Eva-Lynne ignored me. “It was bad. Polygamy may work for some. I think my family generally got along. But Roderick, my husband, was a bastard. I think he would rather have beaten us rather than slept with us.
“All of us tried to run off at one time or another. We all got caught and taken back, and it would be even worse.
“Finally one of the other men in the town heard what was going on, and challenged Roderick. But Roderick killed him and took his wives for his own.
“Which left him free to get rid of us. He sold us to the Gambiones, Cash. They dragged us off to New York, Jokertown, where they had a brothel just for jokers.” Her voice had grown quieter as she spoke. By this time there were tears rolling down her cheeks. For her sake and mine, I wanted to her to stop. But no. “I spent three years there.” Now her smile was savage. “I was very popular with the clientele.
“Eventually one of the girls died; a joker killed her. The Gambiones had to lie low for a few weeks; they shipped most of to San Francisco.
“I’d saved a little money.” She hesitated for a moment, then said, in the smallest possible voice, “I used my charms. And I got out. You wanted to know how someone who looks like me winds up in Mojave? That’s why.”
“I had no idea.”
“I’m glad. But now you know. And now you have good reason not to fall in love with me.”
I mumbled something. “What was that?” she said.
“My mother used to say, even after the wild card: ‘love trumps all’.”
Eva-Lynne gave a short, sharp laugh. “I’ll tell you what—
She was interrupted by the blare of a warning siren, the same one used the night of the flight test. We both jumped at the sound, and she said, “We’d better get back.”
As we started down the hill, I let Eva-Lynne lead the way, thrilling to her every step and sway. In spite of the revelation of her sordid or, at least, troubling past, I loved her more hopelessly than ever.
As we reached the hangar, we saw that Quicksilver had been rolled into the open. Eva-Lynne took my hand and said, “I can’t believe you’re going to ride that thing all the way to the Moon.”
“And, hopefully, back again,” I said. She laughed. For a moment, everything seemed possible.
Then Kakfa scuttled up to us. “Need to talk,” he hissed. Or perhaps spat would be a better word. He looked directly at Eva-Lynne. “Alone.”
She took her dismissal with grace, and headed back to the office.
“We’re launching tonight,” Kafka said.
“Tonight? Since when?”
When Kafka got agitated, he began to scuttle back and forth, like a roach in a jar. “Tominbang’s orders. He says there are ‘problems’.”
“What kind of problems?”
“I don’t know,” Kafka hissed. “But we go tonight!”
I had prepared myself to make the call to Mr. Skalko. I had not expected to do it so soon.
“Tominbang’s in a lot of trouble,” Al Dearborn told me a few moments later. Tominbang had failed to appear for a lunch meeting. Instead he had telephoned, and wound up telling Dearborn his sad story: he had not been using his own money for the Quicksilver-to-the-Moon program. Instead, he had dipped into funds belonging to others, apparently in the hopes that profits from the first Moon flight would allow him to pay back his unwitting “investors” before they realized they’d been robbed.
But one of the parties found out. “Some guy named Warren Skalko. Ever heard of him?”
“Yes,” I said. In order to keep Dearborn from pressing further (since I doubted I could lie to him), I added, “he’s the local godfather. Bad news.”
The bad news explained the flurry of activity in the hangar. Jokers and deuces were shredding papers; a burn barrel out back was a-flame. Every few moments, a car would launch itself out of the parking lot in a spray of gravel. “You’d think we were about to be bombed,” I said to Dearborn.
“From what Tominbang said, that’s a distinct possibility.”
“How can we launch tonight if he’s not here?”
“He’s not making the trip.”
“Given the situation, I’m not sure I’m making the trip.” In fact, I was, at that moment, quite and sure I wasn’t. I was two minutes away from making a hasty departure from Tehachapi-Kern.
“Well, Cash, as you know: without you, there is no flight to the Moon.” He smiled to take the edge off what was clearly a threat: “I’d hate to have to kidnap you.”
“In that case,” I said, “when do we leave?”
Dearborn clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit!”
Seeing one last opportunity to put an end to this madness, I said, “Can we operate Quicksilver with a crew of two?”
