Pillar to the Sky

by William R. Forstchen

  They were back in business, and that night, alone, Victoria wept with gratitude … and remorse that her father was not there to share the moment.

  21

  Though still in an EVA suit she took a deep breath before opening the airlock door. It held for a second, resisting her grasp, for it had seemed like an eternity since this hatchway had been opened. There was always the chance the seals had atrophied, and before the door was opened, those on the other side had been ordered to don EVA gear as well.

  A slight rush of air—outward, actually—as the hatch popped open. She floated “down” through the opening, gazing about, trying to focus her attention on the three who awaited her, almost drawn up in a formal line, floating in the middle of the station.

  She extended her hand.

  “Commander Singh, it is an honor to meet you,” she said, avoiding the line her father had used more than two and a half years ago. “Permission to come aboard.”

  Singh extended her hand, grasping it.

  “Permission granted, Dr. Morgan, welcome aboard.”

  She next grasped the hands of Philips and Malady which quickly turned into hugs.

  “It’s been more than two years since we’ve seen another person,” Philips offered, almost as an apology.

  Victoria was nearly overcome with emotion, but on the day her father died she had learned to transcend that kind of display. Never show fear unless the one you trust is afraid, and never show open emotion if they were to get this job done, led by a woman barely in her mid twenties.

  The fact that she was even on this flight, the first manned mission back to the station since the collapse, was a testament to her inner fire and determination. Though easy on the surface, the agreement that NASA would take over control of Pillar Inc.—but, at the same time, Pillar Inc. would operate as a private firm and, upon completion of the tower, run it—had been complex. Exactly where were the management dividing lines between operations, design, deployments, launches, crews, and who owned what could have proven to be a nightmare. For a while it looked as if the open offer Victoria had made in Franklin’s name was turning into a lawyer’s dream: hundreds of lawyers arrayed on both sides, with enough paperwork that if loaded into a resupply ship would have grounded it.

  Fortunately there was a forceful president who cut through most of it with the sharp demand to get the job done, and quoting one of her old favorite miniseries—a western, also a favorite of Franklin’s—declared, “We make a deal fair to us and fair to you. Now everyone shut the hell up: we have a handshake with a man I trust. Now let’s get back into space.”

  Nearly all of the R & D team were shifted from the all-but-bankrupt Seattle firm, back under the aegis of NASA at Goddard, which had the most open space of any with their semi-deserted labs. NASA in no way could meet the payrolls some of them had been garnering in the private sector after going into exile from that beloved lab during the lean years. Many took the cut to see the project through, and for those who had legitimate financial issues, like four kids in college and grad school, “someone” would come through with a scholarship to help balance things out.

  Some would continue to work for a scaled-back Pillar, the way contractors from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Marietta, and other firms once filled the halls of Goddard as well. Launch costs would go fully to NASA and nearly overnight the Brit and his partner felt overwhelmed by the personnel coming in to their bases in New Mexico and their island in Kiribati, going over every inch of the launch vehicles that had been completed but waiting to go since the disaster and wanting to install additional backups and redundancies that would have added tons to the vehicles and required a year or more of downtime.

  The president, in an “informal” visit to the facility, talked about the risks Americans once took, including an ancestor of hers who had gone west in a covered wagon in a very different time when such risks were part of life and part of being an American. The message was clear: We will take risks to get the job done that we once accepted in the early days of NASA and must do so again if the dream is ever to be achieved. The video of the teams who were scheduled to go aloft, arrayed around Victoria, had carried the message home. They were volunteers ready to put their lives on the line. It was time to start flying again. The president closed her interview just before the mission lift-off by invoking Amelia Earhart: “In the days after her flight disappeared, did we ground all aviation? Did we shrink back and say we must rethink all this and not fly again until surely it was safe? Of course not: we forged ahead. And I ask you, what would she have told us to do?”

  It resonated, and since Kiribati was relatively close to where Earhart’s plane disappeared, Franklin had seized on the moment, and days later the main airport at Tarawa was renamed “Amelia Earhart International.”

  Not since the 1960s had there been such a flood of effort to rapidly assemble launch systems to haul up crews, supplies, and ribbon. There was, as well, out at Edwards Air Force Base, a new complex—for the time being kept classified—to test out another component of the system. This was where Victoria spent most of her time before launch. She was grateful when specialists were added to their team who had designed similar systems for the International Space Station twenty years earlier.

  And as for Victoria, her life had literally turned upside down. Franklin had moved her into the slot of vice president of Pillar Inc., which put her on the cover of nearly every magazine, on the Internet and in print, as one of the youngest top execs of the century—to which she replied that those before her, including Jobs, Gates, and Franklin himself, had achieved far more and started with much less when they were younger than she was now.

  With that behind her, she had bullied her way aboard the return launch to the station. It was not just a joyride, as critics screamed; it was management from above, and the term caught on. She needed a firsthand evaluation of what was already in place, what progress had been made during the lonely exile of the three, and when all would be in ready to resume construction. It was one thing to get a report; it was another thing to see it in person.

  “And besides,” Franklin whispered with a grin even while her mother objected, “it is the stuff of publicity, which we need.”

