In the Quick Read online

  Sometimes I would stand outside and worry it would be different when I opened the door. But it never was. The only thing that changed was that my piles of things would disappear. I assumed my aunt threw them out. A few times when I looked inside my aunt was in there, just sitting with her hands flat on my uncle’s desk, doing nothing. When that happened I put my roll of twine or burned-out light bulb or handful of hinges back into my pocket and went away.

  Eventually I stopped making piles on the desk. But I still collected stuff. I didn’t care so much about the things themselves. But when I picked something up—something that most people would consider junk, not worth a notice—a crowd of other things would appear in my mind. I’d sift through them until one piece joined another in my imagination. Then the pieces would do something together, some movement or action, and I would hear my uncle’s voice asking, What does it do?

  Sometimes I never figured it out, what the movement did, what it was for. And the idea would fade away. But other times an answer surfaced and the idea would cohere into something whole, an invention, so vivid it felt real.

  3

  I hadn’t been in my uncle’s study for months. It seemed like I was in trouble every day, and I didn’t want my aunt to catch me and yell. But I kept hearing the man’s voice on TV, saying the Inquiry explorer was in trouble. I kept seeing the faces of the crew.

  So when my aunt was out I picked up one of the dogs, Duster, slipped inside the study, and shut the door behind me. I didn’t believe the TV report that said the fuel cells were to blame. I’d find my uncle’s schematics and study them, and then I’d know for sure.

  Whenever I came in here I rarely touched anything. The room was so still, everything exactly as he left it, as if he had stepped out for only a minute and would be right back. It even smelled faintly of him.

  I hesitated to move anything, so I walked around the room, just looking and thinking. Behind me the windows rattled as a test rocket streaked through the sky. On the walls were astronomical charts and pictures of planets. Opposite the desk was an artist’s rendering of the Pink Planet, glowing pink and white in an expanse of black; it had hung there since I could remember. The Pink Planet wasn’t really a planet but a moon, my uncle had taught me, and it wasn’t actually pink. The reflection of its atmosphere against the silty haze of its surface only made it appear that way. NSP had established a satellite outpost there the year I was born, and because of that my uncle had always called it June’s moon. He used to say it was a bit inscrutable, like me. And then he would laugh and say it was salty too, like me.

  Duster whined at the door so I let him out. Then I sat at my uncle’s desk and opened a drawer and found pads of paper and mechanical pencils. In the next, extra hard drives, a graphing calculator, and a large magnifying glass. The top-left drawer rattled when I opened it, and it took me a minute to recognize the things inside—my aunt hadn’t thrown away my piles after all. Nearly a year had passed since I’d set these items on my uncle’s desk. Now they looked old and broken, their magic gone.

  I closed the drawer and moved to my uncle’s filing cabinets and found indecipherable charts and spreadsheets inside. I opened drawers and riffled through folders. Time passed. The sun went down and the gray sky wrapped itself around the room. Test rockets vibrated behind the glass, and the room turned cold and my fingers stiff.

  Then the windows went quiet. It was five o’clock, the silent pause between the day and night launches, when the sky stilled and it felt like the earth was holding its breath.

  I kept looking, and finally I found something, a thick folder full of schematics like the one my uncle had shown me. Some of the schematics were more detailed than others, some in color and some not, with pages and pages of calculations attached. Some showed pictures of what the fuel cells looked like in real life, stacked fifty or sixty at a time inside the walls of Inquiry and NSP’s second and identical explorer, Endurance. Encased in thick graphite, they were each about the size of a bread box, and together they generated all the energy Inquiry needed for its major systems—propulsion, life support, communication—and also produced an essential by-product, water, used for drinking and for watering the crops in the explorer’s grow modules.

  The schematics were numbered from one to thirty-two, and studying them in order I could follow the evolution of the cell from inception to completion. I laid them out on the floor in front of the window and read them page by page like a book. At first I focused on how the cell changed, in shape and size and complexity, from one page to the next. Each modification made sense to me, and the final design seemed perfect in every way.

  Then I went back and read each sheet more carefully. There were notes on every page, in my uncle’s tidy hand and in other people’s too. I could guess whose they were—the team of students who had helped my uncle develop the cell while at Peter Reed, the school named for him on the NSP campus. While most of the engineers at NSP worked with a team of adults, my uncle liked to work largely alone, with only his students as collaborators. When he died he had four research assistants assigned to his lab—and there were four hands in addition to his own on the schematics. One was a bold print that indented the paper, another a lovely loping cursive. Also a dashing script and a print so narrow and neat I had to squint to see it. I guessed the first was James Banovic’s, the next Theresa’s, and the last two Amelia’s and Simon’s.

  They had come to the house a lot when my uncle was alive, and I saw them when he brought me to work. There was an eight-year age difference between us, but I wanted to be like them and would hang around my uncle’s study when they visited for as long as my aunt would allow. James frowned a lot; he and my uncle were always deep in conversation. Theresa was beautiful and commanding. She had a clear, precise voice and a slight accent—she was born in South Africa—and everyone listened when she talked, including my uncle. Amelia was tall and strong and daring, and often impatient with the others. Simon was also tall and very thin. He was careful with his words and always had a book or notebook in his hand, and a pen. While the other three seemed to barely notice me when I hung in the doorway, Simon always nodded and said, Hello June.

