Red Hope (3 page)

Keller waved his hands in the air as an exclamation
point.

Tatyana looked him in the eye and said, “Right. Well I
can tell you that my clients are very interested in your engines. However, we
want exclusivity on this. Nobody else can market them. So when can we have this
prototype?”

Her face lost its smile and was serious now.

“Tatyana, you and your group can buy all that we
build,” said Keller with almost genuine sincerity.

Tatyana looked at the hover ship and then back at
Keller.

“I am glad to hear the good news because we plan to buy
your entire production. However, as we discussed on the phone; do not share
this with any other institutions.”

“Fair enough,” Keller said nodding his head in
agreement. His fingers were crossed behind his back.

With all of the small talk done, he got to the point.

“I guess it all comes down to price.”

“Yes, I suppose it does. My clients are willing to pay
you ten million dollars for this prototype and that includes all of the MM10
motors.”

Keller did a small jump to avoid stepping on a cactus.

“Well, you see, it’s going to cost twenty million
because once I send these motors over there, your technicians will reverse
engineer them just like you’ve always done with our military hardware.”

Tatyana was taken aback with his hardball negotiation
mixed together with insult and some truth. She thought for a moment.

“Fair enough,” she replied without confirming his
accusation.

They walked over to her car. She looked up at him with
squinted eyes and said, “You’ll be hearing from us soon. We will wire the
payment to your corporate account first thing tomorrow. That is for the shipment
of this hover ship including the MM10 engines.”

“You’ve got a deal,” said Keller.  They shook hands.

Tatyana pulled on the door handle to her silver BMW.
It was locked. She laughed realizing the futility of locking it out here in the
middle of nowhere. With an insincere smile, Keller watched as she got in,
started the engine, and maneuvered along the dusty dirt road up and over the
ridge. The brown dust cloud from her wheels drifted slowly among the cactus.
She was gone.

Tommy finished his maintenance and walked through the
brush over to Keller. He said, “Mr. Murch, everything looks good. There is
still plenty of fuel on board.”

“Of course!  That’s exactly how we designed it.”

Keller stared at the dusty trail Tatyana had left. His
marketing smile was gone.

“Thanks Tommy. Thanks for looking after Tatyana. I
wanted this demonstration to be dramatic. No. I
needed
it to be
dramatic. I think we hit one out of the ballpark, don’t you?”

Tommy nodded his head as he wiped some dirt from his
face.

“Yes, I think it went well Mr. Murch. I only wish we
had some American companies that wanted to use our motors. Now it’s just going
to be used to levitate Russian military vehicles. I mean, we couldn’t even meet
Tatyana at the hangar. We had to hide out here in the desert like rats. It
makes us look paranoid or underhanded.”

Keller replied, “Oh it’s not paranoia. I really
am
trying to hide this deal. I don’t think the Feds would look too kindly on this
international sale
just yet
; I’ve got people working on it though. My
financial needs are on a much shorter time scale than government paperwork can
provide.”

Keller laughed at his own words. He slapped his hand
on Tommy’s shoulder.

“Don’t you worry about NASA, Tommy. They’ll come
around when they see these motors everywhere. We just need to make them jealous
enough to realize their mistake.”

Keller glanced down at his watch to see how much time
he’d lost dealing with the badly wired switch. The watch was old and the dial
had a faded blue logo for
Insane Galactic Game Technologies
. That bit of
nostalgia always made him smile. He looked up and said, “It’s time to head home.
I’ll meet you back at the hangar.”

Tommy grabbed his lunchbox from the trailer and then scrambled
through his warden’s keychain to lock the door.

Keller walked through the desert brush back to the
hover ship. He climbed up into the cockpit and closed the door. The startup
process was simple because the engines didn’t use combustion. Just some
switches and an old fashioned key; something insisted on by Keller himself. The
rockets flared their deafening high-pitch whooshing sound.

Tommy sat in his pickup truck watching the rocket powered
ship as it ascended into the sky. He slowly accelerated the old truck out of
the small parking area and drove up the winding dirt road over Saddle Mountain.

Flying behind Tommy’s truck was a hover ship powered
by the MM10 rocket engines. Today it was piloted by a once great millionaire
who was only a week away from going bankrupt and losing the company he had
poured his life savings into.

Many books have been written about how to motivate people. They run the
gamut from achieving personal wealth to simply avoiding the loss of what we’ve
scratched together in life. When you get down to it, though, it’s really just
about greed.

We’re all greedy in some way. Scientists and engineers
have a special kind of greed; an insatiable gluttony for interesting knowledge.
For them, reading an encyclopedia fires off their dopamine sensors. Discovering
that pumice rocks float tickles their prefrontal cortex. Interesting facts feed
them and nourish them, but they also motivate them to do something with that
knowledge. Often it’s just to prove to their buddies that they can do something
better or faster; sometimes at any cost. And that is why cutting edge
scientists and engineers often die poor.

