Ian Sales: All That Outer Space Allows

Kristin could afford to boast—not only was she beautiful and wore the loveliest clothes, but her husband wielded a lot of power in the spaceyard. It wasn’t that Suzanne felt grateful for Kristin’s friendship—she liked Kristin, and knew the sentiment was returned—but sometimes she couldn’t help feeling a little resentful at Kristin so frequently calling attention to her many advantages.

They moved further into the room, greeting the other wives in their dresses of yellow and blue and red and other colors, and made their way to the table where the coffee and cakes were laid out. While Kristin poured them both drinks, Suzanne complained about her husband’s recent surliness.

“He hardly speaks to me when he gets home,” she said. “One evening, he complained his steak knife wasn’t sharp enough and went to get another from the kitchen. He couldn’t find them and flew into a terrible rage. It was awful. And do you know where the steak knives were? In the first drawer he looked in!”

“Men are always like that,” Kristin said knowingly. “We’ve been in our apartment for five years now, and my man still can’t find the electronic dishwasher.”

“And if I ask him to fetch something of mine,” Suzanne continued, “like a pair of shoes or some jewellery, he can never find them—even if I give him exact directions!”

Kristin nodded in agreement. She leaned in and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “They’re under stress, darling. It’s this project they’re working on,” she murmured. “Project Philadelphia it’s called.”

“What’s that?” Suzanne knew nothing about her husband’s work. She was aware the spaceyard built ships for the navy, for the war against the Regulans; but that was all she knew.

“I shouldn’t tell you this,” said Kristin, “but…” She placed her purse on the table, slipped a small bottle of whiskey from it and added a dash of liquor to her coffee. “They’re trying to make spaceships invisible. They’ve got a destroyer ship down in a special dock, and they’ve built all this weird equipment into it. It’s supposed to make the spaceship completely invisible. He says the theory all adds up, but no matter what they do everyone can still see the spaceship.”

Kristin sipped her coffee, frowned, and added a few more drops of whiskey. “There’s even been a couple of ‘accidents’, something about a crewman getting phased into the decking or something.” She shuddered. “It all sounded very gruesome, darling.”

By this time, several of the other women had gathered round them, and soon they all had whiskey in their coffees and had been told all Kristin knew about Project Philadelphia. Some of the other wives added details to Kristin’s account, learned from their own husbands.

Of course, all this knowledge meant nothing. Suzanne couldn’t help her husband with his work, but at least she now understood the reason for his bad mood each evening. She even felt a little sympathetic. It must be difficult to work so hard on a project, only for it to repeatedly fail.

After the social had ended, Suzanne waited in the room for her husband, but he didn’t appear. He had told her he would come and fetch her. After ten minutes, she went looking for him. She checked her porta-phone but he hadn’t called her, and although she briefly considered ringing him she didn’t want to seem impatient or demanding. So she left the room and headed for the club foyer. As she passed the archway leading into the main bar, she happened to glance through it.

And there he was, standing at the bar with the spaceyard’s only female test pilot, Betty, who was still dressed in her flightsuit.

Betty turned toward Suzanne as she approached her husband and gave her a flat, hard stare. He, however, hadn’t noticed her and didn’t turn around until she stood beside him.

“Oh hi, honey,” he said. “You know Betty.”

He put his whiskey on the bar, turned and pecked his wife perfunctorily on the cheek.

“I thought you were coming to fetch me?” she asked, trying hard not to sound petulant.

“I couldn’t find you,” he replied. “I swear I looked in every damn room but I couldn’t find any of you.” He shrugged. “I figured you’d walk past the bar on the way out so I came in here to wait.”

He couldn’t have looked very hard. He needed only to find a room full of women in their best outfits, and there she would be.

“I must be going,” Betty said abruptly. She drained her tumbler, put it on the bar, nodded at Suzanne’s husband and strode from the room.

“I guess you’re ready to go too,” he said.

Suzanne smiled wanly.

Her husband finished off his whiskey and took her by the elbow.

The spaceyard lights were on night-cycle, and the stars shone brightly through the forcefield dome. Somewhere out there was Earth, too far away to be visible with the naked eye. Even the Sun was an unremarkable point of light in a heaven of stars. Suzanne shivered. She gripped one of her husband’s arms and hugged it. During the day, when the lights shone so bright they hid the emptiness of outer space on the other side of the dome, it was easy to forget the spaceyard was sited on a chunk of rock somewhere on the outer edges of the Solar System. Its exact location was, of course, a closely-guarded secret.

Suzanne’s husband put an arm about her shoulders and crushed her to him. He was humming some tune under his breath. Perhaps he’d had more than one whiskey in the bar. Or perhaps his good mood was a consequence of Betty’s presence. Suzanne wasn’t sure she liked Betty, since the test pilot never mixed with the wives and treated them with the same level of detachment as the husbands. If there was any bond there due to their shared gender, it was well hidden.

In bed that night, Suzanne’s husband was more loving than usual. He didn’t turn his back on her and go to sleep as he usually did. Suzanne tried to persuade herself it was because she’d prettied herself up for the social and her appearance had awoken his slumbering affections. But she suspected she was only fooling herself.

The guard had to ring ahead, and once Suzanne had been cleared, he gave her a security pass to wear. The route from the yard’s entrance to the building containing her husband’s office was clearly signposted, and she had no difficulty finding her way. The site was very secure—no one could get in unless they were supposed to. In fact, her presence drew several questioning glances from various people, but they said nothing after spotting the security pass pinned to a lapel of her lemon-yellow cardigan style jacket. And they were people she knew, friends of her husband and husbands of her friends. Inside the building, she found herself walking along a corridor lined with windows overlooking the docks, so she stopped to take in the view. Each of the docks, a rectangular pit some six hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide, was identified by large numerals painted onto the concrete before it. The spaceyard was busy: the docks were filled with spaceships in various stages of construction. She spotted a dock off to one, and wondered if that was Project Philadelphia. But the spaceship berthed within it looked no different to any of the others.

Suzanne’s husband looked up in surprise when his secretary ushered Suzanne into his office. He frowned on seeing who it was, then came around from his desk and put a concerned hand to her shoulder. “What’s up, hon?” he asked. “Is there something wrong?”

“There’s nothing wrong,” she assured him. “I’m here for the guided tour.”

He turned away and swore under his breath. Striding across to his desk, he jabbed a finger down at his intercom. “Nirmala,” he snapped. “I’m going to be out of the office for—” He glanced back over his shoulder at Suzanne, who was smiling uncertainly— “For about thirty minutes,” he said. “Maybe an hour.”