Atmosphere(34)

Hank smiled. “Well, I’m glad for it. I enjoy these rides with you, Goodwin. You’re one of the good nerds.”

Joan laughed.

“No, I mean it,” Hank said. “A lot of these eggheads have come in here and acted like they’re smarter than everyone else. And talking to that Marty fellow requires propping your eyes open with toothpicks. But you—you’re easy to talk to. And you’re trying. I’m on the other side of it, tryin’ like hell, too. My mother always said, ‘I like a try-hard.’ I agree with her. I like somebody scrappy. Man or woman, I don’t care.” Joan detected that Hank was affording himself a sense of magnanimity with this statement, but she let it go. “You’re scrappy, Goodwin. I’ll always stick my neck out for that.”

Joan smiled. “Well, thank you. I hope you know that I feel the same about you. If you need anything, I hope you’ll ask.”

Hank nodded and put his hand in his jacket pocket.

“I do have something for you, partner,” Hank said.

Joan laughed. “Oh?”

At that moment, Hank pulled out his aviator sunglasses and put them on. He then pulled out another pair for her.

“Pilot to pilot,” he said. “You need to look the part.”

Joan took them and laughed. “Oh, this is great,” she said. She slipped them on and then tightened her face, clenched her jaw, and removed all hint of a smile from her face.

“Atta girl!” Hank said.

Joan put her helmet on and, later, took over the controls as they flew home. She got them back to the base, and then Hank took over and landed them.

After she had gotten in her car to drive home that day, she’d picked up the glasses again and put them on. When she had looked in the mirror, it had no longer seemed like a joke.

“Coors Light for Goodwin,” Griff said now, as he handed Joan a beer.

Everyone beat their hands on the tables to thank Hank for circulating another round. Joan started moving through the crowd toward an open window for some air.

She watched as Donna hung back, across the room from Hank. Vanessa was laughing with Steve about something, and Joan wondered what it could be that made Vanessa laugh that hard. She wondered if maybe Vanessa had a thing for Steve.

“Do you think Hank’s in the lead to get the first assignment out of our group?” Lydia asked. Joan had not realized Lydia was behind her.

Vanessa caught Joan’s eye and smiled. Joan instinctually looked away. Did Vanessa know how beautiful she was? Her beauty seemed so obvious to Joan, but no one ever reacted to Vanessa the way they reacted to most beautiful women.

“Are you listening to me, Goodwin?” Lydia asked. “Hank seems like the favorite out of the Group 9 pilots, don’t you think?”

Joan turned to her. Lydia was dressed for a party—she was wearing a blue dress and the sides of her hair were pulled back with two tortoiseshell combs—but her eyes were narrow, her lips pursed tight. Joan realized that being at a party and partying were two different things. “I don’t know,” Joan said. “It’s hard to gauge.”

Once NASA had one successful shuttle mission, they were going to start scheduling many more. Everyone wanted to be chosen for a crew as soon as possible.

Already there seemed to be an unspoken hierarchy emerging, with favorites and leaders, long shots and outsiders.

Hank, Teddy, Duke, and Jimmy were training to fly chase—to be the pilots who guided the shuttle to the landing site once it reentered the atmosphere. Vanessa and Griff were spending a lot of time in the dunk tank, experimenting with what was possible on spacewalks.

Lydia and Harrison had been added to the team working on the thermal protection system—the shuttle’s complex protective skin of tiles and blankets—which meant they had the most hands-on time with the spacecraft itself. And Donna, Marty, and Joan had been assigned to Spacelab, an orbital science laboratory designed by NASA’s European counterparts.

Donna was studying the effects of weightlessness on the human body, for which Joan was immensely grateful. She was still puking in microgravity.

Joan, herself, was preparing for ultraviolet and X-ray astronomical observations from space. She’d helped design experiments for a set of planned solar instruments, and soon would begin making calls to geologists and physicists she’d known in her time in academia to get their ideas about potential shuttle experiments in those fields, too.

Despite how necessary each of these jobs was, Antonio was partial to certain people in Group 9, and he showed it. He favored Lydia, Griff, Harrison, and Hank. He gave them more scheduled time on the most relevant and urgent skills that one would need to fly.

So, yes, Hank probably was the favorite of the pilots. But this was not something Joan was particularly interested in talking about at 11:30 on the last day of the year, when everyone was trying to—for one small moment of their lives—let go.

“I think Hank will get assigned first,” Lydia said.

“Can we talk about this another time?”

Lydia sighed. “Sorry for trying to remain focused on the objective.”

“I’m just saying that you could back off a little,” Joan said.

“Do you honestly not realize that everyone here is clocking everyone else? That Antonio is going to hear about everything that happens here tonight? Someone gets drunk and passes out in the bathroom and trust me, all of JSC is going to hear about it and there’ll be a little mark next to their name.”