The Tranquillity Alternative

by Allen Steele

  Laurell stared at her. For a moment, Cris was afraid she was going to ask her exactly what she meant. If she did, Cris knew that she might tell Laurell something that she shouldn’t know, if only because she hadn’t unburdened herself to anyone thus far. Beneath the cool, professional barrier she had erected, there was a white-hot ember of anger, kept alive by contempt for the intolerant assholes who had done this to her….

  And a need for revenge.

  But Laurell didn’t ask. “Okay,” she said, slumping back in her seat as Cris pulled into a reserved parking space in front of the building. “If that’s what you say, I’ll trust you.”

  “Good girl.” Cris glanced at her watch. Ten minutes past three. She had already caught flack from the mission director for insisting on spending her last night at home, and Parnell was probably pissed off about her missing his little barbecue at the Beach House. She didn’t need any more shit about being late for the breakfast briefing.

  Fuck it. What were they going to do … fire her?

  She unbuckled her seat and shoulder harness, then reached into the back seat for her attaché case. “You know how to get to the commissary, right? Near the VAB. Grab a bite to eat, then get somebody to show you to the VIP viewing stands. Tell ’em …”

  “Tell ’em I’m your sister?” A wan smile.

  Cris hesitated. “No,” she said flatly. “Tell ’em you’re my wife.” Then she returned the smile. “It doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

  Before either of them could start crying, Cris pulled Laurell close and embraced her. People were walking past the car, NASA employees heading for their shifts; under the bright sodium glare of the parking lot lights, they could see into the car. She hesitated, but then realized that it no longer mattered very much.

  She kissed Laurell farewell, not furtively as she had so many times before when they had been in a public place, but with all the passion she felt for the one true love of her life. Laurell’s arms moved around her shoulders as her soft lips responded with equal ardor.

  “Ten days,” Cris whispered as she broke the kiss and gently disengaged Laurell’s arms. “Ten days and I’ll be home, and I promise I’ll never leave you again.”

  Laurell reluctantly slid back into her seat. “God, I love you.”

  “I love you too, sweet. Be good.” Cris found the door handle, popped open the gullwing and shoved it upward, then crawled out of the car, pulling her attaché case and its treasonous secret behind her. “I’ll bring home a present….”

  Then she turned and began striding down the walkway to the entrance of Operations and Checkout, where a uniformed MP was waiting to hold the door open for her.

  Captain Cristine September Ryer, USAF, NASA Astronaut Corps, reporting for her final mission.

  Suit-up took only a few minutes. The blue one-piece astronaut jumpsuit over shorts and T-shirt, tucked into high-top sneakers, was preferable to the clunky old pressure suits she had worn during basic training. Cris spent several minutes stuffing her pockets with pens, notepads, penlights, food sticks, and assorted other paraphernalia—she had packed her duffel bag yesterday, and along with everyone else’s it had already been loaded aboard the ferry—then went down the corridor to the infirmary, where two doctors gave her the usual pre-launch physical which told them nothing that they didn’t already know.

  When she was done, her next step was supposed to be joining the rest of the crew for the breakfast briefing. However, Cris had been careful to forget her mission notebook, making it necessary for her to walk back down the hall to the women’s locker room. The room was empty, as she had anticipated, but she looked both ways as she reinserted her magnetic keycard into the slot of her locker and opened it.

  The 3.5-inch diskette concealed within her attaché case bore the handwritten word “Tetris” on its label. Indeed, if someone booted up the disk and typed that word into a keyboard, they would find a fully functional copy of the popular Russian arcade game. Yet the other program on the disk, not listed in the directory, was a game whose stakes were much higher.

  For a moment Captain Ryer hesitated. She could easily walk into the bathroom, snap the diskette in half, and shove the remains into the trash can; no one would be the wiser and she would no longer be taking this terrible risk. But all she had to do was remember her anger and the reasons for it, and it was all settled. She zipped the diskette into her left thigh cargo pocket and checked to make sure that it didn’t bulge when she flexed her leg. Then she took a deep breath, pulled her notebook out of the locker, and slammed the metal door shut.

