Linda Ryu

I don’t even want to address the Dawn situation. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction—if she could even begin to know how I feel, and why should she? My question is, why does my story always have to be her story? She didn’t say word one to me, never even gave me a hint so I could prepare myself, let alone apologize, and yes, while she might have broached the subject that day at the glass, she was voted down seven to one, and all I could think was she’d gone completely out of her mind till her crewmates put an end to it. But they hadn’t put an end to it and they wound up being fooled just as much as me. Dawn stayed in, I stayed out, and I waited three full days before the call finally came—Dawn, Queen and Empress of E2, deigning to call me, the peasant, the serf, the nobody, trying to explain herself in what was really all about her and her guilty conscience and had nothing to do with me because by that point I must have been all but anonymous to her. I wasn’t inside. I wasn’t a member of Team Two or Team Three either. I didn’t have a microphone and I wasn’t from CBS News, so really, who was I?

She told me she felt bad. Told me how she just couldn’t help herself, as if some sort of spell had come over her—“Really, Linda, E2 has that kind of power, it’s almost mystical”— before she broke down and started mewling over how Ramsay had stabbed her in the back (without mentioning the cold steel blade she’d stuck in mine), which is when I hung up on her. And refused to pick up the phone when it rang five seconds later and kept on ringing on my desk till somebody said, “Will you pick up, already?” and I said, “No, I won’t.”

By the way, in case you’re wondering how I could swallow all the shit they threw at me and keep on swallowing it, let me just say that I am determined, no matter what I’m up against or how two-faced and scheming people really show themselves to be. Mission Control—and Dawn—couldn’t have made it any worse if their intention was to annihilate me, as if all of E2 and its ambitions and pronouncements and funding schemes existed only as an elaborate joke on me, because there’s no advance warning, nothing, and I don’t actually find out what’s going on till the day of the reentry/closure ceremony. And why is that? Because they want to make it a surprise. Because they want to churn the TV ratings and don’t really care who or what they stomp in their wake. Can you even imagine it? My parents are there. Two of my best friends from college. The Sacramento Bee ran my picture on the front page and I’ve been through the press conference and my fitting and I’ve cleaned out my apartment and put everything in storage, and even, irony of irony, polished Dawn’s car for her.

And then, the very morning of Mission Three closure, Judy and Dennis show up at my stripped-to-the-basics apartment in the Residences and tell me what? That there’s been a change of plan. That’s how Judy puts it, after sprinkling cinnamon and sugar on it for a full ten minutes while Little Jesus nods along and licks his lips and tugs at his ears. There’s been a change of plan. But I’ve asked a rhetorical question here and I haven’t really answered it: how could I even think of staying on for another second, let alone don the turd-brown uniform and sit there dutifully in the front row, my lips sealed, while the worst humiliation of my life plays out in public? Answer: it isn’t easy.

What happens is this: after I throw my fit, a true tear-up-the-cushions and pound-the-walls-with-both-fists display and run out of breath cursing the two of them in English and Korean both (and before I can say, Fuck you all, I’m out of here), Judy calmly props her briefcase up on the coffee table, flips the twin latches and extracts two items. The first is a check drawn on SEE in the amount of $50,000. “For your services over the course of three years, and I know it should be more,” she says, “but we’re hoping you’ll accept it as a peace offering, at least,” and, of course, in my rage and hurt and disappointment I won’t even look at it, let alone touch it. The second is a contract, fully executed and witnessed, but for my signature, appointing me, Linda Darlene Ryu, Executive Vice President of SEE, Tillman, and—in a clause set off with five blue asterisks from the pen Judy hands me across the table—guaranteeing me a place as MDA for Mission Four. And what do I have to do in return? Shut up and smile.

Think what you will, but everybody has their price, and what was I supposed to do, take an axe to the airlock and force my way in? I could have, easily, could have called every newspaper in the country and spilled the kind of dirt that would bring down the whole shitty lot of them, from G.C. to Dawn and Ramsay and even poor innocent gung-ho Gavin (who’s inside now, with Dawn, as if I don’t have enough to fume over), but what I do instead is put on my Dragon Lady face and start plotting my revenge. It’s Dawn I want, more than anybody, Dawn and Ramsay, and if I just walk away I’ll never sleep another night in my life.

