Time and Distance

“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.”

Those words derailed my life. Again.

Well, I mean, it wasn’t the words themselves that set me off. Shoot, they don’t even make sense. Then again, I suppose they do, now. To me. In a way, I guess.

The voice was what got me all tuned up. Tense. Nervous. Immediately so. See, I was on a barstool in a swanky hotel in downtown Houston. By myself, technically. But I’d just started chatting with a dolled-up wayward housewife seated next to me, when, coming from behind my left ear, I heard the impossible: my ex-wife’s voice. She was saying those words.

I didn’t think Elaine was even on Earth, let alone standing behind me in Texas. Nevertheless, and lovesick fool that I still was… or, am… I shot-gunned the rest of my Chivas and spun in my seat as quickly as decorum, and my nerves, would allow.

There was a woman there. It wasn’t Elaine, though. It was Elaine’s boss’ boss, and she was high enough in the chain of command at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that she could’ve given me orders, too, if she’d ever found the need.

She was wearing a wrist phone, and she was just drawing her arm back from me when I turned and met her eyes. She smiled as she began. But there wasn’t any joy behind it.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Danny. We’re going to need you to come back out to LBJ.”

I was still on ‘tilt’ from hearing that recording. And I was about a third in the bag from my first three Scotches. So, where I should’ve just shut up and thought, and maybe listened some, I opened my mouth instead.

“Hey, Tiana? If NASA has a crisis after business hours, it’s not gonna be something your lawyer can solve before sunup. Send me a message later. I’ll get up early tomorrow and – “

A too-large, too-firm hand landed on my shoulder and stopped my fussing. I glanced. She had two plainclothes security guys with her. One of them, the grabby one, was enjoying his job a little too much just then. He spoke too calmly.

“Deputy Administrator Cordero needs you to come take a ride with us, Mr. Nimkoff. Now, if you please.”

I weighed my options. Other than getting myself roundly thumped and handcuffed and frog-marched out of the place, my only choice was to head for the lobby and go get myself in Tiana’s car. So that’s what I did.

Well, I say “car.” What I found idling in the portico was a four-unit motorcade, with blue lights flashing and the whole bit. I followed Tiana into the back of the third vehicle. I hadn’t even found my seatbelt yet when the sirens lit off and we accelerated like a parade of oversized dragsters. She didn’t wait long to start filling me in.

“OK, Danny. I don’t have to remind you about your security clearance and the attorney-client privilege. But I do need to let you know that your clearance has been upgraded -- for what I’m about to tell you. You talk about it? You’ll die of old age in a Club Fed, and I don’t mean the nice kind with the ping pong tables. Clear?”

I just nodded. Tiana paused. She watched apprehensively through the windshield as our motorcade torched a red light and barreled through one of downtown Houston’s busiest intersections. Whether because of that, or the subject matter, I didn’t know, but she sounded uncomfortable when she continued.

“Yeah, so… You probably know that we’ve been working on faster-than-light travel since… oh…”

She paused again. I wanted to hurry her along. “At least for my lifetime, ma’am. My teachers used to call the whole idea a boondoggle. Einstein said it’s impossible.”

She gave up trying to remember the precise year, and shrugged. “Anyway. Here’s the deal. We’ve built it. FTL. First, we lit off a test sled in orbit. Then we put a monkey in the sled, and now we have a human-crewed vehicle. It works. It goes faster than we can measure. Accurately, anyhow.”

All I could think to say was “wow.” It’s not that I wasn’t thinking. I surely was, about as fast as NASA’s new toys could go. In a blink, I realized that the agency’s number-two official didn’t pump up my clearance, and fish me out of a bar, and play for me the voice of the woman who’d shattered my heart, just so she could take me for a spin in her motorcade.

Thinking back now, I should’ve known at the hotel. I shouldn’t have had to wait for the memories of the rumors I’d heard, about Elaine being chosen to pilot some kind of black-ops project, and about her blast-off from Kennedy the night before. Those memories arrived before I could get any words out, sitting there next to Tiana. But all they did was confirm what I already knew to say. When I could finally talk, that is.

