Chapter Seventeen
Hunter kept himself busy during the next few weeks. Airin was still avoiding him, and he let her keep her distance. He saw her at least a once a day, usually at breakfast or dinner, and he always asked how she was doing, how she was feeling, how her work with Val was going. Enough information to satisfy Dira, if not enough to satisfy him.
NASA was working him hard, which he appreciated. His various assignments gave him something to focus on besides Airin. During his fifth week as Jones’s replacement, they had him in the university simulator at least six hours a day, testing out flight scenarios for the long journey to Mars and what promised to be a hellishly difficult landing procedure.
“We’re fifteen years away from this mission,” he commented after a particularly long session, during which they’d killed him about forty different ways.
“And?” the project engineer asked, scribbling something down on a clipboard as Hunter emerged from the cockpit and stretched.
“And you’re acting like we’re heading for Mars in six weeks. They didn’t sim this much for the Apollo missions.”
Janelle glared at him over her glasses. “There’s one big difference between a flight to the moon and a flight to Mars. A twenty-six-minute difference, to be precise.”
There was virtually no communications delay between Earth and the moon. That meant if an emergency happened, the pilots in the spacecraft could communicate instantaneously with mission control. You might only be up there with two or three other people, but you had the resources of a thousand people—some of them the smartest on the planet—down there on the ground, working out problems on your behalf.
On a journey to Mars, you wouldn’t have that help. It could take between three and twenty-two minutes for signals to travel between Earth and Mars, meaning that six minutes was the bare minimum to get a reply from the other end after you asked a question. In the simulator right now, dealing with landing scenarios, they were working with a thirteen-minute delay each way. If something blew up on the spacecraft—literally or figuratively—the crew wouldn’t hear back from mission control for twenty-six minutes.
Crises tended to develop a lot more rapidly than that.
“That’s why simulations are so much more important with a Mars mission,” Janelle went on. “The name of the game for a Mars crew is—”
“Autonomy.” Hunter, like everyone else on the Mars teams, had heard that word a lot.
“Exactly.” She pointed at him. “You’re lucky, you know. Ten or twenty years ago, you wouldn’t have been such a hot property. While our missions were all low-Earth orbit or to the International Space Station, the selection folks weren’t as focused on independence and risk taking and creative problem solving. But now that we’re going to Mars, cowboys like you are back in style.”
He grinned. “Cowboys are always in style. And rugged individualists make great explorers.”
“The challenge is balancing independence with teamwork.”
“Those qualities aren’t mutually exclusive. I’m all about teamwork. And that’s what they’re studying in the biosphere, right? How different personality types work together? I’m sure NASA will figure it out.”
Janelle nodded thoughtfully. “I’m starting to hear some interesting things about the biosphere project.”
“Yeah? I thought the first report wasn’t due out till next week.”
“I’ve seen some of the preliminary data, and one thing stands out. All eight subjects are coping well with the isolation and close quarters and other restrictions, but the two couples are exceeding expectations. They’re operating with higher levels of emotional resilience and productivity.”
He remembered his conversation with Dira. “NASA will never send couples into space.”
“I used to think so, too. But a mission to Mars is different from anything NASA has planned before, and they wouldn’t have included couples in the biosphere study if they weren’t interested in how they’d perform.” She glanced at her watch. “Okay, break’s over. Time to let me kill you again.”
“That was just a break? I thought we were done for the day. Did I mention we’ve got fifteen years to get ready for this mission?”
“If we’re going to produce an autonomous crew in that time, we have to start training now. Fortune favors the prepared.” She gestured with her clipboard toward the simulator. “Anyway, you’re just cranky because we’re working your ass off instead of Jones’s. Stop complaining and let’s tackle the next scenario.”
“Whatever you say, ma’am. Like I said, I’m all about teamwork.”
An hour later, they finally finished for the night. As Hunter was driving home, he found himself thinking about the conversation with Janelle.
Would NASA really consider sending couples to Mars?
He hoped not. Adding built-in emotional baggage to a mission was a bad idea.
But for some reason, he kept picturing two astronauts in pilot couches, side by side, their helmets titled toward each other as they looked at telemetry data. One of the astronauts was him. The other one . . .
He shied away from identifying the second astronaut. Another image filled his mind’s eye instead: Airin as he’d seen her that morning. Her ribs had been declared fully healed by her doctor, and she and Val had been headed to the ocean for Airin’s first long swim since her injury. She’d been wearing a red bikini under a white cover-up that covered absolutely nothing up, and he’d wanted to follow her so bad he’d been like a dog lunging against his leash.
