Nigerians in Space Read online

  “There’s a specimen I’d like to check out, Onur.”

  “Oh?” Onur looked mildly interested.

  “A four-three. There’s some correlation with this agglute.”

  “You are running it under the SET?”

  “No. The new directive said we can only access the microscope on Tuesdays. It’s in the latest memo.”

  Onur shook his head. “Memos, schmemos.”

  “The H2O is set at four. There’s some K.R.E.E.P. that I want to move in the seven-eights.”

  “We are moving it last year.”

  “No, Tugwell was tasked with moving them. He never finished. Please sustain the levels for seven minutes.”

  Thank God for Tugwell, Wale thought, thank God for bureaucracy. Tugwell had provided any number of excuses since he’d been fired for corrupting a core sample of K.R.E.E.P.—a kind of sawdust from the surface of the moon—with a glob of milk chocolate. If anyone cared, a whole comic strip could have been written about Tugwell’s antics in the moonrock business. Watery coffee, milky tea, dusty files and magnetic tapes, the old granules of cigarettes, must, egg-sandwiches melted into the cafeteria walls, the dull-aching bones of the people who swept up after him—thank god for bureaucracy. How much easier to steal from it.

  And then Wale was in the hiss of the air shower and disappearing behind the mist into the vault with his mask. He had four minutes. Anything longer and Onur would become suspicious. Inside, the filtration system sputtered as it sucked up his terrestrial emissions. A row of stainless vaults squatted above a white linoleum floor, with blue LED lights on the front. All blue, all uncompromised. Any change in weight or chemical composition and the alarm would blow. He paced straight to the seven-eight vault and opened the thick-walled cabinet. With the H2O levels up the cabinet emitted a fine cloud of vapor. He reached into his lab coat and removed three glassine bags with coin-sized valves in them. 78-5329-23 was a small sample encased in a glass Petri dish, looking no more important than the rest. The 23 meant that it had already been contaminated, but that was the Contingency Sample, that was what Bello was paying him for. The 23: his commitment.

  Wale emptied the contents of 23 into a glassine bag and removed a false Petri dish from his other pocket. After switching the Petri dish, he took the bag and walked quickly to the nitrogen tank. Attaching the hose to the valve, he vacuumed the air out of the bag and flushed in some nitrogen. He did the same for two more bags so that the specimen was protected, and kept these in his pocket. Next, he opened the 46 vault and removed a dimpled, ashen breccia rock that looked like a mangled barbecue briquette. He stepped back through the airlock trying to look innocent with the breccia extended before him, and set it in the glass glovebox.

  “I am not seeing you on the monitor,” Onur said. “You alright, Wale?”

  “It was the H2O levels. You can take them down now.”

  Onur had produced a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts from somewhere. A donut was gone but for a dollop of cream on his chin. Wale pointed at the dollop and tossed Onur a napkin.

  “Thanks. No, I mean, you are tense. Is your wife okay?”

  “By the grace of God, she is in good health.”

  “Oh, I am thinking you look tense. People are talking about you and the boss. You forget about him. He is a wonk. When he is going you will be promoted.”

  “I don’t want a promotion.”

  “You are too modest, Wale. You deserve one—you are the best in the lab. Next to me," he laughed.

  But Wale was speaking sincerely. He had long ago resigned himself to bureaucratic routine, joined a Rotary club and churned out journal articles to cut onto the academic circuit one day, an honorable change of career. But after Bello found him with Brain Gain that was all over. A dream had been reborn. He was going home.

  Obliviously Onur wanted to talk about his wife. He swallowed a can of Mr. PiBB in one go, and suddenly burst into tears. “She is crushing me!” and he went on about her spending, the way she flirted with other men, the way she wouldn’t give him a child, the way she threatened to move to Florida to live with her sister, “where at least they are having a beach with the heat. Lousine is too beautiful for any man to leave. As lovely as—as an agglutinated highland roid. She must leave me first, oh my brother.”

  Wale consoled him, pretending to cut away at the breccia rock he had extracted from the vault. And they went on comparing notes, Onur telling him how envious he was about Wale’s little son Dayo, Wale peppering the conversation with astute observations about the clasts and melt of the breccia rock. Everything was going off fine.