“It’s Elaine, yeah? Whoa. Tiana. Hold up. Agency policy, right? If any of this involves that woman, I have to be walled-off from it. Heck, I want to be kept miles from any issue having –

She didn’t wait for me to start quoting the human-resources manual. “Hey. Danny? Do you really think the HR ladies are going to be your problem tonight?”

The motorcade found an on-ramp and tore its way up onto the Gulf Freeway, heading southeast into the gathering dusk. We were really cooking. 115, easy. And Tiana was half-on frightened by the time I spoke again.

“OK, so, it’s Elaine. What happened? An accident? Did she sock her copilot? What, did she crash this new FTL ship into the Moon or something?”

Tiana shook her head, but her eyes never left the windshield. “No, Danny. I have to save the rest for the SCIF. And we’re not really sure, just yet. But the, ah, the… working hypothesis is, that, ah…

... she’s stealing it.”

*

20 minutes later, the motorcade cleared security at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center faster than anyone ever had. Tiana and I speed-walked our way from the car to the building’s very center and its SCIF, the sensitive compartmented information facility. I’d never been in it; I just knew that it was a super-secure conference room.

A uniformed guard at the door coded us inside, where we found three people seated. Tiana’s sole superior, NASA Administrator Delbert Wright “D.W.” Fairmont, scowled and tapped a pen at the far end of a long conference table. There was a blonde woman to his left who I didn’t recognize. My boss Edna Gretsch, NASA’s General Counsel, stood when we entered, and pointed me to a seat across from her. She wasted no time.

“Skipping the pleasantries, Danny. Gotta move. We need what you know. And you don’t get to find out what we already know. So I’ll tell you this once: do not, do not so much as shade, or part-way spin, or half-explain anything you say to us. Clear?”

I just nodded and sat down. Edna and Tiana sat, too. Then Tiana started.

“Danny, Commander Elaine McCready launched from Kennedy last night with three other crew members. They docked in orbit with the FTL ship and boarded it – we don’t have a name for it yet – and then, as planned, we had the ship perform a comparatively-tiny jump past light speed. Just to the Moon. One point three seconds was the goal; they arrived in a third of that.”

I almost asked a question. Edna was watching me, and she shot me a ‘don’t’ look. Tiana continued.

“When the ship slowed from light speed, we stopped getting brain-wave or pulse readings from any of the crew but Commander McCready. We don’t know why. At this moment, we don’t believe the others survived the jump.”

The blonde seated to D.W.’s left spoke up. “Mr. Nimkoff, in the FTL ship the pilot sits in a different area, apart from the rest of the crew. So far, my team in engineering is thinking that something structural up there offered your wife –”

I shook my head at her. She continued before I could say a word.

“I’m sorry. Your ex-wife. We think she was partially protected, somehow.”

I didn’t let Edna stop me again. “Partially? But you’re getting readings from her gear. She’s alive, right?”

D.W. finally said something, past a very dour wrinkling of his upper lip. “Oh, hell, yes. She’s alive, all right.” The blonde picked up the story from there.

“When we lost the crew’s readings we immediately started a full systems check. Everything was working except for, basically, the clocks. Right now my team’s assuming we didn’t compensate accurately for how light-speed travel affects time, aboard ship.”

I looked around the table, hoping for a clue about my role in any of this. I didn’t get one. So I asked the blonde.

“OK, so, Ms., ah…”

She obliged quickly. “Sidorov. Katja Sidorov. And it’s ‘doctor.’”

I nodded a quick acknowledgement and continued. “Dr. Sidorov. I’m not… I mean, I can’t be here to fix some busted clocks, right?”

She knew engineering, so that’s where she started. “Well, the ship’s systems’ clocks aren’t actually broken per se. They’re just not synched-up anymore. With the other devices on board, they are. But not with ours back here on Earth. So when we’ve tried to control the ship –“

D.W. exhaled impatiently and interrupted. “It’s the pilot that’s busted, Danny. Elaine’s alive. She’s conscious. And she’s doing things up there. Functioning. But we can’t get her to listen to us. If Tiana’s played you that bit of audio, you must know something’s gone ‘ka-tink’ in your ex-wife’s mind. That’s never supposed to happen to a NASA Commander. Never.”

