Page 13 of Atmosphere

Joan laughed so loud that it startled the man a few seats down. She covered her mouth. Vanessa reached over and gently took her by the wrist, pulling her hand away from her mouth. Joan looked at Vanessa’s fingers on her.

“You did him a favor,” Vanessa said. “He was falling asleep in his beer. But, really, how are you settling in?”

“Well, wildly incorrect assumptions about my social status aside…” Joan said. “It’s going all right.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Joan wasn’t sure why she was still talking—what she was thinking, saying this out loud? “Though…”

“Hm?”

“Did you sense an…undercurrenttoday?” Joan asked, turning toward Vanessa. “When talking to almost anyone in the astronaut corps?”

“You mean the feeling that any of them would slit your throat for ten bucks?”

Joan laughed, this time at a completely reasonable volume. “Exactly!”

“Yeah, I suspect we have a horse race ahead of us,” Vanessa said.

“Am I supposed to compete with you?” Joan asked. “And Donna and Griff and everyone? It seems like a lot of work, to do all that and still put all my time into training.”

Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “Spoken like a real killer.”

Their food arrived at the same time, and as Joan looked at her chicken, she wished she’d ordered Vanessa’s steak.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think you and I are going to have a problem,” Vanessa said. “I don’t think anyone’s going to put us up against each other like they would Donna and Lydia. I mean, I’m an aeronautical engineer. But…you’re the astrophysicist, right?” Vanessa said.

Joan corrected her: “Astronomer.”

“What’s the difference?”

Joan shook her head. “There barely is one.”

“But there is a difference, clearly.”

“An astrophysicist studies the physics of space, whereas my focus is on space itself, the sun in particular. Then again, you can’t study space without studying the physics of space. And time. Or math. Or anthropology and the history of humans’ understanding of the stars. Or mythology and theology, for that matter. It’s all connected.”

Vanessa nodded. “And that’s why you like it.”

“Hm?”

“You’re smiling as you’re talking.”

“I am?”

Vanessa grinned out of the side of her mouth again, and Joan wondered if it was one of those quirks she was born with or if she’d practiced it, knowing how captivating it would be.

“Yes,” Vanessa said. “You are. I love that. I love when people love what they do.”

“I do love what I do. I have been…I don’t know…obsessed with the stars since I was in elementary school. During the winter, when it got dark out early enough, I would lie in the backyard and look up at the night sky, just aching to touch the stars. I’d sit there with my hand stretched out as far as I could reach, trying to convince myself I could scoop them into my hand. I begged my parents to buy me a Unitron telescope for my twelfth birthday. I had never made a fuss about anything before, never asked for so much as a doll, I don’t think. But I had to have that telescope. I had to see the stars up close. And that was before we landed on the moon, mind you.”

“You’re like the girls who liked the Beatles before they went onEd Sullivan.”

Joan laughed. “Yes, the moon landing was, for us space nerds, exactly like the Beatles onEd Sullivan! I liked the moon first.”

“Good for you.”

“But I cannot claim to be cool enough to have liked the Beatles first. I barely like the Beatles at all.”

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