Quantum

by Patricia Cornwell

  Always checking if they need something. Reprogramming. A little tweaking. Fixing bad boo-boos when the going gets way too rough. Forever futzing with their various sensors that let me know how our pilots, astronauts and other travelers would fare if similarly hurled and banged around. Smashed to the ground. Or against the side of a building after a pinnacle takeoff in a high-density urban area like Boston or New York City. Or splashed down in the ocean after streaking through the atmosphere, returning home from the International Space Station, the moon, deep space or soon enough Mars.

  “Jeez, I need a beer,” Fran says, both of us pointing our keys with a chirp.

  Unlocking and remote starting, and I’m all for a little distance if there’s a chance your vehicle might blow up.

  “And you’re sure as hell buying after putting me through that,” she rants but doesn’t mean it.

  “No drinking, not even one,” I remind her. “Unless something miraculous happens, we’re going to be furloughed at midnight. So, guess who’s got to be here? And I have to anyway because of the EVA.”

  “As usual, you depress the crap out of me.”

  “Good news is we can hang out at Mission Control, watch the launch, watch Rush talking to the astronauts . . .”

  “Rockets, schmockets. And I’ve seen how many launches and spacewalks over the years? And who cares diddly-squat about astronauts?” she adds, not wanting me to be one even if she won’t say it.

  Her black Tahoe is backed in next to my take-home police truck, a white Silverado with a covered bed, tricked out with the appropriate sirens, lights and run-flat tires. NASA Protective Services is in blue on the doors, and our logo may be the only one I know of in law enforcement with a design that includes planet Earth, an orbiting moon and a belt of stars.

  Not that anything is normal about working at Langley Research Center (LaRC), the oldest of NASA’s 10 national field centers, what most of us refer to as just plain Langley. Not to be confused with the Central Intelligence Agency, headquartered in Langley, Virginia, some 200 miles to the northwest of the peninsula we share with the air force base. You might say Carme and I were created by an alchemy of rivers, creeks, ocean and bay catalyzed by a sonic-booming elixir of military airspace. We’ve always had one foot in the water, the other in the sky while shooting for the moon and beyond.

  Our Mayberry while coming along was 764 acres of numbered government buildings connected by tunnels forming a labyrinth of mysterious chambers, incubators, labs and test ranges haunted by legends and inhabited by geniuses. For as far back as I can recall, my sister and I were wandering the same hallways and hangars that Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh and John Glenn once did.

  We routinely heard eyewitness accounts of Neil Armstrong, John Young, Buzz Aldrin and other death-defying explorers learning to pilot a lunar lander and moonwalk in our gantry. It all started right here in Virginia, not Florida or Texas. But on this very spit of land in 1917, when the US government created the first laboratory for studying human flight, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NACA.

  At the time there was no S in the acronym, no Space in the equation, not when we didn’t have airports or the FAA yet and Robert Goddard was still almost a decade out from firing off the first liquid-fueled rocket. Reaching for the stars wouldn’t become an urgent priority until 1957, when Russia sent up the first satellite in history. Sputnik was the launch heard round the world, the space glove tossed down.

  NACA morphed into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, and the space race was on. Of course, if you ask me, it’s been on since our so-called primordial soup days if not before and forever. Because it’s the very stuff we’re made of and who we are to sail through the air and just keep going. Unimpeded, infinitely, our heaven-bent behavior tracing back long before Igor Sikorsky and the Wright brothers roared off terra firma, soaring, spinning, mostly crashing. Nor were those early inventors the first to conjure up such lofty contraptions.

  Leonardo da Vinci was designing gliders and helicopter-like flying machines in the 15th century. Eons earlier, fantastic tales were spun fast and furiously about galactic visitors making fiery landfalls and whirlwind departures, and foolish mortals with wings of wax and feathers flying too close to the sun. Myths and other ancient texts including the Bible are rich with astonishing revelations and allusions that might hold scientific clues about our true origin were we not expected to take them at face value.

