"I think it's the beer. Honest."
She stabbed out her cigarette and swung around on her stool. "They're awfully fun," she said, nodding toward what had become the pilots-only table. "A bunch of eighteen-year-olds with their first hot rods." She turned back to me. "How old are you, Thayer?"
"Twenty-eight."
"That means you're still fourteen. In boy years."
"Boy years?"
"Like dog years. A boy's real age is only half his chronological age. Believe me, I've done all the research." She took out another cigarette. "There are girl years, too."
"I can't wait."
"They're a little trickier. The conversion factor is one-point-five. When I was thirteen — "
"— You were actually twenty."
"Of course, that's only good up to twenty-one. Then the conversion factor begins to diminish until you're twenty-nine when you're twenty-nine."
"And twenty-nine when you're thirty-three."
"My. A college graduate." There was that smile again. She looked over at the table in the corner, where Enloe, Guinan and the others had their heads together. "Do you suppose Casey's ever going to come back?"
I glanced at the clock. "He's probably waiting for the eight P.M. news."
"You're probably right. Damn you and that stupid Russian rocket. I hope it blows up."
"It might do just that." My head was clearing.
Then Dr. Rowe walked in.
He was dressed as he always dressed, except for the fact that his tie had been slightly loosened. For the first time, there was relative quiet in Pancho's. Rowe seemed amused. "Anybody know what happened with the Russians?"
"Pancho, what's the matter with you! Turn the damn radio on!" Dearborn shouted from the table.
Rowe stepped up to the bar and ordered a beer. As he waited, he glanced at Margaret and me. "Margaret. Ed, what do you think?"
"I don't think they've had enough test flights."
He got his beer and stared into it for a moment. "I hope you're right." He looked up. "And I hate myself for it."
Three minutes to eight. Rowe went to a table — alone. Margaret slid off the stool and took my arm. "Let's go," she whispered.
"Don't you want to know?"
"No."
We found her car. She slid behind the wheel and I got in beside her. Then we just sat in silence. Finally I said, "What was the big rush?"
"I just wanted to get out of there." She pulled up her knees, dropping her shoes. Through the car window came a hot breeze that rippled her hair and blouse. Suddenly I pulled her toward me. After a moment, she pushed me away. "Something wrong?"
She smiled, and unbuttoned her blouse. "I've just decided we're perfect for each other."
(A handwritten note:)
I can still remember each time we made love … each move within each time. On the couch in her office one Friday when everyone had gone. (Sliding my hand under her skirt to her moist center. We didn't even take our clothes off.) In the car outside a motel in Rosamond, where Deb and the kids had come to visit me. (Her head in my lap … hair caught in the steering wheel … stains on my jacket.) The motel in Lancaster on a hot afternoon. (The shades drawn against the heat if not the light, her riding me, drowning me in her breasts….)
Pathetic. But this is what happened.
(From the notebooks of Edgar Thayer:)
The news of the Soviet failure encouraged all of us. We started receiving visitors … a couple of generals from the Western Development Division, which supervised the missile program and who, until that week, had believed the idea of space travel to be so much cream cheese, and from Aeronautical Systems, who were running around trying to take credit for Rowe's project, which they had been forced to fund.
A Senator Kennedy showed up, too.
Since I was spending twelve hours a day in flight control, I was oblivious to most of this. We were debugging our data processing network while at the same time the engineers in Hangar Three were putting together and tearing down the LOX pump that had caused the pogo. There were orbital operations to be rehearsed and worldwide communications to integrate.
Oh, yes: on April 20, after Sampson and Dearborn flew another test, Rowe announced that Enloe and Guinan would make the first all-up flight. Major Wilbert Wood Enloe would become the first man in space.
I saw Dearborn moments after the announcement. He was still shaking his head, like a man who'd been in a bad fight. Sampson didn't react at all. I concluded that he hadn't expected to get the first flight.
Enloe began to fly daily landing approaches in an F-104 that had been modified to handle like the X-11A.
I didn't see Guinan at all in those several days between the incident at Pancho's and the announcement. When I chanced to meet him at the commissary on Wednesday the 21st he acted as if nothing whatever was the matter. "No hard feelings?" I said.
"Like I told Mikey, if she wanted to be with me, she'd still be with me." He was piling enough food on his plate for three men. "Enjoy it while it lasts, buddy boy. Because one of these days, she'll pull the same thing on you."
I hated Guinan for saying that, though I already suspected it was true. Margaret had told me — confessed is not the word; she might as well have been discussing a change in the weather — that she had slept with three of the four pilots so far.
Dearborn, Mr. Lucky, had been first. "He made a pass at me five minutes after we'd been introduced. I mean, I was putting a cuff on him — to check his blood pressure — and just like that he had his hand on my thigh." (I had my hand on her thigh.)
"You were powerless to resist," I said. "After all, he is an ace."
"I'd like to think that was it. I just took his hand away. He couldn't believe it for a moment. Then the next thing I knew I was locking the door and, well … you know." She blushed.
"Show me." And she shifted so her head slid down my stomach.
Sampson had been second. "Dearborn told him about me, then told me he had told Sampson, just to get his reaction. You know, Mike had been sitting in the office outside …"
Except for that drunken night at Pancho's, I would have sworn Sampson was a straight arrow. It was hard to picture him lusting after Margaret, and I said as much. "That was the whole idea. He's not married, he doesn't have a girlfriend. No one could even remember seeing him with a woman. I think the guys thought he was some kind of freak."
"Who knows what aces think of each other."
"Anyway, I noticed he was hanging around the medical office one day for no particular reason. I pretty much teased him into asking me out to dinner.
"It was very sweet. He insisted on picking me up — and he drives some beat-up little foreign car, a Renault, I think. Nothing like any pilot I've ever known — and taking me all the way to Lancaster to some romantic, out of the way little Italian place."
"The only romantic, out of the way little Italian place in Lancaster."
"That must be true, because who do you think we saw the moment we sat down? Wilson Rowe."
"With Mrs. Rowe?"
"Not unless he's married to a twenty-year-old."
"His daughter."
She laughed. "I don't think so."
I raised myself on one arm, momentarily shocked out of the mood … which was well into the realm of the ridiculous. Here I was, ensconced in the bedroom of a woman not my wife … daring to be disappointed by the idea of Rowe having an affair.
Then, in the time it took for Margaret to place her hand on my chest, forcing me onto my back, I relaxed, embracing it all. We were isolated, working impossible hours in reduced circumstances on what was supposed to be this magnificent adventure. The fact that Margaret had been intimate with the other aces, except for Enloe, made me feel I was part of a select club. After all, the normal rules of behavior no longer applied.