Origin & Earth (The Orris Project Book 1), page 38
As a courtesy, he called Tim on his lunch break the next day. Tim told him not to worry about coming in for the check unless he needed the money, as he had many auctions going that had not yet closed. “If you get the check now, I’m just going to owe you more the next day,” he said. “But it’s totally up to you. Just let me know what you want to do.” It was Tuesday, and they agreed to wait out the rest of the week. Garrett would go in on Saturday to pick up a check so that Tim’s books would balance, and Garrett could invest the money.
That Saturday morning, Garrett walked into Tim’s store and up to the counter. Tim looked up from his phone and greeted him. “Well! Hello there, millionaire!” Tim said. Garrett smiled and shook his head. He had thought it might be a lot, but not that much. Tim opened the register drawer and withdrew a cashier’s check. Before handing it to Garrett, he dramatically sniffed it and said, “Whoa! Smells like a lot of money here.” Tim handed him the check. Garrett looked at the amount, shocked: $1,408,619.13.
“You know what the amazing part is, Garrett?” Tim said. “I haven’t even sold half of them yet! And just on this check that I gave you, I made more than I did last year, more money in a month than an entire year!”
Garrett stayed with Tim for another hour, asking him questions about money: how to keep it, how to invest it, and most importantly, how to protect it. It was a fruitful conversation by Garrett’s measure.
14
Three more weeks passed, and an exhausted Becky walked into the apartment with Mike, who had picked her up again from the airport. She looked like death warmed over.
“Hey, Garrett,” she said.
Garrett walked to her and hugged her. “I know this is tough on you, but it is really nice to see you again.”
She smiled at him and brightened a little. “Well, this time will be better. I’m here for two weeks. No more of this two-day crap.” The bill was going before the house as a body, and Jim had called her back once again in case they required her presence. “And the bill isn’t going up for another three days, so I’m on vacation now.” She walked into Mike’s bedroom with her bag.
“Beer or booze?” Garrett asked Mike.
“Beer is fine. I don’t want to drink too much tonight, she’s going to sleep early and will get up early, and I’d like to get up with her.” Garrett handed him a beer, and they clinked bottle necks.
After dinner, the trio sat around the freshly cleaned kitchen island talking about the events that had occurred since they were all together last. Becky’s eyelids were heavy, and it was no surprise to either Garrett or Mike when she announced she was going to bed. Mike and Garrett talked and drank beer for another two hours, and then Mike turned in, too.
Alone in his apartment again, Garrett had drunk a sufficient amount of beer to return to his comms. Over the last five weeks, he had watched many of them, but any time Lauren had made one with their little baby girl, he would watch it over and over again without moving on. On that night, he watched one from his mother and then he opened the next chronological video. It contained Lauren, but without the baby. She sat there with a small smile on her face, staring behind the camera. Finally, she nodded and looked into the camera lens. “Garrett, I’ve waited over a year to make this video, and it will be a hard one for you to hear,” she said. After only her first spoken word, his own name, he knew it would be a grave message, and probably bad news. She never called him by his given name. It was always “Slouch.”
“I asked everyone in your family to let me be the one to bring you this news, and I warned them it would be a long time before I would, for good reason. I wanted to have all the information and all the answers before I told you. With all of that said, and now that the official investigation has been closed, I can tell you that four days after you left, Terry Stone died.” The breath went out of Garrett as though someone had kicked him in the chest.
“I was there when it happened,” she continued, with more emotion in her voice. “The transport went up, but the rockets didn’t fire.” There were tears in her eyes, but she wiped at them, shook her head, and appeared to get herself under control. “They determined that one of the large bolts that held the bumper pads in place on the track came loose and rattled out. They think you must have just missed the bolt when you launched. When Terry’s transport passed over it, it destroyed all the proximity sensors that could have triggered the rockets, and it also damaged the…” She picked up a stack of papers and read through a part of the top page. “It also damaged the SLO-4 rocket, rendering it inoperable.” She set the papers down and breathed for a moment before continuing.
“I think I know the rest without having to look at the report. After he hit the bolt, it didn’t just destroy the sensors and the rocket, but it hit the transport itself. When that happened, the transport became unnaturally wedged into the carriage. The command center fired the other three rockets manually to disengage the transport from the carriage so Terry could deploy the parachute, but it didn’t work. They were mechanically fused together. The escaping gas from the rockets came out at wild angles. It created a spin, and…” She trailed off for a moment, staring underneath the camera. Without looking up, she said, “They think the centripetal force killed him.” She looked back up but did not talk right away. She stared into the camera for several seconds. A tear formed in her eye and rolled down her cheek. “I could see it spinning from the ground.” She wiped the tear away. “There’s one more thing, unfortunately. I think he felt responsible, even though he shouldn’t have. It wasn’t his fault. Jack killed himself that same night. Jack Abbott. He hanged himself.” She sat upright, sniffled, and wiped both of her eyes again. “I’m sorry, Gar, I love you so much. I’ll be back tomorrow with Hope for a happier visit. I love you.” She nodded at the camera operator and the image froze.
