Pillar to the Sky

by William R. Forstchen

  “Unbuckle your harnesses, we have just under six minutes. A real good burn, folks, best yet; you are definitely the top of the club at 117 kilometers up, so we have a few extra seconds. Float about, but be careful. If you feel queasy, do the ground crew a favor and hang on to that bag, and don’t be ashamed to use it.”

  The copilot, a young woman—Victoria guessed she was from India—floated up out of her seat, motioning for the others to join her, and, then pushing off from the forward cab, floated past them, laughing, knees tucked to chest, somersaulting over their heads. Victoria fumbled with her harness for a few seconds, unbuckled, took a deep breath, pushed off from her seat, rose up, head bumping against the ceiling, and tried to follow suit, but like a marble in slow motion she bounced back and forth against the cabin. But she didn’t care.

  Is this is how angels feel? she wondered.

  Her father was up, and as she drifted past him she reached out a hand, brushing his face.

  “How are you, Daddy?” she cried.

  “I can’t believe it!” he shouted. She caught a glimpse of her mother. She had unbuckled but still held the armrests.

  “Come on, Mom!” Victoria cried as her father floated up beside her.

  Eva floated but, as if glued in place, hands resting on either side of the large overhead window, she was looking out, mesmerized. The sun to their port side was setting. To the east, hundreds of miles off, far, far below, the distant surface of the earth glowed with the lights of Dallas, El Paso, Oklahoma City. On the horizon above, the moon, two days shy of full, was rising as their ship glided eastward at over 2,000 miles an hour. And overhead it was a sea of stars. An endless sea of stars.

  Eva was crying as she gazed upon it with reverence and wonder.

  Victoria felt a hand slip into hers. It was her dad, and she looked at him, the fear of earlier in the day forgotten.

  “Come on!” he cried, and, pushing off the ceiling with his other hand, he propelled himself and her down the length of the cabin, both laughing hysterically. The copilot, though joyful in her first somersault, was aft, doing her job now, reaching out to brake them before they slapped into the aft bulkhead, offering a word of caution; then, taking hold of Gary, she gently pushed him forward.

  She felt like Superman, floating down the length of the cabin, playing at having her arms stretched forward, floating over her mother, looking down at her. And yet, still her mother was glued to the window and was now openly crying, saying something in Ukrainian.

  The British family. The father was trying to somersault like their copilot, without much success, instead bumping back and forth. Jason was up, just floating and laughing, but his poor mother would have none of it, and had her bag out now and, between retches, was soundly cursing her “bloody damn crazy” cousin who had talked them into this.

  The copilot, seeing her distress, floated over by her side to offer words of reassurance.

  Jason drifted past Victoria and reached a hand out.

  “Care to dance, fair lady?” he cried, taking her hands, and for a moment they tumbled head over heels, laughing wildly. She caught a glimpse of her father, just floating, his gaze now glued to a top-side window.

  “Excuse me, good sir,” she said with a smile, and, breaking free from Jason, pushed off a bulkhead to float up by her father, reaching out to grab his shoulder as she drifted up to him. He pulled her in by his side, nodding to the window.

  “My God,” he whispered, “it is so beautiful. Remember when I taught you the constellations?”

  There was a catch in his voice as he looked at her and smiled, pointing to the window.

  She looked out and gasped. Never had she seen so many stars.

  “Orion, isn’t it, Daddy?”

  “Yup!”

  “And there’s Gemini. And, oh, that’s Sirius.”

  “Two-minute warning,” echoed in the cabin. “Everyone back in their seats at one minute, please.”

  “We only have a few seconds, angel,” her father said, and in her heart she suddenly wondered if he was speaking in a metaphor. That against that eternity of stars they did indeed only have a flicker of time, a few seconds to gaze in wonder and questioning and desire.

  There was a long moment of silence, father and daughter floating side by side, glued to the window.

  “Imagine a day when we can watch like this for hours on end,” he whispered.