He was right as rain. When he finished, he was staring into a place about three inches behind my eyeballs; I felt like he could read every thought I was having. I was awash in many deep and varied troubles. He could sense that, and I knew it.

My first trouble was, whether D.W. actually could read my thoughts or not, most of them had to do with what I knew about Elaine… and what I’d always kept hidden from our employer. That, itself, bothered me plenty. My second trouble was, I couldn’t know how much of it NASA’s top brass knew by that time, or didn’t know. And my third trouble was, I didn't know how much I didn’t know. So I played for time, and I tried to learn what I could.

“OK, I’m assuming it’s this clock problem that prevents us from controlling the ship from here?”

Katja nodded. I took a breath to continue. But D.W. leaned forward and started tapping the table with a pointed first finger.

“Counselor? I’ve been married to the same woman for 43 years. And the staff’s briefed me on you and Elaine. You know, and I know you know. What’s going on with her? Spill it.”

I stared at the tabletop for a long moment. This, what I was about to say, and how everything was about to go, was going to hurt. But I finally rucked-up and did it.

“Elaine has a disorder. Nowadays it’s called emotionally unstable personality disorder.”

My boss, across the table, put her head in her hands and rubbed her temples. “Ohhh, Danny. Tell me you did not just say that.”

Katja probably could’ve built a pacemaker from a pop can, but she didn’t know much psychology. She looked to D.W., who leaned back in his chair and kept his gaze locked on me. His voice was flat as Kansas when he spoke.

“Danny. That’s what they used to call borderline personality disorder. Right?”

I nodded. Tiana touched her wrist phone, and the tabletop in front of her glowed with what must’ve been Elaine’s electronic personnel file. She swiped through it with one finger, scanning the projected graphs and documents as quickly as she could. Then she spoke without looking up.

“There’s nothing in her file about this. The Commander’s psych eval is perfect. I mean, for a human, it’s literally perfect.”

I shrugged and looked to D.W. He stood up to leave, and he shot me a knowing glance on his way to the door.

“I’m gonna go get a shrink. Danny? You and I, mister, we’ll be talking later about how your ex-wife got herself into this agency – and got her hands on my spaceship. I’ll be back in five, everybody.”

Tiana deactivated the file on the table reader and followed D.W. out of the SCIF. Katja left a few seconds later. Edna folded her arms and sat there, looking at me, waiting for an explanation. I didn’t know where to begin. She finally picked a spot.

“So. Did Elaine ever get a formal diagnosis? From a professional?”

I shook my head. “Nope. It’d have sunk her career. We didn’t get her any treatment. Maybe, after we split, this last time, she went and saw somebody? I wouldn’t know…”

Edna dismissed that notion with a curt wave. “No. I’ve read the file. Nothing. And they’d have never let her fly the FTL ship if she’d had so much as a bad day at work. Danny, I’ve got a niece with this disorder. It’s notoriously difficult to pin down. Without a diagnosis, how do you know –”

I interrupted her and stood up. “Because I had to figure it out. I couldn’t make any sense of it. Elaine, the relationship, myself towards the very end… any of it.”

It was all going to come out. But I couldn’t just blurt it right at my boss’ face. I turned to the paneling and let myself rant.

“I mean, for six months, or one month, or, like, a week, we’d have the most amazing, intimate, perfect marriage anybody ever had. And in my life, I have never, ever loved anybody like that. I didn’t imagine it was possible. When it was good, it was a fairy tale. Just a… a pornographic, booze-soaked, cautionary fairy tale.”

I could hear Edna chuckle a bit at that. I didn’t turn around, though. I kept rolling.

“And then she’d get stressed, or something bad would happen, and ‘poof!’ Instead of the wife I knew, I’d wake up next to a woman who couldn’t stand me, and who wouldn’t talk to me. She’d push me away, emotionally, or with feet and fists. Didn’t matter. Or, I’d wake up and she’d just be gone. For days. Usually on benders, but who knew? One time, we went looking at houses to buy in the morning, and that afternoon we adopted a cat. That night, some heartbroken random guy showed up at our condo asking for her. And she left with him! I mean, Jesus!”

