Pillar to the Sky

by William R. Forstchen

  Eva had finally unclasped herself from her death grip on Gary’s shoulder and was now watching intently, Danny providing a running commentary, all complimentary, as Victoria climbed up to pattern altitude, did her calls, cut clean ninety-degree turns from downwind to base, and then to final approach.

  “Oh, she is going to kiss this one!” Danny announced gleefully.

  Even her instructor clicked in.

  “Looking great, Bravo Xray, you are in the groove. Now just let her land herself.”

  A dozen or so students had broken free from the crowd around Franklin, which was growing by the minute as students—and even some professors who obviously had been abed only a half hour ago—were racing out to the airport to see the man who was actually going to build a tower to the heavens.

  Eva and Gary, with Danny by their side, did not notice. If prayers could give proper lift and glide to an airplane, it was certainly having its effect as she effortlessly cleared the threshold and this time did kiss the ground all so gently fifty feet beyond the numbers.

  A brief announcement as she turned onto the taxiway, “Lafayette traffic, 777 Bravo Xray clear of active.” She came to a full stop on the taxiway, her instructor going around behind the plane, then climbing in for the ride back to the terminal. As the Cessna came to a stop a hundred feet away, Gary felt such a swelling of pride with how his daughter was now all focus, intent, serious, nodding, listening to her instructor, holding up a checklist for a moment, then shutting the engine down. They climbed out of the plane, walking aft, never forward, as she had been taught, tying the plane down, chocking the wheels, doing a quick walk around for a visual postflight inspect, and only then, with childlike enthusiasm, she flung herself into her instructor’s arms, hugging him, the instructor a bit red-faced, patting her on the back and twirling her around, while her friends at last raced forward to congratulate her.

  Eva wanted to rush over as well, but Gary held her back.

  “Give her a moment,” he whispered. “She’ll come to us.”

  Friends gathered around Victoria and NeSmith, some slapping her on the back, others hugging her, and then indeed the group pulled up her short jacket and sweatshirt, teasingly threatened to pull them up higher, then laughed as she shrieked that it was “too damn cold!” They pulled out the tail of her shirt from her trousers, and a lanky young man, producing scissors, cut her shirttail off and held it up triumphantly before handing it to her and kissing her on the lips.

  Eva chuckled at that, but Gary felt a bit of an icy chill.

  “Well, it does seem our young lady is growing up,” Eva observed. “I wonder who he is.”

  Gary had nothing to say, and his wife squeezed his arm again, this time playfully.

  “How old were we when we met?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Gary replied a bit sharply.

  The exuberant group now made their way back to where Gary, Eva, and Danny were standing. Danny came forward first, looking all formal in his flight captain’s uniform, and actually gave her a traditional military salute, which she laughingly returned. In the hours she had spent with him up in the cockpit of the Gulfstream, an obvious friendship had developed.

  “You did great, young lady. I didn’t tell your parents this, but on my third landing I just absolutely froze up, bounced it three times, my instructor yelling at me to go around, then I circled out there for fifteen minutes, struggling to get my nerve back, with him cussing at me to just bring it in.”

  “Oh, great,” Gary whispered. “And we trust our butts to him?”

  Danny looked back at him and laughed.

  “Yup, you do. And I usually never confess that. The navy ain’t so forgiving: I thought they’d wash me out that day, but I finally got my carrier wings.”

  He gave Victoria a warm hug.

  Victoria’s instructor was beaming.

  “You are one of the best I’ve taught in a while, Victoria, even though that second landing was a bit shaky.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Next session with me, later this week, we’ll work the schedule based on weather,” and then he turned to the other students. “She did it in nine hours. Mr. Jenkins, you’ve had twelve hours now; listen to what she has to say later rather than the two of you staring at each other moon-eyed.”

  Mr. Jenkins was the young man who had cut off her shirttail. “So that’s his name,” Gary said as he looked at the redheaded youth, who obviously had more than a friendly interest in his only daughter.

  Jenkins, aware of the way that Gary was staring at him, reddened.

  “Now, the rest of you, you’re missing out on what Franklin Smith has to say, and I want to hear it as well. Mr. Jenkins, one hour, I want you out to preflight the plane, and let’s see if you can do the same, finally.”

  The group broke up and started to head to the hangar, but Victoria’s flight instructor nodded to Gary, who followed after him while Victoria stood wrapped in her mother’s arms, the two talking excitedly.

  Gary extended his hand to the flight instructor, wondering if by chance this man remembered him from long ago.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “No, the thanks are mine,” Brandon said. “Your daughter is a natural pilot. Piece of cake this morning. I’ll confess that when I cut some of them loose, my stomach is in a knot. I make a wrong decision on that and I have a kid augering in. No such worry with your girl. You should be proud of her.”

  “We are, but still…”

  Brandon nodded understandingly.

