Earth Bound (31 page)

This was the part that gave Charlie the willies. The manned capsule had to pause while the unmanned capsule pivoted ninety degrees to order to bring the nose of the manned capsule into the proper alignment. Given all the problems they’d had with the thrusters and radar on the unmanned capsule, she didn’t trust the damned thing as far as she could throw it.

“Roger that,” Dunsford said. “We’ll wait here ’til she’s ready. I have some practice with that.”

A few appreciative laughs broke out in the room. Charlie glared at the ceiling, hoping that Dunsford could feel her disdain from a world away.

“If you can relay any visual information about the yaw, we’d appreciate it,” Parsons said.

“It’s visible out my side.” Greg Henkins was calmer and less egotistical than Mitch Dunsford. Charlie was glad he’d be narrating this bit.

“The sequence is starting,” Parsons told the astronauts, and everyone in the room, when one of the engineers gave the hand signal. “It should take about a minute to complete.”

“I can see… yeah, I can see the sequence initiate. The capsule’s response was crisp,” Henkins said. “It’s rotating slowly, but it’s responding to the command.”

Charlie rubbed the back of her neck. God, they were so close, couldn’t things just go their way for a little while longer?

A few more seconds of silence passed. One of the engineers in charge of the unmanned capsule said, “Our instruments say it’s moved about thirty degrees.”

“I think you’re behind,” Henkins said. “I’d say it’s more like forty, forty-five degrees.”

The instruments on the ground definitely weren’t reporting in real time. There were lags, jumps, and sputters in the data relay. They still had a lot to learn if they were going to get to the moon—but that was a problem for another day.

“We’re coming up on sixty degrees rotation now,” Henkins said.

Parsons’s fingers tapped out the seconds on the board in front of him. “About ten seconds left in the sequence.”

There might only be ten of them, but they ticked off interminably slowly.

“Come on, come on, come on,” Charlie whispered.

The comm link crackled again. “And we’re in position.”

A spare round of applause followed this. No one was truly happy; they still had so much left to do to make this rendezvous work. But they were all appreciative.

“We’re going to put in the final commands,” Dunsford said. He listed off the numbers, and over the comm link, Charlie could hear the astronauts push the buttons in sequence.

“Okay,” Parsons said, “you’re on your final approach. Nice and easy now, gentlemen.”

“The docking light is on,” Dunsford said. “But it’s damn hard to read out my side.”

There was some shuffling, then Henkins said, “I’m using the handheld sextant, and the angle looks good.”

“That’s because you don’t have the sun in your eyes,” Dunsford muttered.

It was official: Charlie hated the astronauts. Parsons was completely right about that. They needed to develop robots immediately.

“You’re about ten feet out,” Parsons said. “We’re going to stop you for a minute so you can check the status panel.”

After a pause, Dunsford said, “We’re centered. Well, an inch off. Maybe two.”

“Proceed,” Parsons instructed.

Then Henkins blurted out, “Oopsie.”

Oopsie
was definitely not a word anyone in Mission Control wanted to hear. Oopsie wasn’t as bad as a curse, or an explosion, but it wasn’t encouraging.

Before Charlie could panic, Dunsford chuckled over the comm link. “Well, we’ve made contact with the capsule. And the… yeah, the latches have set. I can’t believe it, but, Houston? We did it.”

You didn’t do anything.
But the cheers going up in Mission Control immediately swallowed the thought. They’d successfully navigated a space rendezvous. They’d been given this impossible task, they’d experienced catastrophic setbacks, but they’d done it.

“Hold there, Dunsford, I need to quiet everyone down in here before we proceed.” Parsons stood and gave a withering glare to everyone in the room. “Can you pipe down and confirm that the dock was good?”

Some of the men in the room who had nothing better to do kept hooting and hollering, but at least half a dozen took their chairs and began fiddling with the equipment and printouts. One by one, they shouted out the all-clear.

“Okay, gentlemen,” Parsons instructed the astronauts, “begin the next sequence.”

“Running command 340 now,” Henkins said.

Charlie exhaled and listed against the wall. She watched Parsons’s hand clutching a heavy black pen, flying over a page of notes. Everything in the room was recording, yet he still trusted no observations in the room beside his own.

