“Absolutely!” Tominbang said. “These two are your instructors!”
I have never done well in school. I have done spectacularly poorly with nat tutors. I could not imagine myself working happily with teachers who were jokers.
Before I could protest, however, Dearborn slapped me on the back. “You better get started, Co-pilot. We launch in sixty days.”
Before that day was out, I was introduced to Bacchus, the bee-like joker, who claimed to have been a professor at Cal Tech in an earlier life. The roach was named Kafka, and he made sure I knew he had no degrees of any kind. “I’m just a homegrown genius,” he said, without a trace of humility.
Bacchus took the lead in my education, hissing and wheezing his way through my first my first lessons in astro-navigation, making it clear that I, who could barely find the North Pole in the night sky, would need to learn the locations of twenty “guide” stars. (Navigation and propulsion—which is to say, my lifting—were linked, since the lifts had to occur at precise locations in space.)
It just got worse from that point on.
The only bright spot in that first two weeks was that I was able to keep Dearborn away from Eva-Lynne. Well, it was not so much a deliberate action on my part as deliberate inaction. Even though I hated being locked in a room with Bacchus and Kafka I began to prolong my lessons as late as I dared, and within the first week Dearborn was so frustrated that he went to Tominbang and said he needed a car of his own.
Tominbang obtained a 1959 Cadillac convertible with fins more suited to an airliner. It was painted pink. Dearborn, ever practical and obviously secure in his image, took it happily. He even went so far as to apologize to me. “Sorry, Co-pilot, but for the next few weeks, I’m flying solo. You’ve won your wings.” Sure enough, I saw less and less of him at my apartment, though he did actually make it home every night—sober. Now all I had to do was be sure to arrive at Haugen’s by six-thirty every morning, and linger there until I saw Dearborn’s pink beast flash past.
While the extra time spent at the bakery caused me to gain weight (I was now averaging two pieces of Danish per morning), it also allowed me to approach Eva-Lynne.
It was slow going; she had to work the counter, and she was, it seemed, immensely popular. But over the course of a week I learned the following: she was 24. She lived with a cousin in Rosamond, the tiny community to the south of Mojave, at the entrance to Tomlin. Her favorite musician was not, as I had feared, one of the Monkees or possibly Simon and/or Garfunkel, but “all those Motown singers”.
And, a big surprise, she was not a refugee from a bad experience in Hollywood. She had, in fact, never been to Hollywood, and didn’t know if she wanted to go. “Everybody keeps asking me about it, so maybe I should.”
While she was beautiful enough to compete in that brutal environment, I could not, in good conscience, advise her to try. “You’re the only reason people come to Mojave.”
“Stop!” she said, blushing with what I hoped was pleasure.
What I didn’t learn was whether or not she would go out with me. Part of it was due to my own inability to utter an invitation. The sheer amount of foot traffic also made such a delicate conversation difficult.
It was on a Friday morning in early June, however, less than three weeks after Mr. Tominbang first approached me, that I felt I had my opening. I had arrived, as usual, at six-twenty, only to find Eva-Lynne with her eyes red-rimmed. I immediately asked if she was all right, but got no answer, because Fran was already yelling at her, a more frequent occurrence. “Hey, beauty queen, get your ass over here!”
I got my coffee and Danish and sat down at one of the small tables by the window, and witnessed no further outbursts. Imagine my surprise when, during a quiet moment, Eva-Lynne suddenly sat down with me. “Cash, do you mind if I ask you a question?”
Only if I can ask you one in return. The words appeared in my brain, but stayed there, stuck amidst the numbers. “Sure,” I said, pathetically.
“This new job you got—could they use a secretary or something? A girl to answer the phones, maybe?”
I had no idea of Tominbang’s staffing requirements. But at that moment, in a fit of arrogance, I decided I would pay Eva-Lynne’s salary, if necessary. He was paying me enough. “We sure do,” I heard myself say. “It’s only a temporary job, though.”
“Anything to get me out of here now.”
“What time do you get off work?” I was able to ask her a question like that as long as the next phrase had nothing to do with a date.
“Two.”
“Can you get a ride to the airport in Tehachapi?”
She got a look on her face that suggested a hidden power, one having more ancient roots than the wild card. “That won’t be a problem.”
