Part Nine
What could top going to the moon?
Jeff had achieved his long-held ambition and though he would never tire of going into space, ultimately it was time to pursue other goals. Still keeping his hand in all things space and aerospace engineering, but this time with his feet firmly on the ground. Besides this, he had a young family to think about. Neither they nor Jeff could cope with him being dumped on a deserted island every time the WSA were planning a big mission to the moon or other places. As much as he loved being an astronaut, Jeff felt that his talents and long-term interests lay in the development of future vehicles and technologies that would facilitate establishing a human presence on the moon – and eventually beyond. NASA and the World Space Agency were both hopeful that the success of the moon mission, both scientifically, technologically and with the general public, would be the catalyst for governments to invest in space exploration again. Jeff though, believed there was a niche for the private sector, free from the politicking that he knew went on within government agencies.
He remained with the WSA for a further year in an administrative role whilst building up contacts and laying the foundations for his new aerospace business. Although the business was at first to primarily deal with the WSA and NASA, the real corporate wheeling and dealing to match Jeff's medium-to-long-term ambitions was best done in the sprawling business world of the Eastern Seaboard. Therefore, the family moved once more, heading north and settling in a nice suburb of Boston. Venturing into the corporate world did not mean Jeff completely abandoned his previous career. Flying still meant the world to him, plus he felt it was important to keep his hand in with the latest developments. With Lucy's agreement, he transferred to the Space Wing of the Air Force Reserve, enabling him to spend time each month flying jets and contributing to testing.
Summer looked to have finally arrived. They had been in Boston for a few months now and had settled in nicely. Lucy had been to visit Boston on her trip with her father all those years ago and had liked the place, but never dreamed that she would end up living there. In a way, being on the East Coast felt as if she had come full circle. She was also within a reasonable distance of an old friend – Tom Delaney had since become a presenter on a major news network and was based in New York. He had come far, as she had long thought he would. Lucy had progressed nicely in her own career too; however, she had recently given up working full-time and switched to freelancing. They had a third child on the way. Lucy had surprised herself by realising that she wanted another baby. Three seemed to be a nice number and Jeff was happy to oblige. The business was going from strength to strength and they'd always been careful with their savings, so they were fortunate enough to be able to rely on only one main income to support a growing family. Lucy wanted to offset Jeff's long business hours and monthly Reserve absences by being around for the children and freelancing would also allow her to keep her hand in and continue to earn her own money. Not that Jeff was at all stingy when it came to ensuring his family was provided for financially, just that Lucy felt more comfortable paying for her own necessities and small treats for the boys out of her own pocket.
The family had just spent a nice afternoon in a local park, enjoying the warm weather. Jeff and Lucy had been discussing what they should do for Virgil's second birthday, even though it was a couple of months away yet. Jeff was sorting the boys out with drinks in the kitchen when the phone rang. Lucy went to answer it.
"Hello?"
"Lucy, it's Peter."
"Hi, how are you?" Lucy was surprised but pleased to hear her brother's voice.
"I'm fine. I'm ringing because…it's Dad. He's had a heart attack."
"How is he?" Lucy clutched at the phone so tightly that her knuckles went white.
"Not good. He's in intensive care at the moment. Mum's with him." The fact that Peter sounded as if he had to hold back a sob told Lucy more about her father's condition than any words could.
"I'm coming over," she said, as if the hospital were just down the road. "I'm going to get the next available flight out. Tell Mum I'll be there as soon as I can."
"I will do."
"I'll let you when I have a flight," said Lucy, trying to think.
"Okay," Peter replied. "I'll see you soon." As soon as she put the phone down, Lucy ran upstairs to find a suitcase. Jeff saw her disappear and wondered what the hurry was. After settling Scott and Virgil down to watch some cartoons, he went to investigate and found his wife scurrying about throwing things into a suitcase.
"I have to fly back to the UK, now," Lucy said to him, without even looking up. "Dad's had a heart attack."
"That's terrible," Jeff said. "Is he going to be okay?" He just got a shrug in response as Lucy flung some more items into the case. He grabbed hold of her shoulders and swung her round to face him.
"Slow down, Luce," he said.
"Jeff, please. I have to get to the airport," she said, desperation in her eyes.
"I know, but try and calm down."
"Calm down? My father's dying!"
"Getting into a state isn't going to help anybody, least of all him," Jeff said. Lucy lowered her eyes. Jeff gave her a quick hug.
"Have you got everything?"
