Pillar to the Sky (36 page)

In the kitchen Gary found that sometime during the night Eva had taped together some soda straws with a little handmade card placed beside them. “Remember that day with Erich and the straws? Have a grand time, my love, and kiss the stars for me.”

There was a tap on the door, and Eva opened it. It was Victoria, with Jason standing politely to one side out in the corridor. Gary was filled with emotion at the sight of her. Like any parent, he found it hard to see the lovely young lady she had grown into: in his mind she was still the skinny, slightly gawky, acned sixteen-year-old who was so filled with promise and so obviously loved her father. Then his heart took him to imagining his four-year-old who would smother him with “smoochies,” then insist that they give flying lessons to her collection of “my little ponies.” Too swiftly, all too swiftly that had passed, and yet with each day there were still new adventures, and he felt such pride in what she was and what she was becoming.

She tried to say something but then just broke into tears and threw her arms around him.

He laughed softly. “Hey, you two, I’ll be back safe and sound in four months at most. Come on, now, if anything, you two should be cussing at me out of jealousy that I get to go up first!”

Victoria nodded as she leaned against his shoulder.

“Promise, Daddy?”

“Sweetie, remember what I always used to tell you: Don’t be afraid of anything unless you see me afraid. We designed this thing and I get to ride it at last. Afraid? Hell! It’s going to be darn near the best time of my life!”

He paused and looked at the two women.

“Except for the day your mother finally admitted after a year of coaxing that she was in love with me.” He smiled at Eva. “Come on, you knew it the first time you laid eyes on me!”

Eva exchanged a glance that spoke of a lifetime of love and smiled back. “Oh, but of course,” she said in Ukrainian.

Then he looked to his daughter.

“And the other best day was the first time I held you.”

That got both of them crying and he extended his arms to embrace them.

There was another polite tap on the open door of their small apartment on the platform. It was one of the crew members from Mission Control: Gretchen, who had gained such fame for guiding the descent system for the first wire and was now heading up the division overseeing the pod he was about to ride in. Franklin, with his genius, was seeking out so many people Victoria and Gretchen’s age to form his team, and through them reaching out to the world with a new youthful vision of the future of space exploration. It was no longer a realm of straightlaced males with pencil-thin neckties and pocket protectors. One of the best of the spinner operators sported a tattoo of the Pillar on his forearm. Gretchen had at least abandoned her purple hair dye for today as she stood smiling but obviously moved by what she was seeing.

“Dr. Morgan. Time to get you suited up; you have a flight to catch.”

Wife and daughter flanking him, they took the elevator down to the ground level and into the Mission Control room, which to his surprise was packed. As they entered the room, all were on their feet, applauding. He was never one for speeches or any form of public speaking and now felt a bit embarrassed, glad he was not suffering any tremors as he braced his shoulders back and walked through the room, not using crutches, but with Eva and Victoria on either side to support him if need be. This inner team knew his condition, that if he stopped and tried to shake everyone’s hand it might be difficult, and more than a few had tears in their eyes, not of fear but of joy, as he carefully walked past them. Now, in a small ready room, he was delighted to see Dr. Bock, bleary-eyed from what must have been a grueling flight from the States.

“Damn it, Gary, I think I just set a record for the farthest a doctor ever traveled for a house call,” Bock said.

Gary gladly took his hand, but Bock was instantly all business, grasping his hand for a second but then squeezing it, asking if Gary could feel the pressure, then seconds later listening to his heart and rattling off questions, with Gary lying in response to more than a few.

“I know if I said I was grounding you, you’d all tell me to go to hell,” Bock said, and then there was a genuine smile. “Godspeed, Gary Morgan, my prayers go with you.”

