Della
At three o'clock on Saturday afternoon I walked onto the control-room floor with a dead man's notebook in a freezer bag, and nobody looked up.
I'd done Stormy Norm in the Sentra. I'd done him with the seat right back and the windows up and my eyes shut, and halfway through the overnight low the line had gone dead in my headset like a door shutting in another house. I'd said his name into it twice, and then I'd got out of the car.
Things I had. One, the notebook, thawed, in a bag that still said Turkey on it. Two, Kip's printout of the three o'clock log, folded in four. Three, a memo on my phone with Royce shouting into his collar. Four, a coffee on my desk with a plastic lid, which had been there since noon. I hadn't touched it, and I hadn't thrown it away either.
Things I didn't have. Two hours and forty minutes, and then the Moon.
The deputy flight director sat one desk down from Sully, a careful man with a lanyard and a cardigan of his own. I put the bag on his desk, and the printout on the bag, and I said it as plainly as I've ever said anything.
"Take the console."
He looked at the bag, and then at me, and he did not look up the step.
"Ms Quint."
"He put the number in. October, on an ops login, inside the correction. Then three in the morning, the Tuesday after Mack died, the same login took the alarm out and left his number where it was. From that chair. It's in the log. Take it."
"In flight, Flight's Flight," said the deputy, quietly, the way you'd tell a child about stoves. "I'd need an order from the program. The program's in a car." He nodded at the grey box on Sully's desk. "And that reader's enrolled to the Flight chair, not to me. It doesn't move without his release."
"Then I'll get the program out of the car."
"Kip," said Sully.
He didn't turn round. He said it at his normal size, to his screens, and it came out of every speaker on the floor a beat later. That doubled voice, live and late, had been the sound of that room for five days, and I'd liked it.
Kip stood up so fast his chair rolled into the next row.
"Go out to the car park and fetch Mr Ambler," said Sully. "Tell him the override's waiting on his thumb. And Kip. Your station stays locked for the medical. Nobody runs a number that isn't mine."
Kip went. He went past me with his eyes on the carpet and a can in each hand.
I went up the step.
I hadn't been up it since yesterday. It was eight inches of plywood under the same stained carpet, and it felt like a stage. Sully had his reading glasses on their cord and a page with a lot of columns. He didn't look up.
I held my phone up and played it.
"… pull it, Sully, pull the whole Moment, tonight …"
It sounded small. It sounded like a speakerphone in a shop.
"Royce told me to pull it," said Sully. "I pulled it. Ask him." He turned a page. "The log shows an operations login, Ms Quint. There are eleven in this building. Kip's got one. So does the man who empties the bins."
"You told Bette to hide the bottle."
That one he heard. I watched him hear it. His pen stopped for about the length of a breath, and then it went on.
"Ms Quint's been up four days," said Sully, to the room, not loud. "She's been running a private line to a crew member we've just declared unfit. In a pirate voice. The whole country's heard it." He took his glasses off. "I'd like her off my floor."
Nobody moved to take me off it, and nobody moved to stand next to me either. Forty people in rented chairs looked at me as if I were a dog that had walked into a church.
I went back down the step. I'd been taken off floors before. You go before they make you, and you go slowly, so it looks like a choice.
In the Fishbowl I called the name I'd found on Friday night, a woman at the FAA with a direct line and a surname, not a duty desk. It rang four times, and then her voice told me she was out of the office until Monday and that I should contact the duty desk.
I said into my phone, "One. Monday."
That was the whole memo. I didn't have a two.
At ten to four Kip came back without Royce.
"He's in the car." He was out of breath, because he'd run both ways. "He's got the windows up. He's eating a doughnut. He won't open the door. I knocked, and he did a thumbs-up at me, through the glass, and it was, basically, it was the saddest thumbs-up I've ever seen."
"Did you tell him about the override?"
"I said it through the window. He did the thumb again." Kip looked at his own thumb. "I don't know if that was a yes."
"Then we'll wait for him," said Sully, from the step, without turning round.
The clock on the wall said three fifty-two. Under it the stream panel still said the cabin camera was unavailable, in grey letters, with a cartoon satellite.
I stood in the Fishbowl and couldn't sit. I sat. I stood up.
At ten to five the wall came alive.
It wasn't a picture at first. It was a torch, a bright white circle jerking about, and behind it a face, upside down and enormous, with a butter knife between its teeth.
