by Jeff Pollard
“That's good, I like that,” Caroline says.
“My dad was awesome,” Richard says.
The Hummingbird II reaches its apogee, hovering, then the engine cuts out and it begins its free fall.
“Come on baby, come on baby, come on baby,” Kingsley says just above a whisper. There are a lot of feats of modern engineering that we give no second thought to and have no appreciation for their delicacy. We typically don't find it very enthralling to watch planes land. They might be right on the edge of disaster, but that doesn't make for a compelling watch. Just wait until you witness a five story building plummeting out of the sky. Even if it becomes a common sight, even if Eagle 9Rs fly every day and return to Earth like this, making this unpowered descent followed by a hover slam a routine event, it will still be an engaging watch. Will the engine start back up? Will it maintain control? Unlike a plane landing, there is little sense that what is happening is under control. Should the engine have started by now? Is it about to crash and explode?
In this case, those fears aren't unfounded. The Hummingbird II engines take too long to re-ignite, and when it attempts the hover-slam burn it's already too late. The burn slows the vehicle, but it slams into the pad at over sixty miles per hour. In an instant the legs crumple and the engine bell disappears as the bottom of the rocket is flattened and thrust up into the fuel tanks. A massive explosion quickly follows.
Kingsley's jaw drops and the new space tourists audibly gasp.
“Is that supposed to happen?” Richard asks sarcastically.
“So, I think I'll pass on riding that,” a tourist weighs in.
“I was this close to a sale,” Kingsley says as they're back on the road. “What else could go wrong?”
“I really want to visit Hannah and the baby in New York.”
“Why?” K asks.
“Aren't you curious? You have a kid out there, don't you at least want to meet him?”
“But then it becomes real. If I don't meet him then I can pretend he doesn't exist.”
“Okay,” Caroline says distantly.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“I mean it sounds bad, but honestly, I'm not that kid's father. This is how sperm donation works. The people who use it are the ones that make the family. Just because my DNA is involved doesn't mean I have anything to do with it. I mean if you donated some of your eggs would you then show up at Christmas to spend time with your kid?”
“I don't know,” Caroline replies.
~
“I told you I'd be back,” Kingsley says as Sergei Kuznetzov greets K and Caroline. “This is my...Caroline.”
“We've actually met before,” Sergei replies. “Sit sit sit,” he welcomes his guests eagerly, leading them to a table in a glassed in patio that's been carefully set for afternoon tea, with a kettle sitting atop a miniature ceramic fireplace. Sergei uses a miniature poker to stoke the fire made of twigs that heats the tea.
“What a cute little fire,” Caroline says.
“You didn't tell me you'd met before,” K says, looking curiously to Caroline. She shrugs her shoulders and indicates with her body language that she didn't know either.
“She was at my second wedding,” Sergei says, returning to the table with a tray of all the accessories that could possibly accompany tea from honey to vodka.
“I was?” Caroline asks.
“I was living under a different name at the time,” Sergei replies as he stands next to the table, delicately pouring out three cups of tea. He doesn't play host to many guests, so when the rare guess does arrive, he rolls out the red carpet. “You still don't remember? I married your cousin.”
“Gonna have to be more specific,” Caroline says.
“You were in the wedding,” Sergei says with disbelief.
“That doesn't help much,” Caroline says.
“I was married to Princess Mallory. The wedding was in Morocco.”
“Right, of course. I vaguely remember a wedding in Morocco,” Caroline says.
“How bad is your memory?” Kingsley asks.
“I've literally been in a hundred weddings. I imagine you couldn't tell me the details of every sandwich you've ever eaten.”
“It was a cold Saturday in November 1984, the first time I ever had a Reuben,” Kingsley says wistfully. Caroline rolls her eyes.
“So what's the occasion?” Sergei asks, finally ready to sip his tea.
“I told you I'd be back for more money,” K says. “We've got the hotel up, time to put in a couple new wings.”
“No problem. Money's yours,” Sergei says. “If I get to live there.”
