Pillar to the Sky (35 page)

“As for Eva, she’s got a lot of healthy years ahead, and I think for this moment I would prefer her to still be close by Victoria and guide her.”

Franklin gazed at him, eyes filled with concern.

“You speak as if you have no plans to come back.”

Gary leaned back and laughed hoarsely.

“Of course I do. I’ll return with the next crew transfer.”

“Why not go up with them? Let the astronaut I’ve selected ride the pod and I’ll consider giving you the empty chair in his launch capsule.”

“You got a lift pod sitting there,” Gary replied, pointing out the window. “What the world should have witnessed as a triumph—the first person to actually journey from geosynch to the earth’s surface via the tower—was essentially a news blackout, and rightly so out of respect for what that poor man was enduring. I’m offering you a public relations coup now. ‘Co-designer of the Tower Goes Aloft to Inspect and Help with Guiding the Beginning of Pillar Two.’ And yeah, throw in that I have Parkinson’s and long for zero gravity to free me of its infirmity. What the hell, we might even find that exposure to zero-g and solar radiation might actually have a palliative effect.”

“Damn you,” Franklin sighed.

“I am the perfect candidate to go up and you know it, Franklin. No need for training, I helped design the damn thing, though I must confess the whole toilet arrangement is rather crude. You’ll have world press focused on it; I’ll do the usual announcements and interviews, and throw in how eventually, besides everything else, I believe the real tower will be a destination for those in my situation or with other debilitating infirmities to free us from gravity and again float and play like a child. I’d rather like that, my friend…”

He hesitated.

“… while I still have a mind that can enjoy it.”

In tears, all Franklin could do was nod in agreement.

“Gary, you are one royal pain in the butt at this moment,” he sighed, swiveling about in his chair to look out across the platform. “We had to drop three spinners to clear the way for the pod to come down. I’m not complaining about that—we always had that as a contingency plan anyhow—and that poor guy, no one can blame him for wigging out. I’m not blessed as you are to be a parent, but I think I do understand the anguish.”

“I honestly think neither of us can fully grasp the intensity of his loss; even trying to grasp it brings me to tears,” Gary said quietly. “Thank God we have not had to face it, but Eva and I sweat bullets every time Victoria goes off on some new flight escapade, or her recent trick of trying out base jumping in one of those damn squirrel suits. Even Jason was flipping out over that one.”

Franklin looked back at him and chuckled.

“Didn’t tell you this before, but I threatened to fire her from the company if she did that crazy stunt. She laughed—actually laughed—though most respectfully argued it gave her a better ‘perspective’ on certain things and more respect for her position with the company at such a young age. It was proving to others that she had the ‘right stuff’ to eventually help oversee operations in space.”

Gary laughed softly.

“And, damn it, your public relations team was there to film the whole thing and ensure it went viral,” he pointed out. “I damn near resigned that day myself in protest.”

The two laughed once more, and it touched Gary’s heart yet again, as it had on their first night together—flying to Seattle with his daughter up in the jump seat, peppering Franklin with questions—that this man loved Victoria as if she was his own daughter … and worried about her as much as Gary did.

“A brain like hers—the best of both of you—doing silly stunts like that. But then again, it does play well with the press.

“Then I read the final draft of her dissertation. To think that kid has worked out the model for energy transfer from geosynch to anywhere on earth … Once they stamp her paperwork at her dissertation defense, I’m giving her control of that division.”

“What division?”

“Exactly that, my ultimate goal all along with the Pillar rates right up there with perpetual motion … and that is limitless energy. She’s going to run it. Hell, from the first day I met her as a gangly high schooler, I knew she had a future that might be even more brilliant than that of her parents.”

Gary could not help swelling with pride at this news. And then it struck him.

“And you are telling me this now to talk me out of what I am asking for.”

“Ah, Gary, you are mastering the art of political persuasion. That has always been the problem where I felt I fit in. The minds of engineers like you, Eva—the team that once flourished at Goddard—always left me overawed, humbled. But, damn it, it was rare that one of you could translate what you were doing into the elegant beauty and wonder of it all and then fill the public’s imagination with dreams. Think of the irony of it. Even as the public turned its back on Apollo, at the same time they were enthralled with the adventures Hollywood portrayed of our future in space.

