Patricia said her name and they shook hands, then Isobel ran off to get out of her half-wet clothes. When she came back, she had a snifter of brandy. She sat on the sofa next to Patricia and started making low-maintenance small talk about all the places around the world that would kill for some of this rain.
“So I think I heard about you,” Isobel told Patricia. “You go back almost as far with Laurence as I do. He seems to collect people for life.” She glanced at Laurence, who squirmed, as he sensed he was supposed to.
They were pretty high up in the hills—despite its name, most of Noe Valley was a steep hillside. The living room had picture windows facing over the downward slope of garden out front and the tops of trees farther out. Potrero Hill answered the hill they were on, with its own trees and split-level houses. Their front room had high ceilings, and then a spiral staircase led up to the upper level containing Isobel’s bedroom, bathroom, and study, with a balcony overlooking the living room. Laurence’s in-law bedroom was down a few steps, over on the other side of the kitchen, with a view of the tiny backyard.
The three of them ordered burritos, and judged that the rain had stopped long enough to risk trudging down the hill to pick them up. The evening had turned warm, despite the massive puddles at every street corner and the clouds on the skyline. Laurence walked between Isobel and Patricia, and was conscious of being hemmed in by women. Especially with them talking past him.
“How did you end up having Laurence as a housemate?” Patricia asked Isobel.
Isobel told the story about Laurence running off to see the rocket when he was a kid. “I kind of kept an eye on Laurence, and when he got done at MIT I offered him my spare room for a while. Actually, Laurence is hardly ever home; this is the first I’ve seen him in weeks. Which can only mean one thing: Red Dwarf marathon.”
Laurence made a big show of rolling his eyes, even though he was kind of in the mood for the long-threatened marathon.
For her part, Isobel had just come back from Greenland, where Milton Dirth was building a vault that was supposed to last ten thousand years, and would only be opened by solving a math problem. “It looks like a bomb shelter, crossed with a Caddy store and a high-end funeral parlor. Everything is shiny steel and chrome, and marble, with glass partitions.”
“What’s in the vault?” Patricia asked. “Seeds? Genetic material?”
“Nope,” said Isobel. “Milton figures whoever opens it in five thousand or ten thousand years will have plenty of edible crops, or they won’t be around at all. It’s all technological and scientific knowledge. Schematics, plans—basically, an instruction manual for re-creating our level of technology, including some ideas for what to do if there are no fossil fuels and certain other elements are unavailable. He’s assuming a roughly early-nineteenth-century science level in whoever finds it. Which might be a stretch, yes. At least the vault will be easy to find: The one piece of electronics in the whole place will be a vertical beam of light, like a searchlight, going off twice a day for at least ten thousand years. That was one of the hardest parts to create.”
“It’s not a serious project,” Laurence said as they crossed Castro Street. “Milton doesn’t think the human race will still be here in a hundred years, much less a few thousand. This is just his way of hedging his bets. Or assuaging his conscience.”
“It’s gotten me three free trips to Greenland,” Isobel said. “Honestly, I think Milton’s opinions depend on how many interns he’s killed today.” She half-winked, to indicate this was a joke and Milton killed no interns.
During the dinner, Isobel talked more about her career transition, from rockets to Milton’s Ten Percent Project. “I used to dream about rockets.” Isobel scooped a corn chip into the communal pico de gallo. “Every single night, for months and months. After we pulled the plug on Nimble Aerospace. I had these weird dreams that there was a rocket launch going up any minute, and we’d misplaced the final telemetry. Or we were sending up a rocket, and it looked beautiful and proud shooting up into the air, and then it collided with a jumbo jet. Or worst of all was the dreams where nothing went wrong, rockets just soared for hours, and I sat on the ground watching with tears in my eyes.”
“Wow.” Laurence touched Isobel on the wrist. “I had no idea.”
“So how did you stop dreaming about rockets?” Patricia asked.
“I think I just got bored with it,” Isobel said. “Boredom is the mind’s scar tissue.”
*