Della
At two o'clock on Tuesday the rocket went up on every screen in the furniture shop at once, and forty people who'd been pretending to be calm all morning stood up together like a church.
I didn't stand up. I was in the Fishbowl with a headset on and my laptop open and my phone face down on the table, and I was making a list.
Things that could go wrong in the next four hours. One. He talks. Two. He talks. Three. He's sick, on camera, in the suit, and talks. Four. Royce.
The rocket climbed off the screens and turned into a star and then into a dot. The room cheered. On the front wall the livestream counter went past a million and kept going, and Tess's camera showed the cabin shaking, five helmets nodding like dashboard dogs, and the commander in the middle with his hands on his knees, saying nothing. Saying nothing beautifully. I could've kissed the screen.
In my headset, very small, under the roar of it, Ronnie said, "Oh no. Oh no, no, no. Oh, that's high. That's very high."
"You're fine," I said.
"I'm going up. I'm going up so fast, nobody said how fast, why didn't anybody say how fast."
"You're fine. Shut up. You're doing great."
He shut up. He kept breathing, in my ear, hard, the whole way up, and I listened to it for nine minutes with my hand flat on the table until the engines stopped and his breathing stopped with them, for a second, as if the silence had scared it.
Then he said, in a completely different voice, "Della. My arm's floating," and he sounded about seven years old, and I turned my chair to face the wall.
At three o'clock Royce did his first hourly update on the public loop. Every hour on the hour, two minutes, to the livestream and the press and the whole room, about how well everything was going. He stood at his desk in a fresh quarter-zip with a microphone on a stand and his other hand in his pocket.
"This is a historic journey," Royce said. "Not just Halyard's journey. Your journey."
I held up a thumb, through the glass, to nobody.
"Every journey begins with a single step. Ours began with a single launch. And I want to thank every one of you who's been on this journey with us, because a journey is only as good as the people on it."
I held up a second finger, then a third. By the end I'd run out of one hand and started on the other. Six. I counted on my fingers. It was the only way I could count, and even then I did it twice.
When he came off mic he put his head round the Fishbowl door.
"Is your thing secure?" He meant the channel. He'd never once called it a channel. "If anybody hears your thing, we're done. I mean done-done."
"My channel runs on the backup antenna," I said, "which nobody uses, which is why I asked for it. Nobody's on it but me and my client."
"Your client." He liked that. "Great. Love that. Keep it that way." He knocked on the glass with one knuckle and went.
At half past four they put the helmets on for the push.
I'm bad with numbers but I'd had this one drawn for me on the back of a press release by Kip, twice. The push is when the engine fires one more time and throws the ship out toward the Moon. Before the push, they can still turn round and come home cheap. After the push, they're going.
"Helmets on, visors down," said Sully, on the loop. In the room his voice came from thirty feet away and out of the speakers at the same time, doubled, like God with an echo. "Constance, Flight. Stand by for the push."
I said into my headset, "Here we go. Thirty minutes. Sit on your hands."
Nothing. Breathing.
"Commander?"
And then his voice came out of the speakers on the front wall. Not in my headset. The speakers. The whole room. He'd keyed the open loop.
"Folks," said Ronnie. Not in Mack's voice. His own, high and fast and shaking. "Folks, I'm sorry, I need to tell you something before we do this, I can't do this without telling you, I need to tell you, and anyone who's listening, the FAA, whoever, my name's Ron"
The speakers clicked, in the middle of his name. Then nothing at all. A hiss.
Forty people looked at the front wall. Then forty people looked at each other.
From the very back of the room, from a borrowed desk by the fire exit, a woman's voice said, flat and quick and Scottish, "Did your commander just say his name's Ron?"
Ailsa Strachan. Boyd's engineer, from the company Boyd's people used for their software checks, sent in to sit at the back and eat mints and look at everything he was buying. She'd been there all day with her laptop and a face like a closed door. I'd decided on Thursday she was Boyd's spy, and I'd been right about that, and I hadn't bothered to think anything else about her since.
"Comms discipline," said Royce, loudly, standing up. "I had them cut it. The commander's emotional. We don't put emotion on an open loop during a critical phase. I made the call."
In the second row Kip turned round with an energy drink halfway to his mouth. "Basically we lost the main antenna for a second. It does that on the handover."
Nobody listened to Kip. I didn't listen to Kip. I looked at Royce, standing there with his chin up, owning it like he owned everything, and I thought, he cut it, the little shit actually cut it, and some part of me that I wouldn't put on a list was grateful.
In my headset Ronnie was saying, "Hello? Hello? Can anybody hear me? I can't hear anybody, there's nothing in my ears, there's nothing, it's all gone quiet, Della, it's all gone."
"I can hear you," I said. "I'm here. Only me. The main antenna dropped. It's just me."
"I said Ron. I said it. I got as far as Ron."
"I know."
"They heard."
"They heard Ron. Lots of people are called Ron."
He made a sound like a hiccup, and then he was sick in his helmet.
I have heard a great many terrible things over a phone. I'd once heard a man resign from a hospital board while being arrested. I'd never heard anybody be sick inside a sealed helmet, with nowhere for it to go, on a channel with no delay, from however many miles up he was. Kip had the number. I didn't. It was very close. It was like he was in the room.
I got up. I went out of the Fishbowl, onto the floor, and I stood by the coffee machine with my back to everyone and one hand over my other ear.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. Breathe through your nose."
"Can't. It's in the. It's in my nose."
"I know where it is. Breathe through your mouth, then. Slow. With me. In, two, three. Out, two, three."
