by Jerry
“Cecily, are you upset about something?”
“That’s a good one! He comes back after fifteen years and asks me if I’m upset.”
“Fifteen years!” Alan sputtered.
“That’s right. It’s 1994, you bozo.”
“Oh darling, and you’ve been waiting all this time . . .”
“Like hell I have,” she interrupted. “When I met you, back in 1979, I realised that I couldn’t stay in that sham of a marriage for another minute. So I must have set some kind of a record for quickie marriage and divorce, by Danville standards, anyway. So I was a thirty-year-old divorcee whose marriage had fallen apart in less than two months, and I was back to washing my hair alone on Saturday nights. And people talked. Lord, how they talked. But I didn’t care, because I’d finally met my soul-mate and everything was going to be all right. He told me he’d fix it. He’d be back. So I waited. I waited for a year. Then I waited two years. Then I waited three. After ten, I got tired of waiting. And if you think I’m going through another divorce, you’re crazy.”
“You mean you’re married again?”
“What else was I supposed to do? A man wants you when you’re forty, you jump at it. As far as I knew, you were gone forever.”
“I’ve never been away, Cecily. I’ve been here all along, but never at the right time. It’s that drebbing machine; I can’t figure out the controls.”
“Maybe Arnie can have a look at it when he gets in, he’s pretty good at that sort of thing—what am I saying?”
“Tell me, did you ever write the story?”
“What’s to write about? Anyway, what difference does it make? Woman’s Secrets went bankrupt years ago.”
“Matrix! If you never wrote the story, then I shouldn’t even know about you. So how can I be here? Dammit, it’s a paradox. And I wasn’t supposed to cause any of those. Plus, I think I may have started an Indian war. Have you noticed any change in local history?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Look, I have an idea. When exactly did you get divorced?”
“I don’t know, late ‘79. October, November, something like that.”
“All right, that’s what I’ll aim for. November, 1979. Be waiting for me.”
“How?”
“Good point. Okay, just take my word for it, you and me are going to be sitting in this room right here, right now, with one big difference: we’ll have been married for fifteen years, okay?”
“But what about Arnie?”
“Arnie won’t know the difference. You’ll never have married him in the first place.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be back in a minute. Well, in 1979. You know what I mean.” He headed for the door.
“Hold on,” she said. “You’re like the guy who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and doesn’t come back for thirty years.”
“What guy?”
“Never mind. I wanna make sure you don’t turn up anywhere else. Bring the machine in here.”
“Is that it?” she said one minute later.
“That’s it.”
“But it looks like a goddamn bicycle.”
“Where do you want me to put it?”
She led him upstairs. “Here,” she said. Alan unfolded the bike next to the bed. “I don’t want you getting away from me next time,” she told him.
“I don’t have to get away from you now.”
“You do. I’m married and I’m at least fifteen years older than you.”
“Your age doesn’t matter to me,” Alan told her. “When I first fell in love with you, you’d been dead three hundred years.”
“You really know how to flatter a girl, don’t you? Anyway, don’t aim for ‘79. I don’t understand paradoxes, but I know I don’t like them. If we’re ever gonna get this thing straightened out, you must arrive before 1973, when the story is meant to be published. Try for ‘71 or ‘72. Now that I think about it, those were a strange couple of years for me. Nothing seemed real to me then. Nothing seemed worth bothering about, nothing mattered; I always felt like I was waiting for something. Day after day I waited, though I never knew what for.”
She stepped back and watched him slowly turn a dial until he vanished. Then she remembered something.
How could she have ever have forgotten such a thing? She was eleven and she was combing her hair in front of her bedroom mirror. She screamed. When both her parents burst into the room and demanded to know what was wrong, she told them she’d seen a man on a bicycle. They nearly sent her to a child psychiatrist.
Damn that Alan, she thought. He’s screwed up again.
The same room, different decor, different time of day. Alan blinked several times; his eyes had difficulty adjusting to the darkness. He could barely make out the shape on the bed, but he could see all he needed to. The shape was alone, and it was adult size. He leaned close to her ear. “Cecily,” he whispered. “It’s me.” He touched her shoulder and shook her slightly. He felt for a pulse.
He switched on the bedside lamp. He gazed down at a withered face framed by silver hair, and sighed. “Sorry, love,” he said. He covered her head with a sheet, and sighed again.
He sat down on the bike and unfolded the printout. He’d get it right eventually.
1992
BOOSTRAP ENTERPRISE
Victor Koman
WHAT WOULD YOU give to go into space?
The discussion always turned to some variant of that question. Usually the person who asked was new to NASA. Or a temp, hired for one of those surges of activity surrounding a double shuttle launch. This time the questioner was Terry Delbert, one of the wiring people. She had lovely black Irish hair—a genetic gift from her mother’s side—cut gamine short, and dark green eyes that looked up from a round, fresh face at Joe Wenders, who sat sipping his coffee in the break room.
“Well,” he said, “I’m giving it right now. Ten to eighteen hours a day. Six or seven days a week.” Wenders was a large man. Not fat or even husky, just the sort of man who was big, carried it handsomely, and looked as if he could lift by himself one of the three massive eighteen-inch-diameter bolts that held the shuttle orbiter to the external tank.
