Gwendy’s Final Task

I am in bed now, and I am old—much older than 64. Yet the people who surround me are young and beautiful. Even Patsy Follett is young again. Brigette Desjardin is here … Sheila Brigham … Norris Ridgewick … Olive Kepnes is here, and …

“Mom? You hardly look twenty years old!”

“I was, you know,” Alicia Peterson says, laughing. “Hard as that might be for you to believe. I love you, hon.”

And now she sees—

Ryan? Is it really you?”

He takes her hand. “It is.”

“You’re back!”

“I never left.” He leans down to kiss her. “Someone wants to say goodbye.”

He stands aside to let Mr. Farris come forward. His sickness is gone. He looks like the man Gwendy first saw sitting on a bench near the Castle View playground when she was 12. He’s holding his hat in his hand. “Gwendy,” he says, and touches her cheek. “Well done, Gwendy. Very well done.”

She’s not in space, not anymore. She’s an old woman lying in her childhood bed. She’s wearing a pretty nightgown with blue flowers on the hem. She has done her duty and now she can rest. She can let go.

“Look out the window!” Mr. Farris says, and points.

She looks out. She sees a squadron of birds. Then they are gone and she sees a single shining star. It’s Scorpius, and heaven lies beyond it. All of heaven.

“Second star to the right,” Gwendy says with her final breath. “And straight on … straight on til …”

Her eyes close. The Pocket Rocket with the button box in its belly drives onward into the cosmos, as it will for the next ten thousand years, towing its spacesuited figure behind.

“Straight on til morning.”

EPILOGUE

ONE NIGHT SOME TIME after all these things, Gwendy Peterson’s father sits at his window in the nursing home where he lives—frailer, more unsteady, but, as he often says, not too bad for an old fella. He’s looking out at the stars and thinking that somewhere out there in their endless multitude, his daughter continues her pilgrimage. Her phone, brought to him by a nice Indian man named Adesh Patel, is in his lap.

Patsy Follett, Gwendy’s mentor, might not have had as many witty sayings as Oscar Wilde, but she’d had her share. One of them was A scandal lasts six months. A scandal that’s also a mystery lasts six years. It’s only been three years since Senator Peterson and the billionaire businessman disappeared into space, but the march of current events has driven it from the forefront of people’s minds. Not from Mr. Peterson’s, however. It’s hell to outlive your only child, and the fierceness of his loss is mitigated by only two things: the knowledge that he can’t have much longer himself, and he has her voice to comfort him. Her last recorded message. The world doesn’t need to know she died a hero; it’s enough for Mr. Peterson that he knows.

A week after Adesh Patel’s surprise appearance, Gwendy’s dad had another visitor. A woman, this time. The day manager of the Castle View Nursing Home—a haughty little fellow with a pencil-thin mustache who insisted the residents address him as Mr. Winchester—sauntered into the sunroom where Alan was playing Hearts with Ralph Mirarchi, Mick Meredith, and Homer Baliko. He introduced the tall blonde lady towering over his shoulder as Deputy Director Charlotte Morgan of the Central Intelligence Agency. He quickly shooed the other men out of the room, and after offering their guest a ridiculous half-bow, left them alone.

The woman flashed Mr. Peterson a bemused look—a look that said I’m sorry you’re stuck here with such a first-class tool—and sat down across from him. “Please call me Charlotte, Mr. Peterson. I’m an old and dear friend of your daughter’s.”