Ronnie
Two days out, Sunday night, and there are peas on my plate.
Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to understand the peas. Mack Tolliver hated peas. It's in every profile ever written about the man. Tolliver, who famously hates peas. Tolliver, who once sent back a pot pie at a state dinner. There's a cartoon of him on the Moon refusing a pea. And here I am at the quarantine dinner at Halyard's crew quarters at the Cape, which is a long beige room with a pool table nobody uses and a painting of a dolphin that looks like it's been told some bad news, and the kitchen has given the commander peas. A big spoon of them. Bright green. Looking up at me.
I could leave them. A normal man would leave them. But Tess has her camera up, she's had it up since the soup, and Mack Tolliver, on camera, on the night before the night before, wouldn't make a fuss. He'd be a good sport. He'd suffer for his country.
So I suffer for my country. I eat a pea. I do the face. Not a big face, a small face, the face of a brave man swallowing something he's already forgiven. I eat another one. Boyd Castellane, across the table, puts his fork down to watch.
"Okay chat," says Tess, to the phone on its little stick, "so the commander is eating the peas. I don't know what's happening. This is history."
"Darlin', that man's a hero," says Boyd, and he doesn't take his eyes off me.
They've met him twice in person, and once on a video call. Della says he kept them at arm's length, like he was saving himself for the Moon, and that's the only reason I'm alive at this table.
There are four of them, and I've had two days to learn them, and I've learned them like you learn a birthday party: who's going to cry, who's going to heckle, who's going to hand you the knife.
Otis is going to cry. Otis is a school-bus mechanic from Ocala who won his seat in a contest off the back of a cereal box, and he prayed at the salad bar, out loud, for about a minute, with a plate of lettuce in his hands. Now he's telling Hazel about his daughter. "Ruby's nine. I'm bringing her a picture of the Earth coming up over the Moon. She's got a whole wall for it. She measured the wall."
Hazel is going to hand me the knife. Hazel's seventy-four and she taught maths to fifteen-year-olds for forty-one years, and she sits very straight and talks in whole sentences, like every sentence is going to be marked. "My husband mapped the far side of the Moon for thirty years from photographs," she said, at the soup. "He never saw it. I am going to look at it for him."
Tess is going to film everything, including this. Tess is twenty-six and talks so fast it's like she's being chased. "Ten million viewers by splashdown, chat. That's the goal. I believe in us."
And Boyd's the heckler. Boyd's a big silver oilman in a flight jacket with patches on it, and he talks Texas, and he's buying the whole company when we land. "A man ought to drive what he buys," he said, at the bread. He's said it twice since.
"Commander," says Boyd now, nice as anything. "I've been meaning to ask you. What was your call sign at Pax River?"
And here's the bit. Here's where you find out if you can do the job, because I don't know what Pax River is. It sounds like a resort. It sounds like a place you'd go on a pontoon. I put down my fork and I give him the grin, the slow one, the one that starts before the joke.
"Boyd," I say, in the voice, "they called me a lot of things at Pax River, and most of them I can't say in front of Mrs Whitcomb."
Otis laughs. Tess laughs too loud, which I'm learning is how she laughs. Hazel says, "Thank you, Mr Tolliver. That is a very full answer to a short question," and makes a small mark on her napkin with the pencil.
Boyd smiles and picks up his fork. His eyes stay on me. They stay on me through the chicken.
Then Hazel passes me the bread. She holds the basket out across the table with both hands, and she says, mildly, like she's asking about the weather, "Lionel kept your letter, Mr Tolliver. From the late nineties. About the craters. Do you remember what you told him?"
The late nineties. I was in detention for doing the vice principal over the loudspeaker.
"Hazel," I say, warm, Mack, the hand on the heart, "I told him what I tell everybody. Keep looking up."
She smiles at me. It's a lovely smile. It's the smile of a woman who has heard ten thousand teenagers explain why the dog ate it.
"Have some bread," says Hazel.
I have some bread. I eat the last pea. Boyd watches it go down.
On Monday morning they put me in a little briefing room with a whiteboard and Sully Kessel.
