Ana Teresa set the crate on the table. “Welcome to Auxiliary C Sickbay.”
The bare egg glistened in the overhead lights. I set it down on my tray and felt the doctor watching me. I picked up the knife and fork. “How are things out there?”
In the corner, Halim pulled out a chair and set it under one of the room’s support struts. “Good, actually. Everyone is very much pulling together, which…” He climbed onto the chair with one of the hammocks still over his shoulder. “Honestly, I had my doubts about the colonists.”
I sliced the egg in half, revealing the sun-yellow orb in the middle. “Good people.” Setting down my knife, I reached for the salt and pepper. My heart was speeding up, unaccountably. “Mostly good, at any rate.”
“That raises—” He glanced at me, then at Ana Teresa, and grimaced. “That raises my respect for Eugene, that he’s doing such a good job motivating them.”
What would he have said if we were alone in the room? Helen met my gaze, with the same question on her face. I rotated a bit of egg on my fork, trying to think. If I weren’t so wretchedly tired, I would probably have come up with some clever method to send Ana Teresa away, but at the moment, the best I could do was to be quiet and hope she’d finish faster.
Halim seemed to have come to the same conclusion. He hooked the hammock into one of the mechanical receptors built into the support strut and did a pull/twist test on it. Ana Teresa was dragging a chair over to the strut on the other side of the conference table.
The egg was still on the end of my fork.
It is difficult to explain the act of will it took to put it into my mouth. When I was having trouble, sometimes Kenneth would … I closed my eyes and fought to keep my breathing even. Behind my eyelids … He stands in his shirtsleeves, whisking a raw egg in a bowl to make a Caesar salad for me. The muscles on his forearms flex and tense. His hair falls forward out of its pomade.
“Are you all right?” Ana Teresa’s voice was soft, elevated as if she had gotten on the chair.
“Fine.” I opened my eyes and took a bite of the egg.
The yolk coated my mouth like paste. I gagged. Yanking my napkin up, I covered my mouth and breathed through my nose. The doctor jumped down from her chair and was at my side in an instant. I tried to swallow. Gagged again.
She rested her hand on my back while I spit out the tiny bite of egg, folding my napkin around it. Tears crowded my vision. I kept my gaze down so I didn’t have to see Helen and Halim watching this entire little episode.
Ana Teresa crouched next to me and took the napkin away. “Would applesauce be more manageable?”
“It might be. Yes.” My voice was hoarse with shame. “I’m sorry.”
* * *
In the evening, Eugene peeked through the conference room door. When he saw that we had the lights on, he opened the door and stopped on the threshold. His brows went up as he looked at Helen and me, in our glamorous hammocks, hanging from the ceiling.
Helen waved her fingers. “Surprise.”
I lowered the notepad I’d been scribbling on and my IV line coiled through the air with my movement. “Welcome to my parlor…”
“Halim warned me, but…” He turned to Myrtle. “You seeing what they did to my conference room?”
She smacked his rump. “Are you going to gawk or hold the door for me?”
Grinning, he stepped to the side and held the door for his wife. I had a choice between staring at them with envy, bursting into tears, and counting the mechanical receptors in the ceiling strut. There are five. Two of them were occupied with the hammock and another held my IV bag.
Eugene set a CO2 filter in the middle of the table. “I’d appreciate it if you’d stop trying to get yourselves killed.”
“You’d rather we succeeded?”
He looked stricken, which I think made me regret my joke more than he did his. Wincing, he rounded the end of the table toward my hammock. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s the first joke I’ve made. It’s okay.” I gestured at the filter on the table, trying to move him past the moment, because even with the joke, my heart was folding itself into a flat square inside. “What did you find out about the scrubbers?”
He looked like he wanted to keep apologizing, but Myrtle said, “That’s a fake.”
Helen sighed noisily and with much aggravation. “I have just lost a bet, which I do not appreciate.” She glared at me. I shrugged and she stared at the ceiling in such a comic portrait of woe that it was hard not to laugh. “Is the fake filter made from in situ resources, including tape?”