"I think so… Oh, if I need something, I can buy it. I need my passport. That's the main thing," Lucy said, doing up the suitcase. Jeff went and dug around in a small bureau that was in a corner of their room and found her passport. Lucy was already making her way down the stairs. Jeff caught up with her and called Scott and Virgil.
"Boys! Come and get your shoes on."
"Why?" Five-year-old Scott was reluctant to leave the television. Jeff turned it off and picked up Virgil, forcing Scott to come along.
"We've got to take Mommy to the airport," Jeff said. Scott looked at his mother.
"Why?" he asked again.
"Your granddad isn't very well. I've got to go and see him," Lucy explained.
"Can I come with you?"
"No, sweetheart. Hurry up and get your shoes on," Lucy passed Scott a pair of sandals.
"But I want to see Granddad!" Scott protested. He didn't know Granddad as well as he did Grandpa, but he remembered the tall, thin man as being a source of treats and great adventures to distant worlds.
"Scott!" His mother's tone of voice was enough to quieten him for the moment, and he duly put on his sandals and followed his parents out to the car. Soon enough, they had arrived at the airport, and Lucy had got a flight. She was going to have to wait three hours for it though. Jeff offered to wait with her, but she refused.
"No, the boys will only get restless. I'll be fine," she said.
"Well, if you're sure…"
"I am." Lucy was set in her mind. Jeff gave her a hug and a kiss.
"Call me with any news," he said.
"I will do." She bent down and gave Scott a hug. "Be good and look after your brother," she told him. He smiled at her and nodded his head. Lucy picked Virgil up and gave him a kiss and a cuddle.
"Goodbye Vee," she said, before handing him to his father. She squeezed Jeff's hand.
"I'll speak to you soon," she said. Jeff nodded. He looked at the boys.
"Come on, it's time for us to go," he said. "We'll go get an ice cream, shall we?"
"Yeah!" Scott exclaimed, completely forgetting why they were at the airport at the mention of this. Jeff gave his wife a backwards glance as they left. She smiled at him, but it was strained. He knew how close Lucy was to her father. He was the person that she missed most of all since she moved to America. He hoped for her sake that her father would be okay.
The initial signs were good. Lucy had arrived at the hospital to find her father weak but conscious, and able to talk to her. He had berated her at first for flying over whilst she was pregnant, but she retorted that she hadn't been left with much choice. He was more interested in talking about Scott and Virgil and the one on the way rather than his own illness.
"I know far too much about what's wrong with me," he told her. "I haven't seen the boys for a while, so I'd rather hear about them." Lucy obliged, feeling happy that at least she could manage to put a smile back on his face. She had returned to the family home with her mother and brother to rest, her mother fussing around her. Lucy was too tired and too worried about her father to tell her to stop it, so she took it the best she could. Her mother meant well. It was in the middle of the night that the phone call came from the hospital, telling them that John had suffered another heart attack but had not survived. After helping her brother console their mother the best that they could, Lucy called Jeff to tell him the news. He was upset for her, but also saddened himself as he had always got on with John in the subsequent years since their brief first meeting. Lucy stayed in England until the funeral had taken place, before returning home. Jeff worried for her, although she brushed off most of his concerns as usual. She was naturally distressed by her father's death – he was only fifty-four – but she knew that life had to go on. Her father was gone, but she still had Jeff, Scott, Virgil, and the new baby when it arrived.
The early morning sunshine shone through into the living room, making Virgil's hair look almost brick red. He had just finished his breakfast and was glued to the television watching cartoons whilst his mother finished getting herself washed and dressed. He was all alone for Scott had just started school recently and looked to be enjoying it. Every day he came home bursting with things to tell his parents. Jeff had been forced to take time off work recently after coming down with the flu, but he was well enough now to be able to take Scott to school. He was hoping to be back at work the following week. He hated not being able to be directly involved in his company, and Lucy had caught him several times on the phone when he should have been in bed, though he always denied he was doing something that could have been handled perfectly well by someone else. Lucy came back downstairs, almost ready to sit down and do some work on an article she was writing for a magazine. Being freelance was nice in that she was getting to do a variety of work, but all on her own terms. She went over to the television and flicked the channel off from cartoons onto something else. Virgil just looked at her.
"You're not watching cartoons all day," she said to him. "Let's get you some juice, shall we?" Virgil returned his mother's smile and followed her through to the kitchen. Lucy couldn't believe how placid a toddler Virgil was. He had his moments, but overall, he was far more even-tempered than Scott. She was about to give him the juice, but instead he indicated that he wanted her to pick him up. It meant that he wanted a cuddle. Virgil was learning to talk as quickly as Scott had, but he still tended to rely on other means of communication. Lucy was trying to get him to ask for things verbally but, on this occasion, she gave into the big brown eyes and gave Virgil the cuddle he wanted.
