Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  “Please tell him I’ll be up as soon as I finish.”

  Lina maneuvered around them as Jackson picked his wife up in one of his bear hugs. After setting down her tray, Lina quickly turned to leave, but Lorena tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Dan, I want to introduce you to my sister, Lina.”

  Lina, looking terribly frightened, said nothing. Cooper, used to dealing with shy voters, gave her a big, easy smile that put most people at ease.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lina,” he said, trying to make eye contact as she looked for an escape route. If an individual resembles just one animal, then Lina was a mouse. A scared, timid mouse. Cooper felt momentarily put back, since connecting with people was what he was so good at. “Mucho gusto,” he even said in Spanish since he did not know if she spoke English. She did not even nod in his direction. Confused, he looked over at Lorena who was angrily signing with her hands. Ahh, Lina is deaf!

  “Thanks, Lina, for breakfast!” Jackson told Lina. As usual, he spoke louder than necessary, especially in this windowless tomb. As soon as Cooper let her hand go, Lina flew up the ladder, head down and radiating unease. Cooper, puzzled, looked at Henry for clues.

  “Eat!” Lorena commanded them, as if she actually cooked the meal. “Have you ever ate whale, Daniel?” she asked, then did not wait for a answer. “The rice and beans mixed together is called calentado. Then you have bunuelos and empanadas with a salsa called aji. And fresh fruit juice with a mixed fruit salad, which Henry has every morning. I make sure my man is well fed.”

  “I’ll say,” her husband chimed in to annoy Cooper as much as possible. “Lorena satisfies all of my appetites!”

  Lorena playfully slapped him on the shoulder, but he just pulled her on his lap as he sat down. The $5 white plastic chair groaned under their weight. Cooper could not imagine having such a physically comfortable relationship with his own stiff and proper wife who obsessed over the opinion of others.

  “Thank you, God, for all of your blessings,” Jackson whispered softly before digging in. Cooper knew that all the Jacksons said this before every meal.

  “Lorena, Lina, Lisa, and Linda. I’m a poet who doesn’t know it,” Jackson claimed, as if he personally named his wife and sister-in-law, much less his granddaughter. It was sheer accident that their names all began with the same letter.

  “Who’s Linda?” Cooper asked.

  “My granddaughter. My son named my grandson after me, and it only cost me a million bucks. I call him Big Henry cuz he’s growing up so fast, but everyone else calls him ‘H’,” he said, pronouncing the letter “awchee” in Spanish, “because he is often seen, but rarely heard.”

  “H” in Spanish is not pronounced.

  “You paid your son $1 million to name his son after you? I thought the first son of every generation of yours was automatically named Henry.”

  Cooper felt like he was falling behind the 8 ball. Jackson’s father, grandfather, son, and grandson were all named Henry. Remarkably, five Henry Jacksons lived under the same roof.

  “His teenage girlfriend was diagnosed with leukemia, and he wanted children from her before she died to always remember her. Her older sister was willing to undergo artificial insemination, but they first had to screen her egg for the genetic disease, or else risk passing it to the baby. Fortunately, my wife here is a geneticist, so between us we had a lot of resources at our disposal. David did his research and said it would only cost $500,000 to do all the genetic screening. As if he could sell me on the cost.”

  “It was so beautiful,” Lorena chimed in. “When David sat us down, we thought he killed someone again and were so relieved he just wanted a baby. He was very well prepared, with papers on the process, safety, success rate, etc. Henry here cut him short, said it was a great idea, and just asked how much. When David said half a million, Henry told him he better take a million because things like this always are harder and more expensive than one anticipates. Which turned out to be true.”

  “Yeah,” Jackson said expansively, stretching out his arms. “Having children with my son has brought us closer together. Now he barely hates my guts.”

  Which wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

  “Oh, I’ve got some great news!” Lorena suddenly generated more energy than a quasar. “David proposed!”

  “Proposed what?” Cooper was confused.

  “After Monique saved you from getting eaten by Henry’s damn dog, David found her crying in her bedroom. One scar would have ended her modeling career.” Lorena laid the guilt trip on him with the ease of a mother.