I had 50 true stories I could’ve told Edna about how bizarre things had been for Lanie and me. But I knew I had to wrap it up. I didn’t have to look away from the paneling, though, so I didn’t.

“Anyway. At home? With me? Half the time she was a Stepford wife, and the other half, she was a bad country song. An utter trainwreck. An emotional basket case. And I never, ever really knew whether she was mentally ill and couldn’t help herself, or simply the most evil, calculating, manipulative person on the planet. I. Could. Not. Tell. But you know, at the same time, I’ll be damned if she wasn’t always, no matter what, fully pulled-together and behaving like the pick of the litter here at work. Top ratings, top reviews, every day, every time.”

I needed to try and calm down, so I paced a few steps silently. Edna just stayed quiet and let me stew in my own juices. When I could, I continued.

“So. You’ve asked how I know she’s got this disorder without a professional diagnosis. It was a matter of self-preservation. This last time we split, five years ago… when I finally filed for divorce and stayed clear of her… I… I was out of my mind. I couldn’t understand anything I’d been going through, or that we’d been going through. I was crushed. Heartbroken, and angry, and utterly lost at the same time. When I wasn’t working, or drunk, I went out and read every psychology textbook I could get my hands on. Considering her risky behavior, and her awful relationship with her dad, and the alcohol, and the lying, and the mood swings, and the dissociation I saw, and the blah blah blah… yeah. I know, now. I absolutely know what’s wrong with Lanie. And damn me, after all this time, if I don’t, still, sometimes, start to think I can go find her and save her from it… or start to feel guilty, for not saving her from it back then.”

I gave the paneling a quick knock with two knuckles. I was getting ready to turn around again. More for me than for Edna, I let off one more line.

“But I know. Intellectually, I know. I might not feel it all the time, but I understand that the best thing, probably the only thing I can really do, to this day, is to save myself from it.”

When I finally turned back toward Edna, I wanted to faint. D.W. and Tiana had returned to their seats while I was talking. And there was a new man with them, seated to D.W.’s right. D.W. nodded in his direction and spoke to me.

“Yeah, well, Danny, I do wish you’d thought to try and save this country’s space program five years ago, when you were swimming in all that self-pity. But like I say, we’ll take that up later. This is Dr. Cedric Green. Did you hear enough for a diagnosis, Ced?”

Cedric looked at his hands on the tabletop and began quietly. “When it comes to a patient I’ve not met and evaluated in person, I cannot ethically –“

D.W. stopped him cold. “No time, Ced. We need to know. Now. What does the lunatic in that spaceship plan on doing in the next few minutes, and how can we change her mind about it?”

Cedric wasn’t at all happy about being asked to ditch his professional ethics. But he went along with the program.

“OK, look. Speaking generally, right? A high-functioning person with emotionally unstable personality disorder, or a ‘borderline,’ though I don’t use that term, can be triggered by stress. Trauma, particularly.”

D.W. weighed in. “Like, say, faster-than-light travel, and then finding all three of your crewmembers dead?”

Cedric nodded. “Especially something like that. Because through the lens of this disorder, those deaths are going to look like, and feel – very intensely – like, acts of abandonment. And there’s literally nothing worse for one of these people to feel than abandonment.”

Katja returned to the SCIF. Tiana spoke up as she passed.

“So, if Elaine’s been triggered… what’s she likely to do?”

Cedric shifted in his seat. “Again, speaking generally. Such a person could go into a ‘mode,’ or a sort of a schema, roughly akin to a personality, to get through or past the trauma. Probably, such a person would take on her ‘protective’ mode, and she’d begin taking actions designed to keep herself safe. Or, at least ‘safer,’ as she might understand that.”

I had to speak up. “You mean, for example, running away?”

Cedric nodded. “Among other, ultimately self-destructive behaviors, certainly. For these people, it’s all about avoiding, or ending, the emotional pain that they feel much more vividly than others do. So, for instance, a sufferer who’s become very close to a loved one will act out, so as to push that loved one away. Or, sometimes, it’s a suicide attempt.”