As soon as the door closes behind Judy and Dennis, the silence just screams through the apartment. I want to turn on the radio, the TV, the vacuum cleaner and the blender, all at once—anything to fill the void—but I can’t summon the energy. I just sit there, the check in one hand, the contract in the other, and stare at the wall as if I can see through it, all the way across the campus and deep into E2, where the Mission Two crew must be helping each other zip up their jumpsuits and Dawn’s busy pulling her imposture. Along with Ramsay, the King Shit of all time. I am weary, so very, very weary. But still, as numb as I am, as numb to everything as one of the living dead with a stake driven right through one side of her head and out the other, I force myself to pull on the turd-brown jumpsuit Judy handed me after she saw I was going to take the check. What I need to do, above all else, is go out there into the rising glare of Arizona sunshine and find my parents, where I know they’ll be sitting patiently in the special section reserved for relatives of the Mission Three crew. It’s two hours before the ceremony, the tech staff up on the dais fiddling with things, the odd guests beginning to arrive. My parents, who always like to be early, rigidly and anal-retentively early, are already there, my mother poised beneath a red-and-black checkered parasol and fanning herself though the temperature can’t be much more than seventy-five or so, and my father, one knee crossed over the other, sitting beside her bent over a copy of the New England Journal of Medicine, his bifocals radiant in the sun.

Both my parents speak with an accent, a soft charming purr of an accent people would have a hard time placing if they were talking to them over the telephone, nothing at all like the exaggerated consonant-challenged gibberish you hear from the stereotypical mild-mannered Asian characters on TV and in the movies, characters who always seem to play for comic effect. My parents are not stereotypical. They are definitely not mild-mannered. And they do not play for comic effect, not in my life anyway. They are kind and loving and they want the very best for me, even if they do tend to set their expectations in concrete and have never really understood my devotion to E2. They’re my parents. I love them. And going to them now is maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

My father glances up first, instant smile, and then he’s rising nimbly from the white folding chair to take hold of me, murmuring, “Hi, Angel, we missed you,” and I’m rocking in his arms before bending down to kiss my mother’s cheek under the stiff straw-smelling brim of her hat. That moment, embracing my parents there amid the rigid geometry of waiting chairs, brings back all the concerts and graduation ceremonies of my life, from elementary school to junior high to my first (and last) viola recital in ninth grade to high school commencement and college too, and I’m so heartbroken, so defeated, it’s all I can do to keep from breaking down in front of them.

My mother’s right on it. She tilts her head to get a better look at me, the sun slicing in under the brim of her hat to cut a bright crescent out of her face. I watch her photochromic lenses darken till her eyes shade into invisibility. She says, “What’s wrong, honey? You’re getting your dream, aren’t you? Why the long face?”

“She’s nervous, that’s all,” my father says. And then to me: “It’s only natural—the jitters, I mean. They’ll go away, you’ll see—”

“It’s not that,” I say.

My mother, her inflection rising hopefully, makes her best guess, her radar for misery all but infallible. “You’re having second thoughts, is that it?” She’s never been happy about this (I can’t see it, I really can’t see you locking yourself away from the world like some sort of nun, because where’s the future in that?), and since the Mission Three roster was released she’s become more and more protective, ringing me up two or three times a day to take my emotional temperature and coincidentally to mention job openings she’s read about in the paper or a new grad course in environmental studies one of the UC schools just announced.

I look away for a moment, as if I’m distracted by what the tech staff are doing up on the dais, and when I turn back to her, the lie is right there on my lips. “Mom,” I say, “Mom, you’re amazing, you really are. How did you guess?”

My father’s about to say something, but my mother shushes him. “So what does that mean?”

Again I have to look away, but I brave it out and tell her they’ve decided I’m too valuable to waste inside, at least for this mission. “Mom, can you believe it? They made me Executive Vice President of Space Ecosphere Enterprises”—and now a look for my father—“and they gave me a bonus. Are you ready for this?”

They’re both locked in now, not even breathing, and why do I feel like I’m in the fifth grade, flagging a report with a gold star on it? Why, actually, is my heart turning to ash while my voice spikes with all the false enthusiasm I can muster? “Are you?” I repeat, even as somebody up on the dais—Chad Streeter, one of the Mission Four newbies—blows into the microphone and says, “Testing, one, two, three.”