  A uniformed NASA security guard checked her ID badge against his list, then saluted and held open the door of the O&C’s astronaut mess. The room was long and brightly lit by fluorescent ceiling fixtures, sterile except for dozens of mission emblems painted on the beige walls. They ran the course of American manned space exploration, some dating back to the first manned orbital flights of the early fifties: the Atlas-A, B, and C test programs, the Space Station One construction missions, the various Eagle flights of Project Luna, all the way up to Project Ares. Shortly after the completion of the Mars program, though, individual patches were no longer designed for each major mission; someone in the NASA bureaucracy, in his infinite wisdom, had decreed that this custom was a quaint holdover from the old USSF days and that space had become too routine for such trivial matters as honoring crews with their own mission insignia. And it cost too much, besides.

  So the practice had declined. Not long afterward, so too had the space program.

  As expected, most of her crewmates had already arrived and were seated together at a long dining table, eating the traditional pre-launch breakfast of steak and eggs. Sitting next to them were the pilot and co-pilot of the Constellation, two anonymous ferry drivers who barely looked up as Cris put her notebook down at an empty place on the table between them and Gene Parnell. It seemed to her that their conversation faltered a bit when she made her entrance, but that was to be expected; Parnell was an old geezer who had been dragged out of semiretirement for one last hurrah, and the two rocket apes would probably drag their knuckles all the way to the launch pad.

  Damn. She missed Laurell already….

  Cris excused herself and went up to the buffet table, where she passed up the high-cholesterol junk in favor of a cinnamon bagel and a fruit cocktail. There were butterflies in her stomach; her hand shook slightly as she poured a glass of tomato juice. She heard coarse laughter behind her, but didn’t care to know what it was about. She tried to tell herself that it was just another attack of launch nerves, but she could feel the diskette in her jumpsuit pocket rubbing against her leg, and she suddenly imagined that Parnell had Superman’s X-ray vision and could see right through the nylon. If that were so, the X-rays would scrub the disk’s hidden program, and that would certainly take care of things, wouldn’t it … ?

  Cut it out, she told herself. Get a grip. She willed her hands to be steady and told the butterflies to get a job, and when she returned to the table she felt a little better.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Cris said as she sat down. “Got stuck in the morning rush.”

  One of the ferry pilots—his name badge read CAPT. P.A. KINGSOLVER—grunted noncommittally as he cut into his medium-rare steak. His co-pilot, LT. COMDR. H. M. TROMBLY, cast her a sullen look over his coffee mug. Neither of them said anything, but they didn’t have to; it wasn’t difficult to tell that they’d heard a bit about her personal life through the Cape grapevine. Although there had been no outright harassment, she knew that there were quite a few guys in the astronaut corps who didn’t much care for the idea of flying with a dyke.

  Don’t worry, she said silently as she avoided their eyes. You won’t have to much longer….

  Parnell gave her a quick smile. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You’re not the only one running late. One of our passengers hasn’t shown up yet either.”

  “Hmm? Who’s that?” Gene wasn’t bad. Perhaps he was over the hill for th
is kind of thing and had been assigned to this mission as a media overture, but they had worked well together during training and she reluctantly had come to like him, thinking of him in a patriarchal sort of way. If he had heard the buzz around the Cape about the Internal Affairs Office investigation, he hadn’t said anything about it to her.

  “Dooley.” Parnell checked his watch. “He’s staying at a motel on Satellite Beach, I think … must have gotten tied up in traffic coming in.”

  “Yeah, I hear you,” Jay Lewitt said. “Route 3 was murder.” Conestoga’s flight engineer pushed back his plate as he rubbed a napkin against his lean, brown face. He lived in Cocoa Beach off Route A1A, a few miles south of the space center. “Lisa floored the pedal, but she still couldn’t get us through the mess.”

  “Is Elizabeth coming to the launch?” Cris asked.

  “Yeah, she is.” Jay and Lisa had a fifteen-year-old daughter. “It took a little bit of begging, but her principal finally let her out of classes to see her daddy go to the Moon.”

  “Gee,” Parnell muttered, shaking his head. “Used to be that a kid whose dad was an astronaut didn’t need permission to skip school.”

