End Time by Keith Korman Read Free Book Online

atmospheric cloak.
    Even though their blessed life didn’t work out as planned, Bhakti and Eleanor pursued what they loved. Perhaps their private heaven started with the birth of Janet—but for twenty years Bhakti never quite saw it that way. Except for the night his daughter failed to come home.
    Janet’s birth wasn’t an easy one. When Eleanor’s time came, something with the epidural went wrong. The obstetrician called it a one-in-a-million spinal trauma. Maybe the nurses had left her lying on her side too long, Bhakti never really found out; Eleanor lost the use of her left leg, and her right one below the knee. Even with physical therapy, and hobbling around on prosthetic braces, she’d be sitting in a wheelchair for most of the day for the rest of her life. But somehow with each other and with baby Janet to raise, none of this destroyed them. Sure, living on braces or sitting in a wheelchair made things take longer, but Eleanor’s sunny disposition helped make things easier.
    Yet even as her condition deteriorated with the loss of more personal motor functions, his wife’s will to live, to participate and overcome, seemed like a rock on which their family stood. The indignities of an adult in diapers faded to their proper place; another unremarkable aspect of life, no more, no less. So Janet—child, girl, adolescent—didn’t think anything was strange in their house growing up: a miracle in and of itself.
    Then came the Job. The move from Houston.
    From NASA to space tourism, with the fledgling company Escape Velocity, founded by the eccentric but immensely wealthy media master Clem Lattimore—or Cowboy Clem as he was known to many. Besides owning a cable network, a publishing conglomerate, an online You-Buy-Mart, a few of the remaining profitable newspapers in America, and Lattimore Aerospace, none of this was nearly enough for Cowboy Clem—he still lusted after going where no man had gone before. And that meant booking suborbital and soon orbital flights for wannabe Buck Rogers with enough cash in the bank and a hankering for the weightless beyond. It also meant buying up nearly 100,000 acres in Somewhere Texas for his spaceport.
    Actually it did have a name: Van Horn.
    And as big a bit of nowhere you couldn’t find if you were looking for it.
    Endless acres of flats and rocky hills; a hunk of desert north of the Rio Grande and an hour east of Laredo. Nothing more than a bus stop of a town; with a traffic light, a Budget Motel, a Budget Rent-a-Car, and any number of Budget Bar-B-Qs. No doubt soon to have helicopter pads in everyone’s backyard and airstrips for George Jetson’s flying car.
    The distance from Houston to Van Horn was six hundred or so miles, leaving a real city, with real hospitals, real universities, a real museum, and real restaurants—yet what smart ole Clem offered Bhakti beat all. The scientist’s own budget, his pick of team, a blank check. Cowboy Clem built Bhakti and family a house to suit down to the last detail, wheelchair accessible, the counters, the beds, the bathrooms, wind and solar net metering, backup generator, swimming pool, the works. Not only that, the house was done in four months, before they moved in. Eleanor Singh couldn’t say no. She even liked the color.
    Since Eleanor still helped Bhakti with his work, even his lab at the skeletal spaceport hangar was designed around her. And that went for the rest of his team. They’d make as much in a two-year contract as they had slaving away in their respective cubicles and workstations for a decade, no matter how prestigious. Cal-Tech, Hewlett Packard, Boeing, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems all lost personnel. Better health insurance, a free house, the work they loved—it was like joining the Manhattan Project, except this time they weren’t going to blow people up by government dictate and live in a Quonset hut; they were going to send people up on the