Learning to Swear in America (5 page)

“They've decided?” another voice in the hall said.

“Yeah. A bank of Fire Eyes. They're targeting each one to explode in front of the previous one …”

“They'll still hit farther back on the asteroid because it's going so fast.”

“Yeah.”

“You talking about the weapons?” It was a woman's voice. No answer. Someone must have nodded. Yuri shifted beside the door, his ear at the hinge. “No air in space,” she said. “We can't rely on the concussion. The nose cones will have to touch cold rock.”

The speakers walked off, talking quietly about plasma fields and transfer of energy. Yuri stood behind his door, thinking. They'd already decided to use the Fire Eye-24s, then. But what were they? Nukes, surely. Or did the Americans have something else, something he didn't know about? He wasn't a weapons guy and it was ridiculous for him to have to guess. The asteroid was hurtling toward their city, not his.

Suddenly he was angry. They'd brought him here to have an antimatter expert—there was no other explanation for his presence. So clearly Fletcher thought they might need antimatter, or at least wanted the option of considering it. And they'd already discarded the idea without talking to him?

What if the weapons' specs
did
make a difference in the calculations? Why should he take their word that he didn't need to know the details when they hadn't even had a conversation about it? They were dismissing him. When he got his Nobel he was going to put it on a string and wear it around his neck, so he could wave it in the faces of the gray old men of physics. He snorted softly and gripped the carpet with his toes. He was going to wear it
to bed
.

Yuri would make his own determination of what he did and didn't need to see. He stalked to Fletcher's office, ready to demand a look at the list.

Fletcher's office was in the back hall, but as Yuri rounded the corner he saw the director's back disappearing into the men's room a few doors down. He hesitated for a moment, wondering how much damage it would do to his case if he pleaded it by a urinal.

And then he realized that Fletcher's office should be empty. Yuri valued honesty—but not nearly as much as he valued results.

Yuri glanced over his shoulder, saw no one, and walked quickly toward the director's office. He was almost there when a door opened down the hall and a man emerged. Yuri recognized him—he was an expert in cosmic dust working with Team Eight. Yuri kept walking past the director's office, put his hand out to the bathroom door, grasped the silver handle, and gently pushed.

It was a pull door and he knew it, but it looked like he was going into the men's room. The man down the hall shuffled a stack of file folders to his left hand, opened another door, and disappeared. Yuri took his hand off the bathroom handle, glanced behind him, and backtracked to Fletcher's office.

The entry had a number pad beside it, but the door was ajar. Yuri slipped inside, ready to ask where Fletcher was if anyone was there, but the office was empty. He glanced around.

Any chance the director would have a copy of the list out? He stepped behind the desk, gently lifting the papers spread across the top. No luck.

All in all, it was a clean desk.

Guys with clean desks kept things in file cabinets.

There were two file cabinets behind Fletcher's desk. Yuri moved to them, putting his back to the door. Four drawers each, eight drawers total, all labeled. Nothing that read “BR1019,” or “Asteroid,” or “Boom.”

Yuri's eyes dropped to a cardboard box for temporary file storage. He lifted the lid with the toe of his shoe—work relating
to long-period comets. Which meant that files had been moved to make room. He tried the top left cabinet drawer, the one labeled “Long-Period Comets,” the one whose usual contents were now in the box on the floor. The drawer was locked.

Yuri exhaled sharply and turned in a circle. It was a sturdy file cabinet—heavy grade—but the lock was small. Most people wouldn't put the key on a ring. Yuri opened Fletcher's middle desk drawer. The guy had a secret candy stash but no key. Yuri glanced at the door and slid the top right drawer out. Pens, a laser pointer—and a small, unmarked key on a circular ring.

Yuri unlocked the cabinet.

The metal drawer was empty except for five inches of files relating to the BR1019 asteroid. Not much there—testament to the surprise the asteroid had provided when it appeared, dim and heading the wrong direction. The files were organized in alphabetical order, chronological thereunder. Good system. In the back folder, Yuri found a list of United States weaponry in a folder with dark green stripes and a top secret security designation.

He flipped it open and whistled. The packet listed every type of armament in the American arsenal, with full details—number available and locations, explosive power, range, targeting system, system vulnerabilities—everything. It even listed tanks. He visualized a Bradley sitting on the Space Station, firing at the asteroid as it flew past.

He glanced toward the door, wondering for a moment how long it would take Fletcher to use the bathroom. Would Yuri be able to hear water running in the sink?

He flipped back through the list and got a paper cut on the side of his finger. He sucked on it while he scanned the packet, looking for the Fire Eye-24 missiles. Every paragraph had a margin note marking it as top secret. Seemed like overkill after the cover on the thing. He found the right page and looked through the specs. It was a little too much to memorize, so he pulled his cell phone from his pants pocket and turned it on while he scanned the data. He was good at this, at focusing on the task at hand, blotting out other stimuli. Always had been. Which is why he didn't hear the whisper of the hinges on the bathroom door. Things didn't creak at NASA.

He didn't notice the door swing inward until Director Karl Fletcher was in his office. Yuri was standing behind Fletcher's desk, the top file cabinet hanging open, the armaments list in his hand. Ready to click a photo with his cell phone.

“What the hell?”

Yuri turned, looked at Fletcher, conscious of the weight of the spreadsheet, the smooth case of the phone in his hand. He thought for a moment, wildly, of some reason he could be here, some excuse, and realized he would have to settle for honesty. But he saw Fletcher register his mental calculation.

“You're photographing documents?”

“No—I'm sorry. I just needed to see weapons specs. To be able to visualize whole thing.”

