Chapter Twenty
Twenty
Eighteen Days Gone
“How is it going there?” Polly asked her over the phone line.
“Not as well as I’d hoped.” Vivian leaned back against the headboard in the motel room, staring up at the ceiling, her gaze fixated on a faded water mark.
Joe’s military pay hadn’t left much room for savings, and the healthy Life contract that the original Mercury Seven had received for sharing exclusive interviews and stories with the magazine had since been subdivided between so many astronauts as more and more joined the space program that it wasn’t much to go on.
Vivian would get some money now that Joe was gone, but it was hardly going to be enough to support her for the rest of her life, and having come all the way to Virginia only to be turned away, she was beginning to regret the money she’d spent on the plane ticket and motel room.
She didn’t have the luxury of going off on a wild-goose chase like she’d done.
“I’m sorry,” Polly replied. “Are you coming back soon?”
“In the morning.”
“I’ll pick you up from the airport.”
“I can get a taxi,” Vivian protested, guilt filling her at how much Polly had already done for her. They hadn’t discussed it yet, but Vivian figured Polly needed to get back to Houston soon.
“I’ll pick you up at the airport,” Polly repeated. “Get some rest, Vivian.”
As Vivian hung up the phone, someone knocked on the motel door.
She walked over and glanced through the peephole, surprised to see Dr. Robbins standing on the other side. She opened the door a crack.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said. “I tried calling first from the front desk, but they said the line was busy. I wanted to apologize to you. When you came to see me, I was caught off guard and I didn’t know what to say.
You were clearly—understandably—upset, and I was worried that whatever I said would only make things worse.
” He hesitated. “Do you have a moment to talk?”
Vivian glanced around the motel room, feeling a little strange about the idea of sharing such an intimate space with a stranger.
“It’s a nice night,” he said, seemingly noticing her discomfort. “There’s a picnic table out front. Do you want to sit there?”
“That would be perfect. Thank you.”
Vivian locked up her motel room, and Dr. Robbins followed her through the motel yard until they both sat down on the old wooden picnic table near the parking lot.
There were three other cars parked besides the one she rented, and she got the impression this wasn’t high tourist season in this part of Virginia.
“How did you find me?” she asked him.
“There are only three hotels in town. This was my second choice. I figured you’d want to stay as close to the research center as possible. Or the airport. Seemed practical. You gave me the impression that you were the sort of person who took such things into consideration.”
Vivian laughed. “I showed up at your office saying that I think my husband is communicating with me from space because he’s somehow caught in a space-time loop or something and you got the impression that I’m a practical person?”
“Fair point. On the surface, it does sound impossible. Outlandish. But I suppose at one time space travel seemed impossible, too. I don’t like to deal in impossibilities.
Maybe there are no impossibilities; it’s merely that our understanding of such things hasn’t caught up yet.
I figured perhaps you saw it the same way, too. ”
For the first time since he’d dismissed her earlier in the day, Vivian felt a stirring of hope, and she clung to it like a lifeline.
“How would that work?”
Dr. Robbins hesitated once more. She got the impression that he was a cautious man, one who thought a great deal about what he said before he said it.
“You have to understand,” he finally answered.
“My earlier reservations when you came to see me—they’re still here.
When we study and discuss these things, it’s always done in the abstract.
These are theories. Applying them to real life, to your husband’s life, well, I don’t want to give you false hope.
I don’t know what’s possible. No one does.
I know what I think could be possible, but—”
“Then tell me that.”
Dr. Robbins glanced off into the distance for longer than seemed natural given the conversation.
“Are you trying to break it to me gently?” Vivian asked.
“No, I’m trying to synthesize my thoughts for a general audience,” he replied, his tone dry.
She laughed again.
“You said you read my book.”
“ ‘Read’ might be a bit of an exaggeration. I’ll admit I was one of those general audience members that needed a bit more synthesizing—or I suppose a PhD—to understand it.
