Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  “Dude, you really want to explore space huh?” Seth says, “I mean, like you want to probe that shit, like a little too much.”

  “Alright Ham, get back to work, I've clearly been wasting my time talking to you.”

  “Okay,” Seth says.

  “Well, get back to work.”

  “So keep surfing the internet?” Seth asks.

  “No, real work.”

  “So...?”

  “I guess answer the phone,” K says. Seth looks to the phone that hasn't rang since he got there.

  “Who uses land lines?” Seth asks.

  “Alright, then I have an assignment for you. I want you to know everything there is to know about the JSF. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Seth says.

  “You can handle that?”

  “Absolutely. I just have one question,” Seth says.

  “What?”

  “What's a JSF?”

  “That's the name of the F-35 program.”

  “Okay. So what does JSF stand for? Jay something Stealth Fighter?”

  “Joint Strike Fighter.”

  “What's a joint strike?” Seth asks, chuckling.

  “God damn kids,” K says, walking back into his office. He sits at his desk and opens a program on his computer and within a moment has the security camera footage from the parking lot pulled up, fast forwarding until he sees his entrance into the parking lot. He waits for the Suburban to enter after him, but it doesn't. K sees himself park, and then the Suburban surges out of a nearby parking space and rolls up on Kingsley's bumper. He backs the footage up, tracing the location of the Suburban. It was already in the parking lot when he arrived. “How the hell did they get in the lot?” K wonders aloud.

  He zooms in on the two men in the black Suburban as they sit in a parking space, waiting for Kingsley to arrive while he's off somewhere driving in a circle to make sure he had lost him. K looks to the glass walls of his office, seeing the back of Seth's head as he sits at his desk outside K's office, and numerous employees walking past. With the coast clear, he opens a drawer and pulls out a bottle of aspirin, discovering the bottle is empty.

  “Did you hear?” Brittany Hammersmith says, startling K as he quickly closes a drawer.

  “What?”

  “NASA gave ULA the ISS crew transfer contract,” Brittany says and can't keep her jaw from hanging open, still in shock herself.

  “They weren't supposed to decide anything for what is it, six months?”

  “Eight months,” Brittany replies.

  “After they delayed it a year and extended the Soyuz contract, we were gearing up for the certification fight and the final bid proposals. I mean, we have a whole team working on the proposal right now. We haven't even submitted our bid.

  “They went ahead and picked the winner already,” Brittany says.

  “How do they justify that?” K asks.

  “They put out a press release,” Hammersmith says, then reads it from her phone. “Due to the rapidly changing geopolitical environment, NASA needed to abruptly change course and that necessitated the accelerated decision.”

  “So Ukraine, Crimea, that's the excuse?” K asks.

  “Can't keep using the Soyuz.”

  “Yeah but did they even ask us for a bid? We know our bid would have been lower than ULA's, and besides, if we're moving away from Russian hardware, why would you pick ULA when they use engines made in Russia?”

  “You wouldn't,” Hammersmith says.

  K rubs his temples. “I can't just invent things and figure out clever solutions. The problem isn't that people can't figure out how to make things cheaper, how to make electric cars work. The problem is that people are rigging the whole system so they can make money.”

  “You're new here aren't you.”

  “So we're totally out of crew transfer. That means we need to work that much harder at making the tourist industry work.”

  “I thought we didn't call them tourists.”

  “Not to their faces,” K replies.

  Chapter 3

  One Month Later

  “Where have you been?” Caroline asks in a harsh whisper as Kingsley enters through the garage door. Kingsley and Caroline are hosting a Christmas party with several friends: Tim Bowe and his wife Makayla, Travis Clayton showed up surprisingly with a plus one, the French actor Vincent Cassel, and numerous SpacEx employees like Josh Yerino, and Caroline's colleagues from the LA chapter of her charity.

  “I'm not late,” K says as the two of them try to keep their guests from hearing in the next room.

  “Were you driving in circles again?”

  “No. . . yes,” K admits.

  “Being followed again?” Caroline asks.

  “I'm not paranoid,” K says defensively.

  “I didn't say you were paranoid.”

  “You were thinking it,” K replies.

  “So you're not paranoid, but you can read other people's thoughts and know that they're out to get you...”

  “Hemingway thought he was crazy, but we found out later that the FBI was tailing him.”

  “K!” Josh Yerino practically shouts. K and Caroline head into the dining room where the rest of the party is seated and waiting for K to arrive before the dinner can begin.

  “Hey!” K fakes excitement as he greets Josh. Josh gives him an awkward hug and K reaches behind his back and steals his drink. Josh, a twenty-something engineer in the reusability program, had started acting like Kingsley was his best friend ever since Kingsley fired then un-fired him for disobeying an order.

  “Had enough of that,” K mutters as he heads to his seat.

  “I'm sure you recognize Vincent Cassel,” Caroline introduces K to the French actor she used to date.