  “Chucha attacked Dan?” Jackson couldn’t believe it. Much less that Monique took on his hunting dog and, apparently, won. “And I’m just now finding this out?”

  Jackson hated being out of the loop. Why else did he pay people to monitor Twitter for him?

  “They’re getting married?” Cooper looked stunned, like someone sprung Fermat's Last Theorem on him. A very bad feeling trickled down his spine. He examined Jackson closely, but could only see his anger at being uninformed. He breathed a sigh of relief. This crushed his fantasy fuck, but that was probably for the best. And now he was even more curious to see her webpage.

  “Not only that. David gave her Lisa’s ring!”

  Now nothing made sense.

  “Why would Lisa give up her ring?” Jackson asked. “She loved that ring more than her fiancée.”

  Jackson was confused. Doing something so unselfish was very un-Lisa-like. Her ring was a symbol of how she got the best of him. Again. Why would she give that up?

  “I don’t know, but Monique is now wearing her ring.”

  Both men looked dazed at the news. They had too much on their mental plates to properly digest this appetizer. Then Lorena gave them a second helping.

  “I have some more great news,” Lorena told Cooper conspiratorially, leaning over so her ample chest dusted the card table. “I may be pregnant.”

  “Wow! Congratulations you two!”

  Cooper seemed genuinely shocked, which was not surprising. Not many grandparents intentionally have more kids. Most parents would prefer to skip the whole parenting stage itself and go straight to being grandparents, which offered all of the fun with few of the responsibilities.

  “Yeah, well, don’t start buying me cigars yet,” Jackson quickly cautioned. “Judging by the scale, I may be pregnant, too. The last time she told friends we were expecting a baby, she lost weight from lack of appetite while I gained weight by eating her food so it wouldn’t go to waste. People then asked which one of us was pregnant. No, we’ve had false alarms before. I ain’t gonna celebrate until I see the whites of his eyes. Or until Lorena looks like a snake who swallowed a pig.”

  He had reason to lower expectations. They had their egg and sperm frozen 18 years ago when they genetically screened the egg and sperm that became Lisa. They had lots leftover. If David didn’t have kids, they would have had them several years ago. Now that their grandkids were six years old, they wanted babies in the house again. Neither imagined Lisa would get married so young, and David seemed unable to get over the death of his beloved Evelyn. So they figured it was up to them.

  Lorena needed to screen their old egg and sperm with all of the new techniques developed since Lisa was conceived. You don’t mess with your children’s genes lightly. Well, other people don’t mess with their kid’s genes lightly. So it took time. Well, it took three years.

  Only in the last year was Lorena ready to artificially inseminate herself. Yet fertilizing the egg and sperm, then surgically implanting it in the womb was still more art than science, and failed more often than it succeeded. Perhaps because of her age, Lorena did not become pregnant the first two tries last year. Jackson, tired of getting their expectations up, declared that either the third one was the charm, or three strikes meant they were out. In other words, this is the last time they were going to put their emotions on this particular roller coaster.

  Cooper, looking at Lorena,
thought it was ridiculous for grandparents to have more children. He himself got along much better with his grandchildren than his children, those ungrateful fucks. Yet it seemed that nothing could make Lorena happier than getting pregnant again.

  “Well, I wish you both the best,” Cooper lied as sincerely as possible. Groucho Marx once observed that “the key to success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you’ve got it made.” Like most politicians, Cooper faked sincerity well.

  “Is your sister deaf?” he asked, taking a bite out of the whale. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was.

  “Oh, don’t mind her,” Jackson said dismissively. “She’s autistic, which means she doesn’t have great language and social skills. Her biological father thought she was retarded, which she isn’t, so he beat the crap out of her until he abandoned his family and blamed Lina. She can speak well enough to communicate, but still doesn’t talk normal. She actually prefers sign language because she thinks she sounds retarded when she speaks.”

  Which, unfortunately, was true.