Eugene’s mouth dropped open and he turned to stare at her. “How the hell do you know that?”
“Language.” Myrtle sounded more amused than anything.
Helen pointed an accusing finger at me. “Ask Nicole about her list.”
“List.” Eugene turned back to me and his gaze dropped to the notepad I’d been scribbling on.
I tried to sit up, which is not easy in a hammock, so I settled for clearing my throat instead. “I started thinking about what I would do to mess things up here. If that had been my assignment during the war.”
“Wait until she explains why I’m the likeliest candidate for Icarus.”
I grinned at Helen because that was the easiest way to mask the fact that I kept wanting to burst into tears. “You know you like being best at things.”
Myrtle pulled out a chair and sat down. “Oh, I need to hear this.”
“Helen is Catholic, was in the cockpit of the shuttle on the way here. She trains people on driving the rovers, so could easily have checked one out to deal with the BusyBee.”
“I have a grudge against the IAC because they pulled me off the Mars mission.” She sobered and then mentioned a thing I had not. Had I thought about this next thing? Yes, but I hadn’t said it. She did. “And I had access to the Mars Expedition ships.”
Eugene’s brow contracted as he put the math together and went into a tailspin of doubt. He pulled out, quickly, and shook his head, turning to me. “Do you suspect everyone?”
“All the time. I suspect you all, too, just to be clear.”
Myrtle snorted. “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.” She nudged Eugene with her foot. “Wait until she finds out that your first name is really Ferdinand.”
I did not have time to stop my double take before realizing that she was pulling my leg. I knew that his full name was Eugene Simmons Lindholm because I’d read his file. I’d read all of their personnel records because I did, in fact, suspect everyone.
I also had absolutely no doubt that I could trust them.
Granted, that sort of thing got people killed back in my war years. On the other hand, Myrtle was now openly laughing at me. “Oh, I got you.”
“You did.” I pointed to the filter. “So … Icarus pulled out a filter, leaving the others in place. That caused the others to expire faster and, with the alarm disabled, we got CO2 buildup before regular maintenance would catch it. Which gives you a sort of time bomb and allows him to be elsewhere when it happens. Meaning that it could still be Curt or Birgit.”
Eugene nodded. “Which raises the question of why Curt pointed us to the CO2 filter in the port stairs?”
I drummed my pencil on my cast, thinking. It was easier to think, in the way that it is the morning after a fever has broken. Not that I was well, but I was at least clearer. If I had set up a booby trap, why would I give someone the cue to discover it? “Build trust? Avoid CO2 poisoning since he’s trapped in a bed?”
“All right. Here’s another piece for you.” Eugene tapped the filter. “The frame of this is made from the same packing crate as Faustino’s skis.”
My jaw literally dropped. I am not sure I have experienced that before. “So … so either Curt or Birgit used the same guy to fabricate things as Faustino or … or Faustino was Icarus, died stupidly, and has left behind a bunch of time bombs. What about the machinist?”
“Remember the South African guy in comms? Long-timer, so h
e’s had opportunity before this, and wrong type of dumbass.” Eugene rubbed his temples and I swear he had more gray there than he had last week. Sometimes that seemed to happen to Kenneth. This whole thing would …
I wiped under my eyes with my knuckles. “I’m assuming he did the same thing to the scrubbers in all the modules, but this one expired first?”
“Yeah. Let me see your list.” He held out his hand and took the notepad from me.
“I want to see.” Myrtle beckoned him to sit beside her. Eugene’s face changed as he read my list. It started curious and then went thoughtful and finished with horrified.
He looked up at me. “You are genuinely terrifying, you know that?”
“I’m going to choose to take that as a compliment, and don’t disillusion me.”
From his side, Myrtle said, “Oh, that’s a compliment.”
“Hush.”
“Do not hush me.”
