Sex on the Moon (16 page)

24

The real fun wasn’t in the power of the thing—the strength of those massive jet engines, the sheer force of that mechanical monster, built for one purpose only, to lift, to rise, to tear itself free of gravity and physics and sometimes, it seemed, common sense; the real fun came in that moment of sheer helplessness, strapped to a chair, leaning back at a forty-five-degree angle as the beast climbed and climbed and climbed.

And suddenly it wasn’t climbing anymore, the great mammoth engines reduced in a whine of reverse thrusters, the nose tipping downward—and then it was falling. The straps came loose and you were out of your seat, just floating in that bizarre way, moving through the padded cabin, bouncing off the walls, the ceiling, the equipment you brought up there to test. Still helpless, but now because the physical laws you’ve lived with all your life were suddenly gone, replaced by a feeling that was new and unique and wonderful.

Weightlessness. Zero g.

And then the alarm went off, telling you that it was time to strap back in. The craft was now facing downward at a thirty-degree angle, diving at an incredibly high speed back toward Earth, caught again in the grips of gravity and physics. A moment later, the entire sequence began again: the upward climb, the unstrapped moment of bliss, the descent. Again, and again, and again.

NASA had a name for it. They called it the Weightless Wonder, a KC-135 stratotanker known as NASA 931, an airplane that had been specially outfitted for the maneuver. Flying a perfect parabolic route above the Earth, it treated its passengers to as much as twenty-five seconds of weightlessness for every sixty-five seconds of flight. Which didn’t sound like much—until you were up there, spinning through the center of the white, cushioned cabin, trying to figure out how to use a screwdriver or plant a tree or maybe even operate a toilet. The ride up was exhilarating enough, but those brief moments when gravity disappeared were another universe altogether. For some people—a full third of those who went up in the thing—it was too much to handle. NASA called it the Weightless Wonder, but everybody else called it the Vomit Comet.

“But it’s really a misconception,” Sandra was saying, as animated as a cartoon as she bounced around Thad’s apartment, using her hands to help paint the picture for him as he lay back against a couch and tried to imagine himself in the scene she was describing. “It’s not weightlessness. You’re actually falling. Falling around the Earth, at seventeen thousand miles per hour. Altogether you get about twenty minutes of zero g—and it’s just amazing.”

Her left hand was still making elliptical motions, showing the path of the airplane, and her little freckled face was beaming, as if she had just stepped off the thing. Thad was duly impressed. Sandra was still only nineteen, just an intern, not even a co-op, and she had gotten to do something that he himself had still never done. She had really broken out of her shell, and Thad felt proud that he had been a part of her growth. If it hadn’t been for the confidence he had instilled in her over the past year, in person and via their telephone bull sessions, she would never have had the guts to present her project idea to the team in charge of the Vomit Comet. But the fact that they had chosen her work, that was due to her alone; she was a rising star, and no doubt she’d be a co-op by next tour.

“So did you get sick?” Thad had to ask, lacing his hands behind his head as he stared up at the ceiling. In his mind, it was him floating around that cushioned cabin.

“Nah. They give you these pills that make it almost impossible to get nauseous. I think only ten percent of people still have problems. I was too excited to feel sick. And once I started my work, I forgot I was on a plane at all. You know how hard it is to wire a circuit board in zero g?”

Thad could only imagine. He was really happy for Sandra, because she’d had an experience that almost nobody else would ever have. She wasn’t even at the JSC full-time, just visiting now and then, but she had created a memory she would carry with her for the rest of her life.

Thad must have gone silent for longer than was appropriate, because before he realized it, Sandra had sidled up next to him on the couch, pushing his legs aside to give herself room to snuggle into the cushions. She was looking at him intensely, and he kept his eyes turned away—because he knew she was about to bring it up again.

“Okay, now you’ve got to tell me,” she started, proving that he had read her correctly. “It’s just not fair, you keeping secrets like this. Does it have to do with Rebecca?”

Sandra had been peppering him with questions about Rebecca since their aquarium date had morphed into a full-out love affair; in fact, in the past two weeks, Thad and Rebecca had been inseparable. He had spent every night in her still-furnitureless apartment. They had shared nearly every meal together, had spent the weekends camping, alone in a tent. They had made love every night, woken up naked and entwined together.

He hadn’t spoken to Sonya much since meeting Rebecca. She had called a few times in the beginning—but over the past nine days, she had given up trying to reach him, and there was no doubt she suspected that something was going on at the JSC, involving someone else. Thad didn’t want to hurt her—but Rebecca had become much more than a fling to him.

He was in love. As always, it was difficult for him to separate what was fantasy and what was real—but the feelings he was having for Rebecca felt like both, fantasy and real. So he had thrown himself into her with total abandon.

And the more time he spent with her, the more the thoughts in his mind had grown clearer, the more the mental game had started to take a more physical shape. In the process, the game had become a secret that he was finding increasingly more difficult to keep. Both Rebecca and Sandra had noticed—especially during moments like this, when he went silent, playing it through in his head, like a movie on a spool that kept running over and over. With Rebecca, he had resisted by telling her that it was something he needed to protect her from, that if she really wanted to know, he would tell her—but that keeping it from her was for her own good. With Sandra, he had simply remained mysterious. But it was obvious from the way she was gripping his calf, her mouse fingers tightening into a claw, that she was getting tired of the subterfuge. If she was really his confidante, she felt she had a right to know.