The counter in the corner went from nought to forty thousand while I watched, and then to a hundred thousand.
"Lord," said the face, round the knife. Otis. On the wall screens of a furniture showroom in Titusville, ten feet high, upside down. "Is it on? Tess, is it on? Is the little light on?"
"It's on," said Tess's voice. "Otis. You're on. You're on everywhere."
He took the knife out of his mouth and looked at it. "Well," said Otis. "Okay."
The comments came up the side of the wall, and a man two rows from me read them out without meaning to. Otis. Otis is upside down. Is Otis okay. Who gave Otis a knife.
The camera swung. For a moment the wall was all Moon, grey and close and full of holes. Then it was Tess, in the next seat to the commander's, with her sleeve pushed up and her thumb on the remote.
"Okay chat," said Tess. She didn't laugh. "We're back. I've got a guest line. Della Quint. If you're in that building, it's open."
I walked out of the Fishbowl onto the floor and stood in front of the wall, on the carpet, in the middle of the room, where the cable-news crew had put their lights on Friday night. I opened the link and held my phone up in front of my face with both hands.
On the wall, beside the cabin, a second square opened, and there I was. Ten feet high, no make-up, a woman who'd slept on the floor of a glass box, with a ceiling tile behind her head.
It was five o'clock.
"My name is Della Quint," I said.
A second later the wall said it back to me, in my own voice, flat Atlanta, over forty desks.
"I do crisis work for Halyard. I invented the swap. Mack Tolliver died at his house on the Sunday night, nine days before launch, and I put a lookalike in his seat to save a sale. The man in the commander's chair is Ronnie Lark. He does birthday parties. He didn't know any of what I'm about to say, and he said yes before I'd finished the sentence."
The room behind me had stopped, and I could hear it stop: keyboards, and then chairs, and then the hum of the screens with nothing on top of it.
"Before launch I wrote a statement for the day this came out. It said Halyard had been deceived by a lone impostor. I wrote that. Me. I wrote it before I knew him. He isn't one."
The comments went past my own enormous face, and I read them, because I can't not read a screen. Is this a bit. Is this part of the stream. Who is this lady. Is this a bit.
"It isn't a bit," I said. "The ship went off its path on Wednesday because of one wrong number in the autopilot. The number that's killing them isn't Royce's. It was put there by the man at the flight director's console."
I didn't turn round. I didn't need to, because forty people did it for me. I watched it in the little reflection on the screen's glass: forty heads, all going one way, up the step.
"She's exhausted," said Sully. Out of every speaker at once, a beat behind, like a man agreeing with himself. "We have a flight."
I could feel a room deciding whether to believe a tired woman or its own furniture.
I said the rest to the camera. I don't remember choosing to.
"And he's the bravest person I've ever heard," I said. "And I've seen him once. In the rain."
I read them the weather.
I don't know what forty people and two hundred thousand phones made of it. I did it as Norm. A grown woman on a showroom floor, live, with her phone in both hands, doing a weatherman.
"Pollen count one hundred and twelve," I said. "Winds one hundred and twelve. Overnight low thirty-eight. Winds thirty-eight."
The cabin square on the wall did nothing for a moment. Then Hazel floated into it, glasses on her nose, pencil going.
"Thank you, Ms Quint," said Hazel, to the whole world. "I have those. I need the third."
I looked at my hand.
I'd written them on the heel of it, at three minutes past eleven, twice, in biro. Since then that hand had been on a steering wheel and a freezer bag and the glass of the Fishbowl and the rail of Sully's step. The first two lines were still there, a bit furry. The third was a blue cloud with a two at the front and something that might have been a six, and the rest was weather.
"Kip," I said, not in Norm.
"My station's locked." He was standing at his desk with both hands up, as if I'd pulled a gun. "He locked it. And there's no run to get into. I didn't save it. I told you I didn't save it."
"Then remember it."
"I don't remember numbers, I compute them. That's the whole—"
"Use mine," said Ailsa Strachan.
She was at her borrowed desk at the back, and she'd already turned the laptop round to face him. A mint cracked. "The simulator's on my login. The tracking's live. Run it again, Mr Kip."
"It's forty minutes," said Kip. "From raw. It was forty minutes this morning."
The clock on the wall said one minute past five. Thirty-nine minutes to the Moon.
"Then stop talking," said Ailsa.
