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  Faraday’s mind went blank for a second, forgetting the initial question, before she remembered and was able to continue. “Once we’ve settled at float altitude and the balloon has expanded to full size, I’ll release a camera and microwave transmitter. NASA has supplied us with a miniature version of the solar-wing similar to the Helios, which will carry the camera. The images will be broadcast live to F1 Mission Control Base in St. Ives, Cornwall, and live across the world.”

  “How do you feel about this year’s launch?”

  “I’m quite confident, actually. We have a qualified crew and having a NASA research pilot with us can only be beneficial.”

  Sutcliffe thanked the media for coming and asked if anyone had any more questions. Most asked legitimate, relevant questions. A few were cynics who wanted to stir the pot a little and get reactions. Regardless, Sutcliffe, always the total professional, answered all the questions with respect. His replies never wavered and he never lost his composure, always dictating the momentum and attitude of the discussion.

  After the press conference, the Fable-1 crew congregated in the small function room at the back of the Chandelier Ballroom where refreshments had been provided.

  “That went pretty well,” said Matthews.

  Sutcliffe pushed open a window to allow fresh air in. Engines wailed as media vans tussled for an exit from the car park amid a maze of congestion.

  “You think?” said Hennessey. “Sounds to me like they think it will fail again, if you want my opinion.”

  Faraday stretched, surprised how tense she had been during the conference. “They would love nothing more than to see us fail again.”

  Staring out of the window, Sutcliffe picked out his car sitting lonesome now that the car park had almost emptied. He saw Martin was napping with his forehead pressed against the glass. Outside, it continued to drizzle and the heat inside the room had put a smear of condensation on the windows. Gazing out at the gloomy day, lost in thought, he suddenly realised that everyone in the room was looking at him.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  Matthews huffed. “I asked you how you thought the conference went.”

  Obviously most journalists felt they were being overconfident, overambitious and very unrealistic. Nevertheless, public criticism, Sutcliffe thought, might just benefit them. Pessimism drew public attention, especially something as daring as flying a balloon to the top of the sky. In fact, the more people expected failure, the more famous the flight would become with success. The only downside was if NASA thought the expedition would tarnish the research institute with a bad name and withdrew the sponsorship money.

  “Okay,” Sutcliffe replied. And that was all he said.

  Chapter 7

  St. Ives in Cornwall was known for its cobblestoned streets, quaint cottages and artistic traditions. Tourists flocked in their thousands to indulge in romance and adventure, sapping up clean air, spotless beaches and coastal walks, not to mention the old galleries, gardens, craft shops and exhibitions. With a population of six thousand, give or take, St. Ives was popular, but not famous. After next month’s balloon launch, however, the seaside town would be popular and famous.

  The clouds had run out of rain, the storm had moved elsewhere and the F1 Mission Control Base was being baked in a glorious, tangerine-coloured sunset. Located on the cliff-top less than half a mile from St. Ives bay, the base was built to be a model of gracefully responsible design, but the building Jen Hennessey was staring at didn’t seem like a place that represented air travel whatsoever. It looked more like a cross between a fairytale palace and a waste recycling centre.

  Sitting in the passenger seat of Sutcliffe’s car, Hennessey was feeling dizzy. The heaters were on full punch and the car was a stew of heat. She wound down the window and took a deep breath of air. Sutcliffe’s son, a little strange and none too graced with civility, fidgeted on the back seat, one hand yanking on the seatbelt draped over his shoulder, the other toying with a small JVC video camera. Hennessey didn’t pay much attention to him, but stared at the pointed roof and the enormous smoked windows lining the granite walls of the Mission Control Base, which was built into a steep hill. Perfectly manicured lawns surrounded the slate walkway and the entire area was fenced off from the public with security systems monitoring the joint.