“I told you that can't happen,” K replies. “The FBI is tailing me, there's a congressional investigation. I can't be associated with you right now.”
“Sorry friend, that's the deal.”
“Alright,” K says standing up.
“Leaving already, you just got here,” Sergei says, offended.
“K, we drove all this way,” Caroline says, beckoning K to sit back down.
“But I was gonna play hardball.”
“So what happened to you and Mallory?” Caroline asks, and the two ignore Kingsley's supposedly grand gesture.
“That marriage lasted about eight months,” Sergei replies. “It was fun for the first two months. Still the second best marriage I've had.”
“How many times have you been married?” K asks as he reluctantly sits back down.
“Six,” Sergei replies. “I can't help it. I'm a romantic. When it comes to life, love, I just throw myself into it. I don't care if it's a mistake, I will give it a shot.”
“Six marriages isn't giving life a shot, that's giving life a revolver. Six marriages is like playing Russian Roulette with a Glock.”
“What's alternative?” Sergei asks. “To live always second-guessing? It's not me. I throw myself into everything. That's why I'm going crazy locked up in my ebony tower.”
“Ivory,” K corrects.
“Whatever.”
“If you feel cooped up in here, why do you think living in a space hotel the size of your living room is going to be better?”
“If this house circled earth every ninety minutes, I would have better view.”
“How can you get married so many times,” K says, shaking his head as Caroline drives them back towards the Long Island Expressway, headed for a Manhattan hotel.
“I think it's a good thing,” Caroline says.
“How is that possibly a good thing?”
“He's willing to try, he's not afraid of failure. Unlike you,” Caroline says.
“What? I'm not afraid of failure.”
“You are so afraid of failing.”
“I just watched a fifty million dollar rocket explode.”
“You have to admire Sergei, there's something admirable about such earnesty.”
“Earnesty?”
“You know what I mean.”
“It helps that his money is all hidden and he probably doesn't lose any of it when he gets divorced,” K replies.
“Fair enough. But even if he's not totally sure, he'll go for it. That's how people should live. When he finds a woman and starts to fall in love, even when he's been divorced five times, he isn't thinking, 'well I don't want to be wrong, I don’t want people to think I'm stupid.' No, he just lets himself go.”
“I went all in trying to get you.”
“And then we had a fight and you acted like I was Kryptonite. That's why you don't want kids, you're afraid a bad one will come out, or you won't be a perfect father. That's life, you can't make everything perfect, you can't plan everything. Life's not a chess game or a design principle. Sometimes you have to just pour yourself into it and hope that it'll work out. When you're driving at night your headlights only show you the next fifty yards, but you can drive across the country like that. You don't need to see the whole picture.”
“Goin
g by that metaphor, just following my headlights to make sure I stay in the lines, we could end up a thousand miles off course because you're not paying attention to the sat nav.”
“You really hate metaphors,” Caroline sighs.
“Metaphors are for people who don't know how to say what they really mean.”
“We're stopping to see Hannah and the baby. How's that for a metaphor.”
“Not at all. And no we aren't.”
“We're hitting the road first thing in the morning.”
“We'll see,” Caroline muses.
The Sun had just barely risen in the concrete jungle of Manhattan, shining through the corridors of glass and steel like some kind of modern Stonehenge as Kingsley and Caroline walk out of their hotel and head for a coffee shop across the street. It's actually quite eerily quiet in this city that supposedly never sleeps.
“What do you want?” K asks as they wait in line to order.
“Double, no, triple espresso. Gonna need that energy to chase your rugrat around.”
“We're not doing that, so what do you really want?” K asks.
“Oh my god! Oh my god! Kingsley!” a woman screeches. Kingsley puts on a fake smile and turns around to greet a fan. “It's you!”
“That's me,” K says half-heartedly. It's too early for this shit.
“I'm your biggest fan ever!” She practically shouts in his ear as she ambush hugs him. She's not a day over twenty-five, blonde, attractive, and clearly either nerdy or a hipster as she's wearing thick rimmed glasses and an “Occupy Mars” t-shirt that had been popular with SpacEx engineers years ago when Occupy Wall Street was a thing.
