The Calculating Stars

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  “Throttle gate is engaged. Okay … let’s disconnect air.” He lifted his hands over his head. “Hands clear?”

  “My hands are clear.”

  They were clear of all instruments and, somewhat remarkably, not shaking. All of my nerves seemed to be vibrating, but it didn’t show in my hands. Jets are infinitely easier than crowds, and much, much more alluring.

  When the ground crew pulled the hose away from the engine, Parker resumed his litany. “Battery switch checks out. Good start.”

  We went through the pre-taxi checks and nav checks with the same call-and-response. Then we got to “Time to pull the canopy and seat pins.”

  “Canopy and seat pins pulled.” The bright orange plastic came out easily. I lifted them both over my head to demonstrate that I’d done it before stowing them in the pocket by my left knee.

  “Chocks clear.” Outside, the crew followed his hand signals.

  We began to taxi.

  A plane on the ground is an ungainly thing. It jostled me against my shoulder straps, but I followed along with Parker as we went through the rest of the nav and comm checklists during taxi.

  “Arms clear.” He lowered the canopies and cut off the breeze from the outside.

  My God. Even in the rear seat, the plane had such a wide field of vision. What must it have been like in front?

  The tower came across our radio. “Talon One One, Tower. You are cleared for takeoff.”

  Parker’s helmet turned a little, as if he could look over his shoulder to see me. “You ready?”

  “Confirmed, ready.”

  He nodded and replied to the tower. “Talon One One. Cleared for takeoff.”

  Parker brought the jet up to full military power and lit the afterburner. The jet jolted like someone had kicked me in the pants. He released the brakes and popped the burners.

  The engine whine rose in pitch as the jet rolled forward, forcing me back into my seat. It wasn’t like a prop plane, where the force is almost gentle. This thundered through me, dragging my back into the seat.

  She lifted off the runway so smoothly, I almost clapped as the ground fell away. But this was a training flight, not a tourist ride, so my delight stayed inside.

  I watched the gauges and the world outside. It was like the air had become liquid and flowed around us. How can you feel heavy and light at the same time? The G-force of takeoff pressed me into my seat, but the air held me up.

  God. This was a beautiful plane. My love for it probably broke all the rules about worshipping graven images.

  “York.” Parker banked to the south and pressed me farther into my seat.

  “Sir?” He wasn’t going to offer to let me take the stick, was he? Not yet.

  “I … have a problem and I need a favor.”

  “Come again?”

  “You heard me.” The asshole Parker returned for a moment and then he sighed. There’s an intimacy to the sound of another pilot in your ear. “Look … Look. You and Malouf are the only two who know about the thing with my leg.”

  “I…” Where was this going? “I haven’t told anyone.”

  “I know.” He sighed again. “Thank you.”

  “What…” Everything about this conversation confused me. He couldn’t have said this on the ground? For that matter, why hadn’t Malouf reported him? “May I ask what’s going on?”

  Above the canopy, the clouds sank toward us, changing from a featureless expanse of silver gray to crenellations of cotton. Parker took us up into them and the wisps brushed past, feathering away as we ripped through.

  The jet punched out of the upper level of clouds into blue sky.

  “God.”

  It was not profanity. It had been so long since I had seen clear blue … It ached, that blue. The unobscured sun flared across the clouds and brought tears to my eyes, even with my visor.

  “Yeah…” Parker sighed again. “This? This is amazing, but space … I need to see a doctor. My leg goes pins and needles and then randomly, just stops working. They’ll ground me if they even suspect something is wrong.”

  “So go to a doctor who’s not a flight surgeon.”

  Parker gave the bitterest laugh I’d heard from him. “You think I haven’t tried. I’m the first man into space. I can’t go anywhere without reporters following me. I can’t sneeze, I can’t play ball with my sons, I can’t even visit my—”

  He stopped talking, leaving only the hiss of oxygen, the sound of my own breathing, and the rush of air around us.

