Earth Bound (5 page)

He decided to let it go. “Could be worse. That woman I was telling you about started last week.”

“Oh yeah? What’s she do again?”

Parsons tried to find a point of reference his brother would understand. “You know how Gladys at the livestock auction keeps track of all the prices, calculates the average cost of pork and beef, and what corn’s going for on the Mercantile? You know, calculations?”

“Oh yeah. Stuff like that, huh?”

“Yeah.” It wasn’t quite a perfect comparison—and Gladys’s beauty had never once taken Parsons’s breath away—but it would do.

“She must be pretty smart to work on rockets. Almost as smart as you are.”

She was also damn unflappable.

Just this week, Parsons had had to dress down Jack, a computer engineer with more confidence than experience. He had fouled up the schematic for an onboard computer, but when Parsons had pointed that out to him, Jack had denied he’d done anything wrong. When Parsons had finally gotten the son of a bitch to admit, yes, he’d made a mistake, Jack had gone on to give every excuse under the sun for his failure.

Nothing pissed Parsons off more than a person who wouldn’t take responsibility for his errors.

He’d raged at the man for a good fifteen minutes, so angry was he. The entire computing department watched in shocked silence as he threatened to fire Jack should this happen again.

Except for her.
 

She’d kept on with her work the whole time—he couldn’t help but sneak the occasional glance at her. When he’d run out of invective, she’d risen and come over to him with a folder in her hand.

“I drew up some schemes for how we can monitor the life support systems on the two-man capsule.” Everyone else was running from him, but she simply waltzed right up. No one at ASD did that.

“I never asked for these.” But he would have in a few months, as work progressed on the capsule design. Her initiative intrigued him.

She pulled her hand back. “You don’t want them?”

“Of course I do.” He tugged them out of her grip. “Did Hal sign off on this?”

She’d only just set up her desk and she was already going above and beyond. Too bad she was so attractive. He would have thought her close to perfect if not for that.

“I was going to ask him to, but you were already here, so…”

He gave her an assessing look. Was she making a joke? There wasn’t even a glint of humor in her eyes.

She reached for the notes. “I’ll have Hal sign off before I give them to you.”

He tucked the folder under his arm. “No, that’s all right.” The proper process would be to go through Hal, but Parsons was desperately curious to see what she’d done. “I’ll go through this. See if there’s anything useful.”

She’d simply nodded, and turned back to work.

Parsons didn’t want to tell Roy that story, so he poured another cup of coffee as he tried to come up with a response. “She’s smarter than me.”

Roy gave a short laugh. “Find that hard to believe. You always were the brightest in the family.” A soft exhale. “Except for George.”

“Yeah.” Parsons swallowed. “Except for George.”

A weighty pause and then Roy offered, “Sounds nice, surrounded by all those bright folks who have to do your bidding.”

“I think you have the wrong idea of what it's like around here.”

“If you get tired of working in an office all day, you can always come home. Everyone always said you’d make a hell of a mechanic.”

Leave behind the space program to work on farm equipment? No, that would never sound appealing. Parsons thrived in the pressure cooker of ASD—yes, the job was stressful, but the problems were so complex, so engrossing, he wasn’t certain there would ever be room in his life for more than this. Or that he’d ever want anything less.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” was all he said to Roy.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you: Kevin’s been thinking about college. I don’t know nothing about it—maybe you could give him some advice or something?”

Lose your accent right away, otherwise they’ll call you nothing but Okie the first two years. They’ll never believe you could be anything but a moron, no matter how many times you outscore them on tests and problem sets, because you happen to have the Dust Bowl in your mouth.

Maybe things were different now. Parsons wouldn’t know—he’d eradicated his accent and no one at ASD knew anything about where he’d come from.

“Sure, I’ll talk to him.”

“Thanks.” There was a lull as Roy no doubt searched for more to say. “The wheat looks good this year. If this weather holds…”

If this weather holds… we might pay off the note on the back forty. If this weather holds… we might be able to take Ma to the doc in Tulsa. If this weather holds… things might be different.

No one in his family would ever speak aloud those hopes. Fate already had it in for the farmer—who knew what she might do if you tempted her?

“I’ll pray for rain,” Parsons promised.

“Not too much though.” Another long pause. Roy was probably itching to wrap up the call and get on with his day. “How’s your fish?”

Parsons laughed to himself. Roy didn't give a damn about the fish—fish were for eating, not pets, and even the eating part was iffy—but they’d talked about work and the wheat and Ma and Roy’s wife and kids, and Parsons had no wife and children to ask about.

So, the fish. Parsons looked at the three tanks in his dining room, holding jewel-bright fish and emerald green plants in gallons of saltwater. Saltwater aquariums were tricky, requiring constant monitoring so that everything within didn’t go belly up. Even among dedicated fish keepers saltwater tanks were rare. The difficulty of maintaining them was part of the appeal for Parsons.

They were beautiful. Peaceful. And cold.

“The fish are fine.”

“Good, good. Well, I’ll let you go. Thank you for the call.”

“Happy birthday.”

Parsons hung up and stared at his empty mug for a moment. Then he checked the time—a little early to be going in. He could sit in his office and read in the quiet…

Or he could do the same in his kitchen. He grabbed the paper and shook it open. More trouble with Cuba, a new steakhouse opening downtown, and the Ladies’ Horticultural Society would be—

He snapped the paper shut. There was nothing interesting there. Instead, he picked up the notes Dr. Eason had handed him. He’d shoved them into his briefcase right after she’d given them to him, but he’d been swamped all night fixing a report on rocketry for Jensen.