When he arrived at the house a few minutes later, Val was in her favorite spot on the living room couch, but Airin was out.
“How was the swim?” he asked, dropping his bag on the floor and going over to the refrigerator.
Val looked up from her laptop. “What?”
He grabbed a container of yogurt. “Your swim. This morning. How did Airin do?”
“She did great. She’s a monster in the water. Not faster than me, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But still good.”
He took his yogurt into the living room and sat down on the chair across from Val. “How is she doing otherwise? Did you guys do more work on carbon dioxide extraction today?”
Val studied him for a second. Then she closed her laptop with a slow, deliberate motion and set it down on the coffee table.
Shit. Val never closed her laptop, no matter how gripping a conversation or TV show or anything else going on around her might be.
She leaned back and folded her arms.
“For a month now I’ve been pretty patient with your questions. ‘How is Airin doing?’ ‘What is she thinking?’ ‘How is she feeling?’ ‘What do you talk about?’ ‘How are her ribs?’ ‘Is she working too hard?’”
“I—”
She spoke right past him. “I haven’t asked why you can’t ask her yourself, considering that you live in the same damn house. I haven’t asked why you’re avoiding her, either. The reason I haven’t asked is because it’s none of my business. Just like it’s none of my business that Airin does the exact same thing.”
“She does?”
“Yes, she does. She goes out of her way to avoid you, and then she asks me how you’re doing. Just like you do.”
He hadn’t been expecting that.
“She asks how I’m doing?”
Val didn’t answer. She just looked at him, her arms still folded.
He took it for about ten seconds. Then: “Okay, get it off your chest. What?”
“It’s time for you to work this out. You’re supposed to be a crew commander. Airin’s not part of our crew, exactly, but she’s part of our household. You need to handle this interpersonal shit, whatever it is. I can’t be your go-between anymore.”
As much as he hated to admit it, Val was right.
But this was different from any “interpersonal shit” he’d dealt with before. He’d never met a teamwork situation he couldn’t handle, which was one of the reasons he’d advanced in his chosen profession. “Plays well with others” was a critical skill in the military, just as it had always been one of the “desirable astronaut attributes.”
As Val had pointed out, Airin was a de facto part of his crew. She was working with Val. She was part of a shared living arrangement with other crew members. Functionally, the role she played in his life was as a colleague.
But he’d never felt about a crew member the way he felt about Airin.
He’d thought that avoiding her would weaken the attraction. He’d thought burying himself in work would distract him from it. And he’d thought that Val could be a kind of buffer. As she’d called herself, a go-between.
He thought about the body rescue hooks you find in any electrical safety area. The hook is nonconductive, and it’s used to save someone being shocked by an object they can’t release—because the electricity is contracting their hand muscles. If a would-be rescuer tries to pull the victim away, his muscles contract, too.
It felt like contact with Airin carried those same risks.
“You were my body rescue hook,” he muttered.
Val had worked in plenty of electrical safety areas, and she knew exactly what he meant.
“It’s like that, huh?”
He shrugged. And then the worst thing of all happened: pity came into her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Hunter. That’s messy. But you still have to fix it. You don’t think something like this could happen on a long-haul mission to Mars? May as well figure out how to deal with it now. Think of it as an analog simulation.”
He supposed she was right. But the truth was, he was getting pretty damn tired of thinking about everything in his life as an analog simulation.
The front door opened behind him, and when he turned his head, he saw Airin standing in the kitchen.
“Hey,” she said, looking at the two of them.
“Hey,” Val said.
Airin’s gaze fell on the container of yogurt he’d forgotten he was holding. “Is that the last yogurt?”
“Yeah.” He paused. “You want it?”
“No, you can have it.”
“No, that’s okay, you can—”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Val leaned forward and grabbed the yogurt from him. “This one’s mine. Why don’t the two of you walk down to the market and buy some more?”
He and Airin looked at each other.
“What do you say?” he asked after a moment. “Are you up for a walk?”
She looked uncertain, and he was suddenly determined that she would go with him.
He surged to his feet and went over to her. He took her bag, dropped it on the kitchen floor beside his, and grabbed her hand.
“Let’s go.”
Once they were outside, Airin tugged at his hand, and he released her immediately. But she didn’t turn around and go back inside, so he took that as a win.