It was another night-ending comm for Garrett. He did not watch it again, but sat on the couch for another half hour, reminiscing about Jonroe, Terry, and Dr. Abbott and how their lives had each met their different, but equally tragic, ends.
15
The house passed the bill with overwhelming support. Only twenty-eight representatives dissented, with five abstentions. The Senate received the bill, and it went to a vote only five days later. It passed 93-7. The president signed it enthusiastically the day after, to a great deal of fanfare and ceremony. It was from that moment on, that Garrett had a small team of secret service assigned to him.
The United States pledged 30 trillion dollars over fifty-two years for the project and agreed to manage it through NASA. The U.S. would also have a team deployed around the globe to stump for support, both financially and for resources from the other resource-rich countries of the world. Garrett would be a member of that team and travel the whole of the planet with them, including nostalgic trips to both France and Italy.
In the evening, three days after the president signed the bill into law, and the day before Becky would fly back to Alaska, she emerged from the bathroom, walked to where Mike was sitting on the couch and whispered to him. Mike stood up and announced to Garrett that they would go out for a bit. Garrett nodded but said nothing.
She had whispered, “It’s my last night here. Take a girl out for a drink!” When they got to the bar, she asked to sit at a small two-top table in the back corner, but near to the bar. Mike asked her what she wanted to drink, and she told him to get her a soda. He could get scotch and she would drive them back. He did so, and when they finally sat across from each other with their drinks, she dropped the bomb.
“I’m sorry to do this to you this way,” she said. Mike thought she was breaking up with him. His heart dropped in his chest so hard he thought it was more than just a figure of speech. He broke into a sweat before she could even get the next word out. “Mike, I’ve been on the pill since I was nineteen, but I’m almost one hundred percent sure that I’m pregnant.” Mike’s emotions flipped so chaotically that he was not even sure what was happening. It finally dawned on him, having not fully absorbed the implications of them expecting: she was not breaking up with him. He said nothing, just sat there with a slack jaw, staring at her.
“A few weeks after you left Alaska with me, I missed a period. I got a pregnancy test off the shelf and it was positive, but you can never trust those things, so I made an appointment with my doctor to get a blood test. Before the appointment, Jim called me back here to D.C., so I had to cancel it. Mike, I missed another period, and I got another test from the drugstore, I did it just before asking you to take me here, and it was positive.” Mike did not speak. He had a small smile on his face, and he was gazing into her eyes. “I went from being sure that it was a mistake to not being sure, to being almost certain it’s true. Please tell me what you’re thinking, this is killing me.”
The small smile never disappeared from Mike’s face, but he sat back in his chair and rocked his head back, looking at the ceiling. When he looked back at her, he had a pleasant, serene look on his face, the exact opposite of what Becky had expected. “I think that is wonderful,” Mike said. “I understand that I’m only twenty-three and probably not ready to be a father yet, but I’m crazy about you, Beck. This doesn’t seem like a devastating blow to me. I thought you brought me here to break up with me!”
The look of surprise on her face temporarily broke the trauma of the almost-certain pregnancy. She smiled and got off her stool to walk around their small table and kissed him. “No! No, no, no, no! I love you, Mike!” They kissed and hugged.
“So, in that case, will you marry me?” Mike asked. Becky’s face flushed a hard-red color. She had thought it was possible that he might ask her that question when he discovered the pregnancy, but she thought it was a long shot. She was not sure how to answer. In her heart, she wanted to shout “yes,” but the realities of their world crept into her thoughts.
“Is that smart? What… what would we do? I don’t know, Mike, I don’t know what to do,” she said, struggling.
“Let me change the question a little. Do you, right now, want to marry me?”
The tension in her face melted away, and she burst into a bright smile. “Yes!”
“So, what we have is this: forget the pregnancy for a minute. I know it’s important, but please hear me out. I want to marry you, and you want to marry me. Aren’t the rest just details that we have to figure out?”
Her smile grew even wider, and she kissed him again. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“So how about we do this for now: no commitments tonight, but we should start talking about how we could make it work in the real world, even if I have to become an Alaskan lumberjack.” She laughed and nodded.
16
Mike and Becky’s eventual solution to their problem was sloppy and even reckless. The solution was to get married, have a baby, and Becky would quit her job and move into the apartment with Mike. Becky was betting on her ability to get a job in the same building as Mike after the baby was old enough to go to daycare. Until then, they both had good credit and credit cards with high limits. They both knew Garrett planned to leave for his time-jump well before any of that would happen, so his presence would not be a problem.
Garrett had gone around the world with the NASA team over the course of three months and was able to help secure support from other nations totaling $78 trillion over the 52-year construction forecast. The commitments also included raw materials from China, India, Russia, Mongolia, South Africa, Australia, and thirty-one other nations, which the project depended on.
