All Our Wrong Todays(30)

I came here to do something nobody else ever has. To be first. To make history by witnessing history. Somewhere in the fractal fog of my muddled consciousness comes a loud, clear imperative drilled deep from my chrononaut training—focus. Focus on concrete information. What you see. What you hear. What you smell. What you taste. What you touch. What you feel doesn’t matter. Pain doesn’t matter. Grief, anger, humiliation, love, awe, none of it matters. Focus on what’s real.

What’s real is you’re in trouble. What’s real is you’ve made a mistake. What’s real is this is an opportunity to rise to a challenge, even if it’s a challenge caused by your own stupidity.





48


Lionel glances around, weirded out by the phantom movement. But before he can investigate any further, a woman comes in through the lab’s only door, thick steel with a heavy lock that she clunks into place. I immediately recognize her—she’s Cheeky.

Her name is Ursula Francoeur, a physics professor at Stanford University, the first tenured female physics professor they ever had, if I’m accurately recalling my high school history seminars. She’s one half of the only married couple among the Sixteen Witnesses. Her husband is Jealous, Jerome Francoeur, the bureaucrat who approved Goettreider’s funding. Why a federal science-and-technology funding administrator would be jealous of an obscure scientist, even in his moment of unexpected triumph, is one of many enduring mysteries of this endlessly fascinating moment in time.

I’m just registering it’s a bit weird that Ursula Francoeur locked the door—history asserts they barely knew each other—when Lionel Goettreider looks at her with a very odd smile. Anxious. Careful. Charged. There’s a lot going on in that smile.

And then I witness something I’ve never heard mentioned in any of the countless biographical analyses, scientific discussions, artistic flights of fancy, or virtual representations, something evidently no one has ever even considered before it happens right in front of me.

Lionel and Ursula kiss.





49


It’s not a first-time kiss. It’s a grasping, clenching, yearning kiss between two mouths that know each other well.

Holy shit. I know this doesn’t mean much to you out of context but it’s blowing my mind. Nobody, I mean nobody, knows that Lionel Goettreider and Ursula Francoeur were having, what, I guess it’s an affair? Is that why she looks Cheeky? Is that why her husband looks Jealous? What would this have meant for Goettreider if his experiment had failed, if he had lived, if any of them had survived?

Even in their final weeks, when Goettreider and most of the other witnesses had died from the radiation, neither Francoeur ever mentioned anything that might suggest Ursula was romantically involved with Lionel and Jerome knew about it.

But here they are, sharing a secret moment just minutes before the experiment is scheduled to begin. And it’s not a quick peck either. They’re making out. I feel like a bit of a pervert standing here staring at them, but it’s too crazy to look away.

If this is the only thing I see in the past, I’ve already changed Goettreider scholarship forever. The look on his face when they break the kiss, I mean, every schoolkid has seen thousands of images of Goettreider’s face, but I can say without hesitation none of them ever looked carnal.

“They’ll be here any minute,” Ursula says. “I’ll unlock the door.”

“Are you coming over tonight?” Lionel says.

“I can’t,” she says. “I think he knows something’s going on.”

“With us?”

“No,” she says. “With me. I can’t help it. I can’t go home and touch him after I’ve been with you. It’s making me distant. Mean. He doesn’t deserve that.”

“He doesn’t deserve you,” Lionel says.

“You know I hate it when you talk like that. This isn’t a soap opera. It’s my life.”

“It’s my life too,” he says.

“It’s not the same,” she says.

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I know you have much more to lose. But if this experiment works . . .”

“You don’t think it’s going to work?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “My calculations, the yields I’m showing, they seem impossible. But your husband says they’ll pull my funding without some concrete results. Something I can publish. Even if it fails, at least I’ll have some real findings instead of a bunch of theories scribbled on paper.”

“You know Jerome has Donald Hornig’s ear . . .”

“Hornig was Kennedy’s appointment. Everyone says Johnson doesn’t listen to his science advisers because they’re all against Vietnam.”

“This isn’t about Hanoi,” says Ursula. “It’s about the moon. If you can generate even a fraction of the power you’re projecting, it could be a tremendous contribution to the Gemini and Apollo programs. That’s the legacy Johnson wants, the one every man, woman, and child on Earth can see just by looking up at the night sky.”

“Ursula, why would your husband help me get to the president?” says Lionel.

“You really don’t understand politics at all, do you?”

“It’s not how my mind works,” he says.