Alicia was a brunette, energetic, bright, obviously a woman who enjoyed herself. Jake asked her to dance. She pretended to think about it, smiled, and got up. They floated around the floor, exchanged names and compliments, and found a table where they could sit and talk. “I work down at the bank,” she said.
“An accountant?”
“No. I’m in security. What do you do?
“I used to be a pilot.” He didn’t want to use the word retired.
“What kind of pilot, Jake? A boat?”
“Interstellars,” he said, trying to sound modest. Her eyes went wide. Then skepticism flowed into her smile.
“Come on,” she said. “What do you really do?”
He returned the grin. “May I buy you a drink?”
* * *
ALICIA WAS JUST what he needed after the interaction with Leon. She was energetic, funny, and she grew more attractive as the evening wore on. She was about thirty, was a graduate of the University of Georgia, and had been living in the Radford area for about a year. She was a computer geek, charged with overseeing the protection of customer accounts.
And she loved talking about outer space. What stars had Jake been to? Had he really seen some of the Great Monuments? Had he touched any of them? When he said yes, she squealed and wanted to know which one and how it had felt. “I’ve always wanted to go out to Iapetus,” she said. “I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
She was full of questions. What was the farthest place he’d ever visited? Had he seen any of the ruins on—where was it?—Quraqua? Then she connected his name to the Gremlin incident. Wasn’t he the captain involved in the rescue of the schoolkids? “Yes,” he said. “That was me.” It was a tense moment while he waited to see whether she’d dig deeper. But she moved on. What was the most compelling astronomical object he’d seen? (That one was easy: Earth, when you were coming home and got close enough to make out the oceans and continents.)
So they danced and talked their way through the evening.
* * *
WHEN IT WAS over, and she commented that it had been a lovely night but she needed to get home, he made no effort to talk her into going back to the cabin. He liked her too much to chance spoiling things. They had by then visited several of the nightspots. He took her back to the Roundhouse, where she’d left her car. “Alicia,” he said, “I wonder if we could get together and do something like this again?”
“It has been nice, hasn’t it?” she said.
“Absolutely.” He looked down into those brilliant eyes. “Would it be okay if I called you later? Maybe we could set something up?”
“I can live with that.” She smiled and gave him her code.
They kissed, gently, with carefully contained passion on his side. He escorted her back to her apartment complex. He watched her park and waited until she was at the front door. She waved and went inside. Then Jake returned happily up his mountain road. Sex would have been good, he thought, would have been outstanding. He suspected he could not have made it happen, though. But it wasn’t what he needed at the moment anyway.
What he needed was a friend.
The guys in the Cockpit would have thought he’d lost his mind.
* * *
ALICIA’S DIARY
Tonight, I might have struck gold. We’ll see.
—November 26, 2195
Chapter 16
PRISCILLA AND TAWNY rode the shuttle down to the Philadelphia spaceport. She got off and gloried in the familiar tug of gravity, in being able to walk without paying attention to every step, in not having to be careful about the way she handled her coffee. One of the other passengers, a large middle-aged woman, read her eyes and smiled agreement. A young couple, probably finishing a honeymoon, were actually jumping up and down, deliriously happy to have their weight back.
She took a taxi to the Thirtieth Street Station, where she boarded a glide train. Twenty-five minutes later, she got off in Princeton. Her mother was waiting in the station and greeted her with a big hug. “It’s so good to have you home,” she said. “We were following the news reports, but nobody seemed to be sure what was going on.”
“It’s great to be back, Mom.”
Mom had news. Reporters had been calling, asking how she felt about the way Captain Miller had died. “I didn’t get into that. Told them I didn’t know anything about it. They were also hoping to find you, but I didn’t tell them you were coming home.” She smiled.
“Thanks, Mom.”
Her eyes clouded. “I have to say that I wasn’t impressed by Loomis’s behavior.”
“It was an impossible situation, Mom. We didn’t know. You might as well blame me.”
“That’s hardly the case, love. But let it go. Did I tell you that Uncle Phil is finally going to get married? To a doctor, no less. Her name’s Miriam. You’ll like her. And Cousin Ed finally quit his old job with the city. He’s working over at Margo’s bakery. A chef. I think he’s finally satisfied. It’s really what he’s always wanted to do.”
Ed was, in fact, the best cook in the family. He’d been a history major in school, but it hadn’t worked out. He’d tried teaching, had been a naval officer, and had talked about writing a history of the post-Islamic wars. He’d admitted to Priscilla that the era was too complicated and too chaotic for anybody to make sense of. “It might need twelve volumes,” he’d told her. When she’d left, he’d been a clerk at the county unemployment office. “For a while,” said Mom, “we thought he’d just gone around to the other side of the counter.” They both laughed.
They left Tawny in the car and stopped for a snack at the Delmore Pizza. It was almost 3:00 A.M. for Priscilla, who’d been living on Greenwich time for almost three months. But the aroma of pizza had always been enough to keep her awake. They sat down at a table, and Mom said something about going off her diet, but it was worth it to have her daughter home again.
Her mother, fortunately, had stopped calling her “Prissy.” Priscilla had never liked the name. Mom was the only one who used it, but, although Priscilla never said anything directly, she’d made no effort to hide her feelings. Obviously, the message had finally gotten through.
She was living alone now. Had been since Daddy’s sudden death two years earlier. Sitting at the Delmore, trading stories with her mother, talking about Barton’s World and the frightened students, she realized that her mom was proud of her.
* * *
HER BEDROOM HADN’T changed much. The framed photo in which she stood between her parents in front of one of the monitors at the Drake Center still commanded attention from the top of her bureau. A photo of the Galileo, an early superluminal, hung over the bed, and a picture of her with her old boyfriend Charlie Cartwell at a Wildwood beach stood under a lamp. A calendar featuring a wide-eyed parrot hung near the window. It was still set at September, when she’d left for her final weeks in training.
Like anyone’s childhood bedroom, it encapsulated a lot of memories. Jerry the Hamster waving at her from the lamp shade, the upper shelf of her closet where she’d hidden Christmas gifts for her parents, the child’s desk in one corner where she’d started her first diary.
On that night, because she was still running on Greenwich time, she awakened long before dawn. She started thinking about breakfast and decided to get up. It seemed like a good day for a bagel topped with strawberry jelly.