by Jeff Pollard
“You're my assistant,” K says matter-of-factly. “Did you call GP yet?”
“Doing it now,” Hannah replies. “Went to voicemail.”
“Keep calling. And hold on.”
“Hold on?” Hannah asks.
“We're being tailed. I gotta lose 'em.”
“What!?”
“Just hold on,” K says as he takes a sharp turn, weaving through traffic. “Damn,” K says, eying a display showing him the video feed from a rear-facing camera. “Still on us.” Kingsley accelerates towards a yellow light.
“What are you doing?” Hannah shouts. They speed through the light several seconds after it turns red. Kingsley turns sharp to avoid cars crossing his path.
“You're crazy!” Hannah shouts.
“We lost them,” K replies.
“Who?!”
“The tail.”
“Who would be tailing you, have you lost your mind?” Hannah asks.
Chapter 3
“And then what happened?”
“With Gwenyth Paltrow?” K asks.
“Sure.”
“I'm sure you saw the headlines. Or watch TV,” K says.
“What happened that night?”
“I think I know where you're going with this,” K replies.
“You slept with your assistant.”
“I'm not the first person to bang a subordinate,” K replies.
“You didn't bang a subordinate. She was in love with you, and you slept with her, knowing full well that her feelings for you were far beyond the feelings you had for her. Am I right or did I miss something?”
“When you say it like that...”
“What? When I say it like that, what?”
“It makes me sound like an asshole,” K says.
“Why'd you do it? Why sleep with someone when you know it's just going to break her heart?”
“I didn't think about it like that,” K responds.
“How were you thinking about it?”
“I wasn't thinking about it. She's a woman, I'm a man, things happen.”
“Who are you trying to convince Kingsley? You're here because people who care about you are worried about you.”
“And I'm telling you I'm fine,” K replies.
“That's not what it sounds like to me,” Dr. Taylor says. “Kingsley, what do you want out of life?”
“I want to make humanity a spacefaring civilization,” K replies.
“That's what the caricature of you wants. I want to know what you want, as a human being, on a daily basis.”
“Solar powered cars,” K replies.
“Joke all you want, but from where I'm sitting, I'm looking at a man who has no friends, just acquaintances. Has no family, only co-workers. Has no lovers, only casual sex partners. I'm looking at a man who fills his life with things, cars and toys, and fills his time with work, constant work. You don't let anyone into your life. You are a man on an island.”
“You know, you might be right about the island thing, because I have been thinking about building a volcano lair,” K replies sarcastically.
“Are you nuts!?” Dexter Houston demands, standing beside Kingsley's desk. “You're banging Hannah?”
“Keep it down man,” Kingsley replies.
“You don't fuck where you shit,” Dexter says.
“I fuck where other people shit,” K replies.
“You know what I mean.”
“I really don't,” K says.
“You're gonna crush her,” Dexter says. “That girl likes you too much, and you and I both know you aren't going to marry her. That's what she thinks! She's got starry eyes. You get me?”
“We're not dating,” K replies. “We hooked up a couple of times, we're adults, I have casual relationships all the time.”
“She's sitting out there practicing her signature as Hannah Pretorius,” Dexter says.
“Oh come on.”
“If she was my little sister, I would beat the fuck out of your shit,” Dexter replies.
“Aren't you supposed to be introducing me to a new pilot, what happened to that?” K asks.
“He's waiting to come in, but god dammit, you can't be fucking your assistant.”
“Mind your own business Dex, you're not my mother, send in the new guy.”
Dexter exits and sends in Tim Bowe on his way out. Bowe is a large black man, six-foot-four, thirty-six years old. Bowe shakes Kingsley's hand and has a seat.
“Dexter told me some great things about you,” K says, reclining in his chair. “You flew Blackhawks in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dexter said best chopper pilot in the world.”
“I don't know about best,” Bowe says.
“Tim Bowe. You mind if I call you T-Bowe?” K asks.
“I mind that very much,” Tim replies.
“That's too bad because from now on I think I'm gonna call you T-Bowe.”
