Earth Bound (6 page)

“The guys in retrieval, however, are curious about what you can do to help them.”

Hal scoffed. “You have got to be kidding me.
Help
them? You mean do it for them.” He glared at Parsons. Then he gave the guys from retrieval the kind of look that would turn Jell-O to stone. Several of them shifted in their seats.

Without allowing anyone else to speak, Hal scoffed and asked, “What did Stan Jensen say about this?”

“He said to ask you what you could do for them.” Any ease that had been in Parsons’s voice before was entirely gone.

A long, terse silence followed this exchange. Hal and Parsons stared each other down. The men couldn’t be more different, Parsons with his dark suits and his sallow complexion, Hal big and jovial.

Hal wasn’t a bad boss
per se
. He was hands off, which indicated he believed in her, but it also meant he wasn’t concerned with the daily minutiae. He wanted the work done well, and he wanted the credit. He was more concerned with his relationship with Stan Jensen and the computing industry beyond ASD, and he didn’t want to be embarrassed. That was his bottom line.

She’d worked for worse men before and probably would again. She could handle him.

Right now, clashing with Parsons, his good old boy charms were brittle and thinning.

Then they cracked. Hal looked away, pursing his lips and picking at his cuticle. “What’s their problem anyway?”

“Rodger will take you through it.”

The guys from retrieval explained the problem, which related to the angle of reentry, probability, and search grids for the ships after splash down. As the unmanned testing phase for Perseid wound down, it was suddenly occurring to them that finding the capsule, and the astronaut, in the wide blue ocean wasn’t going to be easy.

Charlie rolled her eyes. It was an eminently predictable problem, which was probably why, as the presentation progressed, Parsons gripped his pen with enough force to turn his fingertips white. He was always thinking ten steps ahead, so why wasn’t everyone else?

At least, she assumed that was the cause of his rigid posture.

When Rodger Jardinier had finished speaking, Parsons looked at Hal. “What do you think?”

Hal shrugged sanguinely. “I’m sympathetic, but we’re overworked enough as it is. They’ll figure something out, and if they don’t, Joe Reynolds will spend an extra hour in a life raft.”

An hour if they were lucky.

Parsons seemed even less impressed than she was. “We can have this conversation with Jensen if you want, but I’m presenting this to you this way as a courtesy. This isn’t an assignment you can turn down. You
will
help retrieval with the calculations and probabilities.”

“If I don’t want to, I’m not going to help them find their car keys.”

There was a gasp from behind her—maybe from Jefferies. He was certainly someone who’d never dream of crossing Parsons.

As much as she was enjoying the territorial spectacle the men were playing out, there was no need for this. She cleared her throat. “I don’t want to speak out of turn, but it seems to me—”

“Then don’t,” Hal snapped.

At that, Parsons’s expression went murderous, his fist tightening on his pen as if it were the hilt of a knife. “Do it, Hal. Just get it done. I want spec notes by tomorrow.”

He was up and out of the room before Charlie could exhale. His secretary, a pale blonde woman, stood, blushed, and tripped after him. She evidently had never practiced dramatic exits.

There was a brief, stunned silence. But not too brief—Parsons’s temper wasn’t unknown, although this had been a bit extreme today. The folks from retrieval, the engineers, and all the rest rose and followed. Rodger gave her what appeared to be a sympathetic smile on his way out, but she didn’t need it. She wasn’t even particularly miffed that Hal had barked at her. There wasn’t room for egos in this—but she seemed to be the only person who knew that.

After everyone had left, the clock on the wall ticked off eleven seconds.

Hal at last swiveled in his chair and looked at her. “Don’t ever contradict me in a meeting again.”

“I didn’t.”

“You were about to.”

Next time, she’d let him keep measuring out the rope for his hanging. “But I didn’t. I agree with you.”
 

That definitely surprised him. “You do?”

“It’s unconscionable that retrieval waited so long to take care of this.” Actually, she thought they were lazy and rather stupid, but the best way to handle Hal was to flatter him, so she ratcheted her feelings up to “unconscionable.”

“The consequences should be on their heads, then,” Hal said with a nod. “I’m playing golf with Stan on Saturday; I’ll mention the concerns I have about Rodger. He ought to be replaced. Stan should know before he has a real crisis on his hands.”

Oh yes, the shadow work of ASD that went down on the fairways and in watering holes. She couldn’t care less about that side of things.

“If you think that’s necessary.” That was at least tactful. “But look, there’s another dimension to this. If we don’t help them, they’ll have the entire Pacific Fleet trolling from Hawaii to Samoa. It will take them forever to find the capsule.”

Hal snorted. “That does appear to be their plan.”

“If that happens, it’ll be very embarrassing for ASD. The capsule floating who knows where for who knows how long after this historic flight…” She shook her head. “It would make us look very bad to the Soviets. Let me put a couple of the girls on it. The ones in Virginia. It won’t involve you, and it won’t take up too much time.”

Hal watched her, his expression inscrutable. She’d made the pitch the best way she knew how. If this didn’t work, she was out of bids.
 

Without speaking, Hal gathered his things and pushed his chair back from the conference table. He stood up and rapped on the back of his chair twice. “I don’t like the message it sends. It makes the computer department seem like a service industry, like we’re there to fix the screwups of others.”

But we’re all in this together.
“Maybe it makes us look magnanimous, focused on the mission.”

He sighed, his shoulders falling. “Very well, work up the report.”

Since she wanted to, that was convenient. “Of course. For your approval?”

“No, you can send it straight on to Parsons.”

Interesting. “Of course. Thank you for the opportunity.” And all the extra work, which he didn’t think she should do.

