by T I WADE
Jonesy had little interest in leaving base, and VIN had nowhere to go. Most of the scientists with children already had their families on base; the rest, older scientists, had grown children or grandchildren to visit, most of who were on the other side of the world, and a long round-trip flight was of no interest to them.
All of the other staff had signed twenty-four month agreements which did not allow them to leave base for another fifteen months.
So, everybody stayed, and the airfield, with the bar open over Christmas Eve, received a gift from Santa—a couple of inches of snow, which made the Nevada desert seem like a real Christmas for many.
All shifts came to a halt, and the whole team was given a fantastic Christmas dinner by Ryan. The two eating establishments needed two seatings to accommodate everybody, and a two-foot long red stocking filled with delights from around the world was handed out to each person on site before the meal.
A few days before Christmas a couple of trucks had arrived carrying imported national treats for the Germans and Russians. The Americans got supplies of chocolates and liquors, all the kids received an electronic toy, and the husbands or wives of the workers, a nice thank you gift.
There was alcohol aplenty; Mr. Rose and Suzi had outdone themselves on a German wheat beer and an American lager. They had even produced schnapps and vodka from potatoes for the international contingency, and VIN’s stock of a couple of stashed bottles of Jack Daniels was also swiftly put away by Ryan, the pilots, and a few others.
By Christmas night, the snow returned, and dumped another few inches on the ground; the party was in its final phase with only the die-hards remaining.
VIN and Suzi found a quiet area to sit together and finish their umpteenth beers. Penny Sullivan, Ryan, Bob Mathews, Michael Pitt, and the other two female pilots were using both pool tables, and Jonesy and Maggie were already asleep—in bed together in Maggie’s room—with the door locked.
Chapter 16
Nearly the Whole Plan
During January and February, the cold Nevada winter reduced flying to a minimum. Actual flying wasn’t necessary as there were the simulators to use and spaceflight procedures to be worked on. Atmosphere flying had become old news to many. Bob Mathews liked his Dead Chicken though. He had gone over every inch of the skin of the aircraft in the warm hangar and had the hangar team repair any minute cracks and missing rivets.
VIN had a completed space suit, and often had to go outside with Suzi and sit in the cold temperature to stay cool. Over time his mind and body had adjusted to the hundreds of modifications done to the suit, and often he and Suzi ran around outside testing the suits when there was no ice on the ground. They were even timed running with a jeep on the runway. They both completed the full 10,000 feet at a fast thirty-five miles an hour, running faster than any person on earth. They could both jump twenty-two feet into the air, and VIN beat Suzi by completing two somersaults to her one during a jump.
VIN now spent time in Hangar Four, wearing his suit and learning how to use the rock sweeper machines. He would take one of them to DX2014, with a second one as backup.
The Astermine spacecraft were coming along. All three had dozens of computer programmers working 24/7 to download programs specially made for their longer flights into space.
At the beginning of March, Ryan called his space-pilot team and VIN, for a meeting in Hangar Seven, the home of the three spacecraft. They entered as a group, sat down, and enjoyed coffee and freshly made Danish.
“We are now thirty-three days from our next flight, our problem “decoy” flight into space. Flight training continues tomorrow, but today you will tour the rest of the facility and see the excellent progress completed by the large group of specialists, whose work you don’t know about yet. Today is the day there is no turning back. Mr. Mathews isn’t with us today, nor are his crew, who will not be flying higher than with the C-5. The main reason is that Mr. Mathews is happy where he is, and somebody has to return the C-5 to the United States Air Force.”
“What you see and hear today is top secret, and only the inner-core scientists sitting with you in this meeting know of our extended plan. Many others know bits of information I have shared with you. Over one hundred projects are being worked on here on the airfield. If you do not want to go further, please stand up and leave this hangar. I will understand if you are not comfortable with what has happened up to now, but the new life I am offering you will be as different to your current life as you are to each other. If you have any doubts about what is going on here, please stand up and leave the hangar.”