I've heard that voice my whole life. On launches, on the radio in my mother's car with the windows down: Flight. In person he's bigger than the voice, which nobody ever is. He sits at the end of the table with his arms folded and he doesn't say hello.
"You're going to tell the Recovery story," he says. "Somebody will ask. Somebody always asks. You'll tell it the way Mack told it, word for word, or you'll tell nothing."
"I know the Recovery story. Everybody knows the Recovery story. I've told it at the Rotary."
"You've told your version at the Rotary. Tell it."
So I tell it. I tell it as I've told it for eleven years: the test capsule sixteen years ago, the valve, the pressure going on Rafe Aldana's side, Mack flying her home by hand. I give it everything. I give it the catch in the throat. I get to the end and Sully looks at me like I've tracked something in on my shoe.
"No," he says. "Again. Listen first."
And then he does it. Not the voice. Sully doesn't do voices. He does the words, in his own gravel, flat as a road, but every word is Mack's and every pause is Mack's, and they're not where I put them.
"Sixteen years ago I was riding a test capsule home with the best man I ever flew with. Rafe Aldana." Pause. Two beats. Not three. "Forty miles up, a valve about the size of my thumb decided it was done for the day." He stops. "He laughed there. Every time. Not a big one. You laugh there." He goes on. "We lost pressure on Rafe's side. I had about ninety seconds to choose between flying the ship and holding his hand." Pause. "I flew the ship. I brought her home." Pause. "I've been bringing her home every day since."
He unfolds his arms. "Again."
Mack's people even rehearse the laughs. Sixteen years of a man telling the worst day of his life at dinners and somebody, somewhere, wrote down where the laugh goes.
I tell it again. I miss the pause after Rafe's name, and I laugh too big at the valve, and Sully shakes his head once.
"Again."
The third time I don't do it. I mean I don't do Mack. I just put my voice where Sully's voice went. Two beats after Rafe. The small laugh, like a cough, at the thumb. Ninety seconds. I flew the ship. And when I get to the end there's nothing in the room but the air conditioning.
Sully looks at me for a long time. Then he takes his reading glasses off the cord and puts them in his shirt pocket.
"That'll do," he says. "I signed your paper because I was ordered to. I put that in writing too. If it was up to me you'd be at home with your balloons."
"I don't do balloons. I'm very clear on the website. No balloons."
He stands. The chair complains. "Don't make me sorry," says Sully, and goes.
That night there's an envelope on my bed in the crew quarters. Brown, padded, with Bette Tolliver's handwriting on the front, which I know from a birthday card in a museum. Inside is a watch.
His watch. Steel, heavy, scratched on the face, the strap gone soft and dark from forty years of his wrist. I hold it for a while. Then I call Della.
"It came," I tell her.
In my ear she sounds like she's driving, which she always sounds like. "Good. Wear it. Left wrist. He wore it on the left in every photograph since the nineties."
"It's heavy."
"Then you'll remember it's there." The indicator ticks. "Bette says the chirp's been off for years. It used to beep every hour on the hour and he turned it off because it drove her up the wall. He had a twin made for Rafe Aldana. It went to Rafe's family."
I put it on. Left wrist. It's warm from my hand. I hold my arm out and look at it and it looks right, it looks exactly right, and I don't like how much I like that.
"Lark," says Della. "Are you there?"
"I'm here."
"Say something, you're making me nervous. You're never quiet."
"You told me to be quiet. You made me practise."
"Not with me," she says, and hangs up, and calls straight back, because she forgot to tell me about the gloves.
Launch day. Tuesday. Two o'clock in the afternoon, they tell me, like it's a dentist appointment.
The suit room smells of talc and somebody's coffee. Three technicians put me into the suit like they're dressing a bishop, and nobody says anything to me except "arm" and "other arm," and the gloves are the big ones, Mack's size, with a pad of foam stuffed into each fingertip so my hands fill them out. Della arranged the foam. I flex my fingers and they feel like somebody else's, which, okay, is the job.
Sully walks me down the corridor to the van. He's in a polo shirt with the Halyard rope on it, and he walks on my right, half a step ahead, like a cop. He doesn't look at me. At the end of the corridor there are two big doors, and behind the doors I can hear it already, like the sea.