I described Tominbang’s hangar, then told her I would alert our guards to be looking for her around 2:30.
She leaned forward, kissed me on the forehead, and said, “You’re a doll.”
I drove to Tehachapi wrapped in a golden cloud.
It wasn’t until that afternoon, after Eva-Lynne, eyes alive and happy, arrived for her appointment, after I had spent the day in a tedious session with Kafka concerning retrograde impulses of the Quicksilver propulsion system, that I realized I had made a terrible mistake:
I had brought Eva-Lynne into daily contact with Al Dearborn.
It was only a gradual realization. Tominbang would have hired Eva-Lynne on sight (as my father used to say, he seemed to have an eye for the ladies), though he was not too proud to accept my offer to underwrite her salary. “I think she will prove to be an excellent addition to the team,” he said. “If you find any more like her, please bring them to me.” For a variety of reasons, I was not tempted. (Besides, there was only one Eva-Lynne.)
She was immediately assigned to general office help, with special duty as my part-time assistant. (Bacchus and Kafka were burying me in technical documents that required filing and organizing.)
Only then, once she had signed the now-familiar non-disclosure agreement, did she learn what we were doing. “To the what?”
“The Moon,” I said, the first time I had ever actually said such a thing aloud.
“Who? How?” She was genuinely astonished and, I think, a little frightened. (As if this were nothing but a cover story for some much more mundane, but very illegal activity.)
I showed her our Quicksilver, then introduced her to several members of the team. She soon came to be comfortable with the idea of flying to the Moon. More comfortable, I noted, than she seemed with the number and variety of jokers and deuces.
It wasn’t until the end of the workday, as I was preparing to offer Eva-Lynne a ride back to Rosamond (after all, it was on my way), that Dearborn appeared.
Three weeks without drink—three weeks with the job of a lifetime—had improved his looks and his energy, not to mention his manner. (No more vomiting on feet.) He gave Eva-Lynne a wave, as if she had worked there all along, and turned to me. “We’re going to take our bird out for a test hop tonight. What do you say, Co-pilot?”
“Would a simple, ‘No, thank you’, be sufficient?”
“We’re not going into space, Cash. Just a little proficiency run around the neighborhood. Uh, no ‘heavy lifting’.” He laughed at his own joke, and turned to Eva-Lynne. “Will we have the honor of your presence?”
“What time do you want me?” she said, forthrightly, eyes blazing, using exactly those words, and breaking my heart.
Our small group moved into the hangar proper, where Tominbang and the rest of the team gathered, and I lost track of Eva-Lynne. I confess I got angry—at Tominbang, for disrupting my life and dragging me into this stupid project; at Dearborn, for being everything I was not.
Even, I must admit, at Eva-Lynne.
Darkness fell, and a huge orange Moon rose in the east—like a giant jack o’lantern rising from the desert. I had barely begun to study lunar geography, but I could already recognize the dark smear that was the Sea of Storms—Quicksilver’s landing site.
Our landing site, if I had the stomach to turn around and face my fears. (And I don’t mean fears of death.)
So I did.
Quicksilver was towed to the runway apron by a tractor with a sputtering motor.
“You’d think they could afford a new tractor,” Eva-Lynne said behind me.
I was feeling mildly heroic, proud of a chance to show off for Eva-Lynne, when Bacchus appeared suddenly out of the shadows, handing me two ring binders filled with paper. I glanced at the pages. “I had to pencil in some figures, position of the Moon at launch time, stuff like that. But it should give you a good sense of when to do your mass transfer.”
“To what end?” I wasn’t worried about doing the lifts. All I had to do was glance at the orientation of Quicksilver, its velocity, its reported position in three axes, and wait for Dearborn to tap me on the shoulder.
“For a proper simulation,” he said, clearly disgusted with my lack of professionalism.
I turned, hoping to re-connect with Eva-Lynne, but Commander Dearborn chose this moment to emerge from the hangar.
He was wearing a heavy, silvery garment like a diving suit, complete with a neck ring. Under one arm he carried white helmet. He seemed completely focused on the task ahead of him, like a bullfighter I had once seen in Tijuana.
Tominbang was a step behind him, but compared to Dearborn’s glittering presence, might as well have been invisible.