“Alright, thanks,” K says, giving Caroline an 'oh my god get this crazy person off me' look.
“No, you don't understand. You don't understand!” the woman insists.
“What don't I understand?” K asks, hoping it's not that she likes to rummage through his trash or, like happened once, broken into his house and woken him up while trying to stealthily snip some armpit hairs.
“I have to be your biggest fan, because, well, how many of your fans have one of these?” the woman asks with a smirk. She takes a toddler by the hand and draws her in. “She's your daughter.”
“Hello,” the precocious little girl says. Kingsley freezes. He gulps, then crouches down, face-to-face with this small girl. Suddenly there's a real live girl, a child, not some idea or concept, but a person, a cute little girl, looking back at him with eyes made out of half of his DNA.
Kingsley is speechless.
“My name is Guinevere,” the girl of maybe three says. “What's your name.”
“Kingsley,” K tries to say but a small frog has blocked his airways. “Kingsley,” he says after clearing his throat. “You can call me K.”
“Hello Mr. Kingsy.”
“Look at what she drew for you,” the woman says, holding out a folded paper. Kingsley takes it, expecting to find crayon rockets. “You just got served,” the woman says in a voice an octave lower. She takes the girl by the hand and disappears. The little girl, surely not named Guinevere, waves goodbye as they exit the coffee shop.
“What the hell was that?” Caroline asks.
“I've been subpoenaed,” K mutters.
“Alright,” K says as he and Caroline leave the coffee shop, headed back to the hotel to check-out and hit the road.
“Alright what?” Caroline asks.
“Let's go see Hannah.”
“Did you change your mind!? Alert the presses!”
“Shut up,” K says sarcastically.
“Did seeing that little girl make you grow a heart?” Caroline asks.
“I don't know, maybe,” K admits.
“And the people of Whoville say that the Grinch's heart grew three sizes that day.”
“There's Griffin,” Hannah whispers as she motions Kingsley to the door to the sleeping toddler's bedroom.
“Can I...”
“He needs to get up soon anyway, go on,” Hannah says. K nervously approaches the bed, staring at the back of the little blond boy's head. K freezes a few feet from the bed. Caroline follows after, joining him.
“You okay?” Caroline whispers. K turns and walks out of the room quickly. Caroline follows, finding him sitting on the floor in the hallway hyperventilating.
“You alright?” Caroline asks, sitting next to him. Hannah keeps her distance, staying the doorway, but listening in.
“I just realized I was about to meet my son. Like, there's a human being who will grow up to be an adult and will remember forever that moment when he met his father. It's just such an important moment in his life, and yet I didn't care about it until just now. Just hit with a wave of. . . I don't know, responsibility. Like how irresponsible am I that I didn't think about the other point-of-view in this situation until now. It just hit me, and I feel terrible, I feel like a selfish deadbeat.”
“You're not a deadbeat,” Hannah says, approaching, standing over them. “It wasn't your decision, you aren't really his father.”
“But I am,” K says.
“He's my son, he's not missing out on anything, trust me.”
“You're living in a tiny apartment, what are you doing for money?”
“I'm a nanny,” Hannah says defensively.
“Does that pay well?” K asks.
“Twenty an hour,” Hannah replies.
K takes a deep breath and covers his face with his hands, trying not to cry.
“Maybe we should wait until he's awake and has a whole day to spend with you instead of squeezing this in now,” Hannah says.
“We're driving back today,” Caroline says.
“Come out to California,” K says, standing up. “You know what, come back to work for me. I need a good assistant, the one I have now is a mute idiot. I'll pay you a hell of a lot better than twenty an hour.”
“I don't know,” Hannah says, “I can't just pick up everything and move. I mean, we're just talking about you meeting him, not making me move.”
“I want to be involved in his life,” K says.