“Operate, yes. But the mass properties have been very finely calibrated to your talents, Co-pilot. We’ve got to have a certain amount of mass in that right-hand seat. And, given that we can probably use the extra hands on the Moon, I’d rather not just fill it with a sack of cement.”
Just then, Bacchus walked in, brought by Eva-Lynne. “You wanted to see me?” the joker physicist said.
“Yeah, how much do you weigh?”
“In the mornings I mass 185 pounds,” Bacchus said, his voice like a hiccup. “By evening that decreases to around 182, depending on my fluid intake—”
Dearborn held up his hand. I could have told him that with Bacchus, there was no such thing as a short answer to a direct question. “Sorry. That puts us over our weight limit—”
Before I could even think it, much less say it, Eva-Lynne announced, “One hundred and twenty pounds.”
“What’s that?” Dearborn said.
“How much I weigh.”
Bacchus snorted. Dearborn and I looked at each other.
“Do you know what we’re talking about?” I said.
“Going to the Moon, Cash.” As if she were talking about a drive to Barstow, or possibly as far as Las Vegas.
“Can we take a girl to the Moon?” I asked.
“I don’t know about you, Co-pilot, but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have along.” He grinned at me and Eva-Lynne. “Let’s kick the tires and light this candle.”
It was the evening of Friday, December 20. I realized that Christmas was only a few days away, and I had bought nothing for anyone—not even Eva-Lynne.
Dearborn and I struggled into our pressure suits. Eva-Lynne, after spending several precious moments wrapping her blond tresses into some kind of braid, wore hers as if she were born to it. I said as much as we walked toward Quicksilver. “This suit is nothing, compared to a girdle.”
Thinking of women’s undergarments triggered another worry: “Uh, what are you doing to do about . . . sanitary matters?”
Eva-Lynne stifled a laugh, and motioned me close. “I helped raise a dozen babies, Cash. I know how to make a diaper!” My curiosity more than satisfied, I was about to climb into Quicksilver’s cockpit when she added, too loudly for my taste, “What are you guys using? Can-o-pees?”
Dearborn was already in the forward seat as I strapped into the left rear position. Then Eva-Lynne wedged herself into the one to my right—Tominbang’s former seat.
Sobel was about to close the airlock hatch when he leaned in, agitated. “Bikers are storming the gates!” he said. “What should I do?”
“Lock the damned door and take cover,” Dearborn growled. He had already started the engine.
Sobel froze with indecision for a long moment. Then, apparently deciding that Dearborn’s order made sense, gave me his hand. “Good luck! Bring back some green cheese!”
He wiggled out of sight and closed the hatch behind him. We heard several clicks as the latches fired, and we were sealed in.
“One minute,” Dearborn said. “Hold on, people. You’re going to take the ride of your lives!”
Eva-Lynne reached back to take my hand. I felt no fear: I was too convinced of Dearborn’s luck to think I could be killed in his presence. But I felt trapped in the pressure suit, my movements hampered.
Spang! Something struck Quicksilver! “What was that?” Eva-Lynn said.
“I think the SOBs are shooting at us,” Dearborn said. “Hang on, we’re go.” And go we were—
For perhaps a hundred yards down the runway. Even with my limited visibility, I could see the flashes of bullets striking the pavement in front of us. Then one of them struck home, making the cockpit ring. Then I heard hissing.
Red warning lights erupted on Dearborn’s console. A bell sounded. “Goddammit,” he snapped. With inhuman—or joker—calm, he tried to stop our rollout. The whole vehicle shook as we skidded off the runway. Only then did I realize just how fast we’d been going.
Quicksilver slewed to the left and slammed into something immobile. Eva-Lynne and I were thrown to the left; I hit the bulk-head, though my harness and suit protected me from injury. Eva-Lynne seemed to be fine.
Not so Dearborn. Perhaps his harness had been loose. In any case, he had hit the instrument panel. He was breathing hard, waving weakly at the two of his with a free hand, “Get out!”
