Over at another corner, Rachel sighed. “It’s so stuffy in here, George. Can I go back outside? I feel more comfortable on the asteroid surface.”
“Soon, Rachel, soon,” said George as he rubbed Rachel’s shoulder to soothe her.
On the monitor, Chang looked puzzled. “Hodding, what are you doing? Rubbing the air?”
“My wife,” George said. “Her shoulders are a bit sore.”
“Your wife? But Abby’s in New York,” Chang protested. “She called Mission Control last night.”
“Not Abby. Rachel,” explained George. “I was talking to Rachel.”
“Rachel?” Chang said. “No, that’s impossible.”
Ed’s dad waved dismissively at Chang’s image on the monitor. “He doesn’t believe we’re here,” he said. “He just wants you to blow up the asteroid.”
“Don’t worry, Dad. We won’t blow it up,” said Ed.
“Mr. Benton, did I hear you tell someone that you’re not going to blow up the asteroid?” Chang erupted.
Ed nodded. “You heard correctly,” he mumbled.
Andrew looked at Chang’s image on the monitor. “Colonel, I know how incredible this all seems to you. We’re very shocked and surprised, too. I think we shouldn’t destroy the asteroid until we’re had a chance to study it.”
Chang looked alarmed. “You must blow up that rock.”
“We can’t blow up this rock. It’s different.”
“What do you think you’ve found?” Chang protested. “A Siren Stone? You know they’re just a deep space myth.”
As mermaids had been to ancient mariners, Siren Stones were to modern spacers. They were a way to explain the space crews who turned crazy and disappeared without a trace. In the vast deepness of space, what lonely spacer could resist the beautiful spirits who haunted the Siren Stones? Andrew hadn’t taken the myth seriously—until now.
“Maybe there’s some truth behind the myth,” said Andrew. “That’s more reason to preserve the rock until we learn more about it.”
“What about the three hundred people on Space Station Reagan?” said Chang.
“We can still save them. Let’s not blow up the asteroid. Let’s move it instead,” Andrew suggested eagerly. “We’ll plant explosives on the rock’s surface—the blast will nudge Odette into a new orbit, one that won’t threaten Reagan or anything else.”
Chang shook his head. “Attempts to move asteroids into safe orbits have a lousy success rate. The procedure is too complicated. That’s why we blow up the damn things. I can’t take the risk. I won’t gamble with three hundred lives.”
“We can move the asteroid into a safe orbit,” Andrew insisted.
“You have your orders, Mr. Lundman. Blow up that rock.”
Ed and his dad went outside the ship, back to the airless surface of Odette. Ed wore a space suit, but Dad did not.
“How is the family?” asked Dad.
“Mom’s okay. She moved to California about two months ago,” Ed replied. “Joan’s not at Georgetown anymore. She chose a contract position at Stanford because she likes it there. And Trim and I had a son last year. His name is Norman.”
“Wow, I’m a grandfather! Whoo-ee!” his dad yelled. “Too bad I couldn’t be there for the boy, Norman’s his name? It’s bad enough that I missed a few years of your life, and now I’m not around for my grandson’s.”
A few years of your life: the words echoed in Ed’s ears.
Ed’s dad quit his job at the car factory when Ed was five years old and spent the next five years moving from one bad business deal to another. During that time, Dad never had money, and Mom never smiled. After five years of financial failures, he had simply walked out. To support Ed and Joan, Mom worked two jobs, one cleaning an office building and another waiting tables at a restaurant.
Dad returned five years later, paler and thinner than ever before, but with a small amount he had earned in odd jobs in California. He was ready to lead his family again, he announced sheepishly. Mom wouldn’t take him back, though. Without any argument, he gave her the money and moved into an apartment across town. He had exiled himself from his family when they had wanted him, and now they were exiling him when he wanted them.