There was silence in the room. The pilots looked silently at each other and waited.
For a whole minute Ryan waited, permitting the listeners time to digest what he had said. Jonesy looked down at his coffee, and then chose a second Danish.
VIN looked at the others, and then examined his own life. With no legs, no family, and no real life outside this compound, he didn’t have much, so he copied his partner and also decided on another fresh Danish.
Maggie had expected something like this. Penny Sullivan had talked to her privately a couple of times. Being new, she needed to come up to speed on what was happening around her.
Penny had enjoyed her time in the Air Force. She joined up at eighteen, as young as she could, to get away from a father who drank a lot and, on occasion took out his life’s frustrations on his wife and only daughter. Her brother, four years older, had committed suicide when she was sixteen, and she believed that her father was responsible. Her mother had taken the brunt of his alcoholic anger, but often it boiled over to her or the dog.
Getting away to the Air Force Academy was the best thing her mother had helped her do, and she paid the ultimate price. A year after Penny left their small, rented New York State home for Colorado, her mother was found dead in the kitchen one morning, and her father nowhere to be found.
The police caught up to him a week or so later in Virginia, and there had been a standoff on I-95, with the police shooting her father dead when he returned fire with a shotgun. Penny Sullivan was single, had no boyfriend, no dependents, and nothing much else going for her, except the Air Force career she had worked so hard for, and even that was getting long in the tooth.
After listening to Penny’s story, Maggie had contemplated this new “One Man’s Dream” as she called it, long and hard, and she also questioned her direction in life. What did she have? Was the Air Force the only life? What was in her future?
Her parents had gone through their own turmoil in the twenty years since she left home. Her mother had been diagnosed with cancer a couple of years after Maggie left; she had survived a few years, getting weaker and weaker, until she passed away; Maggie, of course, had attended her funeral. She had visited as often as she could during her mother’s illness, but realized that she was a lone ship upon the waters of life. She had very little in common with her parents, and had developed closer friends and relationships in the Air Force than she had with her family.
Her mother’s death had certainly left its mark on her father. They were very much a lonely pair of individuals, always working, or when at home, having their work on their minds; they had few friends and never had really looked for friendship outside of their marriage.
Now he was alone and all he really had was his work, which he threw himself into body and soul, becoming very successful in the computer field. Maggie often saw her father, who she now hardly recognized, being interviewed on television; but correspondence and telephone conversations after her mother’s death took place only once every other year or so, and then stopped altogether. Maggie Sinclair had nothing to lose.
Michael Pitt enjoyed a slightly better upbringing than Penny Sullivan, but had led a young life of very little security in Georgia. His father, an African American, had married a pretty blonde girl while studying at the University of Georgia. His father completed his Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences and learned the hard way that he didn’t really like the
type of jobs his degree now forced him into. His mother, a married student, had to leave her studies and start work to support the family as his father passed from job to job.
Michael grew up in this challenging environment. A tall, well-built kid with light mocha skin and dark brown hair and eyes, he was neither white nor black, which kept him apart from both groups. He tended to befriend the few others like him, but never had enough confidence to try to fit in with the majority of kids in his class.
His parents’ job changes went on for several years, his father ending up as an apartment building janitor and his mother a worker in a laundry. Debt collectors often came calling, and Michael was told what to say to them, while his parents hid and left him to answer the door.
After countless moves to new apartments or motels in different towns and cities, Michael Pitt decided that the military had to be a better life than what he had and began trying to enlist from his first year of high school. During this year, the family had moved into a motel which was close to the major airport hub in Atlanta—so close that nobody could speak when the jets came into land or took off a hundred times a day.
Instead of finding this a grievance, on hot summer nights he would cover himself with insect repellent and go up to a small flat part of the roof, lie on a camp bed borrowed from a school friend, and watch the screaming aircraft fly several hundred feet overhead. He often felt light-headed while up there; and his school friend suggested that he was inhaling too much jet fuel, and that it would eat his brain away.
