Chapter Four

The Rumorsphere Has Picked Up on It

Sunday, 29 October 2034

Frank touched Stormie on the arm. “It appears the police want to speak to us,” he said.

Vertigo stabbed Stormie in the back. She felt alternately as if everything had happened in an instant, and then that they’d been working at the scene for hours. Time was fluid, and the thought of talking with the police distorted her internal clock until it seemed like one of Dali’s melting timepieces. Who needed Einstein and relativistic speeds to achieve time dilation?

A grey-haired police officer walked up and spoke briefly to Victor, the young blond fireman. Idly Stormie wondered if Victor was his first or last name. By the time the policeman got to Stormie and Frank he had his datapad ready to take their statements. Frank held out his own device, one of the newer-model CommPacts they had laid in for the mission, and as it transmitted his personal information the policeman looked at his readout for a long moment. “Pastorelli? You don’t look Italian.”

It was a comment they heard from time to time, usually with levity. Frank normally laughed it off, but now his voice sliced the air with a sharp edge. He said, “No, I suppose not.” He leaned in and studied the policeman’s nametag for a second. “In America, I find that heritage is not always apparent. Just as, Officer MacNeil, you do not sound Scottish. Our—”

“Okay, then, smartass. You don’t sound Italian, either. Maybe I should be asking you for a green card.”

“I do not understand why,” Frank said. “You can verify with that data store that I am a citizen of the United States.”

“Yeah, we’ll see about that—”

Stormie pitched her voice in as close a match to her grandmother’s as she could—one of the things she had picked up from Mother Mac that she most appreciated. “Officer? I presume your pad is recording our conversation—I’m certain my husband’s is. You seem surprised that my husband would have an Italian family name. You don’t mean to indicate any latent prejudice by that, do you? That would be … inappropriate, don’t you think?”

Actually, she wasn’t sure Frank was recording but it was worth the bluff. Officer MacNeil looked back and forth between the two of them, and snuck a look down at Frank’s datapad as well.

The policeman said, “No, ma’am, that was just a poor joke on my part. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Frank shook his head, and Stormie said, “No, I’m sure you didn’t. My husband’s father was a missionary. How they came by their name is a long story, but Frank came to this country when he was a teenager and his family still lives up in San Luis Obispo.

“We’d like to keep this interview brief, if possible. We’re staying at the hotel down the street, and we’re supposed to meet our business partner tomorrow morning.”

“Your partner’s name?”

Frank said, “James Fennerling, of The Paszek Group.”

The officer made a note on his computer. He asked for Stormie’s information, and Frank transmitted it from his CommPact because hers was in their hotel room.

Officer MacNeil asked, “Gale Pastorelli? That right?”

“Yes. But people call me ‘Stormie.’” She hoped Frank wouldn’t chime in with one of his many variations. Sometimes it was “Abbey Gale,” sometimes “Gaelic,” sometimes “Gale Force”—but Frank stayed silent.

The officer looked as if he wanted to ask about the spelling. Stormie clenched her stomach a little, and Frank tensed as well, but she took a deep breath and willed herself to relax. She’d told the story a thousand times, that she was born when her mother had evacuated from Charleston because of yet another hurricane, and one more telling wouldn’t hurt. But Officer MacNeil just shrugged and said, “I guess I can see that.” He made another notation on his datapad.

“Did either of you see the accident?”

Stormie and Frank said, “No,” and “Yes,” simultaneously. She looked at Frank, who shrugged.

“I was dancing around you, and watched it happen,” he said. He described the action with quick movements of his hands. “I saw the first motorcycle swing into the oncoming lane—it was trying to pass the silver Ford. The second motorcycle followed, but the blue car was approaching. The car started to its right, to give them room, but the lead motorcycle sped up and went the same direction, toward the sidewalk. The car turned back, but the trailing motorcycle had split off and the car caught it in the rear wheel.

“I lost sight of the motorcycle then, because the blue car hit the Ford almost head-on. Then it looked as if the lead rider turned back to see what had happened. In the process, it pulled right into the path of that small van. The van tried to swerve, and after it hit the rider it ended up on the sidewalk there.”

Officer MacNeil made another notation and asked what happened next. They explained what they had done, and the policeman was proper and polite through the rest of the interview. Relief sighed out of Stormie when Officer MacNeil said, “Okay, I think that’s about it. The address and numbers are current, right? I heard you say you go back to Houston in a few days. If we have any more questions, I want to be able to get in touch with you.”

“We had meetings earlier this week in San Diego,” Frank said, “but we will be here in Santa Barbara until Wednesday.”

“San Diego, huh?” The officer raised an eyebrow and began accessing his datapad faster. After a few seconds, he said, “Well, hell, if I’d checked the newsblogs I would’ve known who you were sooner.” He turned his pad in their direction, so Stormie could see the screen.

MacNeil had pulled up an image of Stormie with her hands on the motorcycle rider’s leg, over a caption that read, Lunar Colony Candidate Molests Injured Motorcyclist.