I obeyed, hitting the emergency egress switch on the canopy. It flew off with a muffled thump! The next few moments were chaotic as I unstrapped, helped Eva-Lynne, and got both of us out of Quicksilver.
Lights blinded us. Shadowy figures boiled out of the darkness, swarming over Quicksilver and Dearborn like insects.
Eva-Lynne and I were hustled to our feet, and half-dragged to the hangar building. I still had my helmet on, so sounds were muffled and vision was impaired. I saw some of the Quicksilver team members lined up against the wall, hands (or, in the case of Kafka, pincers) in the air, as beefy nats and jokers in the black leathers of Hell’s Angels held them at gunpoint.
I saw Sobel lying face-down on the ground just outside the hangar, a trail of blood marking the path of his death crawl.
We were shoved into the same equipment room where poor Sobel had helped us into our suits not an hour earlier. We barely had time to catch our breath when Mr. Skalko entered, accompanied by several of his thugs. “You,” he said, pointing to me. “Out.”
I was hauled to my feet and essentially stripped of my suit. Then, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and shorts, I was marched out of the hangar. Dearborn and Eva-Lynne remained behind.
“You cut it a little close,” Mr. Skalko said.
“Tominbang moved up the launch.” I’m sure I sounded angry, because I was. I had assumed that Skalko would take action once he knew the Quicksilver launch was imminent. I hadn’t expected that action to be a mob shootout.
“I know that now. Good thing for you.” I’m sure Skalko knew all about Tominbang’s plans. For one thing, he had surely interrogated the poor man. For another, I doubt I was his only spy inside the program. “Kind of a shame,” he said. He actually sighed. “I was still thinking about it when you called.”
“Why did you stop it? The money?”
Mr. Skalko looked at me with amusement. “You mean, what he stole?”
“Yes.”
“I deal with stuff like that all the time. No, I had to kill this whole idea. Going to the Moon.”
Now I was as intrigued as I was angry. “Why would you care?”
“One flight means nothing. It’s what happens after the flight.” He looked at me as if weighing my worthiness. Apparently I was found worthy. “Once you’ve proven you can do this, other people will follow. They’ll build a little outpost up there. Then a bigger one. Then a whole damn city.
“And to service that city, they will have a regular system of transportation that I can’t control.” He stood there, in the darkness of a desert night, looking at the stars. “Things will come into this country that I can’t stop. That would be bad for my business.”
I saw the point. Not that I cared. “What’s going to happen to them?” I said, meaning Dearborn and Eva-Lynne.
“I don’t know yet.” He saw that I was ready to go back into the hangar. “I want you to go home.”
He tossed me my car keys. I don’t know if he found them with my clothes, or whether he had his own set, which would have been a typical Skalko touch. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “we’re ending our association.”
In spite of the fact that I wanted our association to end—better yet, to have ended some time prior to this—I started to protest. Mr. Skalko held up his hand. “You’ve done good work. You’ve been paid well. But I know people, and this one is going to haunt you. Keep your mouth shut and you don’t need to see me again.”
I had just stepped out of the shower, having taken inventory of a new set of bruises, when I heard wheels crunching on the gravel drive. By the time I was dressed, there was a knock at my door.
Dearborn and Eva-Lynne. He was limping, and Eva-Lynne was supporting him.
Skalko’s men had let them go. After all, the purpose of the attack had been to stop the flight to the Moon. Tominbang had already been punished.
I wanted both to spend the night, but Dearborn shook his head. “Co-pilot, we’re not out of the game yet. We need your car.”
The drive to Los Angeles took two hours, perhaps because it was Friday night, with the holidays approaching. South from my place in Lancaster, through the Antelope Valley into the San Fernando Valley. Then down the new freeway into western Los Angeles. I asked Dearborn several times where I was heading, but he just smiled (or grimaced; he was clearly in pain). All he would tell me was my next turn.
Eva-Lynne dozed in the back seat.
Eventually we arrived at Douglas Field, a small airport in Santa Monica bordering the plant where so many aircraft had been built over the decades. The Douglas Company had moved its manufacturing elsewhere, leaving behind a number of huge, empty buildings. I was directed to drive up to one of them.
