Atmosphere(12)

Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “Spoken like a real killer.”

Their food arrived at the same time, and as Joan looked at her chicken, she wished she’d ordered Vanessa’s steak.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think you and I are going to have a problem,” Vanessa said. “I don’t think anyone’s going to put us up against each other like they would Donna and Lydia. I mean, I’m an aeronautical engineer. But . . . you’re the astrophysicist, right?” Vanessa said.

Joan corrected her: “Astronomer.”

“What’s the difference?”

Joan shook her head. “There barely is one.”

“But there is a difference, clearly.”

“An astrophysicist studies the physics of space, whereas my focus is on space itself, the sun in particular. Then again, you can’t study space without studying the physics of space. And time. Or math. Or anthropology and the history of humans’ understanding of the stars. Or mythology and theology, for that matter. It’s all connected.”

Vanessa nodded. “And that’s why you like it.”

“Hm?”

“You’re smiling as you’re talking.”

“I am?”

Vanessa grinned out of the side of her mouth again, and Joan wondered if it was one of those quirks she was born with or if she’d practiced it, knowing how captivating it would be.

“Yes,” Vanessa said. “You are. I love that. I love when people love what they do.”

“I do love what I do. I have been . . . I don’t know . . . obsessed with the stars since I was in elementary school. During the winter, when it got dark out early enough, I would lie in the backyard and look up at the night sky, just aching to touch the stars. I’d sit there with my hand stretched out as far as I could reach, trying to convince myself I could scoop them into my hand. I begged my parents to buy me a Unitron telescope for my twelfth birthday. I had never made a fuss about anything before, never asked for so much as a doll, I don’t think. But I had to have that telescope. I had to see the stars up close. And that was before we landed on the moon, mind you.”

“You’re like the girls who liked the Beatles before they went on Ed Sullivan.”

Joan laughed. “Yes, the moon landing was, for us space nerds, exactly like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan! I liked the moon first.”

“Good for you.”

“But I cannot claim to be cool enough to have liked the Beatles first. I barely like the Beatles at all.”

“You don’t like the Beatles?”

“I am . . . indifferent to the Beatles.”

Vanessa’s eyes went wide.

“Oh, it’s not that big a deal,” Joan said.

“It’s . . . an illegal opinion to have.”

Joan laughed. “The melodies are good, obviously. It’s good music. But . . . it was a little simplistic, don’t you think? I don’t understand why it worked so well.”

“Why what worked so well?”

“The pandering. To what little girls think love is like. It was just a bit much. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘All You Need Is Love.’ ‘Blackbird’ is a great song. And ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ But the cheesy stuff just struck me as, well, cheesy.”

Vanessa finished her steak. “You are a curious one, Joan.”

“Am I?”

“Yes, it’s all very interesting.”

Joan wasn’t sure if Vanessa was making fun of her. But her gut said she wasn’t.

“So, obviously, you like the Beatles,” Joan said.

“I liked the Beatles when I was a young girl, hopelessly in love. . . . They explained it better than I could.”

Joan looked away and sipped her water. What was she thinking, going on and on like this? Was it really that intoxicating, being asked about herself?

“So, we aren’t going to have to compete,” Joan said, changing the subject. “Me and you. You and me, I mean.”

“Well, look, anything’s possible. But they want us for different purposes, if I had to guess. They’ll want you for designing and running experiments in space. They’ll want me to help build the payloads. They aren’t going to be measuring you against me, or vice versa.”

Joan nodded. “I like that theory.”

Vanessa nodded and then looked Joan in the eye. “Did it kind of kill you today?” she asked. “To be so close to it all? It killed me. I want to get up there almost as much as I want to breathe.”

Something about the openness of Vanessa’s face made Joan realize that, sitting on her barstool, her feet didn’t touch the floor.

Joan blinked. “Yeah,” she said. “I think it did kill me a little.”

“I want to fly the fucking thing,” Vanessa said. “Though God knows, since I’ve only flown privately, and not as a military pilot, it’s going to be an uphill battle. But I want to go somewhere so few people have ever gone that you could name them all—and when people do name them, I want them to name me.”

“I understand that,” Joan said. “I understand that completely.”

Vanessa looked at her, her gaze intense. “You do?”

“Absolutely. To do something so few people have ever done? No one will ever be able to take that away from us. If we do it, if we leave the planet, we will carry that with us into every room we enter for the rest of our lives.”