Gwendy’s Final Task

On top of the tiny fridge, held in place by a magnet, is a steel-framed photograph of Gwendy and Ryan and her parents, the four of them on the beach at Reid State Park, laughing with their arms around each other.

Gwendy will soon start her weather duties, but for now she needs to mentally refocus and review the crew information. She lies down on her bunk and buckles herself in. Servos are humming somewhere, but otherwise her little cold capsule is eerily silent. They may be circling the planet at thousands of miles an hour, but there’s no sense of movement. She opens her red notebook and finds the crew pages. Names and thumbnail bios. Reggie Black is the physicist, of course he is. And Dr. Glen’s first name is Dale. Easy-peasy, clear as a freshly washed window … but it could be gone again in an hour, maybe just fifteen minutes.

I’m crazy to be here, she thinks. Crazy to be covering up what’s wrong with me. But he gave me no choice. It has to be you, Gwendy, he said. I have no one else. So I agreed. In fact, I was sort of excited by the prospect. Only …

“Only then I was all right,” Gwendy whispers. “At least I thought I was. Oh God, please get me through this.”

Here in the up-above, after what she has seen below her—Earth so fragile and beautiful in the black—it’s easier to think He or She might really be there.

13

“WHAT—” GWENDY BEGAN, MEANING to finish with either are you doing here or is wrong with you, she didn’t know which, and Farris didn’t give her time.

He put a finger to his lips and whispered: “Hush.” He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. “Don’t wake your husband. Outside.”

He struggled to his feet, swayed, and for a moment she was sure he was going to fall. Then he caught his balance, breathing hard. Inside his cracked lips—and were those fever blisters on them?—she saw yellowish teeth. Plus gaps where some were missing.

“Under the table. Take it. Hurry. Not much time.”

Under the table was a canvas bag. She hadn’t seen that bag since she was twelve, forty-five years ago, but she recognized it immediately. She bent down and picked it up by the drawstring top. Farris walked unsteadily to the kitchen door. There was a cane leaning beside it. She would have expected such a fabulous being—someone straight out of a fairy tale—to have a fabulous walking stick, maybe topped with a silver wolf’s head, but it was just an ordinary cane with a curved handle and a scuffed rubber bicycle grip over the base. He leaned on it, fumbled for the doorknob, and almost fell again. Black suitcoat, black jeans, white shirt: those garments, which had once fitted him with casual perfection, now bagged on him like cast-off duds on a cornfield scarecrow.

She took his arm (so thin under the coat!) to steady him and opened the door herself. That door and all the others were locked when she and Ryan left, and the burglar alarm was set, but now the knob turned easily and the alarm panel on the wall was dark, not even the message WAITING in its window.

They went out on the screened back porch, where the wicker furniture hadn’t yet been taken in for the cold season. Richard Farris tried to lower himself into one of the chairs, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate and instead he just dropped, letting out a pained little grunt when his butt hit the cushion. He gasped a couple of times, stifled a cough with his sleeve (which was caked with the residue of many previous coughs), then looked at her. His eyes were the same, at least. So was his little smile.

“We need to palaver, you and me.”

It wasn’t what he’d said the first time she met him; close, but no cigar. Back then he’d said they ought to palaver. Needing to, she thought, takes it to a whole new level.

Gwendy shut the door, sat down in the porch swing with the canvas bag between her feet, and asked what she would have asked in the kitchen, had he not reminded her that she had a husband upstairs.

“What’s wrong with you? And why are you here?”

He managed a smile. “Same Gwendy, right to the point. What’s wrong with me hardly matters. I’m here because there’s been what that little green fellow Yoda would call ‘a disturbance in the Force.’ I’m afraid I must ask you—”

He began to cough before he could finish. It racked his thin body and she thought again how like a scarecrow he was, now one blown about on its pole by a strong autumn wind.

She started to get up. “I’ll get you a glass of wa—”

“No. You won’t.” He brought the spasm under control. Coughing that hard should have raised a flush in his cheeks, but his face remained dead pale. His eyes were set in dark circles of sick.