Meg Howrey - The Wanderers

Nothing feels as free as this!

The lettering of this promise is in pink. The freedom being demonstrated concerns a woman in a white bra and girdle cavorting across a simplified background of sky and clouds.

Helen Kane stands in the lobby of Prime Space Systems Laboratory and considers the 1960s-era advertisement for Playtex. She smiles, waiting to be given an explanation. The CEO of Prime Space has ushered Helen toward this lithesome lady in her panties with all the ceremony that one might employ toward revealing an Old Master, and there is nothing to be gained by showing James “Boone” Cross anything other than what Helen privately refers to as PIG: Polite, Interested, Good humored. Helen is a little perturbed, a little uncomfortable, but she can get PIG to fly in much more adverse conditions.

This is Helen’s last day visiting the Japanese branch of Prime’s Systems Lab. Tomorrow she will go back. Home, which is still Houston. A year ago Helen retired from active duty in the astronaut corps at NASA, after twenty-one years and three missions in space. It had been the right thing to do: there were so few opportunities for getting named to a crew; others had been waiting more than a decade for their first mission. It was time to cede to the next generation as the previous one had done for her. This was always going to happen, and she had prepared for it.

She had not prepared. You can’t train for irrelevance.

Helen tells herself that it is nonsense to think of the word irrelevant . She still has a position at NASA, an important one. And, if she chooses, there are exciting things happening elsewhere. It is very likely that Prime Space is going to offer her a job. There is a lot to think about, but not right now. Right now she must give PIG to Boone Cross.

Despite the fact that Helen took the Prime Space Iris to the International Space Station and back on her last mission, she doesn’t feel she has fully penetrated the culture of this company, although she’s got a pretty good handle on its in-house vocabulary. Prime is skittish about using language borrowed from the military, and mixes acronyms with a kind of high-minded verbiage, noun-to-verb mashups, and the stray Latinate pun. The mindless totalitarian-speak predicted in dystopian fiction was not the future. Big Brother had gone artisanal.

The father of this new world made-to-order is from Alabama but employs his company’s argot with the chaotic enthusiasm of a non-native speaker delivering newly acquired idioms. That Boone Cross is a genius is not in question, though the rest is up for debate. He seems unclear as well: he has referred to himself during their conversation as both an anachronism and an iconoclast. Boone is younger than Helen, who is fifty-three and only now noticing that many people seem to be younger than herself. This hour has been her longest excursion in Boone’s undivided presence, and his manner does not seem designed to make her comfortable. Helen neither expects nor resents this, but her mood is not the best.

“You may have noticed that at every Prime Space location,” Boone is saying now, granting the lobby a majestic wave, “we encourage the team to share images about what drew us to working in the space biz. And then we collect these images together so that when people come to work every day, they pass through our collective dreams.”

“What a great idea,” says Helen, covering her impatience. “It creates such a special atmosphere.” Just now, Boone and Helen are the only ones enjoying the special atmosphere. The lobby—a windowless curvilinear triangle—has been closed off to tourists, and Prime Space employees are apparently being rerouted to some other entrance.

For most of the past hour, Boone and Helen have been talking robotics. Helen is not sure who is meant to impress whom, so she focuses on the subject at hand. For whatever reason, she has been brought to the lobby of dreams, and appropriate reactions and statements must be sourced and given. This will not be difficult. Helen has made lots of speeches about dreams: believing in, going for, never giving up on. Since the dream she has achieved eclipses most people’s unachieved fantasies, it behooves her to speak with modesty on the subject, with repeated use of the word fortunate .

“This right here”—Boone points to the Playtex advertisement—“is my tribute to my grandmother. I was going to just put up a photograph of her, but then I challenged myself to be a little more creative. It’s the company my grandmother started working for when she was eighteen. Playtex was a division of the International Latex Corporation.”

“Oh, ILC, of course,” says Helen. She remembers a section of Boone’s autobiography that referenced his grandmother and connected her to his early interest in space exploration. She feels a little sad. Is she sad? Helen considers an alternative: she is dehydrated.

“So as you probably know, in the early sixties NASA opened up a competition for a spacesuit design,” Boone continues. “International Latex, best known as the makers of Playtex bras and girdles, was one of eight companies that submitted a proposal.”

Helen retrieves what she knows about the history of spacesuit design, decides there is a high-percentage chance that it is less than what Boone knows, and says, with PIG, “Mmhmm. Yes.”

“I just find this a fascinating moment.” Boone is about to tell a story he has told many times, she can tell: his voice takes on the confidence of one who has whole paragraphs ready for delivery. Helen puts herself into a good listening posture.

“No one knew exactly what kind of spacesuit would be needed for walking on the moon,” Boone says. “They knew it had to be a sort of portable spacecraft, that it needed to contain a total life support system, but the rest was mostly guessing. The other vendors competing for the contract all had experience making military equipment, but only International Latex had worked with fabric and seamstresses and making something a person can lie down and then get up in. Their design won. My grandmother was making girdles until one day her supervisor pulled her aside and told her she needed to start working on another project.”

Helen loves these stories, like they all do. The early years of NASA: slide rules and pocket protectors and “Failure is not an option.” How little they had known; how much they had dared.

Boone picks up his narrative. “The tension was high. Everyone was racing against the clock, trying to get a working suit together but also adhering to the most rigorous safety standards ever. Seamstresses were assigned a different color pin, and their worktables were inspected to make sure that every single pin came out. The sewing machines paused after every stitch. My grandmother worked on the lining of the gloves.” Boone holds up his hands, more callused than you might expect from a person who made his first billion in networking routers, and is wearing a cardigan. “A new fabric,” he says. “Woven chromium steel. Two thousand dollars a yard. Not an easy thing to stitch. Even decades later, my grandmother still had calluses on her fingertips.”