  Victoria temporarily shifted out of her position at Edwards, delighted to hand all the technical aspects over to an old NASA hand who was considered the real wizard of such systems and how to package them inside a standard loft vehicle, then get them up to geosynch as the first test models. She spent the following month at Langley, that old training center for Apollo and shuttle astronauts, an intense month of training, then out to New Mexico for more training, including several rides on the dreaded “vomit comet,” the aircraft designed to simulate zero gravity, at least for thirty seconds or so per parabolic curving flight at 30,000 feet. She actually held it together this time, with eight hundred hours of flight time under her belt and a commercial flight rating—not much compared to the real pros around her, but it was still enough to at least gain a tad of respect. It was a lot of sixteen- to eighteen-hour days. In a sense it was also a joyful release after so many years of academic discipline and increasingly complex business management decisions. The only thing she truly dreaded was the 7K conditioning run at dawn. Only someone who was truly perverted and a masochist could enjoy such a thing, she muttered every morning at six a.m. as she staggered to keep up with the pack of astronauts, who seemed to actually take pleasure in it all, her pale face lagging behind at times, pride demanding that she sprint to catch up at the end.

  She realized, though, that with NASA now fully on board in a team effort, she had to struggle to meet their traditional standards as well for this to go smoothly and for her to be accepted as more than just a mere “tourist.”

  As for Jason? She had called off the wedding. That had broken her heart and his. It was not that she did not love him; she did. It was just that too much had happened too quickly: the collapse, the death of her father, the mourning, the defense of her dissertation, and t
hen the months of preparation for the few minutes before the Senate that had changed everything.

  She had made a promise—“When everything settles down, we’ll settle down,” she told him—but for now …

  She knew that it hurt Jason more than it hurt her, and with all the transfers of personnel back and forth between Pillar Inc., NASA, and others, she found it interesting that Franklin had personally retained Jason as his “historical consultant.”

  The usual cheap gossip rags tried to make a play on the whole story with their tawdry headlines that someone else was in the picture with the rising young executive and, it seemed, the eventual heir to Pillar Inc. She could hardly walk down the street with a male colleague, regardless of age, without their grainy photos being spread about! When a Hollywood star, a longtime supporter of the space program, who had starred in a film about one of the most fabled moments in NASA history, came to New Mexico to “check it out,” took a ride on the Brit’s suborbital craft Spaceship One, and pronounced his wholehearted support for the program, the paparazzi truly swarmed, much to Franklin’s delight and her frustration. The tabloids plastered a photo of the actor giving Victoria an enthusiastic hug after the flight—which she had gone along on—even though the star was a happily married man and very much a “straight arrow” … and more than twice her age.

  “Why do you think I became so secretive?” Franklin said with a chuckle when she came into his office to vent, showing him the latest breathless broadcast on her iPad. He just smiled and said, “Welcome to fame.”

  And she was indeed famous. The young woman who had confronted a senator who had once defeated her father—and publicly brought the politician down—now was cited as one of the most influential executives of this renaissance of the space program. The senator had announced his retirement at the end of the year and there was already a scramble afoot for the special election to replace him, the front-runner an aggressive young man, the nephew of an astronaut of the Gemini days.

  They were riding a wave at this moment, but like Apollo, Jason had so rightly warned her, it could also be a bubble, with public attention popping in a day, racing to some other cause, and a year later the budget would be slashed again for some more pressing need “down here on earth.” Especially if another disaster hit like the last one. This time they had to do it right—there would be not third chance if this time they failed—and Victoria felt the entire weight of that on her shoulders and understood now why Franklin had seemed to age ten years in the last two, and her mother, back at Goddard, heading up the entire R & D team there on ribbon design, had appeared to drift as well. Still elegant, in the way that Ukrainian women seemed to manage well into their fifties and sixties, nonetheless the trauma of losing the one true love of her life had left its mark. Eva was still as dedicated a scientist as ever, but she had taken a much more mystical turn, speaking increasingly of how the Pillar would be not just a technological achievement to define the twenty-first century, but a renewed spiritual achievement as well, an act of faith that the future was boundless and would transform us.

  All of these factors had contributed to Victoria’s successful argument that she should occupy the fourth seat for the first manned return to the station in two years. Someone had, of course, pointed out the cost per pound of her estimated weight of 125 pounds, to which she retorted that if she could save the taxpayers a hundred million by what she learned and bring the Pillar in even a week ahead of schedule, that was the payback, and if not, she would personally find a way to pay back every dime of her trip. Her newfound friend in Hollywood announced he’d pay for half of her ticket if that day ever came, then slyly added that if that did not occur, he hoped for one of the first rides aloft on the ribbon.

  And now she had ridden the “throne of fire” into the heavens, launched from Kiribati.

  The ride up had been everything she dreamed it would be: the drama of the countdown, the kick in the butt of lift-off, the buildup of g’s, the momentary near-heart-stopping moment of first-stage separation and second-stage ignition, and what would perhaps forever be a haunting announcement: “You are go at throttle up.” Once in low earth orbit they aligned, made their next burn, and spiraled up to geosynch at 23,000 miles over the next day and a half. And if all went as planned, such manned flights would be as obsolete as steam trains and sailing ships, which, long after their useful passage, still held something of a spiritual place in the souls of so many.

