Free Back to the Moon-ARC by Les Johnson, Travis S. Taylor

with this trip. It is what it is. I’m in business to make money and give my customers one hell of a ride. I hope that answers your question, and, as far as I am concerned, this news conference is over.”
    With that, Childers walked from the stage, still clearly agitated by the last question. Childers was more agitated, in fact, than Gesling would have thought possible.
    “Damn,” Paul leaned toward O’Conner and whispered. “What’s up with that?” Gesling was surprised that a question most in the room would consider balderdash would get such a response from Childers—perhaps giving it more credibility than it deserved.
    “Search me,” O’Conner responded with a shrug as she moved toward the podium to more formally close out the news conference. “I don’t know, but I need to wrap this up on a more positive note or that will be the question everyone here will remember—and we clearly don’t want that being the sound bite on tonight’s news!”
    I dunno, I kinda liked it. Shows we’ve got balls, Paul thought to himself. If he’d been holding the pointer, he could have smacked it in his hands like a billy club for effect. He stood sternly anyway and glared with a slight grin at the press members—the boss’s enforcer. He decided then and there that he liked Childers and had every intention of keeping his job and his boss happy, no matter how annoying the passengers got.
       

Chapter 8
    During the tour, while Caroline O’Conner was charming the four dozen or so reporters and their accompanying camera crews with her knowledge of Space Excursions, Dreamscape, and space exploration in general, Gesling’s telephone buzzed in his pocket, almost startling him. Somewhat annoyed, he took a deep breath and then fished it out of his pocket. Paul thumbed the center key and then the number key to unlock the thing, and then it dinged at him, saying that he’d received a text message from Childers.
    The message read:  
    after the tour, meet me in my office asap.  
    Gesling was used to getting boss-grams and didn’t really give it much thought. At that point, he couldn’t imagine that the text message and Childers’s reaction to the question asked by the reporter from the China Daily were related. But he was soon to discover that, unfortunately, they most certainly were. He plopped the phone back in his pocket and ignored it for the time being.
    Completing the tour and seeing the reporters to the heavily monitored exit from the Nevada test facility took about another hour and a half. Pual’s stomach croaked at him a time or two and then started in with a full rumble. He had skipped breakfast and by now was ravenously hungry. He debated whether or not to grab a bite before hotfooting it off to Childers’s office. He opted to grab a candy bar and a soda from the break room first. The candy bar at least quieted, if not appeased, the rumble in his stomach. The soda helped, too.
    Gary Childers’s Nevada office was not nearly as spectacular as the one in Kentucky. A desk, credenza, and table were the only furniture pieces, and only a few deep-space photographs adorned the walls. By the time Paul got there, he saw that a meeting was already taking place. In the room were Mark Watson, Space Excursions’ chief of security, Helen Jones, the “IT Lady,” who kept the computer network operational, and David Chu, the lead systems engineer for the Dreamscape itself.
    It took only seconds for Gesling to determine that everyone in the room was agitated about something. They were all seated at the meeting table and all looked up when he entered the room. He couldn’t tell if they were upset with him or were welcoming an interruption to their apparently intense discussion. Paul was beginning to feel agitated himself, because he didn’t have a damned clue what all the hubbub was about.
    “Come in, Paul. We’ve got a problem.” Childers motioned for him to take a seat at the table next to him. Paul took the last sip of