The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut, #1)(61)

I whistled, which isn’t ladylike, but he’d taught me to do it when we were kids, so I figured he wouldn’t mind. “That is rough. And what’s the favor?”

“Will you come early? To the bar mitzvah. I need…” His voice faltered a little, which made me sit up on the couch. “Ah, hell, Elma. I was planning on joking about it, but I realized that I was going to be … There aren’t any other Wexlers. It’s just you and me and the kids.”

You’d think that at some point the grief would stop. I put my hand over my mouth and leaned forward, as if I could somehow fold over the pain and keep it from escaping into the world again. There might be cousins out there somewhere, but between the Holocaust and the Meteor … it was just the two of us.

I had to swallow hard before I could speak. “Yeah—I mean, I have to check the launch schedule, but yeah. I can come out early.”

“Thanks.” His voice was a little ragged. “Plus, California has actual food. Nathaniel said you got caught in those riots yesterday?”

I let Hershel change the subject, and shot my husband a look. He was engaged in trying to figure out how to fold my panties, and it seemed to be taking more effort than a differential equation. “That’s a wild exaggeration. We had to go to a different streetcar stop, that’s all.”

“He made it sound like you were right in the middle of it.”

“The police were doing a fine job containing it.” I sighed, remembering the gossip I’d heard in the laundry room. “Although … it sounds like our favorite market got hit. Poor Mr. Yoder is Amish, and I think he had to just stand there and let them take stuff.”

“Oof. Well, come out here and we’ll pamper you. You need it, eh?”

There was a consciousness in the way he said it that made me purse my lips and stare at my husband. What, exactly, had he said to Hershel before I came into the apartment? To ask Hershel would be to invite him to discuss my well-being, and that was not something I wanted to do. Not now, at any rate. Maybe when I was out there, if there was time around the festivities. Maybe. “Listen, I should probably go. Nathaniel is about to wrinkle all the laundry.”

“Give him my best, huh?”

“Likewise. Same to Doris and the kids.” When I hung up the phone, I stayed on the sofa for another moment, with my hand still on the receiver. “Did you call Hershel?”

Nathaniel straightened, lowering my underwear. It might have been funny, if his face hadn’t been so serious. “Yes.”

“Did you tell him?”

“No.” He set the underwear down on the dresser and faced me. “I didn’t. I did say that you’d been working too hard.”

“Don’t.” I got to my feet and crossed to the laundry bag. The clothes inside were still warm from the dryer as I pulled them out. “I know you mean well, but don’t.”

*

I didn’t work all the launches. I was on the Maroon Team, which rotated in every third launch. Even there, we were further divided into shifts, which rotated to try to minimize exhaustion, because all stations had to be staffed the entire time astronauts were up.

Sometimes, though, even when you weren’t scheduled, you wanted to be there. We’d sent an unmanned launch up three days ago that Basira and the Green Team had control of, so Helen and I should have had the night off. We did, in fact. But this was the flight that was going to circle the moon.

At five o’clock, Helen came over to my desk and put her purse down on Basira’s empty half. It clunked as she set it down, seeming abnormally heavy for a cloth purse.

Putting a finger by the last row of numbers I’d been double-checking, I stared at the bag. The cloth seemed to contain a faint outline of a bottle. “Nice bag.”

“Refreshments.” Helen grinned and patted it. “You’re staying, right?”

I nodded and wrote a dash in the margin so I’d know where to start up again tomorrow. “Yes. If for no other reason than that it’s the only way I’ll get to see Nathaniel.”

“He could take a night off.”

“Ha. You’ve met my husband, right?”

“Not good if he burn out.” She drummed her fingers on the desk. “What do you think it will look like?”

I shrugged and stacked my papers. Around us, the other women were wrapping up their work for the day, pages rustling as they slid reports into their drawers. “Gray? I mean … there’s never been a hint of color in the telescope images. And we won’t have really clear images until the rocket gets back.”

“They are still pictures from the moon.”

Grinning, I pushed back from my desk and stood. “I admit that I’d probably stay, even without Nathaniel.” It was an amazing thing we were doing. We’d managed to program a rocket so that it could do a giant orbit around the moon without a pilot. We hoped.

It was different from what we’d be doing later when we sent men to orbit the moon. This didn’t involve needing to transfer in and out of orbit, though, because we’d just set up a highly elliptic orbit with the apogee on the far side of the moon. That math was fairly straightforward.

I followed Helen out of the room and joined the tide of IAC employees headed for Mission Control. We wouldn’t all fit in, of course, but there was a viewing room, and then, for those of us with the keys, a second control room.