Eva-Lynne woke as the car stopped. “What are we doing here?” she said.
Dearborn postponed his answer until he had unlocked a side door.
We walked into a hangar much like the one at Tehachapi-Kern. Even more strangely, a Quicksilver vehicle sat in this middle of this one, too. And my old friend, Kafka, was busy in the cockpit!
“Here is where we’re going to launch the first flight to the Moon,” Dearborn said, looking pale but satisfied. As Eva-Lynne and I stared in wonder—and began to recognize other members of the team from Tehachapi-Kern—he explained that Tominbang had always felt that Mr. Skalko would eventually learn of his plans, and strike at him. So he had paid for modifications to a second Quicksilver vehicle, the “ground spare” originally ticketed for the museum!
That was astounding enough. But then Eva-Lynne asked another question: “You’ve got another vehicle. Great. But you can’t possibly fly it.”
“I know,” Dearborn said. “Mike!” he called.
A vaguely familiar figured emerged from the other side of Quicksilver. Major Sampson, Dearborn’s old X-11A colleague, his alternate.
“Remember what I told you, Cash. Always, always, always have a backup.”
The preparations resumed, almost as if the horrifying incident at Tehachapi-Kern had been nothing more than a fouled-up dress rehearsal for some high school drama. Dearborn assured Eva-Lynne and me that Sampson was perfectly capable of flying the mission. Better yet, that he knew all about my lifting power and just how that integrated into the flight plans.
As the sun rose over the mountains to the east, on the cold morning of Saturday, December 21, 1968, Sampson, Eva-Lynne and I once again donned our suits (brought here from Tehachapi-Kern by Kafka) and boarded Quicksilver.
We were much more business-like this time, due, I think, to our improved realization of the seriousness of what we were attempting, and also to Sampson’s more disciplined methods.
At 6:51 a.m., the main rocket kicked in, and we started down the runway. On Sampson’s order, I grasped the tiller, and we lifted.
Even though the test hop had prepared me for the experience of flying into orbit upside down, I was startled by the sight of Douglas Field, then downtown Santa Monica and the Pacific, all of Southern California and finally the blue earth itself growing smaller while rising to the top of the window.
We were feeling heavy, of course. Kafka had told me we would endure at least 6 Gs. But we were strapped in so tightly that it was merely a mildly unpleasant feeling, not something truly stressful.
What was unnerving was being able feel every burp and pop of our rocket motor. “A little instability there,” Sampson said, far too casually, following one particularly wrenching example.
Our flight on the rocket lasted less than three minutes, and ended with an abrupt shutdown which flung us forward in our harnesses. (This was, for me, the single most disquieting sensation of the whole voyage. I felt as though I would fly right through the forward windows.)
“Everybody okay back there?” Sampson asked, in that peculiar, fatherly tone of his.
“Fine!” Eva-Lynne answered brightly. I glanced over at her, and was rewarded with her best smile.
“We’re going to loop around the earth once,” Sampson explained, for Eva-Lynne’s benefit, “then let Cash do his thing. That will send us toward the Moon. In the meantime, enjoy the view. I plan to.”
Of course, being forward, Sampson actually had a view. Though shortly even he didn’t have much to see, as we flew over the nightside of the earth. Below us was darkness punctuated by a surprising number of lightning flashes. Hundreds, in fact.
Eva-Lynne and I removed our helmets and watched this display with enthusiasm, as Sampson tended to the business of orienting Quicksilver. Rolling the vehicle tended to change our view, and, ultimately, made me ill.
In fact, as we neared the completion of our first orbit, and Sampson gave me warning that I would be lifting in ten minutes, I realized I was too sick to do anything. I opened my mouth to say so, and promptly repeated Al Dearborn’s greeting to met that first day at Tehachapi-Kern—I threw up.
“Oh, dear,” Eva-Lynne said. Fortunately, she had noticed that I was turning green, and had a paper towel and airsickness bag ready. The mess was blessedly minor, and within minutes I was feeling better.
Better—but nowhere near capable of doing a lift. “Two minutes,” Sampson said. “Are you ready back there?”
“I don’t know.”