And she was young and had been married once and had taken no vow of chastity and the hell with what you’re thinking, girl! Maureen rolled off the bed fast and switched on the TV with a vicious click. Just to break the chain of thought.
But I am not a tramp.
His divorce is final next week, and I had nothing to do with that. Ann never knew. Ann doesn’t know now. But maybe he wouldn’t have let her go? If that’s my fault, all right, but Ann never knew. We’re still good friends.
“He’s not the same anymore,” Ann had told her. “Not since he flew the mission. Before that it was always tough here, he was on training missions all the time, and I had only a little part of him — but I had something. And then he got his chance, and everything worked fine, and my husband’s a hero — and I don’t have a husband anymore.”
Ann couldn’t understand it. I can, Maureen thought. It wasn’t flying the mission, it was that there aren’t any more missions, and if you’re Johnny Baker and all your life you’ve worked and trained to do one thing, and nobody’s ever going to do that again…
One goal in life. Tim Hamner had a touch of that. Johnny had it, and maybe she had tried to borrow a piece of it. And now look: Johnny had used up his one goal, and the most important thing in Maureen Jellison’s life was a fight with a silly Washington hostess.
It still bothered her every time she thought of it.
Annabelle Cole was liberated. Six months ago it had been the threatened extinction of the snail skimmer; in six months more it might be the decline of artistic tradition among Australian blackfellahs. At the moment there was nothing for it but to blame men for everything bad that had ever happened. Nobody really minded. They didn’t dare. No mean amount of the world’s business was conducted at Annabelle’s parties.
Maureen must have been edgy the night Annabelle braced her for her father’s support. Annabelle wanted Congress to fund studies on artificial wombs, to free women from months of slavery to their suddenly altered bodies.
And I told her, Maureen thought. I told her that having babies was part of the sex act, and if she was willing to give up being pregnant she could give up fucking too. I said that! And I never had a baby in my life!
Dad might miss some important contacts through his daughter’s exercise in tact, but Maureen could handle that. In six months, when Annabelle found a new cause, Maureen would host a party and invite someone Annabelle had to meet. She had it all worked out. That was the problem: As if a fight with Annabelle Cole was the most important event in her life!
“I’ll fix some drinks,” Johnny called. “Best get your shower, the program’s on in a minute.”
“Yo,” she answered, and she thought: Him? Marry the man. Promote him a new career. Get him to run for office, or write his memoirs. He’d be good at anything he tried… but why couldn’t she find goals of her own?
The room was definitely a man’s room, with books, and models of the fighter planes Johnny Baker had flown, and a Skylab, with broken wings; and a large framed picture of a bulky-suited man crawling in space along one of those wings, a faceless, alien shape, disconnected from the spacecraft, risking the loneliest death ever if he let go for even an instant. The NASA medal hung below the picture.
Mementos of times past. But only the past. There were no pictures of the Shuttle, delayed once more; no reminders of the Pentagon, Johnny’s present assignment. Two pictures of the children, one with Ann in the background, short, browned, competent Ann, who already had a look of puzzled unhappiness in the photo.
His hand was wrapped around the glass, but he had forgotten glass and hand. Maureen could watch his face without his knowing it. Johnny Baker saw only the screen.
Parabolic orbits diagrammed against the concentric circular paths of the planets. Old photos of Halley’s Comet and Brooks’s Comet and Cunningham’s Comet and others, culminating in a blurred pinpoint that was Hamner-Brown. A man with large insectile glasses lectured with fierce intensity:
“Oh, we’ll get hit someday. It probably won’t be an asteroid, either. The orbits are too nearly fixed. There must have been asteroids whose orbits intersected Earth’s, but those have had four billion years to hit us, and most of them eventually did,” said the lecturer. “They hit so long ago that even the craters are gone, weathered away, except for the biggest and the newest. But look at the Moon!
“The comets are different.”
The lecturer’s pointer traced a parabola drawn in chalk. “Some mass way out there beyond Pluto, maybe an undiscovered planet… we even have a name for it. Persephone.
Some mass disturbs the orbits of these great snowballs, and they come down on our heads in a wake of boiling chemicals. None of them have ever had a chance to hit the Earth until they get thrown down into the inner system. One day we’ll be hit. We’d have about a year’s warning. Maybe more, if we can learn enough about Hamner-Brown.”
Then an antiseptic young woman proclaimed that she wasn’t married to her house, and was told that was why Kalva Soap had invented a new disinfectant for her toilet bowl… and Johnny Baker came smiling back into the world. “He really makes his points, doesn’t he?”
“It is well done. Did I tell you I met the man who put it together? I met Tim Hamner, too. At the same party with Harvey Randall. Hamner’s a case. Manic. He’d just discovered his comet, and he couldn’t wait to tell everyone.”
Johnny Baker sipped his drink. Then, after a long pause, he said, “Some funny rumors in the Pentagon.”
“Oh?”
“Gus called. From Downey. Seems Rockwell’s refurbishing an Apollo. And there’s some mutters about diverting one of the Titan boosters from a Big Bird to something else. Know anything?”
She sipped her drink and felt a wave of sadness. Now she knew why Johnny Baker had called yesterday. After six weeks in the Pentagon, six weeks in Washington with no attempt to see her, and then…
And I was going to surprise him. Some surprise.
“Dad’s trying to get Congress to fund a comet-study mission,” Maureen said.
“This for real?” Johnny demanded.
“It’s for real.”
“But…” His hands were shaking. His hands never shook. John Baker had flown fighters over Hanoi, and his maneuvers were always perfect. The MIGs never had a chance. And once he’d taken splinters out of his crew chief when there wasn’t time to get the medics. There was a splinter in the chief’s chest and Baker had removed it and sliced deftly to expose the artery, clamped it together with steady fingers while the chief screamed and the Cong mortars thudded onto the field, and his hands had never shaken.
But they were shaking now. “Congress won’t put up the money.”
“They might. The Russians are planning a mission. Can’t let them outdo us,” Maureen said. “Peace depends on showing them we’re still willing to compete if that’s the way they want it. And if we compete, we win.”
“I don’t care if it’s Martians we’re competing with. I’ve got to go. I’ve got to.” He drained his scotch His hands were suddenly steady.
Maureen watched in fascination. He’s stopped shaking because he’s got a mission. And I know what it is. Me. To get me to get him on that ship. A minute ago he might really have been in love with me. Not now.
“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. “We don’t have all that much time together, and I’m laying this on you. But… you had me dead to rights. My mind doesn’t turn off.” He drank deeply of his ice-diluted scotch. His attention went back to the screen, and left Maureen wondering if she’d been imagining things. Just how clever was John Baker?