As he paged through her notes, he realized she’d lied. This wasn’t just about the life support systems; there were notes here on improving every aspect of computing at ASD. Not anything so formal as official suggestions—more like she was thinking aloud.

If he wasn’t misreading this, she was testing the political climate. She’d find soon enough he didn’t give a damn about the politics; he only wanted the mission to succeed. Oh, he’d use the internal politics to get his way, when needed—he wasn’t stupid—but jockeying his way through the pecking order held no appeal.

She’d given him these suggestions to see what he might do with them and thereby get a bead on him. Maybe.

Or perhaps she was as committed to success as he was and didn’t give a damn about the politics either.

She’d slipped in a journal article on thin-film memory with a note attached to it. He’d never even heard of thin-film memory, but he supposed she kept her eye on everything new in computing.

Ultra fast, but looks expensive to produce. Keep in mind for future applications?

Her handwriting was slashing, nearly illegible—as if she were trying to write as quickly as she thought, but couldn’t quite keep up. These sprawling, untidy letters were quite at odds with the polished, attractive face she presented.

She should probably have her notes typed from now on—no one else was going to be able to read this.
 

It was too bad. He’d miss seeing the evidence she wasn’t quite as controlled, as contained, as she appeared.

He tucked the article and her annotation back into the file and started from the beginning, methodically working his way through what she’d given him.

May 1961

The start of this meeting, like so many others Charlie had attended these three months at ASD, was delayed. In this case, it was because Hal Reed was selfish and couldn’t be bothered to be punctual. He thought his time was more valuable than anyone else’s, and he seemed to be engaged in some kind of turf war with Parsons. Charlie’s only consolation was that Hal’s tardiness infuriated the Director of Engineering and Development to near madness, and it was fun to watch.

Across the conference table, Parsons was scribbling on the carbon copy of a memo. He glanced at the clock, sighed, and wrote some more. Then he repeated the pattern, but this time his pen bit into the memo more deeply. If Hal didn’t appear soon, Parsons was going to reduce the thing to ribbons.

For all her intentions of making a schematic of him, Parsons didn’t make any more sense than he had the day he’d hired her. The man was so tightly wound he made her look like a giddy schoolgirl. He was dour and a meddler. There wasn’t a project at ASD he wasn’t sticking his fingers into as far as she could tell.

And he was also a damn fine project manager.

Because he was an engineer, he had a respect for the process she’d never seen before. He expected perfection, true. When you told him a thing was done, that it would work a certain way and under certain conditions, he expected your word to be a guarantee. But he also wanted you to have the things you needed to make the impossible possible. He wanted you to produce gold, but he would give you plenty of straw and he’d help you redesign the spinning wheel.

She respected him, and that surprised her.

He seemed to respect her, but she also seemed to infuriate him. The harder she tried, the madder he became. Everyone irritated him, but with her, there was an edge that could only be personal. Sometimes she’d catch him staring at her so intensely she was amazed she hadn’t ignited. Everything she did, every effort she made, resulted in more cold, forceful looks. If things didn’t improve soon, she was going to have to ask if she’d offended him.

Not now, of course. They had an audience.

Parsons muttered something to himself—she couldn’t make out the words, but his tone sounded crude. The secretary sitting behind him, steno pad in hand, blanched.

Well, Charlie might admire him, but Parsons was clearly an acquired taste.

“Maybe someone ought to tell a joke.” Charlie hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but at the words, Parsons’s hand froze.

“A joke?” He said it slowly, as if it was in some dead language he didn’t understand.

“Yes, a joke. Humor. A type of verbal game to provide social lubrication or pass the time.”

Parsons raised his brows. She’d finally caused his estimation of her to slip, but his response was so delicious she pressed on.

“You could say something humorous, and we could all laugh. Like maybe, ‘It’s wonderful how meetings at ASD always start on time and are always so brief.’”

Parsons blinked several times. “I’m not an expert, but that, Dr. Eason, is sarcasm, not a joke.”

Several of the engineers and secretaries tittered.

“Touché,” she said.

He was attempting to get in the last word, and he was providing a challenge, so Charlie met it with, “If it’s a joke you want, what about, ‘What do you call the guy who shows up last to the meeting?’”

A few beats passed. While the principals sat around the big conference table, the engineers, secretaries, and support staff ringed the outside. One of the younger engineers—Jefferies, maybe—finally worked up the nerve and raised a shy hand. “Boss.”

Everyone guffawed. Even Parsons’s lips twitched. Well, if he wasn’t quite smiling—and Charlie had never seen him smile—then he was at least not attacking his memo when Hal strolled in a few moments later.

“Ah, right on time,” Parsons said, his tone as dry as the Mojave—and he’d pretended to be unfamiliar with humor.

Without acknowledging his lateness, Hal pulled out a chair and settled himself into it. “What’s the powwow for?”

The atmosphere changed when Hal entered. Or rather, the atmosphere surrounding Hal ground against the atmosphere surrounding Parsons, two clouds of charge repelling each other.

Hal and Parsons were colleagues, neither supposedly standing higher than the other. But Hal wanted this meeting to revolve around him—wanted all the meetings to do that.

Parsons, however, was more competent, more efficient, more
everything
than Hal was. Hal’s posturing hardly made a dent in Parsons’s air of authority.

Everyone knew who was really in charge of this meeting.

Everyone except Hal, it seemed.

“We have a problem.” Parsons paused. “We have a
task
,” he amended. “So far, the computer department has been focused on helping to get the thing up there, to make sure orbit is possible, and on running the systems while it’s in flight.”

“Yes, those little things,” Hal deadpanned. He clearly didn’t need humor explained.