  Then the small B-tone of the alarm went off. Onur snapped to attention and rapidly toggled through some screens on the computer.

  “It is the seven-eight. Are you closing up in there?”

  Wale glanced at the screen. “Yes, I sealed it fine.”

  Onur typed away on his computer. “What’s the number of the sample you moved?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “It is twenty-three.”

  “Must have been the H2O.”

  “No, it is the weight. Off by a microgram.”

  They watched as the indicator light moved between blue and red. Onur tapped the screen.

  “It appears to be vacillating,” Wale observed. “Could be the scale.”

  “Yeah.”

  The indicator went back to blue for about thirty seconds, then dipped into red again.

  “Hell, we are going to be worrying all night. I am taking a look.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “No, Daddy Wale, I am sitting on my ass all evening with donuts. You are staying here.”

  “I’ll raise the H2O levels.”

  “No, I am a lightning flash.”

  Onur pulled off his rings and his chain and the stud in his nose and threw on his lab coat. No one could have guessed that he’d been crying a moment before, or that he’d likely do it again. Wale tried to protest but Onur was adamant and outranked him.

  Nervously, Wale switched on the closed circuit camera to see Onur come onscreen in the airshower. Maybe Onur wouldn’t notice, he thought. Maybe he would think it was just a hitch. Even if Onur did notice, though, he had no understanding of the sample or its true value.

  No one besides Wale understood the significance of the twenty-three—but that didn’t mean Onur couldn’t suspect something. Suspicion could ruin him. Tampering with lunar samples could get you fired. Stealing— well, stealing was much, much more.

  Onur strode to the seven-eight vault and keyed it open. He bent over and examined the sample on the shelf without budging it. He picked it up briefly and shook it around, then put it back on its shelf and watched. The scale LED held steady blue for a second, before dropping into red.

  Dammit, Wale thought.

  Onur picked the sample back up and took out a small flashlight, illuminating the sample. His actions began speeding up. He quickly turned and held the sample at the camera with an inquisitive look, and his lips were moving. Wale activated the sound monitor.

  “Wale, what is this? It looks like it is from the mare.”

  Wale turned on his microphone. “You must be mistaken, Onur. Compare it with the—” and then suddenly he remembered that all microphone conversations were recorded. The tape room was in a different building entirely. He tried to sound reasonable. “Please repeat.”

  But Onur was starting to look suspicious. “Wale, what did you do here? Where is the twenty-three? Why are you—”

  Wale flicked off the sound monitor. It wouldn’t make a difference—the tape would still go through. He just couldn’t bring himself to hear it anymore as Onur went through the inductions through his head, piecing it together.

  “I stole,” Wale whispered.

  And his hands were moving fast. He manually bolted the airlock. He went to the dials. He pushed up the H2O and lowered the O2, pumped in N2. The gas could be seen hissing into the collection onscreen, and Onur immediately clutched at the mask, pressing it closer onto h
is face. He wouldn’t be hurt but he would fall asleep.

  Seal up the damn vault, he thought, seal it, Onur. Otherwise all the specimens in the seven-eight would be compromised. But Onur was already ahead of him and had pushed it shut. He was waving his arms in front of the camera lens and pointing at the gas hissing into the chamber.

  Wale flicked on the sound monitor for a second: “There appears to be a malfunction, Onur. Stay calm.”

  “No, Wale! What is going on here? Get the levels! The levels are off!”

  “Stay calm, Onur. Keep your mask on.”

  Onur couldn’t pull the emergency lever because all oxygen would be sucked from the collection room to put out any fire. The air would in theory be immediately filtered back in and he would be able to breathe normally, but that required total faith in the system to reset. They both knew that the lever had not been pulled in eight years. So it was a last resort.

  Realizing this, Wale decided to do something that was very clever and cruel. He soothed Onur on the audio monitor and adjusted the levels back. Then he made up an excuse about the airlock being broken. He told him to hang tight and he would call security for help. He left Onur standing there, cursing, his dark Anatolian eyes wide and questioning, with his lips fluttering in the magnetic wobble of the closed-circuit screen.

