Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (33 page)

Joe was chewing on his lower lip.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Say it.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m supposed to be home for dinner tonight. What the hell am I going to do if you hear what I want to say and then bug out, leaving me twelve hundred miles from home?”

Now that set my heart to pounding. What hurtful thing did he have to say that would make me do that to him? “Oh, I don’t know. That might be the
least
of your troubles.” I wondered how he’d like to try a flailing plummet from ten thousand feet.

“Bring it,” he said.

I sighed. “Get your coat.”

*   *   *

“Where the hell are we?” Joe said.

It was bitter cold and we scrambled through crusted snow to get across the parking lot and into the closest door. The one that said,
Employees Entrance
.

We were in a hallway, a time clock and a rack full of cards mounted to the right by a series of workplace safety posters. There was a sign that said,
Reception at the East Entrance
.

“We’re in Franklin, Wisconsin. We’re going to talk to a guy about a blimp. Well, sort of. BlimpWerks makes remote-control scale-model blimps that can be flown around stadiums with advertiser signs on them. They create special shapes, too.” I pointed at a framed photo on the wall. It showed an SUV-shaped blimp floating above a crowd at a basketball game. The next photo showed a burger-shaped blimp for one of the national fast-food chains dropping leaflets on a crowd at a hockey game. Several more photos showed classic zeppelin-shaped blimps with logos painted or hung on the sides. “But they also have some prototypes I’m interested in.”

Joe looked at his watch and I said, “I’ll have you home for dinner. I promise.”

We found receptionist at the other end of the hallway and I asked her for Mr. Papadopolis, the sales engineer.

Mr. Papadopolis was not as tall as Joe, but muscular—not just a weight lifter but a body builder. He took one look at the way I was hunched over my crossed arms and offered us something hot to drink in the employee break room. Joe had coffee, I had tea.

Mr. Papadopolis had a distressing tendency to want to talk to Joe, but Joe, bless his heart, just pointed at me. “I’m just along to look pretty. She’s the buyer.”

Mr. Papadopolis adjusted quickly enough. “Right. What kind of blimp do you need? Is this a school branding for stadium games?”

I shook my head. “I was talking to your Ms. Wilde in R and D about your new fabric and she mentioned the test spheres.”

“Oh! I don’t know what you’d do with them. They were really just an assembly-and-performance test. We needed to make sure the new fabric heat welded properly and held pressure at least as well as our standard envelope. They’d make awful blimps.”

I nodded. “Yes, wrong shape, not a problem for
our
application. Could you give me and my, um,
colleague
the details on your new fabric?”

Joe glared at me.

“Well, it’s a tougher version of our standard three point two-ounce helium-tight envelope.
Our
proprietary material is a treated three-ply ripstop nylon that will hold its helium long term. Our competition uses polyurethane and has to have helium added midperformance to keep buoyancy. But not our stuff. We can save you thousands on your annual helium costs.”

He looked in danger of going all-in on his sales spiel so I said quickly, “So what’s different about this fabric? Ms. Wilde said something about incorporating Kevlar now?”

“Yes. The middle layer is now Kevlar for decreased pressure deformation, and we added an aluminized Mylar layer on the outside for UV protection. Some of our clients have experimental designs that need higher pressures. They’re working toward lifting body rigidity, for slightly-heavier-than-air vehicles, you know. They want to achieve lift below three knots of airspeed, so they needed something scuff-resistance for takeoffs and landings.”

Joe asked, “How much heavier is this fabric than your standard envelope?”

“A slight increase, just a half an ounce for twice the strength and hardly any deformation.”

Joe frowned and Papadopolis added, “That’s per square yard.”

I said, “Ah. So this is three point seven ounces per square yard? Could we see the prototypes?”

“Right.”

He led us through their assembly bay and into the attached warehouse.

The first thing Joe and I saw was a half-inflated, sixty-foot-long puffer fish hanging from the rafters. I froze, looking up at it. “Wow.”

He glanced at me and then up. “Yeah. Cool, huh? We made it for the triple-F, but they went bankrupt before we got more than the deposit.”

