Finder

Chapter 2

2

When Travis first told Rosie the kinds of projects he was working on, she covered her mouth and laughed.

He didn’t care, he loved her laugh.

He had been courting her for several months, although he was so shy and unskilled at it, she probably didn’t realize it for most of that time. Tuesdays through Saturdays, the days she worked as a waitress at the Sunshine Coffee Shop, he stopped in every single morning on his way to campus for a cup of black coffee and an order of buttered toast.

It was an expensive habit, one he really couldn’t afford with the pittance he made as a lab assistant to Dr. Linsk, but he’d rather skimp on other expenses than give up that one. It was the best part of his day.

Rosie had wide, expressive brown eyes and a beautiful, ruby-lipped smile. She had long curly brown hair that she wore pulled back into a thick ponytail. She smelled like apricots, which he learned later was her favorite scent. She had an aunt who made homemade apricot lotions and apricot jam and often sent Rosie some of both.

Rosie always looked cheerful, even on the mornings when the coffee shop seemed overrun. She didn’t get flustered. Travis liked that about her. He started thinking early on that he would like to marry a woman like that.

Then he realized what he really meant was to marry her.

It took him four months to build up the courage to ask her out.

They went to Brusco’s, the Italian place, and over plates of spaghetti and meatballs they finally got to have a longer conversation than just the usual How are you today? and Can you believe this rain?

Travis learned that Rosie wanted to be a nurse, but she needed to save money for nursing school first, since her parents couldn’t afford it.

He told her about wanting to be a scientist since he was a kid. How he used to study insects and birds in his back yard. Some of his fellow students wanted to use their PhDs to become professors, but all Travis ever wanted to do was research.

“What kind of research?” Rosie asked.

He wasn’t really supposed to talk about it, but he did.

“Martian biology,” he said.

That’s when Rosie covered her mouth and laughed.

Travis was quick to attribute the idea to his doctoral advisor, Dr. Linsk, so Rosie wouldn’t think Travis had just made it up on his own.

“There are pictures taken from some of the telescopes,” Travis said. “We can actually see changes on the surface of Mars at different times of the year. We think it might be plants changing in whatever seasons they have up there. And if there are plants, there might be other kinds of life, too.”

“Like… Martians?” Rosie asked.

“We would call them that,” Travis said. “But we don’t know what they look like yet.”

Rosie looked at him with a mixture of amusement and doubt.

“We actually get funding from the Department of Defense,” Travis said, hoping that would make the work sound more impressive and not just like a Saturday afternoon science fiction movie.

“Why would they do that?” Rosie asked, swishing her garlic bread through the leftover marinara sauce on her plate.

“Because we have to be ready,” Travis said. “In case we need to go to Mars or some other planet some day. Or if…” He hesitated, swallowed. He really wasn’t supposed to talk about this. “Or if they come here.”

Rosie laughed again, but uncertainly this time. She tilted her head at him. “Tell the truth.”

Travis leaned forward across the red-checkered tablecloth. He could smell the apricot on Rosie’s skin.

“They’ve already been here,” he whispered. “In 1947. A spaceship crashed in New Mexico. My professor has samples from one of the bodies.”

Rosie’s round eyes grew even rounder. “No, you’re fooling. Stop it.”

“I’m not fooling,” he said. “I’m dead serious. You can’t tell anyone. I’m not supposed to tell you.”

After dinner they walked a bit on the street where Rosie lived. Travis had brought her home, but they weren’t ready to be done with the date.

He told her all about Dr. Linsk’s work for the defense department before Travis ever became his student. Then in 1962, when Travis was just beginning his PhD studies, a representative of the Agency came to see Dr. Linsk about doing more specialized work.

President Kennedy was going to make a speech in a few weeks, the representative said. The President was going to tell the world we were sending men to the moon.

Before any of that happened, the government needed to make sure it was safe.

They had reason to worry it wasn’t. He told Dr. Linsk about the crashed spaceship from 1947. “It was right near one of our top-secret weapons installations,” the man said. “That wasn’t a coincidence.”

No one knew where the spaceship came from, but “It wasn’t from New Jersey,” he said. Before President Kennedy sent any of our boys up into outer space, the government needed to know what else might be up there with them.

The man from the Agency said there were samples from the crash, “artifacts,” he called them, stored at various military bases around the country. If Dr. Linsk wanted to become involved, the Agency would send over some artifacts in a few days.

Travis didn’t know about any of that at the time. All he knew was one morning Dr. Linsk approached him in the lab and handed him a petri dish. Inside was a pale, rubbery-looking scrap of what looked like a blister you might get on your heel.

“Tell me what this is made of,” Dr. Linsk said.

Travis thought it was an impromptu test.

He worked on it all day and into the night. By the next morning, exhausted and bleary-eyed, he had to confess to Dr. Linsk that he’d failed. He couldn’t identify a single component of the blister, no matter how many different tests he tried to run.

Instead of looking disappointed, Dr. Linsk seemed delighted. He clapped his hand against Travis’s back and told him to go home and get some rest.

In time he invited Travis, on a trial basis, to help him with some of the Agency’s various projects.

Travis was excited about the work. He wanted to make a difference. He wanted to protect this world. And that might mean finding out whether beings from Mars or Venus or some other planet were spying on us and meant us harm.

“You’re scaring me,” Rosie said after he told her all that. She paused in their stroll along her street and huddled against him in the warm June air.

Travis felt as natural as he ever had putting his arm around her and gathering her in close.

When she lifted her face to his, he knew it was time to kiss her.

It took him five more months to save up for the smallest diamond ring. After Thanksgiving dinner with her parents and little brother, Travis asked Rosie to take another walk.

On the same street where he had first kissed her, in the exact same spot, he got down on one knee and proposed. Rosie covered her mouth and cried. Then she laughed and said yes.

Three days later President Kennedy was shot and killed.

Maybe, in a different kind of world, Rosie would have wanted a traditional wedding.

But life was short and love was too important to wait. They married just two weeks later.

The following September, just a month ago now, Travis and Rosie welcomed their baby girl. They named her Caroline, after the President’s daughter.

On the cold hilltop near Cortez, his hands buried under his armpits to keep them warm, Travis thought of his two precious girls home waiting for him as he stared at the hazy stars.