by Jerry
“Now I’m wishing we had an auto-destruct sequence,” I mused sarcastically.
“You think this is a TV show?” Valkyrie said. “No can do, Chopper. No reactor overload. No explosives lining the hull. That’s movie theater stuff. And if you can’t stop the Chinese, then it’s basically game over. I’ll have to report to my bosses at the Pentagon that ODIS let the Chinese commit orbital theft of US military property.”
I stared—via proxy eyes—at the space around me. The layout of the station. The unfinished spars and beams poking out at different angles. Then my eyes hit something I’d not considered before. And as I watched the limb of the Earth drop away and disappear, I suddenly realized what I had to do.
After training was over, it took Chesty and me a few sorties to really get the hang of things. Even with the many, many hours logged in simulation, the real thing took just that much more adjustment, before we began to feel proficient. After that, it was very much a lunch bucket job.
“They used to make people with doctorates do this,” I said to no one in particular as Chesty and I—our proxies—maneuvered a collapsible strut out of the yawning cargo bay of a Centurion rocket’s third stage. Our feet were identical to our hands, and we “walked” our way up and down the slowly-growing superstructure of Ride Platform.
“Did they get paid any better?” said one of the team, a Navy Chief Petty Officer designated as Skips.
“I dunno,” I said. “But it just seems hilarious to me. This is hard-hat stuff. We’re a construction crew, y’all.”
“If anyone ever saw a construction crew in robot form,” Chesty said.
“Quick, someone scratch his robot crotch.”
“Is it break time yet?”
“I forgot my lunch box!”
“How about a beer instead?”
“No beer in space.”
“No beer? I want to talk to the union!”
The one-liners continued to reel from all lips, and pretty soon we’d all been reduced to painful laughter, our proxies emulating us as we hunched, our torsos and heads bobbing—letting it out.
“Okay kids,” Valkyrie’s firm, maternal voice said in our ears. “Play time is over. That will do. You’ve still got a lot of stuff to unload from that Centurion before the sortie is over. And your batteries are draining every second you waste hamming it up.”
The lot of us yesmammed and shut up, though snickers could still be heard here and there.
Having affixed our collapsed strut to its designated hard point, Chesty and I went back to the Centurion and began taking out another.
I noticed there was a rudimentary control board up near the nose cone, tucked just inside the cowling.
“Mind if I take this thing for a test drive, boss?”
If Valkyrie couldn’t see what I saw, she at least inferred what I meant.
“Sure,” she said. “There’s plenty of orbital burn fuel in the tanks, if you want to use it. Take the nose cone off and the third stage has a hard dock that allows us to mate it with the Platforms and boost their orbits, when it’s necessary. Usually we run it from ground, but the Centurion has a manual backup system—just in case.”
“Just in case,” I said, thinking how fun it would be to get behind the “wheel” of a rocket ship in orbit.
The Chinese had all but ignored the Centurion.
Its clamshell bay doors hung open, inviting.
“Chesty,” I said. “One of us has to get to the third stage. If we can’t take the Platform away from them, maybe we can take it down with them still aboard.”
“What?” Chesty said, breathing heavily. “I’m a little damned busy right now, Chopper.”
“Hold them off—I’m going for it!”
“Chopper—” but Valkyrie’s words were swept from my ears as I sprang across the Platform, covering meters with every move. I think the Chinese might have suddenly figured me out, because Chesty announced that they’d turned her loose. She was coming up after them as they came up after me.
I made it to the Centurion’s open bay, found the manual control panel, and began pushing buttons.
After the first time I saw the manual controls—while working on Ride Platform—I got curious, and pleaded with Valkyrie to let me see the Centurion’s operational specs. No sense holding back. Otherwise what was the exchange officer program for? I wanted the full skinny, nuts and bolts and nozzles and gears.
She had reluctantly agreed.
And now I believed this knowledge was our best, last hope.