  “Sir, I’ve been at this for thirty years. There was a time when the air force and navy sent their top-gun guys here who they were grooming for the astronaut corps. Those days are over, sadly. They had to keep their flight time up and would offer me a ride. Some of them scared the crap out of me when I’d go up with them. Too overconfident and hotshot. But maybe that was part of the formula back then. The ones I liked were the ones who knew where the edge of the envelope was and had the guts to admit when to not push it. I put your daughter in that class. She’s told me all about your work, of course, and says her goal is one day to be on that tower and flying missions off of it.”

  Gary nodded. His years at NASA had made him privy to all the inside gossip about which pilots and crews really did have the “right stuff” to fly a dangerous machine like the shuttle, especially after Challenger and Columbia. The fantasy image of the hotshot pilot on the edge, as promulgated by such films as The Right Stuff, had long since passed. It required a lot of guts still, but balanced with an icy ability to analyze and work within the parameters. He wondered if, in building their tower, they would again have to go out to that “edge” and beyond, given how the concept was indeed “on the edge.” The words of Victoria’s instructor were both reassuring but also made him worry, as they would for any protective parent.

  “Now, sir, I’m really dying to hear Smith’s lecture. Can we join him?”

  “One question,” Gary said.

  “Anything, sir.”

  “Who is this Jenkins kid?”

  Brandon threw back his head and laughed.

  “Oh, Peter? The usual freshman crush. They met in my ground school class and were staring at each other the first day.” He shook his head and chuckled. “Sorry, sir, hate to break it to you, but I’ve been working this age group for thirty years. Your daughter is a fine young lady of darn good intellect and sense, I must add. Of course she is going to draw a bevy of admiring boys. Peter is OK in my book if that is what you mean, though, Lord help me, I will be nervous on the day he solos. He’ll be an OK pilot—not the natural like your daughter, but not a washout.

  “It’s tough when I gotta tell a kid they should stick with radio-controlled aircraft and computer simulators and keep their feet on the ground.”

  Gary smiled, a bit embarrassed.

  “You told me that, sir, over twenty years ago.”

  Brandon looked at him quizzically and then started to laugh.

  “Oh my God, yes
, Gary Morgan. When you called I thought the name sounded familiar beyond the incredible work you are doing. I was sorry to burst your bubble then.”

  Gary laughed softly.

  “You were right. I’d’ve put it in nose-first sooner or later.”

  “And look at what you are creating now instead,” Brandon said, and actually gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

  “Well, your daughter didn’t inherit your two left feet. She has a natural instinct for it.”

  The mention of two left feet did make Gary hesitate for a brief second, wondering if Parkinson’s was haunting him even then.

  Brandon nodded.

  “Once your tower starts to go up, will you go up on it?”

  Gary looked at him quizzically.

  “Of course.”

  “Everything has risk, sir, if you are really living. Read some of the stuff by Richard Bach about flying. Not his seagull stuff, the articles about what I’d call the Zen of flying. Your daughter has that shot through her soul.”

  Gary looked back at his daughter, her mother, and the young man, who actually was holding her hand while the two girls talked.

  “Back to the moment,” Gary said. “This Peter, how does he check out in your book? I mean, as a young man who is obviously more than a bit interested in my daughter.”

  Brandon laughed.

  “I have three daughters, sir. The oldest is thirty with two kids, the youngest your daughter’s age. Days I wondered how I’d survive. Don’t worry, you have a good kid. I promise to keep an eye on her.”

  Gary tried to smile.

  Applause was erupting in the hangar as Smith stepped up to a podium raised up on a low platform: behind him was the perfect backdrop, one of the prizes of the university—an airplane once flown by Earhart.

  “Come on, I don’t want to miss this,” Brandon said, pulling Gary along, dragging him out of his worries of the moment as a father as well.

  * * *

  Someone had thought to set up a projector hooked up to a laptop, and Franklin had tossed over a memory stick with the usual video loaded in. The “program” started with a fifteen-minute presentation by a well-known actor who had once portrayed an astronaut in a movie; he was also the narrator for an excellent series on the Apollo program, was very “pro-space,” had provided the voice-over for the video … and had also invested a sizable chunk of change in the project. When the tower was up, he’d be the perfect spokesman and laughingly agreed to do so for free as long as he could do the documentary from atop the tower. Franklin felt it was one of his better deals, given he’d have gladly paid the actor a million.

  Applause did break out at the end when Franklin enjoyed his little ego stroke by appearing in the video, as if he were on board the capsule ascending to the heavens and talking to the audience about the limitless promise of the future ahead. Gary, of course, had seen the video a score of times, helping to add some technical points. Nevertheless, every time he saw it, it sent a shiver down his spine. “The limitless promise of the future ahead of us”: such a different vision of the future from the one the kids around him were now fed on a daily basis. It was again like the days of his earliest childhood when he would watch the last of the moon landings with his father and grandfather, seeing tears in their eyes and hearing their talk about how when he was a man, the heavens awaited and space would transform their world back here on earth.

  Seeing it again, he felt that shiver. A hand slipped into his: it was Eva’s and he could see that her eyes were damp; it was not just her reunion with Victoria, who had gone off to join her friends.

  “We have something to do with that, and I am so proud,” Eva whispered, squeezing his hand tightly.