  “Henry insisted that she come live with us when we got married,” Lorena pointed out proudly, kissing him as he ate. She made no effort to get out of his lap.

  Cooper didn’t want to get into something that he could not get out of, so he went into concerned politician mode.

  “I’m so sorry. And your father never returned?”

  Jackson laughed unpleasantly. Lorena flushed.

  “After like thirty years since abandoning his family, I get a message from Lorena’s family that he has been kidnapped and demanding some huge ransom. Well, this was too good to pass up, so I contacted the kidnappers to ask them how much to kill the son-of-a-bitch.”

  Jackson was now laughing too much to continue. Cooper, for the life of him, could not tell if Jackson was kidding or serious about killing his wife’s father. It was one of the many things about Jackson that disturbed him.

  “Any-hoot, it turns out that dear old dad was behind it all. He finally found out how rich we were and, instead of asking for forgiveness and money, which may have worked, set up this phony kidnapping.” Jackson laughed harshly as Lorena reproached him with a slap on the shoulder. “He must have crapped his drawers when he learned of my offer. From their surprised reaction, I think his buddies were sorely tempted to knock him off!”

  Lorena didn’t like it that her husband found this so funny. She was embarrassed that her biological father would stoop to something as despicable as arranging his own kidnapping to rob his daughter. She also found out that he had children by at least three other women, and supported none of them. Lorena was mad that her father was so good looking and smooth talking that he could fool so many women. He was why she feared infidelity.

  “That terrible man is not my father,” Lorena sternly told them. “My father was the one who raised us since we were kids, and treated my mother like a queen.”

  “The American Henry rescued in the Amazon?”

  “Oh, it was terrible!” Lorena still flinched from the memory. “Dad worked for years as an engineering supervisor for Texaco throughout Latin America. He had just married my mom and started working for Henry when they kidnapped him in Cali thinking Texaco would pay up. We were devastated.

  “Then Henry promised that he would either bring my new father back, dead or alive, or kill those who took him. I can still clearly remember his face when he told me. He was not kidding, either. I think it was that moment when I got a crush on him.”

  “I can’t believe your dad went with you in the Amazon.” Cooper knew his own dad would have written him off as God’s will and slept soundly at night.

  “Ah, hell. My dad had great jungle experience from when he got shot down in Vietnam, and brought along some Special Forces guys that he knew back in the day. Plus, my cousins love an excuse to shoot people.”

  Jackson’s book debut caused a big sensation in Arizona. His dad became an instant hero, which pissed him off. Jackson was already somewhat infamous as a billionaire, but this fleshed out his public image. Before he knew it, Democratic leaders asked him to run for governor.

  “After they got back safe and sound, I grew up fast,” Lorena continued. “I accelerated my schooling and convinced my momma to buy me pretty dresses so Henry would see me as a women. I almost died when I heard that he got a beautiful girlfriend from Cali! The girls in Cali are the hottest in Latin America. Just go to any mall like Chipi Chapi or Unicentro, and you’ll see ten times as many beauties as malls here.

  “I panicked and pressured my mom to get me breast implants. I was only 15, but I needed to hook him before someone else did. In case you didn’t notice, my own daughter recently did the same to me.”

  Cooper, ever the adroit politician, finished chewing his empanada and expressed it carefully. “It didn’t escape my attention.” Which was a huge understatement since Lisa’s big tits stunned him. No more public hugs for her!

  Lisa said she needed them for her tiny role in the Regolith movie and felt so proud of them that one could practically see the blood rush to her ego whenever she showed them off. Which was frequent. The real reason Lorena gave Lisa the over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders was to tie an anchor around her boyfriend’s penis so he did not swim away. Rance Gardener was a whale of a catch, and there were a lot of fish in the sea eager to nibble on his bait.

  “Lisa’s getting married this summer!”

  “Yes, Lisa showed me her engagement ring. I have to admit, I have never seen a more beautiful ring.”

  And wasn’t that the truth.