For his first two years of high school, even though he couldn’t get a good night’s sleep he was still a “B” student. When they moved away to a quieter apartment, out of sight of the airport and its busy schedule, many of his grades turned to “A’s”.
Michael Pitt never forgot his love of the smell of jet fuel and joined the Air Force within hours of graduating high school. His parents were somewhat happy to see him go; one less mouth to feed.
“Some of you have questioned why our project is so big, just to win this space race,” began Ryan, bringing all of them back from their thoughts. “To end all discussions about the private space race, this year both the other teams will beat us.” There were a couple of murmurs from the pilots. “It is part of my plan to take as much interest away from our project as possible, because we have another agenda. America doesn’t like to lose, and certainly doesn’t like losers. This country has been led to believe, correctly or incorrectly, that first place is the only place, and any American or American team taking second place or lower has not met expectations. Ladies and gentlemen, when the other companies complete their missions within the next ninety days, we will become the big loser in the view of many in government and the outside community.” Ryan paused.
“My plan is make them think we are the leading contender in the space race, until next month when our spacecraft explodes. The world then will believe we are not a force to be reckoned with. Hopefully, they will think the race over and forget about us for a time. We could win the race, but to what end? To spin around our globe a couple of hundred miles from ground, deliver supplies to an unproductive space station, and then pat ourselves on the back for a job well done? To my way of thinking, that is only the beginning of a race. On today’s tour you will understand a little more about my dream to go to space. My dream is to live in space, not just spin around the globe. We don’t need some sort of umbilical cord to forever connect us with Houston. My dream is to cut that cord and enable humans the freedom to explore space for ourselves; to live, breed and survive in space without needing to return to mother earth for supplies.” Again he paused, allowing his words to sink in.
“This is my dream, and the dream of many who work with me. You are the scientists who make this all possible. You are the pilots who will fly us into space. You will all keep us out of harm’s way, but we first need to build our new home, a home that will sustain us through our journey while providing a few of earth pleasures we are accustomed to and require. First, we need the three most important requisites for all life: clean warm air, clean water, and healthy food to sustain ourselves. Once we have those three elements, we can survive elsewhere. So let us head into Hangars Eight to Twelve, and you will begin to understand how we will meet those needs in space. This has been my dream since my earliest childhood–my only dream.”
VIN was pretty shocked at what Ryan had just told them. They were going to live in space. All of them! It wasn’t possible!
“At least I can’t ever be fired again, if we aren’t coming back,” joked Jonesy, as he and VIN left. They entered Hangar Eight where Suzi and Mr. Rose were waiting for them. Suzi was in her wheelchair, just as VIN had his old Air Force legs on; the final changes were being made, before they both could begin to wear them permanently.
“Hangars Eight and Nine are Suzi’s headquarters,” began Ryan as they stopped and looked around. “Mr. Rose did a paper on “Eating meat in space” for his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 1975. He has studied this topic since then and is recognized as the most knowledgeable person in the world on this topic. Mr. Rose was employed by NASA for twelve years to study and prepare food for astronauts in space. Suzi has studied plant life and, to date, has completed three dozen experiments in space, thanks to Mr. Rose’s contacts in NASA. Mr. Rose saw Suzi’s potential at the University of Munich in Germany when was in the Visiting Professor program there in 2003. Her work, although not at PhD level, was broad and concise and he asked her to work with him on a research project, studying the food needs of live animals in space.”
VIN looked around. As with the other hangars, there were areas sectioned off where people worked in sterile environments. Here, instead of flying crafts; were hundreds of what looked like rabbits in the first separated section and chickens in the second and third sections.
“To live in space, we need to eat, and a successful diet must include fat. Mr. Rose if you please,” added Ryan.
