Project Rescue

by Mark Kelly

  “Me neither,” said Scott. “I think I was kind of in shock after our conversation, like my brain got scrambled.”

  “For your brain, that’s not shock, that’s normal,” Mark said.

  Scott ignored his brother. “Egg said something like how she and Howard and Lisa had a surprise for us, and because of the whole cosmonaut thing they were going to tell us earlier than they planned to.”

  “I think Egg said they got help from her mom even,” Mark said. “The only exact word I remember her using is ‘big.’ I’m sure she said that: ‘big.’ ”

  “You know,” Mom said, “I hear from my dad—your grandpa Joe—pretty often. He’s mentioned the O’Malleys more than once, but never anything about a big surprise. Of course, my father is pretty good at keeping his mouth shut.”

  “Can we turn on the radio, Dad?” Scott asked. “Maybe there’s more news from space.”

  “Yeah, it could be by now the Soviets have made the repairs themselves,” Barry said.

  “Hope not,” Mark said.

  “Seriously?” Barry looked at Mark.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I want the guy to be okay,” Mark said. “It’s just—”

  “—just that you want the chance to play hero.” Scott finished his sentence.

  “That’s not it at all,” Mark said.

  “Yeah, it is,” Scott said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Mark said.

  “Ow!” said Barry.

  “Sorry,” said Scott. “I meant to kick my brother.”

  “Boys?” Mom looked over her shoulder—a warning look. The twins shot her their most innocent smiles, and she turned her attention to the radio. First she found an old Elton John song, “Rocket Man,” which seemed appropriate. After that there was the weather forecast, clearing with highs in the forties. When finally the news came on, the cosmonaut got only brief mention. Still up there. Still stuck. Mechanical problem still unknown.

  The only new piece of information was this: “Russian sources refuse to comment, but a noted American space expert says the Salyut station typically can provide breathable air for about thirty days.

  “Provided first that the spacecraft has not sprung a leak and second that the cosmonaut does not overexert himself, he should be able to survive comfortably for approximately eleven more.”

  All three boys had the same thought: eleven more days, and after that . . . what?

  * * *

  It was a few minutes before nine o’clock, still early by the twins’ weekend standards, when the Kelly family’s station wagon turned off the road onto Grandpa’s unpaved driveway. Dad had barely set the parking brake when Scott and Mark tore off their seat belts and blasted out of confinement in the backseat.

  Barry was not far behind.

  For his part, Grandpa must have been watching, because only a moment later the front door flew open, and he rushed down the path to meet them.

  A widower who lived by himself, Joe McAvoy had never been much on hugging . . . until the Crazy 8 orbit in the fall. Mom said she had always wondered what it would take to touch the old coot’s heart, and now she knew: It took one of his precious grandsons returning from space in a homemade rocket.

  Grandpa Joe clasped the twins in a grizzly-size bear hug, then backed away to get a better look. “You’ve gone and done it again,” he sighed. “Grown some more, I mean. You do it even though you know darned well that it makes an old man feel older.”

  “We can’t help it, Grandpa,” Mark said.

  “We’d stop if we could,” Scott added. “Who wants to be a boring old grown-up anyway?”

  “Darned right. Better to stay a kid. Lord knows I’m doing my best.” Grandpa straightened up and looked over the twins’ heads. “And here you’ve brought your pal Barry, and he’s grown too.”

  “It’s good to see you, Mr. McAvoy,” said Barry.

  “Good to see you too, son, even if you are six inches taller than you were in the fall. Who else did you bring with you? Why—who’d’ve thunk, there’re your parents! Where’ve you all been hiding yourselves, anyway? And don’t say ‘work.’ Work is a pretty weak excuse.”

  “Easy for the retired guy to say, Joe.” Dad slapped Grandpa on the back, and Mom gave him a quick kiss on his unshaved cheek.

  Grandpa was indignant. “Retired? I’m busier than I’ve ever been in my life!” he said, and as they all walked up the path to the house, he recounted the projects he had going—everything from rototilling the garden patch to fixing up his classic truck.