(I noticed one strange face in the crowd, not far behind Dear-born: Sampson, his backup pilot.)
Dearborn stopped and looked up at Quicksilver, which had now been towed to a distance of fifty yards from the hangar door. He raised his helmet, lowered it over his head, locked it into place.
Some of the team members applauded. I felt an unfamiliar surge of pride. From what I could see of Tominbang’s face, so did he.
And, for a moment, so did I. I was part of that crew!
The next half hour raced past. Dressed in street clothes (but carrying a crash helmet handed to me by Kafka), I joined Dearborn and Tominbang aboard Quicksilver. I had never been inside the vehicle before, and had to be helped down through the top hatch into the newly-installed airlock by Sampson. (“This is where the weapons bay used to be.”) Then I crawled forward into the cabin and wrenched myself to the left-hand seat. (There were three, one forward, and two behind.
“I hope I don’t have to get out of this thing in a hurry,” I said, half-joking.
“The pilot can blow the canopy for emergency egress,” Sampson said, his eyes bland and almost sleepy. I decided right then that I didn’t much like him. Maybe it was the air of truly unpredictable strangeness he radiated—his “wrong way” wild card, no doubt.
As the team cleared out, my helmet radio squawked. “Pilot to Co-pilot,” Dearborn said, “that pistol grip tiller close to your right hand is your lifting mechanism. It is finely calibrated to connect with the center of mass of this vehicle. Touch it only when you do your lifting.”
“Uh, roger,” I said, trying to sound astronautical.
There was some chatter on the radio that did not directly concern me. Next to me, Tominbang practically bounced up and down like a restless child.
Dearborn counted down to ignition, and pressed the start button. Flame shot out of the back of Quicksilver. In a cloud of debris, the pumpkin-seed vehicle started rolling down the runway. It rotated almost immediately, then headed straight up into the night sky . . .
I felt some pressure, but not much more than on an airplane. For the first few moments, that is. The pressure kept building and building, and to my extreme discomfort, we rolled to our left and over on our backs. “Why are we doing this?” I said between clenched teeth.
“Aerodynamics don’t apply here,” Dearborn said, almost cackling with glee. “It just lets our radio antennas communicate with the ground.”
Then he said, “First waypoint, Co-pilot. Give her a little lift.”
As I’ve said, annoyance is my perpetual state, and it quickly transitions to anger.
We made a good test lift.
Twenty minutes late we were back on the ground, hatch opened. As I walked away, weak in the knees, I looked back to see Quicksilver glowing like a campfire coal on the runway.
A crowd surged toward us. Dearborn removed his helmet, he handed it to me. “Flies great, doesn’t she, Co-Pilot?”
I couldn’t help agreeing.
My elation was so profound that it wasn’t until an hour later, as the crowd finally thinned, as Quicksilver was towed back into the hangar, that I realized Dearborn was gone.
And so was Eva-Lynne.
He didn’t come home that night. I know, because I sat up until three.
Maybe that’s why, when the phone rang at six A.M., I was willing to face—no, to welcome—my next challenge. “Yes, Mr. Skalko.”
Mr. Warren Skalko gave no over sign of his power or his wealth. No flashy car. No expensive suits. No gold pinkie rings or necklaces. No thick-necked sideboys. (They were around, but you never saw them, unless you happened to realize that the occasional passing motorcyclist was probably one of them.) His golf game was average, and his bets were small—five-dollar Nassaus. Even his physical person was nondescript: at 50 he was of medium height, a little overweight, balding, his eyes swimming behind thick glasses. If you met him without knowing who he was, you would have thought yourself in the company of an accountant, and not one who handled large accounts.
At one point, early in our relationship, I was silly enough to ask him why he did what he did, when he seemed to live so modestly.
“I can’t help myself,” was his reply.
He always made his own calls, too. “Cash, Warren Skalko here,” he chirped. “Sorry about the early hour. Wondering if you’d have time to get together later this morning, around eight, at the usual place.”
Eight it was, at the driving range of a ratty municipal par-three in Lancaster. It was October now, and the desert nights were cold enough to leave frost on the fairways and greens. So the crowd at the driving range was sparse.
