Chapter 59: Shadows

“What do you need, Paul?” Jyl asked over the video link. Her hair was lighter than usual, and it looked like she had just come in from the beach at Learmonth.

“No chit-chat or catching up?” I asked with what I hoped was a sorrowful look.

Jyl laughed. “It’s working hours for you. It’s Saturday for me. I don’t think it’s a social call.”

I sighed. “Okay, you know me too well. Can modern medicine explain why we have deja vu’s?” I asked.

“Wow, you don’t ask simple questions, do you?” She cocked her head for a minute and pondered. Her lips, pursed in concentration, reminded me of Jeryl.

“There are some theories about it being associated with strong memory function, but there is also some evidence of it being linked to temporal lobe epilepsy. I guess the short answer is that we don’t really know the cause, yet. Why are you interested in it?” She asked.

“I’ve always been curious about it,” I lied. “But we’re doing some new designs on MRIs using our latest actuators to map out the body. We’ve had a couple of incidents of test subjects saying they felt they had undergone the scans before, even when it was their first test. It piqued my curiosity.”

Jyl leaned in, closer to the camera. “That is interesting. Where are you doing the studies at?”

“Hunter has been working with some folks at Siemens in Ireland. Why?”

“How about I go over and talk with them? I’m not that interested in neurological research, but I do want to understand if there are memory related impacts of being close to the actuators, we use all over the place. Hell, what if there is a relationship to the shielding fields we use on the station, ships, or base?” she asked.

“That’s a scary thought,” I replied.

“No kidding. what if you thought you had performed some safety check before, so skipped it?” She frowned. “The more I think about it the more urgent I think it is we understand what is happening in your new MRIs, Paul.”

“I agree. I’m glad I called. How about you head up to Dublin on Monday and meet with the researchers? I’ll let them know you’re coming.”

“Okay. I might want to pull in a couple of other folks in the field. My specialty is not neuroscience, after all.”

“Do you have anyone in particular in mind?” I asked.

“Let me think about it and check a few things,” she said. “I’ll send you a list of potential candidates. This could become very interesting to a bunch of people pretty quickly,” she added.

“Then, let’s keep it close to the vest until we think it through,” I cautioned. “We’ve only got two of the machines right now.”

“I will,” she replied. “Give the kids a kiss for me,” she said as we ended the call.

“What are you working on, sport?” I asked as I walked downstairs and found Jer laying out several drawings.

He gave me a glance and shrugged. “A portfolio project,” he said.

I moved closer and looked over the back of the couch at the drawings he was arranging. They were all vibrant colored charcoals and water colors. One was obviously the desert view from the lab. Another was the green hills of Ireland, still another was a view out of one of the picture windows from Astra Station. Even to my untrained eye, they were wonderful. I leaned in and focused on the first in his ordering, the view from the lab.

It definitely captured the sense of a warm sunset. He had embellished the water color painting with deft lines of charcoal and pencil, adding depth and sharpness to the image. The only discordant note was a dark shape in the lower left corner of the image. I looked closer. The lines could be confused for a stick figure at first glance, but then I noticed the dark charcoal had been applied over a subtle gold figure, making a shadow with a hint of a halo surrounding it. The shape was barely human, but the lines tugged at me. The posture of the figure hit me. It was Jeryl, basking in the sunset’s warmth. The lines were her posture, stretching upward. I could imagine her smile and pleasure letting the sun’s final rays of the day warm her up.

I looked at the other pictures. In each, there was a hint of Jeryl watching. One was the view of a ballet from a box with the dancers caught mid-flight as they leapt across the stage. The dark, haloed image was barely visible in the wings of the stage. Another was an image of a stylized jet, either a GS-3 or a GOT, leaping from the runway. The figure was standing on the tarmac, watching it depart. Another was an obvious graduation ceremony, with most of the scene filled with mortarboard covered heads. The figure was off to one side, watching the crowd, but less distinct. Only the halo of golden yellow identified her.

“What do you call the collection?” I asked as tears filled my eyes.