They are ready, more than ready, the relief on my mother’s face as palpable as if this is the end of a movie and she the heroine who’s survived the most harrowing ordeal the scriptwriters could devise. She’s relieved I’m not going inside. Glad I’m not getting what I’ve so desperately wanted through every waking moment of the last three years. At least somebody’s happy, I tell myself, at least there’s that.

I take a deep breath, as if I’m getting ready to blow the candles out on a birthday cake. “It’s for fifty thousand dollars!” I say, fighting to keep my voice under control. “Can you believe it?”

If I’ve got my new status and Ellen Shapiro does too (she’s officially Executive Officer of Acquisitions for Space Ecosphere Enterprises, Tillman, a title as meaningless as mine but better, of course, than nothing), what really gets me is Ramsay. Ramsay, who’s the ultimate cheat and who all but pissed in G.C.’s face with that whole closure fiasco, is, of course, getting rewarded for it, with a salary twice mine (and the title of Senior Director of Public Relations). Whether he got a bonus or not, I don’t know, though I’ve done my best to find out, snooping through the files when I stay after hours because I am “so fiercely dedicated to my work,” as Judy puts it without a trace of irony. Of course, I am fiercely dedicated—only it’s to getting my own back against the trio, or make that a quartet, that sucked the blood right out of my body. Dawn, number one, then Ramsay, then Judy, then Dennis, in that order. My aim, my objective, my obsession, is to bring them all down, one by one, and climb right on up the ladder to occupy the space they vacate. I am going to rise and they are going to fall.

I can’t get at Dawn directly, of course. She’s become the jewel of E2 and more to G.C. at this point I think even than Judy herself, though Judy’s still with him, or at least nominally anyway. Whether they actually screw anymore or not, I can’t say, but I can picture her down on her knees in his office taking him in her mouth or slipping into her teddy for him after one of the dinner parties they’re forever throwing at their Oro Valley condo. But that’s not the point. The point is Judy and Ramsay. I know they’re going at it—or will be—and what I want is to be there to catch them at it, what I want is evidence I can use.

So what I do, even before I see my first paycheck, is reserve four hundred and seventy-two dollars of the SEE funds Judy handed me and buy a used Canon SLR EOS-A2 camera, with telephoto lens, at Monument Camera in downtown Tucson. I’m no expert, and the array of cameras is pretty bewildering, but as soon as I see the name EOS I know it’s for me, and how appropriate is that, a camera with Dawn’s crew moniker stamped right on the face of it? I’d say it’s karma, but karma is just the kind of imaginative construct I don’t believe in and never will, along the lines of the ultimate banal question, What sign are you? Let’s just say it’s a happy coincidence, and leave it at that.

At first, just to get used to it, I take my camera out into the scrub that all but engulfs the campus and shoot a couple rolls of typical nature shots, whatever catches my eye through the squint of the lens: a fence lizard fifty feet away, a stand of saguaro that looks like a troop of people getting held up by a gunman, a bird with a red underbelly and speckled back I never do manage to identify. I’m an amateur and I take amateur photos, but I’m not thinking of an exhibit in a gallery somewhere or of art or plaudits or anything else, but only of getting comfortable enough to hang out the window of my car from let’s say a block or so away and get a nice close-up of two people going into a motel room. Together.

It’s not like it was before closure, by the way. If Judy and Ramsay are up to anything, there’s no evidence of it, not a shred, though I’m watching every move they make, especially when they’re out in the hall or down in the cafeteria where they think there’s less scrutiny, but as far as I can see they’re just going about their business like any two colleagues of any going concern that just might or might not happen to be a cult. Ramsay’s been installed in a glorified carrel across the command center from mine (which is just a particleboard enclosure three feet higher than my desk, hastily erected in honor of my new status but still located right outside Judy’s office, where I remain her gofer, attack dog and all-purpose snoop). His carrel’s as slapdash as mine, only it’s shoved up against the side wall of G.C.’s inner sanctum, making him readily available to serve our God and Creator’s needs throughout the day, every day. What’s obvious, no matter the penance being exacted here, is that Ramsay’s using the same sort of not-so-subtle blackmail I am and that not only is G.C. leaning toward easing him into Dennis’ position, leaving Dennis the odd executive out (and one less target for me), but that forgiveness in the name of advancing E2’s agenda isn’t exactly the hardest thing in the world to come by. At least for Ramsay, that is, no matter how much it might sting for the rest of us.

