Джек Макдевитт - A Voice in the Night

The radio beeped. Incoming from the Cernan . He pressed the key. “Earthport here,” he said. “Go ahead, Cernan .”

A familiar voice responded: “Earthport, I’m on my way.” It was Laura . “How are you, Matt?”

He leaned over the mike. “Laura, is that really you?”

“Far as I can tell.”

He wasn’t sure what to say next. “When did they start sending ops managers out to do retrievals?”

“About the same time ops managers starting going over their bosses’ heads.”

“Again?”

“I guess so.”

Matt had loved her since the first time he’d seen her, lying sprawled in center field after running into a fence, but holding the ball aloft in her gloved hand. But he’d long since given up. “What happened?” he asked.

“One of the cable news shows started running stories that we were on board with the defunding. That it was okay to shut down you guys. Dr. Prevost went on Worldwide and denied the story, but he looked so weak that it just made things worse. You know how Prevost is. Doesn’t want to offend the politicians. I complained to Louie. He told me to keep out of it. But I got myself invited onto Brick Collier and I guess I said a little too much.”

“So they demoted you?”

“I guess Louie thought this would be an appropriate way to send a message. Send me out to turn off the lights.”

Matt stared at the mike. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

“I’m sorry about a lot of things. We have a chance to get some serious results here and we’re walking away from it.” He listened to her breathe. “You guys packed and ready to go?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“Very good, Matt. See you Friday.” Three days.

He leaned over the mike, savoring her voice, as smoky as her dark grey eyes. He’d always pretty much had his way with women. But his charm, whatever that might have been, had been insufficient with Laura. He’d had only a few weeks with her. And one glorious weekend. The weekend of his life. Now she was coming to take him home from the only assignment he’d ever really cared about. At the moment, she was in every sense of the phrase, far away.

“By the way,” she said, “I’m alone. There were supposed to be a couple of us on this one, but I guess they wanted to give me time to think about what I’d done.”

“Well, okay,” he said in a level voice that was supposed to come across as detached. “We’ll have a party when you get here.” She liked parties. She liked living, and being with other people, and watching the sun rise.

Laura had red hair and a bewitching smile. If she had a problem, it was that she’d never learned to hide her feelings. You looked at her and you knew immediately what she was thinking. He would not have described her as beautiful. At least not when he first met her. But his impression had changed as he worked with her, and got to know her. During those first few weeks she’d grown increasingly hard to resist. She was animated and funny and smart and she took over his life. But he’d made the colossal error of letting her see too soon how he felt. Damn, that had been dumb.

“I’m sorry, Matt,” she’d told him on that last night. “But we’re going to have to break it off.” They’d been out celebrating her thirty-second birthday, and she’d grown increasingly quiet during the evening. Then they’d gotten back to her apartment, and they stood just inside the doorway, the door not quite shut, and she’d turned on him. “Can’t do it anymore.”

“Why?” he’d asked. It had come as a complete surprise.

“Because my life is here, on the space coast. With NASA.” Her eyes had grown teary. “Matt, I want to walk on another world. I want to go to Mars, if that’s ever possible. It’s what I’ve always wanted. It’s the only thing I’ve ever really cared about.”

And he hadn’t known how to respond. Hadn’t understood what she was trying to say. “What has that to do with us? You could ride off to Pluto , if you like. I’d be cheering.”

“It would never happen if I were a mother.”

“Well, okay. Whatever—I mean, we haven’t talked about kids. Or anything like that.”

“I don’t do things halfway, Matt.” She’d looked at him, brushed his cheeks with her lips, and virtually pushed him out the door. “I’m sorry it has to end like this. Truth is, I’m sorry it has to end at all. But there’s no other way.” It was the last thing she’d said.

He looked down at the mike. It still hurt.

“You know, Matt,” she said, “this is the first time I’ve been out here alone.” She hesitated, about to say something more, and he could guess what it might have been, something along the line of her being uneasy lost in all this solitude. But she pulled back. He understood the feeling. And he knew her well enough to be aware that she didn’t like admitting any kind of weakness.

He’d learned that at their first meeting, which had been at a ballpark rather than at work. She’d been playing center field for the NASA women’s softball team. Matt had allowed a couple of the guys to talk him into attending the game because they claimed it was a good way to meet attractive ‘babes.’ He hadn’t really noticed Laura until she crashed into the centerfield fence tracking down a line drive late in the game. She’d bounced off the wooden planks and crumpled onto the grass.

Matt had served as an EMT in the past, and he’d wasted no time running out to her. Her only response when he arrived was to hold up the glove to show him she still had the ball. Her eyes were closed.

“Can you hear me?” he’d asked.

“Of course,” she’d said.

The stated purpose of Matt’s current assignment was to help determine what effects long-term zero gravity would have on the human body. There’d been some slight deterioration in bones and muscles, both his and Judy’s, but nothing that suggested a Martian voyage would not be possible. When the results had first come in, Matt got the impression that some of the people back home were disappointed. As if they were looking for a reason to call everything off. “I just never thought,” he continued, “it would end like this.”

“Nor did I,” said Laura.

He could visualize her, seated on the bridge, looking at the same quiescent Moon. And he wondered how she’d reacted when she’d been assigned to come out to the platform to pick him up.

Laura had launched from the International Space Station, which had become obsolete with the construction of the platform. Out here, vehicles could come and go without having to deal with gravity. Now, very likely, the window was closing and the space age was, finally, over.

“We need a cathedral,” she said.

He didn’t think he’d heard right. “Say again, Laura?”

“A cathedral . Matt, we went to the Moon because one night in 1957 the country looked up and saw Sputnik passing overhead. The civil rights movement got its start because one woman refused to go sit in the back of a bus.”

“What’s that have to do with a cathedral?”

“If you’re going to get somewhere, you have to have a symbol, something that stands for what you’re all about. You’re lost in the Middle Ages, going nowhere, with nothing to live for, but when they build the cathedral at Chartres, you find out what matters in life. What really counts. It’s what NASA needs right now.” She was suddenly there with him, in the operations center, drinking coffee, her eyes looking past him somewhere, sending the message that there were far more important things in the world than any personal relationship between them.