"You're a soppy thing," she said to him, affectionately, as he snuggled against her. She let him go and took hold of his hand to lead him back to the living room, carrying the juice in her other hand. Her intention was to get him settled with an activity so she could prepare for jumping into her work when Jeff came back from the school run, but the television caught her eye.
The channel that she had turned over to had been a news one, and currently it was showing a live picture of one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Clouds of black smoke billowed from the top of it, and the odd glimpse of fire could be seen. Lucy set Virgil down next to her on the sofa with his juice. The caption on the channel told her that a plane had crashed into the tower not too long ago. The newsreaders were trying their best to make sense of it all. Currently, the plane was thought to be a small one, but even Lucy knew that a small plane couldn't have made an impact like that. She looked at the fire burning and wondered how it was going to be put out. Clearly, all the lines to the sprinklers had to have been severed. She hoped that not too many people had been injured or killed. It was inevitable that someone in the tower had died in the impact. One of the newsreaders mentioned terrorism, but Lucy met this idea with a degree of scepticism. Having grown up with what seemed like an endless cycle of bombings and shootings in the news because of the troubles in Northern Ireland, she had a pretty good idea of what terrorism was.
"Terrorists plant bombs or shoot people. They don't fly planes into buildings," she said out loud, though she could not deny that there was something very odd about a plane colliding with the tallest structure in New York City on a perfectly clear, sunny day. She turned onto another news channel where a reporter was going to pieces, full of "Oh my God!" hyperbole, so she found yet another channel where things seemed calmer. At that point, Jeff came home. He began to say something to her about an unrelated matter, but Lucy interrupted him.
"Look at this," she said. "A plane's gone into the World Trade Center."
"What happened?" Jeff asked, coming to sit next to her, his eyes fixed on the television screen.
"They don't know. It's only just occurred," she replied. "It looks as if the top of it will collapse. I can see it listing." The engineer in Jeff took over as he looked at the burning building.
"Well, the plane hit near the top, so most of it should be okay. If the plane had hit further down, towards the middle of the tower, then there'd be problems," he said. Lucy was about to reply when a plane came into view. She couldn't really judge the scale of things, and her immediate thought was that perhaps it was a little plane carrying water to try and put out the fire, but Jeff knew what it was.
"That's a 767!" he exclaimed. The newsreader had also noticed it.
"There's a plane in the area…" she began but seemed to trail into nothing as the plane passed behind the burning tower of the Trade Center. Lucy's brain automatically traced the path of the plane, and she expected to see it emerge from behind the buildings, but instead all she saw was a huge orange fireball as the plane slammed into the second tower of the World Trade Center. The shock numbed her so much that she didn't even let out a gasp of surprise, and she could tell that the newsreaders were completely taken aback too. One of them found their voice and began ad-libbing again to the pictures being relayed around the world. Jeff noted that the second plane had hit the tower about halfway down.
"That's not good," he said, watching black smoke billow upwards as an equally intense fire broke out in the second tower. Lucy tried to comprehend what she was seeing.
"It's first thing in the morning. There can't have been too many people there," she said. Jeff shook his head.
"People would have been arriving for work. Whoever's behind this wants maximum casualties, else it would have been done at night." They continued to watch the coverage, unavoidably transfixed by the event. Soon pictures began to come in showing the planes impacting from different points, and reports of hijackings came in. A close up of the top of the first tower showed people hanging out of windows desperately wanting to be rescued. A helicopter hovered nearby, helplessly.
"Why doesn't someone do something?" Lucy asked. "Why can't they go onto the roof and be lifted off?"
"I don't know," Jeff replied, wondering the same thing. Nothing seemed to be happening. Part of him knew that nothing could be done. The fires on what remained of the floors below those people were far too intense and the damage too great for anyone to even try and attempt a rescue from below. He suspected that the heat and smoke were far too bad for a helicopter to get any closer than it already was. Then there came a report of an explosion at the Pentagon.
"The Pentagon?" Jeff exclaimed, almost leaping out of his seat. Not long after came the first pictures of the Pentagon, with a black cloud billowing over it to one side.
"That's another plane," Lucy said in disbelief. "Look at it. It's got to be another plane."