  She floated in the middle of the station, looking about. It certainly had a worn and battered look about it, unlike the popular image of space stations with gleaming interiors of polished metal and white paint. It almost looked like the interior of a dingy warehouse, except for the startlingly brilliant shafts of sunlight pouring in through the portholes. To conserve on energy, the crew had long ago shut down the usual lighting system; besides, more than half the bulbs had burned out long ago.

  “OK to open faceplates?” she asked of Singh, and again flashed on a memory of her father.

  “Pressure is equalized,” Singh announced, looking back at her control station monitor, then opened her own faceplate and took off her helmet.

  Victoria did the same, and it was a tough struggle not to gag. The station reeked of more than two years of human habitation, which in the last months had been reduced to showers just twice a month to conserve water; and while one worked, the other two had to go to their bunks and remain motionless to conserve oxygen. The scrubbers and filters had long ago gone far beyond 150 percentage of usage and over the last month it had been a near-run thing. One scrubber unit had failed months ago. If a second went down after all this time aloft, they would have to abandon the station. In talking with Singh on the climb up, the commander of the station had dwelled on that more than anything else: get the new oxygen scrubbers and filters running before anything else!

  She looked at the three. Kevin had given up shaving and just trimmed his beard so that a stray hair did not somehow jam his helmet lock. He could easily have played the role of his fictional role model, the fictional Conan the Barbarian. Both Jenna and Singh had dropped a lot of weight and cut their hair short so as to not be troubled by washing it more than twice a month. Their uniforms were worn, faded, and loose-fitting as they began to take off their bulky EVA suits. Though less than ten years older than Victoria, Singh had streaks of gray in her hair.

  And yet … the three who floated about her were filled with delight, to a certain degree, although she could also sense a touch of defiance. They had come to work as such a perfect team, and they were not sure how to react to a “stranger” in their midst after their initial joy.

  She smiled, extending her hand to each, and instantly noted a certain deference—and knew why. She was the daughter of a former shipmate who had given his life.

  She figured it was best to start on a light note.

  “The resupply ship that has just docked has on board, compliments of NASA, a dozen pizzas from Luigi’s of Little Italy and something called cannolis, compliments of their chef; a dozen barbecue sandwiches from Phil’s Bar-B-Que Pit of Black Mountain, North Carolina; and a dozen various curry dishes. And yes, first priority: get a new oxygen scrubber online.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Singh replied, and for a brief instant Victoria was almost disappointed by the reaction. “Did you bring along water for showers? Even two gallons a person would be heaven.”

  “Ten gallons each just for today,” Victoria replied, “and a better recycling system to be installed so you can use it again and again.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Kevin of all people sighed.

  * * *

  The argument about the crew transfers was something Victoria had anticipated but not to this intensity. She assumed that, after two-plus years aboard the station, all three would be clawing at the airlock hatch to get the hell out of there in spite of their public statements about staying on no matter what. It was, in fact, the exact opposite of what the experts, newly rehired at Goddard, Langley, and
JPL, and who had once managed crews aboard the space station, had predicted.

  Rather than being “spacey” they had, instead, become so accustomed to their lives in space, and especially the freedom of microgravity, that a return to earth, with its dreadful gravity, its bustling crowds, and the feared flood of media had in fact become terrifying to them. Nor were there the traditional family ties that tended to bond crews back to earth. Two were single, one divorced, and none had children. The parents of all three were still alive; two sets of parents were ex-military who praised the ideal of service; the third, doctors who did missionary work in Mongolia of all places, went along with that ideal as well. The tragic bond of their fourth crew member whose wife and children had died in an auto accident did not compel them to look earthward with longing, desire, or even much nostalgia.

  They had bonded as a team, for a while not sure if they would even survive to the next day, especially when four months back a micrometeor less than half an inch across had blown clean through the main cabin, missing Singh by only several inches, while Kevin was out on an EVA. It was only Jenna’s instant reaction, slapping emergency patches on the entry and exit damage, that had saved them. And that “night,” with all comm links shut off, they had held Singh as she cried, admitting she had been so terrified that she had frozen in fear. The following day, comm links back open, scant mention was made of the incident, and her two comrades—her two friends—thought nothing less of her reaction and still clearly deferred to her as “the skipper,” as they had come to call her.

  They were bonded. In private they jokingly referred to themselves as “the monastery.” That, like the ancient monasteries of Ireland during the Dark Ages, they had continued to believe in the future and kept ancient and new knowledge alive. And like a monastery they had worked their way around what more than a few on earth, mostly the tabloids, did speculate about in terms of one man and two women floating about alone in space for more than two years. They had long ago reached a very clear understanding that such an issue could tear their unity apart and they were indeed a monastery on board their ship. The one interviewer who had, with a bit of a sarcastic smile, tried to raise that question nearly had his head ripped off by all three when he raised the issue in a live broadcast and they had refused any more interviews from that media outlet, or any other that treaded into that territory.