Page 4 of The Light Year

Bill mutters something unintelligible.

“Commander Booker,” Arvin North says loudly. “Stay awake. Stay focused. Roll thruster eight has been firing continuously, and we think it’s causing the roll. I need you to shut it off.”

There are sounds from space that the women can’t quite identify, but they’re both on the edge of their seats as they wait for Bill to manage this feat—whatever it may entail.

“I,” Bill says. “I can’t.”

“You can. You must.”

Bill is breathing heavily. “Number eight,” he rasps. “Okay.”

The conditions in space are unimaginable for Barbie, and she is absolutely desperate to hear her husband’s voice. Todd has said nothing for quite some time, and this makes her incredibly uneasy. But for the moment, it’s easy to focus all her attention on what Bill is doing and to hope it works so that he can stop the roll.

“Have you located the thruster?” North asks, guiding Bill as if he’s leading a blind person through a task. “It’s going to be to the left on your panel. A string of square buttons that runs vertically. Number eight will be at the bottom.”

“I see it,” Bill says. He sounds strained and distant. “I got it.”

For a long, tense moment, everything hangs in the balance. There is silence in the room, as Barbie, Jo, and Dave Huggins all wait. Mission control is quiet. The only noise is a wailing from down the hall, where Barbie’s youngest son, three-year-old Huck, has been left in the care of a young secretary charged with watching him.

“Mommmmyyyy,” Huck cries. He sounds more tired than aggrieved, and Barbie pushes his cries from her mind as she waits. Even the pleas of her youngest child aren’t going to pull her from this seat until she knows what’s going to happen to Todd and Bill.

“Prepare to disengage… roll thruster eight,” Bill says with obvious difficulty. It touches Barbie’s heart to hear him using theformal protocol when all anyone wants is for him to push the damn button.

Barbie and Jo hold their breath.

“Roll thruster eight is disengaged,” comes Arvin North’s voice. Instead of cheering, there is a pause from mission control as they wait to see whether this will do the trick. Time ticks by slowly, and Vance Majors says a few words to Todd and Bill that are clearly meant to keep the dialogue going and to not leave the men alone as they wait to see what happens.

“Roll speed is slowing,” North says. “We are now rolling at about half the speed we were before turning off the thruster.”

This should be a cause for celebration, but everyone remains subdued.

“Roll has reduced to one revolution every five-point-two seconds,” North says. And then after a long pause: “Roll reduced to one revolution every ten seconds.” They wait for what feels like an eternity. “Roll has ceased.”

Now, finally, mission control breaks into wild applause and cheering, and Barbie turns to Jo. They have the same look in their eyes, and without speaking, Barbie knows Jo is just as happy as she is about the maneuver, but also just as fearful that one or both of their husbands has suffered terribly and may not make it home.

Jo opens her arms and Barbie falls into them. Dave Huggins snaps a few shots of them embracing, though from a slight distance, so as not to interrupt their moment.

“They did it,” Jo says, reaching up to swipe at the tears Barbie hasn’t even realized are streaming from her own eyes. She laughs as Jo’s thumbs brush against her cheeks.

“Bill did it,” Barbie says. In this moment, Bill is an absolute hero to her. Whatever he did up there is going to bring their men home, and they’ll deal with everything else once Gemini landssafely. “I just want to hear his voice,” she whispers, so only Jo can hear. “I want to hear him awake.”

“You will,” Jo promises, just as Huck begins to wail from down the hall again. “Go get your little guy, and we’ll entertain him in here while we listen.”

Gratefully, Barbie rushes out the door. All she wants is to feel Huck’s warm, squirmy body in her arms, to feel his tear-stained face against her cheek. All she wants is to hear Todd speak, for him to be alert, for him to be home.

All she wants is for her world to be whole again.

jo

. . .

Gemini 8 splashes downin the Pacific Ocean, west of Okinawa. Jo stays up all night and waits for news that both Bill and Todd are safe, and when she gets the call at four o'clock in the morning, she makes a pot of coffee and sits at the table in her robe with tears streaming down her face.

"Sorry to call so early," Barbie says the moment Jo lifts up her ringing phone. "I figured you were awake."

"I am," Jo says in a hushed voice. She'd chosen not to tell the kids about the drama in space, in hopes that they might make it through the school day and get home without hearing anything. In her mind, there was no reason to strike fear into their young hearts every time their father went to work, and while she knows they will hear about how close Bill had come to disaster, she just hopes that by the time they do, she's figured out how to mitigate the scariest details and make it sound more like a minor snafu.

"Todd is fine," Barbie says. Her voice breaks on the last syllable and she starts to sob. "He's okay, Jo."

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