Star Dust (4 page)

He turned to go deal with his ever-increasing chore list, the image of her hand clenched tight around his pocketknife, the bandage stark against her skin, stuck in his brain.

Nobody ever expected space exploration to generate all this paperwork.

Kit sighed and shuffled the reams and reams of it on his desk in the office he shared with the rest of the Perseid Six, trying to bring a bit of order to the chaos. Or at least reduce some of it.

People thought the life of an astronaut was one of nonstop excitement, one thrilling mission after another, interspersed with sessions of rigorous training. No one ever imagined an astronaut spending his time reading dusty technical reports. Or sitting at a typewriter and pecking out a test flight report with two fingers, as Carruthers was doing right now.

Pluck, pluck, pluck.
Astronauts were proficient in everything except typing.

Ding
. He’d hit the end of a line.

Swish
. The carriage return.

Those noises were more likely to be part of Kit’s day than the roaring whoosh of several tons of rocket fuel igniting, propelling a man past the atmosphere into the void beyond.

“Did you like your present?”

Kit turned to find Carruthers smirking. He was slim, with blackish-brown hair that had a habit of curling at the ends. He always wore it just a little too long—not enough to get called out, but long enough to let everyone know what he thought of regulation haircuts.
Life
had said he was “screen-idol handsome,” and the ladies who kept him company each night likely agreed. The choice of Miss Delancy made sense: she was Carruthers’s type.

“She scared me half to death when she jumped out of the closet.” Kit said it lightly, as if it were a prelude to a funny story—one he didn’t intend to finish. Kit wasn’t one to kiss and tell. Besides, Carruthers had a different woman in bed each night. He didn’t need the birds and the bees explained.

“Aww, were you so scared you’d disappoint her?” That was Storch, putting in his two cents’ worth. “Maybe I ought to give her a call.”

Kit let his snort answer that. Everything Carruthers did, Storch had to do one better—an arms race of sex. Storch was the joker, always acting as if everything happened solely for his amusement.

Dunsford, a few desks down, put in, “Maybe she’d like my number.”

“You’re married,” Kit pointed out mildly.

“Why’d you have to remind me?” Dunsford whined. “And thank you for breaking up the party at one and sending me home to the ball and chain.”

“Obviously a fate worse than death.” Kit tried to keep his tone sarcasm-free. Dunsford had chosen to get married; he couldn’t complain he hadn’t the freedom the single guys did, not when he’d brought it on himself.

“Precisely,” Dunsford said.

Kit picked up the spec manual, the pages brittle and warped and still smelling of alcohol. He’d read it yesterday, but it wouldn’t hurt to look it over as many more times as he could before the test tomorrow. Parsons would be hunting for even the smallest infraction after how the last test had gone. Engineers were so touchy about their equipment, even if they couldn’t drive the stuff.

“Though Margie did say she met the woman who bought the house next to you in the neighborhood,” Dunsford said.

Kit turned around. He was the only one with a new neighbor. “Oh? Both of them, or just the missus?”

Dunsford snorted. “There is no Mr. Smith. Mrs. Smith”—he placed mocking emphasis on the
Mrs.
—“is a divorcee.” He said it extravagantly.
De-vorce-ay
. Each syllable came out as lascivious, as if the word itself was a scandal.

Huh. So there was no Mr. Smith. Which explained why Kit hadn’t seen him.

Which meant… He tapped the spec manual on his knee. There was nothing in the way of their attraction. Nothing at all.

Except for the fact she was his neighbor. And she had kids. He tried to avoid women like those.

“Can you even imagine what she must be like?” Carruthers said. “A woman who’d actually leave a man? Or who was so shrewish that he left her?”

Kit frowned. Mrs. Smith hadn’t exactly been nice—her final glare at him from the window had been positively livid—but
shrewish
? “She seemed okay.”

Every head turned to stare at Kit.
 

“What’s she look like?” Storch asked, his smile tipping into a leer.

“She’s...” He searched for a description, but all that came to mind was that carrot hair and all those freckles. Freckles on top of freckles, scattered across her nose and cheeks.

But the other men didn’t want to hear about freckles. They wanted something more risqué. “She’s attractive. On the shorter side”—he remembered how he’d had to bend down to bandage her finger—“but if you like redheads, she’d be your type. Kind of like Debbie Reynolds.”

There. That should sound disinterested enough. He didn’t want to dissect Mrs. Smith with the guys, not in the way they wanted to.

“Who’s also divorced,” Storch said.

“Hey,” Dunsford protested. “That wasn’t her fault.”

“A redhead!” Carruthers snapped his fingers. “I knew it. Told you she was a shrew. What did Margie say?”

Kit suppressed his grimace and tapped the manual faster against his leg.

Dunsford shrugged. “That she was standoffish. I don’t remember much else. You know Margie, I can’t keep track of all the words that come out of her mouth.”

Standoffish.
Yeah, Kit could see that. But Mrs. Smith was alone in the world, without a man—she’d had to come to Kit when she’d cut herself. He ought to go over tonight and see if she needed any help. A man’s help.
 

“You’ll have to keep us informed,” Carruthers said, in a way that made it clear he’d make a move on Mrs. Smith if conditions were favorable.

Oh hell no. If Kit couldn’t make a pass at her, Carruthers certainly couldn’t. “She’s got kids.”

Every man in the room deflated. Kids looked at them like they were heroes. Like Superman, the Lone Ranger, and Buck Rogers all rolled into one. It was hard to pursue a lady when her kids had a shrine devoted to you in their bedroom.

