Chapter Eighteen #2
If she had to guess Dr. Robbins’s age, she would place him near Joe’s age. He had the look about him of a man who spent a great deal of time indoors, whereas Joe had been Joe, but it wasn’t improbable to think that their paths might have crossed at NASA or some other place.
Dr. Robbins glanced wildly at the door for a moment as though longing to escape.
“No, I never had the pleasure of meeting your husband, I’m afraid. I did follow the launch, though. I’m not—I’m not a religious man, Mrs. Mitchell. Perhaps if you talked to a priest, or a counselor, or a friend—”
“No. I’m not looking for a meditation on life after death.
I want to talk to you about space, about the possibility of time travel.
Something happened to my husband and the rest of the crew.
Did you know that they haven’t even recovered the spacecraft?
There’s no sign of it. No debris. Nothing. How can that be?”
A gleam entered his eyes as she spoke of the spacecraft.
“I don’t need a theological explanation,” Vivian continued. “I’m looking for a scientific one. I read your book. The things you wrote about there—I’ve never heard people talk about any of this. These wormholes you mention—could something like that have sucked up Joe’s spacecraft?”
Internally, she cringed a bit even as she asked the question, because it did sound like something out of one of the science fiction books Joe loved to read. Besides, no matter how many times she’d read over the section on wormholes in his book, she didn’t entirely understand what one was.
Dr. Robbins shot her another wary look. “They buried me back here because they don’t think very much of the things I’m studying.
You should understand, things like wormholes, time travel, they exist very much on the fringes of the kind of science that sent your husband to space.
” He glanced back at the book in her hands.
“Sometimes I regret writing the damned thing. Maybe I wouldn’t have if I’d realized how much of a negative impact it would have on my career.
People laugh when I enter a room now. I exaggerated earlier about the fact that only five people read my book.
It was more than five when you include the reviewers from scientific magazines who read it and wrote the whole thing off as a load of balderdash.
I had a promising career before I blew it up with that book.
It has made me a laughingstock of the scientific community.
I wouldn’t put much consideration in it. No one else has.”
“Then they think we’re both mad. Fine. I don’t care what other people think.
I want to know what could have happened in space.
How a spacecraft could simply disappear like that.
What do you think happened to it? You can’t tell me that you haven’t considered the possibilities.
I saw the look in your eyes as soon as I mentioned the fact that there isn’t a shred of evidence that the spacecraft was even where it was supposed to be. ”
“Mrs. Mitchell, I don’t want to—”
“What, give me false hope? Confuse me? Let’s make a deal, Dr. Robbins.
Whatever you tell me, however outlandish it may seem, I won’t discount it.
And I won’t entirely rely upon it, either.
But please stop treating me as though I somehow need to be protected from all of this.
I can’t stand by while I feel like Joe is trying to reach out to me for something, like he needs me, and I’m not doing anything.
I keep wondering if he’s still out there.
In space. Or time. I keep wondering if he needs me. ”
It was the pity in his eyes that made her want to cry—the way he looked at her as though he could see how much all of this had messed her up and how desperately she was trying to keep it all together.
“What has NASA told you?” he asked, finally.
“Not much. Just that there was no trace of them. That they were unable to communicate with them, unable to locate them, and they didn’t know why. A friend suggested that there may have been a problem with the navigation system on the spacecraft. That it may have malfunctioned somehow.”
“It’s certainly possible. As much as it irks us to admit it, computers are only as good as the people putting in the data. Mistakes can be made.”
“They finally declared the crew dead because they said that they’d been missing for too long, that without any trace of the spacecraft it was likely something catastrophic had happened. And if something catastrophic happened to the spacecraft, it wouldn’t have been survivable.”
“I’m far from an expert on spaceflight, but as a scientist, I would concur with their assumption. It’s unlikely, yes.”
“Unlikely, but not impossible?”
He hesitated. “I don’t think anything in science is necessarily impossible.
I would say rather that it is unknown. But I understand how they concluded what they did, particularly in such a sensitive circumstance.
There is no easy explanation for what happened to your husband and the rest of the crew. ”
She could tell he was dismissing her before he rose from the seat behind his desk, but once he did, well—
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Mitchell. But I don’t have the answers you’re looking for.”