  Some of their notes on the schematics appeared routine, but others gave me pause. They had used the plans to dialogue about all the ways the cell could be better, how it could be fortified against possible failure once it was installed in Inquiry or Endurance. That’s when it would face the challenges of actual space travel: stress from extreme heat and cold, damage from humidity, deterioration from vibration or air pressure fluctuation, contamination from the chemical components of the air, acidity, basicity…on and on until my head swam with the possibilities.

  They all had different priorities, things they brought up again and again. But James and Theresa drove the conversation. James wanted the cell to be a closed system, powerful and contained. Theresa didn’t agree. She thought the cell should be smart and adaptable—easy to modify on the fly. The dialogue circled back to this dispute on nearly every page. Amelia was usually on James’s side. But Simon was more cautious; his comments were reminders that the cell would keep four crew members alive—would keep the four of them alive if they won the competition to be Inquiry’s first crew.

  Threaded through their notes were my uncle’s. He didn’t take a particular stance one way or another but asked questions, played devil’s advocate, suggested alternatives the others might have overlooked. He was optimistic and upbeat; he sounded confident they would come to the end of all their questions and the cell would be a success. Until the last few schematics, when Simon returned to the question of the cell’s capacity to function at peak levels over time—not just over days, but months and years. Everyone chimed in, talking back and forth to one another, filling the page with ink. But then they seemed to get stuck. The last few lines were in my uncle’s hand at the bottom of the page, where he started to pose a solution. But his answer stopped midthought.
I looked through all the pages again but found no continuation.

  The sun went down and the room grew dim. I turned on a lamp, got a pen from my uncle’s desk, and read the notes again from the beginning. My uncle wrote something on page thirteen, about this question of how the cell might degrade over stretches of time, that could be interpreted two ways. At least that’s what I thought. I brought my pen to the paper, hesitated, and listened for footsteps outside the door. All was quiet, inside the house and out. I added one comment, and then another, and my writing filled in the blank spaces between the other hands. Page after page. When I got to the end, to my uncle’s unfinished sentence, I completed it. Then I wrote what I thought the others might say in response, and what I might say back.

  Then I stopped. I looked hard at the last schematic, at the whole of the fuel cell and the shape of its combined parts. I closed my eyes, and in my mind I made it work. I slowed time down and watched all its parts in slow motion, and then I sped time up and watched it work over days, months, years. And when I did that I saw the problem the notes pointed to, the vulnerability. Every potential difficulty had been addressed by the modifications posed, discussed, and implemented in these pages—except one. Vibration.

  When I used to watch the four of them in my uncle’s lab in their blue uniforms—James, Theresa, Amelia, and Simon—I never had any doubt they would find all the answers they sought. That the fuel cell would ultimately succeed. But the unfinished dialogue created another story, and this story made me uneasy.

  I remembered the last months my uncle was alive, when he was too weak to go to work and his students started showing up at the house. They camped out in his study with the door shut, and my aunt was tasked with keeping me and John away. At dinnertime my aunt would tell them all to leave, but James and Theresa never did. They stayed until late into the night. One morning I looked into my uncle’s study and the two of them were asleep on the floor, curled against each other, pieces of paper spread out all around them. That day my uncle couldn’t get out of bed—he was having trouble catching his breath—and my aunt yelled at James and Theresa. She told them to go home and not to come back.

  Outside the window a test rocket fizzed through the sky. I got up and moved around the room. The fuel cell had gone through many iterations, had been refined and modified. At first this was a matter of making a cell that would function well in the lab. Later it was a process of arming it against the hypothetical scenarios spelled out in the schematics’ notations. But maybe that conversation should have kept going—maybe it stopped too soon when my uncle died.

  There was something else too. When James, Theresa, Amelia, and Simon wrote these notes they thought they would be the team chosen to be Inquiry’s crew. The decision was made between two teams and they had been the favorites. But in the end the team commanded by Anu Sharma had won. Anu’s team had helped develop the explorer’s communications system and hadn’t worked on the fuel cell at all.

  The front door opened, and footsteps sounded in the hall. I quickly picked up the schematics, careful to keep them in order, and stood near the door. My aunt was talking to John in the hallway, and I waited for her footsteps to pass. They didn’t—they came closer. I ducked behind the desk just as the door opened and revealed the sleeve of my aunt’s blue coat, her soft blue glove.

  Why’s the light on in here? she said and stepped into the room. I could see her shiny black boots, and the hem of her coat floating above the floor. The door closed, and for a second I thought she’d gone, but she hadn’t.

  Her cheeks were flushed from the cold outside, her hair tied in a complicated knot. She stood still for a minute. Then she walked slowly around the room and touched things. Papers, instruments, the silver handles on the filing cabinet. Her movements were slow, reverent even. She pulled a book from the case and pressed it to her nose.