  “You’ll be there with me, Daddy.”

  “Of course I will,” he said, and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  “‘For I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, and reached out to touch the face of God,’” Gary whispered. She could see her mother, turning to look up at him, eyes still filled with tears. And she teared up as well; it was a quote from his favorite poem.

  “One minute. Back to your seats, please.”

  “I love you, Daddy,” Victoria whispered, and kissed him on the cheek, reluctant to let go.

  “Back now,” he whispered, voice choked with emotion.

  She gently pushed off from his side, reaching down as she floated over her mother, hand brushing the top of her mother’s head. Eva looked up, smiling, and blew her a kiss. She tried to grab hold of a recessed handhold in the bulkhead to steady herself above her seat. A hand reached out; it was Jason, and she smiled a thanks as he steadied her.

  “Thirty seconds. Back in your seats, please, and buckle in.”

  She managed to coil her feet under her seat, grabbed hold of the armrests, and pulled herself down, fumbling to get her harness back on. The copilot, carefully and with cheerful professionalism, having left poor Edith’s side (the woman was decidedly green and miserable), worked her way from aft forward, checking with each passenger to ensure they were buckled in, reaching her position just as the pilot announced they were at zero for microgravity and starting reentry.

  The remarkable design of this craft now came into play as the wings began to rotate from what most would think to be standard position to nearly vertical, the wings now upright to act as brakes, to slow the craft as it reentered the atmosphere.

  Victoria was buckled in and then felt the first faint tug of gravity returning as the spacecraft, soon to be an earthbound glider again, having arced through its apogee and free fall, entered the upper atmosphere. The faint wisp of molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, the shield under which life existed on the surface below, struck the upturned wings, the friction of their passage slowing the spacecraft, the energy of their passage heating the passing molecules so that a plasma glow soon engulfed the spacecraft, gravity imparted by their deceleration building, reaching a full one g and then sliding up to more than two g’s, pressing Victoria deep into her contoured seat.

  She had learned to love the thrill of what she thought were high-speed turns in a plane, but nothing equaled this! And yet, already a burning nostalgia filled her—nostalgia for the few brief moments of freedom she had known above … in space.

  A hum echoed through the ship; outside the window the glow of superheated plasma, triggered by the braking effect of the upturned wings, pulsed and shimmered. The craft was coming into the atmosphere nose high, the glow shimmering in the forward view from the cockpit.

  “Maximum g’s 2.3,” the pilot announced.

  No big deal, she loved the sensation, such a transition from the zero g of but a few minutes before. A thought did strike her: the comments by Professor Garlin only a few hours ago. When the tower was finished, this experience would be gone forever; a simple ride up a very long elevator was how future generations would start their journey to the stars. No thundering rockets, no fiery returns like a blazing comet through the upper atmosphere, as ancient and soon lost as steam locomotives and horse-drawn carriages. Would there be a romantic nostalgia for this, as there existed for other things lost? Was Garlin right to anticipate resistance from the very people her mother and father assumed would be with them? She felt a tug in her heart, because at this instant she was having the ride of a lifetime and loving it, already
addicted to it.

  She could feel the g load easing off, the glow dissipating, a rumble of servos as the pilot shifted the wings from vertical to act as brakes, returning back down to the “normal” position for flight, a slight thump as they locked into place. She looked straight up, a final glimpse of a star—was it Sirius?—and then the blackness of space shifted to deep blue, nose pitched forward, the horizon visible, still a glimpse of the curvature of the earth, the space plane, now a glider, turning into a forty-five-degree bank, away from the approaching darkness of night turning 180 degrees, the ground below clad in twilight and dusk. They were somewhere over central New Mexico, mountains, desert—was that Albuquerque far, far below off their starboard side?

  “Sixty thousand feet, speed 1.3 Mach,” and now the copilot called out the numbers. Another forty-five-degree bank, nose a bit high, a slight buffet as they bled off speed and altitude, dropping below mach speed. Looking down, she caught a glimpse of the runway, lights on in the early twilight.

