It was not wise on that day. Having my bare feet splashed with vomit violated even my loose standards of hygiene. I practically screamed in disgust. Then, with Tominbang’s help, I found a men’s room and managed to rinse off. Repeatedly. The sickening odor, combined with the ancient fetor of the men’s room, almost made me pass out.
Tominbang was more upset than I was. He kept apologizing for Dearborn. “He has a drinking problem. But he is very capable. He has been logged two hundred hours of Quicksilver test time, and made three orbital flights.”
“Can he stay sober long enough to do the job?”
“It was my impression that he only drinks when he doesn’t have a mission.”
“You’d better get him to work faster,” I said. “If he throws up on me again, I’m walking out.”
If I expected an apology from Dearborn, it would have to wait. He was passed out-let’s say sleeping-on a pile of canvas formerly used to protect the Quicksilver vehicle. This gave me my chance to pin Tominbang down. “So, what exactly is the plan here? Can you really fly a spaceplane to the Moon?”
“Oh, yes. With your assistance, Mr. Mitchell.”
“You’re losing me.”
“Since Quicksilver is capable of orbital flight, it only requires minor modifications for landing on the Moon. A landing gear must be added. Communications gear has to be beefed up. We need to obtain suitable space suits. And the life support fittings need to be changed to accommodate a crew of three.”
Everything was making sense up to the last point. “Why do you need three people? Isn’t this a one-man vehicle?”
Tominbang looked at the floor, as if he were embarrassed. “We will need the pilot- Dearborn. We will need a spacecraft specialist. And I wish to go along.”
That was alarming. “You’re spending all this money just so you can fly to the Moon?”
“No, Mr. Mitchell, that would be crazy,” he said, meaning nothing of the sort. “I have a practical reason. I have made a fortune in allowing certain electronic financial transactions to pass through the off-shore offices of my communications firm. But governments have been making that sort of work more difficult, and it will soon be impossible. I hope to set up the ultimate offshore data recording and retransmitting station.”
I was about to say that that idea sounded crazier than simply spending $10 million for a ride to the Moon. But Tominbang leaned close again. “This is the information you must keep confidential.”
“No problem,” I said, wondering just what subject I could bring up that would lead to my immediate departure from the hangar. I might even be able to stop at Haugen’s and resume that interrupted flirtation with Eva-Lynne. “You were about to explain why you needed me.”
“Because of your unique lifting ability, Mr. Mitchell. Quicksilver’s power plant can’t blast it out of earth orbit, or off the surface of the Moon. Unless, at a key moment, we can somehow reduce its mass to a fraction.”
I opened my mouth to laugh, then closed it. The biggest object I had ever lifted was a semi-trailer full of Johnny Walker and other fine beverages. (Mr. Skalko was unhappy with certain tariffs due him from the passage of this truck through his territory.) That semi dwarfed Quicksilver.
So the gig seemed possible, in theory. Which is all I’ve ever had. (As my father used to say, “Cash, you violate the laws of gravitation.” To which I usually answered: “I never studied law.”) Nevertheless, the very idea of performing a lift while in space and sitting on a rocket-well, it made me feel as faint as when I was washing Dearborn ’s vomit off my flesh.
“I don’t know about this,” I said, perhaps more than once. It was one thing to fantasize about kicking up the dust of Mars with your boots. It was quite another to entrust your life to a crazy foreign man with more money than sense, and a drunken pilot. Oh, yes, on a flight to the Moon!
“The compensation would be of the highest degree,” Tominbang was saying, perhaps more than once and in different ways.
I have many faults, among them slovenliness and laziness, but the greatest of these is greed. So I said, “How much?”
And then he mentioned a figure that would not only buy my cooperation, but my silence and enthusiasm and that of everyone I know for at least a year. “Mr. Tominbang,” I said. “You’ve got a deal.”
(If you’re thinking that I thought I would find Eva-Lynne easier to impress if were a moderately richer man, you would be correct.)
Dearborn uttered a snort at this point, forcing me to look his way. “And what about him?”
“He has already agreed to the terms.” He shook his head. “He really just wants to fly Quicksilver again.”
I said “Oh,” or something equally helpful, then added, “Are we going to dry him out? Seeing as how we’ll be a quarter of a million miles from home and depending on his sobriety?”
“I am searching for a way. I would take him into my own residence, but my travel schedule does not permit it.”
“What about Dearborn ’s situation? Does he have a wife?”
“Sadly, Commander Dearborn needs a place to stay.”
I don’t want to recount the rest of the conversation. I must have been weakened by dollar signs, because I agreed to take him in.
Temporarily.
“Doreen threw me out when I told her I had spent the weekend with Tominbang.” Dearborn and I were headed back down Highway 14 toward Palmdale. It was mid-afternoon, but he had awakened from his nap as fresh and perky as a teenager on a Sunday morning. If he had any reservations about going off to live with a man he had just met, not to mention vomited on, he hid them. “She thought that was some kind of code name for a Thai hooker, and that was it.”
“Doreen sounds as though she’s a bit suspicious.”
“Well,” Shoe said. “I may have given her reason to be. On other occasions.” And he laughed. “Hey, does this thing go faster than 55?”
“Not when I’m driving it,” I said. That was one of the hard lessons I had learned in my association with Mr. Skalko: keep a low profile and avoid even the appearance of breaking the law.
Dearborn laughed and sat back, his feet up on the dash. “You know, they’ve got this new invention called ‘air conditioning’.”
“Never saw the need,” I said. The high desert gets hot at mid-day, but one of the side effects of my wild card is a lower body temperature. Except when I’m lifting. And I generally don’t lift when driving.
“You’re a deuce, huh?”
“Yeah. Want to get out and walk?”
He pointed to himself. “I’ve got a touch of it myself,” he said, surprising me for the second time that day. I wondered what his power was? But he offered nothing. “Besides, I’ve worked with many a joker in my day.” He pointed to the south and east, the general direction of Tomlin Air Force Base. “Right over there.”
“I didn’t know we were allowed in the Air Force.”