* * *

Jim Fennerling, Stormie and Frank’s partner in Lunar Life Engineering and the primary champion and backer of their crazy venture, set aside his book and rubbed his eyes. Fatigue crept over him like a crawling insect, and though he couldn’t quite fathom why, his stomach writhed as if something had crawled into it.

He closed his eyes, and the quick nausea spread up and down from just below his breastbone. Around him his home produced only its usual noises: the refrigerator hummed, the escapement of the old clock on the bookshelf ticked its mechanical tick. He breathed deep and nearly gagged on a waft of Kung Pao shrimp from the kitchen counter. Gradually the nausea spread enough that it thinned a little, the way ripples die out as they move across the surface of a pond. He took another deep breath and the nausea dissipated, and left him with only a general unease.

He looked around his living room to see if he could spot something wrong. Frozen faces stared back at him from all the same pictures, his retirement plaque from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory silently lauded his quarter century of service, his near-antique books and discs and magazines stood regimented in their precise, orderly rows.

A click, the furnace kicked on, and in the blast from the vent Meredith’s Moon wobbled in its frozen orbit.

Jim wheeled over to the fake fireplace and looked up at the half-meter-wide silver-and-gold model spacecraft. Its gossamer web spread out from a silvered sphere, a pea-sized Sputnik, at its center; that central core crouched like a legless spider, ready to crawl out and snag some unsuspecting twenty-first century fly.

Tiny plastic dewdrops shimmered along the web’s slender gold threads; the sheer veil suspended from the threads caught the breeze. The model strained against its moorings, anchored to the fake wooden ceiling beams and the cup hook screwed into the wallboard. It rocked back and forth and the thin film billowed in places, as if the craft flew while motionless. In a way, the real spacecraft did fly motionless: elevated above the Earth’s orbit, suspended by light pressure, it led the Earth in its path around the Sun but always moved in lock step with the planet’s motion. The real spacecraft’s meter-wide central core controlled thousands of power collectors and sensors arrayed across the kilometers-wide solar sail web, as the vehicle maintained vigilant watch over the near-earth orbital environment.

Only Jim referred to the Solar Levitated Out-of-Ecliptic Forward Orbiter—“Forward” in the sense that it preceded the Earth as they orbited the Sun, and in tribute to the twentieth century space pioneer who originated the idea—as Meredith’s Moon. Meredith worked out most of the orbital insertion and stationkeeping routines as part of her doctoral work, with partial differential matrices and other advanced mathematics that Jim could never fathom. She took him once to see the vehicle under construction: the thin anti-static coveralls itched against his arm hairs, the papery booties crinkled as they walked, and the antiseptic isopropyl alcohol smell permeated the El Segundo factory. Meredith’s pride shone in her eyes as she showed him the open silver globe and explained its mission in terms even an accountant could understand. Jim smiled so much at the wonder of seeing his daughter’s dream made real before their eyes that his face hurt at the end of the tour.

Meredith never saw the launch. The brain tumor took her before the spacecraft even got into sine-vibration testing. Jim had brought the model of her artificial Moon back home when he cleaned out her student apartment.

The model shuddered in the air currents. Some dust dislodged from its lacy webbing, and the falling motes sparkled like tiny snowflakes in the light. Jim’s eyes swam as dust fell into them.

He looked away, right into Meredith’s happy eyes in her picture as Gale Pastorelli’s maid of honor. She was only weeks away from dying, then, but she radiated joy all the same. If Meredith were still alive, Jim knew, she’d find a way to ship out with Gale and Frank. She’d stow away in their luggage if she couldn’t wrangle a colony position for herself. So what if the Consortium only let married couples apply? Meredith would’ve snagged a suitable husband in order to land a spot in the program.

Maybe if Meredith was alive, Alyson wouldn’t have gone the way she did.

Jim smacked the arm of his wheelchair. Where did this sudden attack of melancholy come from? What was he worried about? About seeing Gale and Frank tomorrow? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost himself in pointless contemplations.

Meredith and Alyson smiled at him from inside another frame. From the time Meredith was fifteen, people who met them mistook them for sisters. They both enjoyed that, for altogether different reasons. And then Meredith faded, and Alyson followed.

Jim opened his eyes wide and stared at the blank television screen, to keep from envisioning Alyson’s pallid face and vomit-coated blue lips. He gradually looked back at the picture and focused on the image of her, alive. He wondered why he kept the things he did; he hardly noticed them anymore, and when he did notice them they invariably hurt.

Maybe if Meredith was still alive, her mother would be, too. But maybe Alyson would have gone the same way, just at another time.

At least neither of them had to see me in this damn chair.

The furnace cut off. Jim watched the spacecraft model settle down until it hung still from its moorings as if it floated above his head.

How remarkable it would be to float so far above the Earth, to look down on the marble-sized globe and watch the silver clouds coalesce and dissolve over the blue surface, to be a sentinel guarding all of humanity instead of a wheelchair-bound paper-pusher living vicariously through his dead daughter’s best friends. Nothing really floated in space, he knew: everything moved, ellipses in ellipses in ellipses without reference to any single, fixed point because there were no fixed points.