He came to visit them from time to time, though. By the time Ed left to work on the Moon, Mom and Joan were just warming up to Dad again, starting to close the chasm in the family. Eventually, Mom and Joan forgave Dad for his disappearance. About seven years after his return, Dad and Mom renewed their vows, in essence, got married again, with Joan as bridesmaid. But Ed was away on the Moon and couldn’t come back. He had said that his employer had no room for him on the next shuttle back to Earth. In fact, he had not even asked for a seat on the flight.
Ed visited his mom and dad only twice in the next five years. Unlike Mom and Joan, he could not forgive his dad for leaving him when he was ten years old.
And then his dad discovered he had cancer. When Ed got the space transmission from his mother, he realized that if he wanted his father again, he was running out of time. But Ed was on a rock blasting team heading for Mars. By the time the ship returned to Earth, his dad had already died.
Ed wanted to tell his dad that all was forgiven—but was this ghost really his dad?
“Before you arrived here, what was the last thing you remember?” Ed asked.
“Dying,” said Dad.
Ed looked at the stars above them. Is this what heaven looks like? he asked himself. Is that where they were? In heaven?
“INCOMING TRANSMISSION” flashed on the monitor. Andrew watched the words fade out and Colonel Chang’s image fade in. The transmission was coming from the Long Island; Chang had left Space Station Reagan and was heading to Odette.
“You are now three days behind schedule on the demolition of Odette,” Chang said. “Do you intend to blow it up?”
“I repeat, not while there are people here,” said Andrew.
“There are no people there!” said Chang. He sounded agitated; Andrew had never seen him unnerved before.
Chang tried a more reasoning tone. “They’re all in your imagination,” he said.
Andrew looked at Sally. She straddled the floor, legs wide apart, and raised her arms over her shoulder to touch her feet. That was how cheerleaders stretched their hamstrings and calf muscles. He remembered seeing her do those stretches on a football field in Oregon many years ago.
She looked so warm, so lively. When they had kissed, he realized that he had never kissed as passionately as with her. Sally was a real woman again.
Andrew turned back to Chang. “No, sir, they are not our imagination. They are real.”
“So are the two hundred and ninety people now on Space Station Reagan,” Chang reminded him grimly. “That’s two hundred and ninety dead if you don’t blow up Odette.”
“We’re working on a way to move the asteroid into a safe orbit,” Andrew said. “I’m confident we’ll succeed.”
“You know that’s the riskier procedure.” Chang scowled from the monitor. “You leave me no choice, Mr. Lundman. I will demolish Odette and arrest you and your crew.”
“Arrest us?” questioned Andrew. “On what grounds?”
“United States Space Stations Code, section 52, ‘Willful Endangerment of a Space Station,” ‘ Chang stated. “Minimum sentence, ten years. Don’t make this mistake. Obey your orders.”
George and Rachel strolled outside on the asteroid’s surface, talking about the girls. Rachel laughed when she heard how her daughters had grown up.
“Oh, how I wish I could have seen all of it,” she said finally. “Oh, if only I could have been there for them.”
George nodded. “That has been the greatest sadness of my life, that you aren’t there to see them grow up.”
Rachel shook her head. “George, don’t feel sad anymore. I’ll always be with all three of you.”
“Are you in heaven?” George asked.
She took his hand and placed it over his heart. “I’m right
here, in your heart.”
“You always have been,” said George as they continued walking.
“I got to hand it to you, George,” said Rachel. “It must have been hard to raise two girls by yourself for seven years.”
George sighed. “There’s something I have to tell you. I wasn’t alone all that time.”
“Oh?” said Rachel. “My mother has been helping out?”
“No. I remarried four years ago. Her name is Abby.”
Rachel stopped walking and looked at George. “Abby. Is she a nice girl?”
“Yes.”
“And how does she treat the girls?”
George said nothing.
“George, how does she treat the girls?” Rachel asked again, anxiously.
George took in a deep breath. “Extremely well. Abby loves them deeply, treats them as if they were her own daughters.”
Rachel crossed her arms and shifted her gaze to a rock beside them, as if to avoid looking him in the eye.
“Oh, I see,” she said softly.
For Andrew, Sally’s death had ended all of their plans: getting married, getting jobs, and starting a family.