“That’s that, I guess,” Carruthers said.

Kit tried not to be pleased at the defeat in the other man’s voice. It wasn’t like he could make a play for Mrs. Smith either, but Carruthers went through women like tissue. He’d run over Mrs. Smith.

Carruthers took up his typing again, the noise seeming to hit Kit right behind the eyes with each keystroke.

“Jesus,” Storch muttered. “I’ve already got a headache.”

“You young fellas can’t hold your liquor,” Dunsford said. At the age of thirty-six, Dunsford was the oldest of the Perseid Six—and he could drink a prodigious amount.

“A headache?” Carruthers asked, still pecking at the typewriter. “Isn’t that what your girl from last night said too?”

Storch gave him the bird.

Kit picked up the spec manual and flipped back to the description of the heat shield.

Silence fell as all four men went back to their paperwork. So much paperwork.

His mind slipped into the rhythms of the spec manual, the jargon becoming a fluent language as he immersed himself in it, until—

“Campbell.”

It wasn’t loud, but then Parsons didn’t need to shout to make him jump.

As darkly sallow as ever, the lead Perseid engineer stood in the doorway. With his white short-sleeve button-up and thick horn-rimmed glasses, he was the most engineer-looking engineer Kit had ever seen. Given his job, it was only fitting that the man looked as he did, but he didn’t have to be so smug about it.

Parsons also hated Kit—all the astronauts actually—which made their encounters just that much more pleasant.

He sneered at the spec manual in Kit’s hands before marching over and snatching it up.

“What did you do to this?” His nose twisted as his sniffed. “Is that liquor?”

Kit snatched it back. “It’s mine, so what does it matter?”

“It matters because you’re sloppy. It matters because this is yet another symptom of how you approach your test flights. It matters because carelessness like this will cause missions to fail and people to die.”

All of the noise in the room had ceased. Every Perseid astronaut had frozen and was fixed on Kit and Parsons.

Kit ground his teeth. “You can’t engineer something like this to be failsafe. There’s going to be failures and errors—it’s never been done before. And as to the danger, you’re strapping a person onto a rocket and sending him into a vacuum. Of course it’s dangerous. We all accepted that.”

“Parsons, I know you don’t understand,” Carruthers said, “but we’re all military men here. And pilots. Don’t wrap us in fucking swaddling.”

Storch added, “We’re not monkeys. When things go wrong,
we
actually know what to do. Thanks to all the training you force on us.”

“If you think some beer on a spec manual is the end of the world for this mission…” Dunsford shook his head.

Parsons’s nostrils flared. Kit just kept staring him down, knowing that all the other men had his back. Nothing united the Perseid Six faster than their dislike of Parsons.

“Look,” the engineer said, “this isn’t flying toy jets trying to set some kind of silly speed record.”

“Hey!” Storch held one of those speed records, and he wasn’t pleased to hear it dismissed.

Parsons ignored him. “The entire world is watching. We fail, and the Soviets win. And you may not care if someone dies on these missions, but I certainly do.”

With that, Parsons turned on his heel and left. Kit’s fists shook with fury. How like that bastard, to give a speech like that and just run off. He was always trying to ensure he got in the last word. Kit threw the spec manual onto his desk, sending one of the hills of paperwork crashing down.

Yes, as a test pilot he’d done some dangerous things. Been in a few bad crashes. They all had.

But he wasn’t reckless. And he wasn’t sloppy. No one knew his aircrafts like he did. It was why he’d been chosen for this mission.

He didn’t just hop into a jet prototype and push it to maximum acceleration. He’d been an aviator of skill and art and study—still was. Parsons could stuff it.

If he weren’t relying on the man to recommend him for lead in the next mission, Kit would have told him that.

The clack of the typewriter started up again. Kit hadn’t even been aware it had stopped.

“Ignore him,” Carruthers said, never looking up. “He’s probably not getting laid on the regular. Binds him up like that, and then he takes it out on us.”

Kit snorted. “Why don’t you put a girl in
his
closet, then?”

“No girl deserves that,” Storch said with a laugh.

Kit silently agreed as he buried his face back in the spec manual. No matter how he felt about Parsons, he did have to read this manual. Beer or no.

And he’d have to check on Mrs. Smith at some point. Ask about her finger.
 

Just to be neighborly.

Anne-Marie closed the back door and leaned against it. For two days she’d opened boxes, more boxes than she remembered packing. They’d multiplied on the way here, probably somewhere around Waco. Weird things were always happening in Waco.

She’d made beds, put together bathrooms, and filled cabinets, but the house still didn’t feel right. She kept waiting for the alchemical thing to happen. The home-making thing.

When she’d married Doug, she’d moved into his place the day after their honeymoon. She’d put down rugs, hung pictures, and set books on his previously bare shelves. But the space had remained foreign for weeks.

Then one day she’d been out shopping and had thought,
I can’t wait to go home
. Doug’s house was her home.

She’d thought she could make that happen instantly here, but it hadn’t.

Even the kids felt it. They’d tried to be happy, but anxiety laced their words.

“Look, Mom, room for all your pans!” Freddie had said, gesturing at the cabinets as if shelves were a major technological breakthrough.

“And the backyard is huge!” Lisa had added.

Think of the children
, everyone had said. Almost all Anne-Marie did was think of the children. The children were why she’d thrown Doug out and why she’d refused to take him back.