Page 17 of The Launch

“Maxwell,” Bill barks in a confident tone, loud enough that Arvin North will hear him clearly. “Turn that fan counterclockwise and slide it in the other way.”

Ed glances up from the task at hand and looks at Bill with just the slightest trace of annoyance. Still, he rotates the fan, and it slips in easily. “Thanks,” Ed says, moving on to the next item.

Bill chooses to keep working on his own pack and not to look back at Arvin North.

When the buzzer goes off, Bill, Ed, and Jay Reed have completed the task. Todd Roman and Vance Majors have not.

“Unpack the items and place them back on the table,” North says, resetting his stopwatch. “We begin again in ten seconds.” He stares at the stopwatch as the seconds tick away. “And…go!”

When five o’clock rolls around, the men are mentally drained. They’ve finally completed the task in under five minutes—all of them—and Bill’s gone beyond the need for coffee to the need for a stiff drink.

“Let’s hit the Black Hole, yeah?” Ed says as they all walk down the linoleum-tiled hallway of the Launch Operations Center that evening, lunch boxes in hand, egos checked by a day of doing and re-doing the same task repeatedly.

The Black Hole is the bar right off the property, beachside and open-air to catch the breeze off the water. Bill has been there twice, and to be perfectly honest, he loves it.

“I’m in,” Bill says, stopping at the front counter and leaning an elbow on it. “But I need to call home first and let Jo know I’ll be late for dinner. Meet you guys there?”

Todd slips on his aviator sunglasses as they hit the front lobby with its tall ceilings and potted plants. “See you there, bud,” he says, lifting one hand in the air as he pushes through the front door and out into the hot evening.

Two beautiful secretaries are bustling around and closing things up for the day. They smile at Bill.

“Help you, Lieutenant Colonel Booker?” one of them asks, looking up at him from beneath a fringe of darkly mascaraed lashes. Her name is Debra, and she’s got a pep to her that reminds Bill of the girl who led the cheer squad at his high school. He’s heard more than one male employee in the lunch room commenting on Debra’s assets and her smile with a knowing laugh, but she seems cheerfully oblivious to the fact that the guys think of her as the unofficial NASA pinup girl.

“Hi, Deb.” Bill is still leaning on the counter. “Mind if I borrow your phone to call home and check in?”

Debra, a bottle blonde with smooth skin, an hourglass figure, and a penchant for a flipped bouffant hairdo and slim pencil skirts, smiles at him with her row of straight, pearly-white teeth. “Sure,” she says in a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice. “Of course you can.” Without taking her eyes from Bill, she pushes the heavy phone across the counter towards him and then walks away to retrieve her purse from the office space in the back.

“Jojo,” Bills says when Jo answers. “Hi, hon. The guys want to stop off at the Black Hole for a beer—it’s been a day, baby. Mind if I’m a little late for dinner? No, no. You don’t have to hold things for me—just feed the kids. Okay. Sure. Love you.” He hangs up the phone with a firm hand and pushes it back towards Debra’s spot behind the counter. “Thanks, Deb!” Bill calls into the void. The front lobby has emptied out, as business hours areover. Night security will come in soon to man things, but the astronauts and the pretty front desk ladies are done for the day.

Debra comes out of the office with a purse dangling from one shoulder, and a thin cardigan draped over her tanned arm. “Headed to the Black Hole?” she asks conversationally, walking out the front door with Bill. He holds the door for her, admiring offhandedly the way her rear end swings from side to side as she walks.

“Sure. But just for one drink.” He squints out at the lot to where his Corvette is parked. “Gotta get home for dinner with the family,” he adds. He’s just told Jo to go ahead and eat without him, but somehow it feels better to add the fact of his family into this conversation so that Debra doesn’t think he has any nefarious intentions with her.

“Of course,” Debra says with a smile. “You being a family man and all.” She stops walking and stands next to a powder blue 1954 Ford Fairlane. With one hand held over her eyes to shield them from the bright sun, Debra smiles up at Bill, highlighting how much smaller and daintier she is than him. “I might stop by for a drink myself. I’ve got no one to get home to—aside from my roommate, Cathy, and she doesn’t care when I get in.”

Bill feels something—a familiar tug, a forgotten sense of promise or excitement—as he realizes that Debra has gone beyond simple friendliness and entered the realm of flirting. He squashes the feeling immediately. “Good on you,” he says instead, walking to his car. “A career woman with her independence. Very admirable.” Bill tips his imaginary hat to her, and then he turns towards his Corvette without another word.

He’s pretty sure that he’s leaving Debra standing there in the parking lot wondering if she’s said something wrong, but he’s also fairly certain that he’s deterred her from showing upat the Black Hole that evening looking for witty banter or a free drink. A flirtation of any sort is simply a distraction that he does not need—nor does his marriage need it—and so Bill throws his briefcase onto the passenger seat of the Corvette, revs the engine, and pulls out of the lot without a single look back at Debra.

The Black Hole has a bar made of polished driftwood that looks like it’s been slightly burned in a bonfire. The chairs and stools are all handmade and covered in naugahyde, and paper lanterns in a rainbow of colors hang from the ceiling and above the bar, swaying back and forth in the breeze that comes in off the water through the open walls.

“The ITEMS in this pack are THINGS you need to know INTIMATELY,” Todd Roman is saying when Bill enters the bar. Todd is standing beside the table where the men are all slouched casually, nursing cold beers from bottles, or holding short, stout glasses of amber liquid. It’s clear that Todd is mimicking Arvin North, and the other men hoot with laughter. Vance Majors slaps the table, one eye closed as he laughs heartily.

“Hoo, boy—that’s some imitation,” Ed says with glee.

Bill walks directly to the bar and orders a Carlsberg. With his beer in hand, he winds through the tables full of NASA employees, local pilots, and women wearing short skirts and bright smiles.

“Pull up a chair, Booker,” Ed Maxwell says, reaching out and dragging an empty seat from another table without standing. He pats the chair. “Thanks for helping me out today. Didn’t know we could work together on that project.”

“I didn’t either,” Bill says, sitting down and leaning back with a sigh as he takes his first long, cold sip of beer. “But I figured we’d be working as a team in space, so it would benefit us to figure out how to do it with our feet still planted on Earth.”

“Good thinking,” Ed says, holding up his bottle of beer to tap against Bill’s with a mutedclink. “Hey, how was Sexy Deb?” Ed lifts his eyebrows as he watches Bill’s face.

Bill does not smile. “I just borrowed her phone for a sec.” This is not an answer to Ed’s question, but, as policy, Bill refuses to engage in lowbrow talk. He was one of the few guys in the Air Force who would never shoot the bull about the women he’d been with, and it has always been his modus operandi to keep his private life private. No question. “Hey, don’t you have to check in with Francesca after work?”

“Frankie?” Ed frowns. “Nah. She’s got her own life. She’s probably getting her hair done or having a drink with the girls.”

Bill drinks his beer pensively. “What girls?”

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