by Ian Sales
Evelyn laughs. She likes the idea, there’s an irony there she says her readers will recognise. Do that, she tells Ginny, write it like that and send it me. As soon as you can. I want that story for my magazine.
Ginny puts the telephone down. She’s happy she’s sold a story, but it is bittersweet as she thought the original version good enough. No, now she thinks about it, she realises Evelyn is right—this new version is much, much better.
She returns to the lounge.
Who was that, hon? asks Walden, not looking away from the television.
Just one of the other wives, Ginny replies.
Once a month, the wives of the engineers and administrators gathered at the social club for coffee and conversation. Being confined for months on end to the spaceyard, due to its remoteness, was no fun. They all went a little stir-crazy after a time. The men had their work... but what did the women have?
So the wives put on their best dresses, congregated in a back-room at the social club, and gossiped. They oohed and ahhed over the latest fashions in their electronic magazines, and they pretended their coffees didn’t contain something a little extra.
Suzanne was looking forward to the social, just as she did every month—although perhaps more this time. Her husband, a project engineer, had been especially distant during the past few weeks. Each evening, he came home from work, and she took his portable computer and his coat from him, and put them away. He said nothing, not even a thank you, just went into his study and closed the door. And the next day, the level of liquid in the whiskey bottle he kept in there had dropped a couple of inches. His work wasn’t going well. Suzanne didn’t need to be an engineerto see that.
The first person Suzanne spotted when she entered the room at the social club was Kristin, whose husband was one of the spaceyard’s senior administrators. Suzanne was immediately taken with Kristin’s dress in rich purple, complimented her on it, and was praised in turn for her own pink, orange, gold and green paisley dress. Kristin had also dyed her hair a silvery blonde. “It’s very sophisticated, don’t you think, darling,” she told Suzanne, patting her abundant curls with one hand. “My man loves it, he says I look like a tri-dee star or something.”
Kristin could afford to boast—not only was she beautiful and wore the loveliest clothes, but her husband wielded a lot of power in the spaceyard. It wasn’t that Suzanne felt grateful for Kristin’s friendship—she liked Kristin, and knew the sentiment was returned—but sometimes she couldn’t help feeling a little resentful at Kristin so frequently calling attention to her many advantages.
They moved further into the room, greeting the other wives in their dresses of yellow and blue and red and other colors, and made their way to the table where the coffee and cakes were laid out. While Kristin poured them both drinks, Suzanne complained about her husband’s recent surliness.
“He hardly speaks to me when he gets home,” she said. “One evening, he complained his steak knife wasn’t sharp enough and went to get another from the kitchen. He couldn’t find them and flew into a terrible rage. It was awful. And do you know where the steak knives were? In the first drawer he looked in!”
“Men are always like that,” Kristin said knowingly. “We’ve been in our apartment for five years now, and my man still can’t find the electronic dishwasher.”
“And if I ask him to fetch something of mine,” Suzanne continued, “like a pair of shoes or some jewellery, he can never find them—even if I give him exact directions!”
Kristin nodded in agreement. She leaned in and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “They’re under stress, darling. It’s this project they’re working on,” she murmured. “Project Philadelphia it’s called.”
“What’s that?” Suzanne knew nothing about her husband’s work. She was aware the spaceyard built ships for the navy, for the war against the Regulans; but that was all she knew.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” said Kristin, “but…” She placed her purse on the table, slipped a small bottle of whiskey from it and added a dash of liquor to her coffee. “They’re trying to make spaceships invisible. They’ve got a destroyer ship down in a special dock, and they’ve built all this weird equipment into it. It’s supposed to make the spaceship completely invisible. He says the theory all adds up, but no matter what they do everyone can still see the spaceship.”
Kristin sipped her coffee, frowned, and added a few more drops of whiskey. “There’s even been a couple of ‘accidents’, something about a crewman getting phased into the decking or something.” She shuddered. “It all sounded very gruesome, darling.”
By this time, several of the other women had gathered round them, and soon they all had whiskey in their coffees and had been told all Kristin knew about Project Philadelphia. Some of the other wives added details to Kristin’s account, learned from their own husbands.
Of course, all this knowledge meant nothing. Suzanne couldn’t help her husband with his work, but at least she now understood the reason for his bad mood each evening. She even felt a little sympathetic. It must be difficult to work so hard on a project, only for it to repeatedly fail.
After the social had ended, Suzanne waited in the room for her husband, but he didn’t appear. He had told her he would come and fetch her. After ten minutes, she went looking for him. She checked her porta-phone but he hadn’t called her, and although she briefly considered ringing him she didn’t want to seem impatient or demanding. So she left the room and headed for the club foyer. As she passed the archway leading into the main bar, she happened to glance through it.
And there he was, standing at the bar with the spaceyard’s only female test pilot, Betty, who was still dressed in her flightsuit.
Betty turned toward Suzanne as she approached her husband and gave her a flat, hard stare. He, however, hadn’t noticed her and didn’t turn around until she stood beside him.
“Oh hi, honey,” he said. “You know Betty.”
He put his whiskey on the bar, turned and pecked his wife perfunctorily on the cheek.
