The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  She nodded.

  “A seven-thirty? I didn’t know they’d scheduled that early?”

  “Well, there are sixteen of you and they want to give everybody a full half hour at least—you know, for . . . well, final things. To wrap things up.”

  “Who is it, just out of curiosity?”

  Early on, in the first or maybe second week after I’d been selected to join the project, Josie and I had shared a pitcher of mango margaritas at El Caballero in downtown Tillman and after that I’d always thought she was on my side. Or at least sympathetic. More sympathetic to me, I mean, than to some of the others. She was in her late forties, her hair already gone gray and her face composed around a pair of tortoiseshell frames that pinched her temples and marginalized her eyes—and she leaned now across the desk to mouth the name: “Stevie.”

  Stevie. Well, that was all right. Stevie was in and I’d already accepted that. At least it wasn’t Tricia Berner, one of the three women both Linda and I had agreed didn’t stand a chance, even though, when I lay awake nights staring at the ceiling till the darkness pooled and dissolved into something darker still, I could see that she did. She was attractive in her own way, if you discounted her style, which was right off the street, short skirts, too much makeup, jewelry that might as well have been encrusted on her, and she was the best actress, hands-down, among the crew. And that meant more than you might think—from the start, right from the building phase to Mission One closure and on through the course of our training, the project was as much about theater as it was science, and even more so now, with Mission Two, and the pledge we’d all taken. But more on that later. Suffice it to say that that closed door, no matter who was behind it, made my stomach clench till I could taste the pancakes all over again.

  It was ten past eight and I’d already been in and out of the easy chair in the corner half a dozen times and studied the framed photos of the Mission One crew that lined the walls till I could have reproduced them from memory, when the door swung open and there was Stevie, in heels no less, giving me a blank stare as if she didn’t recognize me, as if we hadn’t hauled lines together and shoveled cow dung in hundred-ten-degree heat and crouched elbow to elbow over one table or another through too many meals to count. I saw that she’d highlighted her hair and layered on enough makeup to be clearly visible from the cheap seats, but I couldn’t tell yet whether she was playing comedy or tragedy. They had to have taken her, hadn’t they? For a fraction of a second I let myself soar, seeing Linda in her place and both of us in, a gang of two, bulwark against the autocracy of Mission Control on the one hand and the tyranny of the majority on the other, but then Stevie’s eyes came into focus—hard blue, cold blue, blue so dark it was almost black—and I saw the triumph there. Her lips curled in a smile that showed off her flawless dentition and firm pink gums and then she was giving me the thumbs-up sign and it all came clear. We might have embraced—we should have, sisters in solidarity, the mission above all else—but I stiffened and the moment passed and she was by me, cranking her smile to the limit and gushing over Josie and Josie gushing right back.

  The door stood open before me. I didn’t even have to knock.

  There were four people inside, seated casually, two on the couch and two in a pair of Posturepedic office chairs, three of whom I’d expected and one whose presence came as a total surprise. And, to be honest, something of a shock. They’re not leaving anything to chance here, that was my first thought. And then I was thinking, Good sign or bad?

  But let me explain. The two seated on the couch were a given: Jeremiah Reed and Judy Forester, the visionary who’d dreamed up the project and saw it through its creation and his chief aide and confidante. Privately we called Jeremiah G.C., short for God the Creator, and Judy, in keeping with the religious theme, Judas, because she was a betrayer, or at least that was her potential. We all felt that. It was just the way she was wound, a hair’s breadth from turning on you, the kind of person who would have gone straight to the top in the Stasi, but by 1994 the Stasi was no more, so here she was, among us. Lately, Linda and I had been calling her Jude the Obscure, given some of her counterintuitive pronouncements from on high. She wasn’t much older than I, but she was Jeremiah’s right hand—the right hand of God—and that gave her a power over us that was out of all proportion to who she was. Or would have been, if it weren’t for the fact that she was sleeping with the deity himself. Did I toady up to her though I hated myself for it? You can bet I did. And I wasn’t the only one.