They started their walk without saying anything.
It was twilight, and the gray sky and growing shadows made everything feel vague and elusive and mysterious. Evening birdsong filled the air, along with the occasional car driving by, but behind all that was the waiting silence of night.
Airin was wearing a pair of khaki shorts, a blue NASA T-shirt, and a pair of flip-flops. Her hair was loose, rippling in coal-black waves down her back, and the memory of touching it was like phantom silk against his fingertips.
Airin had expanded her wardrobe quite a bit in the last month. It now included T-shirts and tank tops, jeans and shorts, sandals and flip-flops. It was a Hawaiian wardrobe, but even though her clothes matched her environment, Airin still stood out.
Whether she was wearing a silk dress or a T-shirt and cutoffs, Airin managed to be elegant. She was elegant like his favorite vintage airplane, the de Havilland Dragon Rapide of the 1930s. It was named for its dragonfly shape, created by two sets of wings, a long, graceful fuselage, and the connected cockpit windows that looked like dragonfly eyes.
But Airin’s elegance wasn’t only in her design. There was a sense of strength and speed and toughness to her, too, like the SR-71 Blackbird. The Blackbirds had been made of titanium and steel, and they could withstand sustained cruise speeds above Mach 3. They could outrun any enemy aircraft or missile, and though some had been destroyed in accidents, none had ever been lost to enemy fire.
They looked pretty damn cool, too. They’d been painted a dark blue, almost black, with touches of red here and there.
He could probably come up with a few more planes Airin reminded him of, but maybe he should actually talk to her instead. The only problem was, he couldn’t come up with a single icebreaker.
Then, thank God, Airin came up with one.
“I’ve decided what my field of study is going to be,” she said.
“Yeah? What?”
“Aerospace medicine.”
“Really? I would’ve thought you’d avoid anything to do with medicine because of your history.”
She glanced up at him with a quick smile, and he felt the electric pull he’d been trying so hard to overcome. It was the first time she’d smiled at him in weeks.
“I know what you mean. But I thought about what you said that night . . .”
She faltered suddenly. The words the night we kissed hung in the air, and he hoped she’d go right past them so they wouldn’t have to talk about it.
She did.
“What you said about, you know, studying something I’d enjoy that would also be useful in space. It’s hard to be poked and prodded and operated on when no one’s telling you what’s happening. It makes you feel out of control. That’s one of the issues astronauts deal with in space already, and I thought it would be helpful to have a flight surgeon on board who understands that. So I’m going to focus on space psychology as well as space medicine. Even if I never make it to Mars, I’ll be able to help the people who do.” She paused. “I’m also going to study electrical engineering. It’s a useful field of knowledge on its own, and it also ties into medicine. The body has its own electrical systems, and doctors are starting to look at human physiology the way engineers do. I thought it might be good to have a crew member who can find engineering solutions and emotional solutions to a problem. Someone who can speak both languages.”
“That makes sense,” he said—and it did. As someone who only spoke one of those languages, he could probably use a translator now and again. “That’s going to be a hell of a lot of work, though.”
“I’m not afraid of hard work. I like hard work.”
“I get that. I like to work hard, too.”
She glanced up at him again. “But what are you working for?”
“What do you mean?”
She hesitated, but only for a moment. “I get the feeling that all your hard work serves a double purpose. It’s to achieve a goal, but it can also help you run away from something.”
He stared down at her for a second before turning his gaze back to the sidewalk stretching before them. They were at the midpoint of their journey: as far to their destination as it would be to go back home.
“If I am, why would I tell you about it? Or anyone?”
His tone was mildly aggressive—hopefully enough to shake her off this topic.
She didn’t seem shaken. “I was just asking a question. You made me think a lot about my own goals. What I want and why I want it. I wondered if you’ve ever asked yourself the same questions, or if you’re just on autopilot now. A path you started on years ago that you haven’t really questioned since.”
He felt irritation rising. “What are you getting at?”
“It just occurred to me that your mom and your dad both left you, in different ways. If you go to Mars, you’d be the one leaving. You’d be leaving the whole world behind.”
The air in his lungs felt thick and strange, like air from another planet.
“I guess you’re getting a head start on the psychology thing. What are you saying, exactly? That I’m messed up?”
“Of course not. You’re one of the least messed up people I’ve ever met—especially considering what you went through as a kid. But I do think you avoid some experiences, and I wondered if you ever thought about why.”