  In the forty five minutes it had taken to drive from the Moorland Links Hotel in Plymouth to the F1 Mission Control Base in St. Ives, Sutcliffe had learnt a lot about Jen Hennessey. She had never smoked, drank little and didn’t like to pollute her body with anything detrimental to her health. She lived alone at her parents’ house in Illinois but rarely spent any time there because of her commitments to NASA. She was unmarried, still single and career-driven. Orphaned, she said. Happy, she lied.

  “It looks more like Disneyland,” Hennessey commented.

  “You’re not the first to say that,” Sutcliffe said, laughing softly. “Come on, I’ll show you inside.”

  She nodded to Sutcliffe, who turned to speak to his son on the back seat. “Martin, wait here, we won’t be long.”

  Martin didn’t take his eyes off his camera and acknowledged with a single nod.

  As they neared the small building, Hennessey observed the environment and was reasonably impressed with the location. They passed through a metal gate and arrived at the building entrance. A frosted glass door slid open, obeying Sutcliffe’s electronic key-card. A second sliding door revealed a small foyer. When it opened, Hennessey noted that, as peculiarly unique as the building’s exterior was, its interior was equally as extraordinary. The main foyer was elliptical with grey carpets and black leather sofas pressed up against the wall, very sleek. At a high desk sat the receptionist. A message had been left for Sutcliffe, she mentioned, holding up a post-it-note with a phone number he should call and a name he didn’t know. “Andy…? Andy…?”

  “The plumber?” she reminded. “You asked him to come and check the leak in the men’s toilet yesterday, remember?”

  “Yes, right, thanks. Any other messages?”

  “No, none.”

  Hennessey learnt that the small building had been built in the shape of a T, though its exterior shape didn’t seem to reveal that. The narrow corridor passed doors on either side and at the end was the Flight Control Room. Inside, Sutcliffe saw Mission Commander, Mike Townsend, sitting alone at a computer. When he saw them enter the room, Townsend wheeled his chair back from his terminal, peeled off his headset and walked over. “You must be the American everyone’s been talking so much about?”

  Townsend took Hennessey’s hand in his and softly kissed it. He seemed down-to-earth and she could tell by his firm grasp that he was no stranger to hard manual work. His medium-length hair was stuck down with spray and his moustache, like his hair, had been meticulously clipped and shaped.

  “Jen Hennessey, and I hope it’s all been good.”

  “Naturally. I’ll be supervising all the operations and decisions regarding safety and flight conduct. I guess the role here is much like NASA Mission Control in Houston, only on a much smaller scale. In fact, we have only got four employees working here, myself included. We also have a team of skilled technicians who are responsible for setting up the balloon and retrieving it when it returns. Welcome to F1 Mission Control Base.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How’s the wife?” Sutcliffe asked.

  “Bending the ear, as usual.”

  “And how’s the little one?”

  “Bending the other ear. She has one healthy set of lungs. And we both know who she gets that from.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, mate.”

  Townsend laughed and put his fists up into a boxing posture. “Don’t listen to this one, Jen. He’s a menace to society.”

  Back in the corridor, Sutcliffe took Hennessey to the beginning of a deep, spiral staircase that led to the ground floor beneath the Flight Control Room. The graceful curves of the staircase drew the eye downward.

  “Wh
at’s down there?” asked Hennessey.

  “That’s the workshop. It’s where we store the balloon. I’ll show you.”

  Located on the ground level, etched into the hill, the workshop seemed like any other with its open plan, open rafters and the smell of motor oil and creosote strong in the air. It was full of complex tools, balloon spare parts and tons of polyethylene material. The main doors ran on state-of-the-art electric rollers that went upwards in curving metal tracks.

  “So, what do you think so far?”

  Whatever she had been expecting, the atmosphere at the F1 Mission Control Base was eminently civilised. Opinions contrasting, her first impression that it was too modern and a little eccentric for her taste; all glass, angles and fancy architecture that didn’t appear to fit at all with its function. Otherwise, the location, organisation, and preparedness all met with her approval. “It probably takes a bit of getting used to.” She looked at an enormous trailer with a tarpaulin dressed over it, a V-shaped tow bar poking out. “Is the gondola beneath that?”