  “Can’t visit your…?”

  “Can’t visit my doctor.” Pretty sure that hadn’t been what he was going to say. “If I certify you on the T-38, will you let me use the flights to mask my visits to a doctor?”

  I asked questions to buy time. “How will that work, exactly? I mean … you’re not going to let me go up on my own.”

  “No. But there’s a clinic. We land near it. I go in. I come back out. We keep flying.”

  “Just the T-38? You’re not offering me a seat on a rocket?”

  “Can’t.” His helmet turned as if he wanted to look back at me. “I get some say in that, but not the final word. If I did, gotta be honest, there wouldn’t be any women in the program at all. Not yet.”

  “You know I’ve logged more flight hours than you, right?”

  “Yes. And I know about the Messerschmitts and the target practice and all the other things you WASPs did. None of that matches what a test pilot does, and it sure as hell doesn’t match what we do up there.”

  “Well, we can’t know that, can we? Besides, how hard can it be if you can do it with a bum leg?”

  He put the plane into a roll, as if that proved some sort of point.

  I laughed—giggled, really. “Sorry—wait. I wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just—the plane is beautiful.”

  “She really is.” He leveled the T-38 out and left us nearly floating in our seats. “So will you do it?”

  “You still hate me?”

  “Yep.” He sighed again, which was such an odd sound coming from him. It was as if he had to let his ego leak out before he could keep talking. “But I acknowledge that you will keep your word and are principled.”

  “And you aren’t worried that those principles will lead me to report you?”

  “I am.”

  “The problem is that you’re asking me to risk lives and jeopardize the program.”

  “I’ve kept myself off crew lists. But there’s a difference between deferring missions and being grounded.”

  “And now they want you to go to the moon.” The thing that was tempting about his proposition wasn’t the T-38. It was the chance to finally be in his good graces, even if he resented me for it. I don’t know. Maybe before I’d been in the program, I would have been able to take him up on the deal … but now? Now I knew exactly how fit you had to be as an astronaut. To say nothing of what would happen if I got caught colluding. “I won’t tell anyone, but … I’m sorry. I can’t help you hide it.”

  The air hissed past in our silence.

  “Well … you’re honest, I’ll give you that. Okay.” Parker’s head dipped forward and then lifted. “I know about the Miltown.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  HURRICANE DATA SOUGHT

  3 UN Planes Detailed for Research Work

  PARIS, Nov. 3, 1957—Three United Nations planes will be detailed for special hurricane research work next summer and fall, officials said today. The United States Air Force will supply the United Nations with two B-50 Superforts and a B-47 Stratojet for the project. They will fly the Atlantic, Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico as part of an ongoing effort to understand how weather patterns have shifted since the Meteor strike in 1952.

  How do you tell your husband that you’re being blackmailed? Over dinner? “Say, sweetie, a funny thing happened to me today. Pass the salad?”

  Maybe in bed, while distracting him with sex?

  Or you could just blurt it out while brushing your teeth.

 
; “Parker’s trying to blackmail me.”

  Nathaniel pulled the floss out of his mouth and turned. “What?”

  “He knows about the Miltown and wants my help with something.”

  “What.” Same word. Totally different meaning. His hands were clenched so tightly around the floss that it cut into the sides of his fingers, turning them dead white.

  I swallowed, and the minty freshness made my stomach turn over in sour knots. I drew a full breath that burned cold. The knot of anxiety in my chest would have sent me reaching for a Miltown, but not now. Damn Parker.

  “You can’t tell anyone.” This is why I hadn’t told him at work. If I had, he would have stormed into Clemons’s office and made demands about Parker’s attempts at blackmail.

  “Clemons has to know.” The tips of his fingers, past the floss, had begun to go purple.

  Setting my toothbrush in the holder, I sighed. “Let’s sit down.”

  Nathaniel looked down and blinked at the floss. He uncurled it, flexing his fingers, and dropped it into the waste bin. “Okay.”

