Landing

wasn’t going to be okay. It had once been Alan’s job to imagine all the ways a thing might break, but he’d never thought of this: a quiet, painful fracture, so deep you only realized it was there when it was already too late to hold everything together.

The mission was his life, his soul—and it was so much bigger than Alan, than any of the hundreds of thousands of scientists and mathematicians and builders and ordinary workers whose labor would create, in concert, a miracle far greater than the sum of its parts.

There was nowhere he’d rather be than the lab, among the instruments and equations, his quiet, thoughtful colleagues—the order, the sense.

I’m supposed to think of all the ways a thing might break, and then make that thing unbreakable

He wasn’t sure what exactly love was, how to quantify and measure it, but he knew how he’d felt on that day when he’d first met Carol.

But sometimes the ones who make the sacrifices move the whole world forward out of darkness, into light.

It wasn’t going to be okay. It had once been Alan’s job to imagine all the ways a thing might break, but he’d never thought of this: a quiet, painful fracture, so deep you only realized it was there when it was already too late to hold everything together.

That was love, surely - that sense of being marked by another. Maybe it was. He thought he wanted it to be love, probably, most likely.