Gwendy’s Final Task

Alone again, Gwendy stared at the screen. The word Annmarie had given her was gone, sliding through her fingers like a small slippery fish. She no longer wanted to write the goddamn essay. And she hadn’t meant to say of cross but of course.

“Of cross, of course, of course, of cross,” she murmured. She began to cry. “Dear God, what’s wrong with me?”

Only she knew, of cross she did. She even knew when it had started: after pushing the red button to give Charlotte Morgan a demonstration of how dangerous the button box was, and how important it was for the two of them to keep it a dead secret between them until it could be disposed of in the ultimate dumping ground.

But Charlotte couldn’t know about this.

No one could.

26

DAY 2 ON MANY Flags.

The crewmembers have started doing their various jobs, with the exception of Gareth Winston, who has no assigned job. There are many wonders to explore in Many Flags, but so far as Gwendy can tell, the billionaire has spent most of the day in his suite. Like Achilles, brooding in his tent, Gwendy thinks. She can relate, because she has spent a certain amount of brooding-time herself since Dr. Glen asked his question. Or rather detonated it in her face.

Unlike Gareth, Gwendy has been plenty occupied. She made a brief trip to the weather deck, checking out the various equipment there, and gaping at the earth below her, watching as darkness moved smoothly over North and South America (blue and violet buttons on the Button Box). She participated in a Health and Human Services committee meeting via Zoom. She talked about the importance of space exploration to a class of fifth graders in Boise who had won the videoconference with her in some kind of competition (or maybe it was a lottery). She thinks all those things went okay, but the pure hell of it is she can no longer be sure. She swallowed two Tylenol for a stress headache, but she knows it will take more than Tylenol to get her through what comes next.

They all knew or suspected, it seemed. Everyone onboard.

Knew what? Suspected what? Why, that Senator Gwendolyn Peterson had slipped a cog or maybe even two. Was a pack of fries short of a Happy Meal. A beer short of a six-pack. That the everlovin’ cheese had started to slip off her everlovin’ cracker. And because they were 260 miles above the earth, with a U.S. Senator in charge of some secret mission of A1A importance, Kathy and Dr. Glen had confronted her. They didn’t know what was in her steel box, but they did know that Gwendy was slated for a spacewalk on Day 7, and when she went out she would be in possession of a small rocket, six feet long and four feet in diameter. No more than a drone, really, only it was powered by a tiny nuclear engine that could keep it driving onward and outward for perhaps as long as 200 years. After that it would continue forever on pure inertia.

That nuclear power plant, although no bigger than a model train engine, was powerful. If the operator—Gwendy—fucked up the initiation sequence while she was floating around out there, it could either blow a hole in the MF station or possibly destabilize it, sending it either into deep space or plunging into Earth’s atmosphere, where it would burn up. Not that Gwendy would know; she’d be incinerated in the first two seconds.

Kathy had been as delicate as she could be. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable sending you out there, even with a buddy, if I felt you were suffering some mental debility.”

Dr. Glen was blunter, and she had to respect him for that. “Senator, do you suspect you might be suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease? I hate to ask the question, but under the circumstances I feel I have to.”

Gwendy had known it might come to this, and had worked out her story with Dr. Ambrose, who had agreed to help her with only the greatest reluctance. They both understood that the best story was one that incorporated as much of the truth as possible. In accordance with that, she told Kathy and Doc Glen that because she had been entrusted with something of gravest importance to the entire world, she’d been under severe stress for two freaking years, she hadn’t been sleeping well, and that was why she sometimes forgot things. Kathy readily admitted that 95 percent of the time Gwendy had handled herself up to or above the accepted standard.

“But we’re in space. Things can go wrong. We don’t talk about it when we do our PR stuff, but everyone knows it. Even Gareth knows it, which is why he’s prepared to perform certain tasks in an emergency situation. 95 percent isn’t good enough. It’s got to be 100.”

“I’m fine,” Gwendy protested. “Good to go.”

“Then you won’t mind taking a test, will you?” Doc Glen said. “Just to ease our minds before we send you into space with an important something we don’t know about and a powerful nuclear device that we do.”