“Thank you Mr. Richmond. As you all know there are meat eaters and there are vegetarians. Vegetarians, and especially vegans, can suffer from a lack of protein in their diets. Humans are omnivores. We eat all types of food, and we need a variety of sustenance, due to our survival patterns over the last million years here on earth. Only recently have people turned to vegetarian and vegan diets; I agree that these diets are a healthier form of eating, especially with the drugs and other chemicals added to meat these days. Unfortunately, it took humans thousands of years to form our current eating habits, and we just can’t change them in a decade or so. Also, if a few of us are heading off on what may be a lifetime-long journey, we had better take everything needed to sustain life, and optimum health. In Hangars Eight and Nine we have been breeding rabbits and chicken to give us a proper protein/fat balance in space. First, rabbits are fairly easy to raise. The doe takes care of the young herself, so no hand-raising or special equipment, such as incubators or brooders, are needed; there is rarely a need for intensive care, as long as there are no diseases present. The 100 rabbits here are a breed called New Zealand Whites. They produce the best ratio of meat to feed and are the best meat rabbits. Also rabbits do not thrive in hot weather. Therefore, they are much better suited for temperate or cooler climates, such as our new space climate. Unfortunately, rabbit meat is so lean that if a person ate it exclusively they could develop something called “fat-hunger” also known as “rabbit starvation.” Rabbit meat is extremely low in cholesterol and has an exceptionally high percentage of digestible protein. It is lower in fat than any other meat typically found in the grocery store (chicken, turkey, beef, pork, etc.), and its mild flavor can be enhanced to suit almost any palate.” Mr. Rose paused for a few seconds.
“Due to the necessity of including fat in our diets, we need to take a second meat with us, chicken. Chicken has the fat rabbit meat doesn’t; they are fed much the same types of feed Suzi has produced for both animals in Hangar Nine, and we also get eggs from chickens, something I like very much. I have even desig
ned a smoked strip of rabbit meat, which is as tasty as pig bacon. I love bacon, and I’m fussy about substituting another meat for pork, which we cannot take on our first flight away from mother earth. Much like Mr. Jones and his beer, my guilty pleasure is bacon and eggs. We have to take our passions with us, don‘t we Mr. Jones?” There was much laughter and Jonesy nodded his head, smiling.
“Will we have beer in space?” Jonesy asked.
“It is funny that we all knew what you were about to say,” laughed Suzi. “Of course, Herr. Jones! Do you think a Bavarian will leave the simple art of beer production behind? Beer in Bavaria is one of the best foods consumable for humans, and you have been drinking our space brew since you have lived here, apart from the sub-standard bottles you and Mr. Noble smuggled in.”
“Suzi is correct,” added Mr. Rose. “We humans need a synergistic combination of protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals; everything our current diets have. The most important factor is the intrinsic quality of the actual food itself. There is no extra sustenance in organic food, except that it contains few unnatural products, such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, etc. And, for example, we have found that there are certain types of carrots that have more beta carotene than others. But to put my work in a nutshell, as it were, Hangar Eight will produce the proteins and fats needed for a long space voyage. I think this is a good place to conclude this portion of the tour. Please look through the sterilization walls and, keep in mind that if one day we find a permanent place to live, we will need good growing soil and, animal excrement, used as fertilizer, has many of the necessary building blocks to turn dormant soil into productive soil.”
The group walked around the outside of the sterile compartments viewing the three sections. VIN counted well over a hundred rabbits; a label reading “New Zealand White-Pure” was glued on the rabbit wall. There were also 100 healthy-looking chickens with a label that read “French Heritage-Meat Bird” on the see-through wall and “Best Productive-Egg Layers” on the third wall. In separate cordoned off areas were several single rabbits, big bucks by the look of them, and in another, several roosters. All the feed was in sealed plastic containers and looked like dozens of different types of feed. The whole hangar had large, powerful bright lights everywhere. To the visitors, the bright light around them made it feel like there was no roof on the hangar, and the outside sunlight was shining in everywhere.
