by Ben Bova
“I screwed you?” Thrasher shouted back at him. “I took you out of MIT and made you my chief engineer—”
“The Mars job should’ve been mine!” Egan’s tortured voice echoed off the wall tiles.
Thrasher blinked with surprise.
“I’m your chief engineer, yeah. Big honor. You stick me with this stupid VR job that a trained chimpanzee could handle while you give the Mars program to an outsider.”
“Jessie Margulis is—”
“He’s an outsider! You didn’t even consider me for the job! You never even talked to me about it!”
“There was nothing to talk about! You’re not an aerospace engineer.”
“I could’ve done it. You could’ve hired Margulis and let him work under me.”
“And that’s why . . .” Thrasher stared at Egan, hardly able to believe what he was hearing.
“I needed the money,” Egan said, his voice lower, guilty. “What I told you about the mortgage wasn’t a lie. Just the part about my family handing me the money. Fat chance they’d pitch in to help me.”
“Then who the hell gave you the money?” Thrasher demanded.
16
A RIDDLE WRAPPED
IN A MYSTERY . . .
“I don’t know where the money came from,” Egan said, his first blaze of anger spent, his voice almost contrite.
But Thrasher’s anger was mounting. “Don’t bullshit me, Vince. Who the hell’s behind this?”
“I don’t know!”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand bucks just arrived in your bank account, out of the blue?”
Egan sat on the toilet and sank his head into his hands. “I got a CD in the mail. No return address. Voice recording. Promised me enough money to save my house.”
“A man’s voice?”
“Computer synthesizer.”
Damn! Thrasher thought. Chandrasekhar won’t be able to analyze that.
“So this digitized voice just offered you two hundred and fifty thousand?”
“Not the first message. It just said it could help me with my mortgage payments. Whoever sent it must’ve known I was in a hole.”
“How many discs are there?”
“Five, altogether.”
“And how were you supposed to answer them? How’d they know you’d go along with them?”
“I sent a CD to a post office box number.”
Just about untraceable, Thrasher realized. Sampson—or whoever was behind all this—could have a lackey take out a post office box and then close it when the deed was done.
Egan lifted his head. “Art, I made sure nobody would get hurt.”
“Nobody but me.”
“I was sore at you. I needed the money. Nobody would get hurt.”
Ignoring Egan’s whining, Thrasher asked, “Did you keep the CDs?”
“Yeah, but there’s no way to analyze the voice. It’s all computer synthesis.”
“I want the CDs anyway.” Then a new thought struck Thrasher. “They’ve got CDs of your voice. They’ve got enough on you to blackmail you for the rest of your life!”
Egan’s face crumpled. He sank his head into his hands again and began to sob.
It took a while for Egan to pull himself together. Thrasher watched him coldly, without an iota of sympathy for the man. I took him in, I treated him like a son, I made him chief engineer, and he got mad at me because I didn’t give him a job he couldn’t handle. He sold me out for a measly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Once Egan had washed his face and straightened his suit jacket, Thrasher said gruffly, “Come on, Carlo’s waiting outside. We’ll go back to the office.”
“I’ll resign,” Egan said, his voice hoarse.
“No, I’ll fire you. That way you get severance pay.”
As Thrasher unlocked the door, Egan said, “For what it’s worth, Art, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. So am I.”
Sitting in Thrasher’s office the next morning, Larry Franken took the thin stack of CDs from Thrasher’s extended hand.
“Vince tells me the voice is a computer synthesis,” Thrasher said.
Franken grunted. “No way to get a voice print, then.”
Almost smiling, Thrasher said, “Not unless you want to match it against other computers.”
Franken sighed heavily. “I’ll ask Chandra about it. Maybe he can figure out something.”
“Maybe,” Thrasher said bleakly.
Once Franken left the office, Linda came in, looking concerned.
“I just got an e-mail from Vince Egan. He’s resigned!”
“Damn! I told him not to do that.”
“Is this about the accident?”
“Yeah,” Thrasher said, disgusted. “Vince sold me out for two hundred and fifty thousand bucks.”
“Vince?”
“Vince.”
Linda sank into one of the chair in front of Thrasher’s desk. “He made the rocket blow up?”
“He set it up.”
“But why? Why would he—”
“It’s a long story. I’ll have to find a new chief engineer.”
“What’s Vince going to do?”
The fury suddenly boiled up inside Thrasher. “He can blow his fucking brains out, for all I care! Stupid, ungrateful son of a bitch.”
Linda stared at him. After several heartbeats she asked softly, “He has a family, doesn’t he? Three kids.”
“Yeah. I was going to fire him, so he could get severance pay, but maybe resigning is the smarter option. Looks better on his resumé.”
“You’re not going to have him arrested, are you?”
Thrasher shook his head. “What good would that do? It’d just make the whole mess public. I don’t want that.”
“No, I suppose not.”
Thrasher broke into a bitter laugh. “I’ll probably get asked for a letter of recommendation from whoever he applies to for a new job.”
“What will you do?”
“We have a standard form on file, don’t we?”
Linda said, “We just use it as a guideline. We always put in some personal stuff.”
