"By my timekeeping," Gray said, "your week's service began when you boarded your flight, and will end…" His pause drew her gaze."… well, upon your return to Boston on Sunday, I guess, although I'm not sure your work will take the entire week."
The first course was whisked away and a second — tournedos of beef, assorted vegetables, and creamed potatoes molded into the shape of a seashell was laid in its place.
"You see," Gray said, carving unceremoniously into his tournedos, "we have a bit of a time crunch. We're a twenty-four-hour operation, although, of course, you're expected only to work at whatever pace you can handle."
A waiter appeared with a new bottle of red wine. "Oh. I'd like some more of that," Laura said, indicating the still half-full bottle on the table. Gray poured it for her, and the waiter disappeared.
"What is this?" Laura asked, taking another small sip. "It's wonderful."
Gray turned the bottle to read the label. He clearly had no idea. "It's a Merlot California, 1978." He poured himself another glass, showing no further interest in the subject.
They ate now in total silence, the only sound the faint clinking of silverware on plates. Laura feigned interest in the tapestry on the wall behind Gray as she chewed. In the carved stone mantel. In the flowers of the large centerpiece that adorned the long table. Each time she caught glimpses of Gray. He was slender, but his shoulders were broad. His jaw was square, but not so square as to spoil the oval of his face. There was hair on his forearms and at the bottom of the V of his collar, but his neck and hands were smooth.
The next time she looked his way, he lowered his head quickly.
He'd been looking at the bare skin of her upper arms. Laura stole a glance not at Gray but at herself. At her arms.
They were too skinny. Too pale. He was tanned, and compared to him she looked sickly.
This is going well, Laura thought — the quiet of the room suddenly stifling. There might as well have been a metronome, ticking off the rhythm of their silence — tolling the passage of time during which Laura had nothing to say. The stillness suddenly seemed to weigh on her, to make her want to squirm under the growing pressure of it.
"What is it…?" she began, just as Gray said, "You arrived on…" There was a momentary confusion, but Laura eventually won the battle of insisting that Gray proceed with his comment first.
"You arrived on a good night for a show," Gray said, holding his wristwatch up to check the time. "We have a shuttle landing in about five minutes."
"You mean right over there?" Laura asked, nodding at the three brightly lit pools of light suspended in the mirrored darkness of the window.
She turned to catch him looking at her again. Gray lowered his head and nodded, preoccupied suddenly by the mechanics of consuming his food. The uncomfortable silence again descended on the table. Once again, Gray finished the course before Laura was even half through.
"We have about two launches and recoveries a week," he said out of the blue, dropping his napkin on the table and resuming a conversation she thought had died long before. "Mainly just maintenance on the satellites these days. A few new markets, though. A satellite to complete the coverage over Indonesia went up today."
"Yes, I saw it," Laura said as she ate in a single bite a slice of beef easily twice the portion she normally consumed.
Gray looked out the window — not at the ground, but at the sky. He checked his watch again. "Our antennas are so small," he continued, catching Laura again by surprise, "that the satellites need to transmit at a very high power. We explored the traditional method of collocating our satellites in geosynchronous orbit so they could cover fixed, wide areas, but at thirty-six thousand miles out they couldn't give us the narrow bands we needed for five hundred channels and a one-meter antenna. So, we put up a few hundred low-earth-orbit satellites instead. They pass by fairly rapidly, but there's always at least one over every market we service. It's an enormously complicated matter, actually, to schedule the overflights so that they seamlessly hand off the broadcasting duties. A satellite will transmit for a couple of minutes on an east-west orbit over the U.S., then cross the Atlantic and begin broadcasting to the U.K. Then it switches to French, German, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Russian. I don't think we've done a deal with the Kazakhs yet. Then Chinese and back around the world on a more southerly orbit. It might not pass back over the States for another hundred orbits. Since we only have one uplink from earth, those satellites also handle the continuous, real-time transmission of signals from satellite to satellite. It's a highly complex ballet up there round the clock, but the computer handles it all beautifully."
Gray seemed to have quit talking, a fact that Laura confirmed with a quick glance up from her plate. "That's amazing," she said before gulping down the last of her potatoes.
"Oh, take your time," Gray said graciously just before their empty plates were whisked away and he looked at his watch again.
Type A personality, she guessed. Motor's in high gear around the clock just like his business. He sat back as a sorbet was placed in front of him, and then ate it in three spoonfuls. He was as oblivious to the aesthetics of dinner as he was to the extravagance of his home.
"Here it comes," he said, and stood up.
She cleaved a ledge of the sorbet onto her spoon, shoveled it into her mouth, and jumped up to follow him to the windows. High in the sky above she saw fire. A long pencil of flame fell lower and lower from the starry night, its rate of descent slowing almost imperceptibly.
"It's a single-stage rocket," Gray said, continuing his lecture.
She looked at him, and he looked at the stars. From what Paulus and Petry had told her of the young Joe Gray, she had expected a taciturn, almost morose man who had little time for talk. He must have changed, she decided. "Everything is reusable," he went on. "We use liquid fuel, and it only takes three days to relaunch in a normal cycle. We could do it in hours, theoretically."
"I read that you plan a manned space station some time soon," Laura said, vaguely remembering an article from the library the day before.
He looked at her and smiled, arching his eyebrows conspiratorially. His first obvious deception, she thought. Laura looked back up at the descending spacecraft. It rode its jet of fire ever lower.
"It's just like in the old movies," Laura said. "You know, the silly ones from the fifties. 'Retro rockets' and things like that. Spaceships with little legs that take off on earth and land on the moon or Mars or wherever."
"It's the most cost-effective way, in the long run," he said, and Laura felt relieved they'd finally found something to talk about. His work, she thought. How typical! "We just use ultra-light composites of epoxy and graphite fiber to reduce the weight of the launch vehicle," he continued, and Laura nodded knowingly. "Exclusive of the payload, ninety-eight percent of the weight of a fully fueled vehicle is its propellant. For a given cubic foot of volume, that spacecraft empty is lighter than Styrofoam."
"And it's so quiet, too," Laura commented. The rocket was slowing to a stop — suspended in air and hovering out over the ocean.
"Not really," Gray said, thumping the glass with his fingernails. "Triple pane, one pocket vacuum-sealed, the other filled with argon."
He went over to the wall and pulled a barely noticeable handle up from the paneling. A roaring sound poured into the room when he opened the door.
Laura followed him out into the brisk night, eyeing the doorframe as she passed. It had been aligned so well with the wall paneling that the seam was practically invisible.
The howl from the rocket's engines rattled the air even at their distance. The landing gear had lowered into place around the fiery exhaust, and as they watched, the rocket slowly began to slide sideways toward the leftmost pad.