  “We’re on the numbers, folks: touchdown in two minutes thirty seconds.”

  One more banking turn, a final glimpse of the runway, now looming large, talk between pilot and copilot and ground control, all business now, as if she were just listening in on a standard commercial flight. She had learned enough as a student pilot to be able to follow most of it as they turned on to final approach, nose going up a bit, the thump of landing gear locking into place.

  The ground seemed to be racing in; they were coming in far “hotter” than any 172 or commercial jet. Nose dropped slightly; the four-point harness kept her locked in place as she tried to crane her head up higher to catch a glimpse of the final seconds, of final approach of the array of green lights to either side of the runway, a visual that they were on the proper glide slope, too low and the lights are red, too high and they shift to yellow. Now over the numbers and then a bit of a lurch, the audible squeal of tires striking pavement, and then a long rollout, at last coming to a full stop.

  “If you could please remain seated, harnesses secured, while our tug hooks up and tows us back to the hangar.”

  A moment later there was a bit of a lurch, the tow tractor hooking on to the forward wheel, and slowly they were pulled off the runway, the copilot out of her seat, grinning, squeezing her way past Victoria, bending over to check on poor Edith, patting her on the shoulder reassuringly, the woman looking up at her wanly.

  They came to a stop, a bit of chatter on the radio and intercom as the pilot ran through a shut-down checklist, the copilot unlatching the aft door.

  “All right, crew, we can disembark now. Start with the aft row seats.”

  Victoria unbuckled, stood up, her father already up, the copilot offering a hand. She felt a flash of concern; he did seem a bit wobbly as she guided him to the door, followed by Jason, then her mother and the British couple. She hesitated, then took a few steps forward to look over the pilot’s shoulder. He paused in his checklist and she knew protocol well enough not to interrupt at such a moment, but he looked up at her with a grin.

  “We’ll let you back in later: you can take the right seat and I’ll walk you through whatever you want to learn.”

  She smiled gratefully.

  “Just one quick question, sir.”

  “Sure.”

  “How was it for you?”

  He chuckled.

  “You’re the first one to ever ask me that.

  “How was it for me?” he repeated, as if to himself.

  “I was one of the last to be recruited for the astronaut corps. I started training to fly the Constellation but then the program was killed, as you know. Our friends building this snatched me up, thank God. This was my eighth flight, my fourth in the left-hand seat.”

  He looked forward, saying nothing for a moment.

  “To tell you the truth, of course I love it. It’s crazy that I am actually getting paid to do this. But”—he hesitated—“I’ll confess to you since you ask, as we reach apogee, I find myself looking straight up, wishing I could just go on forever, straight out to the stars.”

  She reached out to shake his hand.

  “I know” was all she could say in reply.

  “I’ll run you through the whole checklist later if you wish, but for now I’ve got a lot to do here and I suspect folks are waiting for you.”

  She headed aft, thanking the copilot, then took the few steps down the ladder and hit the pavement. Her parents were standing there grinning like kids, talking excitedly with their hosts. The Brit now made a show of going up to each and pinning wings to their collars.

  “Each one is numbered,” he announced. “Yuri Gagarin was number one, the first person to achieve space. You six are numbers 673 through 678. Someday I believe it will be in the millions. Wear them with pride.”

  He shook her hand after pinning the button to her collar, wings that she knew she would wear henceforth whenever she took to the air, and on the day she returned to space.

  “Now dinner awaits.”

  * * *

  Wheels up on the Gulfstream the following morning was decidedly anticlimactic for Gary after the experience of the evening before. If Franklin had planned all this out as some sort of therapy, it had most certainly worked. It had refocused the dream.

