8
Traci sat with Noelle beside the pool in the Hoover’s backyard as Roy fussed over their charcoal grill. He lifted a trio of ribeyes from the grate and set them aside to rest, stripped off his shirt, and dove into the cool water.
“I think that’s the only time I’ve ever seen him use your pool,” Traci said over a glass of iced tea.
“It’s how he judges when dinner is ready,” Noelle said. “When he feels sufficiently cooled down, it’s time to eat.”
Traci tugged at her blouse. “I’m tempted to join him. Feels like I’ve been swimming already.”
“Agreed,” Noelle said. She left the shade of their awning and took the platter with their dinner. “We’re moving inside, love,” she announced.
Roy briefly ducked his head underwater before answering. “I might just take mine right here.”
She held up the platter for him. “Shall I just throw one at you, then?”
“I get the hint. Be there in a sec.”
Noelle poured a glass of merlot as Roy emerged in fresh clothes. “I’d offer you both some, but you need a clear head.”
Traci held up a hand. “None for me, thanks. It’s going to be a long night.”
“You mean another long night,” Roy said as he took a seat beside his wife. “I’ve put the coffee on.”
She nodded. “We’ll need it.”
Noelle set the bottle beside her. “How close are you to a viable solution?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘viable,’” Roy said around a mouthful of ribeye. “We’re comfortable with the concept of operations. Keene’s worked out our delta-v budget down to a gnat’s ass, so at this point it’s all about logistics. We’re working on a plan to outfit Columbus in six months.”
Noelle raised an eyebrow. “Is that possible?”
“If we can convince the right people to throw enough money at it, yes,” Traci said, “and if we can keep the outside interference to a minimum.”
“You mean a private expedition, of course. That could be difficult to sell.”
“Only way this can happen,” Roy said. “I think we’ve got a strong enough case.”
“Beware the vicissitudes of politicians and bureaucrats,” Noelle cautioned them.
Traci knew that Noelle’s remark was based on recent experience. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. How’s your research been going?”
Noelle took a long draw from her glass and set it down with a world-weary look. “The resistance one can encounter when preparing to upset their peer’s closely held theories can be surprising, though I suppose it shouldn’t be.”
“Panspermia has always been a little controversial.”
“It has been,” Noelle conceded, “but the evidence we collected at Pluto is compelling. We’ve consistently carbon dated the organic material to around the Late Heavy Bombardment period. The Kuiper Belt was the source for most of those cometary impacts, and it appears likely they brought both water and RNA precursors with them.” She took another sip of merlot. “The burning question, of course, is how they came to be in the first place. That, I cannot answer.”
“I understand,” she said. “Riddles upon riddles, isn’t it?”
“That’s supposed to be what we scientists are for, is it not? For now, I am satisfied that these spheres are the likely source of the Cambrian explosion. That has made many of my peers decidedly uncomfortable.” The ancient, frozen organics they’d brought back from Pluto had been colloquially labeled “Hoover spheres,” both in recognition of Noelle’s discovery and in anticipation of hanging it around her neck in the event her theories turned out to be wildly off base.
“Because it implies some sort of intelligence guiding evolution on Earth?” Traci asked hopefully.
“Personally? Quite possibly, though I have been careful to avoid that conclusion. I simply cannot find a way to prove it. It would be nice to return, to spend more time exploring the belt.”
“I wish we could.” She caught Noelle eyeing her husband. “That brings up another question. Are you okay with Roy leaving again?”
Noelle paused, looking between her husband and Traci. “It’s dangerous, and I understand the risks perhaps more than any other spouse. It’s also necessary, and I would join you if I could. Perhaps drop me off at Pluto on your way.” She drained her glass, an implicit statement on the seriousness of the matter. “I will be fine. It will give me an excuse to further bury myself in my work.”
“If that’s possible,” Roy joked.
Noelle rolled her eyes. “There are times when he makes it easy. What about your family? Do they know your intentions?”
Traci absentmindedly poked at her steak. “I haven’t told them.”
Noelle was surprised; she knew how close they were. “You must.”
“She will,” Roy said, and pulled his phone from his pocket. He thumbed an icon that opened up a scheduling program. “You’re in luck, Keene. We’ve got a jet free tomorrow.”
She began protesting weakly. “But I can’t—”
“No, but I can. Nothing says you can’t ride as my plus-one.” He tapped the schedule to confirm. “Wheels up tomorrow, 0900.”
