Chapter Ten
Ten
Three Days Gone
“I’m sorry, Vivian. I know you’re upset, but I still don’t have any new information for you.”
“How is that possible, Frank? How do you lose a spacecraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars and three crew members and not know where it is?” Vivian asked, sitting across from Frank in his office at the Cape.
“Do you think we haven’t been getting that question from every possible interest involved and then some?
You don’t think the press is all over this and asking the same questions?
Everyone and their mother is giving me a hard time because of the potential that we won’t even be able to recover any data from the spacecraft,” Frank snapped, looking like he hadn’t slept in days.
His desk was a mess, the surface covered in manila file folders and loose papers.
Three different coffee cups sat there along with what appeared to be a half-eaten donut.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my patience like that.
I just—” Frank slumped down in his chair, looking entirely defeated, and despite the frustration welling up inside her, Vivian felt a pang of sympathy for him.
Her husband was lost, yes, but so was Frank’s best friend, a man he had known for nearly two decades.
Not to mention, this had been Joe’s mission in space, but it had been Frank’s mission on the ground, and clearly tensions were running high at the agency.
“Vivian, I know you’re looking for answers and I know you’re angry, but I’m telling you the truth—we don’t know anything. There’s not some big secret that the agency is trying to keep from you. There’s just—nothing.”
How was that possible? She’d hoped that they had an idea of where the crew was and just weren’t sharing the information, that this was another situation like so many in Joe’s career where there were things they wouldn’t tell her, things she couldn’t know.
But sitting across from Frank, seeing the frustration in his face firsthand—
She believed him.
“What does that mean? It’s a spacecraft. There were three men aboard. How is it just gone? How is that possible? How do you not have some mechanism for tracking this? How can they just disappear?”
It felt like something out of one of those science fiction novels Joe loved to read, where people slipped in and out of time and space, here one moment, gone the next. At this point, she’d accept even an outlandish explanation over the agony of no explanation at all.
“It’s the same question we keep asking ourselves,” Frank replied.
“But that’s where we are. There’s no record of it out there.
Not where it should be and not anywhere close to its path.
We are getting absolutely no information from the spacecraft.
It’s not transmitting anything. We were receiving information and then we just lost it.
“There’s no debris anywhere that indicates perhaps it tried to return and had problems on reentry.
And we don’t even have evidence that something went wrong.
The launch went well. There were no warning indicators.
No systems failures. Nothing. I know you want answers, but I don’t have any to give you. ”
Frank hesitated. “You should prepare yourself. The consensus here is starting to be that something happened to them out there and they’re not coming back.
No one benefits from this dragging on, from it dominating the headlines and sparking fear and uncertainty in the American public.
And, Vivian, the science just doesn’t support the likelihood that we’re going to be able to bring them back after three days of no contact.
It hasn’t been done. We don’t think it can be.
For us to have lost contact with them for three days—something catastrophic must have happened. Something unrecoverable.”
“Like what? Aliens taking over their spacecraft?” she exploded.
Maybe she didn’t prefer the outlandish after all.
“No. Not aliens. But something in the environment in space that was inhospitable to the spacecraft. A collision of some sort, perhaps.”
“Wouldn’t you see debris, then?”
“Maybe. You would think, yes, but it’s possible the spacecraft ended up off course. Maybe we wouldn’t know where to look for it.”
Joe had explained the risks of his job to her before, and Vivian understood that they were on the vanguard of space exploration, and when you were doing something for the first time, there was an element of unpredictability. That didn’t make it less infuriating, though.
“There are those in the agency who think it would be best if we got ahead of this, if we accepted that there were problems with the launch, and if we allowed the nation to grieve so that we could all move forward,” Frank replied, his voice heartbreakingly gentle.
The word “grieve” felt like a knife to her stomach.
She refused to accept that death was the only possible solution. For all they knew, Joe and the rest of the crew were in space trying their hardest to return. There was no way Vivian was just going to leave him to fight his way home alone.
