“That’s crazy,” she said. “You’re saying the porn would just appear on your computer screen? Are we talking movies, pictures, what?”
“The whole spectrum,” Jake said. “And Nerdly says that will be the prime motivator for people to sign up. They won’t admit that’s why they’re signing up, maybe not even to themselves—they’ll say they want to be able to chat with people in other places, access those databases and libraries, maybe even do their banking online.”
“Banking online?” she asked. “Is that possible?”
“Not just yet, but they’re getting there. Anyway, that’s what guys are going to tell their wives they’re signing on and paying the monthly fees for. In reality, it’ll be so they can sit in the privacy of their own home office and browse through the entire human history of pornographic images to their heart’s content and not have to pay for it.”
“And you believe this?” Celia asked.
Jake nodded. “If Nerdly says it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.”
“Hmm,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe we should invest some money in the computer industry.”
“Maybe we should,” Jake agreed.
They flew on, and soon the sun itself popped up over the horizon, prompting Jake to put on his aviator shades to combat the glare. They touched down neatly and on time. After securing the plane in the general aviation parking area, they walked to the rental car area and Jake procured a 1993 Lexus for their use.
“All right,” Jake said. “Let’s go get us some breakfast.”
The same waitress that had served Jake and Laura on their trip last year served Jake and Celia now. She did not recognize either one of them—either from Jake’s previous visit or from their general celebrity status. That was fine with them both.
Celia, who was feeling much better today (though not quite back to normal—the hangover had been brutal) promptly broke her vow to never drink again and ordered one of the famous bloody Marys. She had most of it in her stomach before they even ordered food—both of them went with the eggs benedict—and then ordered a second bloody Mary to drink with her actual meal. By the time the plates were removed and the bill was paid, her mood had improved considerably and she was even smiling on occasion.
“All right,” Jake said as he checked his watch. It was 8:34. “Let’s go get you a guitar.”
Frank and Bart were both waiting for them when they arrived at the Portland Music Store. They were polite and subservient as they showed her the instrument and they watched in fascinated awe as she began to strum out some of her work on it once it was in proper tune.
“I like it,” she told Jake. “It sounds good and feels good in my hands. Of course, it’ll never replace the one papa gave me, but it’ll certainly do for the rest of the recording sessions ... as long as I don’t leave it outside.”
“As long as you don’t leave it outside,” Jake said.
Bart even gave them a good deal on the instrument. He let Celia have it for cost—which was sixteen hundred dollars—in exchange for allowing him to take a picture of her and Jake together with the guitar and being granted permission to use the picture in newspaper advertisements that would say that Jake Kingsley and Celia Valdez chose the Portland Music Store as their go-to shop when they were recording their albums in Oregon.
“Fair enough,” Celia said, shaking hands and sealing the deal. “After all, it is true.”
The two of them scratched out a little handwritten contract granting the store their permission to use their image and quotes in their advertisements and then Jake picked up a few odds and ends—extra guitar strings, extra guitar picks, a few replacement cords, and a new tuning fork. They then took their purchases and left the store twenty minutes before it officially opened.
“All right,” Jake said, climbing behind the wheel. “We’re ahead of schedule. We should be back in Coos Bay sipping a drink out on the patio before the first drops of rain even touch the coast.”
“That’s good to hear,” Celia said.
Jake would have let Celia take the controls for the takeoff—it was something he had let her do on several occasions and she always got a nervous little kick out of it—but the two bloody Marys she’d quaffed down earlier precluded this plan. Later, he was forced to wonder if things would have turned out differently if she hadn’t had the bloody Marys and had been able to take the controls for takeoff. True, she would not have really been flying the plane, per se, just making control movements at his direction, but would that have been enough of a difference in their flight path to avoid the collision? He thought it likely. And since everything that followed occurred because of the collision, wasn’t it logical to conclude that everything else might have worked out differently?
There was no way to know for sure. And as he turned the plane onto Runway 13L and made a final check of his takeoff configuration, he had no inkling, no premonition of what was about to happen. It was just another routine flight about to start.
“Flaps at fifteen,” Jake recited, mostly to himself as we went through the checklist, but also for Celia, who had flown enough with him to have picked up the terminology. “V1 is ninety knots ... set. VR is one hundred knots ... set. Mixture ... set ... cowling one ... open ... cowling two ... open ... and ... we’re ready to roll.”
“Ready to roll,” Celia said lightly, her hands gripping the armrest. The mild buzz she’d had from the drinks had pretty much faded away and her normal nervousness at leaving the ground in a vehicle in which she could not actually see what was holding it up had returned.
“Off we go then,” Jake said, pushing his two throttles forward, his eyes watching the RPM gauges.
The engines roared and the plane began to accelerate rapidly since it was nearly empty of passengers and the fuel tanks were less than half full. Jake used his rudder pedals to keep them aligned with the runway center line. The airspeed indicator moved steadily upward, passing through V1—the speed at which they were pretty much committed to takeoff because there would not be enough runway to stop if something went wrong—and then quickly moving to VR—the optimum takeoff speed for the weight of the aircraft and the altitude of the airport.
“Rotate,” Jake said, pulling gently back on the yoke. The nose came up and they broke contact with the ground. As soon as he saw a steady, positive rate of climb, he reached down and pulled the lever for the gear. The machinery began to whine beneath them and, just as the altimeter wound its way past eight hundred feet, became silent once again, leaving only the engine noise. The ground dropped away beneath them, falling further and further. They passed over the airport perimeter fence and out over a golf course beyond it.
“Turning right to one-eight-zero,” Jake said aloud, putting them in a shallow left bank and adjusting his stick a bit to maintain the rate of climb. By the time the bank was complete and they were on course out of the Class B airspace, they were passing through twelve hundred feet.
Everything was looking good. It was time to retract the flaps and start picking up some speed. Just as he reached for the flaps lever to complete this action, his peripheral vision caught the briefest impression of a white object in the sky, just off to their left, moving left to right and closing with them rapidly.
“What the fuck?” he barked.
Before he had a chance to even attempt a course correction, before Celia even had time to respond to his words, there was a solid thump from the left wing as whatever the white object had been slammed into it. The plane shuddered a little but otherwise kept climbing like normal.