Ronnie
Saturday, seven in the morning, and the screen in front of me says Incoming Family Call in a friendly blue box.
Nobody booked a family call. I'd know, because I'd have been combed.
The cabin's still a mess from three o'clock. Tess's cable hangs out of the panel by my knee like a vein somebody forgot to put back. Boyd's strapped in with a fat lip and a wet wipe pressed to it, looking at the ceiling, being sorry at it. Hazel is flattening her graph paper on her knee with the side of her hand, over and over, where his boot went. Tess is zipped in her bag with her arms folded and the dead camera arm folded beside her. Otis is asleep. Otis can sleep through anything except a noise he doesn't know.
An hour ago I asked Della what the Moment was.
"Not from me," she said, in my left ear. "From him. Give me an hour."
Then she went, and she hasn't been back, and I've been sitting here with the pump ticking and a question in my mouth like a sweet I can't finish.
The blue box chimes again.
Otis comes up out of his bag like a diver surfacing. "Is it Ruby? Is that Ruby?"
"I don't think so, buddy."
"Who calls at seven? Nobody good calls at seven."
I press accept.
It's a car. The inside of a car, from the dashboard, with the phone stuck up by the mirror and the picture tilted a few degrees, like a painting in a cheap motel. In the driver's seat there's a man in a quarter-zip with wet hair combed flat. Behind him, through the side window, a car park, a lamp still on in the daylight, and the corner of a furniture shop.
I know the voice before he uses it, from four days of it every hour in both ears. I've never seen the face, and it's younger than the voice. It's grey under the eyes, and the mouth is trying to remember a smile it's done before.
Something moves at the edge of the picture, on the passenger side. A hand comes in, sets the phone straight on its mount, and goes out again. Short nails, and a smudge of old biro on the wrist.
I've seen her once, in a booth, in the rain. Now I've seen her hand.
"Tell him," says Della. Not in my left ear. Out of the little speaker under the screen, with the whole car around her. "He's the one sitting on it."
"Hi," says Royce. "Commander. Hi. Is this just you? Is this a private, can everybody—"
And here's my bit, the one thing I do right today. I know rooms. I know when a man wants a small room, because a small room is where you get away with things.
"Hang on, Royce."
There's a switch under the screen, a little speaker with a picture of a loudspeaker on it. I flip it, and the car comes out into the cabin, the engine idling. A seat belt chime somewhere, pinging and pinging, because nobody's done it up.
"Everybody," I say. "We've got a call."
"Whoa, whoa," says Royce, to all of us now. "This was supposed to be, Della, this was a one-to-one—"
"It's supposed to be them," says Della, out of shot.
They come. Hazel first, because she was already awake and already sitting up straight, with the graph paper held against her chest. Otis, with his sleeping bag still round his knees, so he floats over like a kid in a sack race. Tess unzips and comes last and stops a little way back, against the wall, arms folded. Boyd doesn't unclip. He turns his head on the headrest and looks at the screen over the wet wipe.
Royce looks at the five of us looking at him, and I watch it happen. He finds the bounce. He puts it on the front of his voice like a man putting on a tie in a lift.
"Folks. Good morning. First, I want to say, on behalf of everybody at Halyard, what a journey this has—"
I do him.
I don't decide to. It's seven in the morning and I've been up since the eels, and it just comes. "Here's the thing, Royce," I say, with the bounce, with the tray hands, with the little hitch on the front. "Stay with me. What if the guy in the car is the story?"
Otis laughs. One bark, out before he can stop it. Tess doesn't. Boyd takes the wet wipe off his lip.
Royce stops.
He looks at me through the screen for a while. He's got a face like a kid who's been doing an impression of the teacher and turned round and found the teacher. Then he looks down at his own hands on the wheel. And when he talks again, the bounce is gone. It hasn't dropped. It's gone, like a coat off a hook.
"In the summer," says Royce, "I had an idea."
That's the voice. I heard it once, on Thursday, at one in the morning, on the word confident, a guy in a stairwell. This time he doesn't scramble back up.