I got the gist—just not the particulars.
The science you described was nothing like any of the science classes I ever took in high school or college. ”
Dr. Robbins nodded. “The foundation of it comes from Einstein. But where it’s going, well—we’re still figuring it out.”
“You mentioned wormholes in your book. I’d never heard of them before.”
“I’m not surprised. They’re theoretical. A way of understanding space and time. A shortcut, if you will, between space and time.”
“A shortcut between space and time? Like time travel?”
“The idea is that you could enter a wormhole at one moment in space and time and exit it in another. Like a bridge. But you must understand—there’s no evidence that wormholes even exist.”
“Then why do scientists think that they might?”
“Because Einstein’s theories include wormholes, and when we test his theories, they hold up.
So it may be that there are wormholes out there, we just haven’t found them.
I mean, look, black holes have only been accepted within the last few decades.
In comparison, wormholes are a much newer science.
And considering our space exploration is still in its nascent phase, it’s very possible that they’re out there. ”
Once again, it sounded like an idea from one of those science fiction novels Joe loved to read.
Vivian had tried one once and she hadn’t been able to suspend disbelief enough to follow the plot, had found the scenarios that played out on the page to be too implausible for her to get out of her own head as she questioned the decisions the characters made and the environment they traversed.
And yet—
“If Joe’s spacecraft went into one of these wormholes—”
He hesitated. “Theoretically, then it could exist in another space or time. But we don’t even know if a spacecraft would fit through a wormhole or if the wormhole would collapse. And to be honest, the idea that there is a wormhole somewhere between Earth and the Moon is highly unlikely.”
“Unlikely, but not impossible?”
“Like I said, Mrs. Mitchell, nothing is impossible.”
“You can call me Vivian, if you’d like. Lately, I feel like whenever anyone calls me Mrs. Mitchell, it’s because they’re delivering bad news.”
Not to mention how old it made her feel. How much life did she have left in her? Another fifty, sixty years without Joe? It seemed like an eternity.
“Alright, Vivian. You can call me Cal.” He hesitated. “Dr. Robbins always makes me feel like I should wear a tweed blazer and give lectures first-year undergrads fall asleep in.”
She laughed. “Do you happen to teach at the university near town?”
He grinned. “Alright, I do. And only seven have fallen asleep.”
“You keep a running count?”
He reached into the pocket of his tweed blazer and pulled out a folded white sheet of paper with hash marks on it.
Seven.
He showed it to her for a moment before he placed it back in his pocket with the solemnity of someone who valued the document a great deal. For a man who wrote a book as dry as the one he’d published, he had a surprising sense of humor.
It gave her hope that a man who didn’t take himself too seriously had the good sense to acknowledge his own limitations and be open to the possibility of things he didn’t yet understand.
“I realize this requires some suspension of disbelief and accounting for scientific theories that exist but have not been proven; however, let me get this straight,” Vivian said.
“What you’re telling me is that if the spacecraft encountered a wormhole, Joe could exist in another space or time.
Could he be using this ‘bridge’ to somehow communicate with me? ”
“Theoretically,” he corrected.
“Theoretically,” she echoed.
“Yes. There has been some conjecture that there can be alternate realities.”
“An alternate version of Joe could be trying to communicate with me?”
“Perhaps.”
“How would that work?”
“Well, theoretically, of course—”
She grinned despite the bizarreness of the entire conversation.
“—if the spacecraft had gone through a wormhole, then space and time might have warped. He could have seen an opportunity to travel through time to a different moment in his life, not the moment when the spacecraft entered the wormhole, not the point when everything went wrong, but maybe a different point. An earlier one or a later one. It would be chaotic. It would be unpredictable. It could be a distortion of the original timeline of his life.”
“And the objects? How could he move them? I don’t understand.”
Dr. Robbins—Cal—was silent for a moment, and Vivian could see it all playing out in his mind, could envision him conceptualizing how such a thing was possible.