Orbital

Sixty-Six The Farm House

There’s an evening fog hanging over the small valley. A cluster of cows sit at the far end catching the last of the setting sun’s rays, waiting for the night chill.

Dr. Lee Huang, bundled in two bathrobes and a blanket firmly wrapped around his shoulders, gives his Chinese-American nurse a small smile as she finishes tucking in the fabric. She pats his leg and leaves us.

The hospital is a private clinic in rural Virginia used by intelligence agencies. It’s the kind of place a spy would get a face transplant if that was a thing they did. In Huang’s case, it’s where he’s getting his radiation exposure treatment.

He looks miles better than when I first found him on the CS satellite. The current prognosis is that he might actually get ten or more years of life. Maybe longer if certain cancer treatments advance well-enough.

As he convalesced, he was told over and over a variation of what happened. His actual memory was so fragmented he had no clear idea how he woke up in an American hospital.

“They tell me you’re the one that found me adrift,” Huang says in English perfected as a student when he went to the University of Toronto.

“We picked you up on radar when I was doing repairs,” I reply. “It was a shock to find a man alone in orbit.”

“Yes. Yes,” he murmurs and nods his head and tries to piece together what happened. “I am grateful for that.”

There’s a long pause as we watch the first stars begin to twinkle in the purple sky.

“I’ve been given the opportunity to defect. And I couldn’t help but notice all of my nurses are exceptionally attractive.”

“We would very much like it if you chose to stay. Right now your superiors assume that you are dead.”

“Yes. Yes. They let my satellite de-orbit and burn up.”

“Nice guys.”

“Things were complicated. They believed me dead.”

I study his face. “Did they? Or was that more convenient?”

He stares into the valley, ignoring my gaze. “I love my country.”

“As you should. I’ve been. It’s a beautiful place.”

“I do not love the party, though. This complicates things for me. My friends are back home. My work.”

“Your work burned up over New Zealand. If your boss decided to let you go that way, how eager are they going to be to let you pick up where you left off?”

“This is true. I had an argument with my superiors about something. They insisted they were right and made me go up and do as they asked. When things went wrong they blamed me anyway.”

“And left you to die…”

He sighs. “I wanted to be an astronomer. I studied lasers because of interactive optics. Do you know anything about them?”

“Like using a laser beam to see how light gets distorted in the atmosphere?”

“Yes. Precisely. I wanted to discover new planets, go to distant worlds. Instead…”

He still won’t say what the satellite’s function really was. We pretend not to know in case he returns to China.

“You still can,” I reply.

“I don’t see how.”

“Stay here. There’s a college in New Hampshire that has an astronomy program and a nice telescope on a mountain. They’d love to have you.”

This is the offer I was told to bring him after he asked to meet with me.

“I’d always be looking over my back.”

“At first. It’s a rural Christian college, so it’s a bit out of the way. We’d give you a new name, a new background. In a few years it won’t matter.”

“But I would never be able to go home again.”

“Not anytime soon. Can you now? What happens if you go back?”

“Some people will be very surprised. I do not think life will be very good. But my friends and family are there.”

“That’s a difficult choice. But I’m going to give you one more thing to consider. They will never let you go back into space again.”

He sighs. “This is true. I did some research. The treatments you have been giving me don’t exist in China yet. I’m not sure how long I would have lived had they retrieved me. So in a way, I owe my life to you doubly so. But still, I’m not sure if it would be better if I were to die in my home country.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re American. Roots and history don’t matter to you as much. You’re constantly trying to reinvent yourselves.”

“Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“You come from a country that a generation ago was basically a giant rice paddy that could barely feed itself. Now you’re an industrial giant and a respected world power. You guys are the new masters of reinvention.”

“Perhaps. But there is still a reverence for culture and past. I don’t know that I can turn my back on that.”

I can tell he wants to defect. He just needs the right argument. I was told to talk to him about the American way, a true democracy and freedom. As much as I value those things, I’m throwing those talking points out the window.

“Dr. Huang, you’re a scientist. An explorer. You’re part of something far more important. The people you work for, and the ones I do, they look at space as just another battlefield. A slightly higher ground to gain tactical advantage. But that’s not what it is to us.” I gesture to the stars rising on the horizon. “That’s our culture. It’s not about our past. It’s where we’re going. Stay here and you’ll have a place in all that. Get better and you’ll go up again.”

“But to be a traitor…”

“You can’t be a traitor if you’re already dead. And if all you’re doing is teaching undergraduates astronomy and physics, it sounds like you’re doing a good thing.”

“I’m sure your bosses will have questions about my work.”

“I’m sure they will. The fact that you’re here and not in some basement being pumped full of drugs to make you talk should tell you how they’ll handle that.”

“Perhaps.”

“Let me ask you this. If the roles had been reversed and you had found me, what would have happened?”

Huang is too worldly not to know about the secret Chinese prisons and interrogation centers the party uses to keep strict control.

“We would not be sitting here on a nice bench enjoying a beautiful evening. And your nurses would not be buxom redheads constantly tucking you in.”

“I’m not saying we’re always the good guys and your bosses aren’t. But we try to put a higher value on individual lives. Often we fail miserably at that. Right now, they’re trying to do right by you.”

“Because of what I know.”

“More or less.”

Huang thinks this over for a moment. “I remember more than I’ve told them. I’m afraid if I said so, they wouldn’t let me go back home. In the satellite, after I grabbed your leg, I was so afraid. Then you opened your helmet so I could see your face. You had to know this would make you sick.”

“It was a calculated risk.”

“One you made for me. I had no idea who you were then; the famous David Dixon. But I knew when I saw you that I would be okay. Everything would be fine. For a while I thought my superiors had sent you to rescue me. Now I think that it was somebody else.”

I’m not exactly the religious type, but I’m not going to jump in and talk him out of whatever gets him over to our side.

“Maybe it is my destiny that I end up here and teach at this college. Then perhaps go back into space.”

“Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is.”

We both sit quietly watching as the stars begin to appear beyond the horizon.