Red Hope: An Adventure Thriller - Book 1 Read online

  News of the Mars fossils and the audacious one-year mission washed over the land like a tidal wave, steadily enveloping all aspects of daily life. Within minutes, the headline screaming across internet news sites was “NASA Budget Goes Deep in the Red for The Red Planet.” By dinnertime, every available astronaut who owned a suit had been driven to their local TV studio to give interviews on the national evening news broadcasts.

  “How will this affect morale at NASA since the space shuttle program was cancelled?” asked one of the nightly news anchors. His question was directed at an astronaut dressed, uncomfortably, in an old suit with a bright blue NASA necktie. Not used to such attention, the astronaut swiveled his seat back and forth nervously as he answered.

  “Frankly, it’s the first bit of hope we’ve had in years, and I can coast really far on a little bit of hope,” stuttered the astronaut as his eyes welled up with tears.

  The day before the news conference there had been almost zero chance of progress in manned space exploration. Even though we technically won the Space Race, we were now begging Russia to take our astronauts up to the International Space Station; at a cost of $70 million per crew member. After the president’s new challenge, there was a volcano of hope welling up inside the ranks at NASA.

  Every former astronaut secretly wanted to be on the crew picked for that mission. This resulted in each of them passively making statements about how they would handle it if they were chosen. On one of the late night talk shows, the host had seated in front of him a gaggle of Lunar Program veterans.

  “So, what are the key things about this mission that make it different from your Moon landing days?” asked the host.

  They looked at each other before one took the lead to answer.

  “Well, they’re going to need a completely new vehicle. A much larger one than the Apollo landers. Maybe even two, you know? Send one ahead that has living space plus a laboratory in it. Then, ship the crew out in another one. When they both land on the planet, they’ll have room to do a lot of work. Sounds good, right?”

  Another veteran chimed in.

  “Yes, it’s going to take several years to design and test it. I don’t see how they can meet the president’s schedule. And what about the travel time? It could take six, seven, maybe even more months just to get there! We don’t have the rocket engines to do that in a realistic time frame.”

  "Several years just for the design?" asked the host.

  "Yes. Several."

  This same crew of veterans went on to guest the Late Late show. After that, the Late Late Late show. Finally, they went to Taco Bell and talked about how they would jump at this mission if NASA would only ask them.

  Within a few days, all of the available astronauts had used up their fifteen minutes of fame. The journalists then descended like vultures onto any available paleontologists, any professional who could even spell the word fossil would suffice. Ironically, in this case, they were hard to find. It was the fossil digging season in the Southern Hemisphere. Most of the experienced researchers were out in the field digging for dinosaur bones in some of the most remote locations on Earth.

  NBC’s nightly TV news managed to get one of Russia’s most respected female paleontologists, Yeva Turoskova, on a satellite video phone from a dig in Australia. Her claim to fame was that she was also a retired cosmonaut for the former Soviet Union. Most importantly she spoke English. The journalists saw her as a triple win. On the TV screen, her face was covered in dirt and her graying hair was pulled back in a single pony tail.

  The news anchor asked her, “Can you give us your thoughts on the photographs from Mars?”

  “Um, well. They are interesting, yes? I haven’t seen them close up yet, but they do look a little human. We could tell a lot more if they got better photographs with higher resolution.”

  She looked down for a moment and suddenly disappeared from camera view. When she came back up, she was holding a bucket. Yeva reached in and pulled out a sizable rock with a lizard fossil sticking out. It had very jagged teeth.

  “Do you see this fossil? It is called Rusellosaurus coheni. I know you have never heard of it. It was an ancient swimming lizard. I know a lot about it. Why? Because I have had time to study the fossil from many angles. I can even guess what food it ate by studying its teeth. See these teeth? They are crazy teeth, yes? Probably a carnivore. When I get back to university, I look forward to exploring all of the information they are gathering from Mars.”

  The news anchor was bored. He tapped his note card on the table as his eyes glazed over.

  “Thank you, Dr. Yeva Turoskova, speaking to us from a remote fossil dig site in Australia.”

  She gave a happy smile and said, “It was my pleas…” as the signal cut out.

  A large majority of the internet junk email began changing themes: from Nigerian treasury secretaries to Martian treasury secretaries and selling life insurance to future Mars travelers.

  An official Mars Real Estate Agency was started and headquartered out of Tampa, Florida. Television commercials began appearing after midnight. They were masked as science shows, but clearly selling land lots on the Red Planet. Acreage was cheap for now, so viewers were told to act quickly. Plots with a good view of Mount Sharp were already sold out.

  In modern times, it didn’t take long for the theme of living on Mars to infect the entertainment world too. One comedic late night host had a skit where he interviewed Martians who joked about losing all their money gambling on Vega, a star 25 light years away.

  “What happens on Vega stays on Vega.”

  The religious leaders of the time were quiet about the Mars issue at first. They were taking time to digest it because so many people trusted their opinions and their leadership. After all, they were just as fascinated by this discovery as the secular world.

  A well-known philosophical blogger named Sean Josete composed a New York Times editorial. It was both hopeful and inspiring.

