“Me, too, Bill. Me, too.” Jim smiled at his friend because he didn’t doubt his last statement for an instant.
Chapter 4
Retired Navy pilot Paul Gesling paced in the waiting area outside the office of Gary Childers, president of Space Excursions. Gesling, who was too tall to qualify as a NASA astronaut, looked more like a recently retired professional basketball player than a soon-to-be commercial space pilot. His forty-one-year-old frame was covered with muscle, and his piercing green eyes and coal-black hair gave him the appearance of being some sort of wealthy playboy—at least to the ladies that he frequently found himself in the company of. And they seemed to like it—and him.
He grew tired of pacing after a while and sat on the plush green couch in the waiting area. Being one of those people who was uncomfortable just sitting around without something to read, he absentmindedly picked up one of the brochures that described the company’s history.
The Space Excursions headquarters in Lexington, Kentucky, was everything one would expect of a company founded, owned, and managed by a man who had made his billions in coal. Rich, thick carpet and high, ornately carved ceilings adorned every room in the twenty-five-story building that served as the global headquarters of both Space Excursions and Coal Tech, Inc. The glass and steel building might not be the tallest in town, but it was certainly one of the most striking. A French architect, whose name no one could recall without resorting to looking it up online, had designed the building and reserved the top floor for the company founder and CEO’s pet project, Space Excursions. A dedicated elevator running up the north side of the building served to remind all visitors that they were leaving coal country and entering the twenty-first century.
Gary Childers, having lived through sixty revolutions of the Earth around the sun, as he liked to put it, was a genuine space geek. Born and raised in Kentucky, he had made his fortune in coal. Of course, having started with a smaller family fortune certainly helped. He made his money and career in mining, shipping, and selling coal, but his heart was always in space. His interest became his business after the success of the first commercial human space flight back in 2004 with the launching of the Paul Allen and Burt Rutan project, SpaceShipOne. While other companies were forming to send people to Earth orbit, he decided to do them one better and offer a commercial ride around the Moon. Space Excursions was born.
He hired the best and brightest engineers and scientists from America and around the world to make his vision a reality. With a manufacturing facility in Nevada near the Las Vegas Commercial Spaceport, Space Excursions quietly took the lead in the next step of space tourism. Over a thousand people had now paid over two hundred thousand dollars per person to make suborbital flights with his competitors, and several millionaires had paid the Russians to take them to orbit. Now it was his turn. Five people had paid twenty-five million dollars each for a seat on the maiden flight of Dreamscape, the flagship of Space Excursions. Twenty-five more had made deposits for the next flights, the first of which was scheduled to occur within six months of the first. It had taken a little over fifteen years to get to this point, and Childers had selected Paul Gesling to be the pilot and commander for the first flight.
Thumbing through the rest of the brochure, Gesling saw the usual corporate mumbo-jumbo marketing and financial statements as well as some pretty pictures of the Space Excursions Nevada facility, at which he had practically been living for the last three years. He glanced over the section called “Company at a Glance” and saw listed the other two divisions of Space Excursions that sold their wares to either NASA or the Pentagon. He didn’t have anything to do with those operations. Commercial space was his sole interest. The NASA work was done mostly at the Nevada facility. The work for the Pentagon was performed just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Gesling was still thumbing through the brochure when Childers’s door opened and the company president waved him in. He tossed the brochure back into the stack and entered the office.
And what an office it was. First of all, it was large. It had the usual corporate furnishings of desk, meeting table, and bookcases, plus obligatory corporate photos along the walls. What made it stand out were the models. Models of virtually every piece of space hardware that had been flown by the United States, the U.S.S.R. or Russia, China, Europe, a few from India and even Iran. They were everywhere. Suspended from the ceiling was a model of the International Space Station flanked on each side with Russia’s Mir space station and the U.S. Skylab. Along the north wall were models of each of the rockets that had carried humans into space. The east wall was graced with models of rockets that carried only satellites and unmanned spacecraft. The south and west walls were the windows that made his corner office, and high above each window, just out of direct line of sight, were hanging models of spacecraft—well over a hundred of them.
Gesling took the seat directly across from Childers, and both men sat down at about the same time.
“So, to what do I owe this pleasure?” Childers began. “Your text said it was important but not urgent. I don’t get many of those. Usually everything is urgent and important.” Childers, with his full head of closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair, looked the part of a corporate executive. He could have been the CEO of any large business or a Wall Street executive. He had “the look”—the look of a man with money and power.
“Well,” Gesling started. “Gary, you know I am dedicated to this flight. I’ve worked my butt off getting ready. I’ve been with you for seven years, helped you make the pitches to the board and the regulators, faced the media, and I even took that low-blow interview for 60 Minutes that made us—both of us—look like fools eager to part with our money. But I’ve just about had it up to here with some of the pantywaists we’re taking to space.” Gesling quickly moved his right hand to his forehead as he completed the last sentence and then dropped it back down to his side.
“I’m a pilot, and a damned good one. I flew for the Navy and faced hostile fire more than I’m supposed to admit. That ‘police action’ near Indonesia just about became a war between China and us, and let me tell you, for those of us in the planes, it sure felt like war. I’ve been chewed out by the best the U.S. military has to offer. You’ve given me a few that I’d just as soon forget. Dodging missiles is a piece of cake compared to what you’ve asked me to do—and I am not talking about flying Dreamscape. She’ll be a pleasure. It’s the damned customers that are driving me crazy!”
“You’ve got to be kidding” was all Childers could manage to say. Gary Childers was not usually a man at a loss for words. From the look on his face, he seemed frustrated with Paul. Paul couldn’t understand why.
Looking exasperated and more desperate than a Navy fighter pilot should ever appear to be, Gesling directed his gaze downward to the floor and then back to Childers’s face.
“I am not kidding,” Gesling told him. “Take Matt Thibodeau, for example. First of all, he showed up for the survival training late. While he was there, he kept taking calls on his satellite phone and basically tuned out most of the time. He won’t work with his seatmate—says she’s ‘too bossy’ and will hardly give her the time of day. He’s not yet been able to seal his pressure suit correctly and insists it’s everyone else’s problem but his own. He doesn’t have a clue how to share the emergency air supply and shows absolutely no interest in learning. On top of that, he pukes every time we fly parabolas in the trainer and refuses to acknowledge that it is his responsibility during the flight to clean up his own mess. I cannot and will not clean up this arrogant customer’s puke when we are on our way to the Moon!” Gesling gritted his teeth behind his pursed lips. His jaw muscle tightened tensely.