“From now on? So does that mean I got the job?” T-Bowe asks.
“I thought Dexter already hired you?”
“He said you have to sign off on it,” T-Bowe replies.
“Well, I don't see any reason not to. Maybe I should put you in the simulator and see if you can fly the Griffin.”
“I have no doubt I could learn it quickly sir.”
“Don't call me sir,” K replies. “It's just K. Or King if you want to be more formal. Sire, I'd like Sire. But not sir. Especially from a black guy. You know, I'm South African, having a black guy call me sir doesn't quite feel right.”
“I think I understand, K.”
“No really, let's go get in the sim. You and me, let's do a test flight. I've been meaning to put some more hours in there since they moved the couches and the instruments.”
Kingsley and Tim Bowe leave K's office. “Hannah, could you grab a flight controller and meet us in the sim.” K leads Tim through the offices and to the simulator room in a sub-basement. Kingsley flips the lights on, revealing the huge concrete room containing three mock-up capsules mounted on a hydraulic motion-control rig that can twist and turn the capsule in any direction, and a replica of SpacEx Mission Control.
Kingsley leads the way toward a mockup capsule, up a set of rolling stairs twenty feet high that leads to the Griffin's hatch.
Kingsley and T-Bowe lie down in the Pilot and Co-Pilot seats. This Griffin is set up to hold four astronauts, though they could fit up to seven couches in the small space. The astronauts don't sit, but lie on their backs. The instruments and controls are mounted on the walls of the cone-shaped capsule, right in front of the angled crew couches. Once in space, the couches can fold into the floor, making the small capsule feel quite roomy in comparison to the sardine can it feels like with the couches deployed.
Kingsley and T-Bowe get comfortable in their reclined seats. Kingsley powers up the capsule and an array of instrument displays light up and turn on. The Griffin comes complete with a glass cockpit, in other words, each panel is a computer-controlled LCD screen which can be changed to display almost any piece of information you might want.
“What do you want to do? Launch? Re-entry? Docking?”
“Throw me your best curveball,” T-Bowe says.
“Alright,” K says. He keys his radio, “Control this is K.”
“Control,” the response comes on the radio.
“Go ahead and retract the ladder and set us up for final approach,” K says. A technician pulls the ladder away and the motion-control rig turns on. The windows of the Griffin, small viewports mounted in a ring near the top of the conical capsule, light up as the LCD screens beyond the windows are turned on. The glass displays all turn on, displaying all relevant information: orbital position and velocity, artificial horizon, location above the Earth, fuel gauges, altitude, relative surface velocity, etc. Other displays show the status for the oxygen, electrical systems, radio, etc.
“Are we in space?” T-Bowe asks.
“We're in space. We're coming up on entry-interface in sixty seconds,” Kingsley replies. T-Bowe
takes ahold of the two sticks and turns the spacecraft. The Griffin rotates on the motion-control system, turning them totally upside down. He looks up through the window until the thin blue line, the Earth's atmosphere, comes into view, just above a deep blue ocean.
“A little different view than I'm used to,” T-Bowe says.
“We're about to hit the upper atmosphere at about seventeen thousand miles per hour, so let's get the heat shield pointed in the right direction,” K says. T-Bowe turns the capsule around, using bursts of nitrogen from the RCS. In space there is no air resistance. It only takes a slight push to get a spacecraft turning. As the Griffin comes around, T-Bowe thrusts the RCS again to stop the rotation. It takes a few quick adjustments on the stick to steady the Griffin, nulling her rates.
“Entry interface,” Kingsley says. The Griffin Capsule is descending into the atmosphere, ramming into gas particles at thousands of miles per hour. The gas molecules instantly turn into a plasma. Outside the windows, the blackness of space is replaced by a slight glow that increases in intensity until white-hot flames threaten to melt the window. The Griffin capsule shutters and vibrates. In a real re-entry, they would be feeling up to six Gs, or six times the force of gravity. But all this sim can do is rattle them to pieces.
