Gwendy’s Final Task

29

THERE’S A SMALL CONFERENCE room in Spoke 1, next to the ops room. Present for Gwendy’s mental acuity test are Kathy Lundgren, Dr. Glen, and Sam Drinkwater. Sam doesn’t know that Gwendy has a special high-priority mission (unless Kathy has told him, that is), but he’s going to be her buddy on her Day 7 spacewalk, so Gwendy supposes he has a right to be here. It would be his responsibility, after all, if she became disoriented and freaked out while they were tethered together.

Doc Glen clears his throat. “Gwendy—Senator—I hope you understand that we have to—”

“To take every precaution,” she finishes. She knows she sounds impatient. She is impatient. No, more than that. She’s angry. Not at them, exactly, but at having to be here and having such a terrible responsibility thrust upon her. “I understand. Let’s get to it. I have emails to write and weather info to collate.”

They exchange looks. This isn’t the smiling, friendly woman they are used to.

“Er … fine,” Doc Glen says. He powers up his tablet, then takes an envelope from the breast pocket of his coverall. “It won’t take long, an hour max. I’ll give you a number of questions to answer and certain tasks to perform. Just relax and do the best you can. To begin with …”

He opens the envelope. Inside are eight metal squares. He puts them down in the center of the table on a magnetized rectangle, which he turns to face Gwendy. Words have been printed on the squares in Magic Marker.

go mother must store the to I for

“Can you arrange these to make a sentence?”

Gwendy moves the words around on the magnetized rectangle with no hesitation. She turns it to face the three crewmembers—my judges, she thinks resentfully—on the other side of the table. “Clever that there’s no capital letter,” Gwendy says. “Makes it a bit harder. Intentional, I suppose.”

They look at how she’s arranged the words. “Huh,” Sam says. “It’s a sentence all right, but not the one I would have made.”

“And if there’s a handbook that goes with this test,” Gwendy says, “it’s probably not what the people who made it expected. Which is a bit dumb, if you don’t mind me saying. You were expecting I must go to the store for mother, weren’t you?”

Sam and Doc nod. Kathy just looks at her with a small smile. Maybe it’s admiration, probably it is, but Gwendy doesn’t care. They brought her in here like a test animal and expected her to perform—hit the lever and get a piece of kibble. And so she has. Because she has to, and doesn’t that just suck?

Gwendy’s sentence reads, for mother I must go to the store.

She says, “I must go to the store for mother is the simple way to do it, but simple isn’t always best. It’s ambiguous. Does it mean ‘I have to go there because mother wants pasta and a quart of Ben & Jerry’s’ or does it mean ‘I have to go to the store because mother is there and she needs to be picked up.’ Some ambiguity is still there in my sentence, but it’s less because mother comes first. My sentence says it’s almost certainly an errand.” She gives them a hard smile without a shred of good humor in it. “Any questions?”

There are none, and although Doc goes through the rest of his questions and tasks, the test is effectively over with that little lesson in syntax. Gwendy finishes the whole thing in nineteen minutes and stands up, holding the edge of the table to keep her feet from floating off the floor.

“Are you satisfied?”

They look back at her uncomfortably. After a brief silence Kathy says, “You’re angry. I get that and I’m sorry, but we’re in an environment where there’s no room for error. And I think I speak for Sam and Doc when I say you’ve eased our minds considerably.”

“Completely eased mine,” Sam says. “I have no hesitation about suiting up with you and going outside.”

“I am angry,” Gwendy says, “but not at you guys. Your jobs are difficult, but so is mine. The difference is that mine is thankless. This damned country is so polarized that forty percent of the electorate in my home state thinks I’m a piece of shit no matter what I do.”

She surveys them and yes, she is angry at them, at this moment she almost hates them, but it won’t do to say so. Still, she has to vent. If she doesn’t, she’ll explode. Or go back to her room and do something stupid. Something that can’t be taken back.

“You haven’t lived until you’ve seen signs saying COMMIE BITCH waving at you from the back of your town hall meetings. On top of that, my husband is dead, half my fucking house burned down, and I had to come in here so you guys could make sure I don’t need to be fitted up with Pampers and a drool-cup.”

“That’s a little heavy,” Kathy says mildly.

“Yes, I suppose it is.” Gwendy lets out a sigh, thinking, You want heavy? Try living with what’s in my wall safe. That’s really heavy. “Can I go now? Got work to do. You guys probably do, too. Sorry about the mouth. It’s been building up.”

Doc Glen stands up. Floats, actually. He reaches a hand across the table to her. “No need to apologize on my behalf, Gwendy.” She’s glad he’s left her title behind and reverted to her name. “You’ve got some hard bark on you, and in your job that’s a requirement. Get some rest. I can’t give you an Ambien, but maybe a glass of warm milk before you turn in will help. Or a Melatonin. That I do have.”

“Thanks.” Gwendy takes his hand. There’s no flash, only a sense that he means well. She looks around and forces herself to say it. “Thank you all.”

She leaves and returns to her suite in great lolloping leaps, her hands opening and closing. I could fix this whole problem with the button box, she’s thinking. And you know what? It would be a pleasure.

Once inside she opens the closet door, moves the spare pressure suit aside, then makes herself stop. She wants to take the button box out—it wants me to take it out, she thinks—and in her current state of mind the buttons along the top would look too inviting. She had to eat the chocolates so she could pass their goddamn test, but now she’s faced with this anger, this fury, and it’s like a black doorway she dares not go through. What’s on the other side is monstrous.

How I hate it, Farris said. How I loathe it. If she never understood that before, she understands it now. But he said something else, and it resonates in her mind now: There is simply no one else I trust to do what needs to be done.