“Eva is heading more in that direction with her increasing talk about sociological change, impact on the arts, and the way we perceive ourselves in relationship to the universe that awaits us. During the Apollo program, one of the mistakes they made was that they should have sent up Walter Cronkite himself with his ‘Gee whiz, this is incredible’ schoolboy enthusiasm, which was so infectious. Or a poet—I mean a real poet, like Frost, Sandburg, or my favorite, Bradbury—someone who could capture in words the wonder of it all.”

“So is that an argument against my taking that pod back up?”

“One of them. Though I daresay Victoria will have that eloquence when her day comes to go up.”

“I can do it. I’ll never be as good as my daughter, but I’ll open up the way I do in private, just as long as a camera is not sticking in my face. The guy you selected is a darn good space structural engineer”—Gary sighed—“and is about as exciting as watching paint peel from a wall.”

“Oh, that is rather cruel,” Franklin said, even as he laughed at the very apt description. “Come on, Gary, you are no poet; you dread even getting in front of a microphone in public. On the basis of that, if that was the criterion, I’d send up Eva rather than you.”

“Eva is not dying; I am,” Gary said coldly.

Franklin swiveled his chair around to Gary, who was sitting hunched over, embarrassed that an uncontrollable tremor was causing his right leg to shake.

“We are all dying, Gary,” Franklin replied seriously.

“Well, the difference is, for most of us, it’ll come as a surprise. As for me, I can feel the clock winding down within me. Franklin, I can come to terms with some of it. The fact is I can barely walk and a flight of stairs looks like Mount Everest now; I’ve noticed that decline just in the months since we climbed but three flights to touch our first strand.”

Franklin said nothing. Though he had never discussed it with Gary, Franklin had made sure that every square foot of the platform was handicapped accessible, with Gary specifically in mind. And no longer did he even try to put on a show of climbing a flight of stairs, let alone join in the evening walks around the platform at sunset to enjoy the view in what had become semiformal staff meetings. He took the specially installed elevator up to join the group.

“It is my mind that is starting to scare me, Franklin,” Gary said, his voice barely a whisper.

“I haven’t noticed one iota of difference, Gary,” Franklin said, leaning forward, staring him straight in the eyes. “And that, my friend, is the God’s honest truth, so help me.”

“But I have. Little things: not remembering a name, or where the hell I put my ID badge. Stuff like that.”

“Oh, come on, we all deal with that, even me,”

Gary shook his head.

“No, it’s starting to worm its way in and I can feel it. I lie awake at night, Eva snuggled up close by my side, and I make believe I am asleep, because ever since we found out about this, my wife has this thing about not falling asleep until I do, fearful that I might need something and not tell her.”

Franklin smiled sadly, nodding. His wife was gone fifteen years now, and to cover over his grief, he had thrown himself into the start of this project. It had become such a routine that his life was indeed a monastic one. Just the way Gary spoke of Eva asleep by his side hit him deeply, and he lowered his head for a moment, remembering …

“In the last few months I’ll lie there quietly, breathing softly so as not to disturb her, but wide-awake, playing mind games with myself. Dr. Bock, God bless him, told me that the best weapon in this stage of the fight is mental exercise.”

Gary smiled.

“He is a remarkably gifted man, Bock. Joked that if ever there was a career ahead for mental exercise, it was mine, and to keep at it. So I’ll lay awake and play mental games. From simple formulas clear up to trying to re-create in my mind the pages of calculations Eva and I handed old Erich the end of our first summer together working for him.”

He looked past Franklin to the tower, bathed in the morning sunlight. Without a spinner in operation there was very little activity out on the deck, many of the work crew taking advantage of the hiatus to grab a day off, back on a beach at Aranuka or hop the shuttle back to Tarawa for a change of scenery. For some reason, perhaps because of its once storied and bitter legacy of long ago, there was now a club there that put on swing dances, playing music from the 1940s. Gary felt that drifting music just might somehow float along the coral rock and sands to where his lost uncle and his marine comrades, whose remains had never been found, still rested in hallowed memory, and that their spirits just might smile. It had become a favorite haunt for Victoria and Jason, and Gary and Eva, on their rare days off together.

