Gwendy’s Final Task

53

FIVE HOURS LATER.

Now there’s just the red ring of the Pocket Rocket’s nuclear drive ahead of her as it tugs her steadily onward into the black. It reminds Gwendy of the dashboard cigarette lighter in her father’s old Chevrolet. There’s a temperature gauge among the dozen or so digital readouts inside her helmet and it registers the outside temperature as -435 Fahrenheit, but her suit is a toasty warm 72 degrees. Her remaining oxygen is down to 17%. It won’t be long now. Of course there’s no speed gauge among the readouts, so Gwendy has no idea how fast she’s going. There’s little or no sensation of movement at all. When she peers over her shoulder (not easy in the suit, but possible), Earth looks exactly the same—big, blue, and beautiful—but the MF station is lost to view.

Gwendy looks ahead again at the Milky Way. She wishes the brightest of them was Scorpius, but she’s pretty sure it’s Sirius, also known as the Dog Star, because it’s part of the Canis Major constellation. That makes her think of her father’s sausage dog, Pippin. Only that’s not right, is it?

“Pippa,” she whispers. “Pippa the dachshund.”

She’s losing it again. The fog is closing in.

Gwendy fixes her eyes on Sirius, which is roughly at ten o’clock in her field of vision. Second star on the right and straight on til morning, she thinks. What’s that from? Hansel and Gretel, isn’t it? But that’s not right. She trawls her dimming mind for the correct story or fairy tale, and finally comes up with it: Peter Pan.

15% oxygen now, and it will be a race between the end of her breathable air and the end of her ability to think. Only she doesn’t want to go out that way, not knowing where she is … or if she does know that (outer space is kind of hard to mistake for the bus station in Castle Rock, after all), why she’s out here. She’d like to go out knowing all this happened for a reason. That in the end, she completed the task set before her. That she saved the world.

“All the worlds,” she whispers. “Because there are more worlds than ours.”

She doesn’t have to go out puzzled and confused, nor does she have to go out cold and shivering if her heat quits before her breathable air. (She seems to remember Carol—if that’s her name—saying the heat would last longer, but her suit’s temp has begun to drop a degree at a time.) She has another option.

She has only one disappointment. In 1984, ten years after Richard Farris gave her the button box, he came to take it back. He sat in her small kitchen with her. They had coffee cake and milk, like old friends (which they sort of were), and Mr. Farris had told her future. He said she was going to be accepted at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she was. He told her she was going to win an award (“Wear your prettiest dress when you pick it up”), and she did. Not the Nobel, but the Los Angeles Times Book Award was not to be sneezed at. He told her she had many things to tell the world, and that the world would listen, and that had been true prophecy.

But the mysterious derby-wearing Mr. Farris had certainly never told her she would end a mostly warm and loving life in the deep cold of outer space. He’d told her she’d live a long life. 64 wasn’t young, but she didn’t consider it old, either (although in 1984 she probably would have considered it ancient). He told her she would die surrounded by friends, not alone in the universe and being tugged ever deeper into the void behind a tiny rocket that would continue running on power for 70 years or more and then continue in an endless inertial glide.

You will die in a pretty nightgown with blue flowers on the hem, Farris told her. There will be sun shining in your window and before you pass you will look out and see a squadron of birds flying south. A final image of the world’s beauty. There will be a little pain. Not much.

No friends here—the last ones she made were far behind her.

A spacesuit instead of a pretty nightgown.

And certainly no birds.

Even the sun was gone for the time being, temporarily eclipsed by the earth, and was she crying? Dammit, she was. The tears didn’t even float, because she was under constant acceleration. But the tears were fogging up her visor. The star she’d been watching—Rigel? Deneb?—was blurring.

“Mr. Farris, you lied,” she said. “Maybe you didn’t see the truth. Or maybe you did and didn’t want me to have to live with it.”

No lie, Gwendy.

His voice, as clear as it had been as they sat in her kitchen 42 years ago, eating coffee cake and drinking milk.

You know what to do, and there’s still enough of that last chocolate in your brain to give you time to do it.

Gwendy uses the valve on the left side of her helmet to begin bleeding the remaining air from her suit. It disappears behind her in a frozen cloud. Her visor clears and she can see that star again: not Rigel, not Scorpius, but Sirius. Second star on the right.

A kind of rapture steals into her as she breathes the last of her thinning air.

I am in bed now, and I am old—much older than 64. Yet the people who surround me are young and beautiful. Even Patsy Follett is young again. Brigette Desjardin is here … Sheila Brigham … Norris Ridgewick … Olive Kepnes is here, and …

“Mom? You hardly look twenty years old!”

“I was, you know,” Alicia Peterson says, laughing. “Hard as that might be for you to believe. I love you, hon.”

And now she sees—

Ryan? Is it really you?”

He takes her hand. “It is.”

“You’re back!”

“I never left.” He leans down to kiss her. “Someone wants to say goodbye.”

He stands aside to let Mr. Farris come forward. His sickness is gone. He looks like the man Gwendy first saw sitting on a bench near the Castle View playground when she was 12. He’s holding his hat in his hand. “Gwendy,” he says, and touches her cheek. “Well done, Gwendy. Very well done.”

She’s not in space, not anymore. She’s an old woman lying in her childhood bed. She’s wearing a pretty nightgown with blue flowers on the hem. She has done her duty and now she can rest. She can let go.

“Look out the window!” Mr. Farris says, and points.

She looks out. She sees a squadron of birds. Then they are gone and she sees a single shining star. It’s Scorpius, and heaven lies beyond it. All of heaven.

“Second star to the right,” Gwendy says with her final breath. “And straight on … straight on til …”

Her eyes close. The Pocket Rocket with the button box in its belly drives onward into the cosmos, as it will for the next ten thousand years, towing its spacesuited figure behind.

“Straight on til morning.”