  The video ended and Franklin launched into questions and answers, obviously delighted with the enthusiasm of this young audience versus the sometimes hard-nosed response he got when trying to sell another investor into sinking a couple of hundred million into the project.

  Gary and Eva stood at the back of the hangar. As usual, he had absolutely insisted they not be introduced. He was a lousy public speaker, as was Eva; it was Franklin who was the magic. And besides, they did not want their daughter somehow singled out by students or even professors for special treatment. So far, only Brandon had made the connection.

  “Doctor Smith.” It was obviously a professor, standing up to be recognized.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Are you familiar with the thesis of disruptive technologies?” the professor asked.

  “I am.”

  “You do realize if this tower—or, as you call it, this pillar—of yours actually works, it will put hundreds of thousands out of work. In fact, we might as well shut down an entire graduate program in rocketry research. It will disrupt all satellite placement clear out to geosynch orbit. And to be blunt, sir, it would put into your hands, and your hands alone, access to space. I am uncomfortable with that.”

  That did catch the audience by surprise. There was silence except for the creaking sound of the vast hangar’s sheet metal walls and ceiling expanding with the heat of the morning sun.

  Franklin stood silent for several seconds, nodding his head.

  “Maybe you are right, Professor…?

  “Garlin. Professor Garlin,” she replied sharply.

  “Professor Garlin. In honesty, I must correct one point at the start: I am not Doctor Smith. Never got that far. MIT, in its wisdom, felt we should part company long before then.”

  There was a bit of a chuckle from the audience and whispers as those in the know explained to others why he had been expelled: because he had hacked into the registrar’s computers. For this young audience it made him even more of a hero, a true hacker in their midst!

  “Ah, yes,” Garlin retorted, and it was obvious her misstatement was calculated.

  “‘Franklin’ or ‘Frank’ is fine with me, Professor.”

  “Fine, then, Frank. Would you indulge us with the rest of your response?”

  “I am familiar with your work and glad to meet you at last.” There was no sarcasm in his voice, even though in recent months she had emerged as one of his sharpest critics. “I will not reply with the old line, never to be trusted: ‘Do you trust me?’”

  There were some nervous chuckles from the audience.

  “I am familiar with the theory of disruptive technology: that a new technological innovation can have serious negative impacts on the service provided by a previous technology, and at times disastrous dislocation for those who work in the technology being disrupted by the new one—and even economic upheaval.”

  “You could, in fact, put NASA permanently out of business,” she replied. “And I must add that you have, essentially, taken the research of a team at Goddard into this tower design and, with slight variations, filed dozens of patents based on that work, I think obviously for your own profit.”

  Now there was an audience reaction, for more than one dreamed, as Gary had once dreamed, of working for that august agency. Even Gary had felt uncomfortable with that very fact: that Franklin had indeed cornered the market, as some were now saying, on some of the innovations that he, Eva, and others had labored over for nearly two decades, but inasmuch as it had been for a government entity, such research automatically became public domain and could not be patented.

  “Regarding putting NASA out of business: I doubt that,” Franklin replied, and now there was an edge to his voice. He did not respond to the question about the patents.

  “NASA’s business since its inception,” Garlin countered, “has been to put astronauts—many of them trained here—satellites and interplanetary exploration programs like the recent Curiosity mission into space. Your Tower of Babel will at best interfere with that, at worst could shut it down. If ever built, every launch would have to take into account your tower. It will indeed be a pillar—like a pillar built smack in the middle of an interstate highway.”

  There were nods from more than a few regarding that tough point.


  “Professor, need I remind you of the scores of other areas that NASA works in, from aerodynamic research within the atmosphere, to climate change studies, to anything and everything dealing not just with space but aviation in general?” Franklin replied, again dodging a tough point.

  “But their bread and butter has been space.”

  “And at this moment their funding has all but put them out of business. And that is why I stepped in: for this moment.”

  “To make a profit whether this tower of yours goes up or not.”

  At that, Franklin did bristle, and Gary smiled. The audience reminded him of spectators at a tennis match, their heads shifting back and forth from the elderly professor to Franklin and then back again. It was Franklin’s move now to return the volley just fired at him.

  “My books are open as to my worth,” Franklin said sharply. “Net worth approaching fifty billion, I didn’t check the close of the stock market yesterday, so I can’t give you an exact count. I’ll give you my accounting firm’s number if you wish to check on Monday, or just look at my last tax return: I paid enough taxes the last few years to have nearly provided NASA with one hundred percent of its budget last year.”

  He paused for effect.

  “Give or take a few billion.”

  Again a few more chuckles, but Gary could sense the rising tension.

  “Professor—and I assume you are a professor here at Purdue…”

  “Yes, I am. Thirty-two years.”

  Gary remembered taking a couple of classes with Garlin. Boring as hell in the classroom, but nevertheless a woman he admired for her research into trans-atmospheric aircraft capable of taking off like a plane, achieve orbit, and then return.

  She was right: if the tower went up, her life’s work was finished. With the tower taking payloads and people aloft at a few dollars a pound, all the hundreds of billions of dollars of research and efforts for the last fifty years would be moot.