“The police were doing a fine job containing it.” I sighed, remembering the gossip I’d heard in the laundry room. “Although … it sounds like our favorite market got hit. Poor Mr. Yoder is Amish, and I think he had to just stand there and let them take stuff.”
“Oof. Well, come out here and we’ll pamper you. You need it, eh?”
There was a consciousness in the way he said it that made me purse my lips and stare at my husband. What, exactly, had he said to Hershel before I came into the apartment? To ask Hershel would be to invite him to discuss my well-being, and that was not something I wanted to do. Not now, at any rate. Maybe when I was out there, if there was time around the festivities. Maybe. “Listen, I should probably go. Nathaniel is about to wrinkle all the laundry.”
“Give him my best, huh?”
“Likewise. Same to Doris and the kids.” When I hung up the phone, I stayed on the sofa for another moment, with my hand still on the receiver. “Did you call Hershel?”
Nathaniel straightened, lowering my underwear. It might have been funny, if his face hadn’t been so serious. “Yes.”
“Did you tell him?”
“No.” He set the underwear down on the dresser and faced me. “I didn’t. I did say that you’d been working too hard.”
“Don’t.” I got to my feet and crossed to the laundry bag. The clothes inside were still warm from the dryer as I pulled them out. “I know you mean well, but don’t.”
* * *
I didn’t work all the launches. I was on the Maroon Team, which rotated in every third launch. Even there, we were further divided into shifts, which rotated to try to minimize exhaustion, because all stations had to be staffed the entire time astronauts were up.
Sometimes, though, even when you weren’t scheduled, you wanted to be there. We’d sent an unmanned launch up three days ago that Basira and the Green Team had control of, so Helen and I should have had the night off. We did, in fact. But this was the flight that was going to circle the moon.
At five o’clock, Helen came over to my desk and put her purse down on Basira’s empty half. It clunked as she set it down, seeming abnormally heavy for a cloth purse.
Putting a finger by the last row of numbers I’d been double-checking, I stared at the bag. The cloth seemed to contain a faint outline of a bottle. “Nice bag.”
“Refreshments.” Helen grinned and patted it. “You’re staying, right?”
I nodded and wrote a dash in the margin so I’d know where to start up again tomorrow. “Yes. If for no other reason than that it’s the only way I’ll get to see Nathaniel.”
“He could take a night off.”
“Ha. You’ve met my husband, right?”
“Not good if he burn out.” She drummed her fingers on the desk. “What do you think it will look like?”
I shrugged and stacked my papers. Around us, the other women were wrapping up their work for the day, pages rustling as they slid reports into their drawers. “Gray? I mean … there’s never been a hint of color in the telescope images. And we won’t have really clear images until the rocket gets back.”
“They are still pictures from the moon.”
Grinning, I pushed back from my desk and stood. “I admit that I’d probably stay, even without Nathaniel.” It was an amazing thing we were doing. We’d managed to program a rocket so that it could do a giant orbit around the moon without a pilot. We hoped.
It was different from what we’d be doing later when we sent men to orbit the moon. This didn’t involve needing to transfer in and out of orbit, though, because we’d just set up a highly elliptic orbit with the apogee on the far side of the moon. That math was fairly straightforward.
I followed Helen out of the room and joined the tide of IAC employees headed for Mission Control. We wouldn’t all fit in, of course, but there was a viewing room, and then, for those of us with the keys, a second control room.
Someday we’d have two missions in space at the same time, so they’d built two duplicates of Mission Control. One of them was in use training the next flight crew, but one was, in theory, empty. Or, at least, not in official use.
Helen and I peeled off from the main throng and headed to the stairs that led up to the other control center.
“Hey! Wait up.” Behind us, Eugene and Myrtle Lindholm slipped through the door and into the echoing cement block stairwell.
“Eugene!” I grinned down at them. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“The way Myrtle has been going on about this? If I missed the first fly-by, we’d have nothing to talk about.”