  “Yes. On launch day, it will be towed by truck out of the workshop and set up on the cliff where the envelope will be injected with helium.”

  Nailed to the wall above the balloon trailer, Hennessey spotted the Fable-1 logo, the same one she’d seen at the conference on the projector screen. “What does Fable-1 stand for?”

  “First Aeronautic Balloon Launch Expedition, that’s the name we gave to the balloon.”

  “Hmmm, interesting. Just one thing concerns me though,” she said, turning to face Sutcliffe. “The press talked a lot this afternoon about your past failures.”

  “They always do.”

  “Right. So where do we stand this year?”

  “Well, there were some deficiencies found in the balloon when we did tests in February, but they have all been rectified. We’re still waiting for the helium we ordered weeks ago from an independent supplier, but we’ll have that before the launch. The only thing that will delay or prevent the flight is bad weather and forecasters are predicting a hot summer, so we should be alright. Why don’t I show you the White Room, if that doesn’t impress you, nothing will.”

  In the far corner of the workshop, they came to a large elevator with a keypad embedded in the metal panel. Sutcliffe stuck in a code and watched the doors pull apart. The bottom half of the elevator featured zinc-coated steel with baked enamel, whereas the top half dazzled with shiny mirrors and Hennessey observed the lines under her tired eyes in the reflection. Under the spell of jetlag, her mind was trying to put her body to sleep.

  The elevator descended a single level thirty feet beneath the workshop. When the doors opened, they were in a small lobby facing a large, steel door with a thick handle. It opened a foreboding, unlit room. Sutcliffe flicked a switch and fluorescent lights sputtered into life. The room, longer than it was wide, was the size of a squash court with white tiled flooring, a white ceiling and brick walls that were unpainted. A stepladder was set up over two cans of white paint.

  “As you can see, the room is still being redecorated. It should be done by launch day, if the decorator gets his arse in gear. Feel free to have a look around.”

  The White Room was no ordinary room, but there was nothing extraordinary about it either. No electronic gadgets, the furniture sparse and the tone of decoration bland. A place for changing, for discussing strategy, for privacy and for preparation, much like a sports changing room with its polished, wooden benches bordering the wall on the left and the wall at the back. There were two toilets annexed to the wall on the right. The ceiling was vaulted, the walls a prison of thick cinderblock and there were no windows, making the room impregnable. In the far corner was a large utility cupboard stocked with forty pressurised and capped oxygen tanks on racks. The cupboard was climate-controlled to prevent the tanks from over -heating. An enormous glass display cabinet pushed against the wall stored six Russian spacesuits.

  “Very impressive. You know how to make an impact on a girl.”

  “Tell that to my ex-wife. She left me for an animal doctor.”

  Hennessey laughed, though she didn’t mean to. “I’m sorry. It’s just…nothing.”

  “What?”

  “She obviously likes a caring man.” She continued to snigger.

  “I’m caring. See, I care that you’re laughing at me.”

  “I’m only joking. I can tell you’re a very sensitive man, deep down.”

  Sutcliffe smiled, but he got to thinking. The mission to the edge of space was the only thing he really cared about. After a bad marriage and an even worse divorce, Sutcliffe had lost his appetite for relationships, immersing himself in a project that was time-consuming and mind-distracting. Nothing else had any real importance in his life, not even his son, if he was honest. His obsession with ballooning was like a drug addiction. Every penny he had went into it, he neglected his friends and family, he didn’t sleep enough and he often looked tired and withdrawn. Snapping out of thought, he killed the lights, closed the door to the White Room and they returned to the workshop via the elevator, crossed the workshop to where the staircase began, climbed to the top, walked the length of the corridor and stopped in a room furnished as a small kitchen.

  “Tea? Coffee?”

  “Coffee, thanks. Better make it a strong one.”

  He pointed to a door on the opposite side of the corridor. “Take a seat in my office. We can talk more there.”

