The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut, #1)(83)
“What?” Nathaniel sat up, staring down at me. “He said what?”
What, exactly, did you think was going to happen when you reported me … I cleared my throat. “He said something about how I was never going into space if he could help it. But, sweetie, don’t say anything about it.”
“Don’t—why the hell wouldn’t I?”
I sat up to face him. “Because it was just him and me. No one else heard, and you know how he can play things off.” As the first man in space, the agency had good reason to want to keep his image spotless. If they had to sacrifice a computer for him? I knew what would happen, and Daddy wasn’t here to make sure it didn’t. “Besides, at the moment, they aren’t even accepting women as astronauts. When they do? Then we’ll talk about it.”
*
Two months passed. The U.S. committee that had looked into the crash finally voted to continue the United States involvement with the IAC, in part, I think, because they were afraid the other nations would colonize the moon without us. There were changes, of course, which we implemented over the winter.
Higher security at the IAC required a fancy new electric fence and armed guards roaming the edges. Clemons used the bomb and the Williams farm tragedy like budgetary weapons to get upgrades and add staff.
As Nathaniel predicted, the IAC pushed to relocate the launch facilities to Brazil to limit vulnerabilities. Mind you, we’d asked for this at the beginning, but hadn’t been able to get building a new launch site through the budget because the U.S. was afraid that other countries would use rocket technology for weaponry.
The rockets would be assembled and tested at the Sunflower facility in Kansas, then shipped to the new center near the coast in Brazil for launch. It finally got us near the equator, which was going to help with the moon and Mars programs.
And it meant that the computer department was busy redoing all of our trajectories to account for the new launch site, although it would likely be another two years until it was fully operational. I was hunched over a page double-checking my differential equations when a shadow fell across my desk.
Blinking, I looked up. Nathaniel stood by my desk. He had that serious, constipated expression, as if there were a secret he couldn’t share.
“Sorry to bother you, Elma, but I thought you’d like to see this.” He laid a single sheet on the desk in front of me. “It’s a carbon, so you can keep it.”
Across the table, Basira lifted her head and gasped. She was staring at the same line I was.
PRESS RELEASE: IAC DIRECTOR ANNOUNCES NEW CALL FOR ASTRONAUTS: WOMEN ENCOURAGED TO APPLY.
Someone shrieked. That was me. I had jumped up and thrown my hands into the air like I was some sort of gymnast. Around the room, the other computers had stopped, pencils frozen mid-equation. They were staring at me, and I didn’t care.
“They’re taking women astronauts!”
Pencils, laughter, papers, and hurrahs filled the air. My fellow computers jumped up and hugged each other. We were all laughing and crying and it was like the war had just ended again. I grabbed Nathaniel in a hug that left him gasping. He kissed me, bending me over in a dip that defied gravity.
At the door, engineers poked their heads through the door to see what all the hoopla was about. Bubbles bounced into the room. “What in the—?”
“Lady astronauts!” I shouted from my husband’s arms. “The lady astronauts are headed for orbit!”
TWENTY-SEVEN
“SUPER-FUEL ” TO DRIVE ROCKET INDEFINITELY IN SPACE
April 18, 1957—A “breakthrough” on the path to a super-fuel for rockets that will drive themselves indefinitely with an atomic oxygen captured in the upper atmosphere was reported last week by Peter H. Wyckoff, rocket specialist at the Air Force’s Sunflower Research Center. Oxygen in the upper atmosphere consists of molecular oxygen, each molecule composed of two atoms of the element. However, in the region sixty to seventy miles above the Earth, ultraviolet rays split the molecular oxygen into single atoms. Dr. Wyckoff reported a catalytic agent has been found that would cause the recombination of the atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere into molecular oxygen, such combination resulting in the release of great amounts of energy.
I had not been to the 99s in months, but the Sunday after Nathaniel put the draft of the press release on my desk, I went. And I took applications with me.
Walking across the tarmac to our hangar, the scent of petrol and black tar whipped around me on the breeze. Such a strange combination of scents to be nostalgic for.
No one was sitting on the picnic bench outside the hangar, which wasn’t surprising, with October’s first chill in the air. Nicole’s Cadillac was parked near the door, so I knew at least one person was there.
Outside the small door set in the bay doors, I stopped, almost tempted to knock. Then I shook my head and pushed the door open. They were using my plane, and I still contributed to the rent, so it wasn’t as if I were a stranger.
I stepped through into laughter that dissipated as I took off my hat.
Pearl looked up from a slice of cake and her gaze widened. “Well, hello, stranger.”
Or maybe I was a stranger. When Pearl stood, she had an obvious bump which said that her triplets would soon have a new sibling. Or two. I waved, a little sheepish that I hadn’t known. “Hi.”