  Jay shrugged as he picked up his coffee mug. “Times have changed, Commander. I think her bus driver gets more respect.” He took a sip as he added, “Better job security, that’s for damn sure.”

  “I guess. Well, if our young hacker is running late, it gives us a chance to eat, at least.” Parnell nodded toward Ray Harvey, the mission director. He was seated at the far end of the table, tapping impatiently at his leather folder as he entertained questions from the two other civilian passengers. “Speaking of food, I’m sorry you missed my barbecue, Cris. We had a good time … wish you could have been there.”

  I bet you do, she thought to herself as she spread marmalade on her bagel. What’s a good party without the token queer?

  She reflected, not for the first time, that there were probably as many closet homosexuals working at NASA as there were African-Americans with astronaut wings, but at least Jay was protected by the Civil Rights Act … and no one would ever call him a nigger to his face. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Commander,” she said diplomatically, “but I had some family matters to take care of before I left.”

  Trombly coughed loudly as he hid a smile behind his hand. “I thought you were divorced, Captain Ryer,” Kingsolver said, keeping a straight face. “You mean you’ve found someone else?”

  Cris ignored him; any reply she might make would only add fuel to the fire. She was gratified to see both Parnell and Lewitt pretending to study their notebooks. Farther down the table, however, Ray Harvey was openly glaring at her. He hadn’t wanted to keep her on this mission. Given the chance, he would have yanked Cris two months ago, when the IAO presented their report to NASA’s Astronaut Office. By then, however, there was little he could do about it; she had already been more than halfway through training for this mission and there was no one else qualified to take her place. The rest of the astronaut corps rated to pilot Conestoga had either been reassigned to other jobs or had resigned from the agency; a couple had even taken jobs in Germany for Koenig Selenen.

  For this last NASA mission to Tranquillity Base, she and Parnell were the only NASA lunar astronauts available on short notice. Ray Harvey knew that. He was stuck with an old fart and a dyke, and at least one of them disturbed his shit.

  Suddenly removing her from the mission, though, would have raised too many public-relations questions from the man and woman sitting next to him. Noticing the silent exchange, Berkley Rhodes and Alex Bromleigh glanced Cris’s way. She smiled for their benefit; Rhodes beamed back in response and Bromleigh gave her a short, professional nod.

  Cris kept smiling as she returned her attention to her breakfast. Well, okay, so he’s got five minority members on this mission. An old guy, a black, a lesbian, and two TV reporters. How politically correct …

  “Our media darling,” Lewitt murmured out of the corner of his mouth, smiling in Rhodes’s direction before he glanced back at Parnell. “Y’know, I think she actually put on makeup for this.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.” Parnell pulled a pair of bifocals out of his breast pocket as he studied his notebook. “Cronkite would have had a duck if he’d ever met her …”

  “Now, don’t you start with the stories again.”

  “It was back in sixty-four,” Parnell began loftily as he turned a page, “and I was aboard the Wheel when Walter—Ol’ Walt, we used to call him—came up to interview us for …”

  He stopped as the door swung open and a plump young man strode into the mess hall. “Ah, and I see the prodigal son has finally arrived.”

  Cris looked up as Paul Dooley, dressed in astronaut blues and carrying a laptop computer in his right hand, walked toward the table. She hadn’t seen very much of Dooley at the Cape—he had spent most of his training period at Koenig Selenen’s facility in Bonn—but she noticed that he seemed to have lost a little weight.

  Well, everyone did … but Dooley still came off as the stereotypical computer geek, despite his attempts to communicate an air of cyberpunk raffishness. He goggled at everyone from behind the round lenses of his wire-rim glasses as he stalked toward the last remaining place at the table.

  “Okay, okay, so I’m late,” he said impatiently. He knocked over a salt shaker with his computer case as he placed it on the table, and didn’t bother to set it upright; so much for good luck, Cris thought. “Fucking traffic on the road … can’t believe this shit …”

  “Good morning, Mr. Dooley,” Ray Harvey called out. “How nice of you to join us.”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Ray.” Dooley nervously tossed back his thin black hair with his hand. “Look, I’m really fucking sorry for getting here so late, but … I dunno, where can I get some coffee?”