Fletcher moved in, standing in the path between the desk and the wall.

“You're photographing it?” Fletcher said, and his voice sounded like air escaping from a tire. “Damn it. Do you know how much
trouble … How did you get into that, anyway?” He continued without waiting for an answer, his forefinger jutting in emphasis. “There's only one little piece that you have to figure out. You are not responsible for the whole thing.”

“Yes, but …”

“I told you specifically that you do not have access to this information. That you don't need it.”

“I'm sorry.” And he was.

“You have violated my trust, and you have violated my office.” Fletcher held out his hand for the phone.

Yuri hesitated, then handed it over and stood, miserable, while the director flipped through his photos. What was the last one? He didn't take a lot of pictures. His stomach twisted when he remembered the last set he'd shot. He was a celebrity judge at a science high school's project fair, and Larissa Smirnova had stopped by to hand the medals out. Yuri didn't like her brand of pop music, but she was stunning and he'd elbowed in with the students to snap shots of her. Now Fletcher was scrolling through two dozen photos of a pop princess, with her bodyguards blocking parts of the foreground. It was acutely embarrassing. He stared at his feet, realized he was shoeless, and squinched his eyes shut.

“Get out.”

Yuri paused, looking at his phone in Fletcher's hand, then took a step toward the path beside the desk. The director didn't move over to give him room, and then Yuri realized he still held the weaponry folder in his hand—the one with the green bands, marked “top secret.” A tiny drop of his blood was smeared on
the front, from the paper cut. He paused, wanting to refile the folder. It would be the thing to do, but his back would be to Fletcher, and his hands reaching to the rear of the file cabinet would illustrate the extent of his trespass. He carefully laid the folder on the desk, then squeezed past Fletcher and left.

Yuri stayed in his office during the call for sunset. He wasn't sure how much trouble he was in. Would Fletcher say anything to Russian officials? A dour man with limp hair had lectured Yuri in the car on the way to Domodedovo Airport with one message—obey the rules. Do what the Americans tell you. Yuri had gripped his suitcase handle, thrilled to travel, to be wanted in America. He thought of that now, of Limp Hair lecturing him, and him nodding randomly while he watched Moscow's blocky apartment buildings stream past. It occurred to him now to wonder why Limp Hair had made such a thing of it. And he wondered, for the first time, why Fletcher had denied him access to the list.

He had a dull, pounding headache, and left as soon as the car service could take him back to his hotel.

He thought coffee might help the pain, so he stopped at the hotel breakfast area off the lobby. It was deserted. The doughnuts and cups of waffle batter from the morning were gone, but the coffeepot was still plugged in. He pulled a cup off the stack, reopening his paper cut, and stopped.

There was a rustling at the floor. Floors didn't rustle.

He slid slowly sideways, peering around the end of the counter. In the corner made by the cabinet and wall, a little brown mouse
sat, gnawing a Froot Loop in its paws. Yuri lifted his hand in greeting.

“You're not where you're supposed to be, either,” he said softly.

He took a green Froot Loop from the cereal dispenser, put it in his cup, and slowly crouched between the rodent and the lobby. He lowered the cup sideways to the ground, but the mouse was busy with the food it already had.

“You find that mouse?” the lobby clerk called. “Don't tell anybody, okay?” She started toward the breakfast area, then backtracked. “Try to trap it, will you? I'll get a broom.” She disappeared through a door behind the counter.

Yuri snagged a second cup and moved it slowly toward the mouse with his left hand. It continued to nibble on its cereal until the cup was in front of it, then it darted sideways, away from the counter. Yuri slammed the other cup over it.

“Out-thought you, Myshka.”

He grabbed a plate and slid it under the cup, then slipped into the stairwell before the clerk emerged with her broom.

In his room, he lowered the mouse into the ice bucket and fed it a package of crackers he'd pocketed from the cafeteria. When it stopped nibbling, he gently lifted it, surprised not to be bitten, and took it to the bathtub. He closed the drain and ran a little cool water. The mouse drank, then washed its paws and ears with the water.

Yuri pulled the tube out of the toilet paper roll and placed it upright in the back of the tub, away from the little lake. The mouse
tried to climb it, toppled it over, then crawled into the tube. Yuri smiled. He'd always wanted a pet, but there'd never been time. There'd never been time for a lot of things.

“Did you know that when he was young, Isaac Newton made little wheel that would grind wheat into flour? And for power he used little mouse, just like you.” The mouse stuck its nose out the end of the tube and wriggled its whiskers. Yuri laughed.

Finally he dumped the complimentary toiletries off a plastic tray on the bathroom vanity, placed it on the bedside table, and put the little brown mouse down. It started to scamper off, but Yuri lowered the ice bucket over it.

“Good night, Myshka.”

He had a friend.

Yuri woke in the night. He walked out to the little balcony and stood in his pajama pants, staring at the sky. The constellations were shifted from the Russian sky, but they were the same stars—he could see Ursa Minor and Major before him, Hercules running to the east. There were other things out there, a million unnamed asteroids, black holes and supernovas and unknowable things, and the BR1019, hurtling straight toward him. The monster under the bed turned out to be on the ceiling, an unexpected attack from an unexpected direction.

He tried to imagine what it would be like if they failed. How many people lived on the Pacific Rim? How many schoolchildren? But the picture in his brain was of the mouse's sinewy
paws curled in death, its soft brown body limp as the earth convulsed.

Did that make him a bad person?

He lay back down, lying on his side so he could see the ice bucket covering his small friend. He wanted to cry. It was okay to cry, he told himself. It was work-related, and men could cry because of job stress. But his cheeks were dry as he fell asleep.