Gone were the days of heavy pressure suits; he would be in shirtsleeves throughout. For one thing, staying locked up in a suit for nearly four days would be decidedly unpleasant, and secondly, a cold, pragmatic decision was that if the pod was “spaced,” there was precious little that could be done to get him safely out. The now hundreds of passengers going up each month aboard the various commercial suborbital flights did so in jump suits similar to what Dr. Bock and a couple of Mission Control personnel helped him get into, and he was delighted to see his name embroidered over the left pocket, the logo of Pillar Inc., a Gothic tower rising to the heavens with the disk of the sun creasing the top, the curvature of a blue-green earth at the bottom, a diamond like stitching representing the tower bisecting the middle of the patch. Bock did insist that a blood pressure cuff, a heart monitor, and an oxygenation meter be hooked up, and made noises that if anything started to go offline, they would abort the ascent and bring him back down—to which he replied that he would pull the wires off and use a manual override if they tried, whispering it so that Eva and Victoria, standing out in the corridor, did not hear the exchange.

Bock looked at him with his compassionate, but piercing, intelligent gaze.

“I think you’re crazy,” he whispered back, “and I’m tempted even now to put a stop to this.”

“And if you do, I’m firing you as my physician,” Gary replied, “and it really would put our friendship in serious jeopardy.”

Bock continued to look him straight in the eyes and then grinned slightly.

“You crazy bastard, I envy you.”

“You’ll get your ride up soon enough, Doc. Hell, you’ll get a publication in the
Journal of the American Medicine Association
about the effects of microgravity on Parkinson’s; might open up a whole new field of medicine, my going up.”

Bock, falling out of the role as Gary’s physician, could only nod and, grasping his shoulder, squeezed it tight.

“Don’t do anything stupid. You got a wife, a daughter, and I suspect someday grandkids to come back to and plenty of good years left, my friend.”

Gary simply smiled.

“Nothing stupid. So, all of you, stop acting so glum,” and now he spoke loudly enough for his family to hear: “I’m getting the ride of a lifetime—of my dreams—today!”

As he settled into the pod and waited for the techs to seal it shut, he looked around. It actually seemed a bit more spacious once inside. The unit could rotate on its axis which was already clamped to the tower. It was at this moment in the horizontal position; strapped beneath it was the rocket pack, and beneath that the first stage of a jet engine. The couch he was resting on was really quite comfortable, and as he settled back he could feel the high-tech foam shifting to fit the contours of his body. To his right, there were several portholes and two more overhead that would offer splendid views; to his left, sealed storage bins containing food, water, his medications. A checklist of what was stored and where was attached to the bulkhead at eye level. He had gone through a briefing on the toilet facilities when taken to the pod the afternoon before for a rundown on how it all worked. A bit embarrassing, and he hoped that the designers knew what they were doing. Strange but how “that was done” in space seemed to be a question everyone wanted to ask. Once into low gravity, there was enough room that he could actually move about a bit, at least turn.

Settled in, Gary’s four-point harness secured, the tech crew stepped back. He had made Eva and Victoria promise no emotional scenes, just a quick kiss, a few words, then they would step back as well, since it was going out on the news feeds and if anything he was fearful that the emotion might trigger tremors or affect his voice.

Victoria finally managed to grin as she leaned into the open hatchway to kiss him.

“Proud of you, Daddy, and frankly jealous. Now, come back to me.”

“You’ll get your chance up there soon enough, sweetheart.”

Eva then leaned in and simply whispered in Ukrainian, “Be safe, my love, and God be with you. We are soul mates and I will love you forever.”

And then one more person stepped forward. It was Franklin. He was, of course, on camera and knew it—he had an instinct for that—but there was no acting now.

“Like Bock told you, don’t do anything stupid while you’re up there. And by the way, you forgot this.”

He pulled out of his pocket two sets of astronaut’s wings. The first one, the back engraved with “678” on it, was from his flight long ago on the Brit’s suborbital plane. Franklin pinned it to his collar and then pinned on a second, with the numeral “1” etched in gold.

“For this flight,” Franklin said, holding it up for a moment so the news feeds could focus in on it, “for the first man to ride the Pillar to the Sky,” and then he pinned it next to the first. He grasped Gary’s hand and then said something that caught him off guard.

“See you at sundown, Gary.”