When Garrett got back to the U.S., he traveled with Jim Lambert to the three sites where they were building the rail launch systems. One in Texas, one in Arizona, and the heavy launch system built in Florida. When the first three visits were complete, they toured the four plants building the parts of the Lance. One each in Colorado, Michigan, Toronto, and Georgia. The progress pleased Garrett, and he had only one other trip scheduled before he prepared to go down… his bunker. The bunker they had made for him was in Virginia, and it would be the first time he would go under on Earth with complete confidence he would be safe for the duration of his sleep. It was a concrete structure, built almost like a pyramid but with a dome at the top, and it was climate controlled and sealed off from the environment. The only things in the single room it contained were a bed and a toilet, as Garrett had requested. Armed guards would surround the bunker for the duration of the time he was under.
For the next month, he reviewed the plans with the teams at NASA. The build team; the newly formed Acquisition team, which was studying documents drafted by his wife and translated to English by himself and a language-learning application courtesy of Osa; and the equally new team set up to put together the operations curriculum for the unborn operators of the Lance. Lauren’s calculations pinned Earth’s Lance population number at one-third capacity, as it would be a heavily multigenerational flight. It would include a “one to one” law internally in the Lance, meaning an individual could only have two children, one for each partner. The extra room in the Lance was there for generational layering.
Garrett felt good about the progress on Earth and decided to go under so he could reach the finalization of the project. He met with Jim and all the project heads to make the announcement, and they all wished him well. When he got home the night before he had scheduled himself to go under, he hugged Mike and made a forty-minute phone call to Becky to bid her farewell. He apologized no less than five times for not being able to attend their wedding and promised that he had a special wedding gift that would arrive on their wedding day.
He cleaned Tim out again, added the money to his stash, and signed off on the papers making Tim the full legal owner of anything left over from Garrett’s original consignment. Tim hugged him. He ended up making over $400,000 from the gift over a six-year period, as selling the coins became more and more difficult.
Finally, with his belongings packed in a brand-new bag, he made his way to the bunker. He shook the hand of the guard stationed outside the single entrance point, walked into the concrete structure, and put himself under for approximately fifty years.
17
Mike and Becky’s ceremony was beautiful. They married in Maryland, in Mike’s hometown. The wedding did not set any attendance records, but their families were there. Becky’s parents had traveled down from upstate New York, and some of the most important players in their lives had traveled from Washington. All but one. Garrett was absent and would be so for around fifty more years. Becky could not imagine seeing Garrett again when she was seventy-five years old, but she knew it was possible.
The reception was in the same facility as the ceremony, and when it was coming to a close, Jim Lambert approached the couple and offered his hand to Mike, who shook it.
“What a beautiful wedding, guys. Congratulations. I’m afraid I have to get home to my children, but I have something for you.” He removed a tiny, gift-wrapped box from the pocket of his jacket, about the size of two match boxes stacked upon one another. “My gift to you both is on the table with the others, and don’t worry, it’s just a check.” He held the tiny box up so they could examine it. “This is Garrett’s wedding gift to the two of you. He asked me to deliver it to you personally.” Becky took the small box from Jim and smiled. “Good night, kids.” Jim nodded and headed for the exit.
Becky looked at Mike, “Oh my God, Mike! I want to open it right now!”
Mike winced. “I think that might be a little tacky. You don’t typically open wedding gifts in front of the guests, right?” He took the tiny box from her and put it in the deep interior pocket of his jacket.
“Then we open that one first. As soon as this is over. Okay?” she asked. He smiled, nodded, and kissed her.
An hour later, after countless hugs, handshakes, and well-wishes, they finally arrived at their room. To Mike’s surprise, Becky seemed to have forgotten about Garrett’s gift. She had made no more mention of it, until she pulled him in for a kiss and the box, still in Mike’s pocket, was momentarily pinched between them.
“Oh!” she said. “Let’s open Garrett’s gift!” Her excitement returned. He withdrew the box from his pocket and placed it in her hand. She popped the gift-wrap apart quickly and opened the box to reveal a key and a tiny, folded piece of paper. She unfolded the paper and read: 1427 Lafayette in Garrett’s script.
“Are you serious? It’s a riddle?” she asked Mike sincerely. She frowned, but there was still good humor in her voice.
Mike took his phone out of his pocket and shook his head. “I don’t think he meant it to be a riddle. 1427 Lafayette Street is where Garrett’s bank is,” Mike said. He plucked the key out of the box and held it up to her eyes. “This is a safe deposit box key. Whatever his gift is, it’s in that box.” She looked disappointed, but he shook his head. “It’s a benefit of getting married on a Sunday. We can go to the bank together in the morning and find out what it is!” She smiled and hugged him.
As a couple, they decided that although they wanted to go on a honeymoon, it would wait until after the baby was born and they had a better handle on their finances. Becky had suggested it, announcing that she didn’t want to vomit every morning of her honeymoon, as the morning sickness had already begun before they tied the knot.