Eugene ignored her and sat forward with his elbows on his knees, staring at the list. “If he’s done even a quarter of these, we are screwed.”
“Those are fine. We can find and stop them.” I plucked at the edge of my cast. “It’s the ones I haven’t thought of that can kill us.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
CHILE TAKES OVER RAILS AS STRIKES AND RIOTS SPREAD
SANTIAGO, Chile, May 20, 1963—A growing wave of demonstrations by thousands of citizens over food shortages prompted the government to place the railroads under army rule today. The government also reinforced guards at strategic points and increased the number of police patrolling the city streets with water-spray cannons.
Over the course of the next week, I was, as a Quaker friend of mine says, not my best self. I snapped at people who were trying to help me and— The less said about my behavior, I feel, the better.
While I literally hung around, Eugene worked through my list. He found that Icarus had hidden a steel bowl, filled with perchloric acid, in the guts of the dehumidifiers. It ate through the bowl, and then burned through cables. Icarus had not used my idea to foul the water supply, which is good, because it was really elegant and would have screwed us all.
But Icarus had introduced sediment into fuel tanks. Icarus had disabled smoke detectors.
They had emptied the emergency oxygen masks in all of the machine rooms. Ironically, the thing that had saved us was that I hadn’t been lucid enough to remember where they were.
Every time Eugene checked one thing off the list, I would think of another. All of them were simple ways to cause failures. It was as if I were going through the caution lists for astronaut training and suggesting everything we were trained not to do. When Eugene found something I’d suggested, it felt like a tiny moment I was being actually useful instead of a drain on resources.
On a personal note, Ana Teresa kindly consented to removing the IV after I kept a meal log for three days running. But she wouldn’t clear me to return to work. I still had to keep the food log. I hated her. I hated the log. And I hated myself. It was a party all around.
Aside from that, the week was without remaining incident. Except we still did not know where the BusyBee was, despite sending Halim out looking until the sun set. By the eighteenth, none of the likely spots were still in daylight.
So, the question then was—had we stopped Icarus, or were they biding their time?
* * *
After we turned the lights out, with only the sound of the fans, Helen shifted in her hammock. Light from the hall bled under the door and sketched her in charcoal on gray. “May I ask you a question? It is personal.”
“Sure.”
“With your food difficulties, is there anything you would find helpful?” She asked it, not as if I were broken, but as though this were a problem to be worked.
“‘Difficulties’ sounds like something my grandmother would say. Just call it anorexia. I know what it is.” I don’t know why giving it a name made me feel more in control of the conversation, but it did. I readjusted my head on the pillow, staring into the dark. It had been a decade since I’d had a relapse like this. “I would love to tell you it’s not an ongoing problem, but I am, at least, usually functional.”
“I know, or rather, I know you are functional, because I did not know that you had … anorexia.”
“Were you about to say ‘difficulties’ again?”
“Clearly not, it is simply that English is not my first language.”
I laughed and, God, that felt good. I did not for a moment believe this was a language challenge. She’d spoken English, Taiwanese, and Mandarin when we met, then added French when she fell in love with Reynard. I have been reliably informed that his Taiwanese is understandable and charmingly hilarious.
We hung in the darkness and I think she would have let me change the subject and not answer her. The problem was that my “difficulties” had endangered her last week. I should have been able to lift her. At minimum, I shouldn’t have been struggling to stand.
I rolled toward her, setting my hammock swaying. “Ask me what I had for lunch. Don’t police me. Don’t bully me…” I sighed. “What Myrtle and Ana Teresa have been doing … It’s necessary. Now. As in, right now, when I’m in what Kenneth calls—what Kenneth called—‘a state.’ But it’s not sustainable. It’ll make me dig my heels in more over time. So, just ask me what I had for lunch.”
“That won’t annoy you?”