"It was called the Moment," he says. "Day two. Hour twenty-six. That was the slot. An alarm goes off in the cabin. A light, a noise. Big red light, a horn. Mack says, I've got her. He takes the stick. Ninety seconds. Live. On the stream. Ten million people watch Mack Tolliver fly a ship to safety with his own two hands."
"Was there anything to fly it to safety from?" says Hazel.
"No. That's the point. The autopilot's flying the whole time. It never touches anything. He's just—"
"Waggling," says Boyd.
Royce shuts his eyes.
"With the buyer in the next seat," says Boyd. Not loud. He's not doing Texas. He's not doing Connecticut either. He's doing a man with a fat lip. "You staged an emergency to sell me my own ship."
"To sell you a story. You don't buy companies, Boyd. Nobody buys a company. You buy—" Royce hears himself. I hear him hear himself. It goes in like a splinter. "Yeah. Yes. To sell you the ship."
"Lord," says Otis, quietly, to his sleeping bag.
"Mack said yes," says Royce. "He'd do my ninety seconds if he got ten minutes after, his own, from the Moon. I thought he wanted to do a speech. I never asked him what was in it."
"And then Mack died," says Royce. "Sunday. And Monday morning I was in my office cancelling a cereal shoot with a cartoon tiger, and I thought, there's no Mack, there's no Moment. I said pull it. All of it. I kept the wave. Thirty seconds, a guy waving at the stream. Della saw the slide. I told her it was a wave. It was a wave."
"And at four o'clock on Wednesday," says Della, out of shot.
"At four o'clock on Wednesday," says Royce.
He doesn't finish it. Everybody in this cabin was here at four o'clock on Wednesday. Six seconds, they said. Nineteen.
"To the minute," says Della.
"To the minute," says Royce.
Tess unfolds her arms. "You've known since Wednesday."
"I've known since Wednesday."
"Three days," says Otis. He says it to Hazel, as if he's checking a sum. "That's three days."
"If I say it's the Moment," says Royce, "it's fraud. A faked emergency on a licensed flight. They ground the company that afternoon. Boyd walks. Halyard's dead, four countries' money is dead, and I'm, I'm the guy again. I'm the guy from the podcast. So I said nothing. And every hour I went out and did the update." He breathes. "Journey. I said journey."
"You said it a lot," I say.
"I know."
I listen to him, because that's what I've got. Not the words. The thing under them.
A pitch has a floor in it. You stand on the floor and you bounce. This one's all floor. It's a man in a car in a car park with his seat belt chime going.
"He means it," I say. To the cabin. To Della.
"I know he means it," says Della. "That's what's wrong with him."
Hazel has moved. She's gone back to her porthole without anybody seeing her go, a thing she can do, and she's got one hand on the rail and the Moon behind her, the grey edge of it, a cliff with no top.
"Mr Ambler," says Hazel. "If you built an alarm and a noise, why did the ship move?"
Nobody says anything. The seat belt chime pings.
"I don't know," says Royce.
He says it so plainly I believe it before I've decided to.
"I don't build things. I've never built a thing in my life. I have an idea and I pay somebody." He swallows. "Castellane's people built it. Your simulation contractor, Boyd. They were already inside our software for the due diligence. I paid them. They built it, we ran it. And they swore it was pulled."
Boyd goes very still.
It's not quiet. It's a big man going still because somebody's said his name in another room.
He reaches into his sleeve. Out comes the little black radio, the size of a deck of cards. He doesn't hide it any more. He clicks it on, and the red light comes up on top, and he holds it up in front of his mouth like a hairbrush he's about to sing into.
"Ailsa. Boyd."
A hiss. A crackle. Then, tinny and flat and very far away, out of something no bigger than a biscuit: "Mr Castellane."
"Ambler says your shop built his Moment. His alarm. His day two."
A pause. A small crunch. A mint, I'd bet money.