However, when the rare one avoids calamity and
achieves greatness, they can remember the very moment when everything clicked
or at least when the initial obsessive-compulsive spark ignited.

For Chris Tankovitch, the Director of NASA, that event
was an unusually warm winter evening in 1986 when he witnessed a
once-in-a-lifetime event. While most people were going to bed, Chris and his dad
packed their cheap wobbly telescope into the trunk of the family Chevette.
Chris was holding a box filled with Doritos and Coke in his lap. Reverse didn’t
work, so his dad had to open the door and kick forward with his foot.

His dad paused the car halfway down the driveway and
angled his head toward young Chris.

“I want you to know this is a special event. Your mom
is furious that I’m keeping you up this late on a school night.”

“I know, but this only happens every 76 years. It’s
either now or when I’m like 90 years old!”

With that, they backed out into the road and drove
north out of town in silence. As time went on, they saw fewer and fewer buildings.
Street signs gave way to county road signs. At the very edge of town they
passed a lonely church where one window was still illuminated from the inside.

“I wonder what that person’s dealing with,” asked his
dad quietly.

Rare streetlights illuminated the dashboard like slow
flares shot from a boat. Chris and his dad followed the directions that had
been read to them over the home phone by the astronomy club president. Each
turn took them deeper into darker and darker territory. The Chevette buzzed
down the road through the inky shadows.

His dad still wore his flip-up shades from earlier in
the day.  He leaned his head toward Chris and blurted out, “This place is so
remote, I keep expecting an ambush by Sasquatches. Ha ha!”

It was a dad joke; young Chris rolled his eyes.

Finally after what seemed like forever, they took one
wide turn and saw red dots of light moving all around. Bingo.

The bright lights of the big city make it nearly
impossible to see the stars. Regular flashlights do the same thing to your eyesight
when you’re out in the dark trying to use your telescope. However, red light
has no effect on your night-vision sensitivity. That’s why everybody at a
stargazing party has red filters on their flashlights. Chris was holding his version
in the car anticipating that night’s event.

The Chevette rolled up next to some other rusty cars
with Ohio license plates and stopped. Chris turned on his red flashlight while
his dad pulled the telescope from the trunk. On this unseasonably warm winter
night, nobody needed a jacket. They walked over to the gathering crowd, their
feet crunching over the gravel. Within minutes they set up their telescope and
drank in the total blackness of the rural sky.

The club president asked everybody to gather around
and he waved his hands around like a shaman. He explained that they would need
nothing more than their hands to find Halley’s Comet that night. To
demonstrate, he climbed up on a ladder so everybody could see him; he was
illuminated by a dozen flashlight beams of bright red light. Then he delivered
the instructions for viewing.

“Just raise your closed fist up above your head. Stick
out your thumb and pinky towards the ends of the Big Dipper. Swivel it all
around your pinky half a turn. Your thumb should be pushing on the comet.”

It was just that easy.

After Chris found it once, it was impossible not to
instinctively look at it again and again. It was even more spectacular with
binoculars which made the long tail really glow. The telescope was almost
overkill, but he tried that too of course.

Maybe it was the smell of the damp winter fields.
Maybe it was the excitement of seeing something so rare. Or perhaps it was the
MSG-laden snacks and caffeinated Coke, but something in Chris’s brain clicked
that night.

The view of that Halley’s Comet sky burned like a
living photograph in his mind. He was keenly aware of the sound of the footsteps
on the gravel and the low hum of people chatting and laughing, telling
off-color jokes that would be unthinkable three decades later.

Chris was hooked on astronomy which would become an
obsession with astrophysics. No other subject would top that interest for the
rest of his life. From now on, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking would be his
biggest heroes.

The grown-up version of Chris was happily rolling that
memory around in his head when he got a tap on the shoulder from the stage
assistant in the Public Relations office at NASA.

“Hi Director Tankovitch. We’ve got the teleprompter
set up. The press conference is gonna start in about two minutes, okay?”

Chris smiled nervously and said, “Thanks Jim. Hey, can
you get me a bottle of water?”

Jim raised his palms up and said, “Where’s the
please
?”

He laughed, pointed his trigger finger at Chris and
then disappeared past a bank of light stands.

Chris was lucky in many regards. Most men have
thinning hair by the time they’ve reached their mid-forties, but he did not. Chris
nervously ran his hand through his mop of hair. He couldn’t remember if he’d
washed it that morning because the past week had been a whirlwind of daylong
meetings with Congressional members and NASA officials. However, the fossil discovery
was still unannounced. Chris and the president had agreed to eventually release
a few of the photographs and some basic information.

Earlier that morning, the public relations team at
NASA had sent out a press release to the major news agencies with the headline,
“NASA to Announce Modest Changes to Existing Exploration Plans.” Chris had
purposely created a bland press announcement to make it all the more exciting
when he dropped the Mars news bomb. Anything this exciting would typically
require approval from the executive branch, but this was his chance to be a
shining star among the scientific community.

Unbeknownst to Chris, the press had suspected something
was happening because the president had cancelled his regular press conference
that very morning.