“Mother,” Jer whispered.

I crumbled inside. Five years after her death, Jer was still haunted by the loss of his mother, my wife, our family. I cried, letting my tears flow as I moved around the couch and sat next to him. He stiffened at my first hug and then looked at my tears and sagged against me.

“I miss her so much, but her memory is fading,” he sobbed. “I don’t want to forget her, Dad.”

“You won’t. We can’t. She was and always will be your mother, Jer. She would be so proud of these,” I said with a wave toward his art. “I’m so proud of you. You’ve captured her spirit here. You’ve shown how much you love her and want her to be watching over you. It’s a testament to what a wonderful mother she was.”

“But you’re replacing her,” he said.

“No. I’m not. I will always love your mom, Jer, just like I will always love you and Ali. Nothing can change that.”

“What about Chrissy, then?”

That was a question. I sighed.

“Jer, do you love your sister?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Do you love me?”

He hesitated but nodded again.

“So, you can love more than one person, right?”

“I guess, but how can you love Chrissy and still love Mom? You can only have one wife.”

I nodded. “You know that’s not really true, Jer. Your friend Scott has two moms’.” Scott’s dad had divorced his first wife, Scott’s mom, and married again. Scott called both women ‘mom’, but seldom saw them at the same time.

“But Scott’s dad doesn’t love them both.”

“Of course, he does, but he loves them differently, I’m sure.” I sighed, wondering if a thirteen-year-old could understand the complexities of the human heart. There were times I didn’t understand it, and I had over ninety years of experience.

“Jer, you’re at the age where you are going to start thinking you love more than one girl. Your hormones are going to drive you to distraction, if they aren’t already. That’s a feeling of physical love that you are driven to by biology. You can’t control the chemicals in your body that will make you feel that way. It’s natural. As you continue to grow, you’ll learn that those physical feelings aren’t the only, or even the most important aspects of true love. Your mind and spirit will come into play. You could have a fabulous physical relationship with a partner, but not have an intellectual connection. You may have an intellectual and physical relationship with someone, but just not feel they are your true match. When that happens, I hope you’ll be brave enough to move on, and keep searching for the type of connection your mother and I had. Once you experience that, you’ll understand.”

“So, is that how you feel about Chrissy?” he asked.

I wiped a tear from his cheek.

“I don’t think so, Jer, but I still love her.”

“Paul, we’re getting too much pressure to allow us to sign-off on this trip,” Kelly said. “If you go to Mars, and NASA is not involved, Congress is going to have to take action under the charter.”

“We won’t be operating under the charter, Kelly. Why do you think I’ve never used one of the Orions in the states? They were built in Kenya. I established a totally separate company to manage their construction. I don’t see how anyone can argue that these operations fall under the purview of the charter.”

“You’re planning a trip to Mars, Paul. Legalities won’t matter. You’ve had the backing of the people here in all of your space endeavors. The American people want to be part of the next step. That’s what is driving the pressure on the administration and will force congress to act. I’m trying to warn you.”

I sighed. “NASA wants control,” I said. “I’m not going to cede it. What might work for political purposes, that is less than them running the mission? Hell, they would delay us five years just with mission planning, crew selection, and training. They’ve already said as much.”

“Negotiate a compromise,” Kelly said.

I wanted to scream in frustration. I was not the negotiator. “How can I negotiate when they’re being dumb shits?” I asked. “They want to wait five years so they can find and train some replacement astronauts, because they have no one on their roster with nearly as much experience as my folks. They let their best and brightest come over to work with us, and now have no bench. That goes double for their operations staff and administration.”

“So, you would take some of them as crew if they were qualified?” Kelly asked in a reasonable voice.

“I would, but they don’t have the qualifications of my current selection pool.”

“So, start there,” she said. “Put some NASA folks on your selection committee. Make them come to the same conclusion. That will at least engage them in the process and take some of the heat out of the rhetoric.”

“I can do that,” I said with a sigh.

