* * *
After leaving Amspace, Keene stopped by his own company to show his face and check on how things had gone during his absence. Protonix occupied a five-room suite in an office park on the south side of Corpus Christi, near the interchange between the Crosstown Expressway and South Padre Island Drive. Besides himself as president, it had four other staff, all female. Vicki was Keene’s associate and second-in-command; Celia acted as her assistant; Judith had a math Ph.D. and looked after the computers, while Karen was the receptionist, secretary, and general errand-runner. The engineers at Amspace referred to the firm enviously as Keene’s Harem. In fact, as a point of professionalism and out of the sheer practical consideration of getting things done in an environment that was complicated enough already, Keene kept business strictly separate from anything personal. As with marriage, he had suffered the consequences of those kinds of involvements in earlier years. Sometimes he thought that the first half of his adult life had served partly as a rehearsal for the second, in which he was finally managing to get a few things right.
He was greeted with laughter and applause, a bottle of Bushmills Black Bush Irish whiskey, and an old astronaut-style cap from the souvenir shop at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The girls had watched the demo that morning and said it was terrific. Karen thought that Keene looked great on TV—that unshaven, mildly haggard look was exactly what movie producers were hunting for. He ought to apply for a part, she told him. Keene assured her that there had been nothing mild about it.
Although Protonix hadn’t been named in any of the coverage, the political and media insiders who knew Keene were already clamoring to get ahold of him, and Shirley, who ran the office that he used in Washington, had called with a tentative list of meetings scheduled for Monday. But the big news was that Naomi had presented Celia with five kittens: two tabby, one black, one gray, and one “kind of stripey something,” Celia said. . . . Oh, and yes, apart from that, Judith had left early to attend the computer show in Dallas tomorrow; there were problems with machining some of the parts for the reactor Westinghouse was fabricating in San Diego, that Vicki needed to talk to him about next week; the guy in Japan who had done the thermal studies had downloaded the reports that Keene was interested in; and the parking lot would be closed next Friday and over the weekend for resurfacing. When a few more minor items were disposed of, Vicki followed Keene into his office with a list of things to check for Monday, leaving Karen and Celia clearing desks, organizing purses, and exchanging plans for the weekend.
Vicki had light brown, almost orange hair that contracted itself into wiry curls no matter how she tried to comb or wave it, and a freckled, angular face accentuated by a pointy nose, sharp chin, and straight mouth. Her body was petite and lean-limbed, shaped by that chemistry that can eat anything all day and metabolize energy without an ounce of gain. She lived for her work, and she was good. Originally a radiation physicist at Harvard, she had met Keene when he moved there to become a theoretician from conducting plasma physics research at General Atomic in San Diego. She had grown disillusioned with the academic scientific community at about the same rate as he, and rejoined him back in the real world soon after he quit, moved south to Texas, and set up the business that later became Protonix. She had a fourteen-year-old son called Robin, whom she had raised from toddlerhood by herself, and Keene had become something of a father figure as well as a business colleague.
“So . . .” Vicki stared across the office from one of the two visitor chairs below a wall of framed pictures of launch vehicles and satellites, including a spectacular shot of the Kronian Osiris.
“So,” Keene echoed. They were both flopped loosely, unwinding, happy to forget the week’s routine events for the time being.
“You get to go again. I told you, the others can take care of the office. Why do I get this impression that male animals are fickle?” One of their standing jokes was that Keene would get Vicki up on a mission too one day. It had long been a dream of hers to go into space.