STORMING SPACE
By Michael Cassutt
Would that be Mr. Cash?” the voice behind me said, surprising the hell out of me.
I was in Haugen’s Bakery on Highway 14 getting my morning cup of coffee, though that’s not why I stopped there. I didn’t even like coffee much; it made me jittery, and made my heavy lifting, tricky at best, almost impossible. The owner, a joker of indeterminate gender named “Fran”, was hard on the eyes and nerves.
But Haugen’s had this waitress named Evelyn. Well, her name was pronounced Evelyn: on her nametag it was written, no fooling, “Eva-Lynne”. She was tall and slim and blond and about 25 years old, and my purpose in life, that unseasonably hot day in October 1968, was to find out what mistake she made in a past life that dumped her into a bakery in Mojave, California. Until then I, like the truckers passing through, continued to come by for some really bad coffee, questionable pastries, and just a whiff of her perfume. Perhaps a throaty, “Thanks for coming in. Good to see you again.” (She always seemed on the verge of remembering my name.)
You certainly didn’t come to Haugen’s to have strange foreign men loom up behind you without warning.
“Hmm?” I said, or something equally articulate.
“Mr. Cash Mitchell?” The speaker was a man about forty, thin, dark. Indian, I judged, from the lilt to his voice. Not a joker, either.
“Speaking,” I said, foolishly, as if we were on the telephone. (I was moving closer to my encounter with Eva-Lynne.)
“Ah, good. I am Tominbang. I wish to speak with you on a matter of great urgency.” He shook my hand a bit too enthusiastically.
And I took another step forward. The customer in front of the customer in front of me—a busy-looking woman of 35, almost certainly a real estate professional—suddenly launched a complicated series of orders at Eva-Lynne, no doubt nosh for some morning meeting. I was trapped.
“I’m listening,” I said to Tominbang. If you saw me, medium height, overweight, glasses, you would not be intimidated. But I had had a good couple of months lifting various items for Mr. Warren Skalko of Lancaster, Las Vegas, and other municipalities, so I felt smug. I could not imagine why this foreign man would be talking to me; more precisely, I suspected that any association between us was not going to make me rich. (This turned out to be painfully true.)
“Mr. Warren Skalko recommends you to me,” Tominbang said.
I lost probably a third of my attitude at the mention of my mentor. “I’m always happy to meet a friend of Mr. Skalko’s,” I said, summoning as much enthusiasm as I could. Just to be safe. “Where do you know him from?” Mr. Skalko had several sorts of associates, some from his noted (and legitimate) charity work, others from his country club, and a few from being what that same popular press called “the crime lord of the southwest.”
“We were introduced on the first tee at Riviera,” Tominbang said, naming Mr. Skalko’s Los Angeles country club, and nicely slipping into the second category of Skalko associates. “He mentioned your specific abilities as a mass transporter—”
He was interrupted by a commotion not five feet away. Real Estate Woman was giving my beloved Eva-Lynne a hard time. “What the hell do you expect me to do? Carry it all by myself?”
The customer in front of me, sensing a longer-than-usual wait for bad coffee, shook his head and departed. At that moment I caught Eva-Lynne’s eye—and was struck by something I’d never seen there before.
Panic.
She was trying to maneuver a heavy, unbalanced load of hot coffees and pastry—enough food for a group of a dozen longshoreman, I judged—while behind her a coffee machine somehow managed to boil over and one of the bakers chattered in her ear. Big bad Fran was busy elsewhere. “I’m sorry,” she was saying, “Just give me a—”
“Let me help,” I said, surprising myself as I edged past the annoying Real Estate Woman and placed a hand on Eva-Lynne’s shoulder. This is how my lifting works: physical touch, with mass-to-be-moved proportional to the strength of my grip. The trigger is emotion, and anger or even general annoyance (my usual state), is the most reliable.
You can bet I was gentle. I didn’t want hot coffee spewing all over us. Sure enough, the load lightened just enough so that Eva-Lynne didn’t have to worry about it. One lovely eyebrow arched in surprise. “Out to your car?” I said to the Annoying Real Estate Woman.
“No, why don’t you just carry it over to Joshua Street for me.” Ordinarily I have little patience for sarcasm, but being in actual physical contact with Eva-Lynne had a mellowing effect.
“Let me help,” I whispered to Eva-Lynne, since I had to remain in physical contact to keep lifting. And we glided outside into the gravel parking like a Kern County version of Fred and Ginger.