He ran. I'd never seen Kip run, and he ran across a furniture showroom with his lanyard flying and sat down at her laptop and started typing before his chair had stopped moving.
At ten past five I rang the sheriff's office from Kip's grey desk phone, the one I'd used for the FAA on Thursday, with the phone still up in my other hand and the stream still running.
I held for three minutes through a recording about boat licences, and then I got the same deputy. I knew him by his breathing.
"Ma'am," he said, before I'd finished my name. "My sergeant's watching you on his phone."
"Then you know where I am."
"Yes, ma'am. Cars are on their way."
I put the grey phone down. It was the first time in my life a call to a man in uniform had gone how I wanted, and I had to do it on television.
"Della?"
It came off the wall, a second late. Not Norm and not Mack, just a man in a tin can with a headset round his neck, leaning into Tess's camera.
"You there?"
I had the phone up in both hands in front of two hundred and ninety thousand people. I could see the number in the corner, and I didn't care about the number.
"Where would I go," I said.
On the wall he put his hand over his eyes and took it away again, and he didn't say anything else. Behind him Hazel had her pencil in her teeth and Otis had the orange stopwatch flat against his chest.
At twenty-five to six Royce came in.
He came through the corridor door with sugar down the front of his quarter-zip, his hair flat on one side from the car window, and his phone in his hand with a small square of my face on it. He didn't look at me. He walked down the room between the desks as if it were the aisle at a funeral he'd paid for.
"Royce," said Sully, from the step. "Your reader. The autopilot's waiting on two thumbs."
Royce's key reader was on his own desk at the side, a grey box the size of a stapler with a glass square on top. Sully had his hand flat beside his own. His thumb was already on the glass. A little green light was on under it, waiting.
Royce stood at his desk and put his hand over the reader. Not on it. Over it, about an inch, as if it were warm.
He looked at the wall.
On the wall, in the cabin square, the commander was sitting in his chair in Mack's flight suit with his helmet in his lap. He wasn't doing anything. He was looking at the camera as you'd look at a window with somebody you knew on the other side of it. Just his face, grey at the temples, a man who did birthday parties.
"Royce," said Sully.
"No," said Royce.
The room didn't make a sound.
"Royce. It's medical. You heard the—"
"No."
He took his hand away. He sat down on the edge of his own desk, with his back to the reader, and he folded his arms, and the light under Sully's thumb went on waiting for somebody who wasn't coming.
"Take the console," said Royce, to the deputy. "That's an order from the program."
The deputy flight director had stood up. I don't know when. He went to the step and put his foot on it.
"Kip."
"Two minutes. Two."
At five thirty-nine Sully stood up.
He did it in two stages, both hands on the console, and he put his headset on properly, and he keyed the loop. The whole room heard it twice, from the step and from the walls, and so did the stream.
"Constance, Flight," said Sully. "For the crew's safety, I'm safing the vehicle. Commander, hands off." And he didn't stop. He went on, in the gravel, slow and steady and loud, reading the safing procedure off his page line by line, so that the loop, and the stream, and every speaker in the room were full of him.
On the wall the cabin went white.
It was the Sun. The ship was turning its nose to it, and the light came in across the window and over the commander's face, bright as an operating table. The screen in front of him went black. I saw his hand go to the stick. I saw it do nothing.
"He's safed it," shouted Kip, from the back. "He's safed it, he's—got it, I've got it. Thirty-eight, one hundred and—no, two hundred and sixty—"
Ailsa Strachan already had the laptop in her arms. She came down the room with it at a walk, because Ailsa didn't run, and stood at my shoulder in her flat shoes and turned the screen to me, and said it low, under Sully, in my ear.
"Mr Kip's reading it bottom up. One hundred and twelve. Thirty-eight. Two hundred and sixty-seven." A mint. "And give them the total first, Ms Quint. Four hundred and seventeen."
I didn't understand it, and I didn't have to. I said it.
"Seven-day total," I said, as Norm, as loud as I've ever said anything, over Sully's voice in the speakers. "Four hundred and seventeen. Winds four hundred and seventeen. And tonight's low—"
On the wall Hazel was writing. Ronnie was looking straight at me.
"Two hundred and sixty—"
The cabin went grey.
Not black. Grey. A flat grey card with two small words on it, in the corner, and a cartoon satellite. Signal lost.
The room was very quiet. Then, a second late, off every wall at once, in a woman's voice from Atlanta, the last of it came back to me.
"Sixty."