A red alarm lights up. “Guidance Alarm,” Kingsley says. “We're coming in too short, you gotta pitch up and create some lift, get us farther down range.”
The blunt cone might not seem like a controllable aircraft, but it is. The mass of the capsule is distributed so that the center of mass is not in the center of the vehicle, which means that it actually produces some lift. By rolling the capsule, you can point the lift vector in any direction perpendicular to the direction of travel. T-Bowe rotates the capsule to point the lift vector up, slowing the capsule's rate of descent.
As they break through into the denser lower atmosphere, the capsule stops being so much an aircraft and more a stone falling from the sky. It finally bleeds off enough speed, going sub-sonic. T-Bowe assesses the guidance panel, seeing the ballistic trajectory of the Griffin capsule as it approaches the coast of California. The landing target is marked on the map and their parabolic trajectory is about ten miles short of that mark.
“Activate landing thrusters,” Kingsley says. T-Bowe searches quickly, finding the appropriate touch-screen button. The Draco engines are armed, ready to fire. “There's your throttle, there's your fuel gauge. Bring her in for a landing. If you can't make the landing, you can deploy the backup parachutes, but you have to deploy it above 500 feet or it won't have time to open. Don't deploy the landing gear until you're certain we're coming down on land.”
T-Bowe throttles up with his left hand as his right hand controls the attitude of the Griffin capsule. He eyes the panel showing his trajectory toward the landing site, marked with an X. Another panel presents him with a view from a camera mounted on the outside of the capsule. The windows only look up, not much help for a vertical landing.
A powered descent is much like landing a helicopter, right in T-Bowe's wheelhouse. However, the Draco engines have a very limited amount of fuel. Take too long to land and you'll run out of fuel and drop like a rock. Come in too fast and you might crash or miss your landing site. In a helicopter, even if you lose all engine power, you can still make a controlled landing using autorotation, but in a Griffin, you have no such luxury.
T-Bowe keeps the Griffin pointed down and slightly back. He needs to steer the capsule toward the landing site so that by the time he gets there, he will have killed both horizontal and vertical velocity. With no wings, the only way to steer is to use rocket thrust to push in the direction desired. Bowe anxiously watches his panels as he brings her in. The Griffin's trajectory was pretty close to the landing site and only requires slight adjustments. T-Bowe makes those changes then it's a matter of simply managing his rates and landing without running out of fuel. He does this marvelously, making a near perfect landing right in the middle of the landing pad.
“Not bad for a first try,” Kingsley jokes. “Let's see how you do with a real curveball.”
Kingsley radios down to control and asks for a second run, this time with thirty knot winds. T-Bowe manages the strong cross-wind and makes another near-perfect landing. He throws every scenario at T-Bowe he can think of: zero visibility, inaccurate re-entry that sends them far off course, even a total failure of the guidance computer requiring that T-Bowe land using nothing more than the video feed from the camera and a keen eye to find the landing site. T-Bowe couldn't be phased.
Kingsley then asks the flight controllers for another scenario. “Pull up scenario KM.” This one called for a re-entry that was so short that it was basically impossible to compensate and land successfully. The only safe outcome was to realize you were low on fuel and abort the landing, deploying the parachutes and making a safe splashdown. If the pilot's ego got in the way of his decision making, he might try to squeeze by and attempt a landing. If he did try to land, he would run out of fuel just beyond the point of no return, below 500 feet where the parachute might not have enough time to deploy, resulting in a hard landing or worse.
“Coming in way short,” Kingsley declares. T-Bowe pitches over, turning the Griffin nearly horizontal as he tries to add horizontal speed and close the distance to the landing site. As they approach the coast, T-Bowe pitches back, killing their horizontal velocity, then he cuts the engine and deploys the parachute. In the windows overhead, the parachutes open up and deploy, gently easing them down toward the ocean.
“You aren't going to fool me with that one,” T-Bowe says.
“What do you mean?” Kingsley asks, feigning ignorance.
“Pilots need ego checks, I get it. I'll bet it's impossible to land that scenario. I'll bet if I tried, I'd run out of fuel right after the point of no return. Am I right?”
