Smoke, Mirrors and Deep Space Read online

  “Wouldn’t he have been just as great a kid five years later?” Uriel asked gently.

  “But would he have still been Andy?” Alex countered, walking a few steps closer to this strange being that now controlled his past and present, maybe even his future. “Different egg, different sperm, different kid? Anyway, it wasn’t so bad.”

  “For you, maybe.”

  The lights once more went up on the stage below, which had now become the interior of a small, cheaply furnished apartment. It was night outside the windows, dark with stars and latent dreams.

  Gena carried the crying baby over her shoulder, pacing back and forth across the kitchen with him, patting him on the back with one hand while she attempted to read a biology textbook balanced in the other. Alex sat at the nearby kitchen table with textbooks on military science and aerodynamics piled around him. His head was bent over a book, trying to study. Finally he looked up in exasperation.

  “Jeez, Gena, can’t you keep him quiet? I’m trying to study!”

  “So am I!” The exhausted woman flashed back in frustration. “I’ve got a biology final tomorrow! As a matter of fact, why don’t you walk him for a while?”

  “Because I’ve got two finals this week, and they’re at the academy, not some community college,” he replied steadily.

  “Oh, well gee, that’s just so much more important than my little test, how could I even dream…”

  “Ah, come on, Gena—I told you you shouldn’t have signed up for classes this semester,” he snapped back.

  Alex, looking on from the steps in the auditorium, winced.

  “You also told me no one gets pregnant the first time,” Gena yelled at him angrily. Baby Andy’s cries had increased in tempo and volume in response to this noise, and her patting of him increased accordingly, not really helping the situation.

  “Again, Gena!!?? You gonna throw that up at me the rest of my life? Well no one twisted your arm—you knew as well as I did there was a chance…”

  Gena rolled her eyes. She’d heard this one too many times already. “Right, Alex. So now I’m supposed to give up my life, my career, my dreams…”

  Alex interrupted, trying to sound like the voice of reason. “It’s just for a while, honey, three more years, tops.”

  “…because your career, your dreams, are so much more important.”

  “I’m not saying that; it’s not that way at all. You’re not your mom, Gena, honey.”

  He immediately regretted the bite of sarcasm in his voice, the tears it brought to her eyes. He set down his manuals and got up from the table to come over to her, wrapping his arms around her and the crying baby.

  “It’s just that I can’t drop any classes, sweetheart, you know that. The Air Force training regimen is rigid; they allow no exceptions. If I drop a class, I may as well drop out of the academy all together.”

  “I know,” Gena responded tearfully, “but…”

  He took the baby from her, kissing her cheek. “Go ahead, hon; study for a while. I need a break anyway…and Gen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’ll get your degree, sweetheart; I promise, from the bottom of my heart. It’s just so hard right now on all of us: you, me…Andy.”

  “I know…” she whispered, kissing the sleepy baby nestled against Alex’s neck, then walking over to the table with her textbook.

  “It’s just until I graduate, okay? Then we can afford to put Andy in preschool, and you can go to school full time. I’ll take care of him at night while you study, I’ll even do all the cooking and cleaning.”

  Gena had turned away, so only the older Alex could see her mouth silently in response: “How big of you.”

  Alex turned toward Uriel defensively, “But it did all work out that way!”

  “More or less,” Uriel responded. “More or less.”

  “Okay, so maybe it took a little longer for her to graduate.”

  “Eight years,” Uriel nodded. “And you never washed a single dish. You were too busy…”

  He touched a button on the control panel, and the movie screen rolled back down, the projector flickered on.

  * * *

  21. The Academic Life

  THE DRONE OF the engines through the open jump door was deafening, drowning out not just speech but coherent thought. The air at this altitude—almost 10 thousand feet—felt like needles against his skin, frosting his cheeks below the dive goggles and turning his ears and lips thick and numb.

  One after the other the men ahead of him in line made the jump, instantly disappearing into the empty blue below his line of sight. Alex had purposely placed himself in the middle of the group of skydivers—knowing that he would be swept along, unable to hesitate when the time came, as he otherwise might if he were in first or last position. But his fear was trying to leap up out of his throat, and his skin felt clammy despite the icy cold as his turn approached.

  He’d only jumped a couple of times before, and that was on an automatic rip line. His cocky confidence, insisting to the instructor that he was ready for free fall—embellishing the truth a little regarding previous jumps as a civilian in order to convince him—that had occurred when he was back on the ground and still high on adrenalin from the first jump of the day. Now he wasn’t so sure. What if he froze in panic and forgot to pull the ripcord?

  “Go!” said the jumpmaster and, mindless lemming, he went.

  “Why do you have to do this skydiving thing?” Gena had complained when he’d told her he enrolled in the parachuting elective.