  By the time we got to the sofa, trembles shook my arms and sweat coated my back. I swallowed and stared at my hands, which I held in a relaxed and ladylike posture on my lap. Mama would be so proud. “If you tell anyone, then Clemons will know about the Miltown and my anxiety and the vomiting, and then what will he think? That I’m fit to go into space? That I’m even fit for the program? He already thinks I’m a publicity stunt.”

  “Who told you that?” The sofa creaked as he leaned forward. “Parker.”

  I nodded.

  Nathaniel pushed himself off the sofa and paced to the Murphy bed and back. He stopped in front of the coffee table, legs spread and hands on his hips. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Promise me that you won’t tell anyone.” Tendons jumped under the skin on the backs of my hands, but I didn’t clench them into fists. “Or do anything.”

  His body stayed rigidly still, but he turned to stare out the window at the lights of Kansas City. “I can promise you that I will talk with you before doing anything. I can’t promise to do nothing, because that is a promise I won’t keep.”

  I rubbed my thumb on one of the muscles that kept twitching. Why I bothered, I don’t know, since my entire body was trembling with stress. “He’s been having trouble with his left leg. Pins and needles, he says. A couple of months ago, I caught him in the stairwell and he couldn’t stand. Asked me not to tell. Later, it looked like it had gone away, so I thought it was temporary.”

  And it had felt safer to keep waiting for someone else to see his symptoms. I could chalk my silence up to prudence or compassion, but it had been largely fear.

  Drawing another breath, I told Nathaniel about the flight, and the request, and then the demand. “He took me with him to the clinic. I think he didn’t want me out of his sight.”

  “Into the examining room?” Nathaniel’s voice cracked.

  “No—no. Just the lobby.” There had been a phone at the nurse’s station, and I’d nearly called Nathaniel from there. Thank God I hadn’t. “When Parker came out, he was green. And he stopped in the bathroom to throw up.”

  The problem with small clinics is that the walls are thin. I am all too familiar with the sound of retching.

  “After another five minutes, he came out. He was pale, but not green, and he’d put his aviators on.”

  I had some guesses about why he was wearing sunglasses inside. My eyes always got red after a bout of vomiting.

  Nathaniel grunted. “So the news is bad. Did he tell you what?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t ask. I let him pretend that everything was fine.”

  “That was kinder than he deserved.”

  I shook my head. “I just didn’t want to feel sorry for him.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He let me have the controls of the T-38 on the way back. I guess it was a reward or something.” My fingers had gone to ice. How could I be sweating and cold at the same time? “So … that’s it. Back at the IAC, it was like nothing had happened.”

  Nathaniel grunted again and turned back to pacing. He’s tall, my husband, and our apartment doesn’t give him a lot of ground to cover. With the Murphy bed down, he had even less. He finally stopped in front of the window, staring out. “I could … I could force the issue. With the Sirius coming online, the G-forces of takeoff are going to be harsher than with the Jupiter. I could insist on physicals for all the astronauts.”

  “He would see through that.”

  “I’m not going to have him jeopardize the program, or the people in it, for the sake of his ego.”

  Or for mine, for that matter. Nathaniel didn’t say it, but here we came to the problem. I didn’t want anyone to know that I had anxiety. While some of that was fear that they wouldn’t let me go into space, the rest of it was the same old concern. What would people think? And then, beneath that, the fear that they were right. “He’s been deferring missions while he tried to figure out what was going on.”

  “But now there’s the moon.” The streetlights lit his hair into a corona. “You really think he’s going to defer that?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. I’ll have to get rid of the pills, that’s for certain. And stop seeing the doctor. The more time between my last refill and when Parker outs me, the better. He will, though … Not immediately, because if he did, I would have no reason to keep silent.”

  Nathaniel’s head snapped back to me. “That seems like a very bad idea.”

