Earth Bound (8 page)

Carruthers waltzed out as soon as the capsule returned to the pad, without even a thank you to everyone who’d been running the simulator for him. Then the technicians finished up and exited, followed by the operator.

“Thanks,” she told him as he left.

Charlie was completing her notes when Parsons came in. She looked up at him, and then out into the training facility. Most of the lights had been turned off, and they appeared to be alone.

“I’m sorry, I can finish these back at my desk.” She jumped up and began gathering her things. He probably wanted to get home.

“No, you’re fine. I appreciate your attention to detail.”

She snorted. “I wouldn’t be much use without it.”

He was playing with a pen and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. Most of the men around ASD didn’t, at least not unless there were VIPs around. He’d also taken off his tie. The tail of it was hanging from his pocket.

“About today,” he said. He stopped, looked out at the capsule, back at the floor of the control room, and finally up at her. He swallowed. “Did Carruthers bother you?” he asked.

Charlie almost laughed, but of course, Parsons was serious. “No,” she said firmly. But he was watching her so intently she had to say more.
 

She could tell him that as long as a man kept his hands to himself she was satisfied. She could tell him the leers and innuendo were as normal as the sun rising in the east, and she knew how to use them to her advantage. She could tell him Carruthers didn’t seem particularly harmful, that he was vain enough to never want a woman who was less than enthusiastic.

But Parsons wouldn’t believe her, not unless she told him far more about her life and experiences than she was willing to.

“I can manage him,” she said at last.

Parsons nodded. “The astronauts are basically children. Your work will go better if you think of them that way.”

Charlie laughed. “What do you know about children?”

Lord, was Parsons married? Did he have a bunch of squally kids in one of those monotonous houses in Lake Glade or some other suburb? She glanced at his hand. No ring.

He made a face. “Nothing. Just conjecture.”

That made more sense. For a long moment, they shared a look. In the half-light, his features were softer, younger. The day had taken a lot out of him too, she knew. For as mad as he got, his frustrations were always about the work, about incompetence. She understood that. Appreciated it even.
 

She swallowed and glanced down at her pumps. “I should finish my notes.” Her words were offered so quietly they surprised her.

When he made a noise of affirmation, it was equally muted. And that was why she didn’t look up, until she heard him leave. But then she watched him go, all the way across the room.

“Wait, let me get this straight.” Dot poured a generous measure of sugar into her coffee. “Parsons asked if you were offended by Lee Carruthers?”

Charlie swallowed her smile. It had been fairly amusing. “Yes. And I told him—”

“We’re not ready to discuss your answer yet,” Beverly interrupted. “We haven’t finished digesting the fact that Parsons is aware people have feelings.”

“He didn’t ask how I
felt
about it,” Charlie insisted.

“But he thought it might be wrong for someone—”

“Not just someone, one of the astronauts.”

“—to comment on your appearance.”

That was one way of putting it, but it emphasized entirely the wrong thing. Although it wasn’t inaccurate. “Well, yes,” Charlie agreed.

Dot and Beverly looked at each other before turning back to Charlie. “It isn’t that we don’t believe you,” Beverly said.

“We believe you
implicitly
.” Dot nodded to emphasize this, her eyes wide. “You’ve been here for eight months, and by now we know you well: You don’t lie.”

What Dot wasn’t saying was that somewhere along the way, Dot and Beverly had decided to trust Charlie. Charlie still hadn’t figured out what they’d overheard that had make them think they were going to be fired, but she’d insisted they each be given their own desk rather than sharing. She’d agitated for their promotion to the next GS grade. She’d done what it took to earn their confidence and friendship. And Dot and Beverly were damn competent, so Charlie wanted their respect.

Dot went on. “I once saw Parsons berate an engineer for omitting he’d dropped a prototype during testing.”

“Rumor has it he once showed up at the office forty-seven days in row.”

“And when he did miss work it was because it was Christmas Day, and Jensen ordered him to stay home.”

Charlie sipped her coffee to avoid smiling. None of this was surprising to her. She’d known the man for the better part of a year. “Yes?”

Beverly smirked. “So this man, this almost robotic man, was uncomfortable with how Carruthers was treating you. Uncomfortable enough to ask you about it.”

“He didn’t like asking me. I have no idea what, if anything, he would have done if I’d said yes,” Charlie said.

“But he asked. That’s important.”

Charlie looked at the door, confirming again that no one was there. In the time she’d been at ASD, she’d become accustomed to this daily ritual. She’d arrive early and enjoy an hour or so of quiet work before Dot and Beverly would show up. They’d drink coffee, engage in a half-hour of gossip, and then Hal and everyone else would trickle in.

She just liked it less when she was the object of the gossip.

“We’re getting distracted by a detail,” Charlie said, trying to drag the conversation back where it was supposed to be. “The material point is Parsons is mad about the analog computers and will support the shift to digital. I finally have the leverage to get Hal to do what we all know he should have done in the first place.”

Dot looked at Beverly. Beverly threw her head back and laughed. “You’re crazy,” she said warmly. “Hal is never going to support the shift because he doesn’t know the digital hardware as well. And there’s no incentive for him to learn it because he delegates all the work to you, Jack, Dave, and the computers.”