Anyway, I’m watching. And there comes a night a month or so into Mission Three closure when I’m working late (or pretending to), and a bit of urgent business—a report that actually could wait till morning—propels me into Judy’s office, with its glass walls that are frosted waist high and a door that locks with a key, which, of course, as Judy’s intimate, I have my own clone of. If anybody on the night shift should see me there leafing through Judy’s files or even accessing her computer—Jeff Weston, for instance, who’s still on the cameras and still has no guarantee for Mission Four, and I do feel sorry for him, or Crystal Waters, a Mission Four candidate with honey-blond hair and a résumé that includes stints at Woods Hole and Scripps, if that tells you anything about her chances—they would just assume I’m carrying out Judy’s orders. So really, there’s zero risk in sitting down at Judy’s desk and bringing up her e-mail account, which has no password or encryption or any security measures whatever, and seeing what she’s up to, both professionally and privately too. For all her hardheadedness and attention to detail, Judy’s pretty casual about this new technology, and I’m sure it’s never entered her head that her e-mails might not be strictly private—lucky for me. Because as soon as I sit down and start scrolling through her mail, this one—from Ramsay—leaps out at me:

6:30, then? Same place?

And her reply: Don’t be late.

Then he types a single word: Roses?

And she types back: Stuff the roses. Champagne.

It’s 6:05, a Thursday night, early April. Sundown in Tillman this time of year is in just over half an hour, forty minutes actually, and I am already in motion because, as you can appreciate, it’s a whole lot harder to get a clear shot after dark than before, and I’m already at the door, Jeff calling out something behind me—a joke, no doubt, about the hours I’m keeping, because, sadly, he’s got to suck up to me now along with all the others—but I’ve got no time to acknowledge him or even be civil. I’m gone. But where, you might ask? What does “the same place” mean? It means the Saguaro Motel on Route 77, or that’s my best guess after having noticed a charge from that very location on Judy’s credit card account the previous week. Besides, I don’t have time to think, just act. I’ve got to get there, get parked in a place where I’ll be hidden but still have a clear field of view, catch my breath and stop my hands from trembling, and why are my hands trembling?

I’m in the car, out of the lot and tearing down the winding blacktop road that connects the campus with Route 77, where I’ll have to swing north and go flat out for something like nine or ten miles before the motel appears on my right, if it’s even the right motel, if that’s what same place means and maybe there’s more than one place where they have their little trysts, who knows, but here I am rocketing past some doddering hunched-over old lady in a Honda doing fifty—fifty, for God’s sake—and I don’t care who’s coming the opposite way in a crazy dopplering blare of horns as I dodge back in at the last possible second with about a coat of paint’s width between us and I just don’t care. The clock on the dashboard reads 6:15 and I’m still only maybe halfway there, but then the clock’s fast, isn’t it? Or no—the thought hits me like a brick—it’s ten minutes slow! But that can’t be, it can’t. Now there’s a truck in the way, one of those big double-trailer things with wheels as high as the roof of my car and a shimmering silver back end that blots out the world, and what am I doing? I’m passing it too—on a curve—and it’s nothing short of a miracle there’s nobody coming the other way or I wouldn’t be here to tell you this.

Okay. All right. I’m there now, sailing on past and stealing a furtive glance at the neon-framed front window of the motel office and the twenty or so rooms facing the road, scanning for Judy’s car—or Ramsay’s, which I don’t even know the make of, just that it’s some Japanese thing the color of those marshmallow candies you get at Easter, the yellow ones shaped to look like newly hatched chicks . . . Judy’s car is a Mercedes, black, but it’s really G.C.’s car, as is the other one she drives, a red sportscar of some kind or other, but now I’ve already passed by and I don’t see his car or either of hers and suddenly all the energy seems to hiss right out of me as if I’m a balloon with a fast leak. Swing a U-turn, I tell myself. Find a place to park. Get the camera out. Right. Because you never know.

The motel, incidentally, is on the outskirts of Tillman—walking distance, actually, from Alfano’s or El Caballero, and I walked to it myself one night, hand in hand with John, of the three gold bicuspids and stringy white ponytail. There’s a gas station right next to it and beyond that a side street with various suburban landscape features that would provide cover but make a shot of the front office dicey at best. Directly across from the motel is a fast-food place with maybe a half dozen cars parked in front of it and various bodies going in and out the twin side doors. Golden arches. McDonald’s. Death on a bun.