The control panel lit up and announced via flashing LCD screen that the fuel pumps were being primed. Precious seconds ticked away as the Chinese came on. Wherever they thought they were taking the Grissom Platform via its own RCS, I was about to ruin their day.
Just when the Chinese—and Chesty—had almost reached me, I stabbed at the cheerful orange IGNITE button, and latched onto the control panel’s protective rails with both hands and feet.
The Platform lurched and shoved, the sudden thrust from the Centurion causing it to begin spinning on a new axis as the Platform’s own RCS went out of whack. Chesty just barely had time to grab hold of a support beam before the Chinese tumbled away and hung like cat toys on the ends of spongy strings. They flailed and kicked, but it was no good. The torque was too much for them.
But my proxy held fast, and I—safely on the ground—felt none of the deleterious effects of the spin.
“What are you doing??” Valkyrie demanded.
“I’m taking the Platform out,” I said.
“By whose authorization, Chopper?”
“Ma’am,” I said, “if I can’t have an auto-destruct, it’s up to me to effect a manual destruct. I’m going to try and push us down into the atmosphere. The Platform, the proxies, the Chinese, all of us.”
Silence.
I suddenly imagined my boss being the chief witness at my court-martial.
“It’s the only way,” I said.
“He’s probably right,” Chesty said, agreeing. “We don’t have any weapons, and the proxy batteries will run out sooner or later. And then the Platform belongs to the Chinese. Would you rather tell your bosses at the Pentagon we sank the ship and took the enemy with us? Or let them have it without a serious struggle?”
More silence.
Then, with a reluctant sigh, “Go.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said.
The manual controls were difficult to finagle, with the Platform’s own RCS mucking up the trajectory. But I could already tell it was working. We were spiraling in. Faster and faster. And while the proxy had what it took to withstand the centrifugal gee, I could tell just by looking that the Chinese were in no position to stop me.
The Earth grew steadily larger as we went down, the Centurion’s fuel gradually bleeding to fumes.
“Got any last words, Marine?” I said to my partner.
“I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” she said, half-mocking.
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
I began to wonder what it would be like to re-enter in proxy form.
I decided it was prudent not to find out.
The news called it an unfortunate accident. The fireball had streaked across the skies of one ocean and two continents, before what remained splashed down a hundred miles off the Hawaiian coast.
The Chinese never said a word, other than to offer some back-handed condolences for the loss of the hardware.
Chesty and me?
Well, we didn’t get court-martialed.
Valkyrie did have to report to the Pentagon and she did have to do some rather extensive explaining—thank goodness for the proxy recordings giving the generals a front-row seat to the action—but in the end, the spiking of the Grissom Platform was deemed not only necessary, but valorous.
Though, Chesty and I both felt a bit sheepish receiving awards for a thing which had not, technically, placed either of our lives in danger.
But then, war had become more and m
ore like that. The machines were doing the fighting, as well as the labor. I wondered what someone like Kipling might have thought of that? And decided I wasn’t entirely sure.
When the dust ultimately settled, Valkyrie put us back to work.
“You broke it,” she told us. “You build another one in its place.”
Our exchange officer tours were extended.
The work was, well, work. But satisfying work. And the Chinese didn’t try another stunt on our watch, so thank goodness for small miracles.
The true surprise showed up six months after Chesty and I left Hill.
It was a manila envelope, delivered certified USPS, from the Navy offices in Florida—where they still trained real astronauts.
Inside was a formal memo informing me that, if I chose to accept it, the Navy would gratefully accept me for another exchange officer tour. This time as part of the next year’s class of astronaut candidates. I scanned the list of names who’d already accepted, and saw MAVELINE STODDARD.
Well, hell, who am I to let that Marine show me up?
THE FAMILY ROCKET
James Van Pelt
The thing about stories is there’s the ones you want to tell, and there’s the one that happened. I’ll hold off telling you which kind this one is.
