Learning to Swear in America (6 page)

The next day Karl Fletcher was civil. There was no public calling out, no remonstrance for Yuri’s trespass of the previous day. Okay, he shouldn’t have gone into the director’s office, shouldn’t have looked at the weapons specs. Fletcher had been right—it didn’t tell him anything new, but he hadn’t known that until he’d seen the printout. And the jerk had kept his phone.

He’d given the mouse food and water and let it run in the bathtub in the morning, then put it in a dresser drawer, covered by the ice bucket. He calculated the air volume and oxygen concentration first. The mouse would be fine.

But Yuri wasn’t sure that he was fine. The day passed like the others, consumed by work until evening, but his thoughts were derailed by a gnawing unease that perhaps Fletcher had a reason for keeping him from the weapons list.

Finally Yuri sighed. He rolled his neck, let his chin hang a
moment against his chest, then pushed away from the desk. He walked to the director’s office, hands thrust in his pockets, hesitated a moment at the closed door, and knocked. There was no answer. He raised a hand to rap again when a woman stepped out of an open office down the hall.

“Looking for Karl?”

“Um, yeah.”

“He went downstairs a couple of minutes ago,” she said, tipping her head toward the end of the hall, toward the west stairwell.

“Thanks.”

Yuri slipped past her, aware suddenly of his bare feet. Maybe some people could do complex mathematics with their socks on, but he wasn’t one of them. He hurried to the west stairwell and paused a moment, looking out the huge glass panes at the scrubby California vegetation and creviced hills beyond. The railing was cool under his wrists. He had eaten early with Simons and Pirkola, and the scientists working at NEO wouldn’t gather here to watch the sunset for another hour. Palms fringing the parking lot sent spiked shadows toward him, and quiet voices rose in the stairwell from people talking on the floor below. He recognized Fletcher’s voice and had one foot on the first step, the other hanging in the air, when he heard what the director was saying.

“No, he doesn’t know. Christ, no.”

“He seems on edge.” It was Simons. “I thought maybe you’d told him.”

Yuri took a silent step backward onto the landing.

“Why would I?” Fletcher said. “It would only distract him. We need him working right now.”

There was silence for a moment, a shuffling, then the rattling of an empty soda can tossed in a recycling bin.

“Did anyone tell the Russians that we’re keeping him?” Simons asked.

Yuri felt like he was falling into a black hole, being pulled by a gravitational tidal force into a strand of his component parts, each atom in his body extruded one at a time. Spaghettification, they called it. It started with being snapped in two. And that’s exactly what had just happened to him.

“No. They’d probably try to extract him, even with that thing bearing down on us. They’re incredibly territorial. And it’s not aimed at them.”

“You could make the argument that we’re being territorial, worrying about him knowing too much. You know, given the situation.”

“It’s national security,” Fletcher said. “First we save the continent, then the kid defects, whether he likes it or not.” Another soda can rattled into the bin. “After he’s seen that list, with our hardware laid out like that? Trying to photograph it? No way he’s going home. That’s from higher up.”

Yuri took another step backward and his spine pressed against the stairwell wall.

“The Russians insisted he not see that list, and we promised we’d limit his access. They knew we wouldn’t send him back if he
saw it.” Fletcher hissed in frustration. “They said they told him to behave. We did, too. It’s his own damn fault.”

“That’s the problem with having a teenager in a place like this,” Simons said. “What about the Chinese guy? Liu?”

“Lin. He’s wanted to come here for a long time. We’ve had covert contact before. He knows he’s defecting.”

Distant footsteps came from below. The men rustled, breaking off their talk.

“Keep your mouth shut,” Fletcher said. “Nobody else knows about this. We don’t need the distraction while we’re still working.”

Yuri stood in the darkening stairwell. He would have stayed there for hours, staring west, away from home, but he heard a man’s shoe slap against the bottom stair below him. He slipped out of the stairwell and hurried down the hall to his office. He shut the door silently and sat on the floor, leaning against his desk, until it was well and fully night.

The asteroid filled his mind, pulsing in his brain, making his head hurt. Because whatever results his team came up with, whether the asteroid slammed into Earth or not, life as he knew it was over. His life was in two pieces. He was being spaghettified.

That night he lay sleepless in his strange bed in his featureless hotel room. He’d brought half a dozen different foods home for the mouse to try. The mouse ate all of them, then urinated in Yuri’s hand. That was the day’s highlight.

Yuri thought he could probably get another cell phone. He could even borrow one from an unsuspecting colleague, or from one of the janitors. He wasn’t sure how to call Russia from the United States—there’d be an international code, and he didn’t know what it was—but he could find a way to call someone. His mother. Kryukov, his advisor. Someone in Russia—anyone.