When I wheel into the lot and squeeze in between two massive big-dick pickups that have seen better days, one black, one white, the clock on the dashboard reads 6:33, and whatever’s about to unfold is in the hands of fate. What I’m thinking, even as my unsteady hands adjust the camera, find the angle, the distance, is that they’d be too smart to just park out front where anybody could see their cars, and for a moment the terrible thought hits me that they’ve parked around back, booked one of the rooms you can’t see from the road, because that’s what they’d do—it’s what I would do if I was them. But why, I’m asking myself, why didn’t I think of this earlier? Why am I just sitting here? Why don’t I put the car in reverse, back out and go see—I’ve got to do something, don’t I?

And I’m about to—I actually set the camera down on the seat beside me, 6:35 now and the sky getting denser, grayer, the shadows beginning to blur in the trees beyond the gas station and all trace of the sun gone—when a movement out front of the motel snaps me back to attention. It’s Ramsay, Ramsay himself, dressed in a baseball cap, a pair of blue jeans and a paisley shirt with the collar turned up, coming across the macadam lot in a quick easy athletic stride, Ramsay—click, click—disappearing into the motel’s office, where I can just make out the shadow of him hovering there over the desk. Can I believe my luck? I don’t know and I’m not ready to revise my opinion as to signs and God and all the other idiotic superstitious claptrap people live by, not until I see Judy making her way across the lot from the opposite direction—and it’s unmistakably Judy, though she’s wearing a hat too and a long belted raincoat that erases her entirely, from the tops of her shoes to her throat. Judy. Does she think she can hide—click, click—from me? They’re fools. Careless, petty, banal people, and I’ll never dance to their tune again—they won’t even have a tune. Wait till G.C. sees this, that’s the thought racing through my head. Wait till Dawn sees it.

What about the money shot? I don’t mean in the sense of a porno film, which I personally find disgusting, not to mention degrading to women, but just a shot of the two of them together, colluding, backstabbing, whatever you want to call it—there’s nobody alive who’s going to believe they’re here at the Saguaro Motel at 6:41 in the evening to discuss wastewater treatment options and the intricacies of the O₂/CO₂ cycle. I mean, really. Just then, just as she reaches the door of the office, out comes Ramsay, jerking his head to look both ways up and down the street and then communicating something to her—the room number?—before bouncing down the steps and moving fluidly along the row of parked cars till he reaches the last room down on the right-hand side—in front!—and slips the key in the door . . . and holds it open. And flicks on the interior light as if he’s a photographer’s assistant. Too perfect. She’s there, no embrace, just there for a split second—click, click—and then she’s inside and the door’s shut and the night closes in.

I could end it here, but this is about me, this is about settling scores and seeing my way to the future the way I want it designed for a change. So what happens next, just as I’m unscrewing the lens and reverentially packing my equipment away, is Johnny. Johnny’s there, on the other side of my car, standing at the door of the black pickup clutching a white grease-stained McDonald’s bag in one hand and patting down his front pocket for his keys with the other. Actually? I didn’t even know he had a pickup, not that it matters one way or the other to me, just that I failed to recognize it as his, and now he’s standing there, digging his hand into the tight unyielding pocket of his jeans, and for just an instant my blood pressure jumps. Did he see me hanging out the window of my car all of sixty seconds ago? Did he see me spying? Gathering evidence? Betraying—or getting ready to betray—two of my coworkers who’re probably already deep into it, Ramsay stripping her and Judy stripping him, his cock, her cunt?

No, I decide. No, he didn’t. And in the next moment, without thinking twice, I lean over the passenger’s seat, roll down the window and call Johnny’s name. I watch him start, then recognize me with a cool clean look that admits no surprise because surprise would take him out of himself, and that’s a place he never wants to leave. He bends down to poke his head in the window, a strand of his hair falling loose to dangle over one eyebrow, and maybe there’s a breeze blowing, maybe not. “Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” I say, and I’m feeling better than I have in a long, long time. I give him a smile, fiddle with the top button of my blouse just to draw his eyes. “So,” I say, as if I’m summing up a discussion that’s gone on for hours, “you doing anything special tonight?”