  They had said farewell to Victoria on the tarmac. The Brit was flying back to England and had offered Victoria a hop to Lafayette. He just hoped this did not blow things for her at Purdue. Fly out with Franklin Smith, fly back in with one of the most famous aviation and space innovators in the world. Jealousy in any field, especially academia, could surface in an ugly way at times. He also wondered how the boy back there would be treated. At dinner and later, standing outside the hangar, he noticed that the young man, Jason, seemed to have struck a chord with Victoria, the two standing somewhat close while looking up at the heavens and talking about their experience, and as that family boarded a plane for the flight back to Albuquerque and home, the farewell hug and kiss seemed to suggest they were more than “just friends.”

  Clearing 10,000 feet, Danny announced it was OK to unbuckle and move about. Gary and Eva went up to where Franklin was sitting, staring out the window, for once not already buried in his iPad. He motioned for them to shift the seats in front of him aft and sit down.

  “Everything all right, Franklin?” Eva asked.

  He nodded and forced a smile.

  “Those two guys are just about the toughest damn negotiators in the world, and that Fuchida—my God, he is one hard partner.”

  “How so?” she asked.

  He hesitated.

  “Look, I apologize if I did not let you in on the fact I had Fuchida all but locked up two years ago. They had the lead on nanotube development until that accident, and it was no rumor, it really happened. It was the perfect excuse for someone to kill his funding for, as they always say, ‘more practical things down to earth.’ The Japanese blew their lead at that moment, and that was when I moved in. I had to have the corner on the only material that could actually build a tower, and the assurance it could be manufactured at an industrial level before I took the next step of bringing in you two and going public with Pillar Inc.

  “Sorry I didn’t tell both of you up front, but in this game some things have to be compartmentalized.”

  “We understand,” Eva offered. Having started her education when the Soviet Union still existed, she definitely understood better than most to what extremes secrecy could go.

  “The Chinese wanted him, of course, and I had to outbid them. Let’s just say it was a bit tense and still is.”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “He will hold most of the patents, but I’ve locked him in on an exclusive ten-year right to production, though it will cost a bit more than I expected.”

  He chuckled and shook his head.

  “By the time this is done he’ll be the billionaire and I’ll be broke. Beyond that our two friends in New Mexico have some controlling interest in it as well an
d the manufacturing facility you were standing in yesterday.”

  “How much more?” Gary asked.

  “Oh, several billion more,” he replied vaguely.

  The way he said “several billion” was still startling for the two of them, who were used to decades of tight budgets defined as a few million.

  “I finally did get a contractual guarantee on first delivery with a penalty if delayed, with a bonus if ahead of schedule.”

  “How soon?” Gary asked.

  “Two years.”

  They said nothing. The way Franklin pitched his sales to investors, it seemed as if construction would start the moment he had the money in place, which was, of course, absurd. There was no telling how many billions had already been spent just getting to this point, and with the construction of the base at Kiribati, which was now employing thousands.

  “The problem now is our heavy lift vehicle.

  “Our two friends are also contracted for that. They promise delivery of the first in two years as well. Essentially it is a hybrid of the old Saturn V design augmented with solid boosters. There was a claim some years ago that the old blueprints for the Saturn V were lost. That’s crap. I have them; the original contractors still had the plans but no interest in building them again. So our new team is taking on the job.”

  “My God, that is putting a lot of eggs in one basket,” Eva said.

  “They’re the best at it. Why do you think they want a lock on the carbon nanotube design? It is not just about the tower. It will revolutionize earthbound and low trans-atmosphere flight forever. Once they get mass production going and fulfill our contracts, they’ll be turning out new aircraft with one-tenth the frame weight, capable of cost-efficient flights from here to halfway around the world in little more than an hour. But first we got to get enough ‘wire,’ as we’re calling it, and the heavy lift vehicles to loft the first strand, and I’ll confess I’m sweating it.”

  He looked out the window.

  “I just, shall we say, wrote out checks for twenty billion dollars last night for a—I hate to phrase it this way—a crash program to have the first test and beginning of actual tower construction in little more than two years.”