Kate Day - In the Quick

I imagined turning a doorknob and then the door swinging open. It moves a small thing so you’re able to move a large thing, I said.

Who moves it?

I do. With my hand.

You’re providing the energy, and the doorknob the mechanism?

You have to have both, I said.

He smiled. Or it won’t work.

Exactly.

Then he opened his desk drawer, brought out some papers, and said, I’ll show you something now. The papers had pictures of a box with wires and tubes inside.

These are schematics for a new kind of fuel cell, he said. One that will power an explorer to the edge of our solar system. He spread them out and explained how to read them, how to understand the markings for the cell’s dimensions and functions, and decipher the schematics’ key.

As he talked the box with the wires and tubes transformed in my mind. It became something solid that worked. I could see its moving parts, could see how it turned one kind of energy into another. How it could power something small, like a light bulb or a fan, and also—with many cells working together—something large like an explorer.

There are only two people in the world who have seen these plans, he said, and winked. You’re the third.

Inquiry was the start of NSP’s Explorer program and the first of many missions that would travel to the farthest reaches of our solar system—and maybe even beyond it, my uncle said. This trip would take six years, and it would be powered by his fuel cells. But on the day of Inquiry ’s launch he wasn’t there to see it. He was lying in a cold white room on the sixth floor of the veterans’ hospital. Everyone was crowded around him. My aunt, my cousin John, my aunt’s sister. I stood near the window and craned my neck to the sky.

My aunt and cousin were talking but my uncle was silent and still. Then he said my name softly, June, and everyone drew back. I leaned over his broad, pale face.

His eyes drifted to the window and then to the clock on the wall. The launch is in forty minutes, he said.

I looked at my aunt. She was speaking to her sister.

If you go now you can make it, he said.

My aunt had already said no that morning when I’d asked to go to the launch. She had said, What’s more important? Your uncle or a piece of metal?

But now she was occupied with her sister; she was digging in her purse for something to eat for John. I edged past her and looked back at my uncle. His face was white like the sheets but his eyes were dark and bright, and he winked as I ducked quietly into the hall.

I hurried to the elevator and jammed my thumb on the ground-floor button. In the lobby I pushed through the heavy front doors. Outside the air was icy and the ground hard with frost. I circled around the back of the building and cut across a field so my aunt wouldn’t see.

The NSP campus was at least a mile away so I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets and ran. My boots crunched through a layer of day-old snow, and the air stung my eyes and nose. After only a few minutes my breath grew quick and tight; a sharp pain pressed against my left rib. My nose ran and the mucus froze on my upper lip. But my uncle’s face hovered in my mind and I kept going, tripping more than running for the last quarter mile.

I had only a few minutes to spare when the campus came into view, a cluster of buildings and hangars, dark against the flat gray sky. The airfields were just beyond. I skirted a chain-link fence and ran through a hangar where my footsteps made an echo across its smooth floor. The launch pad was framed by the hangar’s open bay door, Inquiry a tiny shining capsule atop its massive red-and-white rocket. Everything was so still I wondered for a second if I’d made a mistake. Then a rumble moved through my body; smoke billowed from the bottom of the rocket. I ran into the field—the snow was thicker here and my boots sank before they hit the shaking earth. My eyes were pinned to the small silver shape atop the rocket but I became aware that someone else was standing in the field too.

My uncle’s student and protégé James Banovic. He was a few paces away; he wore a large coat but it wasn’t buttoned and it flapped open in the cold wind. His dark curls twisted around his angular face.

He turned to look at me and a purple bruise marked his right eye like a half moon. Why are you here? he asked.

Same as you, I said, and he shook his head—he couldn’t hear me over the sound. Same as you! I yelled.

He came closer. How is he? he asked.

I thought of my uncle’s face against the white sheets of his hospital bed and said okay, even though it wasn’t true.

He kicked the snow hard and it seemed like he was going to walk away, but then he didn’t. The second-stage rockets fired and I saw his lips move slightly—I think he was counting. I counted too, down from one hundred, and when I reached thirty the air seemed to vibrate against my cheeks, to buffet my body forward and backward. There was the briefest pause, and James’s lips stopped and his body went rigid. The rocket shot up and broke the horizon in half and the earth sprang back. I staggered and fell forward as the sky filled with fire and smoke and a beating roar.

He held out a hand and pulled me up—his fingers were freezing. Then he stalked away.

I walked back to the hospital fast with my burning hands pushed deep in my pockets. I wanted to get to a television, to hear what NSP was saying about the launch, and the rendezvous Inquiry would make with a supply station in orbit to stock it further for its six-year mission. I wanted to tell my uncle about the launch.

But when I got there his eyes were closed; he was asleep and by the end of that day the doctors said he wasn’t going to wake up anymore.

I still collected pieces of things, even though my uncle wasn’t there to show them to. For a while I would make little piles on his desk with the idea he might somehow know they were there. His study was the only room that stayed the same in the house. My aunt was always hanging new curtains, changing the light fixtures, rearranging her paintings and photographs on the walls. Even my bedroom had new pillows, a different rug. But my uncle’s room didn’t change. Its bookcases still bowed with the weight of books and journals. Stacks of paper still teetered on the shiny metal desk and on the floor. His computer still sat by the window, unplugged, its face blank.

Sometimes I would stand outside and worry it would be different when I opened the door. But it never was. The only thing that changed was that my piles of things would disappear. I assumed my aunt threw them out. A few times when I looked inside my aunt was in there, just sitting with her hands flat on my uncle’s desk, doing nothing. When that happened I put my roll of twine or burned-out light bulb or handful of hinges back into my pocket and went away.

Eventually I stopped making piles on the desk. But I still collected stuff. I didn’t care so much about the things themselves. But when I picked something up—something that most people would consider junk, not worth a notice—a crowd of other things would appear in my mind. I’d sift through them until one piece joined another in my imagination. Then the pieces would do something together, some movement or action, and I would hear my uncle’s voice asking, What does it do?

Sometimes I never figured it out, what the movement did, what it was for. And the idea would fade away. But other times an answer surfaced and the idea would cohere into something whole, an invention, so vivid it felt real.

I hadn’t been in my uncle’s study for months. It seemed like I was in trouble every day, and I didn’t want my aunt to catch me and yell. But I kept hearing the man’s voice on TV, saying the Inquiry explorer was in trouble. I kept seeing the faces of the crew.