The first time he talked to her about her Web surfing, Ilena packed a bag, took her son, and moved in with a neighbor-a Russian man she's been living with ever since.
Brian says, "I've had a lot of guys email me, and their stories were almost identical. These guys believed there was love there, but once their wife had her residency or her green card, she was gone. Ilena didn't even wait that long. She left two months after we were married. She couldn't even play the game long enough to get legal status."
That's where everything fell apart. Brian didn't eat for eight weeks. He lost forty-five pounds, shaved his beard, and couldn't bear to work on the rocket.
"I've been working so hard for so long," he says. "You go back to before I started this rocket project and look at the fifteen years of abject failure. I built a submarine, but I never made it into a business. I'd succeed in one portion, but I'd fail at a different part. The same with my stretcher or my hundreds of other inventions. I would work nonstop for months and years on end. Then I started getting success in the toy industry, and instead of scaling back I jumped into this project, and at this point in time it's completely overwhelming me."
Another shock came in the form of the "X-Prize," an offer of ten million dollars prize money to the first private group to put a rocket into the atmosphere. And the sudden competition Rocket Guy now faces from well-funded and well-educated teams around the world.
Even the media attention had become a handicap. Some two thousand people have shown up at his door, wanting a tour. "I have a really hard time saying no to people," he says. "What's slowed me down the most over the past three years is my desire to appease people's requests. Whether it's the media. Whether it's reading and answering emails or inviting people out to see things. Or doing school fund-raisers. I go speak at schools quite a bit."
It's been quite a ride. Money. Fame. Love. All of it before the rocket even got to the launch pad.
Fast-forward to July 2003, and, day by day, Brian Walker is coming back. A friend introduced him to a woman, an American, a realtor his own age. Her name is Laura, and already her voice is on his answering-machine message. They've skydived, together. There's even talk about another wedding-after Brian's divorce is final.
And he still gets letters, hundreds of letters from kids, parents, and teachers who love his toys.
There in Bend, Oregon, work continues in the Rocket Garden. There's the centrifuge where Brian trains himself to endure G forces. There's the tower where he tests rocket engines. In a couple months he plans to launch himself three miles high in a test rocket. He plans to finish the geodesic dome he's started. And the observatory perched on top of it. Inside the dome, the rocket waits, painted two-toned, light and dark blue. Ready, on the trailer he was making back in December 2001. Back when anything seemed possible. Love. Fame. Family.
In a way, it's all still possible.
Instead of instruments inside the rocket, he only wants a flat-screen video monitor hooked up to cameras on the outside. Or video goggles he can wear.
He wants to build a rocket sled that will ramp up one side of the dome.
He wants to design a glider-type aircraft that can be catapulted from city to city.
There's a go-cart he's building, powered by twin jet engines.
And the jet engine he bought on eBay and rigged so its 1,600-degree exhaust will melt the ice in his driveway… "When this thing kicks to life, your nuts suck all the way up into your stomach," he says. "It's almost terrifying to see this thing come to life."
And there's corporate sponsorship to search for. "I'd love Viagra as a sponsor, because the rocket makes a damn good symbol for Viagra," Brian Walker says. "Much better than a race car."
There's so much work left to do.
He still needs to distill the nine thousand pounds of hydrogen peroxide. And answer the emails. In the log cabin, his Soviet-made space suit waits.
The whole world waits.
Yes, you'll be hearing a lot more from Rocket Guy.
A lot more.
If he's not the first private person into space, then he wants to pioneer high-altitude skydiving from rockets. He wants to launch space tourism, which will allow people to orbit the Earth in a station, like a cruise ship, and drop out of the sky to visit any place, like a port. He plans to write a book that explains his success as an inventor. He's designing a carbon-fiber cannon that will shoot three-hundred-gallon water balloons to put out forest fires five miles away.
Inside his forty-five-foot-wide geodesic dome, Brian Walker talks about the red, green, and yellow halogen lights he plans to install. He talks about his other dreams. Of being "Teleportation Guy" and instantly teleporting himself to Russia. Or being "Time Travel Guy."
For now, he says, "The only thing reasonable I think I can do is to shoot myself into space. I can't time-travel. I can't teleport myself."
Inside the cool, dark dome, away from the desert sunshine, alone here with his rocket, he says, "I want to have unique special-effects lighting, and I want to have speakers that will make reverberating sounds so I can do really cool presentations."
You see, the way Rocket Guy explains it, the goal-space travel, time travel, teleportation-isn't your real reward. It's what you discover along the way. The same way putting a man on the moon gave us Teflon frying pans.
"And," Brian Walker says, "I want to do my own kind of Kentucky Fried Movie type of thing. Remember the TV show Time Tunnel?"
He says, "I want to do Time Tunnel 2001 with 'Time Guy, and Time Guy's whole mission is to go back in time to nail significant historical babes so he can spread his genetic genes into the future. So he goes back to Egypt to get with Cleopatra, and the moment he arrives he turns around and he's just about to be trampled by chariots, so they zap him back to the future. And then he goes back to France to get with Marie Antoinette, and he materializes on the guillotine just as the blade is coming down. So every time this poor sap goes back in time, he arrives at a point where within seconds he's going to be dead. And, the poor guy, it ends up he never does anything…"
Dear Mr. Levin,
In college, we had to read about people shown pictures of gum disease. These were photographs of rotten gums and crooked, stained teeth, and the idea was to see how these images would affect the way people cared for their own teeth.
One group was shown mouths only a little rotten. The second group was shown moderately rotten gums. The third group was shown horrible blackened mouths, the gums peeled down, soft and bleeding, the teeth turned brown or missing.
The first study group, they took care of their teeth the same as they always had. The second group, they brushed and flossed a little more. The third group, they just gave up. They stopped brushing and flossing and just waited for their teeth to turn black.
This effect the study called "narcotization."
When the problem looks too big, when we're shown too much reality, we tend to shut down. We become resigned. We fail to take any action because disaster seems so inevitable. We're trapped. This is narcotization.
In a culture where people get too scared to face gum disease, how do you get them to face anything? Pollution? Equal rights? And how do you prompt them to fight?
This is what you, Mr. Ira Levin, do so very well. In a word, you charm people.
Your books, they're not so much horror stories as cautionary fables. You write a smart, updated version of the kind of folksy legends that cultures have always used-like nursery rhymes and stained-glass windows-to teach some basic idea to people. Your books, including Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, and Sliver, take some of the thorniest issues in our culture and charm us into facing the problem. As recreation. You turn this kind of therapy into fun. On our lunch breaks, waiting for a bus, lying in bed, you have us face these Big Issues, and fighting them.