“Well, if anybody asks for a recommendation for Vince, just send them the standard form letter, with his date of hire and date of resignation. List the positions he held. That’s all. You can sign it for me. I don’t want to see it.”
She nodded.
“Okay,” said Thrasher. He took a deep breath, then asked, “What’s on the schedule?”
Linda tapped the PDA in her hand. “You’re supposed to go down to the NASA center tomorrow. Something about a neutral buoyancy tank?”
Thrasher made a face. “Part of the training that Bill Polk’s set up for me. I get into a space suit and they dunk me in a deep water tank. Simulates the feeling of zero gravity.”
“Underwater?” She seemed alarmed.
“There’ll be a team of NASA scuba divers with me. They won’t let me drown.”
Linda smiled at him. “I wish I could see that.”
Shaking his head, Thrasher said, “I need you here, running the office.” Then a thought struck him. “Although it would be fun to see you in a bikini.”
“None of that, Mr. Thrasher.”
“We could spend the weekend down by the lake. Take in a ball game, maybe.”
“There’s a strict company rule against that kind of thing.”
“Dammit, I make the rules. I can break them.”
“I’d have to resign,” she said.
“All right, I’ll fire you. Is that what you want?”
“Not really.”
“I’ll fire you on Friday and rehire you Monday morning. How’s that?”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“I want to be with you, Linda. I want you to be with me.”
“So do I.”
“We can keep it secret, just the two of us.”
“You don’t understand, Art,” she said, her voice low. “I come from a very traditional family. We don’
t go off and spend weekends out of town. We have proper courtships, get engaged and then married. You’re not ready for that.”
“I am,” he heard himself say. “With you.”
She stared at him. “Do you mean that? Do you really mean it?”
“We could fly to Reno tonight and get married there.”
“That’s crazy!”
“No it’s not. Happens every day.”
Linda jumped up from the chair. “We can’t just run off like a pair of teenagers, Art. This is serious! You need to think about it. I need to think about it.”
She turned and hurried out of his office.
Thrasher sat there behind his desk, musing. She said she wants to be with me. I heard her say that. So I’ll have to fire her and start courting her like a proper boyfriend.
Is that what she really wants? Thrasher shook his head. What was it Churchill said about the Russians? They’re a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
That’s what Linda is.
Then he remembered, so is Vince Egan, and whoever handed him the money to blow up that rocket.
17
LAKE TAHOE
Thrasher spent most of the next day at the NASA center’s neutral buoyancy tank. Under Bill Polk’s watchful eye he clambered into a space suit and stood like a department store dummy while a pair of technicians checked all the seals and connections. Finally he pulled the bubble helmet over his head and slid the catch that locked it to the suit’s metal neck ring.
“Can you hear me?” Polk asked, speaking into the microphone clipped to the collar of his sports shirt.
Thrasher nodded. “Loud and clear. Radio works fine.”
To the technicians, Polk asked, “Backpack connected?”
One of them made a ring of his thumb and forefinger. “All okay, Colonel.”
“All right, then. Let’s do it.”
Thrasher clumped in his heavy boots to the edge of the tank. It looked like a moderate-sized swimming pool, but he knew it went several stories deep. A trio of scuba-wearing swimmers were already in the water, splashing around like playful dolphins.
“Okay, Art,” said Polk. “In you go.”
Thrasher gripped the ladder’s handrails and started down the ladder rungs. Breathe normally, he told himself. Even if the air hose fails, this suit has enough air for a couple of hours.
Still, he felt nervous as the water closed over his head and his boots reached the last rung of the ladder.
Here I go, he said to himself. Then he stepped off.
He sank slowly downward, the scuba guys close by. Looking up through the bubble helmet, he saw his air line twisting slowly above him. A mockup of the Mars One entry hatch rose to meet him as his sinking stopped. He was floating weightlessly, almost enjoying the sensation.
Until Polk said, “Okay, now open the hatch and get your butt through it.”
Thrasher nodded inside the helmet. No time for enjoying the situation, he told himself. There’s work to be done.
By the time he got back to his office it was nearly five-thirty. Linda handed him a mug of ginger beer as he cruised past her and headed toward his inner office.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“Fine. No troubles. You should’ve seen me. Junior Astronaut Thrasher, that’s me.”
He went to his desk and sat in the swivel chair. Then he noticed an envelope in the middle of the desk. Unmarked. Unsealed. He opened the flap and pulled out a pair of airline tickets.
Reno, Nevada, he saw. Friday. Tomorrow afternoon. Return Sunday evening.
“Linda!” he bellowed.
She came in, looking somewhere between demure and apprehensive.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Very carefully, Linda sat in one of the armchairs. Thrasher noted that she was wearing an ordinary workaday dress, pale green, short sleeves, knee-length skirt. And the opal ring he had given her. She looked beautiful.
When she didn’t say anything he waved the tickets at her. “Reno?”
She nodded minimally. “I thought about what you said yesterday. I slept on it.”
“And . . . and . . .” Suddenly Thrasher was out of words.
“We can get married in Reno, like you said. I still want a church wedding, for my family and all. But we don’t have to wait for that. That is, if you meant what you said.”
