Back to the Moon (21 page)

Vanderheld waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “They've bought into the science fiction of it. I'll go along with anything NASA wants to do up there that gives us a return down here. But in all my years in the Senate and the last two years in the Space Council, I've seen nothing that warrants spending a dime in space.”

To her discomfiture Shirley found herself disagreeing with her boss, an unusual situation. Still, the veep had given her a quest. She'd do her research for him to the best of her ability, no matter how it might be used. “I'll start my investigation right away, sir,” she said, and headed for the door.

“Shirley?”

She stopped. “Yes, sir?”

“Bring everything you find to me first. Don't discuss it with anybody, even in the office.”

“Of course, sir.” Shirley went back to her cubicle, sat down at her computer and stacks of books and memos and articles. Vanderheld had never given her such an admonition before. Surely he knew that she could be trusted. Didn't he? Her hands, hovering over the computer keyboard, were trembling. She thought she knew what she was looking for. But for the first time since she'd been employed by the veep, she wasn't exactly sure why.

SAM AND THE ASTRONAUTS

SMC, JSC

Sam brooded over his controllers as they pondered their consoles. They were watching the blinking numbers that defined what was going on aboard
Columbia,
looking for anything that seemed to be ticking in the wrong direction, varying from nominal.
Nominal,
Sam thought bitterly. That was one thing this mission could never be.

He had first worked in this same room as a controller for the old
Apollo
missions and if he wasn't careful it could flood him with memories. There were a lot of buildings around the center like that, reminders of the time when the country had gone to the moon. Those were exhilarating days and he'd loved working for NASA. But by the time the space shuttles began to fly in 1981, NASA had changed. Sam thought the NASA administrators he had seen come and go had done the best they could, but he also had the nagging feeling that all but one or two of them had betrayed the dream instead of nurturing it. After the demise of
Apollo,
the wind had just seemed to go out of the dream of space that NASA was supposed to cultivate. Now with the shuttle hijacking, he wondered if the agency would even survive another year.

Sam was watching the shift change when someone tapped him on the shoulder—John Lakey, the chief of the Astronaut Office. He was a nervous character for a flyboy. The way he bobbed his head always reminded Sam of a turkey. Lakey said something and Sam turned to him, incredulous. “Two shuttles in orbit at the same time? I don't have enough people or instrumentation for that.”

“Orders, Sam.”

Deborah Kimbrough, another astronaut, handed Sam a copy of a letter. “It's signed by Bonner, authorizing us to prepare for
Endeavor
's launch.” She took a step back. “It's a contingency, Sam. We haven't gotten the final go.”

Sam read the order, crumpled it, and threw it on the floor. “If you do this, you could put both shuttles in jeopardy.”

Lakey bobbed his head. “That's one of our own up there, Sam,” he said. “Dr. High Eagle. The Astronaut Office feels we have to think about stepping up to the plate, be ready to take a swing at this thing.”

Sam sneered. “That's the first time I've heard you astronauts claim a payload specialist as your own. Usually you're busting your ass to keep them and anybody but yourselves off the shuttle.”

Kimbrough put her hands on her hips. “Don't get in our way, Sam.”

“You're crazy if you do this,” he said. “You'll end up killing somebody.”

“As long as it's one of the hijackers,” Lakey said, “so what?”

“So what?
I know that man up there. Jack Medaris was a good man. Maybe, for all I know, he still is—”

“If you don't want to be Flight on this mission,” Kimbrough said, “you can always quit.”

“That's right,” Lakey added. “Bonner can and will replace you.” His eyes cut toward Jim Crowder, who'd been watching. Crowder ducked his head, went back to his paperwork.

Sam looked down on his troops. There was some whispering going on between a few of them nearby. They had heard the argument. Morale was already rock bottom at Shuttle Mission Control and this wasn't going to help it. “Get out of my control room, both of you,” he hissed at the astronauts. “Get out or I'll throw you out.”

“We're going, Sam,” Kimbrough said over her shoulder as Lakey meekly followed. “But if the Air Force demo doesn't work, we'll be back.”