He breathed with me. In. Out. It sounded horrible. I counted it anyway, I counted it like I count everything, badly, out loud, and he followed the count, and after the fourth one his breath stopped shaking.
"Better?"
There was a pause. Then a voice came into my ear that wasn't his and wasn't Mack's. Big, bright and fake, like a weatherman on local television at six o'clock.
"Good evening, I'm Stormy Norm. Here's your forecast for the inside of the commander's helmet. Light chunks, with a chance of dignity later in the week."
I laughed. Out loud. On the floor of mission control, by the coffee machine, with forty people behind me who'd just heard the commander say his name was Ron. It came out of me like a cough and Kip turned round in his chair, and two of the engineers turned round, and Royce turned round from his desk with his whole face asking me what was funny.
I took out my phone and said into it, "One. Don't laugh at him on an open floor."
Kip thought I was taking a call. Royce thought I was taking notes. I went back into the Fishbowl.
The phone number I'd saved on Monday was under the word Jail. It was the number for the people at the Federal Aviation Administration who you call when an aircraft has a problem the company isn't telling them about. I'd looked it up while Royce was cancelling the tiger. I'd never once intended to call it. I'd saved it the way you save the number of a locksmith.
I had it up on the screen. My thumb was over it.
Out on the floor, Ailsa Strachan had walked up behind Kip's chair and was reading his screen over his shoulder, crunching a mint. Royce was on his phone. Sully was at his console with his glasses on the end of his nose, reading numbers to the ship, and the main antenna came back and the room relaxed half an inch.
"Constance, Flight. We have you back. Commander, say nothing, sit on your hands. Passengers, it's going to get loud and heavy for about six minutes, and then it's going to stop, and that's all it's going to do."
Then a new voice came over the loop. High, fast, from the back of the cabin. "Lord, okay, is that a noise, is that a noise it makes."
Otis Mabry, the bus mechanic, praying on the open mic with his helmet keyed. The whole world heard it. The announcer, who sat two desks from Sully in a cardigan and had the calmest voice I've ever heard come out of a man, put his hand over his microphone and said, "Can somebody please," and on the livestream screen the cabin pictures went to a slow piano version of a song about a sunrise.
"Otis," said Sully, on the loop, not unkind, the way you'd talk to a horse. "Son. Unkey your mic. You can pray all you like. Just do it on your own time."
The room laughed. The room loved him. He didn't look up.
Then, at five o'clock, he said: "Constance, Flight. You're go for the push. Sit on your hands."
And in my headset, from very far off, Ronnie said, "Della, I can still turn round. Can't I? Before this. You said before this they can turn round."
I looked at my phone. At the word Jail. At my thumb.
"Listen to me," I said. "This is what happens if I press this. The push gets stopped. You come home in a day and a half with four people who know you lied to them and a world that heard you say Ron. Halyard's finished, and Boyd sues everybody, and you go to prison, and so do I, and Mack Tolliver is a dead man in a fridge in Rockledge whose last flight was a fraud. That's if I press it."
"And if you don't?"
"If I don't, the ship goes round the Moon by itself and comes home by itself, because it flies itself, it's always flown itself. You sit there for eight days and say nothing and four people have the best week of their lives. If I tell them now, I buy them eight days of terror and nothing else. Nobody's safer. They're just scared."
The engine lit. I heard it in his breathing before I saw it on the wall, a long low shove, and he went quiet, and I kept my thumb where it was for the whole six minutes, the whole burn, over the word, not touching it.
The engine stopped.
"Constance, Flight," said Sully. "Good push. You're on your way."
The room clapped. I turned my phone face down on the table.
In my ear, Ronnie said, "Okay." And then, much smaller, "Okay."
At six I went to find Royce, because Royce had told forty people he'd cut a man off mid-word and I wanted to know what else he thought he'd done.
He was in the corridor outside his office, pacing, on the phone. His office door was open behind him and his big screen was on, showing an old slide from some pitch deck: a cartoon fist in a white glove gripping a joystick, stars behind it, and across the top in a font with flames on it, The Moment, Day Two.
"No, it still goes," Royce was saying. "Yes. Tell Boyd's people the Moment still goes. It's fine. Everything's fine. It's a wave, it's thirty seconds, he can do a wave." He saw me and lifted one finger. "I have to go. Tell them. The Moment still goes."
He hung up.
"What," I said, "is that?"
He looked over his shoulder at the screen. "That's old."
"It's a fist."
"It's a concept."
"It's a fist on a joystick with flames on it, Royce. Who's flying, the fist? Is the fist certified? Is Sully signing for the fist?"
"It's nothing. Day two, the commander does a little moment for the stream. It's a wave. It's been pulled back to a wave. It's handled."
"My client doesn't do moments. My client sits."
"Your client," said Royce, "is on a livestream with two million people watching, Della, and every one of those people is a customer, and on day two they get a moment." He said it with his chin up again. I knew that chin.
Behind me a door opened, and Ailsa Strachan came out of the kitchen with a cup of tea and her laptop under her arm.
"Mr Ambler. Day-two segment. My people built half the software on that segment. I'll see it run before my client pays for it."
Royce smiled at her very wide and put his hand on her elbow and walked her four steps down the corridor away from me, saying, "Ailsa, Ailsa, absolutely, let's talk about it, let's do that tomorrow," in his softest voice, the one he used on investors and dogs.
I looked at the fist on the screen a while longer. Then I went back to the Fishbowl, and I put on my headset, and I said, "You there?"
And from however far away he was by then, which Kip could have told me to the mile, Ronnie said, "Yeah. I'm here."