By that time, she knew exactly what she wanted. Her ambition was to be the first woman in space.
Nobody said it would be easy. But after the rocket—she
and Georges had launched it from the Morton Street Pier in Greenwich Village—she felt she was on her way. She had blossomed—in every way, much to her frustration—a lot quicker than Georges did. At age seventeen his idea of sex was still to swap chemical formulas. So she finally gave up on him as a lover and decided to wait till college.
She chose Cal Tech, selected after turning down acceptances from half a dozen prestigious universities in the East. By then, Calypso Andropolous had decided she wanted to get as far away from West Forty-ninth Street as possible. And she never wanted to see another eggplant moussaka as long as she lived.
She also wanted a shorter name, and thus it was that her long Greek surname became merely Andros. That simple change had a liberating effect on her far beyond what she had expected. At last she felt truly American . . . and able to admit to loving nothing better than living off Whoppers and fries. Junk food was, in fact, the thing she missed most here. No, what she missed most was Alan. Still.
Georges had picked MIT, and she did not see him again until he came to Cal Tech for grad school. By that time she was deeply in love with Alan Harris, who was twenty years her senior. She was discovering things about herself she didn't want to know. Harris was a biochemistry professor, tall and darkly handsome, and she wanted desperately to live with him. She knew he was a notorious womanizer, but that didn't matter. She was looking for a missing father and she didn't care. It was what she wanted.
When he broke it off, she thought she wanted to die. The only one she had left to turn to was Georges. And they restarted a friendship as platonic as it had been back at Bronx Science, though it was deeper this time. Georges told her to forget about Harris and just concentrate on a first-rate dissertation.
It was not easy, but she did. Her project involved compressing a big computer program that calculated spacecraft trajectories into a small one that could be operated on a Hewlett-Packard hand calculator. She then devised a way to create voice commands that could free up an astronaut's hands
while he—soon, she told herself, it would be she—handled other controls.
After reading every NASA report that NTIS had released on microfiche, she knew no one there had created anything like it. She also figured out that NASA was a hotbed of careerists, all protecting their own turf. The only obstacle to their accepting her new computer program would be the NIH syndrome—Not Invented Here. It turned out she was right, and wrong.