I stared at it. It had obviously been designed to depict a puffer in its fully inflated defensive mode. Fully inflated, it would be nearly spherical with a white bottom and a mottled brown top. It had the distinctive spines projecting out everywhere but the face. “Triple-F?”

“Fukushima Fugu Festival. You know, where they eat the fish?”

I nodded. “Oh, yeah. Fugu sashimi. Expensive yet poison.”

He chuckled. “That’s right. A few people die every year. I understand the trick is to get a tiny bit of the poison. Just enough so your lips go numb.”

I shook my head. “Not for me, thanks. But
that
—” I pointed up. “—is beautiful.”

“We’re trying to interest the Macy’s parade people but they prefer to commission their own sponsored balloons.” He started walking again. “Ah, over there.” He threaded his way through rows of stacked boxes and rolls of fabric to a pallet rack against the wall. He pointed to the fourth row up.

“
That
pallet. I’ll go get the steps.”

I was tempted to jump up to the shelf, but that would have freaked him out. He went down to the corner of the room and started pushing a large rolling set of steep stairs, about fifteen feet tall, with a railing on one side only. Joe helped him guide it into place, and Mr. Papadopolis threw a lever, causing the wheels to lift up, dropping it onto sturdy, nonskid feet.

When we got to the small platform at the top, the pallet was chest high on me but came up to his stomach. He slapped a bundle of silver fabric about the size of a rolled-up sleeping bag. “Here’s the first test sphere. Four yards in diameter.” He pointed up at the ceiling. “For the helium test it bobbed around the rafters for four weeks. We were going to wait until it lost buoyancy but gave up finally and had to haul it down for the scuff tests.”

I fingered the cloth. I could make out the texture of the weave but it was through a coating or coatings. “How were the scuff tests done?”

“We pumped it up to twenty psi with an air compressor and played soccer with it.”

“Soccer? It was, what, over twice as high as you?”

“Well, maybe it was more like uh, polo. We used golf carts to push it. It was fun until a northwester came up. It bounced over the fence and took off for Racine. Fortunately it caught in some woods before it crossed I-94.” He shook his head smiling. “Hell of a scuff test, though.”

“It didn’t get punctured or ripped?”

“Nope, it was still holding at twenty-one psi.”

“I thought you pumped it to twenty.”

“It was spring. Sun came out from behind the clouds.” He held his hands out, fingers spread, suggesting a ball shape. “You see when the air heats—”

“Boyle’s law, we know,” I said quickly before he could mansplain it to me. I tapped a bundle on the same pallet, the same color but nearly twice as big around. “Are these all the same material?”

He nodded, tapping and speaking in turn. “Four yards, ten yards, twelve yards. After hockey season we’re starting on a lifting body.”

“Would you sell these?”

“What,
all
of them?”

“The small one to start. If it works out, then the others.”

“Have to talk to my sales manager to cost it out.” He eyed me doubtfully. “If you’ve got the resources.”

“Right. I don’t expect to pay a
huge
amount, though. They’re used, right?”

“They’re unique.”

“Well, give me your card and I’ll call you midweek to see what your manager said.”

Rather than go out into the icy wind again, I jumped Joe to the alley behind Krakatoa from the stairwell.

He checked his watch. He was gnawing on his lip again.

Against my better judgment I said, “You aren’t twelve hundred miles from home, you know.” I was still poised to jump away.

Joe looked at me and his eyes teared up. That, alone, made me want to run screaming.

“I’m sorry.” He was staring down at my feet. “I … I betrayed you. I violated your trust. I know an apology is nothing against the hurt I caused you, but I need to say this because the words just keep circling through my head over and over and over, all day and all night. I wish it had never happened. I wish I hadn’t been so
stupid
, so
weak
, so …
afraid
.”

He looked at me and, dammit, a tear spilled down his cheek.

I opened my mouth but I couldn’t say anything.