“ ‘Something happened to them out there’? That’s the official explanation?”
“It’s space, Vivian. There’s so much we don’t know.
So much we haven’t explored, so much we don’t understand.
” Frank took a deep breath. “Joe understood that. He accepted it. We all do. It’s what comes with the territory.
We knew this mission was dangerous. He knew this mission was dangerous.
He knew there was a strong chance that he might not come home. ”
A stone sank in her stomach as she listened to Frank describe Joe in the past tense, as though he was already gone.
“Did you all accept the risk? Because last I heard the astronauts were being told that the risk of something going wrong was, what, .001%?”
“No one believed that percentage, Vivian. You know that. It was a coin toss.”
“Then what’s the point of giving it?” she snapped. “Is the entire mission just throwing numbers out in the air?” She pulled the memorandum the man had given her out of her purse and slid the paper across Frank’s desk. “Did you know anything about this?”
Frank scanned the memorandum, a line forming between his brows. His head shot up, his gaze boring into hers. “Where did you get this?”
“A man slipped it to me at the press conference. Did you know about this? That there were problems with the spacecraft?”
“This memo specifically? No. But look—” Frank sighed. “I’m sure Joe told you. At times, there have been tensions between the people building the spacecraft and, well, those of us piloting it.”
“Tensions” was putting it mildly, as far as Vivian was concerned.
She’d heard Frank and Joe cursing up a storm as they complained about the dynamics between the astronauts flying the spacecraft and the scientists working on it.
The scientists for their part seemed bothered by all the attention the astronauts received, and they clearly had little patience for the inflated fighter-pilot-turned-astronaut swagger that dominated the space program.
In the beginning, the scientists had viewed the astronauts’ roles as merely ancillary, seen them as little more than afterthoughts compared to the machines that were supposed to be operating the spacecraft—the systems that the scientists and engineers were working on, making them the heroes of spaceflight, not the men who gave press conferences and received audiences with the president and ticker tape parades.
The astronauts had unsurprisingly taken umbrage to the fact that they were relegated to little more than mere passengers on this adventurous voyage, especially considering many of them had given up prestigious military careers where they were “the best of the best” to join the space program.
And so, a compromise had been struck as each faction navigated its role and cooperation in spaceflight.
Still—the only thing that could get Joe going more than the doctors that poked and prodded them like lab rats was the scientists and engineers who were building the spacecraft—never “capsule,” as the scientists wanted to call it.
Ironic, really, considering Joe himself had an engineering degree.
“The scientists believe in their systems and their backups, maybe to a fault,” Frank said. “They have all this unshakable faith in the computers to fly these things. Not everyone does. For pilots, well, you know—it’s not just about the machine, it’s about the person flying the machine.”
“Joe is a good pilot, Frank. He’s a good astronaut.”
“Joe was the best damned pilot I’ve ever flown with. And he was a great astronaut.”
There it was again—the past tense. She saw it in his eyes, heard it in his voice—he’d already accepted that Joe was gone.
Neither one of them spoke, because neither one of them could bear to fill the silence with what went unsaid between them.
Death was part of this life. They all knew someone who had perished in flight or in training for space.
For the pilots and their spouses, the deaths were met with spoken assurances that it wouldn’t happen to them or their spouses, because they were good pilots.
Great pilots. The assurances weren’t meant to demean the departed, and they weren’t taken as such; rather, they were offered as a source of comfort, of bravado, of why despite the undeniable odds to the contrary, the fact that it was so damned hard to get a life insurance policy on a fighter pilot or an astronaut, their loved one would make it home.
It was a lie they all told themselves to make the unbearable bearable.
It was a consolation Vivian had whispered to herself, relied upon, heard come out of Joe’s lips time and time again throughout his career.
Death wouldn’t come knocking at their door because Joe was a good pilot. A great one. Great enough to outrun death.
Except that deep down, living among the thoughts and fears they rarely if ever wanted to face, they all knew that one day that might not be enough.