Gwendy’s Final Task

3

THE SERVICE-AND-DELIVERY STRUCTURE BESIDE Eagle Heavy is a crisscross latticework of steel beams housing a huge open elevator. Gwendy and her fellow travelers mount the nine stairs and get inside. The elevator has a capacity of three dozen and there’s plenty of room to spread out, but Gareth Winston stands next to her, his considerable belly pooching out the front of his white pressure suit.

Winston is her least favorite person on this trip to the up-above, although she has every confidence he doesn’t know it. Over a quarter-century in politics has taught Gwendy the fine art of hiding her feelings and putting on a you’re-so-darn-fascinating face. When she was first elected to the House of Representatives, a political veteran named Patricia “Patsy” Follett took Gwendy under her wing and gave her some valuable advice. That particular day it was about an old buzzard from Mississippi named Milton Jackson (long since gone to that great caucus room in the sky), but Gwendy’s found it useful ever since: “Save your biggest smiles for the shitheads, and don’t take your eyes off theirs. The women will think you love their earrings. The men will think you’re smitten with them. None of them will know that you’re actually watching their every move.”

“Ready for the biggest joyride of your life, Senator?” Winston asks as the elevator begins its slow 400-foot trundle up the side of the rocket.

“Ready-ready-Teddy,” Gwendy says, giving him the wide smile she reserves for shitheads. “How about you?”

“Totally excited!” Winston proclaims. He spreads his arms and Gwendy has to take a step back to keep from being bopped in the chest. Gareth Winston is prone to expansive gestures; he probably feels that being worth a hundred and twenty billion dollars (not as much as Jeff Bezos, but close) gives him the right to be expansive. “Totally thrilled, totally up for it, totally stoked!”

He is, needless to say, the paying passenger, and in the case of space flight that means paying through the nose. His ticket was $2.2 million, but Gwendy knows there was another price, as well. Mega-billions translates into political clout, and as it gears up for a manned Mars mission, TetCorp needs all the political allies it can get. She just hopes Winston survives the trip and gets a chance to use his influence. He’s overweight and his blood pressure at last check was borderline. Others in the Eagle crew may not know that, but Gwendy does. She has a dossier on him. Does he know she knows? It wouldn’t surprise Gwendy in the least.

“To call this the trip of a lifetime would be an understatement,” he says. He’s speaking loudly enough for the others to turn around and look. Operation Commander Kathy Lundgren gives Gwendy a wink, and a small smile touches the corners of her mouth. Gwendy doesn’t have to be a mind reader to know what that means: Better you than me, sister.

As the slow-moving elevator passes the lower T in TET, Winston gets down to business. Not for the first time, either. “You’re not here just to send back rah-rah dispatches to your adoring fans, or to look down at the big blue marble and see how the fires in the Amazon are affecting wind currents in Asia.” He looks meaningfully down at the white box with its CLASSIFIED stamp.

“Don’t sell me short, Gareth. I took meteorology classes in college and boned up all last winter,” Gwendy says, ignoring both the comment and the implied question. Not that he’s afraid to ask outright; he already has, several times, both during their four weeks of pre-flight training and their twelve days of quarantine. “It turns out that Bob Dylan was wrong.”

Winston’s broad brow creases. “Not sure I’m following you, Senator.”

“You actually do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The fires in the Amazon and those in Australia are making fundamental changes in Earth’s weather patterns. Some of those changes are bad, but some may actually be working in the environment’s favor, strange as that seems. They could put a damper on global warming.”

“Never believed in all that stuff myself. Overblown at best, nonexistent at worst.”

Now they are passing the E. Get me away from this guy, Gwendy thinks … then realizes that if she didn’t want to be in close quarters with a guy like Gareth Winston, she should have avoided this trip altogether.

Only she couldn’t.

She looks up at him, maintaining what she thinks of as the Patsy Follett Smile. “Antarctica is melting like a Popsicle in the sun and you don’t think global warming is real?”

But Winston won’t be led away from what interests him. He may be an overweight blowhard, but he didn’t make all those mega-billions by being stupid. Or distractable. “I would give a great deal to know what’s in your little white box, Senator, and I have a great deal to give, as I’m sure you know.”

“Ooo, that sounds suspiciously like a bribe.”

“Not at all, just a figure of speech. And by the way, since we’re going to be space-mates very shortly, can I call you Gwendy?”

She maintains the brilliant smile, although it’s starting to hurt her face. “By all means. As for the contents of this …” She lifts the box. “Telling you would get us both in very big trouble, the kind that lands you in a federal facility, and it’s really not worth it. You’d be disappointed, and I’d hate to let down the fourth richest man in the world.”

“Third richest,” he says, and gives her a smile that equals Gwendy’s in brilliance. He waggles a gloved finger at her. “I won’t give up, you know. I can be very persistent. And no one is going to put me in prison, dear.” Oh my, Gwendy thinks. We’ve progressed from Senator to Gwendy to dear in the course of one elevator ride. Of course, it’s a very slow elevator. “The economy would collapse.”

To this she makes no reply, but she’s thinking that if the box inside the box—the button box—fell into the wrong hands, everything would collapse.

The sun might even gain a new asteroid belt between Mars and Venus.