“My family is . . . eccentric.” I helped Rachael squeeze under the chain link fence. She’d worn a nice flannel shirt and jeans that were already muddy. But even by the distant street’s uneven lights wavering through tree branches, she was beautiful.
I waved at the security camera, although it was unlikely my parents would be watching the monitor.
She laughed in that low-throated way that made me tingle as she brushed off her pants. “Everyone’s family is eccentric. Besides, I love you. Are you afraid they’ll scare me off?”
“We’ll see.”
“Where are we?”
I led her onto the beaten and oil soaked dirt inside the fence. After pushing a hundred yards through damp underbrush, Papa’s salvage was a relief.
“My father’s junk yard.”
“You told me already your family was in the recycling business.”
A mountain of broken cars blocked our view, but the river murmured beyond. My childhood home stood beside it, out of sight on the yard’s other edge, where my young life had been spent, exploring the ever changing landscape, finding treasure, hunting rats.
“Papa wanted us to go to space,” I said, holding her hand. We wended our way through a shadowed passage, metal towering on both sides.
“That’s a good dream.”
“No, not a dream. An obsession. He lived for Mars and Venus and Neptune. He filled us with his desire.”
Above, in the narrow gap that revealed the sky, Papa’s stars glittered and winked.
Rachael paused, holding me back for an instant. I could feel the box with its diamond ring promise weighing heavily in my pocket. Could I ask her? Did I dare?
See, there’s a story about Rachael and the ring. That’s a story that could go many ways. In some, I ask her. In others I don’t. In a couple, she asks me before I get up the nerve. Those are nice ones. And, of course, there’s what actually happened.
“But your family . . . never any money, you said.”
Rachael’s family lived with wealth. She spent summers in Europe, cruised the Bahamas on her parents’ yacht.
“The equipment was always a week from breaking down.”
“A ticket on a rocket ship costs a fortune.”
“Ten fortunes.” Commercial space travel had been around my entire life. Flights left daily for the inner planets, but only the very, very rich could escape. Space was not for my father, or my mother, or the six children. “But Papa convinced us we went to Mars, one summer. The trip to Mars . . .” I laughed. “Mars is our Santa Claus, and the moon is our Easter Bunny. Fairies were asteroids and comets were our happily ever after.”
“So, you never went.”
“That’s just it. We did. Papa bought a rocket ship, worked on it, and took us to Mars. Oh, it was glorious too.” I remembered the ship’s rumbling beneath us, the stars through the windows, and then, finally, Mars swimming into view, a ruddy red stoplight.
“A private citizen can’t buy a spaceship,” Rachael said. “You can’t launch one from a junkyard.”
“That’s true. I found out about a year later. He’d faked the whole adventure. The ship was a mockup he’d bought for the salvage, but instead of melting it down, he bolted automobile engines into its base, and fitted the ports with 3D view screens. He shepherded us aboard, started the engines, and took us on an imaginary voyage. We were so young! But the trip was a fairy tale, all illusion so we would believe we’d traveled to space. The thing is, we never talk about it as if it was a story. My family maintains the story, and I think Papa, over time, has come to believe it. Maybe he always believed it.”
“Your dad is delusional?”
“For years.” The junk yard corridor turned in an unexpected direction and forked. I took the right passage. We had moved past cars. Flattened refrigerators, ovens, washers and dryers, stacked like giant, wrinkled playing cards created the walls. “He’s eighty now, retired, my brother and sister run the yard while Papa works on his rocket ship. They say he spends all his time there, tinkering, making ‘improvements,’ He won’t let them near it now.”
“Your father sounds like a romantic. Taking his children to space. That’s sweet. He must have loved you very much.”
Before I’d moved away from home for good, we’d fought, standing near his ridiculous rocket, his puppet show. I’d belittled him. I’d told him he was a fool. He’d spent thousands of dollars on his space ship. Even as I walked away, I regretted yelling at him. I loved going to Mars; I loved him for taking me, but when we hurt family we bring out the nuclear bombs. For years after he didn’t talk to me. Even Mama took months to forgive me. Every time I came home, that argument’s echo filled the house.