It was from an old favorite movie they both loved, starring Spencer Tracy, about adventure on the colonial frontier of so long ago. It was Franklin who sealed the hatch, Gary settling back into the couch, breathing deeply, a bit nervous now and trying not to hyperventilate. His legs were trembling and he was tempted to pull the monitoring wires off right now, but he knew Bock would pitch a fit and perhaps even stop the ascent until he was rewired. Clipping on his headset, he listened in as Mission Control ran through the checklist; it was all so automated now in contrast to the long-ago days of the Shuttle and Apollo. The monitor screen above his head was within arm’s reach, a touch screen showing the rundown of the checklist.

“Ascent Pod Morgan, Tower Control. You are number one on the runway and cleared for takeoff.”

Gary smiled at that, the compliment of naming it after him and his family, but making it sound to the public like the standard chatter of an airplane departure. They had even changed the name from Mission Control, which sounded very space flight and rockets, to Tower Control, as if they were indeed almost an airport.

“Tower Control, Ascent Pod. Ready when you are.”

There was no countdown—again, the stuff of another technology. Franklin knew that a fair part of the world might be looking in on this moment or check the podcast later, and in his perpetual sell job to keep this project alive, he wanted it to look routine.

He felt the vibration as the jet pack beneath him fired up, idled, a check run by Tower Control flashing across the screen, and then throttled up. It had the thrust of an engine for an F-22. Slow at first, a glimpse out the window of a crowd on the roof of the observatory and the Mission Control—now Tower Control—building looking up, waving. He raised a hand to wave back; chances were Franklin had a telephoto camera aimed at the window. He could feel the vertical acceleration picking up, feeling like a helicopter rising at first but then more like being in the Brit’s suborbital ship, pressing him down into the couch, the screen above registering ascent at 1.5 g’s.

A moment of a few deep breaths, some lateral movement, the tower itself flexing from the passage of the pod, wavering back and forth. He knew they were well within structural limits; what the hell, he was half the team that designed it.

The pod punched through 10,000 feet, still accelerating, a brief flash of dark gray tropical clouds, then through them. His ascent had been timed so that he would punch through to sunrise at 20,000 feet, cameras mounted on the vehicle catching the view.

“How we doing, Gary?”

It was Bock, on the private comm channel, and Gary just laughed.

“Wow! This is one helluva ride!” he cried.

He heard laughter on the open channel; someone had switched that through as a live feed after a few seconds’ delay in case any comments slipped out that were deemed inappropriate for the world audience. He knew he had to start doing his job.

“It’s fantastic … I can see dawn has already lit up some high cirrus clouds above me … The tower above, it is glowing red with the dawn…”

As they gained altitude, the air thinning out, the jet pack throttled up to full thrust, pressing him down into the couch. A bit more wobble and lateral movement from the tower.
Don’t comment on that,
he thought. It was a bit disconcerting; he knew his heart rate must be going up.

And then through the starboard window he saw the sun breaking the horizon.

“My God,” he cried, “there’s the sunrise! This is beautiful, so beautiful. Smooth ride.” He was lying on that point, there was definitely a lot of flexing going on with the tower as it swayed from the stress load of the pod racing up its side. He thought of the first man who rode across the two towers of the Brooklyn Bridge in a small boatswain’s chair on the first strand of wire that had been strung across that technological wonder of the nineteenth century. The rush he was feeling now must have been the same.

He glanced at the monitor screen. Jet fuel was burning off quickly: five hundred pounds left. Once that was burned and dropped off, the stress on the tower would be reduced. He shot through another thin layer of cirrus clouds at 30,000 feet, still accelerating, staying below supersonic to avoid the shock wave that they definitely did not want slamming against the tower, speed holding steady at Mach 0.9 now. Which was still going up vertically at nearly seven hundred miles an hour, nearly a mile higher every five seconds. Six miles down behind him now, still about 23,000 to go.

Forty thousand feet little more than ten seconds later, 50,000 nine seconds after that. He was actually laughing. It was incredible. He flashed on memories of so many years ago, summer nights with Eva after they were engaged, at night, back at Goddard, going up to the observatory, lying together on the cool grass, watching as the observatory fired calibrating laser beams to various satellites, cheering and applauding as the beams flashed into the heavens, then they snuggled in closer and shared a kiss, looking up at the stars and talking about their dreams.