Edna nodded. I knew her niece had tried it. Tiana had to ask.

“Cedric, how realistic is that possibility? Suicide, I mean.”

He clasped his hands and looked at his thumbs. “About 70% of EUPD sufferers will try it at least once in their lifetimes.”

D.W. looked straight at me. “Well?”

I told him what I knew. “Yeah. Twice, that I know of. Pills and booze.”

His face began to redden. “Counselor, the debris shield on that ship’s bigger than a football field. If your crazy ex-wife drives that rig into the atmosphere and takes out half of Peoria? I’m gonna bill you for it!”

Katja stood up, and looked at all of us. “No, boss. You won’t.”

D.W. looked to her without speaking. She continued nervously.

“It’s… it’s physics. Traveling at the speed of light, an object the size of, uh, of a cow, say, would wipe out the entire Earth -- if it made it all the way to the surface. At that speed, I mean. But… but, I mean, it’d need some distance, first, to get up to light-plus.”

D.W. pointed at Tiana. “Where’s the ship right now?”

Tiana touched her wrist phone, and she turned a shade paler. “It’s still in lunar orbit.”

D.W. turned back Cedric. “Doc, could you –”

Cedric shook his head and interrupted. “No. Not likely. This disorder causes intense trust issues. These people usually deny that there’s anything wrong with them. Generally, the thought of therapy threatens them. Frightens them. They’ll refuse it. She probably won’t even talk to me.”

D.W. bit his lip, and leaned back in his chair, and tried to stare a hole in the ceiling. When that didn’t work, he turned back to me.

“Well, counselor, apparently you wanted to be some kind of savior. Looks like you’re about to get your chance.”

*

Katja went and got me a comms earpiece and a mic. Once she’d put the set on my ear and checked it out, the room cleared. I was about to be alone with Elaine, and speaking, for the first time since I didn’t know when. My mouth dried up. My fingers shook. I wanted a beer right then more than I wanted oxygen.

I took D.W.’s seat at the far end of the table, and I turned to face an oversized video screen. I’d say I had butterflies in my stomach, but they felt more like airborne hamsters bumping around inside me. Before I was quite ready, the screen clicked on, and I saw the pilot’s compartment on the FTL ship. And, big as life, I saw Elaine looking back at me. Even in her flight suit, her beauty absolutely took my breath away. I’m still not sure how, but I found enough air in my lungs to make words.

“Heyyyy, Lanie. You OK?

She didn’t answer right away. I knew that somehow, in her own way, she was having as hard a time seeing me as I was, seeing her. I tried to smile and offer a little joke.

“Say, you know that cat you left with me? Riley? She lived another four years. I figure you owe me about a thousand bucks for cat food, hey? Tell you what. You come back home and pay up today, and I’ll forget about the litter.”

She smiled at that. Then her face clouded a bit. “Back home, huh? You’re just talking about Earth, I take it?”

She was probing me, looking for some hint about whether there might be something left of our exploded, shredded love affair. I knew. Logically or not, rationally or not, she wanted me to tell her ‘no, I mean back home, with me, in our old place.’ We’d been through make-ups after break-ups a dozen times, and they’d always started just like this. I forced myself to take another breath, and I went with the playbook.

“Lanie, let’s, uh… well… not necessarily. Maybe not ‘just Earth.’ I mean, you know how I feel about you. And you know that doesn’t ever stop, for me. But I don’t think we can get NASA to fly me up there just now, yeah? And I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t let me bring another cat. So, Earth’s gonna have to be at least part of the answer in any event, right?”

She smiled again. “It’s so good to see you. I’ve missed you, Danny. You might not believe that, after… well, after everything between us, you know? But I do. Miss you, I mean. Terribly. Every day… and twice every night… remember?”

Umpteen times, I forced myself to recall where she was at that moment, and why we were talking. I didn’t really care about the stakes, though. I just wanted us to talk like that for months. But in her last smiling, seductive phrase, I recognized a tiny opening. I came to my senses, and I took it.

“Lanie? This is gonna sound crazy. Like always, right?”

