Earth Bound (29 page)

Parsons took a heavy step toward the man. “Shut up,” he growled. “You finish that sentence and you’ll regret it.”

Hal shut his mouth.

Charlie slid Parsons a look, but he only shrugged. All right, so he wasn’t a bruiser, but he’d be damned if he’d let Hal insult her like that. And it felt damn good to do
something
other than existing like he had for the past few months.

“I’m calling a meeting with Jensen,” Parsons went on. “You, me, and Dr. Eason will see if we can fix this. Either we push it back into place with its thrusters… or we re-program the onboard computer from here.”

“Can we do that?”

Parsons shook his head. Of all the incompetent things to say… “Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to do it.”

Charlie cleared her throat of what might have been a laugh.

“I don’t know—” Hal began.

Parsons cut him off with a swipe of his hand. “There’s no time to argue. Get everything you have from Maynard about the onboard computers and meet us in Jensen’s office.”

Hal looked between Parsons and Charlie for one long bewildered moment, as if he might be waiting for them to yell “April Fool’s!” But then he finally left.

When Parsons looked back at Charlie, she was wearing a painfully familiar expression. Half amused, half exasperated, the one she always wore when she’d teased him. He hadn’t seen that from her in such a long time, and all of him ached to see it again.

“Poor Hal,” she said softly. “It might have been easier on him if I’d just said, ‘I told you so.’”

“Forget Hal.”

She sighed. “Things will be very difficult after this. He won’t forget that I was right all along.” She glanced at him. “And I know it won’t be easy for you either if the rendezvous fails.”

“If you’re worried about my career, don’t be.” Although he was touched that she might. “And there’s still time to save this. Tell me what you’ll need at the meeting. I’ll carry it for you.”

“I can carry my own things.” But her protest held no heat. It was more of a reflex.

“I know,” he said. “But I’ll carry them for you anyway. Anything you need for this, I’ll get for you.” He swallowed. “Anything.”

She laid her palm on the desk and lightly flexed her fingers against it. “I’ll be sure to tell you what I need, then.” Her fingers stretched, then curled once more, and his pulse was loud in his ears.
 

“Anything,” he said again, although he’d already said it twice before and had no idea why his tongue kept shaping that particular word.

She lifted her hand from the desk... and gestured to a stack of notes. “Those, please. And these. And those two reference manuals, and this table of constants. Oh, and my slide rule.”

He filled his arms, his heart slowing as his thoughts ramped up back to their normal speed. “Ready?” he asked when he was done.

“Yes.” She took a step toward the door. “No.” She whirled back to her desk, rummaging in the drawers before pulling out a mirror and some lipstick. And there was the other expression he never thought he’d see again, the assessing one as she examined herself in the mirror.

“You look—” His voice caught. “Perfect.”

She stopped mid-swipe. “I’m not.” But it wasn’t defiant. It was small and a touch sad.
 

She gave her lips one last dab, rolled the lush curves against each other, then snapped shut the tube and tossed it and the mirror back into the drawer. Her shoulders squared as her mask slid back into place. “I’m ready now.”

Charlie’s hand was cramped, permanently twisted to hold a piece of chalk or a pencil. They’d managed to figure out the rate at which the dummy capsule was drifting. They had a pretty good guess of where it was going to be during the rendezvous window.

It hadn’t been easy. They’d wasted several hours trying to get the directional rockets to move it back into the locked position, but without success.

If Parsons hadn’t shut Friedrich Gerhardt down, propulsion would still be fiddling with the things.

“No, we’re done,” Parsons had said, sounding both exhausted and tenacious. “We have to abandon the geostatic plan. You’ve blown it.”

“I can still salvage this,” Friedrich shouted over the squawk box.

Charlie almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

“Your time is up. Dr. Eason is going to repair your mistake.”

Four male heads swung toward her. In Florida, Gerhardt was no doubt glaring at his phone as well. They’d probably forgotten she was there. Stan Jensen’s office wasn’t a place she frequented.

Stan and Hal were pale and granite-faced. If it were any other moment, she’d want to laugh about how no one—not even the man himself—thought Hal was going to solve this problem. They all assumed Beverly and Dot, whose names they did not know, would work out the orbit and she would reprogram the machines.
 

For his part, Gerhardt was livid. He wasn’t even trying to hide it. If she pulled this off, he was going to hate her. And Parsons. He would be a powerful enemy for them both.

As for Parsons, she didn’t want to name the things in his face. He was outraged, but not, thank goodness, at her. He was confident beneath his fear, like a marathoner on the cusp of a race well trained for. He really did think she could fix this.

That knowledge warmed her from the inside out.

But there was something else in his eyes. Or not in his eyes, maybe, but the wrinkles around them. Something warmer and more personal, a look that she thought had long, long since gone out of him, out of the world.

Working with him again like this, having his approval, and hearing him get mad: it was everything. She’d missed him desperately.

She couldn’t think of that now. She had to reprogram computers from Earth and surmount impossible orbits and deal with skittish astronauts.

But soon, when this had passed—for better or for worse—she was going to ask him if the damage between them was intractable.