  The third person in this trinity was newly anointed, brought in from outside to oversee day-to-day operations by way of cost-cutting and efficiency. His name was Dennis Roper and he affected a ducktail haircut and slash sideburns, à la 1982. We called him Little Jesus. About a month after they installed him at Mission Control, he hit on Linda, which to my mind was not only unprofessional but sleazy too, given the power he wielded. Linda slept with him a couple of times, though it was wrong and we both knew it whether there was a quid pro quo involved or not—especially if there was a quid pro quo—and when he was done with her he came on to me, but I wasn’t having it. I wouldn’t sink that low even if he was halfway good-looking, which he wasn’t. I never liked short men—and beyond that, short or tall, I liked them to have personalities.

  Anyway, there I was, hovering in the middle of the room, the door standing open behind me because I’d been too agitated to think to shut it, and the four of them (I’ll get to the fourth in a minute) gazing up patiently at me, as if they had all day to do whatever they were going to do, though by my accounting they were already running ten minutes late. “Hi,” I said, nodding at each of them in turn, then motioned to the straight-backed chair set there facing them and murmured, “you want me to sit here?”

  “Hi, Dawn,” Judy said, giving me a big smile that could have meant anything, and the others smiled in succession, everything as routine and amenable as could be, no pressure here, all for one and one for all.

  No one had answered my question so I took it on my own initiative to ease into the chair—was this part of the test?—gazing straight into their eyes as if to say I’m not at all intimidated because I’m one hundred percent certain I’m as vital to this crew as anybody out there walking the planet today.

  “Don’t worry, we won’t keep you long,” Dennis said, getting up to tiptoe across the room and ease the door shut before sitting back down. He drew in a deep breath and let it out again, then bent forward in the office chair so that his elbows rested on his knees and he could screw his eyes into mine. “I know it’s a big day for all the candidates and we’re all looking forward to finalizing things and moving toward closure, so all we want really is to ask you a few things, little details, minor things, that’s all, just to set the record straight—you on board with that?”

  The fourth person in the room, and he didn’t say a word or unfreeze his face or even shift in his seat to relieve the tension in his buttocks and hip flexors, was Darren Iverson, the millionaire—billionaire—who’d financed the project from its inception to the tune of something like a hundred fifty million dollars and picked up the operating costs too, which were in the neighborhood of ten million a year, a million of that for power alone. He was a few years younger than Jeremiah, which would have put him in his mid-fifties, and he didn’t really look like a billionaire—or what I suppose anybody would have expected a billionaire to look like. He wore matching shirt and pants combinations he might have picked up at Sears, in desert brown, with waffle-tread workboots, also in brown. His eyes were brown too and so was his hair, or what was left of it. We called him Mr. Iverson to his face. Otherwise he was G.F., short for God the Financier.

  I looked to G.F., then to G.C. and Judy and finally came back to Dennis. “I feel like I’m on Star Trek or something,” I said, but nobody laughed. Star Trek was one of our touchstones, as was Silent Running, for obvious reasons. “You know, ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’?” Still no reaction. I was feeling giddy, maybe a bit
light-headed from the tension and all the energy my gastrointestinal system was putting into digesting breakfast, and whether it was ill-advised or not, I couldn’t help adding, “Or no woman.”

  Dennis pushed himself back up to a sitting position. “Great, but we just want to ask you a few things that really haven’t come up, to this point, that is”—and here he made it a question—“about your personal life?”

  If this caught me by surprise, I didn’t let it show. I’d assumed they’d be asking me about food values, estimated crop yields, milk production and minimum protein requirements, that sort of thing, the technical aspects of the job I’d be expected to fill, but this came out of nowhere. I just nodded.

  “Are you currently seeing anyone?”

  “No,” I said, too quickly, and that was because I was lying. Despite myself, I’d been drawn into a relationship—or no, I’d fallen, full-on, no parachute—with Johnny Boudreau, who’d been second boss of the construction crew when E2 was in the building stages, and who played guitar and sang in a bar band on weekends.