Despite being in the back seat, the T-7 Red Hawk’s large bubble canopy offered Traci an expansive view. A military training jet that had replaced the nimble T-38 as NASA’s astronaut proficiency tool, its second seat had been designed with instructors in mind. From her perch, she could see the sky ahead almost as well as Roy could in the front seat.
While NASA’s small fleet may have officially been for keeping its astronauts’ flying skills sharp, it was an undeniable job perk. She could feel her excitement building while the jet’s single engine came up to full thrust as they sat at the end of Ellington Field’s runway. When Roy received their takeoff clearance, he put it into afterburner and they were soon airborne. He kept the jet level above the runway after the gear folded into its wells, building speed for a maximum performance climb. “We’re cleared to eighteen thousand,” he said. “What say we see how fast we can get there?”
She was smiling ear-to-ear behind her oxygen mask. Before she could finish saying “Let’s zorch,” Roy had pulled the stick into his lap and had them zooming skyward at a sixty-degree climb angle. The g-forces hit her almost instantaneously, like a load of bricks had been dumped into her lap.
Roy’s voice seemed distant. “Doing okay?”
“Good . . . good,” she said, grunting against the press of acceleration as bladders around her legs filled with air, keeping the blood from rushing out of her head. There was a hint of gray creeping in around the edge of her vision.
“You got this,” Roy assured her. “Like riding a bike, Keene.”
The altimeter tape on her situational display scrolled wildly upward. They were past ten thousand feet when the g’s began to subside. Before long, Roy rolled the jet onto its back and eased the nose down, pushing them over the top inverted. As the tape approached 18,000, the sky spun around them as he completed the roll to bring them level. Roy pulled the throttle out of afterburner and restraints dug into her shoulder as the jet quickly decelerated, settling in at a comfortable three hundred knots.
“Still with me?”
“Oh yeah. Thanks, man.”
“Maybe I’m getting too old, but that wore me out. Want to take over for a bit?”
“Gladly.” She might not have been on flight status, but that didn’t mean Roy couldn’t let her enjoy a little stick time.
“Route’s been loaded in the FMC; expect climb to three-one-oh at the next waypoint. Your airplane.”
Traci rested her left hand on the throttle and wrapped her right around the stick. “My airplane.” She’d played around with the T-7 in her PC sim at home and was pleased to see how well it reproduced the actual cockpit, but there was no substitute for having the real thing at her fingertips. She gave the stick a gentle push left and right, feeling out the jet’s responsiveness, though not enough to take them off course and create uncomfortable questions from an air traffic controller. Clearance to their final cruise altitude came quickly over the datalink, just as Roy had expected. She pushed the throttle forward and gave the stick a slight pull, nosing the jet into a gentle climb past the columns of clouds building up around them. “Early in the day for towering cumulus. Gonna be stormy down there later.”
“Should be gone by the time we come back this evening,” Roy said, but he was more concerned with the weather ahead. “There’s a line building between Meridian and Little Rock, tops at thirty. Might get bumpy.”
Too far ahead for their weather radar to see, she would keep an eye out for them as they crossed into Mississippi. “We’ll be light enough to climb to three-nine-oh by then if need be. Should be good enough to go over the top.” She dialed in the altitude selector and waited for the jet to finish its climb. They were on a straight line to Bowling Green, she was once again in control of a high-performance airplane, and a little weather was not going to get in her way.
Traci took a courtesy car from the FBO—a small private terminal—and drove east, into the rolling farmland outside Bowling Green. Roy had stayed behind, ostensibly to “get some work done,” though she knew he’d not wanted to intrude on the short time she’d have with her parents.
She turned off the two-lane country highway onto an access road, winding past green fields of wheat and tobacco that soon gave way to densely wooded hills. The road ended at a gravel drive, leading to a tidy white Cape Cod. A husky man in a T-shirt, jeans and suspenders waited on the covered porch, his skin weathered by a lifetime of working in the sun.
Traci sprang from the car. “Daddy!”
Elijah Keene came down the steps and swept her into his arms. “Hey, baby girl.” He backed away, holding her at arm’s length. “Let me have a look at you.”
“Not much to look at, I’m afraid.”
“Nonsense. You’re always the prettiest girl wherever you go.”