  “Keep your mask on, Onur.”

  Wale did not call security. Instead, he swiped out and made his way to his office, clearing a few personal items: photos of his family (immediate, not extended), the ticket stub from a Rockets playoff game, after which he had had drinks with Hakeem Olajuwon, trying to fathom the man making love to his wife three feet shorter than him, a signed form letter of congratulations from former Vice-President Dan Quayle on his only promotion. He fingered two half-empty Tupperware containers of ogbono stew and changed his mind and left them on the desk. Finally, he reached into a drawer and took out a snowglobe that he had drained and replaced with distilled water. A figurine of a black cat rested in the middle. He unscrewed the base and there was a valve. Pulling out the glassine bags with the sample from the vault, he attached them to the valve and squeezed the contents gradually until the regolith salted the water. The dust settled onto the cat, getting caught between its ears, on the curve of its haunches. Then he rescrewed the base. Now it looked like any old snowglobe. But the moon was inside.

  The front steps of the building were drenched in a dark, brownish mist of smog and tallow pollen, the sidewalk criss-crossed by snail slime. He was half-way down the walk when emergency lights went on.

  Impossible, he thought, that Onur had tripped the alarm so quickly.

  His hand reached for the briefcase until he realized that the lights were on top of a tow-truck that was about to slide its lifts under the wheels of his Corolla.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “That’s my car!”

  The driver cranked down his window, a white man with a look of apathy and disaffection so ingrained into him that it had creased his cheeks.

  “It’s too late. I put your plates in the system already.”

  Wale began to protest when he saw that there was another car idling behind the tow-truck. A brand new cherry-apple red Dodge Intrepid. It was his boss Tom Rilker.

  Rilker was trying hard to avoid eye contact under the arc lamps, but Wale stomped right up and rapped on the window. Rilker was sporting a tuxedo, with cufflinks of miniature violins.

  “Dr. Olufunmi,” Rilker said. “Can I help you?”

  Wale tried to keep the tone casual. “There appears to be some mistake, Mr. Rilker. That’s my car that he’s towing.”

  Rilker looked at the tow truck as if he was noticing it for the first time.

  “That’s yours, is it? Still got your Corolla. Great car. I just got one for my daughter. Well, you see, you were parked in my spot.”

  “I thought you were in Washington, Mr. Rilker.”

  Rilker considered this as if it was a novel idea. “Washington? Well, that’s true, yes, I was. Very nearly got Senator Palimpsest to put the Moonrock Bill in too. There’s some very lucrative language in there. You hang on tight and we’ll get you tankards of rocks.” He coughed. “Didn’t you get the memo about the reserved bays? It’s not just about my spot. I could give a damn about my spot. It’s about security.”

  “Yes, Mr. Rilker. I understand. I only intended to park for a moment and I was delayed inside. Please tell the driver that the vehicle is mine. My child is sick and I need to take my wife with him to the hospital.” Thinking quickly: “I will be back before my break is finished.”

  Rilker watched the Corolla as it was towed up onto the bed of the tow truck. He seemed reluctant to move. But he turned off his car and walked over to the driver. They exchanged a few words and the driver was backing out, car on top, and heading away. Rilker returned looking sheepish.

  “Damn it. I’m sorry, Doctor. Man was as tight as a tick. We’ll get it back tomorrow. We can pay it out of Travel.”

  Wale reminded him about his sick boy. Rilker snapped his fingers. “That’s right. Hell. I suppose it’ll be too expensive to get a cab here”—Wale nodded—“but you’re not far out of the way. I just came in to pick up a file and then I can drop you at home with Tinuke. Can you take a cab from out there? Good. Get in. I’ll be right back."

  Rilker always grinned after he remembered the names of his employees’ spouses, as if he had done them a service.

  “Thank you, Mr. Rilker, that’s kind of you.”

  Wale watched as Rilker heeled towards the building, his patent shoes looking oily under the lamps of the parking lot. He had a stiff-armed gait that could at any moment have transformed into a full-fledged march. His office was located on the other end of 31-A, and there was no reason for him to go anywhere near Onur. Still, if Onur tripped the alarm then it was over.