"Right. So," says Ailsa. "We built a block for Mr Ambler in the summer, under contract. We delivered it clean, in September. I've got the file." Another crunch. "Anything that happened to it after September happened in his building, not mine."
"They swore it was pulled," says Royce, to the screen, to the radio, to anybody.
"I've the file," says Ailsa, flat as a ruler. "It's clean. That's all I'll say on a radio, Mr Castellane."
Boyd clicks the radio off.
I listen back to her in my head. I do that, I run it again like a tape. Flat and quick, and not a wobble in it anywhere.
"Scottish is hard," I say. "She's either scared or she's Scottish."
"She's both," says Boyd. "She's always both." He puts the radio back in his sleeve. He looks at the screen, at Royce, a long look, the look you give a menu in a restaurant you're about to walk out of. "I had fourteen people go through your company for six months, Ambler. Fourteen. I did due diligence on your coffee machine."
"Boyd. Listen. The sale—"
"Don't," says Boyd.
That's all. It's the smallest word I've ever heard him say.
Royce looks at his hands again. Then at the five of us, one by one, like he's trying to learn our faces off a screen in a car. When he gets to me he stops.
"I'm sorry," he says. "Commander. I'm sorry."
I don't know what to do with it. Nobody's ever said sorry to me as Mack before, and it doesn't fit him, and it doesn't fit me either.
The hand comes back in from the edge of the picture. It doesn't straighten the phone this time. It reaches past it, for the screen of the phone, and the car goes, and the blue box comes back, Call Ended, in the same friendly letters as Practice.
Nobody moves for a while.
The pump ticks. The cable hangs out of the panel. Otis has got his sleeping bag bunched up in both fists like a rope in a gale.
"I'm going to say something," says Otis, finally, "and I don't want anybody to answer it." He looks at Boyd. "You bought a company off a man who does that?"
"I haven't bought it yet," says Boyd.
"Okay," says Otis. "Okay. Good."
Tess goes back to her bag. She doesn't zip it. She sits in it, with her knees up, looking at the hole in the panel where her cable used to go, and I can see her doing a sum of her own and not liking the answer.
Hazel takes her pencil from behind her ear. She writes something in the column on her graph paper, small, the way she writes everything, and puts the pencil back.
I key the channel.
"You there?"
A beat. The car door, a thud. Wind. Her feet on tarmac. "I'm here."
"You okay?"
"No."
"Me neither."
Her breathing. The car park. A truck going by on the highway, somewhere on the other side of a fence. Then, low, all Atlanta:
"Son of a bitch."
And then she doesn't say anything.
Here's where I'd do a bit. This is the exact spot. A silence on a line is a stage with nobody on it, and I've never in my life left a stage empty. I've got Stormy Norm right there on the tip of my tongue. Cloudy, with a chance of Royce. I've got Johnny Jackpot. I've got the golf man.
I don't do any of them.
I hold the edge of the panel, not to do anything, just to hold something. I look at the Moon, filling the window, grey and close and not interested. I listen to her breathe in a car park in Titusville, and she listens to me breathe two hundred and thirty thousand miles away, give or take, a breath behind. It goes on for a minute, I'd guess. I don't count it. It's the first time in my life I haven't counted.
"You didn't talk," says Della.
"No."
"Why not?"
"You were busy."
A sound. Not the laugh through the nose. Something smaller.
"Somebody's lying," says Della. "An alarm doesn't move a ship. Your teacher's right. Either she's lying or he still is." She stops. "I'm going to find out which. Today. Before the burn."
"Della."
"What."
"Eat something first."
"Don't do me."
"I'm not doing you. That's me."
Another little nothing on the line. Then she says, "Go to sleep, Commander," at seven in the morning, and it's the first joke she's ever made on purpose.
A car door slams. Then the line clicks, and there's nobody on it.
Across the cabin, at the left porthole, Hazel has her graph paper flat against the wall with one hand. I can see the column from here. I can't read it. It's three short lines, in pencil, and at the bottom of them she's drawn a question mark, and she's gone over it twice.