PREPPING ENDEAVOUR

LSS, Pad 39-A, KSC

Colonel Olivia Grant pushed her way out of the elevator at the level-three platform on the fixed tower of the pad, a retinue of contractors and Kennedy Space Center managers in her wake. She barged into the center of a group of white-suited pad rats and snatched a logbook from one of them. “Tell me what you're doing,” she barked.

“Closeouts. External tank subsystems,” one of them answered, gulping. “Everything checked and double-checked.”

Grant waved the logbook at the managers. “This is what I mean, people. Stop checking what's already been checked.” She put the book down with disdain and kept moving, pointing to other workers. The Cape managers stumbled along behind, trying to keep up. “There's too many people here. If they aren't doing anything constructive, get them off this pad!” Grant yelled, loud enough so that everybody on the tower could hear her.

She grabbed a Cape manager by the arm and pulled her alongside
Endeavour
's cockpit. Her grip was powerful. “See there?” Grant pointed. “That's a flight-ready bird.”

The woman peered closer at the tiles beneath the cockpit. They were cracked, chipped, and glued. “To tell you the truth, Colonel, if I were an inspector, I would have trouble passing these tiles.”

Grant laughed. “You're a paper-pusher. Tiles get dinged all the time. Just glue 'em in place and we go. People like you think these shuttles are fragile birds. Truth is we don't know how much abuse they can take. I'd fly one as soon as it landed if I had to. Just prop it up, juice the ET, and go.”

Grant caught other pad rats staring at her. She put her hands on her hips and gave them the evil eye. “I want
Endeavour
prepped so if we get the word, we can start fueling no later than 0500 hours the day after tomorrow!” she bellowed. They scattered.

The tower lead, a woman in a short white lab coat, spoke up. “We'll need longer than that, Colonel. This bird's just starting its prep. We can't—”

Grant turned on her. “I don't want to hear excuses. You're professionals. Figure out what you need to do and then
do it!”

Grant kept moving, kicking butt all over the launch tower and taking names. “Penny High Eagle, I'm comin' after you, babe,” she muttered as pad rats scattered before her.

THE FLIGHT OF THE PEG

OSC L-1011 Tristar Launch Platform (the Cow), Patrick Air Force Base, Florida

Pilot Jim Durrance wound up the Cow's engines, powered her off the runway with full flaps, and then steered her into a series of rising spirals while copilot Bill Parise kept his eye on the readouts coming from the Peg. Durrance settled back, happy in his work. The Cow was the best aircraft he'd ever flown and he'd flown a lot of them. The Lockheed L-1011 Tristar airliner had been modified by OSC to launch the
Pegasus-E.
She was a sweet flier, smooth to the touch, exquisite even in the roughest air. Today the winds were negligible, visibility unlimited.

To synchronize with
Columbia
's orbit, Durrance and the Cow had been shifted to Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, just south of Kennedy Space Center. Despite her dance with the Indian DODO,
Columbia
had kept her essential ground track and orbital inclination. If she didn't maneuver further, it had been calculated that her orbit would carry her over the point of her ground launch at near five A.M., eastern daylight time. The Cow would fly to 38,000 feet, loiter until
Columbia
came over the horizon, and then launch her rocket.

“Thirty second countdown,” Durrance announced. “At your go, Cape.”

The Cape range safety officer came back immediately. “You're go for launch, OSC.”

“Copy that.”

“All nominal,” Parise droned. “Gyro set, power go. Nominal, nominal.”

Durrance had a perfect mental image of the checks the Peg was putting herself through, because OSC required that the pilots know the launch vehicle as well as her designers. Fifty feet long, 4.5 feet in diameter, weighing 48,000 pounds without a payload, the bird was a three-stage solid-propellant rocket that could carry three quarters of a ton into low earth orbit. The orbit reached on this mission would be higher than usual but the payload was lighter, so that posed no problem. Guidance was inertial and internalized. Once dropped from the Cow, the rocket would climb into orbit on its own.