“Oh, it will. I’ll resent the hell out of it, but it’ll remind me to think about if I’ve eaten. It also just sounds like a social noise to other people.” I was weeping again, but at least it was dark and the tears weren’t in my voice this time. Kenneth hadn’t asked it every day, saving it for times when he knew I was under pressure, when I was most likely to “forget” to eat. When I say I hadn’t been this bad in a decade, he is probably why. Was. He was probably why. “I will try not to snap at you.”
“Pfff … I’m a Taiwanese woman in the astronaut corps. Your drama does not frighten me.”
* * *
On Monday, my twelfth day as a widow, after I had finally been released from the purgatory of the makeshift sickbay, I sat in a far corner of the cafeteria and had lunch with Helen, who had been cleared to return to work last week. Her hair was still a flattened mess over her forehead from the Snoopy cap because they were letting her fly again.
I was happy for her and intensely jealous. Even jealous of the indentations along her cheeks where the microphone arms had pressed against her skin.
I sat with my back to the room, so I didn’t have to make eye contact with anyone. She drew a circle with her finger on the map of the far side of the Moon in her logbook—her log was filled with flight time. “It’s nearly noon on the far side, so the shadows are not helping, but there was nothing at the observatory.”
“I’ve run out of ideas.” I sat back in my chair, picking tiny bits off of a biscuit. We had checked the areas around all of the outposts and way stations to see if Icarus had parked the BusyBee at any of them. I say “we,” and what I mean is Halim, Helen, and Myrtle. I’d been relegated to making lists and keeping notes.
I’d finally suggested checking for the BusyBee in oddball places like the large-array telescope on the far side of the Moon, which didn’t have a permanent staff. “I’m going to make a recommendation that, in the future, we paint the BusyBees bright orange.”
“Hot pink. Then none of the men will touch them.” Helen winked. “Job security.”
“With a bow on top.” I could feel her watching me with the biscuit, so I put the next bit into my mouth.
“Maybe some lace?” She folded her logbook and tucked it back into her flight suit.
I laughed, but half of my mind was already moving on to other ways to find it. “Maybe if we think about where it could do the most damage and work backwards from there?”
Helen squinted. “But wouldn’t that still involve being close to one of the places we’ve already—”
The lights went out.
A collec
tive groan went up from the people in the cafeteria followed by a weak cheer as the emergency lights flickered on. In the light, Helen was checking her watch, just like I was.
“It bothers me that we do not know why or how this is happening.” Helen pulled out her logbook and made a small dark circle in the calendar in the front. Frowning, she counted and shook her head. “These intervals are very frustrating. Four days. Fifteen days. Eight days. Eight days.”
I frowned, because that sounded like one too many. “That’s five of them.”
She nodded and then looked up, eyes wide and concerned. “Ah. Yes. We had one on Sunday, the twelfth. You were asleep.”
The day after Kenneth’s funeral. “I see.” I looked down and pushed my tray of food away. Across the table, Helen stiffened. Grinding my teeth, I pulled it back and took a forkful of creamed spinach. “I wish someone had told me that.”
“Sorry. The issues with the habitat … It slipped my mind.”
I winced, feeling like a heel. “My fault. Sixteen minutes at random intervals?”
“I want to look at the geometry of the Earth and Moon’s relative positions during the power outages. If the Earth is always facing the same way…” She drummed her pencil on the table. “The sample size is too small to be certain that my hypothesis is correct, but if a different part of the Earth is facing us each time then we can at least reject that hypothesis.”
I stared at her with my fork halfway back to the plate. It had not occurred to me to try to math the problem, and this was why Helen was a wizard.
* * *
On Wednesday, Ana Teresa summoned me to the actual, real sickbay in the SciMod, which was finally dried out and repaired from the water damage. The entire way through the gerbil tubes from Midtown, I composed a detailed explanation of why I did not need to keep a food log and how I would feel much better if I were allowed to work. Had I needed intervention? Yes, even if I hated that I did. However, I was perfectly fine now and continuing to check up on me was a drain on resources that would be best spent on the polio patients.
The Relentless Moon Page 35