  Streets paved in gold and the burning bush come to mind. Along with Balaam’s mistreated talking donkey, Lot’s disobedient wife turning into a pillar of salt, the Red Sea parting, the feeding of the masses with 7 loaves and a few small fish. And one of my favorites, stubborn Jonah refusing to sail to Nineveh and landing there anyway. Spewed up on shore after a three-day journey in the gullet of a whale. An off-nominal entry if there ever was one, and a reminder not to blow off Mission Control.

  Then there are angels, demons, Mount Olympus and gods among us, all of it problematic when one isn’t a fan of blind faith and fables. And in my family, we accept miracles, magic, the paranormal for what they are. Unexplained or misunderstood scientific phenomena that humans love to repurpose and anthropomorphize. Not to mention politicize. Usually to make some point. Almost always a self-serving one.

  When we’d be wise to know our place in the grand design of things, a small blue dot, one of countless vibrant planets flung far and wide throughout infinity, spinning, orbiting like tumbled jewels. Separate worlds seeking to reconnect like the two fingers in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Like E.T. looking up to the heavens, to where he’s from. Like Dorothy chanting there’s no place like home. Suggesting that we may not be from here but someplace else we’re desperate to return.

  Explaining why it’s in our programming, our very nature to propel our fragile flesh-suited bodies perilously through the air. To take flight with our capes and kites, our blimps and balloons, our gliders, zip lines, catapults, bungee cords, parachutes, planes, rockets, space shuttles, jet packs, drones . . .

  There’s not much we won’t try to defy gravity. To break away from what binds us. Returning to our source, chasing what we’ve lost, speeding freely through eternity on waves of energy and light.

  00:00:00:00:0

  PARKING driver’s door to driver’s door is how cops rendezvous in deserted parking lots, and Fran and I hum our windows down.

  “What’s next? You gonna alert the Pentagon about your false alarm?” she asks sarcastically over heat blasting. “Maybe run it by your sugar daddy, General Melville? Except I have to say he wasn’t very sugary toward you today . . .”

  I shush her so I can close out the call we’re actively on, “Comm Center, Alpha 5 is 10-95 at 1111.”

  Radioing dispatch that we’re clearing the scene, offering no other details. I was exquisitely careful from the very first call not to divulge exactly where I was headed inside the building. And for what purpose beyond responding to what most would consider a routine security alarm. I didn’t mention 1111-A, the Yellow Submarine or anything quantum.

  I didn’t cross-reference the stolen badge report in 1110 from late yesterday, always mindful of journalists and others who might be monitoring. Most of all, Mason Dixon, and that really is his name.

  “Ten-four, Alpha 5,” Christine with dispatch comes back, and I key the mic in a sneaky shout-out to her.

  “I have a few things to take care of,” I say to Fran through our open windows as I buckle up. “And please be reminded that the alarm wasn’t false, per se. So, don’t go around saying that or putting it in a report.”

  “It’s not my report to write. Not my false alarm for that matter. And I don’t write up your crap, Captain Cut to the Chase.”

  “Well, Major Jerkoff, my point is we just don’t know what triggered the detector. N
ot yet. But I’m not done checking.”

  “When are you heading home?” she asks, and I can tell she wants to talk as I expected she might.

  “Hopefully within the hour but it depends on what’s crossed my desk, what else has come in. Plus, I need to lock up evidence, refrigerate the swabs.”

  “To do what? You’d better not be thinking of turning them in to the labs, as backlogged as they are.” Here she goes with the lecturing again. “I swear I don’t know why it matters if someone bled in a tunnel. I’m sure a lot of people do, with all the rusting metal everywhere. I mean just being that far below sea level will give you a nosebleed if you stay long enough. Your heart can explode.”

  “Not true.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s a medical fact,” she’s adamant and being ridiculous.

  “Nope.”

