Vessel

31

CATHERINE HADN’T THOUGHT Cal was serious about a road trip, but when attempts to reach Commander Addy via email and phone both failed, they started making plans. Cal was able to dig up an address for her, deep in the Arizona desert in a place so tiny it wasn’t even an actual town—just a general store and a stoplight.

They planned to take off for a weekend to track her down, flying to Phoenix and driving the rest of the way. Maybe nothing would come of it, but Catherine felt like they were doing something. Slowly, the feeling of being helpless, of being frozen, was falling away.

The night before they were due to leave she called Julie, so someone would know where she was going. She didn’t want to tell David. The fewer people at NASA who knew where she and Cal were going, the better.

“Wait,” Julie said after being quiet. “Who is this guy again?”

“Cal’s one of the guys working on Sagittarius II. We’ve got a lead on some information that might affect the current mission.”

“Are you sure you’re all right? I mean, this seems sudden after— well, you’ve been having a bad time lately.”

“I’m doing a lot better,” Catherine reassured her. “No more drinking. This trip—it’s a good thing, okay? It’s me taking positive steps.”

“But doesn’t it seem a little, I dunno—a little risky to you?” Julie was typing as she spoke. “Cal Morganson, you said?”

“Yeah. What do you mean, risky?”

“I mean, this guy you’ve literally never mentioned before suddenly wants you to go away with him to some remote place… and you’re being awfully closemouthed about why.”

Catherine laughed. “Are you saying you think he’s going to hurt me?”

“No, I just—oh.” Julie stopped typing and her tone changed. “Is there something I need to know about this guy?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Are you sure this is just about business? What kind of ‘positive steps’ are you talking about?”

Catherine was too startled to answer at first. “What? Of course it’s business. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“ ’Cause I’m sitting here looking at a picture of Cal Morganson at NASA, and honey, you didn’t tell me he was pretty.”

“Cal?” Catherine laughed. “You think that me and Cal—no.” Pretty? She’d noticed that he was attractive, and he was a lot nicer than she’d originally thought, but… that was ridiculous. “He’s like, half my age or something.”

“Catherine Marie Wells, I am not looking at the face of a twenty-one-year-old right now. Sure he’s younger than you, but boy, wouldn’t that piss David off?”

“Julie.” Catherine paused, patiently. “I am not trying to piss David off. And Cal is just a guy I work with.” She laughed again, because honestly. “I can’t believe you looked him up.”

“Kiddo, I’ve been vetting your dates since you were sixteen. You think I’m gonna stop now?”

“Oh my God, stop. This is for work. Can we drop this?” The humor was rapidly diminishing, and Catherine couldn’t put a finger on why her discomfort was growing.

“Fine, fine. I’m just sayin’. You could do worse. But— I’m done. Subject changed. When are you coming back?”

“I don’t know for sure. It depends on what we find. Shouldn’t be more than a couple of days. I’ll have my cell phone, but we’re gonna be in the middle of nowhere, so I don’t know how good service will be.” Catherine paused. “Jules, don’t mention this to David, okay? I don’t want him to worry.”

“You realize that’s not making me feel any better about this.”

“I know, but just… trust me. Please?”

There was a long silence on the line, and then Julie said, “All right. I trust you. Take care of yourself. Call me as soon as you can.”

By the time she met Cal at the airport, Catherine was starting to have doubts of her own. It was ungodly early; the sun was barely up. What were they doing? What did they think they were going to find, talking to someone so thoroughly discredited at NASA that hardly anyone mentioned her name anymore?

Cal met her at the gate, and she almost didn’t recognize him, hiding behind a pair of sunglasses. Like her, he’d dressed casually in jeans. They looked like tourists, and Catherine had to repress the urge to laugh wildly. Somehow they’d both made the decision to look as unofficial and nongovernmental as possible.

“You made it,” he said. “I wondered if you’d change your mind.”

“I’m sorry, that’s not the correct code phrase. If you’re my contact, you should be saying something about the rain in Germany at this time of year.” Catherine sat next to him at the gate.

“…What?” The sunglasses came off and Cal looked at her closely.

Catherine gave in to the desire to laugh, which didn’t make Cal look less worried. “The sunglasses. You look like you’re trying to go incognito.”

Cal finally smiled, catching on. “Okay, it’s a little cloak-and-dagger. Aaron would kick my ass if he could see me right now.”

“He’d probably kick both our asses.” She paused. “And then fire us.”

“And maybe have us committed,” Cal added. They were serious until their eyes met, then they both burst out laughing.