Thrasher wanted to leap over the desk. Instead he pushed his chair back and came around to her. Linda rose and they embraced.
“You mean you’ll marry me?”
“Yes.”
“I love you, Linda!”
“I love you too, Art. I’ve been in love with you for a long time.”
“I’ll be damned!”
She giggled. “Father Gilhooley used to tell us kids never to say that. God might take you at your word.”
“Tell Father Gilhooley to mind his own business.” And Thrasher kissed her again.
“I’m resigning from the firm,” Linda said, with a mischievous glint in her dark eyes.
“You don’t have to—”
“You can rehire me Monday, when we’re man and wife. There’s no company rule against spouses working for the company.”
He laughed and said. “You can’t quit. I’m firing you.”
Thrasher could barely concentrate on business the next day. He flitted from his office to Sid Ornsteen’s for a scheduled conference. Not even Ornsteen’s dour report on the company’s finances bothered him. Then he had a long Skype face-to-face with Jessie Margulis and Bill Polk, who were in Portales. Thrasher cruised through it like a kid on a jet ski.
At last he and Linda ‘coptered out to the airport and flew to Reno, eating lunch on the plane. Linda had already picked out a justice of the peace to marry them. Not one of Reno’s flamboyant wedding palaces, but a quiet little chapel. The JP looked like one of Santa’s elves in a brown business suit: short, round, with a long sharp beak of a nose.
Then they drove out of the city to Lake Tahoe, and a rambling old hotel by the water. It was just past sunset when they pulled into the parking lot. They could see the rugged profile of the mountains, dark against the still-bright sky.
“There’s Mars,” Thrasher pointed to a red dot shimmering above the skyline.
“That’s Antares,” said Linda. “But it’s still beautiful.”
“So are you,” he said.
As he yanked their roller bags out of the rental car’s trunk, Linda said, a little sheepishly, “Art, you know I’m not a virgin.”
He shrugged. “Neither am I.”
They laughed together and, dragging their roller bags behind them, hurried toward the hotel lobby.
18
WEDDING DAY
“Do I look all right?” Thrasher asked as he fiddled nervously with his necktie.
“Fine, Art,” said Sid Ornsteen. Like Thrasher, he was wearing a dark blue business suit, with a carefully knotted maroon tie.
They were standing in a smallish room just off the altar of the Church of the Holy Epiphany. On the other side of that carved oak door, Thrasher knew, Linda’s family was assembled to witness their wedding.
He’d known that her parents wouldn’t accept their civil marriage. Catholic for centuries, the family wanted Linda to be properly married in church, by a priest. To please his bride, Thrasher agreed.
Then Linda had told him, “You’ll have to ask my father’s permission.”
He swallowed hard, but went to her parents’ house the next evening.
What if they say no? Thrasher wondered. I’m not Catholic. They must know I’ve been married twice already and divorced each time.
But we’re already married, he told himself. Legally, we’re man and wife. Legally, yeah. But not in their eyes.
Linda’s father was sternly polite when he opened the front door and showed them into the house. Linda went straight to the overdecorated living room and sat next to her mother on the capacious sofa with its splashy flowered slipcover. She looked properly demure
in a modest pale green dress. Her mother said nothing; she just sat there, heavyset, stone-faced, in a black dress, like a grim dueña.
Mr. Ursina invited Thrasher to sit in a big wingchair and settled himself in the armchair facing him. He absently fingered his luxurious moustache as he said, “It is good to see you again, Mr. Thrasher.”
“Thanks,” said Thrasher. “It’s good to see you, too.” Nodding toward Linda’s unsmiling mother, “And you, as well, Mrs. Ursina.”
A younger woman came in from the kitchen, bearing a tray of cups and a carafe. She left it on the coffee table and returned wordlessly to the kitchen. One of Linda’s sisters, Thrasher guessed. They must all be hanging out in the kitchen.
Clearing his suddenly dry throat, Thrasher began, “Mr. Ursina, I love Linda. I want to marry—”
“I understand you have already married her,” said the father.
“That’s true.”
“But not in the eyes of God.”
“That’s true,” Thrasher repeated. “We were married two weeks ago, in Nevada.”
“So for the past two weeks you and my daughter have been living in sin.”
Thrasher caught a glimpse of Linda. She was smiling! She seemed to be saying, Don’t be scared. Everything’s going to be all right.
“I want to marry her,” Thrasher said, “in the eyes of God and the whole world.”
Her father broke into a brilliant smile. Linda’s mother smiled too, and nodded happily. Thrasher saw that there were tears in her eyes.
But Mr. Ursina’s smile disappeared. “I understand you have been divorced twice.”
“Yes, I have.”
“My daughter is not a toy you can throw away when you grow tired of her.”
Sitting up straighter, Thrasher said, “Mr. Ursina, I will never grow tired of Linda. I love her. I want to be with her forever.”
Turning to Linda, Ursina asked sternly, “Do you love this man?”
“I do, Poppa. With all my heart.”
The older man sighed. “Then we must arrange for the wedding.”
Before Thrasher could say another word, a horde of relatives burst from the kitchen, laughing and welcoming Thrasher into the family.