She understands, even in her current state, that if she takes the button box out now, that trust will almost certainly be broken. He gave it to her because she’s strong, but there are limits to her strength.

If I have to feel this way, I have to focus it on something other than the box and stay focused until the effect of the chocolates wears off. What?

But with her mind clear, the answer is also clear. She bounces to her desk and powers up her iPad. The emails she sends from her senatorial account are encrypted, and that’s a good thing. She writes to Norris Ridgewick.

Norris: You said that on your trip to Derry you met with “the local constabulary.” The detective in charge of investigating Ryan’s death was Ward Mitchell. Did you meet him? And if you did, did you trust him?

She sends the email to the down-below and walks back and forth through her suite (which doesn’t take long), pulling restlessly at her ponytail. She can’t seem to sit still, not in her current state. She reaches out for Gareth Winston, like she did for the Chinese in their spoke, and finds him. He is on his computer. Writing an email. She can’t see it but she knows that’s what it is. There’s a word in his mind that she gets clear, although she doesn’t know what it means. The word is sombra.

Norris may not reply for an hour or more, she thinks, and Mom used to say a watched pot never boils.

She decides to walk (maybe even run) the outer rim—anything to burn off this wild and dangerous energy. She puts on shorts and a tee-shirt with CASTLE ROCK OLD HOME DAYS on the front, and is just lacing up her sneakers when her laptop chimes with incoming mail. She leaps across the room like Supergirl and settles in front of the screen. The message is brief, to the point, and totally Yankee.

Hey Gwendy,

Met Mitchell, talked to him, wouldn’t trust him as far as I could sling a piano. He couldn’t wait to get rid of me. Want me to take a trip to Derry and go at him a little harder? Happy to do it. By the way—any idea what got your Ryan haring off to Derry in the first place?

Norris

She wishes she could answer that question, but she can’t. Her best guess is that someone told Ryan they had dirt on Magowan, or dirt on her. Either might have gotten him to take a ride north. Did it make any difference? Of course not. No matter what the pretext, Ryan remains dead.

As for sending Norris up to Derry … no. Norris isn’t the man for that job. She believes the flash she had when she took Gareth’s hand was a true insight. She believes that she saw Gareth in one of the two old cars that were in Derry on the day Ryan died. She believes Ryan may have been killed in an effort to derail her Senatorial campaign. And she believes that her house was burned after certain men—perhaps driving perfectly maintained old cars—searched it for the button box, came up empty, and reached the logical conclusion: she has it with her in space. Sending Norris to Derry might only succeed in getting him killed.

Without the special chocolates lighting up her brain, she would have doubted this scenario. No, she thinks, I wouldn’t have been able to think of it in the first place, I would have been too addled. With that brain-booster onboard, however, she doesn’t doubt it. Not one tiny bit. She wonders if Gareth started agitating for a tourist run into space after she didn’t drop out of the race against Magowan. No, probably not until after she was elected and got on the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee.

“Someone was really thinking ahead,” Gwendy mutters to herself. Her hands are clenching and unclenching. Each clench is hard enough to make her short nails dig into the soft meat of her palms. “Someone was really planning ahead.” Then, for no reason at all, she says, “Sombra sombra sombra.” She’ll hunt for it on the Net, but she has something else to do first, far more important.

She sits down and sends an email to Deputy CIA Director Charlotte Morgan.

Charlotte—I have reason to believe that my husband may have been murdered in an effort to get me to drop out of the Senate race in 2020. I also think it has to do with the item I am carrying. I suspect that Gareth Winston knows about the item, and he may have the code that opens the safety box containing the item. How that happened is a long story for another time. What I want from you is what’s known as a “black bag job,” and it has to happen immediately. The detective in the Derry PD who supposedly investigated Ryan’s death is named Ward Mitchell. I think he knows more than he’s telling. My friend Norris Ridgewick (ex-police, sharp as a knifeblade) concurs. I want you to send a team to collar Detective Mitchell, sequester him, and persuade him to talk by any means necessary. I believe someone is trying to stop me before I can dispose of the item under my care, and perhaps (likely!) take possession of it. I believe that someone is Gareth Winston, and if he has the code to the safe box, the only thing standing in his way is an electronic Mesa wall safe. It’s the kind hotels use, and a third-rate burglar could crack it. You know what the stakes are—remember the Pyramid? I understand that my chief suspect is a fabulously wealthy man, but he may not be in charge. Whoever is, they’re thinking years ahead, and that scares me. Don’t even consider that this is paranoia. It’s not. Grab Ward Mitchell and shake him til he rattles. Let me hear back from you immediately, Charlotte.

Gwendy

She pauses, then adds a P.S.: Does the word “sombra” mean anything to you?

Gwendy could check that for herself, but now that her two important emails have been sent, she finds herself looking at the closet again, and thinking about the button box. She wonders if she could concentrate on Gareth Winston having a heart attack and make it happen by pressing the red button. You wonder, Gwendolyn? Is that all? She voices a humorless bark of laughter. There’s no wondering about it, she knows she could. Only there might be collateral damage. What if the station’s electrical system shorted out? Or a high-pressure oxy line went blooey?

She comes out of these thoughts to realize she’s no longer at her desk. No, she’s at the closet. She’s opened it, she’s pushed aside the spare suit, and she’s reaching for the safe’s keypad. In fact she’s already pushed the first number of its simplistic four-digit combination. Gwendy puts one hand over her mouth. With the other she pushes the CANCEL button and closes the closet door.

She decides she’ll go for that run after all.