“Will you come early? To the bar mitzvah. I need…” His voice faltered a little, which made me sit up on the couch. “Ah, hell, Elma. I was planning on joking about it, but I realized that I was going to be … There aren’t any other Wexlers. It’s just you and me and the kids.”
You’d think that at some point the grief would stop. I put my hand over my mouth and leaned forward, as if I could somehow fold over the pain and keep it from escaping into the world again. There might be cousins out there somewhere, but between the Holocaust and the Meteor … it was just the two of us.
I had to swallow hard before I could speak. “Yeah—I mean, I have to check the launch schedule, but yeah. I can come out early.”
“Thanks.” His voice was a little ragged. “Plus, California has actual food. Nathaniel said you got caught in those riots yesterday?”
I let Hershel change the subject, and shot my husband a look. He was engaged in trying to figure out how to fold my panties, and it seemed to be taking more effort than a differential equation. “That’s a wild exaggeration. We had to go to a different streetcar stop, that’s all.”
“He made it sound like you were right in the middle of it.”
“The police were doing a fine job containing it.” I sighed, remembering the gossip I’d heard in the laundry room. “Although … it sounds like our favorite market got hit. Poor Mr. Yoder is Amish, and I think he had to just stand there and let them take stuff.”
“Oof. Well, come out here and we’ll pamper you. You need it, eh?”
There was a consciousness in the way he said it that made me purse my lips and stare at my husband. What, exactly, had he said to Hershel before I came into the apartment? To ask Hershel would be to invite him to discuss my well-being, and that was not something I wanted to do. Not now, at any rate. Maybe when I was out there, if there was time around the festivities. Maybe. “Listen, I should probably go. Nathaniel is about to wrinkle all the laundry.”
“Give him my best, huh?”
“Likewise. Same to Doris and the kids.” When I hung up the phone, I stayed on the sofa for another moment, with my hand still on the receiver. “Did you call Hershel?”
Nathaniel straightened, lowering my underwear. It might have been funny, if his face hadn’t been so serious. “Yes.”
“Did you tell him?”
“No.” He set the underwear down on the dresser and faced me. “I didn’t. I did say that you’d been working too hard.”
“Don’t.” I got to my feet and crossed to the laundry bag. The clothes inside were still warm from the dryer as I pulled them out. “I know you mean well, but don’t.”
I didn’t work all the launches. I was on the Maroon Team, which rotated in every third launch. Even there, we were further divided into shifts, which rotated to try to minimize exhaustion, because all stations had to be staffed the entire time astronauts were up.
Sometimes, though, even when you weren’t scheduled, you wanted to be there. We’d sent an unmanned launch up three days ago that Basira and the Green Team had control of, so Helen and I should have had the night off. We did, in fact. But this was the flight that was going to circle the moon.
At five o’clock, Helen came over to my desk and put her purse down on Basira’s empty half. It clunked as she set it down, seeming abnormally heavy for a cloth purse.
Putting a finger by the last row of numbers I’d been double-checking, I stared at the bag. The cloth seemed to contain a faint outline of a bottle. “Nice bag.”
“Refreshments.” Helen grinned and patted it. “You’re staying, right?”
I nodded and wrote a dash in the margin so I’d know where to start up again tomorrow. “Yes. If for no other reason than that it’s the only way I’ll get to see Nathaniel.”
“He could take a night off.”
“Ha. You’ve met my husband, right?”
“Not good if he burn out.” She drummed her fingers on the desk. “What do you think it will look like?”
I shrugged and stacked my papers. Around us, the other women were wrapping up their work for the day, pages rustling as they slid reports into their drawers. “Gray? I mean … there’s never been a hint of color in the telescope images. And we won’t have really clear images until the rocket gets back.”
“They are still pictures from the moon.”
Grinning, I pushed back from my desk and stood. “I admit that I’d probably stay, even without Nathaniel.” It was an amazing thing we were doing. We’d managed to program a rocket so that it could do a giant orbit around the moon without a pilot. We hoped.
It was different from what we’d be doing later when we sent men to orbit the moon. This didn’t involve needing to transfer in and out of orbit, though, because we’d just set up a highly elliptic orbit with the apogee on the far side of the moon. That math was fairly straightforward.
I followed Helen out of the room and joined the tide of IAC employees headed for Mission Control. We wouldn’t all fit in, of course, but there was a viewing room, and then, for those of us with the keys, a second control room.
Someday we’d have two missions in space at the same time, so they’d built two duplicates of Mission Control. One of them was in use training the next flight crew, but one was, in theory, empty. Or, at least, not in official use.
Helen and I peeled off from the main throng and headed to the stairs that led up to the other control center.
“Hey! Wait up.” Behind us, Eugene and Myrtle Lindholm slipped through the door and into the echoing cement block stairwell.
“Eugene!” I grinned down at them. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“The way Myrtle has been going on about this? If I missed the first fly-by, we’d have nothing to talk about.”
“I must learn her bargaining techniques.”
Eugene overtook Helen and me on the stairs with no problem. “She doesn’t so much bargain as deliver ultimatums.”
“Don’t listen to him.”
“See!” With a laugh, Eugene turned to look at me as we proceeded up the stairs. “What do you think we’ll see? Myrtle thinks it will only be gray.”
“She’s probably right. The pictures are only getting scanned at a resolution of one thousand horizontal lines, and because we’re so far, the transmission is at a slow-scan television rate…” I trailed off. “I just started talking jargon, didn’t I?”
“Mm-hm. But it’s close enough to what we’ve been doing over in comm, so I’ve got a decent idea. It’ll be fuzzy?”
“Yep. But we should get better images as the probe swings back toward Earth.”
We reached the top of the stairs and Eugene opened the door. “Speaking of … how’s Nathaniel?”
Raising an eyebrow, I nodded at Eugene to thank him as I walked through the door. “He’s going to love being called a probe.”
Eugene laughed. “You know what I mean. Is he still as cranky about the IBMs?”
“According to him, they are an abomination, and he won’t consider any manned lunar mission that doesn’t include human computers.” Which was fine by me, as it increased my chances that they’d have to include a woman. Not that men couldn’t do math; it’s just that most of them went into engineering instead of computing. The world of numbers on paper didn’t seem to have the same appeal as the hardware and explosives of rocketry. Their loss.
There were people in this hall, too, but not as many. Most of them were from the Green Team. There were a few astronauts, though. Derek Benkoski and Halim “Hotdog” Malouf were leaning over a console, chatting with Parker. Mrs. Rogers was with another knot of people standing near the large display that would show the images from the probe as they came in.