Gwendy’s Final Task

48

KATHY LUNDGREN’S QUARTERS ARE smaller and more austere than Gwendy’s, but she has cocoa packets squirreled away and makes them each a cup. The sweetness reminds Gwendy of her early childhood—cocoa with her dad on early summer mornings with a mist still on the lawn.

After one sip, she puts her cup on the little table beside Kathy’s narrow bed (no sitting room here), and tells Eagle Heavy’s First Ops what she’s been trying to hide. “You were right. Doc was right. Even Winston knew. I do have early-onset Alzheimer’s, and it’s now progressing very rapidly.”

“But the test we gave you proved—”

“It proved nothing. I aced it because of the chocolates, but the effects don’t last. A few minutes ago I woke up wearing gloves and one sneaker. The sneaker wasn’t tied, because I can’t remember how to tie my shoes anymore.”

Kathy looks at her in silent horror, which Gwendy understands, and sympathy, which she hates.

“For awhile I still could, because I found a jingle on the ’Net that I learned when I was in primary school—”

“Something about bunny ears?”

As anxious and afraid as she is, that makes Gwendy laugh. “You too, huh? Only now I can’t remember the jingle. Unless I’ve eaten a chocolate, that is.”

“You ate one before coming here, I assume.”

Gwendy nods. “But they’re dangerous, like everything to do with the button box. And the box is getting stronger while I get weaker. When I woke up, just before I called you, I had it in my hands and I was getting ready to push the black button. My thumb was actually on it.”

“Thank God you’re getting rid of it!”

“We’re getting rid of it. And that’s not all.” Gwendy takes a deep breath. “I want to go with it.”

Kathy has been bringing her cup to her mouth. Now she sets it down hard. “Are you crazy?”

“Well, yes. That’s sort of what Alzheimer’s is, Kath. But at this moment I’ve never been saner. Or more present.” She leans forward, pinning Kathy’s eyes with her own. “When the button box goes, the chocolates go. If I’m still here, my decline will be very rapid. By the time we get back to Earth, I might not even know my own name.”

Kathy opens her mouth to protest, but Gwendy overrides her.

“Even if I do, the time will come when I don’t. I’ll be wearing diapers. Sitting in my own piss and shit until someone comes to change me. Staring out the window of some expensive rest home in D.C. or Virginia, not knowing what I’m staring at. Having just enough brainpower left to know that I’m lost and can never find my way back to myself.” Rule Discordia, she thinks.

She’s crying now, but her voice remains steady.

“I could tell you that I’d find a discreet way of committing suicide when we get back to the down-below, but I don’t think I could be discreet, and I don’t think I’d know how to do it. I might forget to do it. And Kathy, I’m only 64 and physically healthy. I could go on like that for ten years before pneumonia or a mutated form of COVID took me. Maybe fifteen or twenty.”

“Gwendy, I understand, but—”

“Please don’t condemn me to that, Kathy. Listen. When I was a little girl, my folks bought me a telescope. I spent hours looking at the planets and stars through it, often with my father, but once with my mom. We looked at Scorpius and talked about God. I want to go with the box, Kathy. I want to point the Pocket Rocket toward Scorpius and know that someday millions of years from now, I might actually get there.” She smiles. “If there’s life after death—my mother believed that—I might be there in spirit. To greet my perfectly preserved body.”

“I do understand,” Kathy says, “and I would if I could. But you have to think of me a little bit, okay? Think about what would happen to me afterward. Losing my commission and my job—which I love—wouldn’t be all. I’d probably go to jail.”

“No,” Gwendy says. “Not if everyone else goes along with what I have in mind. Sam, Jaff, Reggie, Adesh, Bern, Dave, and Doc. And they will, because it will stop an investigation that would shut down TetCorp’s plans for space exploration and tourist travel for a year. Maybe two or even five. Tet’s in a race with SpaceX and Blue Origin now. That guy Branson, too. Do you think our guys want to get years behind?”

Kathy is frowning. “I don’t know what you’re …” She stops. “Winston. You’re talking about Winston.”

“Yes. Because any story you cobble together to explain his death will be suspicious.”

“Explosive decompression—”

“Even if Dave Graves could rig the onboard computers to show there had been such a decompression—and I have my doubts—a story like that would shut down the MF,” Gwendy says. “All those tourist plans—Tet’s and SpaceX’s—would be frozen. That’s in addition to the investigation into you and the whole crew.” Gwendy pauses, then plays her trump card. She has saved it for last as she always did in contentious committee meetings. “Plus there’s me. I’d be questioned, and with my ability to think rapidly bleeding away, who knows what I might say?”

“Jesus Christ,” Kathy mutters, and runs her hands through her short hair.

“But there’s a solution.” This is also the way she played it in committee hearings, learned from Patsy Follett. First hit ’em with the sledgehammer, Patsy used to say, then offer them the painkillers.

“What solution?” Kathy is looking at her mistrustfully.

“Our spacewalk tomorrow is unauthorized, right? No one knows about it but Charlotte Morgan and our Eagle Heavy crewmates.”

“Right …”

Gwendy sips her cocoa. So good, with its memories of Castle Rock on summer mornings with her father. She puts it down and leans forward, arms on her thighs, hands clasped between her knees.

“We’re not going to take that spacewalk.”

“We’re not?”

“No. Gareth and I will take it, unbeknownst to you or anyone else in the crew. We decided to do it on our own, and because we’re inexperienced, we didn’t use tethers or a buddy cable. Something went wrong and we just floated away into the void.”

“Why would you do a crazy thing like that?”

“Why did the Mary Celeste show up deserted, but seaworthy and under full sail? What happened to the crew of the Carroll A. Deering?” There’s nothing wrong with Gwendy’s recall for the time being; she hasn’t thought about the Carroll Deering since a book report she did in the eighth grade. “No one knows. And if you eight can keep a secret, no one will ever know why Winston and I decided to go for a little stroll in space.”

“Hmm,” Kathy says. “To be cold-blooded about it—”

“I want you to be.”

“It would solve two problems. We wouldn’t have to explain the gooey death of Gareth Winston, and we wouldn’t have to worry about you saying certain things as your … mmm … condition worsens.”

“Charlotte Morgan will help you,” Gwendy says. “She’ll make sure she’s in charge of debriefing the crew, and she’ll apply a coat of whitewash, for obvious reasons. Also, she’ll want to get her hands on that disintegrator thingie.”

“I suppose she would. I need to think about this.”

Gwendy takes her hands and squeezes them lightly. “No,” she says. “You don’t.”