“So you never went to that job you had lined up after graduation, the one with the City of Eugene?” Sally asked.
“No, I went into the Navy instead,” said Andrew. Without Sally, he had joined the U.S. Navy after graduation, hoping to fight the terrorists who had blown up her train.
He had felt a brief sense of joy when Navy missiles killed the last terrorist commander in Sudan, but it couldn’t erase the sadness of losing Sally. Afterward, he volunteered for service on the farthest, loneliest space station, and later, went into rock blasting.
“No children?” asked Sally. “Why not?”
“Hard to do with my job,” said Andrew. “I’m always traveling for months in space. No time to meet someone, much less raise a kid.”
He paused. He knew he had been making excuses for years.
“But, remember, I had wanted children,” he continued. “That’s what we had planned. We would get married after graduation. We’d live in Eugene. We would get jobs there. I would be a road engineer. You would be an accountant for the bakery. We would have children.”
Sally smiled. “We had our whole lives planned, didn’t we?”
“We sure did, girl,” said Andrew.
“Things didn’t go according to plan, did they?”
“No, they didn’t.” Words came out of Andrew in a rush. “I was looking forward to life with you. It was the most important thing in my life. Instead, I wound up alone, no kids, living anywhere but in Eugene, blasting space rocks for a living. It wasn’t what we had planned.”
* * *
Ed and his dad passed by the drill, now motionless but still stuck into the asteroid. His dad pointed at the drill.
“Is it deep enough to plant those nuclear bombs?” his dad asked.
“We’re not going to do it,” Ed protested. “How can we? We would kill you.”
“I’m already dead,” said his dad. “But think of yourself. That military spacecraft will be here any day now. If you don’t blow up Odette, they’ll arrest you and blow it up anyway.”
“We’ll fight them,” Ed declared. “I lost you once, I won’t lose you again!”
“Ed, you can’t have me forever. Stop clinging to me. Son, why do you keep clinging on to me?”
“Because, because,” Ed started. He couldn’t force the words out of his mouth. But it was time to tell him.
“Because I never got to tell you that I forgive you for leaving me and Joan and Mom,” Ed said.
His dad put his hand on Ed’s shoulder. “I know, son. I’ve known all this time.”
A tear ran down Ed’s cheek. “You mean, you died knowing I had forgiven you?”
“Sure did. Don’t let that bother you anymore.”
Ed heard a clicking sound over his helmet radio. He turned around and looked at the drill’s sensor box. The sensor box’s lights were lit up in red, blue, and green. He kneeled down to read the display.
“My, oh, my,” said Ed. “Dad, you’ve got to see this.”
He turned around to look at his dad, but his dad was not there.
Rachel uncrossed her arms. George remembered that she always crossed her arms when she was angry. Had she been angry? Was she still?
“Since Abby is the girls’ mother now, “ she said, “does she do everything that a mother should do?”
“Yes,” said George.
“Do the girls love her?”
“Very much. You should see the three of them together.”
“Ohhhh …”
“Oh, no, I shouldn’t have said that,” George said. “I’m sorry, so very sorry.”
“No! Don’t be sorry!” Rachel cried. “Oh, George, I’m so happy for you and Megan and Crystal! And Abby!”
She threw her arms around him and squeezed him. Even through his space suit, he could feel that it was the tightest hug she had ever given him.
“I’m thrilled that my family is happy,” Rachel said. “Why wouldn’t I want to hear that?”
George took a deep breath. “I felt I had betrayed you by marrying Abby. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.” She kissed his helmet visor. “You haven’t betrayed me. If anything, you’ve done exactly what I’ve wanted. You’ve raised our girls to be happy, confident young women. You’ve created a warm, caring family.”
“Really?”
“If you’re looking for my permission to love Abby and raise the girls with her, you have it. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
They hugged, they kissed, and this time, George felt her lips press against his.
That’s impossible, he thought. I have my helmet on. Oh, God, I better still have my helmet on!