“Okay, if it’s not Rebecca, is it Sonya again? Because I still think you’re doing the right thing—”

“Why does it have to be about a girl?”

“Because you’re a slut,” Sandra responded. Then she grinned. Two girls in one lifetime was about as far from a slut as a guy Thad’s age could get. Though he
was
technically married, and sleeping with a twenty-year-old beauty. But he no longer saw it that way. He was sleeping with the girl he was in love with.

“Okay, if it’s not Rebecca or Sonya, then what is it?”

Thad slowly sat up, crossing his arms against his chest. He looked at Sandra, trying to read the freckles on her cheeks. She really wanted to know—and in truth, he really wanted to tell her. But the minute he said it out loud, to someone here, in the JSC—it was going to become real in a whole different way. Gordon was so out of it and so out there—hell, Thad was pretty sure the stoner still had no real clue about what they were even e-mailing about. Gordon was playing a game, too, though Thad could never be sure what game the guy thought it was. But Sandra would understand—she would think it was impossible, because it was, but she would understand. And even just knowing about it—that would make her part of the scheme. Thad didn’t want to be responsible for that. He had helped her come out of her shell—he didn’t want to do something that could be detrimental in even a small way.

Still, the idea of talking about it—even in a gentle way—was appealing. He decided that it couldn’t hurt to at least feel it out, without giving away anything important.

“It’s not so much of a secret, actually, as it is a hypothetical.”

“Like, hypothetically, whether or not you believe in love at first sight? Whether someone can fall so deeply in love in a couple of weeks—”

“It’s not about love. It’s more of a moral hypothetical. Let’s say you were in a situation where you knew that there was somebody who owns something that’s clearly theirs—yet they throw it in the trash, they identify it as trash. And let’s say you had the opportunity to grab this thing before anybody knew. And even though
they
had labeled it as trash—you could sell it for a lot of money.”

Sandra was watching him carefully, her left hand still resting gently against his calf, but her claws had retracted.

“A lot of money,” he repeated. “Would it be morally all right to take this thing and sell it?”

Sandra’s eyes never left his face.

“What are you getting at?”

“It’s a hypothetical.”

“Thad—”

“Just go along with it. I really want to know your opinion.”

“Okay, hypothetically, I think it would probably be okay. Since there’s no harm being done, because whoever owned the thing has already deemed it trash. You’re kind of creating value. So in a way, it’s actually a good thing.”

Thad was getting warm inside, like when he’d taken a sip of Rebecca’s wine before letting her finish the glass.

“Now this is torture,” Sandra grumbled. “You know you can trust me. I mean, I’ve known you like ten times longer than Rebecca, and don’t forget—I saw you naked first.”

“It’s not a matter of trust. It’s just … it’s something pretty crazy. And it’s a lot safer if you don’t know.”

“Now you’ve really got to tell me. I’m not scared. I don’t get scared anymore.”

Thad laughed. He really didn’t want to tell her, but he was running out of excuses. Just like with Rebecca—it was doubly hard to keep a secret that you didn’t really want to keep. And was it really anything more than the hypothetical he had just brought up? Wasn’t it still just a hypothetical heist?

“I’m going to give you only one chance,” he said finally. “A little game. If you win, I’ll tell you. But if you lose, you can never ask me again.”

“What sort of game?”

He reached over the arm of the couch and retrieved a little cardboard box from the floor. Inside the box was a stack of flash cards. Each had a Chinese character written on one side, an English translation on the other. Thad had gone through them many times in the course of his Chinese lessons, and even so, he still found them difficult. Reading those twists of black ink was as hard as intuiting an expression from a matrix of freckles.

“I’m going to show you twenty of these flash cards and tell you what they mean. Then I’m going to shuffle them and show them to you again, one at a time. If you get all twenty right, I’ll tell you what you want to know. And if not—”

“I can never ask you again.”

She shifted her body so that she was facing directly toward him, little hands on her lap, her face a mask of concentration. Almost immediately, Thad regretted offering up the game. Still, twenty characters? She couldn’t possibly get them all right.

“Here we go.”

He held up the first card, showing her the convoluted twists of ink that made up one of the more recognizable Chinese words.

“This one means ‘love.’ I guess it’s as good a place to start as any.”

“At the very least,” Sandra joked as her eyes flicked back and forth over the flash card, putting it to memory, “I’m going to have some great ideas for a tattoo by the end of this.”

Thad sighed, wishing he hadn’t told her so many details about his time with Rebecca. He held up the next card, showing her another character.

“‘Umbrella.’ Not quite as popular as tattoos go, I imagine.”

And on and on they went, through the flash cards. Thad didn’t move too quickly, but his pace wasn’t slow either. Within a few minutes, he had been through all twenty, and then he began shuffling. Sandra barely seemed to be watching him, but he could tell she was going through the cards over and over again in her mind.

Carefully, he began showing her the shuffled cards, one at a time. By the fifteenth card, he felt his cheeks flushing red. He had underestimated her. Her memory was even better than his own. As he reached the twentieth card, his fingers were shaking. He held the card up in front of her—and she paused only a moment. Then her face broke out in a huge, freckled grin.

“‘Happiness,’” she nearly shouted, her voice bouncing off the walls.

Shit
. Thad thought about ignoring the results, simply telling her again that he just couldn’t risk getting her involved. Really, it was for her own good. But she had played the game, and won.

He leaned close, and lowered his voice.

“Okay,” he said—and then he started talking.