Durrance lined up on the assigned course and drove the Cow like some gigantic eighteen-wheeler down an air-slab highway in the sky. The monitor bank on the cockpit console did the counting with no voice output, the numbers filling the screen, going from red to orange and then green. Far below, a gigantic cloud formation swarmed toward the coast, the Atlantic glittering through a tear in the bank. Durrance, with the L-1011 on autopilot, gloried in the view.
God bless OSC for letting him drive the Cow. God bless the Peg, and Godspeed.

The winged rocket dropped away cleanly. Durrance powered the Cow over, diving away. Five seconds later the stage 1 motor ignited and the
Pegasus-E
pulled out of her fall and dug into the air, the Hercules engine pushing her to an altitude of 38 miles, wings and fins mounted on the first stage providing pitch, yaw, and roll control during the initial powered flight and the coasting period after burnout. The second stage ignited four seconds later, driving the Peg up to 105 miles. Five minutes and forty-six seconds later the third stage turned itself on, pushing the rocket all the way to an altitude of 558 miles and into orbit at the same inclination as
Columbia.
From there tiny sensors searched the cold vacuum, sensed
Columbia
two miles off and slightly behind. It had been a perfect launch. The Peg used her cold gas reaction system to nudge herself toward
Columbia,
a lateral shift. In slightly less than thirty minutes she was in position. The Air Force called Houston and took Mission Control off-line. This operation would be handled entirely by the Air Force from Eglin and the DIA in Maryland.

Columbia

The galley aboard
Columbia
consisted of an oven, a rehydration station, and a hot water tank. Food trays were warmed in the oven, and dehydrated food was moistened via a needle injector in the rehydrator. The pantry was well stocked, including almost every kind of spice that the astronauts could tolerate—needed because the aroma of food did not drift into the sinuses or caress the palate in a microgravity environment. Sweets were also much appreciated in space. Jack, waking alone in the middeck and starving, had finished a spaghetti meal and was on his third brownie square when the message on the SAREX came through.

DUCK. SHOT ACROSS THE BOW ON THE WAY.

He stared at the screen.
What the hell?

“This is Colonel Bud Ragusa,” a voice crackled over his headset moments later. “United States Air Force Space Command. And this is. . . ?”

Jack, still disoriented after the EVA, remembered nothing except. . . He shook his head. He had this odd memory of High Eagle undressing him. He'd heard astronauts often had strange dreams when they were in space. This was one of the strangest.

“Jack Medaris, Colonel,” he replied cautiously. “What can I do for you?”

“Can it, Medaris, and listen up. We've let you have your little ride into orbit but it's time to come down.”

Jack finished the brownie and went for a wet wipe. “Colonel, I don't know where you're going with this, but be advised we have a legal contract that allows us to be aboard
Columbia.
”

“You don't have a contract to murder and kidnap astronauts, Medaris.”

“We didn't murder or kidnap anyone,” Jack replied curtly. “Listen, our lawyer—”

Ragusa interrupted him. “That dog won't hunt, boy.” His voice softened a little. “All of us down here have read your 201 file. You were once a good man for NASA. Then you kind of went overboard. Looks to me that's what you've done again. Jack, I want you to think about what you're doing and to help you think, me and the boys down here are going to give you a little demo. You may think you're safe up there, outside our reach, but it just ain't so. We can splash you, Jack, any old time we want to.”

Ah, a shot across the bow. Got it.
“Let's don't do anything foolish, Colonel. Wait until our lawyer gets our case out.”

“No can do,” Ragusa answered. “I'm assuming you're in the standard plus-X attitude, cargo bay down. Check your cockpit windscreen. Demo of our splash capability coming up in two minutes.”

Penny flew down through the hatch from the flight deck. “I need to tell you something,” she said, rotating so she was in the same foot-down position as Jack. Jack noted it was slickly done. She had completely adjusted to weightlessness. “No time right now, High Eagle,” he answered her brusquely. “The Air Force is up to something.”

“Nothing you can't handle all by yourself, I'm sure,” Penny replied, rolling her big browns.

“I guess I can,” he replied. He left her in the middeck and headed upstairs.

Virgil was strapped in the pilot's seat. “What do you think they're gonna do, boss?”

“Just scare tactics, Virg. They haven't had time to get anything organized. You're doing better, I see.”