Earth Bound (3 page)

“That I’m a woman.” She half rose from the chair. “If it is, say so, and I’ll save us both some time.” She came all the way out of the chair and actually stepped away.

“Sit down.”

She didn’t.

“Sit down.” He gestured to the chair. “I knew you were a woman when I invited you here. Your first reference, Nat Warren, gave it away when I called him.”

She pivoted one degree toward the chair, but no further.

He let his gaze skim from her head to her heels and back again.
 
“Nat also said you understood electronic computing at a level he’d never seen before.”

She sat back down, more carelessly this time. Her chin lifted and her lips took on a slight curve, as if she might be inwardly preening. “How kind.”

Parsons might have thought her vain, but if even half of what Nat Warren had said about her skills were true, she was entitled to her pride. He steepled his fingers. “Tell me about this compiler of yours.”

Her head tilted a fraction, her eyes narrowing as she considered the request. He had the sense that she was assessing him rather than composing an answer. “The key really was to optimize the conversion between the FORTRAN commands and the machine instructions…”

She launched into an explanation that he barely followed. He couldn’t tell if she was expecting him to keep up with her, or if she was pitching it at a level where she thought he wouldn’t.

Probably the latter. Her stunt with the threatened walkout indicated a confidence nearing arrogance that aroused him even further.

“So,” she finished, with a small flourish of her hand, “that’s how I came up with a new compiler.” As if it were as easy as the twirl of her hand through the air, when he knew it had taken her the better part of two years.

“You’ve had considerable success in academia. Why come to ASD? Why not stay there?”

The curve of her mouth twisted into bitterness. “The opportunities there are… limited.”

“What about industry? I’m sure the Rand Corporation or Maynard would love to have you.”
 

Maynard was the largest computer company in the United States, and it was expanding rapidly into defense applications. If she were planning on using ASD as a stepping-stone to industry, he’d show her the door right now. Not only did Parsons want utter competence—he wanted utter devotion to the mission as well.

“I want to do something meaningful. Not payroll.” She spit those last two words out. Her eyes took on a fervent light as she canted toward him. “Sending a man to the moon will be the greatest achievement of humankind. I want my talents to be in the service of something ambitious. Not anything so small as calculating business expenses or even building a faster electronic computer.”

She was saying everything he ought to want to hear. He’d been that way when he’d first started—full of boundless enthusiasm. Or full for him, at least. But several years of rockets blowing up on the pads and grinding against the bureaucracy of ASD had tempered his eagerness.
 

She had a lot of faith in the program, he had to give her that. They’d see if her enthusiasm survived exposure to actual mission conditions.
 

“It won’t be easy,” he warned. “Men’s safety—and lives—will be depending on the accuracy of your calculations. The end result of this work won’t be a paper you can simply retract if it turns out you made an error.”

She didn’t miss a beat, her resolve never dimming. “I know.”

“I expect perfection. I know I can’t have it, but I expect it.” People here hated him for that, but better their hatred weighting him down than the deaths of any of the men they were sending up.

Again, she wasn’t put off. “You’ll always have my very best. And my very best is better than everyone else’s.”

Jesus, her confidence… Parsons could eat it up with a spoon. Hell, he could eat her up—

He shifted in his chair, derailing the thought before it could reach its destination. “It had better be.” He drummed his fingers on his desk. “You’re not going to get married a year into the job and run off, are you?”

The light in her eyes was doused as if he’d thrown cold water on it. “No. There’s no danger of that.”

He told himself he was only pleased because she wouldn’t leave the team hanging if some man put a rock on her finger. After all, if they were working together, he would not be attracted to her. He’d will himself not to be.

“When can you start?”

For the first time in the interview, he caught her off guard, her mask slipping into surprise.

“Am I hired?” she asked.

“Yes. Hal Reed is in Virginia dealing with an emergency, but he and I are agreed.” He didn’t smile or offer his congratulations, since he couldn’t quite shake the premonition that ignoring his body’s response to her might be impossible. “You’ll answer to Hal,” he explained. “Hal and I answer to the director, Stan Jensen. But we’ll need everything you have for this mission.”

“I promise my work will speak for itself. If that’s all?” She rose from the chair in one graceful swoop, not smiling herself. And not waiting for him to dismiss her. “Give me a month to finish up my current position.” She held out her hand. “Thank you for the opportunity.”

He stared at her hand stretched across the desk, her fingers reaching for his. To take her hand was the proper thing to do. She was wearing gloves, so it wouldn’t be his bare palm against her bare palm—but he didn’t want to touch her. It was bad enough that the sight of her made his brain scramble and her unflappable confidence made his heart race. What would touching her do to him?

But even he couldn’t deny this act of propriety. He reached out and gave her hand the briefest of squeezes. And still his lungs hitched.

“Fine,” he said, shorter than he would have liked. “See my secretary about the arrangements.”

She said nothing in farewell, and he didn’t bother to look up from the reports on his desk as she left.

But the hand with which he’d clasped hers clenched and unclenched on his thigh as the door clicked shut.

“Tell me again why you’re doing this,” her mother said as she watched Charlie box up the living room.

Charlie resettled the lamp in the crate at her feet. She had successfully avoided this conversation all weekend after her mother had showed up to help her pack, but no longer.

“I thought you wanted me to leave Smith. You said I was wasting my life there.”

Her mother had said a great deal more about how universities ate faculty members alive, sucking up their funding and intellectual glory and spitting them out into endless tenure and hiring committees that stunted their ability to work.