  The desk in Sutcliffe’s small but cosy office dated back to the days of Queen Victoria. The furniture was a far cry from the eccentric architecture of the F1 Mission Control Base with all its twirls and curls. Hennessey presumed the modest office design correlated with Sutcliffe’s modest personality. He had managed to personalise the office with a few oil paintings and some photographs of his son. He spent much of his time installed behind his Macintosh conducting hours upon hours of research, writing emails and doing general admin duties. Friends criticised him for being antisocial, but he didn’t see it that way.

  Sutcliffe entered the room carefully juggling two cups of boiling coffee, set them down on his desk, pulling his red hot fingers away, then sat opposite Hennessey.

  “I must apologise for not meeting you before the conference. Things have been a bit hectic these last few weeks.”

  “That’s okay,” she replied calmly. “But someone should have at least acknowledged me beforehand.”

  “I did try to call you at the hotel and I left a message with the receptionist for you to contact me. I assume you didn’t get it.”

  Hennessey remembered the phone had rung when she’d been in the bath, but she had been disinclined to answer it. “Let’s just forget about it, shall we?”

  Sutcliffe nodded. “So, where exactly are you from in the States?”

  She blew at the wisps of steam curling from her cup before taking a sip. “Born in Sullana in Peru, but lived my youth in Illinois with my parents. These days I spend most of my time at the base in California, not too far from L.A.”

  “Quite a change for you, isn’t it? Going from high-speed jets to balloonist?”

  “Not really. My objective is to carry out research on the stratosphere, something I can’t do from an X-43A scramjet.”

  “Do you have any questions?”

  Sutcliffe’s voice was sincere and she found herself studying him, liking him, respecting him. “I haven’t given it too much thought, to be honest.”

  There was a brief silence, just the sound of coffee being slurped, until Hennessey broke it when she decided to talk to Sutcliffe about her mission. Engrossed by the American, her way, her voice, her mannerism, her peculiar but soothing accent, something in her eyes hit him right in the gut. He hadn’t thought about it until now, just how beautiful she was.

  “Tell me about your training,” she insisted.

  The training? Where to start? Sutcliffe, Matthews, Burch and Faraday had all flown to Moscow to join the ATLAS Aerospace company to train as ‘Space Tourists’ a while back.
The intensive course specialised in space training, final countdown preparations and ground-based, complex space simulators. The crew had been fortunate enough to spend two days at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre thirty seven miles northeast of Moscow using the same simulators used by cosmonauts to prepare for space travel. They had also performed a work session in the Hydrolab under-water facility used to prepare cosmonauts for spacewalks.

  “We enrolled at the ATLAS Aerospace company in Moscow four years ago.”

  “Four years ago? Have you done any refresher courses since then?”

  “No, we just haven’t had the funds to go again. We’ve done several parachute jumps, you know, just in case we need to abandon the balloon and most of us have hundreds of flights under our belts. Plus we keep ourselves physically fit with regular exercise and what have you.”

  “How about your spacesuits? Have you trained in them?”

  “A little, not much.”

  “Listen, Brad, have you ever tried tying your shoelace while wearing boxing gloves?”

  He frowned. “No.”

  “Well, that’s what wearing a spacesuit is like. You’ll be working inside a body-shaped pressurised balloon. A long, inflexible balloon at that. I suggest you practice working in one and encourage your crew to do the same over the next couple of weeks. I’ve trained in zero-gravity conditions, practiced high angle-of-attack manoeuvring, difficult landing flare techniques, and also flying under adverse environmental conditions. But I still have difficulty performing basic tasks in a spacesuit.”

  After all his doubts, all his prejudices, Sutcliffe felt reassured having Hennessey on the mission. In the unlikely event of adversity, the research pilot would be a valuable asset to the team.

  Part 2

  Chapter 8

  A sunrise so eloquent and absorbing took on a surreal brilliance, flirting with the Atlantic Ocean on the desolate horizon. Not a breath of wind in the air, the sea calm, just as the weather experts had forecasted.