Painful parts in real stories are the hardest to tell. Maybe that’s why we pay professional strangers to listen to them, or we figure ways to disguise them in fiction. They happen to other characters, not us. What I’ve said here might have happened exactly the way I’ve said it, or maybe I made myself less an asshole than I was. There’s no way for you to know, but I do, no matter how often I tell it.
“He’s an insane saint, my papa. I want you to see the ship. It’s the best way you’ll understand what you are getting into with me, with my family. We are poor, Earth-bound, and crazy.” That came out with more bitterness than I meant. When I was ten, the summer we flew to Mars, I’d dreamed about the stars. Papa took me to launches. Once, we toured a launch pad. Exhaust had coated every surface within a hundred yards with “blast glass,” a thin, black layer of brittle chemical remnants created in the superheat and rocket fuel and tortured air.
I’d kept a piece in my dresser for years, like obsidian, dark as space, sharp and cool and magic.
Papa’s secret. Papa’s hidden life. Papa’s reality. We hadn’t told our cousins or aunts. The uncles didn’t know, nor did our friends, but now when the children came home for holidays, now with their husbands and wives, we’d be sitting at the table, and Papa, losing his mind, would light his pipe. “This reminds me of the trip we took. Remember when we passed the moon? We were together then, we were.”
Everyone laughed, even my in-laws. They nodded knowingly. Alzheimer’s. Senile dementia. I forced my smile. We never, never, never went to Mars, and we never, never, never escaped for even a minute the junk yard. We were buzzards. Hyenas with presumptions of grandeur, feeding off metal carcasses. If Rachael could love me knowing that, then we had a chance. I would give her the ring.
The dogs leapt on us then. Rachael didn’t scream like many would have. They almost knocked me over, quiet as ghosts, as deadly as circus clowns. The two huge, black and brown dogs licked my hands.
“Good security force,” she said, then rubbed one playfully between its ears.
“What’s to steal?”
“Your life was here. This is a valuable place.” She waved her arm to encompass moonlit aluminum-can bales, rusted water tanks, jumbled wire in bird’s-nest bundles. “And when you were a child, this is where your dad took you to Mars.”
“This is where my dad filled my head with . . .” What? Junk? False hope? Sometimes at night, years later, when I thought I would never get away, I’d lie on the porch, looking at the constellations. The river whispered its mockery in the background. Precarious metal mountains teetered in the yard. Some nights, I’d see a real rocket’s silvery streak, and the noise would caress me, like distant thunder rolling, rolling, rolling.
“You’re too serious,” she said. “This is beautiful at night. I’m looking forward to meeting your dad and the whole family.”
I laughed. “They won’t know what to make of you.”
“I wanted to go to Mars too.”
“But . . . you could. What’s stopping you?”
She squeezed my hand. “There’s country club rich, and there’s buy tickets to space rich. Besides,” she said, “I didn’t have the right person to go with before.”
That’s when I knew I would ask her to marry me, regardless of my family, regardless of my dreamer father and his trip to the stars.
That’s the truth, no matter how I tell the story. Before Rachael said I was the right person to take to the stars, I hoped she was the one. Afterward, well, the heart knows itself.
I was eager, now, to find the path through the metal piles and to show her the rocket. We’d look at it standing in the moonlight, and then I’d walk her to the house. Mama would be at the kitchen table, sorting through the bills or reading a book. Papa might be there too, although he could be in the yard somewhere, exploring by flashlight, or he could even be at the rocket. Maybe I’d introduce Rachael to him in the rocket’s night-time shadow.
The path led downhill, and I knew we were close. The rocket stood at the bottom of a shallow hollow so it was not visible from the road or the house, and finding it so suddenly startled me. We rounded twisted iron girders in tumbled stacks and saw her, stained by time, but still glistening, reflecting the moon’s bright light, a tall, silvery bullet. Rachael gasped.