The Tranquillity Alternative Read Online Free PDF Page A

Gene and Judy alone in the place for the night. In days past, they might have been joined by another astronaut and his or her spouse; they would have shared the Beach House, sleeping in the separate bedrooms until a few hours before dawn when someone drove out to fetch the crewmates and bring them to Operations and Checkout for breakfast, the final mission briefing, suit-up, and walk-out. But Jay Lewitt, the Conestoga ’s flight engineer, was the only other crew member who had made an appearance, and he and Lisa had left long before the party had broken up. Cristine Ryer didn’t come at all, though, and the absence of the mission pilot was noted by Judy as they cleaned up the paper plates and empty beer cans left on the porch.
    “She’s not a big favorite around here, is she?” Judy was in the kitchen, scraping gummy baked beans and gnawed pork ribs into a compost can before tossing the plates into the recycling bin. “I mean, nobody seemed particularly upset when she didn’t show up.”
    “What, honey?” Gene Parnell pretended not to hear by dumping an armful of Bud Light cans in another recycling bin near the sink. How everything had changed; he remembered when, during another Beach House party many years ago, the pilot of Eagle Four had provided entertainment by lining up empty beer cans on the porch railing and inviting everyone to pick them off with his favorite Smith & Wesson deer rifle. That type of thing didn’t happen anymore, now that NASA had been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the era of environmental consciousness…. “I didn’t quite hear you.”
    “You heard me.” Judy dropped the last plate into the bin and turned to the sink to wash her hands. “No one likes Ryer, and I don’t think she likes them either, but nobody wants to tell me why.”
    “That’s because no one likes Cris,” he said, hoping that would get her off the subject.
    “Don’t play stupid with me….”
    “I’m not playing stupid, babe,” he insisted, lying for all he was worth. “Cris just isn’t … I dunno, she just isn’t much of a team player. She follows her own drummer and people know it. That’s all.”
    Judy didn’t say anything for a few minutes. She picked up a box of detergent and carefully poured a handful of powder into the dishwasher, which was filled with pots and skillets. Watching her, Parnell was suddenly struck by how much older she now seemed, how gray her hair had become. In the thirty-four years they had been married, he had never really perceived his wife as anything except the sexy college girl he’d met shortly after graduating from Annapolis. But that was 1961 and this was 1995; their daughter Helen was now older than Judy had been when they walked beneath the crossed swords of a Navy honor guard on their way out of the wedding chapel. Judith was no crone, but neither was she the lithe Wellesley student he had met at a long-forgotten mixer.
    Without realizing he was doing so, he found himself contemplating his reflection in the louvered glass of the kitchen window. Yeah, he had grown old, too. Despite a lifelong regimen of jogging two or three miles each morning before breakfast, there was a small pillow beneath his T-shirt where his waist had once been. His crew cut was salt and pepper, and the short beard he had cultivated years ago was now as white as beach sand. He made the pillow disappear for a moment by sucking in his gut, but nothing could be done about the crow’s-feet that appeared at the corners of his eyes when he did so. The last time he looked in a mirror, he saw Cary Grant; now George C. Scott was staring back at him.
    “I’ve heard things about her,” Judy said as she latched the dishwasher door and pushed the button; the ancient Maytag grumbled like a freight train leaving a siding. “I’ve heard she’s … ah, one of the boys. Is that true?”
    It took Parnell a moment to realize that she was still talking about Cristine Ryer. He shrugged as he turned away