Only Mr. Warren Skalko taking some swings with a seven-iron. “Tominbang tested his plane last night,” he announced the instant I was within earshot. (That was another Skalko trait: getting directly to the point.)
I think my heart stopped for a good five seconds. Obviously Tominbang had a distant connection to Mr. Skalko. Less obvious was why Mr. Skalko would have any interest in his activities. Equally less obvious, but of much greater concern to me was whether Mr. Skalko was angry about my involvement. “Yes.”
“Think it’s gonna work? This flying to the Moon?”
I couldn’t help a reflexive smile. “I hope so.” It was, after all, my life.
“Oh, you’d be all right. That Dearborn fella, he’s got the luck.” Swish. Mr. Skalko launched a shot down the range. “But I’m not sure I like this deal,” he said.
This was not code for a stronger emotion. Mr. Skalko was a direct man: if he really hated Tominbang’s project, he would have said exactly that.
“I’m not sure of the value, either,” I said.
“Why are you doing it? The money?” Mr. Skalko knew everything he needed to know about my money problems.
“Yes,” I said, then adding, because he would know, anyway. “And a girl.”
“Ah. That’s even worse.” Swish went the club. “When is the big day?”
“We’re scheduled to take off in two weeks.”
Mr. Skalko examined the seven iron, and then, apparently deciding, he had had enough fun at the driving range, slid it back into his golf bag. “Tell you what,” he said, “give me a call when it looks as though you’re ready to go. No later than the day before, at the usual number.” He sighed and looked around at the country-side. “I need to think about what this means.”
There was never any doubt that I would agree to do whatever Mr. Skalko wanted.
It was only after putting miles between my car and Mr. Skalko that I began to feel troubled by my new status as a spy inside Tominbang’s project. My heart began to beat faster, my breathing grew ragged. It was as if I had just run a mile.
I would have been alarmed, but I had learned to expect this reaction. All I could do was pull off at the first auto salvage yard I came to.
Here were hundreds of Fords, Chevys, Buicks, complete with tailfins and chrome, all suitable for my brand of lifting.
I started at the end of one row and lifted seven in a row, flipping each car onto its hood with a loud bang!. Not only was it noisy, it was dusty. But by the time I had reached the end of the row, my heart rate had returned to normal. And my emotions were spent.
I drove past Haugen’s Bakery (I no longer had reason to stop), then directly to the hangar, where I almost welcomed the sight of Eva-Lynne tottering in, giggling, wearing yesterday’s dress, and on Dearborn’s arm.
My father used to tell me I had no spine, an unfortunate phrase, given that it literally applied to at least two of my joker playmates. Perhaps that’s why I gave his judgment so little credence for so long.
But various mistakes in my life, beginning with flunking out of Harvey Mudd followed closely by a disastrous marriage, which led to excessive gambling and debts, and thence an unsolicited association with Mr. Warren Skalko, had convinced me of the truth of my father’s evaluation.
I had been a coward. Or, if you find that too harsh, I had never faced a challenge, either professionally or personally. Case number one, Eva-Lynne, now lost to a man who embraced challenges, or, if necessary, created them.
Case number two—the flight to the Moon. Some time between Dearborn’s walkout in his silver suit, and my “workout” at the auto salvage yard, I decided that this was the one challenge I had to face.
When I reached Tehachapi-Kern, I avoided any chance of contact with Eva-Lynne, and immediately searched out a technician named Sobel, who had left messages for me for at least a week.
He turned out to be some sort of aquatic joker who actually had to wear a bowl-like helmet filled with water, as well as a bubbling device which regularly uttered a disturbing noise like a baby’s cry. “Wouldn’t you be happier in the sea?” I asked him.
“Never learned to swim,” he said, completely deadpan. (Well, they do call them jokers.) “Actually, I signed up when Tominbang hired a friend of mine. Who wouldn’t want to be part of the first flight to the Moon?”
Which made me feel bad that I had ignored his messages. When I learned that he was the specialist in charge of space suits, that he had wanted me to come in for fit checks for a suit of my own, I felt even worse.
