Dr. Marcum made his triumphant return, old-fashioned paper gag order in hand, on the same Monday Dr. Brando kidnapped Lexi, old-fashioned paper custody order in hand. It was going to be one of those weeks.
“Found it on my door,” Marcum told us after he stuck his head into the first floor faculty lounge, accepting hugs, fist bumps, and handshakes.
“Guess they gave up,” Dr. Shonstein said. “Hawthorn told us it meant nothing unless they personally served it.”
“They may still try,” Dr. Marcum said. “I’m keeping a low profile.”
Marcum timed his return right after the UN Security Council’s majority resolution—that every member nation, every nation on Earth, in fact, had a new right: A fair share of “scientific discoveries which promise to impact, either positively or negatively, planet Earth and the life upon it.” Wasn’t hard to gauge Crimsy’s impact. What was hard was defining “fair share.” The United States, one of ten permanent members of the UN Security Council, voted against the resolution, thereby putting it in limbo until the United Nations General Assembly—every member nation—could vote on it. The term “compromise” was floating around meanwhile, as member states continued expressing outrage and disbelief the American Ambassador admonished “not turn into saber rattling.”
Dr. Brando timed his decision to kidnap—or rather, dad-nap, Lexi—after my mother, in sweet ignorance, invited them to Kenosha “any time you’d like, to stay as long you like.”
“This is such...shit,” he exclaimed, throwing the custody order across his office. I stood at his door and I don’t think he saw me at first.
“Hey,” he said. “Can you close that?”
I started to, backing out.
“No. Stay.”
I walked in and closed the door behind me.
“They’re taking her away from me, Jen.” His voice started cracking. “They’re taking her away.”
I didn’t know what to do, what to say. I just stood there.
“I’m not gonna let ‘em do it. I’m not. This is bullshit.”
I got a little closer. “What happened?”
“You tell me. You saw her. You saw us.” He could tell I wasn’t comprehending. “The custody evaluator. Based on her report, the Court Commissioner found it ‘in the best interest of the minor child that sole custody be granted to the mother,’ one Melissa Mills-Brando. She never hyphenated before.”
“I can’t believe they’d do that,” I said. “On what grounds?”
“As asinine as this sounds, the way I read the report, it’s mainly because I live too much like a bachelor. Which I just happened to be.”
“You’re a fantastic dad. Didn’t that lady talk to anyone?”
“Melissa. Our group, here. My neighbors.”
“They like you.”
“Yeah, but Mrs. McFall made the unforgivable mistake, apparently, of telling the custody evaluator about all the people who come to my door with papers to serve. Except for our government-issue gag order, most of the papers come from Melissa.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Made it sound like I’m some kinda dead beat.”
He sat at his desk.
“None of this sounds like any reason to take Lexi away,” I said.
“It’s not about reason,” he said. “It’s about money and the power money buys. Melissa makes great money. Her family is rich. They have the best lawyers with the best connections money can buy.”
I pulled up a chair in front of his desk. “You think they paid off the judge?”
“Who knows?” He paused. “We can’t have anything anymore. Our children don’t belong to us. Our privacy doesn’t belong to us. Our identities don’t belong to us. Our careers, our reputations, our memories—they all belong to someone else.” He spun in his chair. “I’m not letting it happen.”
Back to that again. “Your lawyers can’t stop it?”
“Lexi and I are leaving.”
“Mike...I mean, Dr….”
“What else am I supposed to do?” He thrummed his fingers on his desk.
“You can’t kidnap her. You’ll be in all kinds of shit.”
“What do I have to lose? They put me in prison? Like I’m not in prison already?”
I placed my palm over the top of his right hand and squeezed.
“You can’t kidnap her,” I said. I heard an odd noise, like quick inhaling. It didn’t register that it was Dr. Brando until I saw him grimace, like he was having a heart attack. I pushed the chair back and stood. “Are you okay?”
He relaxed and rubbed his right hand.
“You okay?”
“Hand just suddenly...shit.” He rubbed his wrist, too. “It’s...I’m fine.”
“Well...please don’t kidnap Lexi.”
“Your mom said we could stay with her. Til the dust clears.”
“Mom would never go along with something like this.”
“She doesn’t know,” he said.
“Then you need to tell her.”
He looked at his desk, dodging the question.
“If you don’t tell her, I will.”
“You’d betray me, too.”
“It’s not a betrayal. I don’t want my mom involved.” Then something I didn’t regret at the moment but knew I probably would. “You guys can stay with me. Til the dust clears.”
“Faculty meeting agenda: My Favorite Marcum! The return of...audio? Jennifer’s Close Encounter. Some important news from our attorney.”
I’d asked for a few minutes to tell the team about my unusual meeting with Alexander Sparks. I mentioned it to Nathaniel, without going into detail, on the way home from our gala date night, from which he politely, with a sweet-but-shallow kiss on the lips, delivered me to my door. The “return of audio” was evident the minute we took our seats.
“Boo!” Everybody jumped. Captain Hightower snickered. “That was Ryong’s idea,” he said. “You guys miss us?”
“Absolutely,” Dr. Cooper said. “So where are you? Home? Back here with Crimsy?”
“Not quite,” Captain Gillory said. “We were told to be at this meeting.”
“How is fair Crimsy?” Dr. Marcum asked.
“Growing like a weed,” Gillory said. “The new strain, if that’s what you’d call it, does quite nicely in our artificial air.”
“You mean, no more controlled containment?” Brando asked.
“You got it,” Hightower said.
Dr. Shonstein smiled giddily. “Yippee!” she said. “Brandy, you were right. You were right!”
“All signs point to Crimsococcus halocryophilus being the First Universal Common Ancestor,” Gillory said. “Of course, nothing can be confirmed until you have her there.”