“Thank you,” Eva-Lynne told me, once the order was safely deposited on the front seat of a new 1969 Ford LTD, and Annoying Real Estate Woman had departed. “I really appreciate it.” Her nose sort of crinkled, and she smiled. “Your name is Cash, isn’t it?”
At last! I’d made it across the barrier, from vaguely familiar five-day-a-week morning customer to friend-with-a-name! Who knew where this could lead! I was just about to extend my hand when Fran appeared in the doorway. “Eva-Lynne, we have customers!”
“Back to the grind,” she said, heading back inside. I followed.
In those brief-but-glorious moments of personal contact, I had forgotten about Tominbang. “You are a gentleman, Mr. Mitchell.”
“Not really,” I said, and I wasn’t just being modest. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Ah, my project,” he said, lighting up like a Mojave dawn. “I am thinking of making a flight to the Moon.”
Nothing less could have torn me away from Eva-Lynne. (And even then, it was close.)
Mr. Tominbang’s late model El Dorado was parked outside, right next to my ’66 Mustang (the fruit of my first lifting jobs for Mr. Skalko, a shipment of color televisions that somehow fell off their truck). There was some discussion as to whether I would ride with Tominbang (“Where are we going, exactly?”) or he with me, until we compromised on having me follow him. That was a relief: if I’d left the Mustang for, say, two hours, the next place I would have seen it would have been as pieces in one of the Mr. Skalko’s other subsidiaries, the Palmdale chop shop.
Tominbang headed north, then west on Highway 58, toward the nether reaches of greater Mojave. This was strange territory for me: I live south of Palmdale, which is itself south of Mojave, in my little rat shack on the slope above Pearblossom Highway. I only found myself frequenting Haugen’s Bakery on Highway 14 thanks to visits to one of Mr. Skalko’s hideouts—excuse me, residences.
No sooner had we cleared the collection of shacks, trailers and used auto parts lots that is Mojave than I developed second thoughts. Maybe it was the wind, which was blowing hard enough to nudge the Mustang off the centerline. (Did you know that Tehachapi is the windiest municipality in the continental US?) Maybe it was hearing Scott McKenzie singing, “If You’re Going to Jokertown” for the hundredth time in a week, with its lyrics about taking that longshot when you see it. (A guy like me doesn’t have many opportunities with a girl like Eva-Lynne.)
Maybe it was thinking about what Mr. Tominbang said. A flight to the Moon?
I was seven years old when the wild card turned, so aliens from another planet were as real to me as Rin Tin Tin or my Fourth grade teacher. My older brother, Brad, used to force me to play Buck Rogers with him—the times we weren’t playing Wake Island, that is. We fought marsh creatures on Venus, dust dragons on Mars, and even some weird rock beings on the Moon.
Brad wanted to explore space when he grew up. Who cared that the Takisians had been there first? Human beings would go further, faster! He read all the Tak World novels, which he then passed down to me. (I read them, too, but under duress.)
More practically, he went to college at Purdue, got his engineering degree in ’61, then joined the Air Force. This was not long after the X-11A fiasco; I remember him telling me that the US was edging back into the space business—but in secret. He had heard rumors of new students being recruited out of Purdue.
Brad went off to Vietnam and disappeared over Haiphong in January 1964. He was still listed as Missing in Action. And America’s “secret” space program? For all I knew that day, we could have had a fleet of flying saucers bombing Haiphong, maybe, or spying on all the freaks in Berkeley.
They sure weren’t flying to the Moon.
We were now so far into the wilderness that my radio reception was fading: there was mention of a riot at some rock concert in California. There were always riots in the news that year. I wouldn’t have bothered to pay attention, but it said the Hell’s Angels were involved. I knew the local Angels: they also did some jobs for Mr. Skalko. When I changed channels, all I got was country and western crap, or preachers, so I switched it off.
Besides, Tominbang’s car was turning onto a dirt road leading to a pair of distant hangars at Tehachapi-Kern Regional Airport. We had passed up a perfectly good asphalt road that led to a perfectly good administration building and tower. I made a note to send Tominbang a bill for any damage to the Mustang’s undercarriage.
The wind was still blowing when we got out. Tominbang’s tie flapped noisily. I wedged dust out of the corner of my eye as my guide fumbled a key out of his pocket and spent an unnecessary amount of time trying to open a padlock.