Charlie swallowed another yawn. Her mouth tasted like the sleep she wasn’t going to get mixed with stale frustration and tinged with success. She took a sip of lukewarm coffee, trying to wash the flavor away. Yuck. She should send someone to brew a fresh pot. She stood up and stretched her arms over her head. Several of her vertebrae cracked. Dear Lord, she was too old for an all-nighter.

She looked out into the main office of the computing department. One would never have guessed it was past midnight. Charlie had sent Beverly home to sleep for a few hours; she should be back soon. But Dot and Jack were working at the long table in the corner. Someone had brought in a picnic basket of food, and the remnants of their meal were piled at one end. The rest was littered with stacks of paper, several slide rules, navigation charts, and hardware specs.

The door to the simulation laboratory was closed, but she could see Dave through the glass, checking some punch cards. Even Hal was still here, though the door to his office and the curtains were closed. He was probably nursing his ego. He’d taken Maynard’s failure to heart, as well he should. This wasn’t his fault
per se
, but it was worse than it needed to be because Hal and Stan had had blind confidence in Maynard. Her only hope—well, at the moment, she had several hopes, but they were deeply buried—was that they’d learn from this for next time.

Because of the malfunction in the unmanned capsule’s radar, they’d had to network together ground-based systems in order to get a lock on the capsule’s position. And that had been the easy part.

Now that they knew where the hell it was, and where the hell it was drifting, she was working to reprogram the docking software.

The backup—because of course she’d insisted on having a backup—was for the astronauts to attempt to dock manually.

The astronauts, of course, thought this was an excellent idea.

She’d stood in Mission Control a few hours prior and listened to Parsons and Joe Reynolds talk them through the new procedure.

“This is what we should have done all along,” Dunsford said. His voice was tinny, but despite the static, he might have been across the ASD campus, not orbiting one hundred kilometers above them.

“The thing is,” Parsons explained, “if the docking software fails, and you attempt the maneuver manually, you don’t have a radar on board. So you’ll be using visual data only. And you can’t accelerate or decelerate until you get close—that isn’t how orbital mechanics works. Your orbit has to intersect with the capsule’s. You can’t catch it.”

“There’s no margin for error,” Joe Reynolds added into the comm link.
 

“Precisely.” Parsons was so tense, Charlie kept expecting him to shatter. He couldn’t bear for anyone else to do anything. From how he held himself, how he kept talking about the mission, she suspected he thought he had failed, though she knew that if anyone was to blame, it certainly wasn’t him. But he seemed determined to fix it on his own.

Parsons held his forehead with one hand, while he continued to explain the situation to Dunsford and Henkins. “If you hit the dummy capsule, it isn’t like striking the curb when you’re parking—”

“I never hit the curb,” Dunsford roared.

She was ready to send the women up at once. Men and their stupid egos. If the unmanned and manned capsules collided, both of them could break apart. It could be catastrophic, and Dunsford was defending his ability to park. Unbelievable.

Parsons ground his teeth together. “Be that as it may, that’s why we’re going to try the docking software first. If it doesn’t work, you can try it manually on the next orbit. But you only get one shot. There are other objectives for this mission.”

Charlie knew that was true, that the rendezvous was only one part of what they needed to do, but it was the only part she cared about. By afternoon, the window for docking would be closed, and the astronauts would have moved onto other tasks and tests.

So she’d gone back to computing to redouble her efforts to save the mission. And now it was time to take their latest results back to Parsons. She looked over the table again, trying to remember if she had everything. She was so damn tired, she hardly knew up from down.

 
“Beverly should be here by one,” she told Dot and Jack. “I’m going to show him the deceleration and braking sequence we’ve programmed. I should be back in a bit.”

The halls buzzed with energy. Half-heard conversations, the clatter of typewriters, and clanks from machinery bounced off the linoleum. Every office she passed was open and lit. The faces were drawn, the eyes tense, but the mood was focused, not grim.

Parsons’s door gaped wide. His secretary’s desk was empty.

Charlie walked in, and the rug in front of his desk dampened the click of her heels. Sleepiness and the lighting softened his expression. He’d switched off the overhead fluorescents. There was only his single desk lamp, which made the papers in front of him glow.

Lord, she had missed his face—the blunt angles of his jaw, the firm declaration of his nose. Most of all, she missed his mouth, which could be crude, hard, or sensual all in a turn. He, this, was the piece that had been absent from her life.

He looked up from his work, and she pulled herself fully upright.

“What do you have for me?” he asked. His voice was rough. He hadn’t spoken in a while.

She set her notes down in front of him. “They’ll have to do a tape dump after they wake up.” The astronauts were scheduled to be asleep. She had no idea if they were managing it. “Jack’s finishing up the new code, but we think we’ve figured out the new braking sequence. They’ll need to run it at six and a half hours out from docking. We’ll need to start the upload when they’re over Hawaii at…”

She trailed off, trying to remember where the capsule was, when they’d be in position after the astronauts had woken so they could clear the onboard computer of the old sequence before sending up the new one. The numbers had just been there, in her head, but now they’d evaporated.

She was definitely too old for all-nighters.

“…at 6 a.m.” She wasn’t certain, so she amended, “I guess. Around then, at any rate. We’ll need to wake them early. And we have to finish and check the code before then.” There was so much to do. She shook herself, hoping to find a bit more energy somewhere in her body. It didn’t materialize.