Delbert turned her wheelchair slightly to get a better look at him. “And how is this”—she waved an arm about the lunchroom—“getting you into spacer.
“Well, of course, that’s a little ways away . . .”
Some of the other lunchers laughed and turned back to their food. They’d heard it all before. Wenders had not, at least not from Delbert—they had been on different shifts until the last week. Delbert twisted in her wheelchair and readjusted the blanket that covered the stumps of her legs. She had a sort of missionary zeal about her when it came to space travel. But then, there were still a few of those sort in NASA.
“You know,” she said, “I’m thirty-two years old. When I was a kid, I figured we’d have space stations by the time I was ten. We didn’t. When we landed on the Moon, I figured we’d have a colony there by the time I was twenty. We didn’t. When the shuttle finally started service, I figured we’d at least have space stations by the time I was thirty. Now the space station seems a decade or more away—farther, if the president’s veto doesn’t get overridden next week—and they’re talking about taking thirty years for a Mars landing . . . I’ll be dead before NASA develops anything remotely commercial enough to put a crip into orbit. Or even an ordinary guy such as you.”
Wenders shrugged. “If you and I weren’t here, it would take that many man-hours longer.”
The lunchroom buzzer sounded, ending all discussion. Wenders watched as Terry wheeled herself back to work, accompanied by a tall black man with glasses and close-cropped hair.
“Nice to see such dedication, isn’t it?” The woman addressing Wenders was someone whose name he could not remember. She added without letting him reply, “She fought hard for the right to work in her division. Actually took it to court.”
“How’d it happen?” he asked.
Without
needing to know what “it” meant, she said, “Traffic accident. She says the guy broadsided her on the driver’s side. Hit and run.”
“Damned shame,” was all Wenders could say. “Pretty girl.”
The other woman made that sort of meditative hum that meant every cloud had a silver lining. “You ought to see how she can just wiggle up into the smallest crannies in the orbiters. She’s good at what she does. She’s no twofer.”
“Twofer?”
“You know—two affirmative-action categories for the price of one.”
“Oh.”
Wenders quietly watched the pair recede into the caverns of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Then, without saying a word to the woman beside him, he headed in the opposite direction.
Wenders watched as the powerful Mate-Demate Device slowly lowered Endeavour into position against the rust-hued external tank. The Vehicle Assembly Building rumbled with afternoon activity. From his vantage he could see down to ground level, where a tiny silver speck glided across the field of view. He guessed that it was Delbert, though he could not be certain—there were at least two other wheelers that he knew about at Kennedy. But the bright Irish green of the clothing gave him the opinion that it was indeed the woman who had asked him the probing question.
What would I give to go into space, he wondered. I’m already giving my life to NASA, same as she is. His hands rested calmly on the railing. She’s right though. It’s not getting me into space.
He thought back thirty-five years to a young boy watching the Friendship 7 from a rooftop in Cocoa Beach. The crackling roar of the Redstone rocket sounded so loud to the newcomer that he had covered his ears in joyous terror. His family had come to Florida so that his father could work on the new manned space program. And no more exciting a proposition could have been placed before a seven-year-old boy. As he watched Alan Shepard roar into space, he knew that someday soon he, too, would be riding a pillar of flame and noise into the endless blue.
Eight years later, when it was revealed that Neil Armstrong had wanted to go to the Moon since he was a boy, a teenaged Joe Wenders knew that his dreams could come true, too. Three years after that, when Joe was a freshman in college, his father called to tell him that he had fallen victim to the post-Apollo layoffs. Joe thanked whatever gods there were that he had a scholarship.
Though he knew that the space effort had been aimlessly winding down since Apollo 11, it was then that he realized he would not be rocketing into space in the near future, if ever.
What would you give to go into space?
The next time Wenders and Delbert met was at a farewell party for some members of the disaster-preparation team. Anytime the shuttles would go for ten flights or more without a major problem, the disaster team was the first to get cut back from high profile to low. On the other hand, the public relations division would grow after a string of successful launches, so it all evened out on paper.
Terry did not remember Joe right away. He introduced himself, saying, “In answer to your question, I’d give my life to get into space.”
Her full red lips curled into a smile. “But then you’d be dead and unable to enjoy it.” Her hand reached out to pat Wenders’s. “Don’t worry—everybody gives that answer first, and we both know it’s not true.”
“Well,” he said after a sip of his bourbon, “what would you give?”
Her smile turned ever so slightly into something feline and inscrutable. “But Mr. Wenders—I asked first. Give me a serious answer, and you’ll get one in return.”
He felt a strange warmth flow through him, as if the alcohol were racing through his bloodstream faster than usual. Her green eyes captivated him, gazing at him with a bold curiosity, yet hiding something deeper, something . . . wilder.
He turned his gaze downward to his drink, suddenly flushed with embarrassment. “I—I’ve never given it much thought until you asked last week. It’s the sort of thing that everyone in the space program asks himself at least once. The usual answer is, ‘I would give anything.’ ”
Terry settled back in her wheelchair, adjusting the straps of her black cocktail dress. She leaned one elbow on the padded armrest, that hand toying with the aquamarine coral necklace around her neck; her other hand grasped her champagne glass.