  “People have freakin’ died in there,” and that’s not quite right either but close enough. “Which reminds me, when’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?”

  “I’m all squared away, and it wasn’t me who was bleeding.” Raising my voice as F-22 Raptor fighter jets rip up the dusk, rocketing through the darkening sky at steep angles of attack that seem impossible.

  “But you don’t know when someone or something bled in there. Hours, days, weeks or months ago? That’s assuming what you found is blood, and human blood at that.” Talking to me while scanning her mirrors, her self-possession and street smarts kicking back in now that she’s no longer fried by anxiety.

  “I suspect the blood has been there at most since late yesterday,” I reply. “No longer ago than that, but it also could be much more recent, extremely recent. Assuming someone was inside that tunnel mere minutes before we were. As hot as those pipes are, blood drops would turn black very fast, looking exactly like what I saw. It wouldn’t take long. Minutes, possibly seconds,” adding that it would be simple to test my hypothesis.

  All I’d have to do is go down to the 1111-A tunnel, prick my finger and bleed on that same asbestos-swathed steam pipe. I could pinpoint with certainty the minimum amount of time required in the same hot, humid conditions for human blood to coagulate, dry and blacken. But this wouldn’t tell me how long it might stay like that before flaking off or washing away in blowing hot air and water leaks.

  “If you want to do something that cray-cray, help yourself,” Fran retorts. “You’re on your own. They find your sorry ass mummified in there 20 years from now, that’s what you get.”

  She doesn’t mean it, and I let her know that later on this evening I bet we can find some pretty decent leftovers in my mom’s kitchen. Some warmed-up mac and cheese from her favorite TV cooking show, Kitchen Combat. Maybe a serving or two of those sinful baked beans that taste like candied onions and bacon. Before we have to be back here and up all night.

  “I’ll text you when I’m home. Give me a couple hours to wrap up a few things before you wander on over,” I mean it literally.

  We’re next-door neighbors, more than that, actually. Like a tribe or a clan, the Chase family and those related have lived in a nearby cove on Back River since the late 1860s, when the farm I grew up on was given to my father’s great-grandfather, George Washington Chase, after the Civil War. It’s family lore that our surname was permuted if not made up from whole cloth by some carpetbagger who thought it amusing to give our mixed-race ancestors a stick about being chased all the time.

  Wasn’t funny then. Isn’t funny now. But for sure I’m here today because our saga had a much more fortunate resolution than most. The Chases truly are one big happy family, and you don’t have to be related by blood to be included. Fran and her 6-year-old son, Easton, live across the garden from my parents and me, inducted into our ecosystem by marriage to her high school sweetheart, my mother’s cousin, Tommy, who’s taking a time-out, and I don’t blame him.

  A mental health break. A sabbatical or convalescence might be a more honest way to describe why he and Fran decided to give each other space. Meaning he’s the one who needed it after she began turning into Mr. Hyde more than Dr. Jekyll. Her phobias had gotten kicked into a higher gear for reasons unknown, although I have a pretty good idea.

  I don’t believe in coincidences, and it wasn’t one when she got worse last spring after finding out that Carme and I had been selected as potential astronaut candidates. Should that end the way I hope, it would change life for Fran as she knows it. Not that she would admit such a thing. But she got increasingly panicky and disagreeable, and Tommy got an apartment in Williamsburg.

  He insisted that she, Easton and their orange tabby cat, Schroder, stay put in Hampton, living in the tin-roofed house on the river one door down from us. They need to stay right where they are, surrounded by family. No better way for a child to grow up, my parents always say, and it’s true. As long as all is good with your loved ones, all is good.

  Or good enough, and I tell Fran I’ll see her back at the ranch, rolling up my window, driving off. Soon it will be dark, and most people are headed out for the day, the traffic picking up as I follow North Dryden Street away from the gantry, back toward the center of the campus.

  5

  I KEEP my speed below 20 miles per hour. Driving through the dormant grassy fields of the Unmanned Aircraft System Test Range. Then dense woods, and marshland thick with ice and tawny tall sea oats.