The drive from Phoenix to Rough Rock was supposed to take five hours. Catherine drove the first leg. They listened to the radio for a while, with a little bit of conversation here and there, but by the time they switched driving duties, they’d left most of the radio signals far behind.

The rental car didn’t do a great job of keeping the road noise out after Catherine snapped off the radio. A dull rushing noise filled the silence as the desert went past Catherine’s window. It was bright and hot, the sky white-blue. Despite the rental’s air-conditioning, she could feel the heat baking through the glass.

After a period of awkward silence, Cal said, “All right, Wells. Truth or… truth. What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen or done?”

“Do I need to remind you that I’ve been to an actual other planet?”

“Yeah, but you don’t remember it. Still, fair enough. On Earth. What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen or done on Earth?”

Catherine thought for a moment. “You’ve gone through the astronaut training program, right?” she asked.

“A slightly abbreviated version; I was never a candidate, but I wanted to get a sense of what you guys go through.”

“Did you do the simulation?” The simulation was a monthlong exercise where a “crew” lived in a replica of a ship like Sagittarius.

Cal looked away from the road as a semi barreled past going the other way on the two-lane highway. “I skipped out on that particular experience.”

“Uh-huh. I should have guessed.” Catherine grinned. “Well, some of us didn’t have that luxury. After the first couple of days, it got dull. We were mostly waiting for Mission Control to throw a crisis at us so we’d have something to do. Except some of us found ways to amuse ourselves.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I don’t know how well you knew Richie Almeida, but that was one man you did not want to let get bored. When Richie got bored, he got creative.”

“You never want your systems operator to get bored,” Cal agreed. “What’d he do?”

“I still don’t know how he did it, but he reprogrammed the onboard computer to respond to commands with a verbal response.” She shook her head, laughing. “Made the mission ‘commander’ absolutely batshit. Every time one of us typed in a command we’d hear something like ‘Aye, aye, Captain!’ or ‘I’m afraid I canna do that, Captain.’ ”

“The onboard computers don’t have a voice response system,” Cal said.

“By the time Richie was done with it, that one did. He was just using recordings.” She laughed, remembering. “It was like being around someone who had the ringtone collection from hell. Any alert we got was prefaced with ‘Houston, we have a problem.’ ”

“I mean, that’s funny, but that’s the craziest thing? Really?”

“That was just the start. I told you that the simulation commander was losing his mind over this, right? Tried everything to get Richie to change it back. NASA wouldn’t interfere since, you know, it was designed to test our responses to the unpredictable. Hell, I’m not convinced that they didn’t help him set it up.” She chuckled. “The commander in question was David.”

“David Wells? Your— I’m sorry, what do I call him right now?”

Catherine wrinkled her nose. “Soon-to-be ex is probably accurate enough. Anyway, yes. And he was not happy. But the kicker came when he did a test ‘space walk.’ I swear, Richie was saving this for a special occasion. When David tried to come back in, the air lock wouldn’t open. He yelled for us to let him in, and the computer said…”

“No.” Cal started to laugh.

Catherine laughed with him. “Yes. The computer said, ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that… . This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.’ I thought David was gonna have a stroke. Mission Control was in tears laughing. I think everybody saw it coming except him. The rest of the simulation, any time David did anything with the main computer, he got HAL 9000 answering him.”

“I’m surprised Almeida didn’t wash out after that.”

“That’s why I think he had the brass behind him, to be honest.” Catherine shook her head, realizing something. “That… might have been one of the reasons David washed out. He never really talked to me about it.”

Cal made a noncommittal noise and they were both suddenly quiet.

“Anyway,” Catherine said, shaking it off, “what about you? What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen or done?”

“Well… I was an undergrad at Caltech.”

“Oh God.”

“Aha, I see our reputation precedes us.” Cal flashed her a smile. “Can you hand me a water?”

“I’ve known a few Caltech engineers.” Catherine reached into the back seat to the small Styrofoam cooler packed with ice and bottles of water and grabbed two. She handed one to him before cracking hers open. “What’d you do?”

“Well. The head of the physics department was notorious for telling students that if they failed out of school, they’d have to get a job working at a car wash.” Cal managed to open the water while keeping his hands marginally on the steering wheel. “He’d say it before every exam. It was annoying as hell.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Catherine said with a laugh.

“I know. Like, why a car wash, right? Still, by my senior year, we could recite it along with him.” Cal paused, took a drink of water. “He also, we discovered, had a classic 1980 BMW that he was crazy proud of. It was a collector’s edition or something, and the damn thing was his baby.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. He gave us a target. Never,” he proclaimed, “give an engineering student a grudge and a target.”