  Meanwhile, as the radio weather had predicted, the gray clouds broke to reveal patches of blue sky. They were almost to the front door when the sunshine caused something out beyond the fir trees to flash white.

  “What’s that?” Mark pointed. “Over toward the lake?”

  Grandpa replied, “Nothing,” then put his hand on the small of Mark’s back and tried to nudge him toward the house.

  Mark would not be nudged. “You didn’t even look, Grandpa! See it, Barry? Over by the launch site—or near it, anyway.”

  By now Mom, Dad, and Scott were looking too. “Whatever it is must be awfully tall,” Mom said.

  Suddenly, Scott felt as if the air had been sucked from his chest. “Wait a sec. Grandpa, is that the surprise?”

  “Nope.” Grandpa had stopped walking but still refused to look. “That is, what surprise? I don’t know about any surprise.”

  Mom bit back a smile. “You may be good at keeping your mouth shut, Dad, but you are the world’s worst liar.” Her words were just out when everyone heard the sound of tires on gravel behind them. A car was coming up the driveway.

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  “Phew, that is a beauty!” Grandpa said about the car, a yellow Cadillac old enough to have fins above the taillights but so clean and shiny it looked brand-new.

  Only one person around had a car like that: Nando Perez—Lisa’s dad, the auto shop owner who had helped the kids with Project Blastoff.

  Egg was the first to jump out of the Cadillac, followed quickly by Lisa and her dad, and then . . . eventually . . . Howard.

  There were hugs, exclamations, and good feelings all around. Mark gave Howard a playful punch on the arm and asked, “Good to see you, man. I bet you missed Scott, Barry, and me, huh?”

  Howard knit his brows thoughtfully, then said, “Not really.” Everybody laughed except Howard, but he didn’t seem to mind. Last year when Egg had introduced her friend Howard Chin to the twins, the twins hadn’t liked him. He seemed unfriendly. He didn’t get jokes. He rarely smiled. It was a while before they realized both that Howard was different, and that different wasn’t necessarily bad.

  It helped when they found out Howard had his own computer at home, an Altair 8800, and he knew the BASIC programming language. Howard’s computer had supported Mission Control for Project Blastoff.

  Without him and without it, there was no way the Crazy 8 spacecraft could have gone into orbit or returned to Greenwood Lake, either.

  “What’ve you people done with Peggy?” Grandpa finally asked.

  “My mom’s, uh . . . out of town,” Egg said. “I talked to her this morning, though. She said she wished she could be here. She said to say hi to everybody.”

  Meanwhile, Mark was getting impatient. “So what’s this surprise, anyway?” he asked. “I think it has something to do with that white thing over by the launch site. Let’s walk over and find out.”

  “Let’s drive over,” Barry said.

  Mark shook his head. “You are as lazy as ever.”

  “I keep telling you it’s not laziness, it’s a matter of conserving resources,” said Barry.

  “Yeah, if you say so,” Mark said. “But either way, I am walking. Who’s with me?”

  Everybody was with him, it turned out—even Barry. And as they walked it soon became obvious that Grandpa, Mr. Perez, and the kids from West Milford were having a hard time containing their excitement. Whatever the surprise was, it had to be a doozy.


  * * *

  Barry, Scott, and Mark had found the launch site for Project Blastoff one day the previous August. That morning they had gone rowing out on Greenwood Lake, and they were walking back to Grandpa’s cabin for lunch. From the shore of the lake, the path went over a ridge and then down into a scrubby field that a developer had cleared for houses he never got around to building. The field was hard to see from either the lake or the road, and it was further protected on the roadside by a stand of trees.

  The boys agreed that the field was perfect for their purposes—especially because it was so close to Grandpa’s barn, where the spacecraft was being built. As best they could, the kids modeled the launch site layout after the NASA facility at Cape Canaveral in Florida, only theirs was vastly shrunken and simplified.