But of course she’d expressed these opinions from her position as a permanent support staff at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she’d spent twenty years smiling next to Charlie’s father and changing diapers.

She—Mother, one of the four Dr. Easons in the family—sniffed. “What I want is immaterial. We’re talking about your career.”

Charlie truly couldn’t decide if that was a lie. A lie by definition had to be intentional. One had to intend to deceive to tell one. Did Mother think her opinion didn’t matter? Was she trying to pretend it didn’t in order to manipulate with greater results?

Charlie had no idea. So she didn’t answer. She rolled a blanket, then molded it around the lamp and folded the box lid closed.

“I took the job because I’m bored at Smith, and I don’t want to design machines to issue checks or make it easier for stockbrokers in New York to buy oil from Riyadh. I know it’s a change, engineering, but I’m excited.”

“It isn’t a change. You became an engineer of sorts the moment you abandoned physics.”

“Sending a man to the moon is a great physics problem. It will be the greatest scientific achievement of our time.”

And wasn’t the A-bomb simply a big engineering problem too?

Charlie kept that dart to herself—Mother and Father’s war work was never to be criticized. Ever.

Mother didn’t bother answering. Charlie enjoyed the silence while she taped the lid and wrote the number thirty on the box. Then she added the box to her manifest and added a note:
lamp and crocheted blanket. Living room miscellaneous.
 

That done, Charlie dared to glance at her mother. Victoria Chambers Eason was lovely in a way that indicated she didn’t care she was lovely. It was a studied elegance. Her dark brown hair was starting to go to salt-and-pepper, but she wore it as she always had: in a severe bun. Luckily for her, a severe bun set off her features. She dressed in tailored, tea-length sheaths that showed off her athletic figure. She wore no jewelry, save her wedding band, and no makeup but for a slash of dark red lipstick.

Right now, her brows were raised in incredulity. Obviously something everyone else in America took for granted was going to be a source of debate.

“What ASD does isn’t
science
, Charlotte, it’s engineering.” She said the last word like she might pronounce
shit
, except her mother would never say
shit
, and she would think any discussion of digestion, nutrition, or biology to be beneath her. Her mother didn’t think the life sciences were legitimate either—the
soft
sciences, for soft brains.

“It matters, Mother. It matters in terms of proving America’s technological dominance over the Soviets. It matters to little kids all across the country who want to study math and be like—”

“They want to be like those astronauts.” Her mother’s tone implied nothing could possibly be worse. “What’s left to discover about the moon? Its orbit was solved centuries ago.”

Charlie fiddled with the pages of the legal pad. “ASD’s work matters to me.”

Mother softened, her shoulders drooping in sympathy and her expression going a bit warmer. “I agree you were wasted at Smith. And industry would be dreary.”

“But you don’t think this is a good compromise?”

“For a year or two, until…”

Oh yes, here it was. For a long time, the conversation had been about Charlie’s field of study.
Why couldn’t you go into physics like Tom?
Tom the golden child, who couldn’t get enough of splitting and combining atoms—and whose genitals were the right shape.

Then the conversation became about where she might find employment. Even now, she suspected if she’d found her way back to IAS, all might have been forgiven. Math wasn’t science, but the Ivy League righted so many wrongs.

But Charlie had chosen Smith, hoping to get more young women into coding. It hadn’t gone over well. There were plenty of serious students there—far, far more than those who wanted to find husbands to support them—but the emerging field of computing had still landed with an audible thud.

Now, having wasted her education and her academic career, there was only one path left.

“Until what?” Charlie asked through clenched teeth.

“Until you settle down. There’s nothing wrong with meeting a man and falling in love.”

That wasn’t a lie. For all of her mother’s regrets about her own life—and really, they were legion—her parents did love each other. Or at least they shared a common purpose: to raise the next generation of scientists, which included their children and their post-docs.

Charlie was a black sheep, but then again, she was a woman. Her prospects had never been the same as Tom’s.

“The only man I’ve met recently is the one who hired me at ASD. Parsons something or other.”

“An engineer?”

“Yes.”

“Which type was he?”

Her mother meant had he been fresh and tried to grope her knee; had he looked uncomfortably around the room rather than at her for the duration of the interview; had he been grandfatherly and condescending; or had he tried to forge a connection by using a shopping metaphor. Some men, scientific men, had no idea what to do when confronted by a real, live girl.

But Parsons had been no recognizable type. Charlie had worried for a minute when she’d opened the door. Something had flared in his eyes, hot and surprised, but it had passed so quickly, so completely, she must have been mistaken.

There had been the handshake—or squeeze, rather. It reminded her of when she’d grazed a pot handle on the stove. The contact had been so brief she hadn’t been able to register the temperature until a blister had formed.

Working for Parsons was going to require special precautions. She could tell he was forceful and commanding. He was going to demand much of his staff, and do whatever it took to get it, but he hadn’t cared she was a woman. He’d noted her gender, as he probably had the color of her dress or the day of the week, but he’d dismissed it. She’d give up a lot to work for a man like that, even if he had radiated an almost volcanic intensity: molten, but leashed.

He was also competent. While the interview had been brief to the point of unorthodox, it had been followed by a detailed written offer and a memo about relocating to Houston. Everything had been perfect, impersonal.

“He wasn’t a type,” she said at last, because he wasn’t. “He’d already decided to hire me when I showed up.”