“Major, major congratulations,” Dr. Levitt said to Brando. “And not only major congrats, but also welcome back, Bill Marcum.”
“Good to be back,” he said.
We had a round of applause and everyone, except Marcum, stood. It was sweet, looking down at him smiling and a little weepy-eyed and hearing the space station crew cheer on audio.
“Total ballsy move. Loved it,” Shonstein said after we sat back down.
“Jennifer has asked for a couple minutes,” Dr. Levitt said. All eyes turned to me.
“So I had a strange encounter with Alexander Sparks at the Red Planet gala,” I began.
“Strange and Alexander Sparks in the same sentence?” Shonstein said. “Tell me it ain’t so.”
“He cornered me. He was bummed nobody brought up sending humans to Mars. He thought it should have been our focus. Like Odysseus and Crimsy were just...preliminaries.”
“So we can’t get a microbe from Mars to Earth, but we’re ready to send humans from Earth to Mars?” Dr. Cooper said. “That’s some logic.”
“Ain’t it though,” Hightower said from the space station. “And Sparks, if you’re out there listening, I didn’t mean it, buddy.”
“Did he say anything about our present dilemma?” Levitt asked.
“Well...I mean, honestly—he sounded like he didn’t really want Crimsy here,” I said. “Something about Mars being home.”
“I know he wants to be the guy who got us there,” Marcum said. “Us humans.” He pulled up a Cosmic American article in the Cloud. “The Red King’s Dream.” An apt reference to Alice in Wonderland. It showed Sparks, standing as tall as he could, arms folded, before a backdrop of Mars. I read the subtitle: “Alexander Sparks’ Final Frontier. By Molly Cukor.” Interesting.
“How much real control does he have over this mission?” Cooper asked. He looked around the table. “Anyone know?”
“Dr. Hale said he made all the software. The artificial intelligence,” I said. “Telos made all the hardware.”
“Our onboard computer software is all Sparksware,” Hightower said. “It’s cloud-based, and since he controls the Cloud—”
“Funny,” Levitt said. “How you think of an investment as money when it’s also stuff.”
“So could he be hampering our ability to get Crimsy here?” Brando asked. “Is that possible?”
If anyone had an answer, Nathaniel Hawthorn rapping on the door frame silenced it. Dr. Levitt waved him in.
“Good morning, everyone,” he said.
“Long time, no see,” Captain Hightower said. “Still no see.”
“I see,” Nathaniel said. “Hopefully, we’re getting close to remedying all that.” He stood straight, took a breath, and smiled at Dr. Marcum. “Welcome back.” They shook hands.
“Glad to be back.”
“You’ve made work for me,” Nathaniel said.
“For which you are happily well-compensated, I presume,” Marcum said.
“Keep hoping,” Nathaniel said. He was in a mood today. “Anyway, I come with an interesting proposition. It may seem outlandish at first. But our hope—my bosses, NASA, the US government, and so forth—is that we can work something out.”
We looked at him. He took another deep breath.
“Would anyone here be amenable to working on the space station?”
We looked at each other.
“Rhonda—” Levitt said.
“Captain Gillory knows all about it. Same Captain Hightower. And Commander Ryong,” Nathaniel said.
“I’m not clear what you’re asking,” Levitt said. “That one of us, what—go up there and, do what, exactly?”
“Work on your discovery,” Nathaniel said. “Do your tests. Do what you’ve been wanting to do down here.”
“If it were that easy, we’d have set it up before the mission,” Shonstein said.
“It would be temporary,” Nathaniel said. “Just until we can resolve the ins and outs of getting Crimsy here.”
“What ins and outs?” Brando asked.
“That’s what none of us understands,” Shonstein said. “Why all the bullshit? Crimsy is not pathogenic. There’s no reason any of us can fathom why she’s still up there.”
“I’m just presenting what I was asked to present,” Nathaniel said.
“Shit.” It slipped out.
“Jennifer?” he said.
I looked at him. “You owe us better than this,” I said. “You say you represent us, but every time you come here, you represent them, whoever them is.”
“Here, here,” said Dr. Marcum.
Nathaniel straightened his posture, almost like he was rearing up. He took another breath. “Why don’t you go?” he said to me. “Step up. If I’m so ineffective—”
“We don’t need to go there,” Levitt intervened. “None of us are astronauts. Honestly, this sounds like a stupid idea.”
“Actually, it’s not,” Hightower said. “We’re short one crew member, maybe by design, wink, wink...Someone who’s smart, physically fit, not tied down to family—so single, probably.”
“You need to come up here and see this thing,” Gillory said. “It’s gonna blow your mind.”
We were quiet.
“By ‘you,’ she means someone on the team,” Hightower said. “Our appreciation for all this is very high, but it can’t match yours. So I agree. You need to get up here and see this thing.”
Our eyes darted around the table.
“Don’t look at me,” Shonstein said. “I have a very demanding child at home. And Malachi, too.”
“I might be able to do it,” Cooper said. “If Jennifer hadn’t brought her mom here, which set off a chain reaction that now has me running the Hale Lab.”
We chuckled at these good-natured remarks, but the implication was clear as we went around the room. Marcum was “a significant means of support for some of my family back in Jamaica.” Brando—no way. Levitt ran the show (“besides, Parada would kill me”). Which left—me.
“Can I think about this?” I asked.
“Nothing to think about,” Levitt said. “It’s out of the question. Way too risky, too much liability, way beyond my pay grade. If anything happened to Jennifer or anyone else, I...Jesus, I can’t believe we’re even discussing this.”
“Shouldn’t this be Jennifer’s call?” Shonstein said.
“No,” Levitt replied. “It shouldn’t.”