  He heard her voice in his head with crystal clarity now as he leapt into space, and all the arguments and reasons he’d given her evaporated with the sweat on his brow. Why indeed?

  “What the hell am I doing?!” he yelled aloud as he plummeted downward.

  The first sensation of falling was of paralyzing speed, as gravity sucked him toward Earth faster and faster. Then—as he reached max acceleration—it felt as if he wasn’t falling anymore at all, he was floating. Floating in space like a bubble, a big soap bubble rising softly into the air now, was he?

  Floating up and free….

  The ground loomed closer and closer. Suddenly Alex snapped out of his euphoria and became aware of where he was. His heart slammed in panic. He checked his wrist altimeter and simultaneously pulled the ripcord right at the lower limit of safety. As it opened, dramatically slowing his plunge, he let out a yell of relief that might have sounded and felt like joy, then maneuvered the chute with shaking hands to a landing that was in respectable proximity to the big white X on the air field.

  As he pulled his flaccid parachute in, he debated for a moment whether he would ever do this again. It wasn’t absolutely mandatory for his acceptance into the Undergraduate Pilot Training program, despite what he’d told Gena. But on the other hand, he now only had to make four more free falls like this and he’d have his Air Force Parachutist Wings—that certainly ought to be worth a couple of brownie points on the rating in scale. Besides, it was bound to get easier.

  That night, after dinner, he grabbed a couple of beers from the icebox, grabbed Gena down onto his lap, and told her about the day’s adventure. As hoped, the story of his brush with death aroused her, but once the sex was over she’d been angry.

  “If you don’t have to do it, why take such chances with your life? What about me and Andy, do you ever think how we’d feel if anything happened to you?”

  He rolled up onto an elbow, touching her cheek gently. “Babe, danger is what I’m going to be doing the rest of my life—being a test pilot is a risky occupation, but it’s what I live for. You knew that when we first got together.”

  “I know,” she sighed, touching him back. “I know. It’s…nothing. Me being selfish, I guess. Just, try not to take any unnecessary chances, okay? Go with the odds.”

  “Gotcha,” he agreed, kissing her nose. Then her lips, and heading for more.

  “But the next year, a new adventure beckoned,” Uriel interrupted, endin
g the moment: “Soaring.”

  * * *

  They floated on invisible ribbons of air, enveloped by a silence neither man wanted to interfere with, as if the atmosphere that held reign here was a living entity that had more to say in its immutable quiet than they could ever put into words, and that to interrupt its message would be an almost intolerable insolence.

  The long slender wings of the sailplane tipped and lifted gently under the instructor’s practiced hand, adjusting to the errant changes in wind and pressure that came through the mountain passes of the towering Rockies directly to their west.

  As they approached the opening to a particularly wide valley, the pilot turned to Alex.

  “Ready?”

  Alex grinned in response, “Roger that!”

  “Take the controls then. You’re on.”

  The cadet instructor was only a couple of years older than Alex, yet he wore the authority of his rank and expertise like an unspoken challenge. He also wore a worrisome little smirk that set off tiny alarm bells in Alex’s primal core. Within a minute he learned why.

  The sailplane suddenly pitched steeply downward, almost a free fall. Alex resisted the urge to yank the stick sharply back toward him to bring the nose up, opting instead to ease it gently back in order to level the plane out of its dive, and then a little more to bring it back into a gradual climb. Yet he had barely accomplished this feat when once again the nose pitched downward, and this time the plane simultaneously veered to the right as well, hit by a hard cross wind.

  Alex’s heart drummed violently inside his chest, but his hand was steady, face calm, his manipulation of the levers and rudders perfectly controlled and unhurried. He brought the plane out of its twisting dive, maneuvering it into a long angling loop. The air hissed by the fuselage like an angry librarian: Sshhhhsshh.

  Another lever, more rudder, and the sailplane arced around, climbing in a slow spiral upward until it had returned to the point above the valley where he’d first been handed the controls. But Alex was ready this time, as the plane once again hit the huge invisible air pocket and began to drop like a rock. And as he controlled that change he was already anticipating the next, ready to adjust the rudder the second the fierce cross winds knocked the plane sideways again.

  Once Alex had returned the plane to its easy upward spiral, the instructor gave him a nod.

  “Bank left and take her home, cadet,” he ordered. He wrote something into his instructor’s log, saw Alex glancing over at the entry quizzically, and graced him with a tight little smile. “Just recommended you for solo.”

  “Okay,” Alex replied. But after the best of efforts at suppression, the grin broke through anyway.

  * * *

  “Gena. Hey, Gena, guess what?” he called out as he came through the front door of their little apartment that Saturday afternoon. “I got the go ahead for solo, next flight out!”

  “The what?” she asked, barely turning from the stove where she was fixing something that smelled great.

  “Solo flight—in the sailplane?”