In case you’re wondering, the pictures turn out fine. I take them back to Monument Camera to have them developed and blown up, though it costs a small fortune, and even with the bonus and the fact that I’m finally drawing a regular salary, it still makes me nervous laying out that kind of cash. But it’s an investment, really, look at it that way. What I’m going to do, when the time is right, and I haven’t decided yet just when that’s going to be, except of course that I’ll be looking for optimum impact, is I’m going to take maybe four of the best shots—solo of Ramsay going into the office, solo of Judy waiting outside for him, the backlit shot of them together at the door of room 23 and a final shot of the door slammed tight—seal them in a manila envelope and slip the envelope anonymously under the door of G.C.’s office. And then I’m going to take one, just one—the two of them backlit—and press it to the visitors’ window for Dawn’s enjoyment or edification or whatever you’d like to call it.

If I sound bitter, if I sound like a bitch, well, forgive me—bull’s-eye on both counts. I don’t think anybody who understands the facts as I’ve tried to present them would blame me, because it couldn’t be any clearer at this juncture. I’m the one who’s been hurt. I’m the one who went into this with her heart wide open and the very highest of ideals and what did I get for it? I got humiliation, I got pain and more pain, and I got to discover the dirty truth of just how far you can rely on your crewmates—or your best friend, for that matter.

There’s a day a week or so after I get the photos back when it all comes home to me in a way that’s so dead-on it’s almost frightening. I’m sitting there in my carrel listening to the phones ring and Ramsay’s voice carrying across the room and I’m watching Judy sit perched on the chair in her office with her posture that’s beyond perfect and I’m thinking I could be in any office anywhere, I could be bond trading or selling insurance or basketball memorabilia, because, really, what does it matter? I’m a functionary in an office, not an ecologist, not a Terranaut, just a drudge with a contract and yet another promise. I decide the time has come. I’ve got a bomb. And I’m going to drop it.

It takes a while to get Dawn on the phone over in the command center at E2, and she’s breathless when she picks up and I can tell from her tone she was hoping maybe it was somebody else calling, like Ramsay or maybe even Johnny or one of the newspapers, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. “Oh, Linda,” she says, her voice dropping off a ledge, “so what’s up?”

“I don’t know,” I say, “I just wanted to see you. Could we meet at the glass, maybe after dinner?”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah, tonight.”

“Really, I’d love to—we need to catch up—but tonight’s Rita’s birthday? And we’re going to do a feast down on the beach and then a group swim . . . ?”

“Come on,” I say, coaxing now, needy, or doing my best impression of needy and all it implies about who owes who here. “You can’t spare like fifteen minutes? There’s something I’ve got for you, something I really wanted to show you—”

So we arrange to meet at eight for fifteen minutes only, because this is such a big deal for Rita, her first birthday inside and all the rest of it, so Dawn really can’t spare the time, today of all days, so she’s really sorry and will ten minutes be okay? Will that work? It’s dark when I leave the apartment, temperature in the seventies, a moon, an owl sailing out of the blackness with a soft determined swish of her wings, and I get there fifteen minutes early, the photo in hand, with every intention of inflicting damage. The thing is, once I get there, once I plant myself on that hard stool outside the visitors’ window while the moths bat at the light and all the interwoven sounds of E2 come to me in a muted symphony—a snatch of somebody’s voice, the coquis rattling away, the distant pulse of the wave machine—all the air seems to go out of me. Before you set out for revenge, be sure to dig two graves. That was what my grandfather used to say, and whether it was a Korean proverb or a Chinese one or just something he made up, I never knew, but it comes to me now, and without thinking I get up from the stool—Dawn isn’t here yet; no one’s seen me—and back off into the darkness till I’m halfway across the courtyard, where I settle myself down on the grass, pull my knees up to my chest and wait.

E2 is right here, all around me, riding the night like a mystery ship. Lights glow from deep inside, the black burgeoning leaves of banana and fern and palm press up against the glass as if they’re trying to break free, the spaceframe goes gray, goes dark, hides. Overhead, even deeper inside, a soft rollicking light keeps playing high off the panels, then vanishing and coming back again, and it takes me a while to realize it’s the reflection off the surface of the ocean, the big pool where the Terranauts, wearing suits or not, are even now bobbing gently in the water that’s warm as a bath and stirred and stirred again by the power of hidden machines no one can begin to visualize, not now, not at this hour.

I don’t know how long I sit there, just dreaming—a long time, a very long time. I hear the echo of voices, watch the play of lights. The night deepens, deepens again, and Dawn never comes.