I looked at the two big hangars and what I couldn’t see from the road—a set of fuel tanks and other mechanical structures behind them, along with a much better road that led back to the airport proper. No other cars present, except one battered blue Scout. “Here we are,” Tominbang said proudly, wrenching the door open.
We had to pass through an anteroom of sorts to enter the hangar itself. Actually, a room and a hallway, with Tominbang flipping on lights as we went. “Please excuse,” he said. “I have just acquired this property and have yet to staff it completely.”
“How many, uh, staff, are you going to have?” I asked, smelling mildew and seeing rust and dirt wherever I looked.
“Perhaps three dozen. Perhaps more.”
Were forty people enough to build a spaceship that could fly to the Moon? I doubted that.
“Before we proceed, I must ask . . .” His voice trailed off as he pulled a two-paged typed document out of the drawer of a battered metal desk. “This is a non-disclosure agreement certifying that you will keep what you are about to see confidential, until such time as it becomes public.”
I looked around at the cold, unused office with its peeling paint, and tried not to laugh. And signed. “How much is this all costing?” I said, handing the document back to Tominbang.
“The final price tag will be close to ten million dollars US,” he said casually, as if he were disclosing the price of a new suit of clothes.
He opened one last door, and we emerged into a rather different space: a huge space probably three stories tall. Bing, bing, bing, on went the lights.
And sitting in the middle of this space was a strange vehicle I can only describe as stubby-winged and shaped like a pumpkin-seed. “This is Quicksilver,” Tominbang said, proudly waving me toward it. “A prototype space plane developed at Tomlin four years ago.”
Not the X-11A. “Never heard of it.”
“It was secret.”
“Then what’s it doing here?” And in the hands of a shady foreign national?
“The Quicksilver program was cancelled last year. It proved to be technically feasible to fly it from the surface of the earth into orbit and return, but at a much higher cost than the Pentagon was willing to pay. Especially with a war going on. This Quicksilver is supposedly being stored until the day it can be displayed in the Air Force Museum.”
“How the hell did you even hear about it?”
“Ah,” Tominbang said, very pleased with himself, “my business is computers and telecommunications. One of my subsidiaries had the contract for the Quicksilver ground stations.”
So he knew about it legitimately. Well, semi-legitimately.
Up close Quicksilver looked used: the paint was faded. There were what appeared to be scorch marks on its skin. Of course, those were just the superficial details. “It was flown into orbit,” Tominbang said.
“Earth orbit is a long way from the Moon.”
“That’s where you come in,” a new voice said.
Out of the shadows lurched a slim, weathered man of sixty. Or, once he stepped into the light, a hard forty. His hair was gray and ragged, like a military crewcut gone to weed. His eyes were pale blue. It was the web of lines around them that made him seem old.
“Ah!” Tominbang said, with the sort of enthusiasm I used to have for Christmas morning, “Commander Al Dearborn, I have found Mr. Cash Mitchell.” Tominbang turned to me. “Commander Dearborn is a Quicksilver pilot.”
We shook hands. His grip was surprisingly limp. “Call me Al. All my ex wives do.” He smiled. “Though they usually add ‘that cheating son of a bitch’.”
“I’ll skip that part until I know you better.”
Dearborn laughed, perhaps a bit too hard. “That’s good. You’re gonna need a sense of humor on this thing.”
That statement alarmed me, and Tominbang noted my reaction. “Commander Dearborn is a noted humorist,” he said. And drunkard, I wanted to add. “He was the primary test pilot for Quicksilver.”
“Actually, I was a Navy exchange test pilot for the bird at Tomlin. The Air Force project pilot was a buddy of mine, Mike Sampson.”
I didn’t like Dearborn’s smell and boozy appearance, so my normal sociability was strained. “So why don’t we have Sampson here?”
“Major Sampson is still on active duty at Tomlin,” Tominbang said, quickly, and with a nervous glance at Dearborn. Obviously this was a delicate subject.
Dearborn peered at me as if we had not just been introduced. “I can’t decide whether I’m gonna like you or want to kill you.”
Ultimately, he did neither. What he did was throw up on my feet.
I’m not a fastidious man; I generally wear T-shirts and jeans, to the annoyance of Mr. Skalko, who clings to the sport coat look and seems to want a “team uniform” for his associates. I also wear sandals, generally a wise choice in the desert heat.
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.”