“What about the PR aspects?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You got the people of the world behind you to go back to the moon with ‘The Orbital Interns’. How are you doing the same with the trip to Mars?”

“We’re documenting as we go, but no contests or anything like we did for the show,” I admitted.

“Change that. You saw what happened when I took those senators to Astra and then up to Aristarchus Base. They all got a nice bump in their poll ratings. The three that were up for re-election won by landslides after getting some space PR. You need to tap that people power. Hell, you’re dating a supermodel. Put her on the show and the male half of the population will tune in at least once. The fact that she is a competent engineer is an added bonus. Get Billy and Tom on it. One of them should be in the candidate pool, maybe a few others that know how to work a camera as well. You’ve talked to me about getting the people on our side for fusion power, and we’ve taken steps in that direction. You need to do the same with this, Paul, or things are going to deteriorate on the political front.”

I sighed. I knew she was right. I just did not want to think about a show that did not involve Jeryl.

“Minister Sun, what can I do for you at this late hour?” I asked. It was early by my time in Utah, but late the next day for him in China.

“Thank you for taking my call, Mister Taylor,” he replied in is accented English. “The People’s Republic wants to discuss increasing our generator orders for the next year and have been told your production lines are at capacity. I thought I would discuss it with you personally.”

I sighed. “Our plants are operating at capacity,” I said. “We’ve been looking at ways to improve production rates, but it is not as simple as adding a new plant.”

“Why not? Perhaps if you were to open a plant here, in China, we could find means of improving throughput.”

“Generator assembly is not the bottleneck,” I countered. “The materials needed for the sub-assemblies are the current limitation. To increase that production effort, we also have to improve other material manufacturing. It is a very complex process.”

“What would it take to move our orders up in priority?” he asked bluntly.

“You know that we have always worked on a first in, first out order process, Minister. Right now, we’re taking orders for the next two years. We may be able to accelerate the installation of the last dozen units as more capacity is created, but we can’t just push your order to the head of the queue.”

“You have prioritized North American production from your West Virginia plant,” he said. “That does not seem like a first-in, first-out approach. Your contracts with Delta have been opened well after some of our orders and they are being filled faster than our generators are being delivered. The PRC does not appreciate being treated like a second-class customer, Mr. Taylor.”

“I believe someone has not been correct in their assessment, sir. Right now, that plant is producing nearly two hundred generators a year that are going outside North America. Some of the new Hong Kong generators originated from there. While I understand your desire to accelerate delivery, I would ask that you remain patient and know that we are doing everything we can to accelerate production.”

“We will not tolerate second-class treatment, Mr. Taylor. It is best you remember that as you discuss your production issues.”

The call ended without another word. I sat and looked at my phone, stunned.

“Christ on a crutch,” Allen said as he closed the door to my office. We were on Astra, working through crew selection.

“What’s up?” I asked, having a strong suspicion.

“NASA wants to base some selections on ‘total life experience’ rather than objective criteria. They’re trying to argue that some of the geriatrics they still have on staff are better suited because of their general experience, while ignoring that we have similar aged people who also have real time in space and on the moon, not just simulator time in a big pool.”

I sighed.

I had taken Kelly’s advice and included NASA in the selection process, against my better judgement. I had also gotten Tom and Billy involved, documenting all aspects of the process. As I had predicted, they were slowing down our velocity, debating what our criteria should be with NASA angling to create some circumstance that they could use to name crew members or preferably, the mission commander.

“How do we prove their hypothesis is wrong?” I asked.

Allen sat down. “Proving a negative is a logical impossibility,” he said. “What we would have to show is that our counter-hypothesis is stronger and provable.”

“How?”

“A competition?” he asked. “I mean, the show gave us a competitive dynamic that really did pit individuals and teams against one another. What if we mirrored that approach and then used the objective criteria for grading them?”

“You’re really thinking about re-launching the show,” I said.

He nodded. “I think it makes a lot of sense. We can split the candidate pool into four teams. We’ll let NASA pick one team, we’ll pick one, and then we use a hybrid approach on the other two with slightly different selection criteria.”