  “Loved you in Deep Blue Sea,” K says.

  “You're thinking of Ocean's Twelve,” Vincent replies.

  “Same thing,” K replies.

  Caroline introduces K to a half dozen more of her friends and their dates, but the names and faces all run together for K as the dinner party of thirty grows increasingly louder like an arms race. The clinking of glasses and silverware, the hum of thirty voices turns into a buzzing in his head. K finally sits down and four caterers go to work, setting out the first course.

  K stares straight into his water glass, looking deeper and deeper into the round bottom, watching the refracted light turn into the spectrum of colors flying through the stem of the glass and imprinting an undulating rainbow on the white table cloth. His mind leaves the party, the noise, the talking, the food, leaves it all behind as he thinks about the refraction of light.

  All colors are simply light waves of slightly different wavelengths. The visible spectrum is only a small slice of the spectrum of light, longer wavelengths than the red side of the spectrum take the form of infrared, microwaves, and radio waves. While shorter wavelengths than the blue or violet end of the spectrum take the form of the ultra-violet, x-rays, and high energy gamma rays.

  ...

  “All of them are the same thing, but only a tiny slice in the middle, electromagnetic waves of wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers are visible to the human eye. The rest are always there, but invisible to us. So when we say that something is blue or green or yellow, all we're saying is that the light waves that get to our eyes are of that wavelength. Color is an illusion created in your mind as your brain tries to show you the information in an easy to grasp way,” Kingsley's father says to young Kingsley as he holds him on his lap. They're on the family's small boat off the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. The two of them are looking at the setting Sun as it's just a few arc seconds above the horizon, the waves stretching out for miles toward the Sun create a pattern of dark blue, light blue, yellow, orange, red, that repeats in every single wave on the water.

  “The brain does the same thing with sound. Higher frequency, shorter wavelength sounds are high-pitched to us, like a screech
of a baby crying. Lower frequency, longer wavelength sounds, sound like the deep bass from a drum or the rumble of a diesel engine. But to an alien, those sounds might not sound anything like that, they might hear a different part of the spectrum. I've heard that dogs sense of smell is comparable to our vision and their noses provide so much information that their brain has to find some way of making the information understandable and so there's a theory that they smell in colors.”

  “Why is the water all the colors?” eight-year-old Kingsley asks his father.

  “When the light from the Sun comes to us it has to go through the atmosphere. Blue light has a shorter wavelength and so it's more likely to run into something like a water molecule floating up in the sky, while the redder side of the spectrum, with its longer wavelength, can more easily get around particles and continue through. So the more stuff you put between your eye and the light source, the more and more of the blue side of the spectrum will run into something and be scattered away. So when we see the Sun setting, we're looking at the Sun through a very thick slice of atmosphere, so it looks very red, and around it it looks orange.”

  “Where does the blue go?” Little K asks.

  “The blue light that's missing from the sunset we see is the blue light that makes the sky blue for someone way over that way. That's why the sky's blue, you're seeing the blue light that's been scattered out of someone else's red sunset. And the waves of water on the ocean are reflecting the whole sky at us because of their shape. The part of the wave that's falling towards us is reflecting the sky way over there, while the part that's kind of falling away from us is reflecting the sunset. So you've got different wavelengths of light being scattered to varying degrees by the atmosphere, creating a color gradient across the sky, and the varying angles of reflection of the water are showing us that color gradient in the sky in a repeating and constantly moving pattern. That's what the world is really like. Not black and white, no straight lines, just waves, waves, waves as far as the eye can see.”

  ...

  Little Kingsley sits in an airport terminal, staring into the refracted spectrum of light coming in from a floor-to-ceiling window as it is projected across the a wide floor. Travelers walk towards it unaware. K stares at their faces as they approach it, and in a split second, all the colors of the rainbow splash across their faces and fade away again. Then K stares at the spectrum on the ground and watches as shadows of people cross through them.

  “Kingsley, do you understand? We're going home now. They're not coming,” the voice breaks. Kingsley doesn't understand. He couldn't possibly understand that he would never see his parents again.

  “K!” Caroline whispers insistently in his ear for the tenth time, hand on his thigh, trying to pull him away from his dead stare into the past. He snaps out of it and slowly turns to face her.

  “You want to join us, we're having a party,” Caroline says.

  “Yeah,” K says, but his voice breaks, having not spoken in several minutes.

  “What were you staring at?” Caroline asks.

  “The waves,” K says, looking back at the spectrum splashed on the table by his glass.

  “Are you finished?” a female caterer asks Kingsley as everyone else had already finished their first course and K hadn't touched his.