“I mean, K, you say that, but I cannot imagine you actually spending that much time with him. What are you going to do, come over to my house after work? Come on, be real.”
“You can live at my house, it's plenty big, you can have a whole wing to yourself.”
“Really? You'd do that?” Hannah asks.
“Yes,” K insists.
In the car, back on the road, Caroline doesn't wait to broach the elephant in the room.
“What was that?” Caroline asks.
“What?”
“She's living with us? What's your plan here?”
“I don't know,” K says.
“So you just ask her to move across country, let someone you used to be with live with us, uproot a kid just on a whim. What's your plan?”
“I. . . you told me I don't need to plan. You wanted me to drive by headlights. In that moment, that was where the headlights were pointing me.
“So I want kids and it's all I'm not ready, but she has your kid and now you're super responsible daddy K?”
“You told me not to plan! The headlights!”
“Kingsley,” the always relaxing voice of Brittany Hammersmith says over the in-car speaker phone. “You know we have a board meeting in three weeks right?”
“I'm aware,” K says.
“Just a heads up, the Kokes are going to hold a vote of no-confidence and try to replace you.”
“Replace me with who?”
“With me,” Brittany says. “Look K, they're not the only investors that don't see the point of reusability when we already have the cheapest rocket. They're getting some more board members on their side. Show them reusability can work, or else you might lose the company.”
“It can work.”
“Theoretically, yes. But when you have Hummingbirds exploding that kind of trumps your animated video.�
� Kingsley hangs up.
“This is why I should have never taken on any investors,” K says.
“Why did you take on investors and diminish your own power?”
“Because I was impatient. The extra investor money allowed us to put people in Griffins sooner, we're probably three years ahead of where we would be without it.”
“But you are losing control of your company.”
“That was the risk I took,” K replies.
Chapter 7
“Come on baby,” Kingsley whispers, cheering on the launch of Griffin 8 from the Launch Control Facility. The Eagle 9 races into the sky, carrying a precious cargo of Robert Downey Jr., Justin Timberlake, two billionaires you've never heard of, and two SpacEx crew members.
Pilot Sylvia Probst, former F-14 pilot with a doctorate in Aerospace Engineering, is on her first trip to space. She had been the pilot for three launches by now, but those were all unmanned flights and her role as pilot, sitting in Launch Control, was to take over in the event of an emergency or guidance failure, neither of which had occurred. Even now, while in the pilot's seat of Griffin 8, she was asked to do little more than babysit the computer. There's a saying in the aerospace industry: in the future planes will be flown by a computer and accompanied by a human and a dog. The human is there to feed the dog. The dog is there to keep the human from messing with the computer.
Travis Clayton had decided to move to the back of the rotation to allow his colleagues, and sub-ordinates as the head of the SpacEx astronaut program, a chance to fly earlier. The move also gave Travis a break from the rigorous training that preceded a flight, time he was using to get to know his new lady-friend.
So Griffin 8's flight engineer was Gary Ross. This was his first spaceflight with SpacEx, but was his seventh spaceflight in total.
Gary Ross had been an Electronic Warfare Officer in the Air Force. He flew EF-111 Ravens for a decade. His job was to manage the electronic warfare equipment while the pilot focused on flying the plane. The EF-111 was what the aviation community calls a “Wild Weasel.” The task for the Raven was to wreak havoc on the opponents' electronics. EF-111s would fly ahead of an attack force and jam or confuse the enemy radars. They were also equipped with radiation seeking missiles, which would use the radar beams being broadcast by a missile site on the ground as a homing beacon. Wild Weasels were a fearless bunch, heading right into the teeth of enemy air defenses so their friends could do their jobs elsewhere. Gary Ross started flying right-seat as an EWO in 1982, just as the EF-111s were being brought into service and replacing the older EF-4Gs. He'd literally helped write the book on how to be an EWO in a Raven, preparing for a showdown with Soviets in Europe. Of course the showdown with the Soviets never came, but just as Ross thought that he'd never see real action, Iraq invaded Kuwait.