“I must learn her bargaining techniques.”
Eugene overtook Helen and me on the stairs with no problem. “She doesn’t so much bargain as deliver ultimatums.”
“Don’t listen to him.”
“See!” With a laugh, Eugene turned to look at me as we proceeded up the stairs. “What do you think we’ll see? Myrtle thinks it will only be gray.”
“She’s probably right. The pictures are only getting scanned at a resolution of one thousand horizontal lines, and because we’re so far, the transmission is at a slow-scan television rate…” I trailed off. “I just started talking jargon, didn’t I?”
“Mm-hm. But it’s close enough to what we’ve been doing over in comm, so I’ve got a decent idea. It’ll be fuzzy?”
“Yep. But we should get better images as the probe swings back toward Earth.”
We reached the top of the stairs and Eugene opened the door. “Speaking of … how’s Nathaniel?”
Raising an eyebrow, I nodded at Eugene to thank him as I walked through the door. “He’s going to love being called a probe.”
Eugene laughed. “You know what I mean. Is he still as cranky about the IBMs?”
“According to him, they are an abomination, and he won’t consider any manned lunar mission that doesn’t include human computers.” Which was fine by me, as it increased my chances that they’d have to include a woman. Not that men couldn’t do math; it’s just that most of them went into engineering instead of computing. The world of numbers on paper didn’t seem to have the same appeal as the hardware and explosives of rocketry. Their loss.
There were people in this hall, too, but not as many. Most of them were from the Green Team. There were a few astronauts, though. Derek Benkoski and Halim “Hotdog” Malouf were leaning over a console, chatting with Parker. Mrs. Rogers was with another knot of people standing near the large display that would show the images from the probe as they came in.
“Where do you think we should watch?” Helen stood on her toes, trying to see over the crowd.
I scanned the room and spotted some empty chairs near what would normally have been the flight surgeon’s desk. Steering our group over there, it was hard to keep my eyes off the big dark screen. This would get us one step closer to the moon. After this, they’d pick a landing site, and then … then someone would go to the moon. “Helen, I’m suddenly delighted that you brought ‘refreshments. ’”
“That sounds promising.” Eugene grinned down at her. “Running into you all was definitely the right choice.”
Helen patted her bag. “Better than watching baseball.”
At the surgeon’s station, she pulled out some paper cups and a mason jar filled with her homemade blackberry wine. It was an unctuous beverage, but there were days when sweet and strong were exactly what you needed. Then Helen pulled out some soda water. “Found cocktail recipe.”
“Good lord.” Eugene leaned forward to peer into her bag. “Do you have an entire bar in there?”
“No ice.” She frowned at the two liquids. “Not cold, though.”
“Don’t need it cold.” Myrtle picked up two cups and held them so Helen could pour. “Just need it strong.”
I laughed and took the cup. The bubbles lifted a scent that held the memory of summer warmth. When Helen had hers filled, I lifted mine. “To the moon.”
“To the moon—and beyond.” Eugene tapped his cup with ours.
The sparkling water cut back some of the cloying sweetness and brightened the dark fruit. “Say. This isn’t bad.”
“Bad before?” Helen narrowed her eyes and gave me one of her patented tsks.
Drawn by the promise of alcohol, a couple of engineers drifted over, including Reynard Carmouche. I was a little afraid that he was going to bring Parker with him, but fortunately he was more interested in staying with the other astronauts.
Someone had brought gin, and of course that meant we had to experiment with other cocktail variations. For science. Chemistry is a very important part of rocketry.
Holding a gin and blackberry “bramble,” Helen leaned in to bump me with her shoulder. “Betty asked about you.”
“That’s nice.” Which is Southern for “fuck that.” “Did I tell you we’re going to California for my nephew’s bar mitzvah?”
“She meant well. And she’s sorry.”
All of the “she meant well” in the world would not make up for that betrayal. “I think I’ve even talked Nathaniel into taking a vacation. Can you imagine? He’ll probably sit on the beach with a report on orbital insertion.”