“I thought you were coming to fetch me?” she asked, trying hard not to sound petulant.
“I couldn’t find you,” he replied. “I swear I looked in every damn room but I couldn’t find any of you.” He shrugged. “I figured you’d walk past the bar on the way out so I came in here to wait.”
He couldn’t have looked very hard. He needed only to find a room full of women in their best outfits, and there she would be.
“I must be going,” Betty said abruptly. She drained her tumbler, put it on the bar, nodded at Suzanne’s husband and strode from the room.
“I guess you’re ready to go too,” he said.
Suzanne smiled wanly.
Her husband finished off his whiskey and took her by the elbow.
The spaceyard lights were on night-cycle, and the stars shone brightly through the forcefield dome. Somewhere out there was Earth, too far away to be visible with the naked eye. Even the Sun was an unremarkable point of light in a heaven of stars. Suzanne shivered. She gripped one of her husband’s arms and hugged it. During the day, when the lights shone so bright they hid the emptiness of outer space on the other side of the dome, it was easy to forget the spaceyard was sited on a chunk of rock somewhere on the outer edges of the Solar System. Its exact location was, of course, a closely-guarded secret.
Suzanne’s husband put an arm about her shoulders and crushed her to him. He was humming some tune under his breath. Perhaps he’d had more than one whiskey in the bar. Or perhaps his good mood was a consequence of Betty’s presence. Suzanne wasn’t sure she liked Betty, since the test pilot never mixed with the wives and treated them with the same level of detachment as the husbands. If there was any bond there due to their shared gender, it was well hidden.
In bed that night, Suzanne’s husband was more loving than usual. He didn’t turn his back on her and go to sleep as he usually did. Suzanne tried to persuade herself it was because she’d prettied herself up for t
he social and her appearance had awoken his slumbering affections. But she suspected she was only fooling herself.
The guard had to ring ahead, and once Suzanne had been cleared, he gave her a security pass to wear. The route from the yard’s entrance to the building containing her husband’s office was clearly signposted, and she had no difficulty finding her way. The site was very secure—no one could get in unless they were supposed to. In fact, her presence drew several questioning glances from various people, but they said nothing after spotting the security pass pinned to a lapel of her lemon-yellow cardigan style jacket. And they were people she knew, friends of her husband and husbands of her friends. Inside the building, she found herself walking along a corridor lined with windows overlooking the docks, so she stopped to take in the view. Each of the docks, a rectangular pit some six hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide, was identified by large numerals painted onto the concrete before it. The spaceyard was busy: the docks were filled with spaceships in various stages of construction. She spotted a dock off to one, and wondered if that was Project Philadelphia. But the spaceship berthed within it looked no different to any of the others.
Suzanne’s husband looked up in surprise when his secretary ushered Suzanne into his office. He frowned on seeing who it was, then came around from his desk and put a concerned hand to her shoulder. “What’s up, hon?” he asked. “Is there something wrong?”
“There’s nothing wrong,” she assured him. “I’m here for the guided tour.”
He turned away and swore under his breath. Striding across to his desk, he jabbed a finger down at his intercom. “Nirmala,” he snapped. “I’m going to be out of the office for—” He glanced back over his shoulder at Suzanne, who was smiling uncertainly— “For about thirty minutes,” he said. “Maybe an hour.”
Returning to Suzanne, he added, “I don’t know why you want to see the docks. You won’t understand anything, and I’m really busy at the moment. I wish you women could have picked a better time.”
“Is it because of Project Philadelphia?” she asked.
He glanced at her sharply. “How do you know about that? It’s supposed to be top secret.”
“Kristin told me.”
“She shouldn’t know herself. But I guess that’s her husband’s problem.”
They left the office and took an elevator to a higher floor, which was obviously for senior management: the linoleum floor was now carpeted and the walls were covered in discreetly patterned wallpaper. They stopped before an imposing double-door and, after a nod at the secretary sitting behind a desk to one side, the door swung open. This was the office of Kristin’s husband, and it was three times the size of a project engineer’s, with a deep carpet, a large polished steel desk, some upholstered plastic chairs, and a wall of television screens giving views over the entire spaceyard. Standing before the desk were three men and four women. Suzanne recognised Kristin straightaway, and with her were Eniola, Layla and Aiko. Their husbands were project engineers too, and they were the only other wives who had declared an interest in a tour of the docks. Kristin’s husband had agreed to it because, she claimed, he couldn’t refuse her anything.
Kristin’s husband, who had been sitting behind the desk, rose to his feet and led the small party out of his office, into an elevator, and out of the building onto the large open area fronting the docks. There were fifteen docks arranged in three rows. To the right were workshops and hangars and that single solitary dock, and to the left storage yards and tank farms.
After being led past docks one through five, while their husbands explained the progress of each spaceship and its construction, and then back up past docks ten to six, Suzanne had to admit she was bored.
“Is that Project Washington?” Suzanne asked her husband, pointing at the spaceship in a dock to one side of the other fifteen.
“Philadelphia,” he snapped, “it’s Project Philadelphia. And yes, it is.”
“Can we have a look at that? It sounds really exciting—an invisible spaceship!”
