Gwendy’s Final Task

“For awhile I still could, because I found a jingle on the ’Net that I learned when I was in primary school—”

“Something about bunny ears?”

As anxious and afraid as she is, that makes Gwendy laugh. “You too, huh? Only now I can’t remember the jingle. Unless I’ve eaten a chocolate, that is.”

“You ate one before coming here, I assume.”

Gwendy nods. “But they’re dangerous, like everything to do with the button box. And the box is getting stronger while I get weaker. When I woke up, just before I called you, I had it in my hands and I was getting ready to push the black button. My thumb was actually on it.”

“Thank God you’re getting rid of it!”

“We’re getting rid of it. And that’s not all.” Gwendy takes a deep breath. “I want to go with it.”

Kathy has been bringing her cup to her mouth. Now she sets it down hard. “Are you crazy?”

“Well, yes. That’s sort of what Alzheimer’s is, Kath. But at this moment I’ve never been saner. Or more present.” She leans forward, pinning Kathy’s eyes with her own. “When the button box goes, the chocolates go. If I’m still here, my decline will be very rapid. By the time we get back to Earth, I might not even know my own name.”

Kathy opens her mouth to protest, but Gwendy overrides her.

“Even if I do, the time will come when I don’t. I’ll be wearing diapers. Sitting in my own piss and shit until someone comes to change me. Staring out the window of some expensive rest home in D.C. or Virginia, not knowing what I’m staring at. Having just enough brainpower left to know that I’m lost and can never find my way back to myself.” Rule Discordia, she thinks.

She’s crying now, but her voice remains steady.

“I could tell you that I’d find a discreet way of committing suicide when we get back to the down-below, but I don’t think I could be discreet, and I don’t think I’d know how to do it. I might forget to do it. And Kathy, I’m only 64 and physically healthy. I could go on like that for ten years before pneumonia or a mutated form of COVID took me. Maybe fifteen or twenty.”

“Gwendy, I understand, but—”

“Please don’t condemn me to that, Kathy. Listen. When I was a little girl, my folks bought me a telescope. I spent hours looking at the planets and stars through it, often with my father, but once with my mom. We looked at Scorpius and talked about God. I want to go with the box, Kathy. I want to point the Pocket Rocket toward Scorpius and know that someday millions of years from now, I might actually get there.” She smiles. “If there’s life after death—my mother believed that—I might be there in spirit. To greet my perfectly preserved body.”

“I do understand,” Kathy says, “and I would if I could. But you have to think of me a little bit, okay? Think about what would happen to me afterward. Losing my commission and my job—which I love—wouldn’t be all. I’d probably go to jail.”

“No,” Gwendy says. “Not if everyone else goes along with what I have in mind. Sam, Jaff, Reggie, Adesh, Bern, Dave, and Doc. And they will, because it will stop an investigation that would shut down TetCorp’s plans for space exploration and tourist travel for a year. Maybe two or even five. Tet’s in a race with SpaceX and Blue Origin now. That guy Branson, too. Do you think our guys want to get years behind?”

Kathy is frowning. “I don’t know what you’re …” She stops. “Winston. You’re talking about Winston.”

“Yes. Because any story you cobble together to explain his death will be suspicious.”

“Explosive decompression—”

“Even if Dave Graves could rig the onboard computers to show there had been such a decompression—and I have my doubts—a story like that would shut down the MF,” Gwendy says. “All those tourist plans—Tet’s and SpaceX’s—would be frozen. That’s in addition to the investigation into you and the whole crew.” Gwendy pauses, then plays her trump card. She has saved it for last as she always did in contentious committee meetings. “Plus there’s me. I’d be questioned, and with my ability to think rapidly bleeding away, who knows what I might say?”

“Jesus Christ,” Kathy mutters, and runs her hands through her short hair.

“But there’s a solution.” This is also the way she played it in committee hearings, learned from Patsy Follett. First hit ’em with the sledgehammer, Patsy used to say, then offer them the painkillers.

“What solution?” Kathy is looking at her mistrustfully.

“Our spacewalk tomorrow is unauthorized, right? No one knows about it but Charlotte Morgan and our Eagle Heavy crewmates.”

“Right …”

Gwendy sips her cocoa. So good, with its memories of Castle Rock on summer mornings with her father. She puts it down and leans forward, arms on her thighs, hands clasped between her knees.

“We’re not going to take that spacewalk.”

“We’re not?”