  “Yeah, thanks” he says, suddenly feeling like everyone is watching him. Kingsley gets up and leaves the table without a word, heading to the master bathroom. He finds an aspirin bottle and discovers it is empty. He looks in a different cabinet, again finding another empty bottle. K heads out through a door on the master bedroom to a balcony overlooking the backyard. He grabs a small silver case from the railing, extracting a marijuana cigarette. He pulls his old Zippo from his pocket, the one that used to belong to Neil Armstrong and lights the cigarette.

  He leans over the railing, eyes closed.

  Caroline's hand gently lands on his back, surprising him, he jumps.

  “What's wrong?”

  “Nothing,” K says.

  “Not nothing.”

  “I just was staring into space.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “I just had a vivid memory of my father, that's all,” K says. Caroline rubs his back, letting his words hang in the air for some time.

  “So you came out here to smoke a doobie?”

  “Did you learn English from stoner movies? Who would have thought that a duchess would even know that word? Besides, this is medicinal.”

  “Come back to the party,” Caroline says.

  “I don't like parties,” K replies.

  “What? You love parties, you're a party animal, what are you talking about?”

  “I'm terrible with names and faces, everyone runs together, I can't pick voices out of the noise, I'm terrible with parties. People just think I'm good at parties because they get a little taste of me. I'm like Gatsby, I make a quick appearance and leave them wanting more.”

  “We met at a party.”

  “It was a Radiohead concert, and if you'll remember, I spent most of the time either eating or smoking weed and listening to the concert while everyone else mingled. I don't mingle, I don't do small talk. I get hungry, I get horny, I make a joke, I get out of there. If anything, the only reason I ever made any effort at small talk it was to get laid. Now I don't really see the point. I'd rather just go downstairs and work on programming my supersonic retro-propulsion simulator. The physics still aren't quite there. The aerodynamic models of gases just don't work too well at such high speeds because the gases aren't chemically inert.”

  “What are you even talking about?”

  “My Mars landing simulator program, it needs work.”

  “You'd rather be doing that than spending time with our friends?” Caroline asks.

  “Are you seriously asking me that?”

  “Then do it for me. I want to be a good host. I want our guests to have fun. I enjoy these things. So do it for me, it'll make me happy.”

  “Alright, alright,” K says, putting out the cigarette and following Caroline back downstairs where the third course has just started.

  Some time during the fourth course Kingsley's cellphone starts ringing. K goes to answer it, but finds Caroline glaring at him. He puts it back in his pocket. She smiles and pats him on the thigh and mouths the words, “thank you.”

  Then cell phones start ringing all over the place. Kingsley's again, Tim Bowe's, Travis Clayton's, Josh Yerino's, everyone on the SpacEx side of the table. The rest of the dinner party looks concerned, some check their phones, wondering if the zombie apocalypse has just begun, but finding nothing. Kingsley looks to Caroline but doesn't answer his phone. He waves to Travis and Tim, giving them permission to answer their phones. The SpacEx contingent get up and head to the next room to answer their phones.

  “So what just happened?” Vincent Cassel asks, “some kind of nerdmergency?”

  Josh Yerino pokes his head back in the dining room, waving to Kingsley with a serious look on his face. K gets up and follows into the next room where he finds two astronauts trying to figure out how to turn on his television and failing.

  “How many engineers in the room and you can't get the TV on?” K asks. The voice-activated system heard “TV on,” from Kingsley and turns on.

  The story plastered all over the news is from a leak inside the Government Accountability Office saying that the GAO was investigating the F-35 program. However this was just the beginning.

  Within an hour of the story breaking, Senator Walken of Oregon took to the Senate floor to explain. Walken, one of two independents in the Senate, was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, specifically in the Sub-Committee on Readiness and Management Support, not a very sought-after post. Politicians usually try to get into committees that had the power of money like Senate Appropriations or House Ways and Means, because controlling the money gave you the kind of influence that lobbyists were after. Being an independent in Was
hington usually assured one of never rising to high prominence in any important committee.

  Walken was a very unusual senator. He had actually been a stand-up comedian and turned that into a career as a head writer on three different TV shows. The first was a rather low-brow sitcom about a sex-addicted President that was made in the style of a regular family sitcom like Home Improvement or Everybody Loves Raymond, except that the family was the first family, and the bumbling idiot father wasn't breaking things with power tools, but rather constantly getting into trouble because of his sex addiction.

  Walken then created a drama about a newly elected President of the United States who had a big skeleton in his closet: he was gay. The show began with a focus on the President being blackmailed, the constant threat of being outed, and keeping his affair secret from even the First lady. The first season ended with a cliffhanger in which the First Lady walks in on the President and his lover. By season three, the President was finally outed just before he was to face re-election and his presidency seemed doomed. But through the magic of TV, the president was able to make rousing speeches and rally the American people to his cause and win re-election. However the inspirational speeches weren't enough to rally the actual American people to his cause and the network canceled the show following that season. The show made Walken a house-hold name and a darling in the gay community. This firmly placed Walken out of the silly game of comedy and in the serious world of drama.