His jaw felt tight. “What, because I don’t want to be in a relationship? There are good reasons for that, and they don’t have anything to do with my childhood.”
Airin didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “I shouldn’t have said anything. Forget I brought it up.”
That pissed him off even more.
“So all this time you haven’t been talking to me, you’ve been studying me instead? Nice.”
Airin stopped walking, which meant he had to stop walking, too.
She turned to face him. Even in a T-shirt and flip-flops she managed to look fierce, her stance wide and firm, her hands on her hips.
“You make it sound like this last month was my fault. Like we’re not talking anymore because of something I did. But you’re the one who rejected me. You kissed me, and then you said nothing was going to happen between us. And yes, I’ve been avoiding you, but it’s not like you objected. You’ve been avoiding me, too. We sleep across the hall from each other, and I hardly ever see you.”
It was true. Although if Airin thought out of sight meant out of mind, she was wrong. He thought about her every damn night, and a lot of those nights ended with him spilling into his hand as he imagined going into her room and sliding into her bed.
“You’re right,” he said after a moment. “I have been avoiding you. The truth is, I want to fuck you. I want to fuck you, and I know it’s a bad idea, and it just seemed easier not to spend time with you. Because whenever I do, that’s all I can think about.”
She stood absolutely still, staring at him with wide eyes. As he waited for her to respond, it occurred to him that using that word—fuck—was another kind of aggression. Another attempt to scare her off, to warn her away.
A word that crude was miles away from the elegance and grace that seemed to form the core of her being.
You and I don’t belong together, a word like that said. You and I don’t fit.
“I think about you in bed at night,” she whispered.
Shit.
“Don’t tell me that, Airin. Jesus. Now I’m going to have that image in my head.”
She took a half step toward him, and the scent of her hair came to him on the breeze. “You said you didn’t want anything to happen between us, but you didn’t tell me why. Tell me now, Hunter.”
Because I’m reporting on you to your mother.
That was the most obvious reason, and it was the one he couldn’t tell her. But there was another reason.
“Because even if I did want a relationship, I suck at them. And you deserve more than someone who’ll hump you and dump you. Especially for your first time.” A sudden thought occurred to him. “If it still would be your first time. I mean . . . I don’t want to assume . . .”
One corner of her mouth quirked up. “You think I had sex with someone in the last month? I know we’ve been avoiding each other, but I’m pretty sure you would’ve noticed if I had a guy in my room.”
He shrugged. “Hell, what do I know? We made out on Waikiki Beach. Maybe you went to the guy’s house. Maybe you got a hotel room.”
Now both corners of her mouth were up. “Nope. I’m still a virgin.”
Then her smile faded, and her eyes searched his in the twilight.
“I’m still a virgin, and I’d like not to be one. I’m not asking you to marry me, Hunter. But maybe you could show me what I’ve been missing.”
His hands curled into fists. What the hell was she doing, offering him everything he wanted like this?
I’m reporting on you to your mother.
You deserve more than a roll in the hay.
They were both good reasons. But as he stood there staring at Airin, the woman he fantasized about every damn night, he knew there was another, deeper reason to resist his pull to her.
I’m afraid.
It was another thing he could never tell her.
Afraid of what? she’d ask.
And that was a question he didn’t know the answer to. A question he didn’t want to know the answer to.
He didn’t want to lie to her, but he couldn’t tell her the whole truth, either—because he didn’t know what it was himself.
So he settled for telling her part of the truth.
“I can’t,” he said.
She looked frustrated, and boy could he sympathize.
“Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then she sighed, deep and long, and started to walk again.
He fell into step beside her.
“We’re still going to the store?” he asked.
“I see no reason to abort our mission,” she said. “Besides, I’m hungry and I want yogurt.”
He felt his muscles starting to relax. “Okay.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes, but it wasn’t an awkward silence. Somehow, even though neither of them had gotten the answers they wanted, they’d moved past where they’d been to a better place.
“I missed you,” he said suddenly, bumping her shoulder with his arm.
“I missed you, too,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something, but things have been weird between us, and I didn’t know if you’d say yes. It’s a work-related favor.”
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Whatever you need.” He paused. “Which is what, exactly?”
They’d reached the market, and as they paused outside the door she grinned up at him.
She had the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen.
“Just remember you’ve already agreed to do it.”
“Agreed to do what?”
“Come with me on a parabolic flight.”
There was a swooping sensation in his stomach, like when your foot tries to land on a step that isn’t there.