“Maybe you could at least come back to the 99s?”
“Hey!” A voice from the front of the crowd cut through the murmur of conversation. “It’s starting.”
I rose onto my toes to see over the heads of the other folks, using the motion as an excuse to step away from Helen, who really did mean well. Betty had just been interested in breaking into Life magazine, which that visit had done for her. Bless her heart.
But none of that mattered today. Today was all about the moon. I took another sip of the sparkling blackberry concoction and let the excitement of the group pervade me. This kind of group I didn’t mind. It was just being the center of attention that distressed me.
The room quieted, and we began to hear the voices of the people in the main control room. It was like being at a launch run by ghosts. It was weird being on the outside of the main Mission Control. I was so used to being in that room and doing the math. I closed my eyes for a moment and listened for Nathaniel’s voice among the others.
Beside me, Myrtle inhaled sharply. “What is that?”
I opened my eyes. There, on screen, the first grainy images had appeared. It took me a moment to make sense of the grays and blacks flickering on the screen.
Over the loudspeaker, Nathaniel’s voice resonated through the room. “What you’re seeing, ladies and gentlemen, has been rendered in ones and zeroes, transmitted through the depths of space, then translated back into an image. This is the surface of the moon.”
And, like a magic trick, I could see the curve of the horizon.
Joy erupted out of me in a cheer. Around me, people jumped into the air like we’d won a race. I guess we had, or at least the first heat of it. I raised my glass to the success of the Friendship probe and the team who had planned the mission.
Malouf raised his hands in triumph. Mrs. Rogers danced like a girl. Parker punched the air with a hoot. Eugene lifted Myrtle off the ground, spinning her around in a hug. And I laughed and laughed.
“Me next!” Helen punched Eugene’s arm and he chuckled.
Eugene picked Helen up and spun her around and around. I stared at the screen, grinning so hard my cheeks hurt. The moon. Someday. Someday, I would go there. Someday, I would walk on the moon.
* * *
Funny how seeing your goal made manifest can change things. When we started to get the higher-resolution images in, the stark beauty of the moon became even more real. Yes, it was forbidding, but there was also a majesty to the austere landscape.
I think everyone at the IAC felt a renewed energy for the project. I put my head down and buried it in calculations. But there was another thought that kept running through my mind.
It turned out that Bubbles’s figures were correct. The change in interior structure of the fuel core made it significantly more stable, which in turn allowed it to generate more thrust. With that, we’d be able to increase our payloads by a good 23.5 percent, which would drastically reduce the number of launches needed for the moon base.
Nathaniel was working on a new scenario with those numbers. It was complex enough that he was running our calculations through the IBM, no matter how much he hated it. The program would take hours to run and he liked to babysit the machine, even when Basira, its actual programmer, was there. It’s not like he could fix anything if a punch card failed to feed or something, but … men.
“So … I got another invitation to go on Mr. Wizard.” I fiddled with the edge of a discarded punch card I’d pulled out of the trash. When you stacked a couple of them together, the holes from the punch cards let specks of light through and almost sparkled.
“Is that so?” Nathaniel looked up from the abstract he was reading. “Have you responded?”
I shook my head.
“I haven’t been to Chicago in a while.” He shifted in his chair. “Maybe we could take a vacation?”
“You keep using that word. It wouldn’t be a vacation if I were working.”
“Well, a vacation for me, then.”
Smiling, I tore the edges of the card into little strips. With the notched corner of the card, the strips almost looked like feathers on a wing. “I haven’t said yes.”
“Whatever you decide, I’ll support you. No matter what.”
“I know.”
He meant it to be supportive, I know he did. But it put the decision squarely on me. Either I would cause strife at work if I continued fighting for women’s inclusion in the space program, or I would disappoint Nathaniel. Oh, he would never say that, but if he was proud of my success, then it followed that he would be disappointed if I quit.