  Passing rows of nondescript brick government buildings with tiny windows and signs out front offering a hint of what might go on inside. Measurement Systems. Autonomy Incubator. Continuous-Flow Hypersonic Tunnel. Flight Research. Acoustics. Most of the facilities painted white with antennas everywhere, and I check my cell phone for messages.

  Annoyed to find that Mason Dixon tried me again. As if his name isn’t bad enough, worse, he’s wicked Alec Baldwin gorgeous, explaining his nickname, Calendar Boy.

  A semifamous internet journalist, he’s crafty and charming, and his uncle Willard happens to be the governor of Virginia. I’m still furious with myself for giving Mason my personal number. But it made sense at the time, and I’d probably do the same thing again under the circumstances.

  Playing his voice mail while I drive:

  “Hey, Calli, it’s me, Mason Dixon, as in ‘the line you don’t cross in reporting the news.’” Off air and on he has a way of crooning, as if everyone is his lover or wants to be. “Clever, right? I’m thinking it will go viral. Do you like it?”

  No, I don’t. Considering my dad is descended from the daughter of a slave and the man who owned her during an era when the Mason-Dixon Line defined far more than simply a border separating North from South. I could accuse Mason of being a bigot, but it’s not my style, and besides, he’s too self-involved to have a clue. He knows nothing about my history and mixed ethnicity, only that I remind him of J-Lo, whom I’ve pretended to be on many a Halloween but don’t remotely resemble, if you ask me. Sadly.

  “. . . Word on the street is that the eagle has landed, i.e., the head honcho of Space Force has been spotted in the area,” Mason’s recorded voice. “Specifically, at Langley, and you know your friend Mason, here . . .”

  Not my friend, none of your business and no, I don’t know you or want to.

  “. . . I’m sitting here pouring myself a bourbon and thinking . . . soooo what’s General Moby Dick Melville himself doing in your lovely neck of the woods, right? The big fish that keeps getting away, you know I really do want that interview, Calli. I’m pretty sure you know how to help me out, and maybe there’s something mutual here . . .”

  “Presumptuous horse’s patootie . . . ,” and it’s a good thing no one’s around to hear my coarse comments.

  “. . . Anyhoo, whenever the big fish comes around, others can’t be far behind, right? Soooo what’s goin’ on, girlfriend? Sounds mighty intriguing. Call me. And oh yeah, didn’t you and he once
. . .”

  I end the message, unable to listen a second longer to Mason’s syrupy voice droning on as if he has some special right to my time or attention. Why would it ever enter his self-absorbed thoughts that I would connect him with my former boss? Or anybody else who matters?

  On Langley Boulevard now, headed toward the giant white vacuum spheres and monster mechanicals of the wind tunnels. The most iconic and dramatic view on campus, and I’m fortunate to enjoy it from both of my NASA offices, directly across the street from each other. It’s good and bad that I can look out my window in Building 1232 and see into my corner window of 1195C, making me feel I’m in two places at once.

  Around a copse of winter-bare hardwood trees, picnic tables and tennis courts, and next to the fitness center, where I never spend enough time. Especially this time of year, when my none-too-swift metabolism wants to hibernate. Then the almost century-old Variable Density Tunnel that brings to mind the Hunley submarine, which sank during the Civil War. Or a Gothic iron lung. Or maybe a primitive alien vessel from Star Trek.

  Built with a lot of rivets from back in the heyday of the Wright brothers, the National Historic Landmark has been on display for as long as I’ve been around, and when my sister and I were kids, we used to climb all over it. Irreverently playing war games when no one was looking. Flying it like a weaponized space shuttle . . .

  . . . Or pretending it was one disguised as an asteroid . . . Then switching into marine mode . . . Breaking the surface with periscope up . . . Diving into the silent depths of the sea . . . Firing torpedoes at the enemy . . .