy’s voice is growing faint. Soon it will be gone. Already the MF is receding, glowing in the sunlight like a jewel in the navel of the earth. “Are you okay?”
“Brilliant,” Gwendy says, and she is.
She is.
53
FIVE HOURS LATER.
Now there’s just the red ring of the Pocket Rocket’s nuclear drive ahead of her as it tugs her steadily onward into the black. It reminds Gwendy of the dashboard cigarette lighter in her father’s old Chevrolet. There’s a temperature gauge among the dozen or so digital readouts inside her helmet and it registers the outside temperature as -435 Fahrenheit, but her suit is a toasty warm 72 degrees. Her remaining oxygen is down to 17%. It won’t be long now. Of course there’s no speed gauge among the readouts, so Gwendy has no idea how fast she’s going. There’s little or no sensation of movement at all. When she peers over her shoulder (not easy in the suit, but possible), Earth looks exactly the same—big, blue, and beautiful—but the MF station is lost to view.
Gwendy looks ahead again at the Milky Way. She wishes the brightest of them was Scorpius, but she’s pretty sure it’s Sirius, also known as the Dog Star, because it’s part of the Canis Major constellation. That makes her think of her father’s sausage dog, Pippin. Only that’s not right, is it?
“Pippa,” she whispers. “Pippa the dachshund.”
She’s losing it again. The fog is closing in.
Gwendy fixes her eyes on Sirius, which is roughly at ten o’clock in her field of vision. Second star on the right and straight on til morning, she thinks. What’s that from? Hansel and Gretel, isn’t it? But that’s not right. She trawls her dimming mind for the correct story or fairy tale, and finally comes up with it: Peter Pan.
15% oxygen now, and it will be a race between the end of her breathable air and the end of her ability to think. Only she doesn’t want to go out that way, not knowing where she is … or if she does know that (outer space is kind of hard to mistake for the bus station in Castle Rock, after all), why she’s out here. She’d like to go out knowing all this happened for a reason. That in the end, she completed the task set before her. That she saved the world.
“All the worlds,” she whispers. “Because there are more worlds than ours.”
She doesn’t have to go out puzzled and confused, nor does she have to go out cold and shivering if her heat quits before her breathable air. (She seems to remember Carol—if that’s her name—saying the heat would last longer, but her suit’s temp has begun to drop a degree at a time.) She has another option.
She has only one disappointment. In 1984, ten years after Richard Farris gave her the button box, he came to take it back. He sat in her small kitchen with her. They had coffee cake and milk, like old friends (which they sort of were), and Mr. Farris had told her future. He said she was going to be accepted at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she was. He told her she was going to win an award (“Wear your prettiest dress when you pick it up”), and she did. Not the Nobel, but the Los Angeles Times Book Award was not to be sneezed at. He told her she had many things to tell the world, and that the world would listen, and that had been true prophecy.