What were Parsons and she going to do? Things couldn’t go on in this way—and she didn’t only mean the nights with no sleep during a mission. She knew now, as she’d never been certain of before, that Parsons hadn’t known about the plan to give Maynard the contract. And furthermore, she didn’t care.

Even if he’d known, she was ready to ask him if they could take up again. And if they were going to be… well, whatever they were, there were bound to be conflicts.

Hal and Stan had been wrong this time, but Parsons might be forced to rule against her at some point. When he screwed up—and he would, she had no doubt—but when he did, she didn’t have to like it. She didn’t have to stay quiet about it, and he knew her well enough to know that she never would, but she wasn’t going to blame him or take it personally—at least not in the future.

And she wasn’t going to agree to any “we never talk about work there” nonsense. The truth was, she wanted to talk about work with him. She wanted to talk about everything with him. She wanted him for better or worse, in and out of ASD. She cared deeply for him, so there was no point in—

“Whoa, why is the attitude indicator ball moving?” Mitch Dunsford’s voice interrupted her chain of thought.

“Look at the horizon. We’re spinning,” Henkins said.

“Halt the command,” Parsons said. His voice was calm, but a half-octave higher than normal. She was probably the only one who noticed. “Change the command mode from pulse to rate. Do it now.”

“Roger,” Henkins said. “The command mode is on rate. And… damn, we’re still spinning.”

“Okay, try power cycling the board. That’s command—” Parson waved his hand in the air. Three or four men were busy flipping through binders, trying to find the mode they wanted.

“2046,” one of them shouted.

Parsons relayed this information to Henkins, who punched in the code.

Almost immediately he relayed, “We’ve stabilized. We’re turning the board back on.” There was a pause, and it was as tense in the room as it had been during the yaw. “And the power up is complete.”

Dunsford cut in, “I get it, Parsons. We’ll memorize the command book next time. Can we stop with the excitement?”

In spite of herself, Charlie laughed. She listened as one hundred kilometers above the earth the astronauts righted the capsules, and went through the rest of the checklist.

“Okay, you guys get some sleep, we’ll start again in the morning,” Parsons finally said to Henkins and Dunsford an hour later.

“You too. Night, Ma,” Dunsford deadpanned.
 

Parsons was so tired he didn’t even glare at the link. He did swivel in his chair to face the room, which was still full of happy, tired people. “Is the night crew here?”

“They’re filtering in,” Stan said. It had been such a taut day the ASD director had spent most of it in Mission Control—which was likely unprecedented.

“Well, then, the rest of you go home and sleep. Be back here by 6 a.m.” He gave everyone a sweeping look, but his eyes lingered on her. She wanted to tell him she was going to swing by her office, but she didn’t dare, not in front of everyone. She settled for a half wave, and hoped he knew her well enough to follow.

Back in the computing department, everyone was preparing to leave. Charlie hugged Beverly, hard. She didn’t care if it was unprofessional.

“We never would have found this without you. You made this happen,” Charlie told her.

She could feel Beverly shake her head. “Everyone did. It wasn’t only me.”

Well, Charlie was going to have to have a talk with Beverly later, about claiming credit when you had literally saved the day, but the time for it wasn’t now.

She released the computer and took a step back. “You did
so
well. Have a nice night. You can come in late tomorrow if you want.” Hopefully any other mechanical failures would wait until at least 10 a.m. to show up.

Beverly nodded. “Good night.”

Charlie exchanged platitudes with Jack, Dave, and Dot. Hal was still hiding in his office. She glanced at his closed door and rolled her eyes. He might never emerge again.

She went into her office and picked up the phone receiver. She wanted to celebrate this moment—no, not quite that. To mark it. She wanted to debrief with Parsons, but she couldn’t do that, not right now at any rate. But there were other people she could share this with.

She asked the operator to place a long-distance call to her parents and reverse the charges. She didn’t want to get in trouble for making ASD foot the bill for a personal call—though she did hope they’d gotten home early from the lab.

“Charlotte,” her mother said after she’d accepted the call. “Why are you telephoning?”