He nodded slightly. “There. That was it. I’ve been trying to get that out—just that. The early versions were all begging and asking and totally wrong. I’ve deleted them and burned them and flushed them. I don’t need a response. I don’t expect one.” He turned on heel and as he walked away, I heard his last words echo off the wall of the alley.

“I don’t deserve one.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Cent: Going Viral

I knew the commercial-satellite community would take notice as soon as
AOS-Sat One
made it into the space command tracking catalog, but I wasn’t expecting the rabid subset of amateur radio hobbyists who tracked satellites. And I didn’t count on them directing
everybody
on the Internet to our website, specifically to Tara’s new video spot: thirty seconds of me and the universe and every satellite and piece of debris I’d recorded, finishing with my nausea-inducing spin cross-fading into the Space Girl logo.

The video went viral over twelve hours and our hosting service crashed hard at hour fifteen. At first they thought it was a denial-of-service attack, but when they saw it was legitimate traffic, they offered me five years of high-bandwidth service if they could manage ads on our sidebar. Tara said, “Hell, no,” and took over the e-mail negotiations.

In the end,
they
got an ad for their hosting service on our home page and the site got its own dedicated server on the main backbone.

“
I’ll
manage the advertising,” said Tara. “Last thing we want to do is to cheapen our brand with a bunch of erectile dysfunction ads. I’m thinking Iridium Communications and Merrell apparel.”

The [email protected] inbox choked on incoming fan mail, interview requests, and business inquiries, and our hosting service had to upgrade
that
.

Twenty-four hours later the video started showing up on network news. Grandmother recorded as much of the coverage as possible.

Dad was
not
pleased.

I told him, “You
knew
we had to go public to grow the business. What did you want me to do? Start a lemonade stand?”

He scowled at me. “At least your visor is down in all those clips.”

Our site crashed again and our service replaced the dedicated server with a server cluster.

I gave up on keeping Tara off the site. Someone had to deal with the e-mail, but I didn’t give her access until we’d set up two offshore virtual private network accounts with advanced encryption.

She VPN-ed into the Norway account and, from there, VPN-ed into the Singapore account. Only then did she touch the hosting service to download e-mail and update the site.

Journalists were not just sending
us
e-mails.

USSPACECOM’s press office said, “We have no comment on that.”

Iridium Communications did confirm that the image on the video
was
their Iridium 4 commsat and that they had received the full inspection video referred to therein. They did
not
mention that my orbit-to-ground communications were via their network.

A junior member of the House Armed Services Committee announced his intention to call for an investigative hearing on this threat to national security. The chairman said drily, “I wish the representative from Florida good luck with that.”

*   *   *

Roberta appeared on CNN, introduced by the interviewer as Dr. Matapang of Texas A&M University. The titles beneath her face said,
Dr. Roberta Matapang, Satellite Designer, Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering
.

“Who
is
Space Girl?”

Roberta raised her eyebrows. “I believe that is the call sign of Apex Orbital Services’ CEA.”

“CEA?”

“Chief executive astronaut.”

The interviewer did a double take. “Oh. But what’s her name? Her nationality?”

“American? Don’t know for sure.”

“But you
have
met her?”

“Yes. Three times. Once when she delivered our failed
Tinkerbell
research satellite after recovering it from orbit. A lunch meeting to arrange the delivery of our
Lost Boy
unit
into
orbit. And when she picked up
Lost Boy
prior to that mission.”

“What does she look like?”

“A young woman. American? Canadian? Very intelligent. Direct. I like her very much.”

“Are you in communication with her now?”

Matapang looked from the interviewer to the camera and winked. “Depends on whether or not she is watching, doesn’t it?” She looked back at the interviewer. “I’ve talked to her by phone twice, during missions. Other than that, we exchange e-mails.”

“During missions? What does that mean?”

“She was in orbit, both times.”

“How do you
know
that?”

“Well, she was delivering satellites to orbit both times.”

They split the screen and put up a still taken from our video, a full frame of
AOS-Sat One,
but before I moved into the frame. “Was one of them this satellite? Made by your lab at Texas A&M University?”