After a period of awkward silence, Cal said, “All right, Wells. Truth or… truth. What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen or done?”
“Do I need to remind you that I’ve been to an actual other planet?”
“Yeah, but you don’t remember it. Still, fair enough. On Earth. What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen or done on Earth?”
Catherine thought for a moment. “You’ve gone through the astronaut training program, right?” she asked.
“A slightly abbreviated version; I was never a candidate, but I wanted to get a sense of what you guys go through.”
“Did you do the simulation?” The simulation was a monthlong exercise where a “crew” lived in a replica of a ship like Sagittarius.
Cal looked away from the road as a semi barreled past going the other way on the two-lane highway. “I skipped out on that particular experience.”
“Uh-huh. I should have guessed.” Catherine grinned. “Well, some of us didn’t have that luxury. After the first couple of days, it got dull. We were mostly waiting for Mission Control to throw a crisis at us so we’d have something to do. Except some of us found ways to amuse ourselves.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I don’t know how well you knew Richie Almeida, but that was one man you did not want to let get bored. When Richie got bored, he got creative.”
“You never want your systems operator to get bored,” Cal agreed. “What’d he do?”
“I still don’t know how he did it, but he reprogrammed the onboard computer to respond to commands with a verbal response.” She shook her head, laughing. “Made the mission ‘commander’ absolutely batshit. Every time one of us typed in a command we’d hear something like ‘Aye, aye, Captain!’ or ‘I’m afraid I canna do that, Captain.’ ”
“The onboard computers don’t have a voice response system,” Cal said.
“By the time Richie was done with it, that one did. He was just using recordings.” She laughed, remembering. “It was like being around someone who had the ringtone collection from hell. Any alert we got was prefaced with ‘Houston, we have a problem.’ ”
“I mean, that’s funny, but that’s the craziest thing? Really?”
“That was just the start. I told you that the simulation commander was losing his mind over this, right? Tried everything to get Richie to change it back. NASA wouldn’t interfere since, you know, it was designed to test our responses to the unpredictable. Hell, I’m not convinced that they didn’t help him set it up.” She chuckled. “The commander in question was David.”
“David Wells? Your— I’m sorry, what do I call him right now?”
Catherine wrinkled her nose. “Soon-to-be ex is probably accurate enough. Anyway, yes. And he was not happy. But the kicker came when he did a test ‘space walk.’ I swear, Richie was saving this for a special occasion. When David tried to come back in, the air lock wouldn’t open. He yelled for us to let him in, and the computer said…”
“No.” Cal started to laugh.
Catherine laughed with him. “Yes. The computer said, ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that… . This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.’ I thought David was gonna have a stroke. Mission Control was in tears laughing. I think everybody saw it coming except him. The rest of the simulation, any time David did anything with the main computer, he got HAL 9000 answering him.”
“I’m surprised Almeida didn’t wash out after that.”
“That’s why I think he had the brass behind him, to be honest.” Catherine shook her head, realizing something. “That… might have been one of the reasons David washed out. He never really talked to me about it.”
Cal made a noncommittal noise and they were both suddenly quiet.
“Anyway,” Catherine said, shaking it off, “what about you? What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen or done?”
“Well… I was an undergrad at Caltech.”
“Oh God.”
“Aha, I see our reputation precedes us.” Cal flashed her a smile. “Can you hand me a water?”
“I’ve known a few Caltech engineers.” Catherine reached into the back seat to the small Styrofoam cooler packed with ice and bottles of water and grabbed two. She handed one to him before cracking hers open. “What’d you do?”
“Well. The head of the physics department was notorious for telling students that if they failed out of school, they’d have to get a job working at a car wash.” Cal managed to open the water while keeping his hands marginally on the steering wheel. “He’d say it before every exam. It was annoying as hell.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Catherine said with a laugh.
“I know. Like, why a car wash, right? Still, by my senior year, we could recite it along with him.” Cal paused, took a drink of water. “He also, we discovered, had a classic 1980 BMW that he was crazy proud of. It was a collector’s edition or something, and the damn thing was his baby.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. He gave us a target. Never,” he proclaimed, “give an engineering student a grudge and a target.”
“What did you do?”
“We washed his car.” He gave her a smug look. “In the men’s locker room showers.”
“How the hell did you manage to get it in there?” Catherine laughed again.
“Hello, Caltech engineering students. We figured it out.”
“What did he do?”
“I think he managed to reverse engineer how we got it in there, but last I heard, he’d stopped using his car-wash speech.”
“Air Force pranks were never as good as the stories I hear from you geeks.” Catherine leaned back against the seat, smiling.
“Come on. Didn’t you, like, steal a general’s plane or anything?”
“Not me. I was a strictly-by-the-book sort of girl.”
“Besides, you say ‘geek’ like you’re not one. I have bad news for you, Cath. You’re an astronaut. You’re pretty much Peak Geek.”
A sign up ahead said they were getting close to Rough Rock. “Do we know exactly where she lives out here?”
“Well… her address is general delivery, and GPS wasn’t any help. I think this is going to be a case of finding someone who knows her and hoping they can tell us which landmarks to follow.” Cal pointed at the GPS on the dash. “We’re gonna go to the main crossroads and start from there.”
“Oh yeah, because starting anything at a crossroads isn’t ominous at all,” Catherine said.
“I’m not planning to make any deals. Not yet.”
At the crossroads was a gas station, with a store that called itself a trading post. Cal pulled into the gas station. “Well, this is it: the booming metropolis of Rough Rock, Arizona.”
“I expect to see tumbleweeds any second.” Catherine climbed out of the car, her legs complaining at the long ride.
“I’m going to fill up the car, if you want to go in and ask if anyone knows Addy.”
“Sure.” It felt good to walk, like rust falling off her joints in great flakes. The gas station wasn’t much more than a shack that held a shelf of rudimentary auto supplies, a collection of snack foods of dubious age and provenance, and a cooler of sodas in the back. After saying hello to the woman behind the counter, Catherine grabbed a couple of sodas and took them up.
“This,” she said, “and the gas.”
“All right.” The woman was short and squat, with black hair streaked with iron gray in a long braid down her back and wrinkles around her eyes from squinting into the sun.