by Jeff Pollard
Of course, there's a flip-side to that coin. They fail to reach orbit and crash into the Moon at hundreds of kilometers per hour, or they reach orbit but not precise enough to be rescued. The Griffin crew tries but can't get to them in time. They spend their last moments waiting for inert gas hypoxia to set in. They go unconscious, maybe their lives flash before their eyes, and then they die. They're stranded in orbit. Tim won't give up and will bring their bodies back. This disastrous double mission results in the cancellation of the American manned space program, SpacEx lives on with Brittany Hammersmith at the helm, mostly launching commercial satellites, trying to keep the space tourism industry alive, but without Kingsley to will it to success, space tourism remains a tiny niche market for decades. Little Griffin and Tycho and Selene will grow up and at least one of them will want to retire on Mars and fulfill K's dream. But it's hard to be the child of a person like Kingsley, and he knows it. Maybe by 2050 a country will finally get serious about going to Mars.
Kingsley wonders what it would be like if he does run out of oxygen. Will his life flash before his eyes? If so, which memories? Or will it be a dream instead of memories?
Chapter 35
19 Years Earlier – June, 2001 – Silicon Valley, California
“That's a lot of money.”
“I know it's a lot of money,” Kingsley replies.
“That's over 300 million each after taxes.”
“I can do math,” K replies.
“So what's to think about!?”
“Why'd we start this company?” Kingsley asks Jason Taggert, his sole business partner. Together they founded PalPay nearly two years ago. They started coding it while they were both in grad school at Stanford, but decided to drop out and work on the site full time. For the past year they have been living in a small office they rent in Silicon Valley. Showering at the YMCA down the street, sleeping in their offices, and by day pretending that they have a very profitable world-wide financial corporation.
“To make money,” Jason replies.
“No, no, no,” K replies. “We started this company to level the playing field, to connect the world so that there could be a free exchange of ideas and products and services, without the same old powers-that-be standing firmly in the middle, taking a cut while adding no value. That's why. So why do they want to buy us? Why are they willing to throw a billion dollars at us?” K asks.
“To make money,” Jason replies.
“Precisely. Because they see it catching on, and they want to make it the ubiquitous method of exchange, and then they'll add the fees and the percentages and stake out their claim as the middleman and they figure they'll make billions doing it, that's why they're willing to spend this billion now.”
“Okay, so you want to not sell, and for the two of us to just go on running this thing and barely making enough money to operate the servers...forever? That's what you want to do with your life? Putting out server fires?” Jason asks.
“I want to help people,” K replies.
“You say that, I mean, you always say shit like fixing global warming or saving the planet, but you don't even like people.”
“What does that mean?”
“You want to save humanity, but you don't care about people,” Jason says.
“I care about people,” K replies.
“What about Wendy?” Jason asks. “You dumped her like she was nothing.”
“That's – don't change the subject. What are you gonna do with that money? Fuck all the bitches?” K asks.
“Are you kidding? Sex is free Kingsley.”
“Pussy is never free,” K replies.
“See what I mean with the not caring about people thing.”
“Whatever,” K replies.
“So let's go out there, and tell those guys that you, Kingsley Pretorius, and your wonderful partner, Ace Taggart, agree to sell. And let the party begin.”
“I'm not calling you Ace,” K replies.
“It's my new millionaire name,” Jason replies.
“You have to one-up me? Ace and King? Can't you just be a different made up name that doesn't follow a pattern, something like Jay-T?”
“I'm not in a boy band, besides Ace is short for Jason.”
“No it's not,” K sighs.
“Come on, I'm sure you can think of better ways of helping all that humanity you claim to care about than hanging out here and running a website that'll be obsolete in five years anyway,” Jason says.
“And what are you gonna do with the money?” K asks
“Buy an enormous house, marry Isla, start a company that does something that I don't have to pay any attention to, hang out with my bride in our massive pool or jacuzzi or yacht and have sex all day and then pop out some kids when we get bored of that.”
“You're gonna marry Isla?” K asks.
“Why not?”
“You're gonna settle down now? So what are you gonna do in two years after she takes half your money in the divorce?” K asks.
“Why do you think she's a golddigger?” Jason asks. “Besides, why would we get divorced?”
“He said unironically,” K replies.
“No seriously, like she's open-minded, she's bisexual, we do all kinds of stuff. Why would I cheat when we have threesomes?”
“And you think all that is her just being herself, you don't think that's her way of planting the idea in your brain that she's perfect so you should promptly marry her with no pre-nup.”
“You've got some serious mommy-daddy issues,” Jason replies.
“No, you're thinking of Isla, clearly she has Paternal-Attention-Deficit-Disorder.”
“Okay, so you're not gonna be my best man,” Jason replies. “Come on K, take that brain of yours, give it a budget of a few hundred million, and figure out what you can do for humanity.”