  Dennis—Little Jesus!—flipped a note card in his hand and made a show of squinting at the name written on the back of it. “What about John Boudreau?”

  I wanted to say, Are you spying on me now?, but I kept my composure. I couldn’t summon Johnny just then, couldn’t picture him or take a snapshot in the lens of my mind, and I realized that if he really did mean anything lasting to me we’d have this month to make our peace with wherever that was going to go, and then there’d be closure, 730 days of it. I shrugged.

  Into the incriminatory silence Judy said, “You are using birth control, right?”

  I nodded.

  “And—forgive me, but you do understand how vital this is, don’t you?—have you had multiple partners in recent months, anything that might endanger . . . or, what do I mean?” She looked to Dennis.

  “E.,” he said, using my crew sobriquet, E. being short for Eos, rosy-limbed goddess of dawn, which I took to be a compliment even if it came by way of left field, “what we mean is we can’t risk any sort of infection arising after closure—”

  “You mean STDs, right?” I wasn’t angry, or not yet—they were just doing what was best for the mission and what was best for the mission was best for me. “You don’t have to worry,” I said, and I gave Dennis a meaningful look. “It’s been only Johnny, Johnny and nobody else.”

  Judy: “And he’s, uh—?”

  “Clean? Yes, as far as I know.”

  Dennis: “He does play in a band, doesn’t he?”

  “Listen,” and here I shot a look past the two of them to where G.C. sat there on the couch like a sphinx and then to the brown hole of G.F., “I don’t really see the point of all this. The medical officer, which I assume is going to be Richard, right?” Nothing. Not a glimmer from any of them. “The medical officer’s going to do a thorough exam, and even if I had gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia—or if any of the men had it—it’d just be treated, right?”

  There was a silence. Distantly, as if it were being piped in over a faulty sound system, there came the muffled clank of the bulldozers going about their business across campus. G.C.—lean, pale as a cloud with his fluffed-up hair and full white beard—uncrossed his legs and spoke for the first time. His voice was a fine tenor instrument, capable of every shading and nuance—when he was younger, long before the project, he’d performed on Broadway in things like Hair and Man of La Mancha. “But the issue is birth control,” he said. “You do understand, don’t you, that we can’t risk having any of our female crew getting, well, knocked up. To put it bluntly.”

  It wasn’t a question and I didn’t answer it. “I’ll take a pregnancy test, if it’ll make you rest easier. Believe me, it won’t be a problem.”

  “Yes,” he said, tenting his fingers to make a cradle for his chin so he could stare directly into me, “but what about post-closure?”

  And now—I couldn’t help myself—I gave each of them a smile in turn and said, as sweetly as I could, “You’ll have to ask the men about that.”

  I don’t remember much beyond that though I’m sure my face must have been flushed and the vein on my forehead pulsing like heat lightning. I felt so grateful—and relieved—I could have kissed them all, but I didn’t. Or at least I don’t think I did. Dennis later told me I’d practically bowed my way across the floor before pausing at the door to give them all a broad valedictory wave, as if I were ducking into the wings after an ovation, but I don’t remember that either. It was heady, at any rate, even if I can’t say for sure what was true and what wasn’t. And it didn’t really matter. Not anymore.

  Unfortunately—and here you had to appreciate the subtlety of their scheduling—the first person I saw on coming through the door was Linda. She was seated in the chair I’d vacated, head down, studying her notes on closed systems, group dynamics, technics, Vernadsky and Brion and Mumford, boning up, though there was no point in it now. I saw that she’d put on a dress—a bronze rayon shift that only managed to look dowdy on her—and pinned up her hair, which was usually such a mess. What did I feel? Honestly? Sad, of course, but in that moment it was no more than a fluctuation in the flight I was on, the first stage of the rocket falling away while the payload hurtles higher and ever higher.