I know. I know that’s not a logical progression. I do. I just …
Basira sat on the other side of the room, oblivious to our conversation, as the compiler rattled. The cards ran through the feeder with a thwick, thwick, thwick as each hit the metal guard. I pulled out another card from the trash and flipped it so the notch mirrored the first one. Wings. That was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? Wings and flight and space, and I wanted to go into space in ways that did not make sense, even to me.
I had a life I should be content with. And I was. I liked being Mrs. Nathaniel York. If I turned down Mr. Wizard and the interviews and the invitations to dinner parties, then I could go back to concentrating on my husband and my job. I loved both, and … and I could do more.
Was I really going to be content running calculations for someone else’s ideas? It would remove the immediate stress, true, and leave … what?
I curled the leading edge of the “wings” and held them together so they cupped the air in tandem. Paper planes might be a good project for Mr. Wizard. I could show Rita how to make a wind tunnel. Oh.
I lowered the wings, light peeking through the hole punches in little sparkles.
Oh. I had been thinking about who I would disappoint— What would people think? —but I knew the answer to that. The little girl on the show. The Girl Scouts in their tinfoil helmets. The crayon letter writers. My niece.
What would people think?
Those little girls thought I could do anything. They thought that women could go to the moon. And because of that, they thought that they could go to the moon, too. They were why I needed to continue, because when I was their age, I needed someone like me. A woman like me.
“I’m going to say yes.”
Nathaniel nodded, watching me. “I’ll come with you.”
“There’s a launch that week.”
“It’s a supply launch with construction material for the orbiting platform, and unmanned. The team is solid, and I won’t be needed for any press conferences.” He stood up, and even though Basira was right there, he came over and kissed me.
“Nathaniel! What will Basira think?”
“She’ll think that I love you, and she’d be right.”
TWENTY-ONE
; ROCKET GROUP TOLD OF RUSSIAN RESPECT
Special to The National Times.
PRINCETON, N.J., Dec. 3, 1956—The International Aerospace Coalition was told today that the “tremendous admiration the people of Russia hold for IAC scientific and technical advances” was a key to future understanding and cooperation between Russia and the IAC.
I flew us into Chicago a day early, and Nathaniel did his level best to keep me well and thoroughly occupied until I went to the studio. As much as I’d been wanting him to delegate some of his work, it was odd knowing that there was a launch happening without him. I never thought we would hit a point where rocket launches were routine, but when you have one or two a month, your views change.
“How about a boat tour?” I stopped by a sign for the Mercury SceniCruiser as we crossed over the Michigan Avenue Bridge.
“That sounds … chilly.” Nathaniel had given up fighting the wind blowing off the lake and carried his hat in one hand. His ears had turned pink with the chill.
He was probably right. The wind had been brutal, but in the rare moments when it wasn’t blowing, the sun was actually fairly warm, and this was December.
The winter might finally be breaking. Of course, then summer would come and never leave. I peered down the stairs toward a boat docked on a walkway right next to the river. “Looks like they have an interior cabin. Come on. It’ll be fun.”
“And the fact that it won’t have a pay phone has nothing to do with your interest.”
I tucked my arm into his. “The fact that its lack of a phone is the first thing you thought of is rather telling, don’t you think?”
He laughed and turned us to the stairs. “Busted. Sorry. Really. I am trying not to think about work.”
“I know…” I patted his arm as we started down to the river. I’d already caught him on two different pay phones today. “We can go back to the hotel, if you’d rather.”
Shaking his head, he sighed. “They’re fine. I’m disrupting things every time I call.”
“It’s so touching when they grow up.”
The wind wasn’t so bad when we got below street level. There were some tourists, mostly folks with kids, but not too many given that it was a Tuesday. We only had to wait behind one couple for tickets. As the gentleman talked to the young man in the ticket booth, his wife turned to smile at us, in that way you sometimes do with strangers in a line.
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