  In fact, like Crazy 8 itself, it had had a patched-together look. It was bare dirt, not asphalt, and there were weeds and even tree stumps here and there. The blockhouse that enclosed their own Mission Control had started life as a metal gardening shed, then been wired for electricity and reinforced with cinder blocks to protect from the blast of the rocket. Grandpa had borrowed some orange painters’ scaffolding, which they set up next to the rocket to act as a service gantry and provide access to the spacecraft at the top.

  Mark hadn’t been to the spot in months, but its appearance was permanently impressed on his mind. After all, this was the place where he had spent the most challenging and emotion-packed ninety minutes of his life, ninety minutes during which he had seen his brother launched into the sky and then done everything in his power to bring him safely home.

  Now, as he moved toward it through the trees, Mark looked to his right and saw several enormous construction vehicles parked in a row as well as the metal skeleton of a building much larger than the puny blockhouse they had cobbled together. His heart sank.

  “Wait—did that developer guy come back to start building the subdivision?” he asked. “Is that the surprise?”

  “Not exactly.” Egg was grinning.

  The path made a sharp curve, and then they emerged from the trees. The area had been paved, and the new building by the construction vehicles appeared to be a hangar, like a garage for airplanes or spacecraft.

  But that wasn’t the amazing part.

  The amazing part was straight ahead, a three-stage rocket, its bottom and top sections black-and-white, the middle section silver, that rose 150 feet above a steel-framed base. The space vehicle was enmeshed in a web of cables and pipes. Beside was an elaborate orange scaffold, the launch support tower. It was a lot taller and sturdier than the puny structure they had relied on for Project Blastoff.

  What they were looking at, in other words, was a compact but up-to-date launch complex—a vision so extraordinary that no one was able to speak for several seconds, not even the locals who had seen it before.

  Mark felt as though he had walked from his grandfather’s cabin to a sci-fi dream of a space station on an alien planet. Scott was equally overwhelmed, but also the first to find his voice. “Is there an elevator?” he asked.

  Egg crossed her arms over her chest and looked at him—disgusted. “Is that all you’ve got to say? Do you know how hard we worked? Do you even know what that is?”

  “I do.” Mark’s voice quavered. “It’s a Titan II rocket, the kind NASA used for the early Gemini missions ten years ago.”

  “And way, way, way up there”—Barry’s voice was a whisper—“that’s a Gemini spacecraft, isn’t it?”

  “It’s an Apollo command module,” Howard said. “Three seats but without the lunar components. And yes, there is an elevator, Scott.”

  “Good,” Scott said, “because I’d be exhausted if I had to climb that high wearing a space suit. Those things are heavy.”

  Now Egg was really annoyed. “Uh, excuse me, but who says you’re gonna be the one to fly in it?”

  Lisa sighed. “Here we go again.” Being afraid of small spaces, she was the only one of the kids who didn’t want to go into space.

  “What . . . ,” Mr. Kelly began. “How . . . ? Can someone please . . . ?”

  “It’s mighty pretty, isn’t it?” said Grandpa Joe. “But I wish I’d had your help with getting the permits. It took a lot of fast talking before the town planners were won over. And there may have been some arm-twisting from outsiders, too. Peggy wasn’t too free with all the details.”

  “Do you mind just starting at the beginning, please?” Mom said. “How did this all get here?”

  Chapter 8

  * * *

  The story was this.

  One day soon after Project Blastoff’s success, Egg, Lisa and Howard had been sitting together at lunch when they had an idea. It would be dumb if, after all the work they put in, the Greenwood Lake launch site just got overgrown with weeds and brush and disappeared. It ought to be useful somehow, useful for another space mission.

  “But we couldn’t figure out how to make that happen,” said Lisa. “We were busy with school and everything.”

  “And they couldn’t exactly sneak around and operate on their own the way you kids did last summer either,” said Grandpa. “After Project Blastoff, everybody knew what they were capable of. If they had started working out here, or borrowing materials, it would have been obvious that something was up.”

  “So this time we decided to get grown-up help—and grown-up permission—from the beginning,” Egg said.

