Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

Malik, Lydia, and Jerboa had been excited about becoming a fake rocket company, until they’d started considering the practical problems. For one thing, nobody will hire you to launch a satellite unless you’ve already launched a satellite before—it’s like how you can’t get an entry-level job unless you’ve already had work experience.

Plus, they weren’t entirely sure that they could get a satellite into a stable orbit, which was one of the dozen reasons Malik was sweating. They could definitely place a satellite at different points in orbit, and different trajectories, by adjusting the time of day, the distance traveled, and the location on Earth they started from. But after that, the satellite wouldn’t be moving fast enough to stay in orbit on its own. It would need extra boosters, to get up to speed. Jerboa thought they could send a satellite way higher—around forty-two thousand kilometers away from Earth—and then use relatively small rockets to speed it up to the correct velocity as it slowly dropped to the proper orbit. But even if that worked, it would require Garbo.com to customize the Garbo-naut 5000 quite a bit. And Madame Alberta had severe doubts.

“Sorry, man,” said Ricky. “I’m not sure I can get my people to authorize a satellite launch based on just seeing a picture of the rocket. It’s a nice picture, though. Good sense of composition. Like, the clouds look really pretty, with that one flock of birds in the distance. Poetic, you know.”

“Of course you can see the rocket,” Lydia interjected. She was sitting off to one side taking notes on the meeting, wearing cheap pantyhose in a forty-dollar swivel chair. With puffy sleeves covering her tattoos (one for every country she’d ever visited.) “Just maybe not before next week’s launch. If you’re willing to wait a few months, we can arrange a site visit and stuff. We just can’t show you the rocket before our next launch window.”

“Right,” Malik said. “If you still want to launch next week, though, we can give you a sixty percent discount.”

“Sixty percent?” Ricky said, suddenly seeming interested again.

“Sixty-five percent,” Malik said. “We’re a young hungry company. We have a lot to prove. Our business model is devouring the weak. And we hate to launch with spare capacity.”

Maybe going straight to sixty-five percent was a mistake, or maybe the “devouring the weak” thing had been too much. In any case, Ricky seemed uneasy again. “Huh,” he said. “So how many test launches have you guys done? My friend who works for NASA says every rocket launch in the world gets tracked.”

“We’ve done a slew of test launches,” Malik said. “Like, a dozen. But we have some proprietary stealth technology, so people probably missed them.” And then, he went way off script. “Our company founder, Augustus Marzipan IV, grew up around rockets. His uncle was Wernher von Braun’s wine steward. So rockets are in his blood.” Ricky’s frown got more and more pinched.

“Well,” Ricky said at last, standing up from his cheap metal chair. “I will definitely bring your proposal to our Senior Visionizer, Terry. But I have a feeling the V.C.s aren’t going to want to pay for a launch without kicking the tires. I’m not the one who writes the checks, you know. If I wrote the checks, a lot of things would be different.” And then he paused, probably imagining all the things that would happen if he wrote the checks.

“When Augustus Marzipan was only five years old, his pet Dalmatian, Henry, was sent into space. Never to return,” said Malik, as if inventing more stories would cushion his fall off the cliff he’d already walked over. “That’s where our commitment to safety comes from.”

“That’s great,” said Ricky. “I love dogs.” He was already halfway out the door.

As soon as Ricky was gone, Malik sagged as though the air had gone out of him. He rubbed his brow with one listless hand. “We’re a young hungry company,” he said. “We’re a hungry young company. Which way sounds better? I can’t tell.”

“That could have gone worse,” Lydia said.

“I can’t do this,” Malik said. “I just can’t. I’m sorry. I am good at pretending for fun. I just can’t do it for money. I’m really sorry.”

Lydia felt like the worst person in the world, even as she said: “Lots of people start out pretending for fun, and then move into pretending for money. That’s the American dream.” The sun was already going down behind the cement fountain outside, and she realized she was going to be late for her twelve-step group soon. She started pulling her coat and purse and scarf together. “Hey, I gotta run. I’ll see you at Time Travel Club, okay?”

“I think I’m going to skip it,” Malik said. “I can’t. I just… I can’t.”

“What?” Lydia felt like if Malik didn’t come to Time Travel Club, it would be the proof that something was seriously wrong and their whole foundation was splitting apart. And it would be provably her fault.

“I’m just too exhausted. Sorry.”

Lydia came over and sat on the desk, so she could see Malik’s face behind his hand. “Come on,” she pleaded. “Time Travel Club is your baby. We can’t just have a meeting without you. That would be weird. Come on. We won’t even talk about being a fake aerospace company. We couldn’t talk about that in front of Normando, anyway.”

Malik sighed, like he was going to argue. Then he lifted the loop of his tie all the way off, now that he was done playing CEO. For a second, his rep-stripe tie was a halo. “Okay, fine,” he said. “It’ll be good to hang out and not talk business for a while.”

“Yeah, exactly. It’ll be mellow,” Lydia said. She felt the terror receding, but not entirely.

Normando was freaking out because his girlfriend in 1973 had dumped him. (Long story short, his strategy of arriving earlier and earlier for the same first date had backfired.) A couple of other semi-regulars showed up too, including Betty the Cyborg from the Dawn of Time. And Madame Alberta showed up too, even though she hadn’t ever shown any interest in visiting their aerospace office. She sat in the corner, studying the core members of the group, maybe to judge whether she’d chosen wisely. As if she could somehow go back and change that decision, which of course she couldn’t.

Malik tried to talk about his last trip to the thirty-second century. But he kept staring at his CEO shoes and saying things like, “The neo-Babylonians were giving us grief. But we were young and hungry.” And then trailing off, like his heart just wasn’t in it.

Jerboa saw Malik running out of steam, and jumped in. “I met Christopher Marlowe. He told me that his version of Faust originally ended with Dr. Faust and Helen of Troy running away together and teaching geometrically complex hand-dances in Shropshire, and they made him change it.” Jerboa talked very fast, like an addict trying to stay high. Or a comedian trying not to get booed offstage. “He told me to call him ‘Kit,’ and showed me the difference between a doublet and a singlet. A doublet is not two singlets, did you know that?”

Sitting in the Unitarian basement, under the purple dove hands, Lydia watched Malik starting to say things and then just petering out, with a shrug or a shake of the head, and Jerboa rattling on and not giving anybody else a chance to talk. Guilt.

And then, just as Lydia was crawling out of her skin, Madame Alberta stood up. “I have a thing to confess,” she said.

Malik and Lydia stared up at her, fearing she was about to blow the whistle on their scam. Jerboa stopped breathing.

“I am from an alternative timeline,” Madame Alberta said. “It is the world where the American Revolution did not happen, and the British Empire had the conquest of all of South America. The Americas, Africa, Asia—the British ruled all. Until the rest of Europe launched the great world war to stop the British imperialism. And Britain discovered the nuclear weapons and Europe burned to ashes. I travel many times, I travel through time, to try and change history. But instead, I find myself here, in this other universe, and I can never return home.”