  He wrote, “All life is a miracle, in my mind, regardless of what planet it lives on. I'm not amazed so much by its existence, but by how it develops from something so simple into something so wonderful and complex. Look at it this way. After an egg is fertilized, the cells start to quickly multiply and a brand new organism starts growing without any instructions at all from the parents. The microscopic DNA works like a fine craftsman, insuring that everything falls into place at precisely the right time. With that kind of perfection happening trillions of times every day here on Earth, it makes perfect sense that life is abundant throughout the cosmos. I genuinely wonder how God chooses to reveal himself to people on other worlds.”

  Within a week of the president’s press conference, all of the interviews that could be gotten were given. The real estate plots were sold out. Most Americans felt this was an exciting mission, but the discrepancy between idealistic and realistic timelines would eventually kill much of that excitement. Budget problems would probably halt the program at some point in time. This was not a defense program. Therefore, it was killable.

  That’s how Washington, D.C. works. It would take a steadfast president to keep the momentum going. In other words: it was completely doomed. The fossils would sit, unobserved, for another ten years until we sent yet another unmanned rover to wheel around on Mars.

  While the president was announcing the discovery at the NASA press conference, there was a man out in California who was still in his pajamas, frozen like a statue and watching the president speak on television. He sat motionless in the kitchen of his beach house in Santa Cruz, near the top of the scenic Monterey Bay. This is where this man spent his extended weekends before returning to the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley thirty miles to the north.

  He had a TV remote in one hand and a spoon filled with Raisin Bran in the other. The only signs of life were the blinking of his eyes and the chewing of his cereal. He was watching on television what he believed to be the quintessential event of his life taking place.

  He cringed as
the journalists tried to get the NASA director to admit that his organization wasn’t up to the task. He smiled when the NASA director didn’t take the bait, even though everybody knew the timeline was impossible. Fortunately for NASA, this man watching from California, Keller Murch, could provide the missing technology today. He’d already built rockets that ran for days if not weeks.

  When Keller heard the NASA director admit that the existing rocket motor technology would be the biggest challenge, Raisin Bran sprayed from his mouth. He threw his breakfast in the sink and ran downstairs to his six-car garage.

  The floppy-haired Keller jumped into his supercharged 1968 Ford Mustang GT. He drove at nearly 120 mph from his beach house toward his office in Silicon Valley. This stretch of freeway known by the locals as Highway 17 was one of the curviest mountain roads on the West Coast. It had a history of killing wealthy entrepreneurs who tried to navigate it too quickly while drunk with dotcom power and gin.

  Halfway through the trip, the road passed through the mountain town of Scotts Valley; it’s the only straight portion of the road. The two freeway exits there fly by fast when you’re commanding a high-powered sports car. The last exit always caught Keller’s eye because of the Wendell’s Restaurant at the bottom of the off ramp. That was the first corporation he ever worked for.

  When Keller was only 15, he lied to the Wendell’s Restaurant manager about his age, so he could work. It was near his boyhood home in Elkhart, Indiana, just two blocks away from the mobile home factory which always made the lunchtime rush intense.

  That job taught him everything he would need to know in the business world. The customer wasn’t always right, but they were never wrong. After being promoted to assistant manager at the age of 20, he married his high school sweetheart Angie. They were a happy working couple; in those days you could make ends meet without a college degree.

  Four years later their world was rocked: she was diagnosed with cancer. At that time, medicine could only prolong her life for a little while. She managed to hang on for almost a year. They were near bankruptcy when the end came. Keller was convinced that the love of his life would still be alive had he been a rich man. He kneeled down in front of her grave and said, "Honey, I'm going to make you proud. I’m going to do something great with my life."

  One warm summer night shortly after her funeral, his district manager came in to help with the dinner rush at the hamburger restaurant.

  “Hey, Keller, you run the cash register. I’ll cook the burgers, okay?”

  While the district manager was flipping hamburgers, a glass vial fell out of his shirt pocket and smashed on the ground. A little mountain of white powder lay on the greasy tile floor, surrounded by shards of broken glass. The manager let out a yelp and threw the spatula onto the grill. He grabbed two customer comment cards from the front counter and dropped to the ground on his knees. He used one card to scoop the white powder onto the other card.

  The district manager stood back up and glared at the line of customers. In a loathing voice he said, “Don’t you dare judge me.”

  He immediately turned and walked back to the manager’s office, carefully holding the white powder in the cupped cards. The customers waiting for their food stared in disbelief and abandoned their orders.

  If the district manager’s job was so stressful that he had to resort to drugs, Keller thought, then maybe this wasn’t such a promising career after all. It was about time Keller changed course and lived up to the promise he’d do something great with his life.

  That’s when luck struck. In addition to having a drug-using district manager, one of his coworkers was a part-time game programmer for the up-and-coming personal computer market. Keller agreed to help him market his games for a slice of the profits. They formed a company called Insane Galactic Game Technologies.

  The games sold well through magazines and online bulletin boards; the internet was just catching on. The two entrepreneurs eventually simplified the company name to I.G. Game Technologies. It wasn’t long before they sold the company for the insane price of $8 million; both walked away happy and carefree. This is when Keller learned that luck rarely knocks twice.