“If you tried it, yes, you'd run out of fuel. But it's not impossible, just impossible for you.”
“Oh I guess Dexter's the best pilot in the world, huh?”
“Not Dexter,” Kingsley says. “Me.”
“Alright, let's see it,” T-Bowe says.
“Can't do it right now, I'm too sober.”
“Too sober?” T-Bowe asks.
“I fly better drunk,” Kingsley says.
“Well, did I get the job?” T-Bowe asks, knowing the answer.
“Yeah, I think we can find a place for you,” K replies.
“Great. Do you get cell reception in here?”
“No, we'll have to get out of the capsule,” K replies. The simulation is ended and the ladder is wheeled up to the capsule as the motion-control shuts off. Kingsley and Tim Bowe exit the Griffin.
“I told you he was good,” Dexter says to Kingsley as T-Bowe walks away, calling someone on his cell.
“Who's he talking to?” K asks.
“His wife I'll bet, telling her they're moving to L.A.”
“He's married?” K asks.
“Yeah, so?”
“Fuck,” K says.
“What does that matter?” Dexter asks.
“I gotta put that guy in harms way. If we lose a crew, that's bad enough, but if I kill somebody's husband, some kid's father, that's ten times worse. I thought I told you to get me bachelors.”
“He's the best pilot I know,” Dexter replies. “Wait, did you hire me and Travis because we don't have kids?”
“That's part of it,” K replies.
“Not because we're the best pilots you could find. We're the best unmarried non-fathers you could find.”
“Damn right. I've gotta be able to order you guys to do dangerous things and still be able to sleep at night.”
“Well,” Dexter says. “You gonna fire him now?”
Hannah walks up, trying to put her arm around Kingsley. “Hannah, could you get us some whiskey,” K says, shrugging her off.
“Sure thing,” Hannah says suspiciously.
“I can't fire him now. He passed the Kobayashi Maru.” The Kobayashi Ma
ru, or Scenario KM for short, is named after a test in Star Trek. It's a test to put a cadet in a “no-win” scenario to test their reaction. While the fictional Kobayashi Maru test involves an unwinnable battle against Klingons, Scenario KM is not quite as serious. Kingsley has been a Star Trek fan since childhood.
“He aborted?” Dexter asks.
“Here's your whiskey,” Hannah says, handing Kingsley a Maker's Mark on the rocks.
“Get three more,” K says to Hannah. “Yeah he aborted, he aborted pretty early. He saw right through the test.”
“What a pussy,” Dexter replies.
“You crashed that thing four times in a row before you learned your lesson,” Kingsley replies.
“I can land that,” Dexter insists.
“I'd like to see you try,” K adds.
“Makayla is thrilled, when do I start?” T-Bowe asks.
“Right now,” Kingsley says as Hannah returns with three drinks. Kingsley hands one to T-Bowe. Dexter takes another. “Travis!” K shouts up to Travis at a control panel. The four men board the Griffin, each with a whiskey in hand. The men take their turns attempting to land the KM scenario, turning it into a drinking game. Kingsley laughs each time as they run out of fuel and crash just before landing. During the descent, the motion control tips the capsule, requiring deft hands to keep their drinks from spilling.
After Dexter, Travis, and T-Bowe had each failed, T-Bowe says to Kingsley, “Alright, let's see you do it.”
“I'm not drunk enough,” K replies.
“Come on,” Dexter says.
“Alright alright,” K relents. The blue sky is replaced by the blackness of space as the scenario is restarted, sixty seconds from entry interface. With each man holding a fresh drink, Kingsley rotates the Griffin until they are upside down.
“Come on man,” Dexter says as he spills some whiskey. Each man has to hold his drink upside down.
“Chug it down,” Kingsley laughs. The men chug down their whiskey, then K hands his glass over to T-Bowe as they start re-entry. As they break through the sound barrier and activate the landing engines, the capsule is still going to fall quite short of the target. Kingsley pitches over, pointing the Griffin downstream to reduce drag and thrusting with the Draco landing engines at full blast.