“What did you do?”

“We washed his car.” He gave her a smug look. “In the men’s locker room showers.”

“How the hell did you manage to get it in there?” Catherine laughed again.

“Hello, Caltech engineering students. We figured it out.”

“What did he do?”

“I think he managed to reverse engineer how we got it in there, but last I heard, he’d stopped using his car-wash speech.”

“Air Force pranks were never as good as the stories I hear from you geeks.” Catherine leaned back against the seat, smiling.

“Come on. Didn’t you, like, steal a general’s plane or anything?”

“Not me. I was a strictly-by-the-book sort of girl.”

“Besides, you say ‘geek’ like you’re not one. I have bad news for you, Cath. You’re an astronaut. You’re pretty much Peak Geek.”

A sign up ahead said they were getting close to Rough Rock. “Do we know exactly where she lives out here?”

“Well… her address is general delivery, and GPS wasn’t any help. I think this is going to be a case of finding someone who knows her and hoping they can tell us which landmarks to follow.” Cal pointed at the GPS on the dash. “We’re gonna go to the main crossroads and start from there.”

“Oh yeah, because starting anything at a crossroads isn’t ominous at all,” Catherine said.

“I’m not planning to make any deals. Not yet.”

At the crossroads was a gas station, with a store that called itself a trading post. Cal pulled into the gas station. “Well, this is it: the booming metropolis of Rough Rock, Arizona.”

“I expect to see tumbleweeds any second.” Catherine climbed out of the car, her legs complaining at the long ride.

“I’m going to fill up the car, if you want to go in and ask if anyone knows Addy.”

“Sure.” It felt good to walk, like rust falling off her joints in great flakes. The gas station wasn’t much more than a shack that held a shelf of rudimentary auto supplies, a collection of snack foods of dubious age and provenance, and a cooler of sodas in the back. After saying hello to the woman behind the counter, Catherine grabbed a couple of sodas and took them up.

“This,” she said, “and the gas.”

“All right.” The woman was short and squat, with black hair streaked with iron gray in a long braid down her back and wrinkles around her eyes from squinting into the sun.

While they waited for Cal to finish gassing up, Catherine said, “Do you know a woman named Iris Addy? She’s supposed to live around here.”

The woman looked her over with dark olive-brown eyes. “You from the government?”

“What?”

“You and your friend. White people in a rental car, asking after Iris. You ain’t dressed like government, but just the same.”

“No—not really. I mean, that’s not why we’re here. We just want to talk to her.”

The woman humphed, then started ringing up the total after Cal finished. “That’ll be forty-five fifty-one, with the sodas.”

Catherine handed her cash and tried again. “I… I think I went through something similar to her. We just want to talk.”

“Yeah, I know who you are now. I saw you on TV.” She handed Catherine her change. “That road out there is Route 59. Follow it up about five miles, you’ll see a bunch of power towers. Turn right there. Iris’s place is about six more miles.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. She ain’t gonna be happy to see you.”

“Still. Thanks.” Catherine took the sodas and left “We’re all set,” she told Cal. “And I got directions.”

“There’s only a few hours of daylight left,” Cal said. “Should we find a place to stay and try in the morning?”

“Let’s not.” She handed him one of the sodas. “I have a feeling the clerk is going to give Iris a heads-up that we’re coming. Be nice if she didn’t have time to run off.”

“All right.”

When they were back on the road, there was no more easy chatter. Catherine’s stomach was tied in knots and she couldn’t stop fidgeting with the soda bottle.

“Hey.” Cal reached over and squeezed her forearm, giving it a shake. “It’s going to be okay. Worst case, she can’t tell us anything, and we got to have a nice drive through God’s country.”

“Yeah,” Catherine said, unconvinced. “Sure.”

The towers the clerk mentioned were easy to spot, and Catherine wiped her damp palms against her jeans as the remaining miles ticked by. A homestead came into view, a gray, weathered cabin and a few outbuildings equally as weathered. A handful of sheep and goats stood around in a pen, and as they pulled up, a dog started barking.

Cal and Catherine got out of the car and had barely taken ten steps to the house when a woman burst through the front door. She wore denim overalls and a plaid shirt, and had wild hair that spilled over her shoulders. She had a shotgun in her hands, and as they watched, she racked it and aimed.

“Now you just get back in that car and turn right around the way you came,” she said.