Back to the Moon (7 page)

FSS, LC 39-B

The Fixed Service Structure had the appearance of an unfinished office building, a steel framework holding open catwalks and steel steps, interior elevators, and small corrugated tin enclosures for officials to get out of the wind. A vast complex of tubing and pipes, designed to fuel and provide power to the shuttles, snaked through the structure, giving it the further appearance of a gargantuan boiler room turned inside out.

On the fifth level of the complex, Jack, dressed in astronaut blues, walked to the center of the tower and went behind the gray canvas curtain marked
IG TEAM. DO NOT ENTER.
As he came in, he kicked a small duffel bag. “Sorry, Virg.”

Virgil was sitting behind the curtain on the steel floor, leaning against a vertical support, waiting. He got up, picked up the duffel, and set it beside his console. “Sorry. Just some odds and ends I'm carrying with me.”

“Let's go, Virg,” Jack said urgently. “We're falling behind.”

Virgil nodded, flicked a switch on the console, tapped on a laptop keyboard, and then turned an analog dial as far as it would go. “They don't hear nothing now but a squeal like a hog in heat. You're good to go, boss.”

Jack found Cassidy by the elevators. “Come on, Hoppy,” Jack said, pointing toward the white room down the catwalk.

“Shorty” Guardino, leader of the ingress team, was standing in the room that led to the shuttle hatch with his headset peeled back, his eyes squeezed shut in pain. His two white room assistants were cursing and also fumbling with their headsets. Jack knew the screech in their ears produced by Virgil's machine was intense. Guardino was reaching for the telephone just as Jack and Cassidy caught his attention. He dropped his hand away. “Hullo, Hoppy!” He grinned, instantly recognizing the famous ex-astronaut. Jack noted the other members of the ingress team straighten at the sight of the famous pilot.

Cassidy squared his shoulders. “Hey, Shorty, you old hoss,” he grinned, smacking the man on the shoulder. “Here with some bad news, son. This launch is a scrub. Some kind of a communications problem.”

“Yeah? It's screwed up, all right,” Guardino said crossly. “Man, a howl in this headset just about busted my ears. But what are you doing here? Thought you retired.”

Cassidy pointed at the badge on his pocket. “Consultant for Bilstein,” he said easily. “Even old broken-down ex-astronauts got to make a living. Bilstein told me to get out here and run an abort training session. Make the best of a bad situation. We're going to the slides. Come on.”

Guardino nodded toward Jack. “Who's this?”

“My assistant. Come on, Shorty. Let's do this and get it over with.”

Guardino and his men looked at one another and then reluctantly followed Cassidy down the open catwalk, across the primary tower floor, past the elevators, and to the baskets. Jack followed. The five baskets, each designed to hold two people, swayed in the slight breeze. They were attached to slide wires twelve hundred feet long that stretched from the tower to the ground. Cassidy swung open the gate to one of the baskets. “Come on, Shorty. Let's play the game. Bilstein wants to make sure you guys know how to get in and go.”

Jack stood back, still anxious. This part of the script was critical. The ingress crew had always been a question mark, how they'd react. Every move had been choreographed, every word in the script practiced again and again. There was not a second to spare—one extra bit of conversation was all that was needed to cause the entire operation to get behind, for everything to fail. But Cassidy was doing his job well. The men trusted the astronaut.

Guardino and his team climbed aboard the baskets. They creaked and swung against their stays. Gurardino eyed Cassidy. “How come you ain't getting aboard?”

“Do you think I'm nuts?” Cassidy laughed. “I'm just here to make sure
you
do it, Shorty.”

“You sonuvabitch,” Guardino griped, but he did it with a grin.

Cassidy tapped his headset and turned to Jack. “Damn loops are still down. Keep these guys in the basket until I get back. I'm going to give the long line a try.”

Guardino gripped the sides of the basket as a light breeze sent it wobbling. “I'd almost rather be blown up than have to ride one of these damned thangs!” He looked at Jack and scowled.

Jack took the clipboard he carried and nonchalantly made a note. He avoided looking at his watch. The precious seconds were ticking away.