“If we’re going to do it, do it right. Don’t screw it up.” With that contemptuous touch—as if she would screw up work she’d practically had to beg to do—he strode out.

“I don’t intend to,” she said as the door closed behind him. And she didn’t. Hal might be a bit of an ass, but this was precisely the sort of opportunity she’d come to ASD to pursue. She intended to knock it out the park and straight into orbit.

The monkey pulled back its thin lips, revealing a row of yellowing teeth, the canines obscenely long.

Parsons resisted the urge to bare his own teeth.

“So, this is Shem,” the monkey keeper said, as if actually introducing Parsons to the thing. “He’s all ready for his mission.”

Parsons peered into the cage. The monkey had been brought to Houston from the facility in Arizona, before the animal finished his trip to the Cape. Parsons wasn’t sure why the monkey had to meet them here at ASD, but here it was.

ASD wasn’t quite prepared to send up a man—the rockets still only had a fifty-fifty shot of making it off the pad, and they had no idea if the capsule sitting atop those rockets would prevent outer space from killing any life forms inside. So they were sending up the next best thing.

“Ready? How?” Parsons asked. The monkey simply had to survive the shot to space and the fall back to Earth—there were janitors doing more hands-on work on this mission.

“Oh, he’s been trained to push buttons in a sequence.”

The monkey kept its teeth bared. Parsons would feel the same about having to push buttons in a sequence.

In about twenty-four hours, this animal would go where no human had ever been. Yet it looked as if it would rather be picking lice off another chimp. Or sinking those canines into the nearest human.

“Hmm,” he said. “How secure is this cage?”

“Um, pretty secure.”

Parsons leaned back. “The Soviets send a dog, so we’ve got to send a monkey, of course.”

“Ape,” the keeper corrected. “Not a monkey.”

“Right.” Parsons slapped his clipboard against his hand. “Well, nice meeting you, Shem,” he said to the monkey.

“We’re going to meet the astronauts next. Give Shem a chance to say hello to his fellow space travelers.”

Parsons almost laughed. Oh, those flyboys were going to love being compared to an ape. If he didn’t have so much to do before launch, he’d go along just to see their faces.

The chimp showed his teeth again.

“Yes,” he muttered under his breath. “Do exactly that when you meet them.”

He went back to his office, mentally going through his pre-flight checklist. The computing department was supposed to be calculating the estimated flight path of the capsule carrying the monkey. The mission couldn’t proceed without those numbers, and Dr. Eason had promised he’d have them this morning.

He passed by his secretary Peg at her desk without a word, which was probably a relief to her. Slamming his office door behind him, he savored the brief moment of solitude. The tension was only going to get worse the closer they got to launch, so he might as well take half a heartbeat to breathe.

Tossing the clipboard onto his desk, he scanned the desktop for the numbers he’d been waiting for. But there was nothing there. No papers, no file folder, nothing.

He crouched to search under the desk, in case they’d somehow fallen. Still nothing. He straightened and braced his palm against the edge of the desk, the corner biting into the heel of his hand.

There were no numbers. She’d promised him, and they weren’t here. Dr. Eason had never once missed her deadlines. She’d never once let him down.

Without those calculations, the mission would have to be scrapped. Again.

His fingers curled tight into his palm, his hand transforming into a fist.

“Peg,” he called.

She poked her head through the door. “Did you… did you need something?”

He spoke very carefully. “Did someone from computing drop off those calculations?”

It took her a moment to answer, but he already knew what she would say from the way her eyes widened. “No,” she said, barely above a whisper.

Parsons closed his eyes for half a moment, before pushing past her.

He said nothing as he marched through the halls, letting his expression clear everyone out of his path.

When he reached it, he wrenched open the door to the computing department, scanning for his target within.

There. There was Hal. Parsons raised his clipboard and aimed at the man. “Why aren’t those calculations done?” he asked with deadly quiet.

Hal’s mouth fell open. “Well, um… There was—”

“The electronic computer is down.”

Parsons pivoted toward her voice. He hadn’t seen Dr. Eason, but of course she was here. She stood at a workbench, painstakingly soldering something together, her elbows tucked in tight against the curve of her waist, her hands gliding in practiced arcs. She didn’t bother to look at him, simply kept melting solder and carefully dabbing it into place.

She’d personally told him the calculations would be done in time. This shouldn’t feel like a betrayal—yet it did.

“You’re telling me twenty-four hours before we’re about to launch a capsule with a live animal, our computer has gone down?” Parsons couldn’t hold back the rage erupting in his voice—it was too powerful to stop. Of all the goddamn things to go wrong…

Hal didn’t answer. He just shut his mouth and stared.
 

“Yes.” If Dr. Eason was fazed by his anger, she didn’t show it. She never did. He could throw this clipboard at her head—not that he ever would—and she’d merely give him a bored look.

“What happened?”

“There was a power surge. Some of the circuits burned out.” Another dab of the solder, as slow and graceful as all the rest.

“How many do you mean by some?” He was snarling at her now, and still she wouldn’t look up.

“Dozens.”

He felt light-headed for half a moment.
Dozens
. Dozens of circuits to be repaired.

Parsons turned back to Hal. “Why aren’t the girls working on the calculations, then? We need those numbers.”

Hal’s tongue came to his top teeth, his throat working, but before he could say anything, she cut in. “They are. But they’re not as fast as the machine.”

“I know.” If his jaw clamped any tighter, his teeth would crack. He couldn’t tell what made him angrier—that the computer was down, or that Hal let her absorb his diatribe without even trying to step in. “When will this be fixed? When will I have my numbers?”

She glanced at the clock, and he could see her calculating. “The machine should be operational in approximately one hundred and sixty-three minutes.”

“And for the girls to confirm the calculation?”