“Is the candidate pool big enough?” We were planning on an eight-person crew to go to Mars.

“We would have to expand it some, but that would make NASA happier as well.”

“Let’s not limit our thinking to NASA,” I said. “We should invite the ESA to participate as well as the Chinese.”

“Do you think that’s wise?” Allen asked.

“I do. Let NASA have to deal with international pressure to be objective. It might help us level the playing field more.”

Allen nodded.

“Do we advertise and tape it all? Billy is chomping at the bit to formalize a production schedule and get the networks bidding for a show.”

It was my turn to sigh. “Yes, let’s do it, but I want you and Meagan and Tamara to be the hosts of the show.”

“The public will want you involved,” he countered.

“I will, from time to time, but my girlfriend will be a participant, so I can’t let there be a hint of bias. You guys can run with it.”

“Will you at least help with the challenge planning?”

“That, I can do,” I replied.

“But, Dad...”

I cut Ali off with a look.

“You are not flying to Sydney on your own. I know you’ve soloed in jets before, and I know you’ve gotten type certified for the GS-3, but you are still a fourteen-year-old high-schooler.”

We were in Learmonth for a week before heading back to Park City for summer activities. Ali thought nothing of wanting to fly down to visit Jane. Her sense of entitlement had grown over the past year. She had tried to get Chrissy to go for a visit ‘home’, but Chrissy was fully engaged on the Mars mission planning and had simply said she didn’t have time right now. That had led to alternative scheming by Ali.

“Can Pete go with me?”

“What’s so important about seeing Jane,” I asked.

Ali blushed. I had suspected she and Caitlyn had done more than running around our house nude together. They had been a little less circumspect than they thought since their encounter over a year ago. Both were attractive young women. Ali had been acting strangely the last week of school when Caitlyn had announced she was going out with a junior boy. Ali had gone into a sulk for the first few days of the trip and then suddenly decided she had to go to see Jane.

“I just miss her,” Ali finally said. “It seems like ages since we saw each other.”

It had been at the Winter Olympics. Jane and Camilla and Bluey had come up for the opening ceremonies and part of the first week of the games. We had all been so busy, I did not know if the girls got up to anything, but they had both stayed in Ali’s room.

Chrissy was so much better at these types of conversations, but it was my job as the parent, I decided.

“And you want to do something with Jane that you can’t do over the phone?” I asked gently.

Ali blushed harder and looked away.

“Honey, I know you’re at a difficult age. I understand what your body is going through, at least as well as any man can.”

She looked up, searching my eyes for something.

“You and Caitlyn and Jane make each other feel good, don’t you?” I asked.

She held my gaze and then nodded, once.

“There’s nothing wrong with that, Ali. But you can’t just turn up and expect people to make you feel good, how you want them too, when you want them too. Caitlyn has a boyfriend and you’re feeling jealous and left out a little, right?”

“I suppose,” she admitted after thinking about it for a moment.”

“That’s natural,” I said. “But what happens if you show up and Jane has a boyfriend, too? You are all getting to that age,” I admitted.

“She doesn’t,” Ali said. “Though she does like one guy.”

“If she likes him, why are you so sure she’ll be able to make you feel good, how you want to?”

Ali sighed. “I guess I can’t,” she said. “But what if she is feeling lonely and...” she stopped herself, but I suspected ‘horny’ was the next word.

“Feeling that way is part of growing up, Ali. It’s okay to feel that way, but how you act on those feelings is what will define what sort of young woman you grow up to be. Demanding people please you is going to lead you to a hollow emotional life. You need to find someone that wants to be with you, not that you demand will be with you.”

“But how do you know?” she asked.

I pulled her in for a hug. “That’s that hardest part, knowing the difference between what your body wants, what your mind needs, and what your heart seeks. When you can balance those three things, you will be grown up.”

“What are you going to do without me?” Chrissy asked with a smile. She was packing in our bedroom at Deer Valley.