Fortunately, we got to work, and within two hours I learned more about the operational aspects of the flight to the Moon than I had in three weeks. The silver suit, made mostly of heavy rubber, was one of half a dozen originally developed for the X-11A program a decade past, acquired, no doubt, through some shady contact of Tominbang’s. “We’re adding special boots, a white coverall and a special helmet visor for use on the lunar surface.”
“I’ll be out on the surface?”
“At the moment, only Dearborn and Tominbang are scheduled to walk on the Moon. They will erect the relay station. But if they have trouble, you will have to help them.” Somewhat ashamedly, I found myself hoping they would: why go all the way to the Moon and not walk on it?
I bent myself into various shapes in order to get my head through the helmet ring. Then I was zipped tight, and immediately began to perspire. I could not stand up straight, either. “You’ll be sitting most of the time,” Sobel said, taking some measurements, like a tailor, then helping me out of the garment. “You’ll either be hooked up to Quicksilver’s cooling system, or to a backpack.”
Then a more practical question arose. “What about sanitary facilities?”
Sobel smiled and held up a metal bottle and tube. “Standard USAF catheter.”
“And what about . . . other functions?”
“You’ll be on a low residue diet for the last few days prior to the flight.”
“How long will I be in this thing?”
“Two days, tops.”
That was some relief.
When I returned to my office, I found Bacchus leering all over an alarmed Eva-Lynne. (I couldn’t help noticing that she had, indeed, changed clothes from the previous night.) “I’ll be with you in a minute, Doctor,” I told this sex-crazed joker. “Eva-Lynne, I need to talk to you in private.”
As I closed the door, she said, “Thank God. I’ve met some aggressive men in my life—” I could only imagine. “—but he is by far the worst. I don’t even like having him breathe on me.”
“Sorry. I should have warned you.”
“I’m not sure a warning would have done much good. I probably wouldn’t have believed you.” She favored me with the same smile that had so bewitched me that first time I saw her. “But it’s very sweet of you to protect me.”
Seeing that she was about to leave, I cleared my throat and prepared to subject myself to bad news. “Speaking of protection, did you get home all right last night?”
She whirled to face me, and I saw a look on her lovely face that I had never seen before. One lovely golden eyebrow rose slightly. The effect was far more womanly, if that’s the word. Knowing. “Let’s just say, I got where I was supposed to get.”
I must have blushed. I certainly had no idea what to say. And I never, in fact, got the chance to respond, because Eva-Lynne prevented it. She took me by the hand and said, “You know, Cash, I think you and I need to have a picnic.”
My protest was truly feeble. “There’s nowhere to eat.” Most of Tominbang’s team packed lunches, or ate the offerings of the tiny cafeteria over at the airport.
“Don’t be silly, Cash. It’s not about food.”
“I hope you weren’t under the impression I was a virgin,” she said, once we’d reached our picnic grounds, a flat area halfway up the hill a hundred yards beyond the fence which ringed Tominbang’s hangar complex. In one last stab at being a masculine provider, I had bought two bottles of Dr. Pepper from the building’s vending machine as we walked out.
“No,” I said, telling the truth. This was, after all, 1968. Virginity had ceased to be in fashion about the time of my sophomore year at Harvey Mudd some years earlier. I had been married, and had been in several shorter sexual relationships myself, so I should have been beyond the adolescent fear that my sexual skills would not measure up, so to speak.
“But you were hoping I wasn’t a slut,” Eva-Lynne said, articulating my next thought before I could. My blush confirmed her statement.
She exhaled. “Have you ever heard of Diamond Butte, Arizona?” she said.
“Should I?”
“No reason. When I get through telling you about it, you’ll probably wish you still hadn’t heard it.” Diamond Butte, she explained, was a tiny town in the northwestern corner of Arizona a few miles south of Utah. “It’s cut off from the rest of Arizona by the Grand Canyon, but technically not in Utah. It’s kind of like—what’s that television show? The Twilight Zone. Nobody knows which set of laws to apply, because no one’s there to enforce them.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Nobody enforces either set.”
“Right.” She grimaced. “Which is why, for years, most of the people in the area were polygamists. My family, for example. My mother was my father’s seventh wife. I had twenty brothers and sisters. And I was literally sold to a man—my future husband—when I was fourteen. I became his eleventh wife when I was sixteen.”
“And that’s what you ran away from?” I said, hoping that was the end of the story.