She blushed and self-consciously smoothed down her pale blue flight suit. “I could’ve worn bib overalls to the prom and you’d have said that.”
“And I’d have been right, too. Come on, your mother’s in the kitchen getting lunch ready.”
The house looked the same as it had when she’d first left home, barely changing in two decades. The same handmade furniture sat in the living room, passed down over three generations. The only concessions to modern technology were an old flat-screen TV hung over the fireplace, and an equally old laptop placed in a hallway nook. She wondered if it still worked.
Her mother waited in the kitchen, hair as white as her husband’s and wearing a flowered dress. She turned away from a kettle on the stove and bounded across the room. “Traci!”
“Hi, Mama.”
Betty Keene studied her daughter. “Look at you, girl! You don’t look a day older.”
She brushed aside the white streak in her hair, suddenly feeling guilty for not having been home for at least a year. “I feel it, though.”
Her mother led them to the kitchen table. “Yes, I imagine you do. You’re still keeping busy, then?”
She knew her mother meant the lack of missions at the space agency. “There’s always plenty of work, even when we’re not flying,” she said, still unsure of how much to share with them. She noticed her mother glancing at her hands. Last time she’d been here, Traci was still struggling with tremors. “And I’ve been doing okay, Mama. Keeping up with my therapy.”
Her mother grasped Traci’s arm. “I know you are. You’ve never been one to let anything keep you down.”
Had she been? Until recently, she hadn’t felt that way.
They talked over a lunch of vegetable soup and cornbread, Traci’s favorite. “I’ve never been able to find any as good as this,” she said. “Haven’t been able to get the recipe right myself, either.”
“Still not much for cooking, are you?” her mother asked.
“I try, on the weekends. The rest of the time I’m just too busy. It’s usually salads for me in the evening. It’s easy, and I can’t burn it.”
Her father suspected she had come to them with news. “What’s keeping you so busy, if you don’t have a mission to train for? Or am I wrong about that?”
He always had been perceptive. “You just might be, Daddy. That is, if I have anything to do with it.” She pushed away her bowl and took a breath. “We found Jack.”
Her father seemed to take the news in stride, recognizing that there would be much more to come. Her mother beamed. “God bless, that is wonderful news!” She looked back and forth between her husband and daughter, noting the serious looks on their faces. She realized they hadn’t heard a word of it in the news. “Is it?”
She nodded. “It is, Mama, but it’s been kept quiet. Not for very good reasons, I’m afraid.” They had a long unspoken agreement that whatever Traci told them about internal goings-on at the agency would remain private. “There’s going to be a lot of debate over what to do about it.”
“And you’ve got a part to play in that,” her father said.
“I do.” She explained the mission she and Roy had been planning in secret, and the obstacles left to overcome.
While her father might have been focused on the practical matters at hand, her mother naturally leaned toward other concerns. “How do you feel about this? About him?”
“He’ll eventually die out there if we don’t do something. We have to act fast, and we’re not very good at that.”
Her mother gave a gentle smile. “That’s not what I asked, dear.”
She wiped a tear away. “I know, Mama. And I’m not sure.”
“You never were. It sounds like you’re conflicted.”
Have been since high school. “I am. I still don’t know—”
“Maybe you do. He drives you crazy, doesn’t he?”
She laughed. “He does. Did. Still does.”
With an eye toward her husband, Traci’s mother took her hand. “That’s how you know, dear. The more they get under your skin, the more they mean to you.”
She knew that instinctively. Why had she been so reluctant to give in to it? She looked up at her parents. “There’s so much more to tell, and I wish we had more time. I just wanted you to know what I’m doing, and why. It may be a while before you see me again.”
Her mother stiffened herself against that eventuality, while her father appeared more resigned. Both understood what had to be done. “We know, baby girl. You came to say goodbye.”
As they climbed away, Traci turned to watch the verdant Kentucky farmland recede behind them. Roy leveled them off at cruising altitude, arriving there after a much more sedate departure. Civilian airports were not as accommodating of noisy max-performance climbs by military jets.
“Two hours to Ellington and no weather to worry about. Ready for some more stick time, Keene?”
“Maybe not right now. But thank you.” The T-7’s ejection seat was mounted at an angle just enough to not be uncomfortable. Content with the knowledge of what she needed to do, and with a belly full of home cooking, she slept all the way to Houston.