  “Great, honey… Uh, could you go see what Andy’s up to, maybe give him a bath while I finish

  dinner?”

  * * *

  Just before the start of his senior year Alex was notified that he’d been selected to enter the Undergraduate Pilot Training program.

  “This is it, honey!” he told her excitedly, waving his acceptance notice in the air in front of her.

  She looked up from her English Lit and Composition textbook. “If I do good this year…”

  “Well,” she corrected.

  “Well what? If I am very, very good and work very, very hard, I will get into the aviator program post grad, where I can train to be a jet pilot.”

  “So, what exactly does that entail, all those very, very’s?” she asked dubiously.

  “Time, honey, lots of time.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, turning back to her textbook with a sigh.

  “There’s a mandatory Introductory Flight Training, of course. The ground school is scheduled in as part of the regular curriculum, but there’s fifty hours of flight time that has to be done on weekends.”

  “Of course it does.”

  “Come on, Gena.”

  She shrugged, looking up. “Don’t mind me, I’m PMSing. So, what’s that gonna be, ten Saturdays? Twenty? We’ll get through it.”

  “Sure,” he said. “It’ll be over in no time.”

  He decided that this might not be the best time to tell her about the Project Fledgling course he’d also signed up for, and all its required “flying time” in the T-37 simulator; nor about his plans to join the Aero Club and the Air Force Academy’s cross country soaring team as soon as his IFT was completed. She’d find out soon enough, and he’d just have to deal with her objections when she did.

  * * *

  “No! Absolutely not. Gena, honey, we can work this out ourselves.”

  “We haven’t so far. I can’t get you to listen, to change a thing. Maybe a marriage counselor will help.”

  “For God’s sake, Gena, if they think my marriage is in trouble they might drop me from the UFT.”

  “Oh bullshit, you’re already in, why would they drop you? And so what, anyway, I’m sick of this whole thing!”

  “Think about what you’re saying, Gena! The whole reason you’re pissed is because of the time I’ve spent away from you and Andy to get to this point. Now you want me to just throw it all away?! Four years of hard work and sacrifice? That would make it a complete waste for all of us!”

  “The Aero Club, Alex? Flying every weekend, every spare minute of off time in whatever bird you could get your hands on? The stupid cross-country soaring competitions, gone for weeks at a time? Those didn’t have anything to do with UFT, and you can’t tell me they did! I know lots of guys who got into UFT without doing any of those things!”

  “Yeah, but I want to be more than a military transport pilot, more than even a fighter pilot. I want to test the newest and best flying machines they can come up with, and eventually I want to go to NASA. That’s the top of the line, babe, and if you want in, you’d better show them you have…”

  “The right stuff?” she finished, raising a brow. “What about the right stuff for the other parts of your life?”

  “It’ll be different, Gena—soon as I graduate UFT and get my assignment. Just hang in there a little while longer, okay?”

  * * *

  22. Gena the Teacher

  ALEX LOOKED OVER at Uriel, making a face.

  “But things did get better, especially after Andy entered kindergarten and she was able to go to school full time.”

  “Without any help from you.”

  “Whatever. The point is, she did finish. And she got a good job,” Alex argued.

  “Teaching middle school?”

  “What’s wrong with teaching?”

  Uriel looked at him with a wry expression, and indicated the stage with a jerk of his head.

  The movie screen had disappeared, and lights once again brightened on the stage below, which had now become a virtual classroom. It was a large dirty room, with graffiti on the marred tables and chairs, obscenities scrawled across the displays of student work hung neatly on the cork bulletin boards at either end of the room. At the front of the room were two large posters showing the internal and external anatomy of Rana pipiens. Someone had crudely drawn inappropriate genitalia with a black marker at the points on the posters where they thought it should be.

  The classroom was filled with thirty-six unruly twelve-year olds. They were huddled around lab tables in nine groups, each comprised of four students. On the table in front of each group was a large, partially dissected frog pinned to a dissection tray belly up. Gena stood in the middle of the room, holding up a specimen frog which had already been partially dissected to expose the internal organs of the chest and abdomen. She was attempting to discourse on the internal structures over the loud and c
ontinuous uproar of loud chatter, screams and laughter from the ill-behaved and overly excited students.

  “All right, all right, settle down class. Please!” Gena ordered, her voice loud and firm, and a little desperate. Finally they sputtered into a tenuous calm. “Okay, so this little white triangle in the center of the chest is the what?”

  There is no answer. For once, absolute silence greeted her, accentuated by the slow drip of saliva.

  “Come on now,” she urged, trying not to let exasperation enter her voice. “I just told you thirty seconds ago! Wasn’t anyone listening?! What’s this triangular organ?”

  Just then a boy got up with his frog in hand and chased a shrieking girl right past Gena, both of them rudely pushing the teacher aside in their play. Gena grabbed the boy by his upper arm as he shoved past.