  He coasted for nearly two decades on small investments and ended up slumming around the northern California town of Palo Alto; part of a region referred to as Silicon Valley. That’s where the Googles and the Facebooks of the world got their start. He figured that a new location might bring him more luck.

  Keller attended house party after house party of business people that he’d met through friends. However, he couldn’t find the second break that he so desperately wanted. It dawned on Keller that I.G. Game Technologies might have been the high-point of his career.

  On the night before he planned to abandon California, Keller decided to drink his blues away at a hipster café and bar in Palo Alto. He walked into the darkened establishment and all he could see was a swarm of illuminated white apples staring back at him. Everybody was socializing through their laptops. It was very quiet. Before the end of the night, though, he ran into a trio of enthusiastic grad students from Stanford. They bragged about the amazing work they were doing in their rocket laboratory. They invited him to see it for himself.

  The next day he visited them at their lab in a building that appeared to have more balconies than classrooms. Every building on campus was wrapped in either evergreens or other scenic trees. Keller stood near the main entrance, astounded by the beauty of the Stanford University campus.

  A voice came from the balcony above him, “Hey, Mr. Murch! Go in through the doors, we’ll meet you by the elevator.”

  He was led into a futuristic rocket engine laboratory buried deep inside this place called the Durand Building. Over the next few hours, the grad students demonstrated a rocket engine that used very little fuel, produced a modest amount of thrust, and ran for a long time.

  The students had approached several government institutions and corporations to raise some venture capital, but they hit a brick wall. Nobody was interested. The students were told that demand wasn’t there. The space industry was dead. They should focus their new technology on more Earthly applications.

  Keller thought differently. He hired them on the spot. The three students took a leave of absence from their PhD programs. That day saw the birth of Murch Motors Incorporated. It had a total of four employees.

  Those halcyon memories rattled around in Keller’s brain as his Mustang raced along the freeway. Scotts Valley vanished in the rear-view mirror, and his past faded from his mind. Keller felt rushed like he’d never felt before. He shifted through gears like they were bowling pins to be knocked down.

  “I’m driving like Steve McQueen, baby!” yelled Keller as he roared down the road.

  When he arrived at his office, Keller skidded into a handicapped parking space. He ran in without even locking the car doors. Still in his pajamas, he walked briskly through the beige hallways. Keller stopped at the office that housed the three engineers who had created his wunderkind engine. He now called the inventors his Space Cadets. He asked them how well their rocket technology would work in the empty vacuum of space. He asked them if it could push a ship to Mars.

  They discussed the details and spent an hour running some calculations. Not only would the idea work in space, but it would work even better. The chief engineer told Keller, “The superconducting magnets would work even more efficiently in the freezing temperatures of space. It’s a great way to boost rocket performance.”

  Keller didn’t know what that meant, but he nodded his head as if he understood. Satisfied with their rough estimates, he gave them the thumbs up to modify the rocket designs for the vacuum of space.

  Keller picked up the phone and called his lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Somebody answered the phone without saying anything. It was quiet. Keller heard a sigh.

  Keller asked, “Hello? Milburn? Are you there?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am. Who am I speaking with?”

  “Um, this is Keller
Murch. You know, the guy who pays you a ton of money to influence the Congress critters?”

  “Hi, Mr. Murch. How can I help you today?”

  “I need you to get me in touch with the NASA Director, Chris Tankovitch. I have some valuable information for him. Is he in your Rolodex?”

  Milburn sighed. “Yes, but that is a very expensive card in my Rolodex, especially after today’s press conference.”

  Keller could taste the extortion.

  “Look at it this way: I’ve asked you to sell my Murch Motor technology to NASA for the past two years. So far you've been a pretty worthless investment.”

  “Be careful, Mr. Murch. Worthless is a strong word. I don’t like strong words. Besides, didn't I put you in touch with the Russian Defense Bureau? Have you met with them yet?”

  Keller nodded instinctively. His fingers rattled on his desktop.

  “Yes. Yes, you did. Look, just get me in touch with the director, and I’ll make sure you are well compensated.”

  “How well?”

  “Even weller than you are now.”

  Keller hated going through lobbyists, but he knew that high-level public servants couldn’t be contacted directly by third-class millionaires like himself. Their office entry fees were much too steep.

  “I’ll see what I can do. Have a good day, Mr. Murch.”

  That evening after dinner, Keller’s phone rang. It was a Washington, D.C. area code. He took a deep breath and answered, “Hello, this is Keller Murch from the Murch Motors Corporation.”

  On the other end of the phone was the NASA director. He sounded defeated and exhausted.

  “Hi, Mr. Murch. This is Chris Tankovitch. I’ve only got a minute, but our mutual friend Milburn told me you have some information that might assist in our mission to Mars?”

  Keller thought hard and said very slowly, “Director Tankovitch, you don’t have to worry about how you’ll get the astronauts to Mars. I have the rocket engines that’ll get them there in a month. I can show you a working prototype. No budget fight will kill this program.”