Deuces Down

It was on a Friday morning in early June, however, less than three weeks after Mr. Tominbang first approached me, that I felt I had my opening. I had arrived, as usual, at six-twenty, only to find Eva-Ly

I got my coffee and Danish and sat down at one of the small tables by the window, and witnessed no further outbursts. Imagine my surprise when, during a quiet moment, Eva-Ly

Only if I can ask you one in return. The words appeared in my brain, but stayed there, stuck amidst the numbers. “Sure,” I said, pathetically.

“This new job you got-could they use a secretary or something? A girl to answer the phones, maybe?”

I had no idea of Tominbang’s staffing requirements. But at that moment, in a fit of arrogance, I decided I would pay Eva-Ly

“Anything to get me out of here now.”

“What time do you get off work?” I was able to ask her a question like that as long as the next phrase had nothing to do with a date.

“Two.”

“Can you get a ride to the airport in Tehachapi?”

She got a look on her face that suggested a hidden power, one having more ancient roots than the wild card. “That won’t be a problem.”

I described Tominbang’s hangar, then told her I would alert our guards to be looking for her around 2:30.

She leaned forward, kissed me on the forehead, and said, “You’re a doll.”

I drove to Tehachapi wrapped in a golden cloud.

It wasn’t until that afternoon, after Eva-Ly

I had brought Eva-Ly

It was only a gradual realization. Tominbang would have hired Eva-Ly

She was immediately assigned to general office help, with special duty as my part-time assistant. (Bacchus and Kafka were burying me in technical documents that required filing and organizing.)

Only then, once she had signed the now-familiar non-disclosure agreement, did she learn what we were doing. “To the what?”

“The Moon,” I said, the first time I had ever actually said such a thing aloud.

“Who? How?” She was genuinely astonished and, I think, a little frightened. (As if this were nothing but a cover story for some much more mundane, but very illegal activity.)

I showed her our Quicksilver, then introduced her to several members of the team. She soon came to be comfortable with the idea of flying to the Moon. More comfortable, I noted, than she seemed with the number and variety of jokers and deuces.

It wasn’t until the end of the workday, as I was preparing to offer Eva-Ly

Three weeks without drink-three weeks with the job of a lifetime-had improved his looks and his energy, not to mention his ma

“Would a simple, ‘No, thank you’, be sufficient?”

“We’re not going into space, Cash. Just a little proficiency run around the neighborhood. Uh, no ‘heavy lifting’.” He laughed at his own joke, and turned to Eva-Ly

“What time do you want me?” she said, forthrightly, eyes blazing, using exactly those words, and breaking my heart.

Our small group moved into the hangar proper, where Tominbang and the rest of the team gathered, and I lost track of Eva-Ly

Even, I must admit, at Eva-Ly

Darkness fell, and a huge orange Moon rose in the east-like a giant jack o’lantern rising from the desert. I had barely begun to study lunar geography, but I could already recognize the dark smear that was the Sea of Storms -Quicksilver’s landing site.

Our landing site, if I had the stomach to turn around and face my fears. (And I don’t mean fears of death.)

So I did.

Quicksilver was towed to the runway apron by a tractor with a sputtering motor.

“You’d think they could afford a new tractor,” Eva-Ly

I was feeling mildly heroic, proud of a chance to show off for Eva-Ly

“To what end?” I wasn’t worried about doing the lifts. All I had to do was glance at the orientation of Quicksilver, its velocity, its reported position in three axes, and wait for Dearborn to tap me on the shoulder.

“For a proper simulation,” he said, clearly disgusted with my lack of professionalism.

I turned, hoping to re-co

He was wearing a heavy, silvery garment like a diving suit, complete with a neck ring. Under one arm he carried white helmet. He seemed completely focused on the task ahead of him, like a bullfighter I had once seen in Tijuana.

Tominbang was a step behind him, but compared to Dearborn ’s glittering presence, might as well have been invisible.

(I noticed one strange face in the crowd, not far behind Dear-born: Sampson, his backup pilot.)

Dearborn stopped and looked up at Quicksilver, which had now been towed to a distance of fifty yards from the hangar door. He raised his helmet, lowered it over his head, locked it into place.

Some of the team members applauded. I felt an unfamiliar surge of pride. From what I could see of Tominbang’s face, so did he.

And, for a moment, so did I. I was part of that crew!

The next half hour raced past. Dressed in street clothes (but carrying a crash helmet handed to me by Kafka), I joined Dearborn and Tominbang aboard Quicksilver. I had never been inside the vehicle before, and had to be helped down through the top hatch into the newly-installed airlock by Sampson. (“This is where the weapons bay used to be.”) Then I crawled forward into the cabin and wrenched myself to the left-hand seat. (There were three, one forward, and two behind.

“I hope I don’t have to get out of this thing in a hurry,” I said, half-joking.

“The pilot can blow the canopy for emergency egress,” Sampson said, his eyes bland and almost sleepy. I decided right then that I didn’t much like him. Maybe it was the air of truly unpredictable strangeness he radiated-his “wrong way” wild card, no doubt.

As the team cleared out, my helmet radio squawked. “Pilot to Co-pilot,” Dearborn said, “that pistol grip tiller close to your right hand is your lifting mechanism. It is finely calibrated to co