Della
The deputies came in through the lobby at five to six, past the cable-news crew and the green sofas, and nobody stopped them, because there was nothing left on the wall to watch.
There were two of them, a big one with a moustache and a young one with a notebook. They looked at the room, at forty people in polo shirts and a grey card on every screen, and the big one said, "Which one's Kessel?"
Nobody pointed, and nobody had to. Forty heads went up the step.
Sully was in his chair. He had both hands flat on the console, one each side of his key reader, and the green light under his thumb had gone out. He didn't get up, and he didn't say anything. The deputies went up the step and stood behind him, one at each shoulder, as if they were all three waiting for a lift.
He stayed in the chair. The ship was behind the Moon.
I was on the floor in front of the wall, where I'd been for an hour, with my phone still in my hand. The guest link had gone grey with everything else.
I said into it, very quietly, "One."
Nothing came after it, and I put the phone in my pocket.
At six o'clock the room watched a clock.
That was all there was: the clock on the wall, in big white numbers, with nothing under it. Somewhere behind the Moon a man who does birthday parties was pressing a button, or he wasn't, and we'd never know which until he came out the other side.
Kip said, "Now," at six exactly, very small, to his screen.
Nobody answered him.
I couldn't stand there, so I walked, down the side of the room past the rented desks and back up the other side. I walked past Ailsa, who had her laptop shut on her knees and her hands folded on it, and wasn't crunching anything. I walked past the announcer in his cardigan, who had his face in his hands. I walked past Kip twice, and the third time I stopped.
"Kip."
He looked up.
"I said you were useless," I said. "In a memo, on Thursday night. Two words. I was going to have you moved to the back."
"Okay."
"I deleted it. I want you to know that. There wasn't anywhere at the back to move you."
He looked at me for a while.
"That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me in this building," said Kip.
"It wasn't nice. It was an apology."
"It was a bit nice."
"Don't," I said, and walked on, and I heard him laugh behind me, once, in a way that sounded a lot like crying.
Royce's office door was open. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the green sofa, under its price tag, with a paper plate on his knee. On the plate was the last doughnut in the building.
He held it up when he saw me in the doorway, and tore it in half, quite carefully, and held out the bigger bit.
I took it and ate it standing up. It was stale, and it was the best thing I'd ever eaten.
"Did I do it right?" said Royce. "The no."
"You did it right."
"I've never said no to anybody. Not once. You know that? I say here's the thing." He looked at his half. "My mum'll have seen it."
"She'll have seen it," I said, and went back out to the clock.
Six sixteen. Six seventeen.
At eighteen minutes past six the room held its breath, and I could hear it. Forty people not breathing has a sound, like a fridge switching off.
The grey card stayed grey.
Six nineteen. Six twenty.
"Kip," I said.
He didn't turn round. He had both hands flat on his desk the way Sully did.
"If the burn changed the path," he said, "they come out later. That's, that's what you'd want. A burn moves you. It's a different line round the back. It's later." He swallowed. "If it went wrong. If it went long, or they pointed wrong, or it never fired."
"Then what."
"Then they don't come out," said Kip.
He said it plainly, with no basically on it.
"Della."
It came from the step.
I'd never heard the voice before. It was soft and flat, and it had snow in it, and factories, somewhere a long way north of Florida. It was a voice you'd hear at a hardware counter in Ohio, a nice man telling you you'd bought the wrong size screws.
Sully was looking at me over the console with his glasses off, and the deputies were still at his shoulders.
"Sixteen years," said Sully, "and he picks the Moon." He shook his head, very slightly. "Your clown's gone, Della."
I didn't say anything.
I've said things for a living for twenty years. I looked at him, and I let the silence go on, and I kept it.
Six twenty-one.
At six twenty-two the grey card went away.
There was no picture, because the cabin camera was off. It was the loop, the room's own voice, out of every speaker at once, with a hiss on it like a kettle and the delay on it, and then a voice in the room that wasn't Mack's.
"Halyard, this is Ronnie Lark."
It was high and fast, with a crack in the middle of it.
"I don't know where we are," said Ronnie. "Hazel says we're fine."
The room came apart.
I don't have it in order, and I've tried. Kip was standing on his chair, and I don't know how he got up there. The announcer had his cardigan sleeve over his mouth. Somebody at the back was banging a desk with both hands like a drum. Ailsa Strachan was sitting very still with her laptop on her knees and her eyes shut, and her mouth was moving, and I think she was counting. The cable-news crew came through the corridor door all at once with their lights.
I sat down.
I sat down on the showroom carpet, in front of the wall, with my legs out in front of me, and I stayed down.
"Constance, Halyard," said the deputy flight director. He'd taken Sully's headset and was standing at the bottom of the step, because he couldn't get past the deputies to the chair, and his voice was shaking. "Ronnie. We read you. We read you five by five. Stand by."
"Standing by," said Ronnie, a beat later. Then, off the mic but not quite: "Hazel, they read us. Otis. Otis, they read us."
And somewhere behind him, small and high, a man saying, "Lord," over and over, as if it were the only word in the language and he'd just found out what it meant.
Kip got down off his chair and typed for four minutes without breathing. Then he turned round.
"They're on a path home," he said, to me, on the floor. "They're coming home. It was long, the burn, a couple of seconds long. Two. It's nothing. It's a trim. The autopilot can fly a trim tomorrow, it's tiny. It needs two keys."