Ground Level, FSS, LC 39-B

Penny stepped inside the second elevator, waved to the departing guards, and pushed the button for the crew level. She knew the way. Although she had missed some of the training for the flight, she had attended the shuttle tower familiarization. The doors opened and she stepped out, turned right, and clumped down the access-arm catwalk. To her right through a chain-link fence, she could see the Launch Control Center, hundreds of cars in its parking lot sparkling in the hot July sun. To the left was nothing but a beach and the Atlantic Ocean. She stopped for a moment and watched a pelican fly over the catwalk, and then stepped through the open door leading inside the so-called “white room,” the cramped enclosure where she would be inspected one last time before climbing through the small hatch into the shuttle. A technician in white coveralls, a telephone handset to his ear, turned as she entered. “Well, here I am,” she said.

The man, a big guy who looked like he could be one of those wrestlers on late-night TV, stared at her. “Yes ma'am.” He gulped. “I can see that.” He slowly hung up the phone.

Penny waited. “Can I go inside?” she finally asked, pointing at the circular hatch.

That seemed to knock the technician out of his trance and he helped her strap on her parachute and then guided her to kneel on the wooden step in front of the hatch. She pushed her head inside and crawled through and then stood up on the aluminum plate of the aft middeck bulkhead. She had a moment of disorientation. It was like standing inside a small van turned up on its tail. Two seats, their backs horizontal with the ground, were bolted above her. Her seat was the closest to the curved airlock, which meant it was the farthest from the hatch. There was little room to maneuver, and she felt especially clumsy encased in the LES suit. She ducked under the nearest seat and waited for the technician to help her. He wormed through the hatch, pushing a stool in front of him, and placed it beside her seat. He was built like a little Mack truck. From the look of his nose he'd managed to have a few head-on collisions too. She leaned against him and climbed up on the stool and fell back into the seat. Then she raised her arms while he strapped her in, finishing with a final click of the belts that met in a cross on her chest. “You got a name, sailor?” she asked, keeping it light.

“V-virgil,” he said, tripping over his tongue.

Penny was used to getting this reaction from men. She had been described in
People
magazine as “blessed with almost perfect olive-hued skin, sculpted cheekbones, and dark eyes that are like pools of liquid amber.” She knew she made a striking impression on people, especially men.

She looked up at the empty flight deck. “Where's the rest of the crew?” When the big lug didn't answer, Penny scootched around in the pool of hot sweat that immersed her butt. The rubber smell of the LES suit was nauseating too. “Well, hell,” she said irritably. “Am I supposed to fly this bucket myself?”

He checked her restraints again. “I'll go find out what's holding them up. Sit tight, okay?”

Penny blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Okay, Virgil. It's not like I have a choice, is it?” When he plugged her headset into her seat, she heard a loud whistle. “Ouch.” She grimaced. “That hurts!”

“Let me see your cap.” She allowed him to take the cap and fiddle with it. He handed it back. “It checks out, ma'am,” he said.

Penny put the cap back on while the technician climbed out of the hatch. The noise was gone but now her headset seemed unnaturally quiet. She pressed the transmission switch. “This is High Eagle. Anybody hear me?” She heard nothing, not even static. “Great,” she grumped. “Doesn't anything work out on this pad?”

Penny saw out of the corner of her eye a blue-suited man crawl through the hatch. He stood up and looked at Penny. He seemed surprised to see her. “Dr. High Eagle,” he said, finally. “I'm Hoppy Cassidy. I just came by to wish you luck.” He laid a big grin on her. He had about a million teeth, it seemed.

Penny recognized Cassidy from the photographs along the wall at the astronaut office in Houston. He was still a good-looking guy. She would have flirted with him had she not been wrapped inside a foul-smelling rubber suit. “Where's the rest of the crew?” she asked.

Cassidy shrugged. “A glitch. I'm on a consulting team, here to keep things safe. Don't worry. I'll make sure we're ready topside.” He turned to the technician. “You need to take care of the rest of the equipment, Virg,” he said, and then climbed the ladder to the flight deck, cutting off further conversation.

“Well,
shit
,” Penny grumbled under her breath. “What a lash-up.”

