The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut, #1)(34)

He was reading with his feet up on the desk, one of his cigars clenched between his teeth. Smoke belched around him like a misfiring engine. The book he held had a rocket in front of a dusty red landscape on the cover, and looked more like a novel than a technical paper.

“Let me check his schedule.”

He lowered the book. “Send her on in.”

“Oh—” I swallowed. Something about his crisp British diction always made me feel as if I’d come in unwashed from a field. “Thank you, sir.”

He held up the book as I approached his desk. “Have you had the opportunity to read this yet?”

“No, sir.”

“It has a Captain York in it, who sounds remarkably like your husband.” He gestured toward a chair. “Sit, sit. Have you ever met this Bradbury chap?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, I think he must be a fan. The notion of an ancient civilization on Mars is rubbish, but I will happily accept any press that excites people about space.” He set the book on his desk. “The American Congress is getting huffy about appropriations again. Is that what you’re here for? Do you need another one of the IBMs for the computing department? They are offering.”

I shook my head. “That’s really Mrs. Rogers’s decision, but for myself … well, they aren’t very reliable.”

“So the engineers keep telling me. Overheating.” He grunted, nodding. “What brings you here?

“Oh—well. It’s actually about keeping people excited about Mars, sir. You see … I wanted to talk to you about considering women for future missions.”

“Women?” He sat forward and gave me his full focus. “No, no. If we want people to be excited, we need the most highly qualified pilots on these missions, or the public will have our heads.”

“I understand, but if we want to establish viable colonies, they’ll need families, and that means convincing women that it’s safe.” I opened my notebook to the chart of statistics I had drawn up. “Now, certainly, you don’t want to send the average woman into space, any more than the average man would be a good candidate. But as an example, I thought that maybe you might consider some of the WASP pilots. There were 1,027 women who flew during the war for the United States alone, and they averaged seven hundred flight hours each, with 792 of them going well over a thousand flight hours. The average fighter pilot, on the other hand—”

“No.”

“I … I beg your pardon?”

“I am not sending women into space. If a man dies—well, that’s tragic, but people will accept that. A woman? No. The program would be shut down in its entirety.”

I stood, putting the notebook on his table and spinning it so he could see. “I think we could shift public perception, though. With these numbers—”

“No. You are speaking of women who ferried planes around as if they fought in combat.”

Pressing my hands against the comforting grid lines, I took another breath. He had said “combat” as if that was a consideration for the space missions, but you wouldn’t need that on a colony. I chickened out, the way I always do, and didn’t call him on that slip. “We’re doing an air show. Maybe you could come out and see it? As an example of how we could shift perception of women pilots. The amount of training the WASPs had to go through was more rigorous than the men, because of the variety of planes that we flew.”

“I appreciate your efforts, but I have to keep this project running. I do not have time for charity work.” He picked up the novel again and started to read. “Good afternoon, Mrs. York.”

I closed the notebook and bit down hard on the inside of my lip. I couldn’t tell you if I was trying to keep from yelling or crying. Probably both.

*

The weeks marched on and my attention was pulled away from the idea of an air show, partially from despair, but mostly because the IAC was working nonstop toward a lunar landing. While the American branch was doing that, our European counterparts were preparing to establish an orbiting space station. Teletypes flew back and forth across the Atlantic as the rocket scientists shared notes.

We were all pulling long hours. Still, Nathaniel and I tried to leave before sundown on Fridays so we could observe Sabbath. Not that either of us was especially observant, but it was good discipline.

I leaned on the doorframe to his office as the heavy gray shadows of evening dulled the parking lot outside. Nathaniel had his shirtsleeves rolled up and was glaring at something on his desk.

With one knuckle, I rapped on the inner office door. “Ready to go?”

“Hm?” He looked up and rubbed his eyes. “I’ve got a little more to do. Mind waiting?”

“You know … you’d think that we’d do a better job of leaving by sundown in the summer.”

Nathaniel spun in his chair to face the parking lot. “What time is it?”

“Almost nine.” I came into his office and set my purse and coat down on one of the chairs. “Did you take a break today?”

“Yeah … I had a lunch meeting with Clemons.” He turned back to the desk and picked up the paper he’d been studying. “Elma, if you were in orbit, would an r-bar or a v-bar rendezvous make more sense to you?”

“Okay, first of all, a lunch meeting does not count as taking a break.” I leaned over the back of his chair, so I could see the paper he was so fixed on. It was a report called Line-of-sight guidance techniques for manned orbital rendezvous, which seemed to consist of more questions than answers. “Second … what’s the assumed orbit?”