  “And they came to me,” said Grandpa.

  Egg nodded. “You and my mom and Mr. Perez.”

  Mr. Perez, like his daughter, was a person of few words. Now he smiled.

  Grandpa nodded. “And you asked if we, being grown-ups and responsible citizens, would be willing to invite NASA representatives to visit us here for a little confab. Frankly, I’m not sure NASA would have paid any attention to us except that Peggy—Egg’s mom—has those connections of hers there.”

  The grown-ups agreed it would be a shame if the launch site deteriorated. So they issued an invitation. In response, a delegation of NASA officials came to New Jersey and took a tour of the launch site with Mrs. O’Malley, Egg, Lisa, Howard, Mr. Perez, Grandpa, the kids’ science teacher, Mr. Drizzle, and one more person. His name was Steve Peluso, and he was a smart kid the West Milford kids knew from school.

  Egg didn’t like Steve Peluso. She thought he was conceited. Also, he had beaten her out for the blue ribbon at the science fair three years running. Much to everyone’s surprise, however, Steve had come through with a key assist on the Project Blastoff mission—an assist that probably saved Scott’s life. From then on, even if they didn’t exactly accept him as a member of the group, they all agreed they were grateful to him.

  “What was it you wanted NASA to do exactly?” Mark asked.

  “Develop Greenwood Lake as an alternate launch facility to the one in Florida,” Egg said.

  “And they did? And this is it?” Mark looked from left to right. “It’s practically built already!”

  Egg nodded. “We told them putting a new launch complex here would make sense because we had already tested it out once and because, well, not to be all braggy and everything, but—”

  “—we’re here,” Howard said.

  Annoyed with Howard for stealing her punch line, Egg narrowed her eyes.

  “There is no sense being falsely modest, Jenny,” Howard said. “We pointed out that the space program needs to take advantage of every resource, and ‘every resource’ includes us.”

  “It’s come together so quickly,” Grandpa said, “because these characters were here to push the project and to help with construction. Also, we had a bit of luck. A NASA contractor had a Titan rocket in storage in St. Louis. As for the command module, it was a spare used for training. The people at the factory in California shipped it here.”

  “So what do you think?” Egg asked Barry and the twins.

  Scott’s and Mark’s feelings were conflicted. What they saw before them was awe-inspiring. Huge! Beautif
ul! Shiny and new!

  Looking at it, each boy could almost feel the surging power of that enormous rocket pushing into space.

  And each boy fervently hoped that one day soon he would get to feel that power for real.

  But the boys both felt something else, too, and Scott tried to explain. “It’s beautiful,” he said simply. “But I, for one, am righteously, uh”—he looked at his parents, who wouldn’t like it if he used the words he was thinking—“annoyed!” he said finally.

  “How could you do all this without telling us?” Mark asked.

  “After all we did together—why would you leave us out?” Barry added.

  “The NASA people told us to keep it quiet,” Egg said. “In fact, once they grabbed on to our idea, they kind of took over, and they’re the ones who told us we couldn’t tell anybody else about it yet, not even you.”

  “So we came up with another plan all on our own,” Lisa said. “The idea was this summer when you came back to see your grandpa, we’d show you the launch complex and go to work on some new mission.”

  Egg added, “It would’ve been fun, like last year—except even better because now we have experts to help us.”

  “We felt bad we couldn’t tell you yet,” Lisa said.

  “Some of us, at least.” Egg looked pointedly at Howard.

  It was quiet for a moment as all this sank in. Then Mrs. Kelly cocked her head. “And now . . . something has happened to change the plan of yours from summer to now?”

  “The stranded cosmonaut.” Mark looked first at his mom, then his brother.

  Scott nodded. “I bet Mrs. O’Malley is in Florida right now. And she’s asking NASA to help us use the Gemini spacecraft, and the Greenwood Space Launch Facility, to blast off and rescue Ilya Ilyushin.”

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  The twins figured Egg must know where her own mother was. When she didn’t contradict Scott, that meant he was right.

  Right?