“So since Hal will never change, the only thing of interest that happened yesterday is Parsons betrayed a fascinating vulnerability when it comes to you,” Dot finished.

“There is no vulnerability! There’s nothing at all.”

“We agree there’s nothing on your side,” Beverly said. “But his?” She cocked her head.

Charlie swallowed. She hadn’t even told them the worst part, about him helping her out of the training capsule. About how it had felt confusing and hot, slow and fast at once.

It was merely some polite reflex. There wasn’t any attraction or awareness between Parsons and herself.

Charlie shook her head. She wasn’t going to validate this lunacy by speaking of it further. “If Hal is so devoted to antiquated tech, what’s he doing at ASD?”

“I don’t know,” Dot said. She was now adding a generous spot of cream. She always started with enough sugar to choke a horse, drank about a third of her cup, and topped the rest with cream. It was the oddest way to drink coffee Charlie had ever seen.

“He likes some aspects of ASD. The glamour, the jet set, the buzz of it. And he’s not stupid.”

Hal wasn’t someone who put in the grunt work to develop ideas, and at core, he was good at evaluating the work of others. Not inspiring feats of genius in others necessarily. He wasn’t a leader, but he could examine two different plans and see how they were going to play out. And he wanted to make sure he backed the eventual winner, no matter what.

His management style couldn’t be more different than Parsons’s. While she respected Parsons more, and while he was clearly more dedicated to the mission, there was something about how Hal operated that she found interesting. She wished she could stop thinking about merit and focus on politics as he did, if only now and again.

“Well,” Charlie said, taking another sip of her coffee. “We have to get Hal to switch to digital, if only because I hate dealing with vacuum tubes.”

“The best course will be to tell him Maynard is doing it.”

Dot was right. Hal wanted ASD to follow industry in all things. If mentioning Maynard convinced him to switch to digital... Well, Charlie was going to do whatever it took to achieve it.

“Okay, then. I’ll put together some notes.”

Beverly turned away to doctor her own coffee, and didn’t comment on Charlie’s plan. But her time at ASD had taught Charlie something about her too: Beverly played her cards close to the vest. She never revealed too much, or gave too much away. If she wasn’t endorsing this course of action, it was because she thought it the wrong one.

Beverly didn’t voice these reservations, probably because no one was going to listen to her, because she was a computer, and a woman, and because of her race, but Charlie had learned to pick up on these moments of hesitation.

Just then, Hal came in, all ingratiating grin.

“I heard yesterday’s test was a rousing success,” he said as he perched his hat atop the stand by the door.

Not wanting to get into it with him until she had a plan, Charlie gave him an arch smile. “We got what we needed.”

That was true enough for now.

October 1961

Charlie waited in the hall outside the conference room. Somewhere, someone’s secretary was typing, but the wing was otherwise deserted. A notice about the upcoming office Halloween party—with apple bobbing!—was tacked to the wall in front of her.

She straightened her tartan skirt and squared her shoulders. She hadn’t been nervous, really nervous, since she’d told her parents she was going to major in math and not physics. There hadn’t been any point in being nervous then. They’d disapproved, as she knew they would, but she’d persevered and that had been the end of it.

There was even less point in being nervous now. She had the job. She’d been doing it well for months. She’d saved the mission carrying the chimp into space—he’d come back safe and sound and scored a triumph for ASD—although she hadn’t officially gotten the credit. She was an integral part of the effort to send Joe Reynolds into orbit early next year.

So what if she hadn’t met the ASD director or the chief of the facility in Virginia before? They only cared about results. And she got them. They weren’t going to care she—

No. She wasn’t even going to think it.

With a few deep breaths, she returned her heart rate to normal. She folded her arms behind her and held the position until her shoulders ached. It was good, the ache. It grounded her, distracted her. She didn’t give in and release, however.

Instead, she tapped the toe of one shoe against the linoleum floor a few times. He’d said to be here at a quarter after, and it was now—fine, she’d check the time. She swung her arms forward and glanced at her wristwatch. Half past.

Parsons was never late. Ever. The man had a Swiss mechanism where his heart should be.

But he’d also said not to knock, that he would come and get her.

She could hear voices inside. The meeting wasn’t over. So she waited.

Sometimes she suspected Parsons simply enjoyed ordering her around.

And right before she did something stupid, like rap her knuckle against the door, it swung open.

Parsons had on his jacket. Black of course, like all his suits. His tie had black embroidered stripes on a black silk base. He looked even more the undertaker than usual.

He looked at her for several long beats. Those eyes—dark brown, impenetrable—focused on her face. His expression was pained. Altogether, he looked damned uncomfortable. But he struck her as a man who hated comfort. He would think it common. Pedestrian. And there was nothing pedestrian about him.

She cocked her head and waited. At last he stepped aside, and she strolled into the room.

“This is Charlie Eason,” Parsons said.

At the end of the long table sat Stan Jensen and the director of the ASD facility in Virginia.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Eason. Would you like some water?”

Her heart started to beat a ragged tattoo in her ears. She ignored it.

“It’s Dr. Eason.” She walked to the chair next to Parsons’s and pulled it out. She sat heavily. Her hands were shaking now, so she kept one braced on the arm of the chair. With the other, she twitched at her skirt until it covered her knees. She set her hand in her lap, draping her arm in the arc of a ballerina’s.