Kaz said, “My Lithuanian maiden aunts and the IRS call me Kazimieras. Everyone else calls me Kaz.”
“Glad to meet you, Kaz. I go by JW, or J-Dub if you’re in a hurry.”
As they toasted their new acquaintance, Kaz watched the way the doctor’s shoulders rolled with thick muscle under his button-down shirt.
“You lift?”
“Just enough to keep from getting too fat. The men in my family are all built like fire hydrants.” He paused as Rod Stewart started singing “Maggie May,” then said, “That birdstrike that took your eye must have been something else.”
“It turned out poorly for the seagull.”
The usual deflection didn’t work with the doctor. Under JW’s friendly questioning, Kaz found himself talking about the accident in a way he never had, confiding personal details about how the surgeries had felt and all the weirdnesses of getting a glass eye.
“You have a good bar-side manner, Doctor,” he said at last. “Your turn—tell me about yourself.”
JW smiled at him. “Not much to tell. I’m a Midwest kinda guy, the Air Force paid my way through medical school, I did some trauma work, and I’ve been a flight surgeon with NASA for the past four years.”
“What school?”
“Stanford.”
That was as good as it got.
“And the trauma work?”
“I spent eighteen months at the Cleveland Clinic, responding all over the state via helicopter.”
Kaz gave a low whistle. “I’ll bet you’ve seen some hairy stuff.”
“Yeah, I sure have. Motor vehicle, burns, shootings. Even drownings on Lake Erie.”
“What brought you to Houston?”
“I like space.” JW smiled again. “Apollo’s been an amazing four years.”
Kaz turned his head at a sudden loud burst of laughter. He saw a short, tanned, balding man, a gap between his front teeth, holding court at a table by the wall.
JW followed his gaze. “That’s Pete Conrad, Apollo 12 commander and moonwalker. He’s Navy too. You know him?”
“I think I saw his Corvette outside. He left for NASA while I was still in flight school. I’ve never met him, but I always felt like I was following in his footsteps, only ten years after. Until the seagull, that is.”
“He ejected from a T-38 last year,” JW said. “Nighttime, weather here went bad, lost a generator, ran out of gas trying to get to Bergstrom. His parachute set him down a hundred yards from the base ops building, and he didn’t have a scratch.”
“Better to be lucky than good. Or in Pete’s case, both.”
JW shot a discreet glance at Kaz’s glass eye. “So how’d you end up in beautiful Houston-by-the-sea?”
“After the accident, the Navy thought maybe they would keep me flying in transports, but I said screw that and asked to go back to school.” Kaz shrugged. “They sent me to MIT, then I did some time in Washington, and now I’m here to work with the 18 crew.”
“What did you study at MIT?”
“I already had a master’s in aerospace systems from the Navy PG school at Monterey. I really liked the science of sensors and electro-optics, so that’s what I did at the Lincoln Lab in Boston.”
“Wait—you have a doctorate from MIT?”
Kaz shrugged.
“And you said Washington too. Doing what?”
“The specifics are classified, but I ended up at the National Security Agency.” Kaz drained his beer. “Turns out the NSA Director flew P-38s in the war and headed NASA’s lunar landing program all through the 1960s. He’s the one who took an interest in my work.”
JW stared. “Holy cow! You’re talking about Sam Phillips. He’s a legend! You work directly for him?”
Kaz grinned and nodded. “But don’t let that get around. Here I’m just another one-eyed ex-astronaut trying to help Apollo 18 get to the Moon.”
His cheeseburger arrived, and he realized how hungry he was. But before he took a bite, he asked, “You eating?”
“Nah, I need to get home. Ferne’s holding dinner for me. She’ll have already fed our two little ones.” JW drank the last of his coffee and slid down off the stool. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Zemeckis.”
Kaz laughed and picked up his burger. “You too.”
7
Lunar Receiving Laboratory, Houston
Kaz felt foolish. He’d asked for an 08:00 meeting with the NASA experts on what the Soviets might be looking for on the Moon, but now he couldn’t find the building.