  I made a decision. I would come out from behind the desk and accept my punishment, and then I would ask her for help.

  My aunt turned when I stood up. Her eyes were wet, smudged with black. She blinked at me.

  I need to ask you something, I said. It’s important.

  She looked at the papers in my hands and frowned. What do you have—

  It’s about Uncle’s fuel cell—

  You went through his things. She pulled the papers from my hands and the pen dropped to the floor. Her mouth twisted. You wrote on his things.

  It might help Inquiry. I can explain it—

  You’re twelve years old, she said. Do you know that?

  I felt a surge of irritation but tried again. I described the problem with the fuel cell carefully; I spoke slowly and used the right words.

  But she held up her hand. Stop talking. She straightened the papers and put them carefully into their folder. She pressed the label on the folder flat once, twice, and tucked the folder under her arm.

  You haven’t brushed your hair, she said. I told you to do it, and you haven’t. Then she put her hand firmly on my shoulder and steered me out of the room.

  4

  That night I woke at midnight and sat up in bed with a start, my head full of whirrings and scrapings. I had been running it in my mind as I slept, the cell. Slowly at first, it made a soft, familiar hum. Then quicker, moving through time at such a clip, at breakneck speed. Until the hum started to shudder and break.

  One of my aunt’s paintings on the opposite wall loomed, a white canvas with swaying black lines. In the dim light the lines seemed to tremble like the cell had in my dream. I jumped out of bed, wrapped a blanket around me, and went into the hallway.

  My aunt’s room was dark. I opened her door a crack and whispered, Aunt Regina? But she didn’t answer. I went inside and got close to the bed. Her head was in her hands on the pillow, her forehead smooth. One of the dogs, Reacher, was at the foot of the bed. He stretched out long and grunted. I said my aunt’s name again and her dark lashes fluttered but she didn’t wake.

  I leaned on the bed and looked at the cracks in the ceiling. A hook. An arch. The number fourteen.

  My aunt sat straight up. What?

  She saw me. Oh June. You scared the— What’s the matter now?

  Reacher lifted his head.

  I can’t sleep, I said.

  Go back to bed. Sleep will come.

  Can I stay?

  No.

  Just for five minutes.

  Reacher shook himself and bits of silky hair momentarily filled the air. He turned once in a circle and lay back down.

  She sighed. All right.

  Can I sit on the bed?

  She moved over and I settled between her and the dog on a white comforter that smelled like down feathers.

  She reached to rub her feet and moaned softly. My feet hurt.

  Mine do too, I said.

  I’m watching the clock, she said, and closed her eyes again.

  Did they say anything more about Inquiry? I asked.

  No. She pulled the comforter around herself.

  I don’t know why anyone would want to be an astronaut, she said after a minute. They must always be hungry, or cold, or scared. Or all three at once.

  I hadn’t thought about whether the crew were scared or cold or hungry. I carried their faces around in my mind, but those pictures were smooth and flat. I knew the facts of their lives on Earth and their jobs on the explorer. I knew what they could do, their abilities. But that was just information. Now I thought of them floating inside the compartments of the explorer, with empty stomachs, with cold hands and feet.

  Time’s up, she said. Back to bed.

  I didn’t want to go.

  If you can’t sleep, read a book, she said. Or draw something.

  For you?

  All right. She laid her head on the pillow again. If you want to.

  Back in my room I got some paper and a pen from my desk. In my
mind I heard my aunt’s soft moan and I drew an invention that would help her. The idea was a wire basket with legs that could climb stairs so she wouldn’t have to run up and down them all the time. The drawing was detailed like my uncle’s schematics. It showed the invention from different angles, different positions. I hoped it would work. Then my aunt would admire it and say, Thank you June.

  * * *

  —

  Whirrings and scrapings woke me every night that week. But I didn’t go back to my aunt’s room; I worked on my invention. At night I roamed the house to collect things. Parts from a dryer that didn’t work anymore, wiring from a broken remote control car, the telescoping neck of the lamp in my room. Bicycle spokes. Bolts and screws I’d hidden in my dresser drawers.

  During the day at school, bored with math lessons I’d already taught myself a year or more ago, I filled sheets of paper with drawings of baskets and mechanical feet. At home I worked close to the TV, even though the reports on Inquiry said nothing new. I started to put the things I’d collected together, and then to take them apart and put them together in a different way. I wasn’t systematic. I tried one thing and then another until I’d built something that roughly resembled my picture—a haphazard-looking wire basket with metal and silicone feet, and a battery pack screwed to its underside.

  To test it I built a makeshift staircase in my room out of old boxes and duct tape and set my invention in front of it. Its articulated metal feet stood flat on the carpet, its basket level with the first step. I pressed the up button on the remote control, and the machine clicked twice and lifted its foot. But the foot only hit the step, tuc, tuc, tuc, like it was trying to get through it rather than over it.