After a few minutes the burly technician crawled back through the hatch, pushing several duffel bags of equipment and what appeared to be the rest of the crew parachute packs. He was below her so she couldn't see what he was doing, but it sounded like he was stowing everything. That didn't seem right. Weren't the other crew members supposed to wear their parachutes too? Penny squirmed under the tight straps, trying to see what he was doing. “I think my headset's dead,” she complained. “Did you find out what happened to the rest of the crew? And why are you stowing their parachutes?”

“Just putting them up for protection until they get here,” he said, coming up beside her. He was fumbling in a duffel bag for something she couldn't see. “You won't believe this, but their elevator got stuck. We're working on it now. Your headset? I wouldn't worry about it. Not much going on over the loops right now. But I'll look at it in a minute. We're having a few glitches.”

The telephone in the white room rang and Virgil abruptly left her to crawl through the hatch and answer it.

A few glitches?
Penny thought that wasn't the half of it. The air-conditioning unit on her suit was definitely broken. And she had already used her diaper for number one. If she was going into space today, she was going hot, wet, and stinky.

Flight Deck, Orbiter (OV-102) Columbia

Cassidy settled into the commander's seat and checked a laptop computer and a playback unit plugged into the comm system by Virgil. The playback unit had the voice of each crew member recorded during the countdown training the week before. The computer “listened” for the standard queries from the Launch Control Center and had each crew voice respond appropriately via the playback unit. The system had worked perfectly. Launch Control believed all the crew members were comfortably seated, answering calls, and ready to go. With the automatic sequence initiated he felt
Columbia
begin to wake up. She first needed her own internal power. Three hydrazine-fueled auxiliary power units (APUs) gave her the hydraulics to actuate propellant valves and move the main engines on their gimbals. Three fuel cells provided her electricity. Inside the cockpit the indicator lights blazed. Cassidy patted the panel in front of him, whispering a greeting: “G'mornin', sweetheart. Daddy's home.”

Interior, Crew Elevator #1, LC 39-B

Grant assessed the situation. “This is bullshit,” she summed up. She tried the telephone. Dead.

“Maybe they don't know we're stuck yet,” Brown offered.

“They expected us topside ten minutes ago,” Grant replied. “Somebody's pulling something.” Her eyes fell on Barnes. “Janet, you're small enough to get through the access hatch. Do you think you can climb up the shaft?”

“Sure, Ollie.” Barnes struggled to get out of her LES suit, peeling it back from her shoulders.

Brown and Betsy Newell lifted Barnes to the elevator roof. She pushed open the access hatch. The next level was twenty feet straight up, reachable by a ladder between the two shafts. “I can see the doors,” she said. “Here I go.”

“Good woman,” Grant called after her.

Columbia

Penny recognized the sounds from her one session in the shuttle simulator. The shuttle stack was readying itself for launch. But that didn't make any sense. Where was Ollie Grant and her crew? She looked up at the flight deck, saw Hoppy Cassidy coming down the ladder.

“What are you doing?” she yelled at him. “Where's the crew?”

“Who was that on the phone, Virgil?” Cassidy asked, ignoring her.

“LCC. Wanted to know why there wasn't any video. I told them the camera's fried. They bought it.”

Cassidy looked at Penny. “Dr. High Eagle, there's been a change in plans. You've got a new crew. Sit back, relax, and we'll haul you on into orbit safe and sound.” When she started to protest, he held up his hand. “Not now. Later.” He walked past her.

“If you think I'm just going to sit here...” Penny bristled, twisting until she saw Cassidy and “Virgil” by the hatch.

“Sorry, Hoppy,” Virgil said, loud enough that Penny could hear him. “I didn't know what else to do except strap her in. She must have come up in a different elevator.”

“The rest of the crew?”

“In the other elevator, I think.”

“How about Jack?”

“He ain't here yet,” Virgil said, peering worriedly out the hatch.

“Where is he?” Cassidy demanded.

“I don't know.
He just ain't here!
”

Penny had heard enough. She started struggling with the unfamiliar straps around her chest, but the thick gloves of the LES suit defeated her. “Help me out!” she demanded.