"Don't trip, clown," says Sully, and the doors open.
The noise.
It's not a crowd, it's a weather system. There's a chain-link fence about fifty yards off and behind the fence there are more people than I've ever seen in one place, and every one of them has a phone up, so the whole crowd is a wall of little lit rectangles, ten thousand of them, all pointing at me. They're screaming his name. Not Mack. Tolliver. Tolliver, Tolliver, Tolliver, like a drum. A woman is crying. A man in a sun visor, right at the front, is shouting with his hands round his mouth, "Do the voice! Mack! Do the voice!"
And in my left ear, close, under all of it, like she's standing inside my helmet:
"Wave."
It's the first time I've heard her in there. It's like she's in my head.
"Wave," says Della. "Smile. Don't trip."
So I do the wave.
You know the wave. Everybody knows the wave. It's in the posters and the cereal ads and the mural on the side of the Countdown. The right hand comes up slow, open, past the shoulder, and it doesn't go side to side, it just stops up there for a second, high, like he's checking the wind, and then it comes down. I've done it at four hundred birthday parties. I've done it at a car wash. I've never done it for this. The crowd sees it and the noise goes up again, higher than I thought it could, and the man in the sun visor stops shouting for the voice and just yells, with nothing in it, the way you yell at fireworks.
"You're doing great," says Della, in my left ear. "You're doing so great. I hate it."
I get in the van without tripping. I want that on the record.
The tower has a lift. Nobody tells you that. You think the astronauts climb, like it's a ladder to a treehouse, but it's a lift, a metal cage that rattles, and it goes up thirty storeys past the side of the rocket, which is white and frosted and breathing, it's actually breathing, little sighs of white off its sides like a horse in winter. I have never been this close to one, and the closer I get, the less it looks like a rocket and the more it looks like a building that's decided to leave.
The hatch is round. The cabin's small, the size of two minivans welded nose to nose, and full of fans, and the seat at the end by the big window is mine. They strap me in. The joystick is by my right hand, a grip like an arcade machine. I keep my hands off it. Touch nothing. Say nothing. Sit.
They bring in the others. Boyd on my right, then Tess, then Hazel, then Otis by the hatch. Otis is praying again, quietly, which for Otis is not that quietly. Hazel has a pencil behind her ear. Tess has the camera on an arm in front of her face with a little red light on it, and she whispers, "Okay, chat, we're in," and I think, we certainly are.
The hatch shuts. It makes a sound like a bank vault. Then it's just the fans, and five people breathing, and the voices in our helmets.
Sully, on the loop, in both ears, a long way off and right there: "Constance, Flight. Comm check."
I say, in the voice, as few words as I can, "Flight, Constance. Loud and clear." It's the first thing I've said all day. My mouth is so dry it clicks.
Then there's nothing to do. An hour of it, on my back with my knees up, looking at a window full of blue sky while men I'll never meet read numbers to each other in both my ears. And because I'm me, I start thinking out loud, on the only channel where that's allowed.
"You there?"
"Where would I go." Della. Left ear.
"I've been thinking."
"Don't."
"On Friday, when you had me on the laptop, Royce put his head round the door and said, and the fallback? What's the fallback?"
And she doesn't answer straight away. Somewhere in a furniture shop in Titusville she's sitting in a glass room, and I can hear her not answering. It goes on for a second. Then two.
"There isn't one," says Della.
Three words. Flat. Short. I know that voice. I heard it in the booth at the Countdown, when I asked why they couldn't just push it back to the spring. Can't. My problem.
"Okay," I say.
"T minus two minutes," says somebody on the loop, a calm man, the announcer.
"Okay, okay," I say, to nobody, to Della, to the window.
Otis says, "Lord," very clearly, about a foot behind my head.
Boyd's hand is on his knee. Hazel takes the pencil from behind her ear, looks at it, and puts it back. Tess's red light is on.
And underneath us, a long way down, something wakes up. It doesn't start like an engine. It starts like the ground clearing its throat, and then it keeps going, it keeps going up through the seat and my back and my teeth, and the window shakes, and the whole sky outside starts, very slowly, to move.