But what would he say? Because if he left, the math would be wrong. The asteroid would hit North America. People would die. The asteroid should blow up when it entered the atmosphere, like the one over Siberia in 1908. No huge dust cloud to cover the planet, block the sun, wipe out the crops. But some impact on Russia, surely. Trade would be disrupted, the balance of power thrown off. It could hurt his country, too. It could endanger his wobbly table and bowl of dark borscht, and across from him the craggy, understanding face of Gregor Kryukov.

He had to stay to save these people who were willing to sacrifice him. He had to get home to Moscow, too.

So he had two problems. He had to save the world, and he had to save himself.

When the car service deposited him at the NEO building the next morning, Yuri had circles under his eyes.

In his office, he pulled out a fresh pad of paper and began to calculate the problem. He chewed slowly on a pencil eraser, and as he came to the point of divergence from Simon and Pirkola’s work, his hand hesitated a moment, hovering. Then he brought it down decisively, scrawling longhand the same symbols he had used previously, following the same line of thought. The most logical approach was to reduce the asteroid with antimatter before they blew it up. And he knew how to do it.

He leaned forward, occasionally punching a calculator with his left hand, keeping his right hand moving over the paper. He was going to do the math his way. The right way. When he was done, he would explain it to Simons and Pirkola, make them understand.

An hour later he took a break to check his e-mail. He thought there might be a message from his mother, but there wasn’t. There were several from people he knew at Moscow State. He had just gotten his doctorate and been made an assistant professor in the physics department, a colleague to his professors. He saved the message from his advisor until last. It said, “
Возвращайся к работе
. Get back to work.” He laughed.

Then he exited his e-mail and pulled up airline flight schedules. It was late May. The asteroid would hit Earth’s atmosphere on June 9, which stunk because he was going to miss the hockey playoffs by working sixteen-hour days, and Team Dynamo would be out early.

He needed to persuade Simons and Pirkola to his view as soon as possible. Yuri tapped on his keyboard, clicking “print” repeatedly. Giving himself hard copies of flight schedules for the next couple of weeks. If he could get his teammates to accept his approach, he could slip out early. Take a cab to the airport in the middle of the night, maybe, and be in Tokyo by the time he was missed. But if Simons was sticking with his own approach, Yuri had to be here, at the Jet Propulsion Lab, being very, very persuasive.

He folded the printouts and stuck them in the bottom of his book bag. Something to look at before bed.

A few minutes later, Karl Fletcher rapped on his door, opening it as he knocked. Yuri had a pencil sticking out of his mouth and looked up blankly, his mind still lost in his calculations.

“How you doing?” Fletcher said.

“Um, okay.”

“You printed off some flight schedules.”

Yuri stared at him. Were there cameras? Fletcher smiled.

“The computers are all connected, so we can troubleshoot.”

“Oh.”

“Why the flight schedules?”

Yuri flushed.

“Um … my flight home. I thought I should look. Like good luck, you know?”

“Ah. The airports will still be here, huh? Well, don’t worry now about your flight. We’ll take care of all that when the time comes.”

“Okay.” Yuri flushed again and wished his circulatory system had voluntary muscle control.

Fletcher pulled Yuri’s cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to him.

“Don’t make any calls in the US,” he said. “It’ll cost you an arm and a leg.” He looked at Yuri for a moment, then left his office, hitting the doorframe with the side of his fist as he went by.

Yuri had trouble focusing the rest of the morning. He looked around casually, trying to locate cameras. He didn’t think there’d be any—he didn’t see the point in them—but once it occurred to him, the skin on his neck crawled. He tried to think what disgusting personal habits he might have displayed, and wondered if he’d given the Americans access to his e-mail by opening it on this computer. He’d have to be sure not to open it on his cell phone—no way they hadn’t put some kind of spyware on it.

When his office phone rang a half hour later, he jumped. He
hit a button to answer on speaker so his hands were free to keep working, finishing his thought. Simons’s voice echoed.

“Yuri? Let’s meet in the cafeteria for lunch. I’m having dinner with Karl Fletcher tonight. Bring any notes you want to go over and we’ll touch base, okay?” He went on without waiting for a response. “Noon.”

“Um, okay.” Touch base? Was this a baseball reference? Surely they wouldn’t make him play.

Yuri opened a new tab. If the asteroid hit, there was a good chance it was because he’d spent too much time looking up American idioms.

He lost himself in work again, and it was already twelve when he glanced at the clock.

He hurried down to the cafeteria and lifted a hand to Simons and Pirkola as he got in the food line. It was a decent place, with tables big enough to accommodate laptops. It was almost full.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“I just got here, too,” Simons said, then went back to talking with Pirkola about some point in their work. Yuri made minimal eye contact, chewed on a leathery Salisbury steak, and thought that if an asteroid had to hit Earth, Salisbury might be a good spot to take out.

“You think about what we talked about the other night? About sticking with established work?” Simons said.