A parabolic flight. His Achilles’ heel.
He sighed. “Is there any chance, any chance at all, that you’d accept a substitute for that favor?”
She looked thoughtful. “I guess you could sleep with me. But that wouldn’t really be work related, would it?”
He knew she wasn’t serious. But the truth was, those two things—the idea of sleeping with Airin and the idea of a parabolic flight—were alike in one way.
They combined temptation with dread.
Parabolic flights were NASA’s way of creating weightlessness on Earth. They were used to train astronauts to maneuver in free fall and to test equipment before it went into space. High school and college students competed for opportunities to conduct zero-g experiments, and scientists took advantage of the opportunity, too.
It was a pretty simple operation. A jet plane followed a parabolic flight path—up and down, up and down—to create periods of weightlessness followed by periods of hypergravity, when your weight was nearly double what it usually was.
The first few parabolas were always great. In fact, the taste of free fall during the twenty-second intervals could be addictive. That’s where the temptation came in.
But then came the fourth parabola, and the fifth, and . . .
There was a reason those planes were nicknamed vomit comets.
He wasn’t afraid of the flight itself. He was a pilot; he trusted the technology and the process. What he was afraid of was the physical weakness it revealed in him. A weakness that, as a pilot and astronaut, he’d never expected to have.
He was susceptible to zero-g motion sickness.
You adapt when you’re actually in space, astronauts who’d logged time on the ISS and in low-Earth orbit had told him. You just have to be up there long enough for your vestibular system to get used to free fall.
He’d adapted to everything else the military and the space program had thrown at him, and he was sure he’d eventually adapt to this, too. But in the meantime, parabolic flights were the bane of his existence.
Airin was studying him with her eyebrows up. “Val was right. She told me you hate parabolic flights, but I didn’t believe it. I was sure you couldn’t be afraid of anything flight related.”
“There’s a difference between hating something and being afraid of it,” he practically growled, realizing as soon as the words were out of his mouth that he’d tacitly admitted to the first thing.
Airin smiled. “Great. Then you’ll come with me? It won’t be on a NASA flight, because I’m not in training and I don’t have a micro-g experiment I want to conduct or anything. I’m going on one of the commercial zero-g flights.”
“Seriously? Those things cost five thousand dollars per passenger. For a ninety-minute flight that includes about seven total minutes of weightlessness.”
“Seven minutes is plenty. That’s about what Alan Shepard experienced on America’s first spaceflight, so it’s good enough for me. But yes, it’s pricey. I don’t know if I ever truly appreciated being rich until I started doing research on these flights.”
“Your ribs have only just healed up. Are you sure you can—”
“The day before Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, he cracked two ribs when he was thrown from a horse. He didn’t tell anyone in case they scrapped his flight. He had to rig up something with his flight engineer so he could close the cockpit door.” She paused. “My ribs are fine, Hunter. The doctor cleared me.”
“Okay, but—”
“So will you come? I bought two tickets because I want to go with someone—ideally, someone who’s experienced it before. Val and Dean can’t spare the time for a trip to California, but Val said you’ve got a few days of vacation coming up.”
“Yeah, I do. But I wasn’t planning to spend it going to California for a parabolic flight. I was planning to spend it living the life of a beach bum on Kauai.”
She clasped her hands in front of her. “Please, Hunter. Please?”
He imagined Dira’s reaction to the news of her daughter’s latest adventure. Man, she’d loathe the very idea of it.
The thought of being the one to tell her almost made up for going on a parabolic flight himself.
Almost.
He sighed. “Yeah, all right. I guess I can spend my vacation on the vomit comet.”
Airin turned to go inside the store, but he reached out and took her by the shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The words contained more than he’d meant them to. He’d meant to apologize for the awkwardness of the last few weeks, and that was probably what Airin heard. But he knew he was also sorry for other things.
I’m sorry I kissed you. I’m sorry I stopped kissing you. I’m sorry I’m not kissing you right now, because that’s all I want to do.
“That’s okay,” she said, and he could tell she was responding to the first, most obvious thing. “I’m sorry, too.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
She smiled up at him. “I know. But it seemed like the polite thing to say.”
As the two of them went into the store, he knew things were good again. The awkwardness between them was gone, and they could move into the dynamic they should have been in all along.
Friendship.
It was the best result he could have hoped for. It was the best thing for both of them.
And maybe if he repeated that often enough to himself, he’d start to believe it.