  “What else am I supposed to do?” I spread my hands, but my fingers were shaking, so I rested them in my lap again. “He knows. I don’t know how, but he does.”

  With a grunt, Nathaniel turned to pace again. “The driver—that night we stayed in a hotel because of the reporters, I sent a driver to pick up our clothes and your prescription.”

  So it wasn’t just Parker who knew. How long—how long before everyone knew and I got booted from the program and it went into the papers and—

  My stomach lurched and twisted in time with my thoughts. I staggered to my feet and barely made it to the bathroom before losing it. Huddled on the bathroom tiles, I clutched the toilet and retched. Nathaniel came in behind me and held my shoulders as all of the accumulated anxiety of the day heaved out of me.

  And I hated myself. Daddy would have been so disappointed in me, unable to handle a little pressure. If I couldn’t handle this, maybe I shouldn’t be in the space program. I was stupid and weak, and it didn’t matter how hard I worked: this sickness would always be a part of me.

  Nathaniel filled the tumbler from the bathroom sink with water and held it out to me. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  “How will you stop him?” My throat hurt as I spoke, but I took the water and swallowed.

  “I don’t know.” He ran a hand over my hair and down my back. “Not all of it, at any rate.”

  “I don’t even know part of it.” I rocked back to sit on the floor, leaning against the side of the tub.

  Nathaniel stood and opened the medicine cabinet.

  “No.” My fingers tightened around the tumbler.

  Ignoring me, Nathaniel pulled out the bottle of Miltown and crouched in front of me. “Elma … is this better? Throwing up and being miserable? Is that better than whatever it is Parker could do to you?”

  “I don’t—” My voice fractured on the pain in my throat. “I don’t know.”

  “Then let me tell you what I see.” Nathaniel shifted to squeeze in next to me against the tub. He put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me against him, the pill bottle in one hand.

  “Okay.”

  “You’re better. With this. I was so—so worried about you before…” He shook the bottle so the pills rattled inside it. “Before this. I could hear when you threw up. You’d stopped eating. We went to bed together, but you didn’t sleep. And you weren’t talking to me about any of it. I thought you might be pregnant, until
… that day. In my office. I was really frightened for you. And right now? The idea that Parker might put you through that, deliberately, because he’s made you afraid to use a tool that helps—I would like to punch him.”

  That last sentence was so matter-of-fact that a laugh surprised its way out of me. Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I looked up at Nathaniel, but his eyes were squeezed shut, a crease carved between his brows. “You … you aren’t kidding.”

  He let his breath out in a controlled stream. “No.” Rolling the bottle in his fingers, he shook his head. “I have never had such a strong urge for violence. If I had been there, I probably would have punched him. And then he would have beaten the tar out of me.”

  With each revolution of the bottle, the little white pills inside rattled and shifted. Their tiny clatter promised a blanket of soothing calm. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Do you think the pressure is going to get any lighter?”

  Sighing, I folded in on myself, and sagged against Nathaniel. He pulled me tight, pressing his lips against the top of my head. “Here’s what I think. You keep yourself healthy, and then we can deal with Parker. Together. I don’t know how, but I know we can.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because we survived the end of the world.” He kissed me again. “And you are my lady astronaut.”

  * * *

  I followed Nicole’s maid back to her sunken living room, where most of the 99s were munching on hors d’oeuvres and sipping cocktails. Jacira and Sabiha had joined the mix, but I didn’t see Betty or Violette.

  “Sorry I’m late. Aunt Esther called, and it took a while to get off the phone.”

  “How is the dear?” Nicole rose from the arm of the sofa she was perched on, leaving Imogene with her head bowed over a flight manual. “Martini?”

  “Please.” The glory of knowing a senator’s wife was that liquor was never lacking at the Wargin house. I’d taken the Miltown out of my purse, but hadn’t gotten rid of it, and having something to take the edge off seemed very appealing.

  Helen bounded across the room to hug me, still holding the manual she’d been studying. “Missed you.”