He felt his helmet with one gloved hand; he was still wearing it. He looked around. He didn’t see Rachel anywhere.
Inside the ship, Ed scrolled through the graphs and figures appearing on his computer monitor. A three-dimensional computer graphic of Odette appeared, showing how animated waves poured from the core of the asteroid.
“Incredible!” Ed exclaimed. “The drill’s sensor detected electrochemical signals below the asteroid’s surface. The asteroid is hollow, and it’s emitting electrochemical signals.”
“Like a battery?” asked Andrew.
“More like a brain. Look at this.” Ed pointed at the animated image. “It’s also absorbing electrochemical signals.”
“From where? The only sources of electrochemical signals are us, from our brains,” said Andrew.
“I can’t prove it without further tests, but I think the asteroid is absorbing our brain waves and sending its own signals into our brains,” Ed guessed.
“Holy smokes. Sally, Rachel, your dad. Could the ghosts be based on our memories and thoughts?”
Ed nodded. “That’s possible. Dad’s ghost knew how I’ve felt since he died.”
They heard the sound of metal doors swinging open and boots pounding upon steel as George emerged from the air lock. After entering the control room, he began to take off his space suit.
“Funny thing happened out there,” he said. “One minute, Rachel is standing there, hugging me, completely alive—”
“No,” Andrew interrupted. “Rachel isn’t alive. The asteroid is. This is a Siren Stone.”
Aboard the Long Island, Colonel Chang returned to his usual calm, if humorless, mode after hearing Andrew’s explanation of the ghosts. To Andrew, this was as close as Chang would get to showing happiness.
“Finally. Now that you’ve determined that there are no living human beings on Odette, proceed to destroy it,” said Chang.
“Colonel, we still can’t do that,” said Andrew.
Chang glared at them through the thousands of miles of space. “Why not?”
“The asteroid is absorbing our brain waves and emitting its own brain waves. It’s some kind of living being. We can’t—
we shouldn’t—kill it.”
“It’s a rock!” Chang snapped. “Unlike Space Station Reagan. Reagan has two hundred and ninety permanent residents: scientists, tradespeople, artisans, farmers, settlers, and children born on the station. Don’t forget that Reagan isn’t just a space station; it’s their home. You have to blow up the rock!”
“We’ve been working on the calculation for moving the asteroid. We’ll know how many explosives to use, where to place them, and when to detonate them. We can do it,” Andrew insisted.
“No, you won’t. You’re under arrest!” Chang yelled.
Andrew cut off the audio link to the Long Island. He could still see, if not hear, how Chang continued barking orders to restore the audio link.
“George, have you finished the prep for shifting the orbit?” Andrew asked.
“I’ve figured it out,” said George, “but it’s a complicated calculation. If I missed a variable, it might not work.”
“It’s a chance we’ll have to take,” said Andrew. “Ed, how’s our flight plan coming?”
“Just finished it,” said Ed, looking up from his computer monitor.
“Good, good,” said Andrew. He moved toward the crew quarters. “Excuse me for a minute. There’s one last thing I have to discuss with Sally.”
“We should have died together,” said Andrew.
“No, no,” Sally said. “We should have lived together.”
“But we didn’t,” he argued, “and that’s what’s haunted me for years. Life didn’t go the way I wanted. No house in Eugene, no job with the city, no cottage in the summer, no vacations to Disney World, no taking our kids to see their grandparents, no kids at all—”
“Hush,” Sally ordered. “Listen to me. You’ve had a good life without me. You’ve beaten the enemies of our country. You’ve saved lives by blowing up asteroids before they hit people. You’ve been all over the world and beyond, from Oregon to Polynesia to the Moon to the asteroid belt. You’ve done things, seen things, helped and saved people. Don’t ever think that your life was a waste of time.”
“Even if I’ve lived it without you, Sally?” Andrew said.
“Even without me,” she replied, smiling. “You’ve gotten on with your life, even if you don’t know it. Stop mourning my loss and the loss of what could have been. What you made instead is great and wonderful.”
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