“Step one, vasectomy. Step two, never get married. Step three, found a sorority in my own house. Step four, I don't know, maybe start the 21st century version of Playboy. Maybe that's 3D porn. Heffner 2.0,” Kingsley says in a way that few people would recognize as sarcasm.
“You really don't think you can do anything for humanity with that money?”
“Like what? Take on the oil industry? They spend more than that on suits for their lobbyists. It's not that nobody's designed a good electric car or figured out how to make solar power better. It's that too many people with too much money have too much power and won't let those things happen. And while a few hundred million is nice, that's nothing compared to the revenue of say ExxonMobil. What'd they make, 18 billion dollars last year alone? And that's just one company. You can't change the world with a few hundred million. How much does Bill Gates have? And he's done what exactly?”
“I'm starting to think you'll just never be happy with anything. You won't be happy unless you end up an actual King...on Mars.”
“Hey!” Lovell shouts into the mic and slaps K's arm. “It's almost time.” K wakes up from a trance. “You were really out of it with this meditation stuff.”
“Just thought of a weird memory,” K replies.
“You ready to launch this thing?” Lovell asks. They talk to Probst on the radio, going over their exact flight plan several times. It's a set of four burns. The Emergency Ass Guided Lunar Ejector has four thrusters for attitude control and a pair of higher-thrust nozzles for propulsion. Rather than pitching over the whole EAGLE, they keep the EAGLE level with the horizon and rotate the propulsive nozzles. At liftoff, the two nozzles are aimed straight down. They liftoff at full power, going straight up (or 90 degrees) for 12 seconds. Then they move the nozzles to 45 degrees, pointing down and toward the rear, and burn for 22 seconds. Then they rotate the nozzles to 30 degrees and burn for 31 seconds, followed by a burn at zero degrees, level with the horizon, for 60 seconds. Then they reduce the throttle to 65% thrust and burn for another 174 seconds. During this final burn they'll need to keep the EAGLE level as the curvature of the Moon'
s surface will seem to fall away below the horizon compared to their angle-of-attack.
They need to keep the EAGLE level and rotate the nozzles at the right times and they should be able to make orbit. However, they do not have any instruments that tell them their angle of attack, no artificial horizon. Just the real horizon all around them, but that's not exactly a precise instrument. The EAGLE itself is manually operated, it has no electronics. Even the joysticks manually operate the thrusters by opening valves. This is because the EAGLE needs to be as light as possible.
During their ascent, nobody on Earth can help them. There will be no way to verify that they are on the right track. And if they reach orbit, they won't know they are in orbit and won't know if the Griffin will be able to get to them in time. As soon as they lose line-of-sight with the Wally rover, they'll lose radio contact. The EAGLE features a simple beacon that the Griffin can track, but that's it.
“Alright, you stay on top of the burn times, adjust the nozzles, and I'll keep her level,” Jim Lovell says. K adjusts the lever that controls the nozzle direction and looks to his left and sees the nozzle move. Jim makes a slight input on the joystick and watches the thrusters at the corners of the “ship.”
“You ready?” K asks.
“Ready.”
“Thirty seconds,” K says. K watches the timer tick down on his wrist-display. He gives Lovell the countdown. Jim pushes the throttle all the way forward and the twin nozzles on either side of them power up instantly. The EAGLE lifts off from the rover and accelerates somewhat slowly into the black sky. K watches the timer and 12 seconds after liftoff, he presses the lever forward to 45 degrees. The nozzles turn and they start moving forward.
“Uh oh,” Lovell says. The EAGLE starts pitching back, angling toward the sky. Lovell fights it with the thrusters.
“The CG is off,” K says as he leans forward quickly. Lovell leans forward too and he gets the nose to come back down and keeps control. K sighs in relief briefly, but the next maneuver is coming up soon. K rotates the nozzles again, now to 30 degrees. The nose of the EAGLE begins pitching up again. Kingsley leans forward as far as he can as he's strapped into his seat, straining against his lap belt. Jim gets on the joystick more aggressively. The control thrusters and the propulsion thrusters are fed by the same tank of monopropellant. If they use up too much fuel in keeping control, they'll run out of fuel before they reach orbit. The nose starts rising again, out of Lovell's control. K fumbles with his lap-belt, undoing the metal clamp. He moves forward out of his seat, moving the center of gravity forward.
“She's still fighting me,” Lovell says. Kingsley lays down where his feet had just been. Holding on to the front tube of the metal frame, he watches the clock on his display.
“You're gonna have to adjust the nozzles,” K says as he can't reach the lever behind him. “When I say, push it to zero degrees. In ten seconds.”
“Okay,” Lovell says tentatively as he maintains control.
“Three, two, one, mark,” K says. Lovell pushes the lever to zero degrees and the nose immediately lurches upwards. K tries to move even farther forward, extending his torso out over the front end of the tiny ship. At the same time, Lovell hammers the joystick forward to bring the nose down.
“She's still fighting me!” Lovell says as the nose refuses to go down. K inches himself forward, extending his whole upper body beyond the front frame, holding on to the tube frame with all his might.