He was still thinking about that when the phone rang. His gut clenched; whatever was wrong was on the other end of the line. He steered himself over and picked up the receiver—he could not abide the room-filling phone pickups that some people had in their homes. Frank’s name was on the little ID screen.

Not now. Not this late in the game.

“Hey, Frank,” he said immediately. “Not getting cold feet, are you?”

“Hello, James,” said Frank. “We may have a problem, my friend.” Frank’s voice was calm and his speech as formal as ever, but Jim sensed that he was serious.

“What kind of problem, Frank?”

“There was an automobile accident. The emergency crew has gotten us decontaminated and we have answered the police officer’s questions, but the rumorsphere has picked up on it—”

Frank was still talking, but Jim’s brain was stuck trying to process what he’d just heard. Accident? Police? Emergency crew? Contaminated? The phrase “breach of contract” ran through his head, and embarrassed him that he thought of money first, before the welfare of his friends. The habits of an accountant turned venture capitalist. And they were his friends now; at first they had only been Meredith’s, but now he claimed them as his own.

“Frank, are you and Gale alright? Are you hurt?”

“I had some small pieces of glass in my hand, but otherwise I am unhurt. Stormie also is unhurt.”

“What happened? How’d you get in an accident?”

Frank told him the story from the beginning. Jim’s first impulse was to pace about the room; instead, he wheeled his chair one-handed into the kitchen and filled a glass with ice water from the refrigerator door. He drank while he listened.

“Where is Stormie now, Frank?”

“She is next to a fire wagon, talking with the police officer. She suspects whoever took her picture ran it through a face-recognition algorithm which matched her to the Asteroid Consortium. She is quite upset about the implications. She looks as if she may begin to wash her hands again.”

Jim rubbed his face, trying to prioritize the potential problems; in school and in business he’d learned to consider all possible scenarios. Internet gossip was annoying but probably harmless; he would call Claire tonight and they could have some positive spin out in short order. “Decontamination,” on the other hand, implied “contamination,” and even though that might sound worse than it really was, it was likely to cause more trouble. He was no doctor, so he wasn’t sure if his list was complete, but the scenarios that ran through his mind had frightening names like SARS, hepatitis, plague. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. If he could eliminate the worst-case scenario, then they could work their way to the no-problem scenario.

“Okay, Frank,” he said. “Do the police or the hospital types have any reason to think that the lady Stormie was helping had a disease? HIV, maybe, or something worse?”

“I do not know. They moved her away and a few moments ago a helicopter arrived to transport her.”

“Okay, I can call my brother-in-law and get him to dig into that. Did you ever meet Bruce? He’s a detective—he should be able to detect something for us. Meanwhile, ask one of the EMTs to take blood samples from you and Stormie. It’s too soon for anything to show up, but we’ll have it analyzed independently, just to make sure. Better yet, see if they’ll take two samples: one for us to analyze and one for them to keep in an official chain of custody.”

“Is that necessary?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. I hope not. What I do know is that the contract is pretty specific about timing and disease exposures and incubation periods and such. I’ll have to dig into the details, but if we don’t make the milestones we forfeit our payments, and it’s clear that you both have to be in good health before we send you to Utah. I figure they’ll poke and prod you again when you get down in the mine. It may help to have some test results of our own, even if we don’t need them. It’s best, of course, if the woman Gale was helping was clean. Pity you don’t know her name.”

“I am sorry, my friend,” Frank said. “We did not intend to cause so much trouble.”

Jim laughed, a little. “Oh, no, of course not. I guess you had to step in and help, didn’t you?”

After a slight pause, Frank said, “Yes, of course. We could not stand by and do nothing.”

“Couldn’t? You mean, ‘wouldn’t.’ I don’t guess many people stepped out of the crowd. Were you two the first ones to help?”

Another slight hesitation on Frank’s part. “I do not know. Perhaps there were one or two others.”

The pauses told Jim everything he needed to know: Frank wouldn’t have claimed to be first on the scene even if he was—he was the most humble person Jim had ever met—but it was almost certain that Frank wasn’t actually first. Gale was, and probably in such a way that she earned her “Stormie” nickname. She would’ve seen what needed to be done and jumped in to do it while Frank was still taking stock of the situation. That’s why they made a good team: his tendency to deliberate usually kept her from leaping too far before she’d looked. Usually.

“Right,” Jim said. “It’s a pretty safe bet you were the first. I’ve known you a long time, Frank, and you’ve never been one to stand idly by when someone needed help. Although in a case like this I bet you were just trying to keep up with that crazy wife of yours.”

Jim took the silence on the other end of the line for assent. “Don’t worry about it, Frank. It’ll all work out. Meanwhile, get that blood sample. If the EMTs won’t do it, ask them where the nearest Urgent Care is and go there. Then try to get some sleep, and I’ll see you at breakfast as planned. Right now I’ve got to call my no-good brother-in-law about checking that woman’s test results.”

“All right, James. Thank you, and again I am sorry.”

Jim said good-bye and put his water glass on the counter. He got a beer out of the refrigerator and took a long drink before he scrolled down to his sister’s number.