After some discussion, Kristin’s husband decided it was permissible for the women to be shown around the Project Philadelphia spaceship. In fact, since there was no work being done on the spaceship at the moment, it was the perfect time for a tour of her interior.
She was far from prepossessing. Her sleek hull was battered and streaked, and the great round engine bells of the spacedrive were blackened and charred. The five women stood at the railing beside the entrance ramp to the spaceship and gazed, puzzled and a little fearful, at its battle-scarred bulk.
“The United Earth Space Ship Aldridge,” said Kristin’s husband. “She’s a Procyon class destroyer. Normal crew is sixteen, but we only use six for this project.”
“To make her invisible?” asked Suzanne.
“Yes, to make her invisible. I won’t explain how it works.” He gave a forced laugh. “You have to let us keep some secrets, you know.”
“Let’s go aboard,” one of the other men said.
Suzanne’s husband led the way up the ramp and through the open airlock into the UESS Aldridge. Both airlock hatches had been left open, and from the inner one a straight passage led both forward and aft. The party headed toward the bow. The interior of the destroyer was exactly how Suzanne had pictured it: grey metal decking underfoot, grey metal walls to either side, light-fittings enclosed in grey metal guards, grey metal hatches every ten feet. She felt a little silly, walking along that grey military gangway in her burgundy peplum jacket and matching skirt. All five of the women wore brightly-coloured outfits: burgundy and orange and scarlet and lilac and aquamarine. It was as if a flock of tropical birds had invaded the spaceship.
The party came to a steep staircase, a “ladder”, and the wives halted in consternation. It looked too steep to climb in high heels, but the women were reluctant to remove their shoes because they might get a run in their nylons. Since they had no choice, the wives ascended the ladder as carefully as they could.
“We should have put them in overalls,” complained one of the husbands.
The men all laughed.
At the end of the upper passage, they stepped through a hatch and onto the ship’s bridge. It was a cramped space, filled with acceleration couches and consoles, with readouts and dials and buttons and switches on every available surface. Suzanne’s husband leaned forward and flicked a set of switches on an instrument panel on the roof. There was loud thunk, causing a couple of the women to give muted shrieks, and then a horizontal line of bright light appeared at the front of the bridge. It slowly widened, dispelling the dimness, until a wide forward-looking viewport was revealed.
“Armoured shutter,” explained Suzanne’s husband.
He took her elbow and directed her further forward between two of the acceleration couches. “The pilot sits here and the astrogator here. Over there is where the sensor tech sits, and behind him is the engineer. The captain sits at the back there, and beside him is the head gunner, the torpedo man and the fireman for the space lance.”
Suzanne had to admit this tour was proving less interesting than she had expected. She only hoped it would make her husband feel more comfortable talking to her about his work, so he wouldn’t lock himself away in his study every evening. Nonetheless, she smiled and tried to appear engaged but, looking about the bridge, she saw exactly the same expression on the other wives’ faces.
Something began to make a noise outside, a strange whoop-whoop unfamiliar to Suzanne.
One of the men swore: “What the hell’s going on?”
Kristin’s husband pulled a porta-phone out of his pocket and spoke quickly into it. “There’s a fire in workshop thirty-two,” he informed the other men.
“That’s right next to tank farm fourteen!” exclaimed Eniola’s husband.
“If that goes, we lose half the stores,” Layla’s husband pointed out.
The men pushed their way to the bridge hatch.
“What about us?” asked Kristin.
> “Stay here,” ordered her husband. “Don’t touch anything. I’ll send someone to come and fetch you.”
The men hurried off the bridge.
Kristin shrugged theatrically. “Well, ladies,” she said, “so much for that. I guess we ought to make our way back to the main door, or whatever it’s called.”
“Oops,” said Aiko.
Something began to thrum deep in the spaceship. The deck began to vibrate and a smell of ozone filled the bridge.
“Oh my God!” said Kristin. “What have you done, darling?”
“I didn’t see the button,” Aiko protested. “Look, it’s not even supposed to be here, it’s like it’s just stuck on or something.”
They all started bickering. Kristin was blocking the exit from the bridge, and Suzanne wanted to leave the spaceship. She didn’t like it in here—even with the window uncovered, there were too many dark corners. Layla complained there was oil on her lilac skirt and she’d never get it clean. Eniola was scared of whatever it was Aiko had switched on—out of fear of what the spaceship might do or what her husband might do Suzanne could not tell. Aiko was adamant it wasn’t her fault—whatever it was—and Kristin was determined they stay where their husbands had left them.
Aiko and Kristin snapping at each other started to annoy Suzanne, so she made her way to the front of the bridge, hoping she might see the men returning through the window. She thought about sitting in one the acceleration couches, but it would mean clambering over the armrest and she couldn’t do that in her skirt and heels. She could see some figures strolling toward the dock. As they drew closer, she recognised her husband. And with him were the husbands of the other women.
As the men reached the dock, they stumbled to a halt and gazed up at the spaceship. They looked this way and that, some put their hands to their brow to shade their eyes. One of them pointed along the length of the dock at something, and suddenly they were slapping each other on the back, shaking hands and looking very pleased with themselves.