"Whose?"
He looked at the step, and then at Royce, who'd come out of his office with sugar on his chin and was standing in the doorway holding the paper plate.
"Mr Ambler's," said Kip. "And whoever's Flight."
They took Sully out at seven.
The big deputy said, "Mr Kessel," and Sully stood up. He took his glasses off their cord and folded them and put them in his shirt pocket. He came down the step, and nobody spoke, and forty people moved their chairs in to let him through.
He walked down the middle of the room between the desks, with a deputy at each elbow, past Kip, past the wall, past me, and he didn't look at any of us. The young deputy held the corridor door, and Sully went through it.
The door shut on its slow hinge.
On my desk in the Fishbowl the coffee was still there with its plastic lid. I took it out to the kitchen and poured it down the sink. It had gone cold at about one.
At ten past seven Kip came and stood in the Fishbowl doorway with a headset in his hand.
"I've opened your channel," he said. "From his console. The deputy said I could." He held the headset out. "And I've turned the recording off. It's a switch. It's always been a switch. I'll show you."
He showed me. It was a switch.
I put the headset on.
"You there?"
The delay, and then his breathing, before the words.
"Where would I go," said Ronnie.
I put my hand over my mouth in a glass room.
"Is that your real voice?" I said.
Nothing for a second and a bit. Then:
"It's the only one I've got left."
Kip had rotated the Flight credentials the night they walked Sully out, and the reader on the step knew the deputy's thumb now. At two o'clock on Sunday afternoon, hour one hundred and twenty, Royce Ambler and the deputy flight director stood at their two desks and put their thumbs on two glass squares at the same time, and a ship two hundred thousand miles away fired its engine for a little under three seconds. Kip said, "That's it. That's perfect," and sat down.
Royce looked at his thumb for a while afterwards, as if somebody had signed it.
At ten past two I read Ronnie the notebook.
I read it in the Sentra, with the seat back and the engine on for the air, on a channel nobody was keeping. It took eleven minutes out loud, and he didn't say anything the whole time, not a breath I could hear.
When I'd finished he said, "Can I have it on the screen?"
"Why?"
"I want to read it to Tess. She's next to me. She doesn't know I've got it." He stopped. "I don't want to do it out of my ear."
So Kip typed it up from my phone pictures, all of it, with Mack's crossings-out, and the deputy sent it from Flight's console to the commander's screen, the only console in the world that can.
Tess put her stream up at a quarter to four, and Otis's mend held. I watched it in the Fishbowl on the wall, with the door open, with Kip and Ailsa and the announcer standing behind me, and Royce in his doorway with no plate.
The Moon was in the window behind them, going small.
Ronnie read it to her.
"From up there," he read. "Ten minutes. Say it slow."
He looked up from the screen at her, and then down again.
"Friends. Most of you know me. You know a story I tell, about a capsule that came home. I've told it at dinners for sixteen years. There's a part where I say the valve stuck, and there's a laugh there. I put that laugh there. I practised it.
"There wasn't a bad valve. The valve was fine. A man I love sent a command to that capsule too early, from a console on the ground, and the capsule went wrong, and Rafe Aldana died of it. And I flew the capsule home, and I got out, and I stood in front of a microphone and said valve. And then I said it for sixteen years.
"A small company in Indiana that made valves went out of business, and twenty-two people lost their jobs over a thing that didn't happen. I've got their names. They're on the next page.
"Tess, kiddo. You're sitting about four feet from me. I know, because I gave you the seat. Your dad was funnier than me. He did a Sinatra you wouldn't believe. He was scared on the pad, every time, and he went anyway, every time, and he never once pretended he wasn't scared. I've been pretending for sixteen years and it's the hardest work I ever did.
"Ros. I'm sorry. I should have said it at your kitchen table. I'm saying it from the Moon because I'm a coward and it's the only place far enough away.
"That's it. That's all of it. I'm Mack Tolliver, and that's the true one."
He stopped there. The page underneath had the names on it, and a coffee ring, and he didn't read the names. He looked at Tess.
On the wall, in the next seat, Tess Aldana had both hands over her face. Behind her Hazel was at the porthole, with her back to them, very straight. Otis had his hands together. Boyd was looking at the floor of the cabin with his fat lip, and his eyes were wet, and he didn't wipe them.
Tess took her hands down.
"He did do a good Sinatra," she said. "Mom's got a tape."
She reached up to her wrist and turned the stream off, and the wall went back to its cartoon satellite, and in the Fishbowl doorway nobody said anything for a long time.
At five o'clock I put the headset back on in the Sentra.
"You there?"
"I'm here."
"They're going to charge me," I said. "Royce's lawyer rang. Conspiracy, probably. False statements. He said probably the way you'd order soup."
"Okay."
"Royce too."
"Okay." A pause. "Will you be at the dock?"
"Where's the dock?"
"San Diego. Wednesday. Hazel looked it up."
I looked out through the windscreen at the lit box of the control room across the car park, with its forty people, and the deputy in the big chair a step up, sitting right on the front edge of it.
"I can't stand docks," I said. "Everybody's waiting for somebody."
"That's what they're for."
I took out my phone and turned it round and said into it, low, "One. Find a lawyer. Two. Find out where San Diego is. Three. Shreveport."