“I could quit and find another job pretty easy,” she said. “I would probably take a small cut in pay, but it might be worth it not to have to deal with him every day. But I’d be just as bored as I am now. What I know is the car business. And I hate the car business. But what I do like is business, and I think I’d be good at it.”
So she vacillated, and we talked. She never laughed at my plans to find a career in space, and she helped me with my studies. And we never talked about getting married.
THE NEXT DAY Travis and Jubal picked us up, very early, in a five-year-old Ford van with enough seats for the six of us. Before getting in Kelly looked it over quickly and asked Travis what he’d paid for it. When he told her she winced.
“You should have talked to me, Trav,” she said.
“Just get in, Ms. Strickland Mercedes, okay?”
We picked up Dak and Alicia and hit the road, destination unknown. Boxes of Krispy Kremes and cups of strong coffee were passed around.
We took the A1A exit and crossed Merritt Island and entered the Kennedy Space Center grounds through an entrance I’d never used before. Travis showed a special pass to the gate guard, so I guess he still had a little pull around there.
We got there in time to witness something I’d never seen before: the raising of the world’s largest garage doors to reveal the retired Shuttle [188] Atlantis and the old Saturn 5, newly restored after many years of sitting in the Florida sunshine and rain, now standing proudly and awesomely erect in one of the bays of the old Vehicle Assembly Building. All done to music, of course… Also Sprach Zarathustra, which was probably always going to be the anthem of space exploration, thanks to Stanley Kubrick.
“I want y’all to just look at that Saturn 5 for a moment, kiddies,” Travis said. “I want you to look at it, and I want you to consider the concept of hubris.”
“And dat be… what?” Jubal asked.
“That’s what the ancient Greeks said when somebody was getting too big for his britches… or whatever Greeks wore under their togas. Excessive pride. Arrogance. I want you to look at that rocket and ask yourself… ‘Are we biting off more than we can chew?’ The builders of that thing are gods, in my book. And the Greeks warned mortals not to try to act like gods.”
“It’s not the same, Travis,” I protested.
“No. We’ve got a few advantages over the guys who built and launched these things. Chiefly, unlimited fuel. Ninety-nine percent of that rocket was fuel, liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which are very tricky to handle, very dangerous in themselves, even if you don’t burn them in those huge engines. We don’t have to worry about that.
“But we have to worry about just about everything else. Do you know how many million parts were in that thing, fully loaded, on its way to the moon?”
“No, how many?” Alicia asked.
“Well… I don’t know, but it’s a bunch. Somebody here can tell us. My point, though, is one faulty transistor could bring this behemoth down in flames. One screwup in space, and we’d be dead. Can we build that well?”
“Sure,” Dak said, but it was impossible to stand in the shadow of that thing and say “sure” with any confidence. So I backed him up, and so did Alicia and Kelly. That left Jubal, and we all turned to him, the only guy whose vote really counted.
[189] “I t’ink we can, ma fren’s. But I promise you dis. De firs’ minute I t’ink we cain’t do it, I tell you right off.”
It didn’t bring a smile to Travis’s face, but eventually he nodded his head.
“Let’s go see the museum,” he said.
KELLY AND ALICIA had never seen it. Isn’t that always the way? I think our visit to Kennedy that morning fascinated them, gave them a glimpse of the fire that burned in Dak’s and my guts. And if you were even vaguely considering something as screwy as going to Mars in a home-built spaceship… well, you couldn’t help wanting to know more about the ones who had gone before you and the hazards they faced. The hazards you might soon be facing.
We ate our picnic lunch at a table in the shade near the rocket park, where many of the early missiles launched from Cape Canaveral made a metal forest of white trunks. It was hot, there weren’t many tourists around. I had a funny thought. If we do this, and get famous, when they made a movie about us the director would want to shoot right here, where it all was decided.
“Have you given any thought to how much all this will cost?” Travis asked.
We all looked at each other. I’d certainly thought about it, but I didn’t have a clue. The one thing I could say with absolute certainty was that it would take far, far more money than I had. Another thing I was pretty sure of was that if Travis didn’t have enough money to do it, then it just wouldn’t get done.
“One million dollah,” Jubal said.
We all looked at him. Travis was frowning.
“Where did you get that number, beloved cousin of mine?”
“I pick it outta de air,” Jubal admitted, and we all laughed. “But it oughta be plenty enough, I t’ink.”
“I t’ink so, too,” Kelly said, and Jubal patted her on the back.
“Okay, where did you get that figure?” Travis wanted to know.
[190] “It’s what I have in the bank, more or less,” she said quietly.
Stunned silence.
“But I thought-” I started, then felt the daggers she was staring at me. Well, of course. The night before last I had watched her turn a red car into a black one. She had the computers, she had the security codes, the passwords, the bank account numbers, the PIN numbers. She could probably steal her old man blind, if she wanted to.
But that wasn’t something we had to share with everyone.
“I know, it’s awful,” she said. “One person having so much, others having not anything. I can’t help it. It’s not easy, having money when your three best friends don’t, and they won’t let you give them some help here and there, when it’s needed. It hurts me to see Manny’s family struggling so hard… but none of them have ever asked me for a thing, and they haven’t held my money against me.
“So, yeah, I’ve got money. About a million dollars. And I’ve been drifting since high school. I’ve been looking for something to do with my life. I’ve tried a lot of things. I met Alicia while I was volunteering at the battered women’s shelter.”
“She did more than that,” Alicia said. “She put her money where her mouth was a couple times, saved the place from closing down once.”
“It didn’t take much,” Kelly said. “And that kind of work is not for me, I found out. I’d get too depressed at the hopelessness of it all if I tried to make it my life’s work.
“Today I learned about people who wanted to go to the moon, and they did it. It hasn’t been my dream, and it may never be, but it’s a place to start.” She looked at Travis. “So how about it, Mr. Ex-Astronaut? Do you want to go to Mars, or will you let the chance pass you by? I’ll bet you a million dollars we can do it.”
Travis shook his head and smiled, slowly.
“I won’t take that bet. Because if we do this thing, I’ll jump in with both feet. So I’d be betting against myself.”
“You faded, Kelly,” Jubal said.
“What’s that?” Travis asked.
“I say, I bet her one million dollah we cain’t build us no ship and get [191] to Mars. Dat way, I win, I kin give her back de money she waste jus’ on account a believin’ in me. She win, we go to Mars and she get my one million dollah.”
“Jubal, I hate to remind you of this-”
“I know. You my loco parent. I always figgered dat one loco parent was plenty enough, yes.” He smiled, and I tried to smile back, but it was tough, thinking of Avery Broussard and what he’d done to his brilliant son.