“I can no longer work some of those formulas in my head, Franklin,” Gary said, his voice flat, not looking for pity, just making a simple statement of fact. “Time was I could snap them off in a heartbeat; give me a diameter of wire, its molecular structure, OK, maybe a pocket calculator for a few of the tougher calculations, and I could tell you what you wanted. Now?”

He shrugged.

“What level chess do you play to unwind?” he asked.

“On the computer? Level six was all I could ever beat more than half the time”—Franklin smiled—“unless I cheated a bit and took back a few moves to play over.”

“I could play a game in less than ten minutes at level eight,” Gary said. “Give me an hour and I could break even at level nine.”

“And now?”

“Nowhere near it, and don’t ask me what level,” Gary replied. His voice, as with those who fought Parkinson’s, had taken on a strained, trembling tone, his right hand shaking slightly. Of late he had taken to hooking his thumb through a belt loop to hide the trembling.

“Franklin, we’ve been at it for how long? Seven years, isn’t it?”

Franklin nodded.

“Have I ever asked you for anything?”

Franklin smiled and just sighed.

“I am asking for this. While there is still time. Let me see it. Let me ride that throne, as some now call it, to the heavens. It won’t be a joyride. I’ll talk every damn foot of the way up and your public relations people can pull out the best sound bytes. You can play the angle, make it public at last that I have Parkinson’s, and in space I can again be free of a body that has to struggle just to walk across a room.”

He chuckled.

“Hell, you’ll market that alone into another few billion for the development of medical facilities once the ribbon pillar is in place. Get Bock down here to help sell that idea while I’m on my ride to the heavens.”

“You really are conning me with that argument,” Franklin said.

“That from one of the best cons of all when it comes to raising money for mad schemes. I take that as a compliment.”

Franklin could not help but chuckle softly, his deep baritone voice filling the room. And then Gary pressed on.

“And what we are preparing for up there? The positioning of the ribbon canisters, tests stapling them together, prepping for deployment of the real tower while we finish beefing up the construction tower … Is there anyone on this planet, other than my wife, who understands the dynamics better than me?”

He paused.

“At least for a few more months, maybe a year at most, I’ll understand it,” he whispered, “and then it shall be a gradual slipping into the night. My friend, let me do this before my mind goes into the night, and I shall be content then.”

Gary fell silent, not moving, Franklin’s tears streaming down his face as he gazed at his friend. At last he nodded in agreement.

15

He had not slept a wink. Part of the reason was a rushing thrill, mind racing, for the moment at least focused as to what this day would bring. And then there was Eva, who wanted to soak up every moment possible with him. Several times during the night they would talk, remember, laugh, go to the window to stare at the floodlit tower, sip tea, since coffee no longer agreed with him, then return to bed, and a few times there were tears.

There was no need for the alarm that beeped at 3:30 and then softly played a piece by Gary’s favorite composer, Constance Demby. He had discovered her work while in graduate school. Her album
Novus Magnificat: Through the Stargate
—which combined the spiritual, even Gregorian chants, with what some called “space music”—was a stunning synthesis, and spoke to him of the mystical beauty of reaching for the heavens. He had made sure all her works were loaded on his iPad; the music would most certainly fit the experience to come. Back at their home in Seattle he still had the original CDs and even a rare vinyl recording, the cover jacket signed by her when they had met at a public conference on the tower years back, and Gary had asked her to one day take a trip up, an offer which she enthusiastically embraced.

Eva helped him dress; he was embarrassed that he could barely tie his own shoelaces now. Though hungry, he had been advised to avoid eating breakfast in case of vertigo; the food packed for him would be rather bland, with no fiber—tasteless stuff—and loaded in as well were the array of medications he had come to live with, enough to carry him through six months if need be.