A chunk of icy monopropellant breaks off from the wall of the tank. The ice reaches the valve that sends fuel out to the thrusters and blocks the valve completely shut. All four attitude thrusters quit at once while the twin propulsive thrusters keep operating at full blast, fed by a different valve. The loss of thruster power causes the nose of the EAGLE to pitch up violently while Kingsley is perched with more than half of his body hanging over the front.
With the rapid pitching-up movement, Kingsley is torqued, his upper body pushed down and away from the EAGLE. His body flips over, spinning around the tube-frame until he finds himself hanging off the bottom of the EAGLE, looking up at Jim's feet.
This completely changes the EAGLE's center of gravity and causes it to start spinning in the opposite direction.
Now the EAGLE and Kingsley tumble completely out of control, spinning faster and faster until Kingsley's grip can take no more.
Lovell shuts down the propulsive thrusters and finds himself now in zero-G, floating up against his straps as the EAGLE tumbles low over the lunar landscape. The tumble makes the Moon and the sky switch places every few seconds, and on each pass he sees Kingsley for a moment, each time farther away.
Chapter 36
“Still no signal.”
“Roger COMMS,” the flight director says. Brittany Hammersmith and Paul Weller sit in the VIP section behind Mission Control and listen in.
“This is bad,” Paul whispers, not wanting Hannah or Griffin to hear, seated a dozen seats over. “When they took off, and we know they did take off at the right time, they were supposed to be a few minutes into ascent when the Griffin would have flown over them at a much higher altitude and should have picked up on that signal. Now we're five minutes past the flyover and they have no signal.”
“So what does that tell us?” Hammersmith asks in a whisper.
“Maybe the beacon isn't working, which would be really bad, or they lost control for some reason and aren't where they are supposed to be, which would be really really bad. If we don't get anything real soon, there's not going to be a happy ending.”
Hammersmith gets up and walks down the aisle toward Hannah. She crouches down next to her and whispers low, so Griffin doesn't hear. “You should get him out of here. The conversations down there are about to get disturbing.”
“What?” Hannah asks. Brittany sits next to her and gets in closer to further shield her words from reaching little Griffin.
“You don't want Griffin to hear them talking about Kingsley being stranded in orbit or crashing into the Moon. You should get him out of here before that's all there is left to talk about.”
“Why would I protect him from that?” Hannah asks. “His father is a hero for what he did. He did this so others could live. This isn't something to hide from him.”
Brittany is shocked by this response but realizes Hannah is right. She looks at Griffin, realizes that this boy is about to learn of his father's death and she holds back tears, heading back to Weller. Brittany sits straight upright, holding back her emotion with a poker-face meant for the cameras.
“Come on,” Weller says, standing up. Weller leads Brittany to her office where once the door is shut, they hug and she lets the tears flow.
“I guess it's all up to us now,” Paul says.
Lovell pushes the thruster control to 90 degrees, pointing the thrusters straight down, but still turned off. The EAGLE is still tumbling at one revolution every three seconds and Kingsley is getting smaller. Lovell sits back in his seat, looking straight up, trying to focus in on the exact zenith above the spacecraft, the direction the spacecraft will thrust when the thrusters are turned on. With no attitude control he has no way to stop the rotation.
Lovell times the revolutions until he can predict when Kingsley will appear overhead. After a few revolutions, he slams the throttle forward, then turns it back off immediately. On the next two revolutions he takes note that K doesn't seem to be moving closer or farther. Lovell performs a second burn, activating the thrusters for a split second as K is directly overhead. It takes another twenty seconds until the EAGLE approaches Kingsley. K is also tumbling and if they are unlucky enough to have the EAGLE meet K while he is facing away, then they will collide and bounce away from each other.
But their luck finally improves and Kingsley is able to grab hold of the EAGLE. He climbs aboard and straps himself back in the seat. The EAGLE, without propulsive thrust, is on a sub-orbital trajectory, falling back toward the Moon. Kingsley's boarding has cause the rotat
ion to slow but not stop. Kingsley presses the thrust vectoring lever all the way forward and tells Lovell to give it a quick burst. The burn slows the rotation.
Somewhere along the line, the design of the EAGLE had gone badly wrong. With the nozzles at 90 degrees, they indeed thrust through the center of gravity of the EAGLE and thus don't introduce any turning force. But as they rotated the thrusters, the center of thrust veered further and further forward of the center of gravity, causing more and more of a pitch-up force. Both K and Lovell had picked up on this, that's why Lovell returned the nozzles to 90 degrees, where he could thrust directly toward Kingsley. But now by vectoring the nozzles, they are introducing a turning force and using it in bursts to halt the EAGLE's rotation. They get the EAGLE pointed almost straight down, so that sitting in their seats, they are facing the lunar surface, while the nozzles are pointed almost directly at the horizon. Lovell throttles back up and they restart their orbital insertion burn. The flight plan is completely useless, this second attempt will require them to throw out the old one and try to guess at a new one.