  I’m already in too far, Wale thought. Much too far.

  The lies he had told Rilker would never add up with what he’d told Onur. He opened up his briefcase and looked at the snowglobe. There was no way to hide what he had done. His only chance was to hope that Rilker didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. If Onur kept his mask on and didn’t act rashly there was the slightest chance of getting away with it.

  Wale got into the car and was inundated by the smell of the polystyrene coat on the new leather. There was music on the stereo, a voice he normally associated with Christmas: Nat King Cole singing selections from Porgy and Bess. Cole’s voice was incredibly crisp and the instruments sounded livelier than the real thing. Nice car, he thought, the Intrepid. And then he saw the keys, right in the ignition. Waiting for him. There wasn’t much choice.

  Now. He got out of the car and went around to the driver’s seat. The vehicle jerked forward as he pressed the pedal down, but when he adjusted to its power the going was smooth. Now.

  The guard waved him through as he approached the boom gate and he was on the highway and merging with the rest of them, an anonymous speck in the city of cement and water and gravel and veins of cars.

  His wife Tinuke fought him the whole way to the airport. She never asked about his decisions—by unspoken agreement—but he was expected to volunteer, and she could sense how much he was holding back. He tried to be stern with her, promising to explain in due course. His schedule had been moved up, he said, at the last minute. Why hadn’t he told her? He’d only just found out.

  He nearly forgot his boy in his baby cradle in the rear of the taxi. His heart climbed into his neck through security. But Onur hadn’t tripped the alarm yet, or at least had not brought it up to any sort of level involving an airport. Security seemed normal and the guards didn’t search anyone more than usual.

  They made their way to the domestic airline counter, with a very dark-skinned, full-lipped attendant offering Wale a toothy smile. Passports. He brought out their passports. Tickets. He searched his pockets. He looked at his wife, who frowned. He went through his briefcase and, in a fit of confusion, actually turned over the snowglobe in its bag. But t
he tickets did not reveal themselves.

  The Corolla, he thought.

  His mind went through the calculations. He was remarkably fast, remarkably quick at the thought processes required of a thief. When the police—or the FBI, more likely—searched his car for the stolen sample, the tickets would be found under the floor mat. And with the tickets, their destination. With their destination, arrest, jail. Either a life of hiding or outright turnover to the American authorities. There was no going back after stealing a state treasure from NASA. He added up the time and distance it would take to return home, but it was too risky. The tickets were merely a connecting flight to Washington, anyway. They were supposed to meet Bello there.

  “Give me your credit card,” he said to Tinuke. They bought three economy seats to Washington, leaving forty-five minutes after the flight Bello had booked for him. It would put them there a full hour before the drop. He’d give Bello the snowglobe, Bello would hand him the international tickets, and they’d be shepherded onto Nigerian Airways, first-class to Abuja. Everything would turn out fine, he said.

  There was a dark gloam on the horizon that snuffed out the jetstreams and coiling engines and airport vehicles flat like baking pans. Wale tried to ignore the smears of water on the viewing window, the thick raincoats the baton-men and baggage handlers pulled over their heads as the drops coated the runways with rain. The storm came on hard and fast for a full thirty minutes. He waited on the plane, tapping his foot.

  To console himself and quiet his boy Dayo, he removed the snowglobe and shook it. The boy stabbed at it with the rice-paper nails of his little fingers, trying to run his hands over the cat in the snow under the glass. Bright-eyed and giggling, Dayo looked at his Daddy and Wale felt a surge of pride. This was all, after all, not just about going into space but about the boy. He’d always imagined raising his family in Nigeria, and now he was returning to make the country a better place.

  Brain gain. Returning the minds, giving back what had been stolen. Going home, and, after he got the lunar program running, walking on the moon with his countrymen. He wouldn’t hit golf balls like the American astronauts. He would squeeze out rhythms from a talking drum into the blackness between the stars. These were the drums of war and of death, of celebration, the drums that had bonded the towns of his homeland over centuries in tonal communication. He didn’t actually know how to play one but he figured he could take lessons. He would bind the stars with the drums. There would be dancing.