  She didn’t notice me. Didn’t lift her head. I could see her lips moving over the phrases we’d chanted together like incantations—Thought isn’t a form of energy. So how on Earth can it change material processes?—as if the people inside that room would care. They’d asked about my sex life. Asked things like, “How do you feel about Ramsay? Gretchen? Stevie? You think you can work with them inside?” And what did I say? Of course, I said. Of course. They’re the best people in the world. I look forward to the challenge. We’ll make it work, make it click, everything. It’s going to be awesome!

  I could feel Josie’s eyes on me, but I didn’t turn to her, not yet. I glided across the room as if I were riding a conveyor belt and then I was right there in front of Linda and I said her name, once, very softly, and she looked up. That was all it took. I didn’t have to say a word. I watched the new calculus flicker like a current across her face and saw her put it all behind her and with an effort raise up her arms for a hug. “Dawn,” she murmured, “Dawn, oh, Dawn, I’m so glad, I am—”

  It was an awkward embrace. I was standing and she was sitting, the notebook spread open in her lap, her feet planted on the carpet, and I could feel the strain in the muscles of my lower back. Her grip was fierce, almost as if we were wrestling and she was trying to pull me down. I couldn’t say anything because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t sound like I was congratulating myself—and I couldn’t do that, not at her expense.

  “Dawn,” she said, “Dawn,” and drew it out till it was a bleat even as Josie moved forward to get into the act and Judy appeared at the door of the control room. I let go then and Linda sank back into the chair.

  “Congrats,” Josie mouthed for me alone, an expert at conveying meaning without sound, and then Judy was saying, “Linda? Linda, come on in. We’re all ready for you.”

  I waited there the full half hour, settling myself into the chair and chattering away at Josie as one thought after another came cascading into my head, already wondering about the closure ceremony and measurements for our uniforms and whether we’d have our choice of living quarters or if they’d been pre-assigned (if Josie knew, she wasn’t letting on). At nine, on the stroke, Ramsay appeared, in T-shirt and jeans, a baseball cap reversed on his head and the fingers of his right hand rooting at the beginnings of a shadowy growth of beard. I hadn’t seen him the last couple of days, our schedules at odds, and the beard surprised me. If I’d assumed he was in, Dennis’ question had pretty well confirmed it—pointedly, he hadn’t asked how I felt about any of the men or women Linda and I had relegated to the second tier but only the ones we’d handicapped as the front-runners—and if that was the case he’d have to shave before we were presented to the press or M
ission Control would have something to say about it. Beyond that, the way he was dressed—his whole attitude, from the minute he slouched in the door, flashed a grin at Josie and me and perched himself on the corner of the desk as if it belonged to him—bespoke a level of confidence that verged on arrogance. Or inside knowledge. Maybe that was it. He’d been chummy with G.C. and Judy from the beginning, all in the name of public relations, of course, and I realized how naïve I’d have to have been not to understand that there was a pecking order here.

  “Hi, girls,” he said, “what’s happening? Everybody feeling just unconquerable this morning? But wait, wait, wait—E., let me be the first, or maybe”—here he snatched a look at Josie—“the second to congratulate you. Well done! All for one and one for all, right?”

  I just stared at him in astonishment. “But how did you know?”

  “How did I know? Just look at your face. Quick, Josie, you got your compact? Here, come on, take a look at yourself.” Going along with him, Josie fished her compact out of her purse and handed it to him so he could snap it open and bound across the room to hold the little rectangular mirror up in front of my face. “See? See there?” He swung his head round comically to where Josie sat at her desk. “Look at the way the zygomaticus muscles are stretching that smile, and wait a minute, the risorius too, which, in laymen’s terms is called the look-how-proud-I-am muscle.”

  I couldn’t help myself: I felt dazzled. And all his cutting-up, which I might have found sophomoric and more than a little annoying in another place or time, seemed witty and genuine, touching even. “What about you?” I asked. “You hear anything yet?”

  “I’m the nine o’clock,” he said, giving nothing away. He snapped the compact shut and gestured toward the door with it. “Who’s in there now?”