Chris peaked out from the side door and saw people
tiredly looking at their watches and checking their text messages. Most had
been at the White House waiting for the president’s press conference when he
cancelled it; their bosses sent them here instead. Even with that, only half
the chairs were filled.

Chris laughed at them for being bored. He was about to
drop one of the most historically significant speeches from a public official
right in their lap. It was because of this pressure that he was struggling with
his opening sentence.

Perhaps a heavy self-important boring statement about
how mankind always wanted to fly? Perhaps a funny one-liner? He thought about
the most memorable opening line he’d ever heard. It was from the best man at
his wedding who stood up drunk and started with, “Some people say
Best Man
is just a label.”

Chris shook his head and said out loud, “Nah, I’ll
just go with something boring.”

He felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around
expecting to see the stage assistant with a bottle of water and said, “Thank
you for the water…”

His eyes jammed wide open. Standing there was a
smiling President Daggett Jennings. Secret Service agents were filing into the
hallway and into the back of the NASA press room. The executive entourage had
just arrived.

The president smiled as he put his hand on Chris’s
shoulder.

“Chris, my speech will only last five minutes or so. I
would appreciate it if you would stick around to answer the follow-up barrage
of questions.”

Chris’s mood plunged. The air had been punched out of
him. Even though Chris had battled to keep the Mars planning missions funded
through all the tight budget years, his old classmate was about to take all of
the credit and crush his moment of glory.

Chris threw together some words.

“Well, hang on, wait, no, see, I have my speech all
ready to go. Look over there,
DJ
. It’s already on the teleprompter!”

Chris instantly realized his blunder of using the
president’s old college nickname. The president noticed it too and he was also was
puzzled that Chris would actually try to argue his way back into the spotlight.

“First of all, it was
DJ
back when I was
cheating off your physics exams in college. I thought we already went over
this. It’s
Mr. President
now. And I had them turn off the teleprompter. You
really shouldn't try to trump me on this, okay? I’ll be reading from a napkin.
It’s not a bad speech for something I threw together on the drive over.”

The president unfolded a crumpled napkin with
handwritten scribbles on it.

Chris’s face wrinkled into a mild panic. He blurted
out, “But I’m the director of NASA. I think it really should be me making this
presentation.”

The president’s smile turned into a stern frown.

“Look Chris, you are my old friend. But managers don’t
make these kinds of announcements. Presidents do.”

They both stood behind a curtain to the side of the
stage. Chris looked like a child who had just been scorned.

The press noticed that the president’s personal press
secretary had stepped up to the microphone. They had been expecting to see the
public relations assistant for NASA. The audience swung around in their seats
to face forward. The room was now rumbling with chatter. The press secretary announced
two simple rules:

“No cellphones. No noise. After the president is
finished, he will be leaving and NASA personnel will answer your questions.”

The president grabbed Chris’s arm with a two-handed
executive handshake. He put on his big political smile and winked.

“Cheer up, Chris. Watch how it’s done.”

The president walked across the front of the room to
the microphone and adjusted it to his height instead of Chris’s lower stature.
He breathed out of a huge smile, scanned the audience and coughed once. He laid
down his napkin which was hidden behind the lectern and then his expression
became more serious.

“On July 20, 1969, the entire world held its breath as
American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped down a ladder and put the first human
footprint on the Moon. I was just a toddler at the time, but I remember that
moment clearly. My mother was crying because she knew that we had reached a
moment in human history where things would never be the same. We could not go
back to being content with our Earth-bound lives.”

The president paused for effect and drank some water
from a glass.

“Here we are, almost five decades later and we have
maintained that wanderlust by sending machines to Mars to find things that can
amaze us and motivate us. A short while ago, one of the most important finds in
history occurred. Although we did not find signs of current life as we had
hoped, we found something even more amazing. We found evidence of previous
life. Abundant life. Complex life.”

He leaned down closer to the microphone.

“Intelligent life,” boomed his voice from the
speakers.

A journalist from the LA Times jumped out of his chair
and ran out the back of the room trying to get the early scoop on the news. He
realized that the president hadn’t finished and slid to a stop to turn around.
He stared at the president, caught between the urge for more information and
the urge to flee.

The president continued, “I’m going to have my office
manager Francine hand out a packet of photographs to you right now that show
what we found. Francine, if you could, please.”

Confidently, his assistant Francine walked around
passing out small packets of black and white high-resolution photos. The
members of the press were grabbing at them. Each photo showed what looked to be
shimmering rocks at first. However, closer inspection showed human-like fossils
embedded in the side of a large gem-encrusted boulder. The photos were labeled
A, B and C. However, there was no photo D included in the packet. That one was
still being kept secret by the president and would not be released to the press
just yet.

Chris stood patiently to the side of and behind the president,
putting on an effective fake smile. Even he had to admit that the president
could turn on charm like a light switch. People listened. In hindsight, Chris
realized it would’ve been inappropriate for him to give this speech.