A key rattled in the door: Eva-Lynne, brushing a stray wisp of blond hair away from her face. “Oh, hi!” A pause. “Cash!” She lowered her voice… flirtatiously? “My hero. We’re just opening. The usual?”

“Yes, thank you.”

I followed her in. “You’re early today,” she said, slipping behind the counter, though not without giving me a memorable retreating vision. “New job?”

“How did you know?” The door opened and closed behind me.

“Just a guess. You’ve always looked a little-at odds,” she said, handing me a cup and my bag of Danish, and waving away my money. “My treat, as a thanks for yesterday.”

I was so pleased by the mere knowledge that Eva-Lynne had actually given me some thought that I almost missed what happened next:

Dearborn stepped up to the counter. He made no overt sign that he found Eva-Lynne attractive. In fact, he was painfully polite, as he asked for a large cup of black coffee.

She spilled it. “Oh, God,” she said, reddening, “what’s the matter with me?”

Dearborn quickly righted the cup and sopped up the pool of coffee with a napkin before Eva-Lynne could deploy her counter rag.

It was only a moment, but it made me sick. Dearborn ’s mere presence had unnerved Eva-Lynne.

I had to keep him away from her.

We said nothing about the events at the bakery as we drove the last few miles up to Tehachapi-Kern Airport. What, indeed, could I have said? Commander Dearborn, please don’t have any contact with a woman I worship from afar?

He would have laughed at me. I would have laughed at me.

Then we reached Tominbang’s hangar, and the subject no longer seemed as critical.

In the hours since Dearborn and I had driven off, the Quicksilver team had gained a number of new members. First off, a pair of steely-eyed security guards in khaki and sunglasses quizzed us before we could get close.

There were at least thirty cars of varying age and make in the lot. The lights were on in the hangar. People were scurrying around, apparently to great purpose. Tominbang was the center of attention, introducing people to each other, signing various pieces of paper, smiling and nodding the whole time.

Many of the new hires, I realized, were deuces. Possibly all of them. “I guess Tominbang’s the only nat in the place,” I said to Dearborn.

“Think again, Co-pilot.”

I hadn’t spotted Tominbang as a deuce, but, then, I often fail to detect them. It made all the sense in the world, though. Who else would have come up with the idea of a flight to the Moon as a solution to a financial problem?

Sure enough, spotting us, Tominbang broke away from the fluid horde. “Greetings, crew mates!” He was smiling so broadly that he seemed deranged, an unfortunate image. Certainly he was, now that I had been alerted to it, clearly a deuce. “We are really rolling now!”

Paralyzed by the troubling sight of Tominbang’s smile, I could not respond. Fortunately, Dearborn was more resilient. “Where the hell did all these people come from, T?”

“I have been hiring them in Los Angeles for the past three weeks. Today was the day they were to report.”

I finally found my voice. “What are they supposed to be doing?”

Tominbang was like a car salesman showing off the features of a new model Buick. “That group,” he said, indicating a group of five examining the undercarriage of Quicksilver, “will perform mechanical modifications to the exterior of the vehicle.”

“Landing gear,” Dearborn added, helpfully. Obviously he had had more extensive conversations with Tominbang than I.

A smaller clump was busy looking into the open cockpit. “That team will modify the life support systems, and also the space suits.” I hadn’t thought about space suits. Obviously we couldn’t walk on the Moon in our street clothes!

There were other groups in discussion-legal, security and public relations, Tominbang said. I gave those issues zero thought at that time.

The smallest group-a pair of jokers, one an honest-to-God human-sized cockroach, the other apparently related, since he looked like a giant bee-stood nearby, watching us with what I took to be unnecessary interest. “And what do they want?”

“Ah,” Tominbang said, as Dearborn chuckled, “our trajectory team. These are specialists from Cal Tech who will program the maneuvers Commander Dearborn will make with the Quicksilver.”

“The nav system is primitive, but workable. Propulsion is the big question mark.”

“I thought propulsion was my responsibility,” I said, foolishly.

“Absolutely!” Tominbang said. “These two are your instructors!”

I have never done well in school. I have done spectacularly poorly with nat tutors. I could not imagine myself working happily with teachers who were jokers.

Before I could protest, however, Dearborn slapped me on the back. “You better get started, Co-pilot. We launch in sixty days.”

Before that day was out, I was introduced to Bacchus, the bee-like joker, who claimed to have been a professor at Cal Tech in an earlier life. The roach was named Kafka, and he made sure I knew he had no degrees of any kind. “I’m just a homegrown genius,” he said, without a trace of humility.

Bacchus took the lead in my education, hissing and wheezing his way through my first my first lessons in astro-navigation, making it clear that I, who could barely find the North Pole in the night sky, would need to learn the locations of twenty “guide” stars. (Navigation and propulsion-which is to say, my lifting-were linked, since the lifts had to occur at precise locations in space.)

It just got worse from that point on.

The only bright spot in that first two weeks was that I was able to keep Dearborn away from Eva-Lynne. Well, it was not so much a deliberate action on my part as deliberate inaction. Even though I hated being locked in a room with Bacchus and Kafka I began to prolong my lessons as late as I dared, and within the first week Dearborn was so frustrated that he went to Tominbang and said he needed a car of his own.

Tominbang obtained a 1959 Cadillac convertible with fins more suited to an airliner. It was painted pink. Dearborn, ever practical and obviously secure in his image, took it happily. He even went so far as to apologize to me. “Sorry, Co-pilot, but for the next few weeks, I’m flying solo. You’ve won your wings.” Sure enough, I saw less and less of him at my apartment, though he did actually make it home every night-sober. Now all I had to do was be sure to arrive at Haugen’s by six-thirty every morning, and linger there until I saw Dearborn ’s pink beast flash past.

While the extra time spent at the bakery caused me to gain weight (I was now averaging two pieces of Danish per morning), it also allowed me to approach Eva-Lynne.

It was slow going; she had to work the counter, and she was, it seemed, immensely popular. But over the course of a week I learned the following: she was 24. She lived with a cousin in Rosamond, the tiny community to the south of Mojave, at the entrance to Tomlin. Her favorite musician was not, as I had feared, one of the Monkees or possibly Simon and/or Garfunkel, but “all those Motown singers”.

And, a big surprise, she was not a refugee from a bad experience in Hollywood. She had, in fact, never been to Hollywood, and didn’t know if she wanted to go. “Everybody keeps asking me about it, so maybe I should.”

While she was beautiful enough to compete in that brutal environment, I could not, in good conscience, advise her to try. “You’re the only reason people come to Mojave.”

“Stop!” she said, blushing with what I hoped was pleasure.

What I didn’t learn was whether or not she would go out with me. Part of it was due to my own inability to utter an invitation. The sheer amount of foot traffic also made such a delicate conversation difficult.