  Cooper thanked her for breakfast as she collected their empty plates, shocked at how much he loved the fucking whale. As Cooper watched her carefully walk up the ladder carrying the trays, he could not help but check out her ass and legs. Because she still had a flat stomach and a big chest, she looked real good from the front, but he had never checked her out from behind. The comparison to Ann fueled his resentments. Only the thought of becoming president and destroying Jackson calmed his nerves.

  24

  “Henry, let’s wrap this space thingy up fast.”

  Jackson was surprised Cooper wanted to continue, but he explained this much. He might as well finish it.

  “The Chimbo launcher gets people into orbit, and has the power to launch supplies directly to the Moon, but we still need a way to get everywhere else.

  “Unfortunately, nothing works in zero gravity, including humans. We grow 2-3 inches taller, our bodily fluids flow towards our head, our face and eyes get all puffy and our legs skinny, we lose calcium in our bones, our muscles atrophy, we get cardiovascular deconditioning, balance disorders, the toilets don’t flush without suction, we can’t take showers, we have to pee and poop in diapers, we can’t cook normal meals – we can’t even have sex without strapping our lover down.

  “95% of astronauts need medicine. I can’t think of a worse place to drug expensive workers than in space, where sudden decompression, which almost happened on Mir, can literally pop your eyes out. Russian cosmonauts are forced to wear a ‘core temperature monitor’, which is a penny-sized probe inserted up their butts. The toilet recycles urine into drinking water, so the crew could die of thirst if the toilet breaks.

  “No, micro-gravity sucks. We need mini-gravity. Humans just can’t be productive in micro-gravity, wearing diapers and anal monitors. Which means we need to make Ganymed, the largest Near Earth Object, our space port.

  “We land on Ganymed as it passes nearby, install mass thrusters, and carefully re-orbit it into a high earth orbit like satellite Vela 1A, just over 100,000 kilometers high. That makes it easy to retrieve capsules launched from Chimbo, which could be re-launched from Ganymed to a much longer and faster catapult on the Moon.

  “Ganymed has several trillion dollars worth of precious metals and we have to hollow it out anyways to shield us from cosmic radiation. We could make billions off tourism since surveys show that 60% of Americans would pay a year’s salary to get into space. Yet at the sa
me time, Ganymed offers four trillion tons of mass, whose gravity will do our bodies good. Workers will be less sick and medicated, and thus more productive. After a Russian cosmonaut spent a year in orbit, he could barely walk after a week back on Earth since he lost so much muscle mass and bone tissue. In contrast, people could live years on Ganymed aided by heavy boots and arm weights. Compared to micro-gravity, bathing, defecating, and sex in mini-gravity will seem almost normal.

  “Because of cosmic radiation and zero-gravity-related illnesses, we want all trips through space to be as short and fast as possible. The Chimbo launcher can accelerate non-living payloads at 20 constant g’s directly to the Moon, while people and animals would get to the Moon’s launcher via Ganymed. A long lunar catapult could send capsules and ships to Mars in just a few weeks, and a similar launcher on Mars could return them just as fast.

  “At a constant acceleration of 5 g’s, a thousand mile long lunar launcher could shorten trips to the outer planets from several years to several months. A similar launcher on the largest moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune would send capsules back just as fast. Maglev catapults could make the entire solar system accessible and affordable by keeping the fuel and the propulsion system on the ground. Like airports, maglev launchers could turn something extraordinary into something routine.

  “Chimbo gives us a space port, which gives us the Moon, which gives us the solar system and a better platform to study the universe. Navigation, global warming, ballistic missiles, satellite communications, and nuclear weapons all derived from astronomical observations. Europeans would never have dominated the world without first studying the stars.

  “Astronomers have always wanted to put scopes on the Moon. The Moon has no atmosphere to obscure telescopes, and it provides a steady platform because it is seismically dead. Because the Moon rotates only once every 28 days, it has 28 more days to collect light, meaning it could see 28 times better simply by focusing on a distant object for 28 times as long. So we want thousands of optical telescopes, all focusing for long periods at specific objects. And because of the light gravity, we could build telescopes five times heavier than the heaviest on Earth.