"What's going on?" Jeff wondered. The news reports were coming in thick and fast. In London, Canary Wharf and the London Stock Exchange had been evacuated over fears of an attack there. The White House was also evacuated. Speculation was already rife as to who was responsible for this attack on America. Close ups from the Pentagon revealed that part of the building had collapsed. Barely a few minutes had gone by when suddenly the pictures cut back to New York, where there seemed to be utter chaos.
"What's happened?" Lucy asked Jeff.
"It's collapsed! The tower's collapsed! It's not there anymore!" Jeff said, his voice rising slightly as he was unable to believe what he was seeing. Virgil was unsettled by his father's agitation and clung onto his mother's arm. She pulled him close to her, at the same time absent-mindedly running her hand over her stomach. The baby was due in a month. What kind of world was she going to bring it into? She watched the cloud of white dust rise over Manhattan, hearing the reporter choking as he tried to find shelter. She could hear sirens and shouts in the background. Lucy could only imagine the franticness of newsrooms across the country at the moment, remembering what it was like when something major developed. Tom… The thought of her friend and his wellbeing crossed her mind and added to her anxiety. She glanced at Jeff who looked pale and grim, and suddenly realised that he might well know people both at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center who had been caught up in the disaster unfolding before them. For the first time, she was glad that he had been ill and was therefore at home with her right now. A wave of guilt swept over her as she remembered that there were going to be many people tonight who would not be in the fortunate position she was in now. Before Jeff and Lucy had time to digest the fact that part of the World Trade Center had come down, there was a report of another plane coming down in a field near Pittsburgh. Lucy just covered her mouth with her hand and shook her head. It was all too much.
"The world's gone mad," she said softly, unable to keep the tears out of her eyes. Jeff put an arm around her, but his eyes did not leave the television screen. He couldn't even begin to understand how someone could commit such an horrific act or think that they could achieve something by it. He felt desperately sorry for the many people who had been caught up in the disaster and hated the feeling of helplessness that he had. He had some associates who worked in or around the Trade Center, and he was hoping that they would be okay. Even as he watched, the other tower finally gave way, and another huge cloud of dust and debris covered Manhattan Island. He couldn't help wondering if all the years of disaster movies had been tempting fate. But nobody could have written a script that followed the events he had just witnessed. They spent the rest of the day in a daze. When Jeff brought Scott home from school, the five-year-old took one look at the television, which was showing replays of the twin towers on fire and asked his mother what movie it was that she was watching. Lucy could have cried at the innocence of her sons' question, but instead sat down with him and tried to explain what had happened.
Later that evening, Lucy peered round the door of the study to find Jeff sat on the floor looking at something. She came into the room and managed to negotiate the extra weight she was carrying to sit next to him. It was then that she saw that he was looking at some of the many photographs of his space career, in particular the ones of the Earth.
"What's the world come to?" he asked her, waving a hand over the photographs. "How can someone be so deranged as to not only kill themselves but hundreds of people as well?" Lucy didn't answer. She could sense the anger in Jeff's voice, and knew that he was talking to himself as much as he was to her. He continued his tirade.
"And there's people out there who see it as something to celebrate? That it serves us right? I wouldn't wish that sort of attack on any nation in the world."
"I know you wouldn't. Most people wouldn't," Lucy said, gently.
"Then why did it happen? Where do things go from here?" Jeff asked her. Lucy simply looked back at him. He sighed heavily.
"I just wish that something could have been done," he said to her. "Those poor people who'd rather jump than be burned alive…" Lucy hushed him and took hold of his hand.
"Like you said, there just wasn't the possibility," she said to him. They sat in silence. Lucy got to her feet.
"Come on, let's go to bed," she said, extending a hand to Jeff. "We've seen more than enough today." He hesitated at first, but then took it as he stood up. He wrapped Lucy in a hug, feeling the baby bump press into him. It gave him a sort of comfort.
"I don't know what I'd do without you and the boys."
Author's Note: What Jeff and Lucy saw and said as they sat watching the events of September 11th 2001 on the television is based around how I, my mum and a family friend witnessed that day unfold. As I sat looking at the World Trade Center burning, the thought of International Rescue actually came into my mind, but that was followed by the horrible feeling of knowing that such an organisation didn't exist, and that there was going to be no miracle rescue of the people trapped inside. Perhaps someone like Jeff was watching too, and one day there will be an organisation like International Rescue - after all, Thunderbirds has held a special place in many people's hearts with regards to technology and engineering, so maybe someone, somewhere will be inspired the same way with the human side of IR.