Charlie wasn’t sure what precisely she was doing. She also wasn’t sure what she could tell them. But they were her parents: They should know something about her life and work. “We had a setback yesterday. A major one.”

“Oh. I am sorry to hear it. Are you okay?”

Charlie hadn’t spoken to her parents much since they’d been in Houston. There hadn’t seemed to be much point. She understood their position: her mother would always be just a little bit disappointed by her and her father would never really look up from his own work. Charlie wanted this, this job at ASD. And she wanted Parsons. They would accept those things, eventually, but with an eternal measure of skepticism.

She only hoped they could be happy for her.

“I’m fine,” she told her mother. “Better than fine. I fixed it.” There was no point dissembling with them. Beverly had discovered the problem, and Jack and others had helped with the coding, but they would not have fixed it today if it hadn’t been for her. It was her achievement as much as anyone’s. “We achieved the space rendezvous.”

“Charlotte! That’s wonderful. You must be so proud.” Mother actually sounded pleased—or was going to the trouble to make it sound as if she were.

It was progress.

Charlie slumped in her chair, letting the pride filter through her. Out in the main computing department office, she heard some conversation and cheers. What was going on out there?

She glared at the door, then she turned her attention back to her mother. “Is Dad around?”

“No, I’m so sorry. I’m sure he’d love to hear all about it, but he’s still in the lab.” This was not surprising in the least. It would have been more surprising if he’d been home, in fact.

“I’ll have him call you when he gets home,” Mother promised.

“It’s okay. I was up all night.” Except of course for the brief nap she’d taken on Parsons’s couch—but Charlie had better leave that part out. “I need to get some sleep. We have several more days of the mission to get through, but I’ll call this weekend and tell you all about it.”

“It sounds like quite a story.”

“It was.” The noise outside her office kept increasing. It sounded like a ballgame might be raging out there. “I better not keep you.”

“I’m glad you called.”

“Me too.” And Charlie was. Maybe she and her mother could reach a détente at some point. “Good night.”

She rang off and went to see what was causing the commotion.

Precisely like in the Bobby Darin song, she opened the door and stepped into a party. Well, party might be taking it too far. In the main computing department office stood a group of people who hadn’t slept in days, but who were drinking and slapping each other on the back all the same. The tension and pressure had passed, to be replaced by jovial, sweaty adulation.

Jack and Dave were at the center of the melee. She didn’t see Dot and Beverly, so maybe they had gone home. There was no sign of Stan Jensen, though departmental parties were probably beneath him. She also couldn’t find Hal.

Charlie stepped into the room and started searching for the one person she truly wanted to see, but at her entrance, a raucous bellow went up.

Rodger from retrieval grabbed her hand and started shaking it excitedly. “Excellent work. Excellent,
excellent
work.” He offered her a beer.

She laughed. “I’ll accept your congratulations, but not your drink. I need to get home.”

It was taking everything Charlie had not to yawn in Rodger’s face. She tried to pull her hand back so she could cover her mouth, but Rodger was still pumping it enthusiastically.

“I can’t believe you managed to pull that off,” Rodger was saying.

That was taking it a little bit too far. It had been surprising, but surely it wasn’t that surprising. She was competent, after all.

“Me neither,” she said feigning humility.

Jefferies offered her a hand, which saved her. Rodger relented, and after a few, more subdued, shakes, Jefferies released her. “You deserve some kind of celebration after what you did.”

Charlie sneaked a quick yawn into her sleeve. “Honestly, Beverly, who isn’t here”—she looked around to confirm this was true and to search for Parsons again—“is the one who figured out the capsule was moving. And Jack—”

Several shouts of “Jack!” went up.

“—wrote the first draft of the code. I only—”

“Made it all work.”

So Parsons was there.

He was walking through the crowd toward her. The people parted like the Red Sea for him. His face was exhausted, his shoulders slumped, and his clothes wrinkled—and she wanted to fall into his arms.

But that was probably not the best course of action, given the fact that a dozen of her male colleagues were looking on. She’d save that part for later.

Parsons stopped right in front of her and gave her the barest hint of a smile. Her insides clenched.