She giggled a bit. I talked faster.

“But how about this? How about you bring that fancy ship back to Earth, slow as you please. I’ll get NASA to take me up to the space station, you meet me in the airlock, and we’ll commandeer the room with the most spectacular view. For a month. You in?”

She smiled again. But then her head tilted a bit, and her eyes took on a faraway gaze. She paused. She was dissociating. I was losing her, and I saw it happening. Before I could speak, she did, in a high, singsong, gauzy-sweet voice.

“Noooooo, lover, that… See, that sounds a little… a little too… close, right now…”

I needed her full attention. I tried to get it.

“Lanie? Hey. Hey, now! Come on, lady friend. Don’t drift away on me.”

She sat motionless. Vacant. Then two seconds later, her eyes were clearly focused. Her jaw was squared-off, and she was all business.

“Listen, Danny, I could do some really good science in this thing while I’m up here. It’s not like they’ll ever let me take it out again, right?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. She continued.

“I can be orbiting Mars in, oh, three minutes. Ish. I think it’s best I go for a little while. Don’t you?”

I couldn’t get the words out fast enough.

“No! Elaine, we’ve got more pictures of Mars than we have pictures of Florida. Besides, our comm link, at that distance – it’ll take 20 minutes a message. Stay here, why don’t you?”

She shook her head. I could see her reading dials and touching buttons.

“It’s only three minutes to get there, Danny.”

I stood up, mostly because I wanted her distracted. Or to stay and fight. Or to do something, besides just putting on her emotional armor and leaving.

“Lanie, lover, it’s three minutes for you. Remember your Einstein? Relativity? Your three minutes, at light speed, is 21 minutes for me. Plus whatever time you spend there, and then another 21 minutes on the way back.”

She finished making her preparations, and she looked me square in the eyes.

“I want to talk more, Danny. With you. Just us. But I think I have to go now. For a little while. Just ‘til I feel, oh, I don’t know… safe, again. Will you be there when I get back?”

Right then, in that SCIF, looking at her on that screen, the last thing I ever wanted to do, and the only thing I could see myself doing, was to sit there for God-knows-how-long, waiting, yet again, for that woman to come back to me. Whether for one set of reasons or another, I didn’t know; but I knew what my answer had to be.

“Yes, baby. I’ll be here. Just turn on the comm link when you’re near Earth again, and I’ll have mine with me. Twenty-four, seven. K?”

She smiled at me once more, and she reached for a button. And she was gone. Again.

*

I wish I could tell you that this story has an ending. It doesn’t. Well, it hasn’t had one yet, I suppose. Probably won’t. I don’t know.

I do know that after Elaine jumped to light speed that first time, I spent the longest and most-miserable three hours and nine minutes of my life, hanging around LBJ, wearing that comm set, listening to D.W. and Edna hassle me about not disclosing my ex-wife’s condition, and wondering whether we’d ever see her again.

The few who knew about the problem weren’t any happier than I was. They were waiting on pins and needles too. It didn’t comfort them much to know that if Elaine had decided to plow back into the Earth at light speed, they and their families never would’ve known what hit them.

Over the ensuing few weeks, Elaine would pop back and forth, from Earth to Pluto to an admittedly-cool touch-and-go skid-landing across Saturn’s rings. I kept the comm set on me night and day, never knowing when, or if, it’d ever bring me her voice again… but always feeling the most shameful elation, every time it did.

The last time we spoke, yesterday, she said she was going to Alpha Centauri. She’d decided to make herself Earth’s first interstellar traveler. I tried to talk her out of it.

“Lanie. That’s four light years, one way. For you. For me? It’ll be 28 years a leg. Baby, if you go, I don’t know if I’ll still be here when you get back.”

She paused. She was worried. “What? You’ll abandon me?”

She still had the means to wipe out humanity at her fingertips, so I scrambled to put out that fire.

“No, lover. I never abandon you, do I? But I might not live ‘til I’m 96, you know?”

She didn’t answer. I waited an hour. After two, I slept. It’s been 24 hours now. And all I know, for sure, is that she’s still, as always, keeping me. At a distance.