“I’m sure I’ll find something to while away the hours on,” I teased back. “I’ve heard there is a supermodel on a show we’re doing. Maybe I’ll try to pick her up during breaks in taping.”

“As long as you don’t distract her from her job,” she replied. She gave me a serious look. “I really want to do well on the show,” she said seriously.

“I believe in you,” I said. “But I can’t be a judge of you.”

“I know. So, seriously, what are you going to do for the next couple of months?”

“Dr. Perdew and I are finishing up designing some experiments to explore some theories we’ve been working on. I’ll probably spend time between here, New Orleans, and our plant in Barcelona where we’re we are building components.”

“What sort of components?” she asked as she finished putting some clothes in her bag.

“Magnetic controllers and sensor packages. We think we can build a super-collider in orbit and not have all the tunneling and infrastructure buildout we would have to do here on earth.” I went on to explain the concept.

“Where in orbit will you build it?” she asked. “You have to worry about outside influences, like solar wind and cosmic rays, don’t you?”

“We’re looking at putting it at L-4,” I said. The Lagrange Point 4 in the Earth-Lunar orbital path was a stable point, sixty degrees ahead of the moon, that balanced gravity between the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. “We think our controller design will create sufficient field strength to shield us from outside influences, but that will be part of our start-up testing.”

“I kind of wish I could be involved in that,” she said. “You’re doing so much cool stuff. It must be nice to pick and choose where to focus.”

I laughed. “Like you haven’t?” I asked.

She blushed. “Okay, I guess I have,” she admitted. “But, in my defense, I think the lunar hab construction work I’ve done, the experience I’ve gained, is going to be needed for establishing a Mars base.”

“I can’t disagree. I just don’t know how I feel about you being away for that long,” I admitted.

“On an Orion, it’s only a three-day trip,” she countered.

“That’s travel time, one way. We’re looking at a much longer mission duration.”

“How long?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Sorry, but you’ll find out those details when your team does.”

She got a thoughtful look. “So, it has something to do with one of our challenges. I guess it is good that I’ll be staying in the crew dorms for a while. Otherwise, I might be tempted to use my womanly wiles to ferret out those types of details.”

Putting action to words, she stepped around the bed and came into my arms. I kissed her, enjoying the feeling of her next to me. I was going to miss her over the next few months.

Katiana knocked on the side of my opened door and stuck her head into my cabin.

“Are you decent, boss?” she asked.

I waved her in, and she floated into my office space in the Orion we were using this week. I had decided to run a test on the magnetic controllers we were planning on for the orbital accelerator. These were not the full-size models we would use in another year, but the concept was the same. The quick and dirty hub and reel configuration I had worked out was scaled down to fit into the cargo bay of the Orion. Once we had the payload built and configured, I had decided a test at L-4 made more sense than something in orbit near Astra. We did not really need that many prying eyes yet.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I was wondering how long we plan on loitering here,” she said.

We had been at L-4 for almost two days.

“Probably another day. Why?”

“We’ve deployed the baby accelerator and run the tests on the reel configuration for spinning it up and extending the controllers multiple times. You’ve already identified some stability issues in the plane of rotation, so I was just wondering if we were going to try and fix them while here or go back to the drawing board. They are pestering me for you to make an appearance on the show,” she said.

The ‘they’ were Allen, Tamara and Meagan. I had told Katiana not to think of Tamara as her boss when it came to scheduling me around the filming. I was keenly interested in the selection process they were filming but wanted to give Chrissy her best un-biased chance at winning a spot on the crew. I also did not feel much like being the referee for the NASA members of the selection team. At least the Russian, ESA and Chinese representatives seemed reasonable.

We had been forced to broaden the selection committee, but I still felt we could control the narrative on tape. Given the four government sponsored agencies, I had put four of my people on the committee; Terry, Jyl, Allen, and Meagan. Tamara was the formal host of the show, and I was the designated tie-breaker, if needed. So far, historical political positions had played in our favor to keep the four from forming any sort of voting bloc.

