'You can feel things, Charley. Things the rest of us can only guess at. Don't tell me you can't feel that too.' She wasn't listening, he guessed. She was holding tight on to the arms of her wheelchair, eyes closed, face taut with pain.
'I need my medication. They're on the desk.'
'Right.' He nodded. 'What kind of pills might they be?'
She stared at him. 'You'll give it to me? Is that meant to be some kind of a deal?'
He shrugged. 'No. You know me. I hate deals.' Then he walked over to the desk.
'Michael?' Helen said, a taut note of concern in her voice.
'You heard. She needs her pills.' He handed her the bottle without looking at it. She took it, opened the cap with shaking hands, poured several capsules into the palm of her hand.
'Thanks. You always were a good guy, Michael. That's why people take advantage of you.' She looked at the pile of capsules, took a deep breath, put them in her mouth, then swallowed hard. He watched her struggling, took a bottle of mineral water from a desk nearby, gave it to her to drink.
'Michael,' Helen said, voice rising from the monitor.
'Thanks.' Charley was looking at him, her face full of pain, so much older than he remembered. 'You can't get it, you know.'
'What's that?'
'The password. I'm not so stupid that I'd leave it open to some dumb number-juggling app like that. You're wasting your time. That's why she's squawking at you. Don't you know that?'
'Hey' — he shrugged — 1 kind of guessed. It was worth a try, though. We're desperate, Charley. What do you expect me to do?'
'I told you. Think about what comes after.'
'Sorry. That's the kind of crap that got us here in the first place. "Catch a falling star…"'
' "And put it in your pocket…"' Charley said, a lazy, drunken smile on her face.
'Annie?' She looked at Lieberman with old, tired eyes.
'You did well but I don't need you any more. Take Irwin off-line, will you?'
'You mean,' she asked, puzzled, 'cut them off?'
'Yeah. Just from the line to the satellite. I still want them to be able to talk to us.'
'Okay,' Annie replied, and hit the keyboard.
'Michael!' Helen's voice sounded shrill and piercing from the tinny speaker.
'Don't fret,' he said, and sat down next to Annie at the adjoining PC.
'What's going on?' Schulz asked nervously.
Lieberman looked at their pale, exhausted faces. 'Are you having any luck?'
'I don't think so,' Helen admitted.
'I thought not. Annie?' She was calm, but he knew what she wanted.
'Your mom will be proud of you. You go to her now.'
It had been a long time since he'd punched these particular keys in anger. He kept getting things wrong. And it was years since he'd designed those big solar wings now hanging over the world.
'What are you doing?' Charley asked, her voice a blurred smear.
'Remember. Lone Wolf around 1982. You were there. You recall that too?'
'No,' she drawled, a line of taut anxiety behind the slurred voice.
'But you do. And you know something? Maybe there is some kind of god around. Because yesterday, and I didn't even know it at the time, something came back from that time, and I didn't even know it until right now.'
Sitting by the sea at Half Moon Bay, on a warm July afternoon, the two of them happy (this was when they were just friends, colleagues), full of the confidence and optimism of youth. Shading their eyes and looking up at the sun, thinking how they could help everyone by putting a piece of silicon and metal in the sky to leach a little of its power and make the world whole.
'What do you recall of that time?' he asked absentmindedly, working at the keys.
'Naivete. Dumbness,' she said.
'Yeah,' he muttered. In his mind's eye he was back with their old selves then; he could see them, bright-eyed and full of enthusiasm, arguing about the right lock to put on the system, the mot juste that would keep it safe from prying eyes.
He turned and looked at Charley. 'You remember.'
'I don't know what you're talking about,' she answered, some dim form of fury behind the statement.
He looked at the screen and it was like peering at a past picture from his life. All Schulz's stuff was state-of-the-art visuals, like a video game made for the military. But back in the eighties, when he and Charley had been putting the satellite together, the original one, it was just command-line material, string upon string of impenetrable, inconvenient codes that brought forth impenetrable, inconvenient responses. It amazed him the way they still lived inside his head.
'What are you doing?' Charley said icily.
'The right thing,' he said, and watched the screen clear, throw up one single question: password?
It was a playful argument on the beach that day, one that amused them at the time, trying to find a lock for the bold, brash scheme that would give mankind a nice little push into space. And they both came up with the answer, kept it secret between the two of them, knowing that there was nothing more apposite under the circumstances.
He typed in the word: phaeton. And closed his eyes.
Dumb kid, hapless kid, stupid kid, he thought. But, hey. The moron was a trier.
Charley had used something to lock this new system up, and even though the situation wasn't the same, was full of black poisonous toys they had never envisaged back then, it was still appropriate.
'It heard you,' Schulz squeaked out of the monitor, sounding like a teenager. 'I saw the screen. Dammit, Michael. It heard you!'
'Yeah,' he answered softly, and wondered why there was something like shame hanging around the back of his head just then. Some of the old Charley was still there, he guessed. It made her lock this new, bright, fiery Sundog with the same key they used on the old one, the good one, as if it were some kind of incantation, full of a deep, mysterious power.
'I can take it from here,' Schulz said. 'Just plug me back in.'
'I know that.' Lieberman wasn't looking at anything but the screen. 'But this is my baby, Irwin. Mine to play with.' He was typing furiously now, astonished by how much came back to him.
'Michael,' Helen said very firmly, 'what are you doing?'
'I remembered, yesterday. Out of nowhere. Or maybe out of somewhere. I wouldn't care to guess. What do you think, Charley?' He turned to look at her and it was like staring at someone on the point of death. Her face was grey and lifeless; her eyes had lost that bright Charley spark.
'Don't, Michael'
Lights started to move on the monitor. Familiar windows began to appear.
'We can take it from here,' Schulz repeated.
'I heard you the first time. Like I said: This is my baby. You just get that damn helicopter here.'
He looked at Charley. Her head was in her hands. 'Correction. Our baby.'
Schulz watched what was happening on the screen and said, 'Michael, no…'
From somewhere, Helen was yelling, loud, angry, and more than a little scared.
In under thirty seconds it was done. He watched the confirmation codes come through. Then he walked behind the desk, found the power cables, ripped them out of the wall, relished the dying hum of the hard drives spinning down into stillness, the silence that was descending on the room.
'You didn't listen,' Charley said, her eyes almost closed now. 'The god's not out there. It's inside us. Inside everything. The earth most of all.'
'Didn't I?'
'No,' she said drowsily, eyes half-closed, some softness in her voice that reminded him of the old Charley. 'And no devils, Michael, you never did understand that. There are no devils. Only the ones we make ourselves. We make our own crosses. We hammer in the nails.'
'Yeah,' he muttered, looking at the distant shape of Annie, who was now out in the yard with the pilot, both of them crouched over the still, small figure on the ground. 'I wouldn't argue with that.'