  Parnell tipped down his bifocals, stared at Dooley, and silently pointed toward the buffet table. Bromleigh, in his dual role as ATS cameraman and network news producer, pulled an industrial Sony camcorder from beneath his seat and stood up, apparently getting ready to grab a shot of Conestoga’s crew eating breakfast together before their historic mission. Berkley Rhodes automatically primped for the camera as Dooley, apparently miffed that no one was catering to him, shuffled over to the buffet table in search of caffeine juice. The two ferry jockeys continued to watch Cris as if she’d come from another galaxy with the intent of exterminating all male life-forms on planet Earth.

  “Having fun?” Parnell whispered to her.

  “Loads,” she replied just as quietly.

  She was mildly surprised when he reached out to pat her arm. “Don’t worry about it,” he murmured. “A short trip up, a short trip back … it’ll be a milk run.” He removed his hand and picked up his coffee mug. “Might as well enjoy it. After this, you’ll need to learn German to go to the Moon again.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. And maybe the Germans won’t throw me out for what I do in my private life….

  Ray Harvey cleared his throat and stood up. Conversation at the table died as he opened his notebook. “Gentlemen, ladies … if I can have your attention, we’ll start the briefing. Liftoff is currently scheduled for 0730 hours….”

  Transcript: The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite; broadcast September 30, 1963

  Cronkite: Good evening. If this doesn’t look like my usual desk in New York … well, it isn’t. Tonight, we’re transmitting live from Space Station One, in orbit 1,075 miles above Earth, which was officially completed two days ago.

  If we pan our television camera slightly to my left, you can see out a porthole window in the station’s circular rim … and, yes, there it is, the planet Earth, over a thousand miles away. If you look carefully, you can make out the Florida coastline beneath a cloud formation. We won’t be able to look at it for very long, because the space station is rotating on its axis and soon this window will no longer be pointing toward Earth, but it’s a magnificent sight for you folks bac
k home.

  With me now, in our temporary CBS studio in the station’s mess compartment, is General Chet Aldridge, the United States Space Force commander in charge of Space Station One. General Aldridge, how does it feel to have the Wheel finally operational?

  Aldridge: It feels great, Walter. It’s been seven years since this project was begun and four years since the first sections were launched from Cape Canaveral, so we’re mighty glad to have the job done at last, and mighty proud of the men who built Space Station One.

  Cronkite: When President Nixon made his televised address to the nation yesterday, he said that the purposes of the Wheel were not entirely military in nature. As a military officer yourself, can you comment on that?

  Aldridge: It’s not for me to dispute the words of my Commander In Chief, Walter, and so I’m not going to get into a fight with the President …

  Cronkite (chuckling): No, sir, I’m not asking you to do that …

  Aldridge: … but the President is quite correct. Although Space Station One has the primary military mission of maintaining surveillance over … uh, countries who may pose a threat to the security of the United States, our goals are also scientific in nature. Now that the Wheel has been completed, our next major task will be the construction of the three lunar spaceships which will be sent to the Moon by the end of this decade. That’s our next goal, sending men to the Moon, and we plan to accomplish it just as well as we did with the building of this station.

  Cronkite: You mentioned surveillance, General. Can you tell me exactly what you’re looking for down there?

  Aldridge: I’m sorry, Walter, but that’s classified information, and I’m also sorry that I can’t show you the Earth Observation Center. However, I can tell you that, even as we speak, Space Station One is passing above Cuba. If Premier Castro happens to be watching this program right now, this should give him something to think about.

  Cronkite: On the lighter side of things, the network has received some interesting mail from our viewers over the past few days, since we announced that we would be doing a live telecast from the Wheel. One letter in particular comes from a young man, Michael Walsh of Baltimore, Maryland. Mike tells that he’s a fan of a science fiction TV show on one of our competing networks, and he says that everything he has seen on that program looks just like the pictures that the Space Force has sent from the Wheel. To quote him, General, he says, “How do I know this isn’t just a fake?”