“Is there a stalemate on something?” I asked.

“No. They just think you should be a little more present and visible.”

I sighed. “What is their next challenge?” I asked.

She glanced at her notebook. “Lunar habitat construction,” she said. “They’ll depart Kenya in about forty hours.”

“How did they all do in the jungle?” I asked.

Katiana smiled. We had mixed the challenges to include core teamwork and survival aspects as well as orbital and lunar activities. The most recent involved the crew travelling unassisted through parts of the African landscape, living off the land with rudimentary survival gear. They also had to develop a detailed map of the terrain they traversed.

“All teams survived. The committee is still evaluating their route maps, but I don’t think the NASA team did as well as the others,” she said with a smile.

NASA had insisted on putting a ‘seasoned’ team together. The leader of the team, while fit, was still fifty-two years old. The team’s average age was close to fifty. They had also averaged less than two months total time in space. Our lead team, in contrast had an average age of thirty-two and close to eighteen months’ time in space. The objective results were beginning to paint a pretty compelling picture to the entire selection committee.

“You’re right. I’m not going to try and fix our design up here. We’re going to need to spend some simulator time to get it right. I suppose we could be wrapped up by tomorrow,” I conceded. “We could beat them to Aristarchus Base by several hours.”

“That would at least get Tamara to stop pestering me for a day or two. Can I tell her we’ll see her there?”

I nodded.

Katiana smiled.

“Is there anything else?” I asked, seeing she was not making a move to leave.

“When will you be picking your crew?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

She waved her fingers around. “All this. You’re building something for a special task. I get the science aspect, but you don’t do ‘just science’. You are always working two or three things at once. Sometimes, I can see the dots and connect them, but this is beyond me,” she said.

I hoped it was beyond everyone until I knew for certain what I was going to do.

“What dots do you think you see?” I asked.

“This experiment has something to do with the equations you’re working on with Dr. Perdew. That’s pure science. I can understand that, but I think there is more. Then there is the MRI work Hunter and Jyl are covering for you. Aside from the magnetic controllers, I don’t see an intersection. Then there is the journey out here. You brought crew that are not candidates for the Mars mission, and you’ve been training them hard for this whole week. It’s like you have another task in mind for them.”

I nodded. She had parts of plans and was trying to link them when they might not actually be connected.

“Start with the end,” I said. “The crew is larger than you expect, right?”

She nodded. We had twelve people on the crew, plus ourselves.

“How many times did we deploy and recover the testing package?”

“Four times. You had different combinations of crew on each evolution,” she noted.

“So, forget about the MRI stuff for now. If you string those two facts together, what do you suspect?”

She thought for a moment. “You’re performing your own crew selection process, and it involves deep space construction type activities.”

I smiled and nodded.

“And,” she continued, “you’ll have your crew ready about the same time as the Mars mission, so most of the world won’t even notice.”

I nodded again.

“So, whatever the mission is, you don’t want the world to know about it,” she concluded.

“The next few evolutions will be more work in orbit and out here,” I said. “Once we have two crews jelled, we should have a few targets for them to go take a closer look at.”

“Asteroids?” she asked.

I gave a non-committal shrug. It had always been one of the alternatives we had in mind.

She pursed her lips.

“The radiation shielding is the link to the MRI work, right?”

I was surprised she made the connection, but happy that she did not know the other details.

“We’ve seen some things that made me want to take a closer look at the effects from being inside the field created by the actuators. That’s the MRI linkage,” I admitted. It was at least part of the truth.

“So, how long until you have answers?” she asked.

“A few more months, or less, I hope. Why?”

She smiled. “I think you need some personal oversight on that mission. I want to volunteer.”

“We can make this smaller,” I said as I slid out of the MRI machine.

Jyl laughed while Hunter shook his head.

To read this story you need a Registration + Premier Membership
If you have an account, then please Log In or Register (Why register?)

Support the author's future writing by purchasing this book from Bookapy

A New Past (The Complete Trilogy)

Charlie Foxtrot

$26.99