Only if I can ask you one in return. The words appeared in my brain, but stayed there, stuck amidst the numbers. “Sure,” I said, pathetically.
“This new job you got-could they use a secretary or something? A girl to answer the phones, maybe?”
I had no idea of Tominbang’s staffing requirements. But at that moment, in a fit of arrogance, I decided I would pay Eva-Lynne’s salary, if necessary. He was paying me enough. “We sure do,” I heard myself say. “It’s only a temporary job, though.”
“Anything to get me out of here now.”
“What time do you get off work?” I was able to ask her a question like that as long as the next phrase had nothing to do with a date.
“Two.”
“Can you get a ride to the airport in Tehachapi?”
She got a look on her face that suggested a hidden power, one having more ancient roots than the wild card. “That won’t be a problem.”
I described Tominbang’s hangar, then told her I would alert our guards to be looking for her around 2:30.
She leaned forward, kissed me on the forehead, and said, “You’re a doll.”
I drove to Tehachapi wrapped in a golden cloud.
It wasn’t until that afternoon, after Eva-Lynne, eyes alive and happy, arrived for her appointment, after I had spent the day in a tedious session with Kafka concerning retrograde impulses of the Quicksilver propulsion system, that I realized I had made a terrible mistake:
I had brought Eva-Lynne into daily contact with Al Dearborn.
It was only a gradual realization. Tominbang would have hired Eva-Lynne on sight (as my father used to say, he seemed to have an eye for the ladies), though he was not too proud to accept my offer to underwrite her salary. “I think she will prove to be an excellent addition to the team,” he said. “If you find any more like her, please bring them to me.” For a variety of reasons, I was not tempted. (Besides, there was only one Eva-Lynne.)
She was immediately assigned to general office help, with special duty as my part-time assistant. (Bacchus and Kafka were burying me in technical documents that required filing and organizing.)
Only then, once she had signed the now-familiar non-disclosure agreement, did she learn what we were doing. “To the what?”
“The Moon,” I said, the first time I had ever actually said such a thing aloud.
“Who? How?” She was genuinely astonished and, I think, a little frightened. (As if this were nothing but a cover story for some much more mundane, but very illegal activity.)
I showed her our Quicksilver, then introduced her to several members of the team. She soon came to be comfortable with the idea of flying to the Moon. More comfortable, I noted, than she seemed with the number and variety of jokers and deuces.
It wasn’t until the end of the workday, as I was preparing to offer Eva-Lynne a ride back to Rosamond (after all, it was on my way), that Dearborn appeared.
Three weeks without drink-three weeks with the job of a lifetime-had improved his looks and his energy, not to mention his manner. (No more vomiting on feet.) He gave Eva-Lynne a wave, as if she had worked there all along, and turned to me. “We’re going to take our bird out for a test hop tonight. What do you say, Co-pilot?”
“Would a simple, ‘No, thank you’, be sufficient?”
“We’re not going into space, Cash. Just a little proficiency run around the neighborhood. Uh, no ‘heavy lifting’.” He laughed at his own joke, and turned to Eva-Lynne. “Will we have the honor of your presence?”
“What time do you want me?” she said, forthrightly, eyes blazing, using exactly those words, and breaking my heart.
Our small group moved into the hangar proper, where Tominbang and the rest of the team gathered, and I lost track of Eva-Lynne. I confess I got angry-at Tominbang, for disrupting my life and dragging me into this stupid project; at Dearborn, for being everything I was not.
Even, I must admit, at Eva-Lynne.
Darkness fell, and a huge orange Moon rose in the east-like a giant jack o’lantern rising from the desert. I had barely begun to study lunar geography, but I could already recognize the dark smear that was the Sea of Storms -Quicksilver’s landing site.
Our landing site, if I had the stomach to turn around and face my fears. (And I don’t mean fears of death.)
So I did.
Quicksilver was towed to the runway apron by a tractor with a sputtering motor.
“You’d think they could afford a new tractor,” Eva-Lynne said behind me.
I was feeling mildly heroic, proud of a chance to show off for Eva-Lynne, when Bacchus appeared suddenly out of the shadows, handing me two ring binders filled with paper. I glanced at the pages. “I had to pencil in some figures, position of the Moon at launch time, stuff like that. But it should give you a good sense of when to do your mass transfer.”
“To what end?” I wasn’t worried about doing the lifts. All I had to do was glance at the orientation of Quicksilver, its velocity, its reported position in three axes, and wait for Dearborn to tap me on the shoulder.
“For a proper simulation,” he said, clearly disgusted with my lack of professionalism.
I turned, hoping to re-connect with Eva-Lynne, but Commander Dearborn chose this moment to emerge from the hangar.
He was wearing a heavy, silvery garment like a diving suit, complete with a neck ring. Under one arm he carried white helmet. He seemed completely focused on the task ahead of him, like a bullfighter I had once seen in Tijuana.
Tominbang was a step behind him, but compared to Dearborn ’s glittering presence, might as well have been invisible.
(I noticed one strange face in the crowd, not far behind Dear-born: Sampson, his backup pilot.)
Dearborn stopped and looked up at Quicksilver, which had now been towed to a distance of fifty yards from the hangar door. He raised his helmet, lowered it over his head, locked it into place.
Some of the team members applauded. I felt an unfamiliar surge of pride. From what I could see of Tominbang’s face, so did he.
And, for a moment, so did I. I was part of that crew!
The next half hour raced past. Dressed in street clothes (but carrying a crash helmet handed to me by Kafka), I joined Dearborn and Tominbang aboard Quicksilver. I had never been inside the vehicle before, and had to be helped down through the top hatch into the newly-installed airlock by Sampson. (“This is where the weapons bay used to be.”) Then I crawled forward into the cabin and wrenched myself to the left-hand seat. (There were three, one forward, and two behind.
“I hope I don’t have to get out of this thing in a hurry,” I said, half-joking.
“The pilot can blow the canopy for emergency egress,” Sampson said, his eyes bland and almost sleepy. I decided right then that I didn’t much like him. Maybe it was the air of truly unpredictable strangeness he radiated-his “wrong way” wild card, no doubt.
As the team cleared out, my helmet radio squawked. “Pilot to Co-pilot,” Dearborn said, “that pistol grip tiller close to your right hand is your lifting mechanism. It is finely calibrated to connect with the center of mass of this vehicle. Touch it only when you do your lifting.”
“Uh, roger,” I said, trying to sound astronautical.
There was some chatter on the radio that did not directly concern me. Next to me, Tominbang practically bounced up and down like a restless child.
Dearborn counted down to ignition, and pressed the start button. Flame shot out of the back of Quicksilver. In a cloud of debris, the pumpkin-seed vehicle started rolling down the runway. It rotated almost immediately, then headed straight up into the night sky…
I felt some pressure, but not much more than on an airplane. For the first few moments, that is. The pressure kept building and building, and to my extreme discomfort, we rolled to our left and over on our backs. “Why are we doing this?” I said between clenched teeth.