“We’ve determined that it’s logically impossible to give your life to get into space. So you can’t give anything. You must give something, though. How about your home?”
It was Wenders’s turn to smile. “I rent.”
Delbert raised an eyebrow. “A man your age?”
“Ultimately we’re all renters when the final eviction arrives.”
“Ooh,” she said, leaning closer. “A candidate for the post of NASA philosopher.” She took a long drink from her flute of champagne.
She leaned in such a way that—from his position—he could see the gentle curve of her pale breasts within the dark folds of her dress. His pulse quickened. With a glance, he drank in every feature he could: her soft black hair; sensuous lips; intense emerald eyes; smooth, bare shoulders that alluringly led the way inward toward her breasts and outward toward her graceful arms. Her waist was narrow, meant for an arm to encircle. Her ebon evening dress disappeared beneath the black velvet of her wheelchair blanket. Beneath that blanket, her thighs ended in stumps a few inches below her hips.
The bourbon had robbed him of that degree of composure that allowed him to suppress involuntary reactions. He started ever so slightly when his gaze touched upon the dropping folds of fabric where her legs should have been.
She noticed. He could tell instantly that she had noticed. Her smile faded, replaced not by sadness or regret, but by an anger not even thinly disguised. An anger salted with disappointment in him.
“I’m a Catholic, too, if that also repels you,” she said, her eyes narrowing.
“No—of course not—” Joe’s face turned sunset red as he stammered to recover the beginnings of their friendship. “I’m sorry. It’s just such a tragedy that you’ve—”
“I don’t need legs, Mr. Wenders, to be a complete human being.” She set her glass down on the end table. “I don’t need legs to earn a living, to help build a goddamn spaceship, for God’s sake. I don’t even need legs to be a woman, a complete and total woman.”
“I know that . . . I—”
“Something you might have found out tonight.”
With that, her slender arms gripped the wheels of her chair and turned it sharply about. She encountered a wall of partying humanity that she had difficulty negotiating.
Wenders, embarrassed beyond rational thought, rose and headed toward her. At her left, he said in low tones, “I’m sorry. I—I don’t react well after some drinks. I wasn’t coming on to you . . .” His voice tapered off.
“Well, I was to you,” she said in a quiet yet sharp tone. “But I never, ever, want to see that look in the eyes of a lover. That was pity, Wenders, shock and pity and . . . revulsion all in one knee-jer—”
She stopped, then broke into a sour smile. “You see, Joe, I resent it in others because I’m physically incapable of knee-jerk reactions.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry we got off on—” He froze and turned red again. She turned the wheelchair toward him and smiled, this time warmly. “I don’t have a wrong foot, either.” She looked up at him, her friendly humor returning. “Bring me another champagne, would you? Then we can start over again.”
THEY WATCHED the next shuttle launch together. That was when she introduced him to Shaka Verwoerd, one of the wizards responsible for keeping track of the miles of tubes, pipes, and hoses that convey fuel from the tanks to the engines, and that circulate all the other fluids in the orbiter. He was tall and lean—a gift from his Zulu mother’s side of the family—with sharp, aquiline features from his Afrikaner father.
His dark eyes had a brooding look to them that morning, as if he could wait no longer for something. He rolled Terry away from Wenders and the bleachers and spoke to her for some tim
e. Joe wondered what sort of friendship they shared—at times they seemed inseparable.
Afterward the three lunched in the VAB. A tension between Delbert and Verwoerd seemed to grow more palpable with each minute. Wenders ate his ham sandwich quietly and observed the two. Verwoerd acted as if he wanted to be alone with Terry, and Wenders was an unwelcome intrusion. Delbert, on the other hand, was very warm and encouraging to the agitated man, giving him as much of her attention as she could without ignoring her other co-worker entirely. What they exchanged now and then in low tones was impossible for Wenders to hear, but after ten minutes of this, Verwoerd put his sandwich down without having had more than one bite.
“Well,” he announced curtly, “I’ve got the rest of the day off. I’m going parasailing this weekend.” He gave Terry a light kiss on the lips, shot an odd glance toward Wenders, then left the table.
Wenders said nothing to Delbert for a long moment. She reciprocated, quietly munching away at a heavily buttered sourdough French roll. She seemed to be unaware of—or ignoring—the strained atmosphere.
“So,” she said after she had washed down the roll with some milk. “Want to hit the Keys this weekend?”
They took her minivan, since it had a rack for her chair. She drove, Wenders watching in frank wonder at the odd farrago of controls—both electronic and mechanical—clustered around the steering column that enabled her to drive. An accelerator and cruise control rested under her left hand. It kept the speed constant unless disabled by the red brake grips on the steering wheel. The parking brake was controlled by a covered switch next to the air conditioner. Wenders experienced a warm appreciation of the technology that permitted Terry to live a full and active life, just a few decades ago—before the advent of automatic transmissions—she would have been dependent on the good graces of others to get anywhere beyond a few blocks from her home. He firmly believed that she could pilot a jet if she wanted to.
