Code to Zero (33 page)

The countdown reaches zero.

In the blockhouse, the launch conductor says, “Firing command!” A crewman pulls a metal ring and twists it. This is the action that fires the rocket.

Prevalves open to let the fuel start flowing. The liquid oxygen vent is closed, and the halo of white smoke around the missile suddenly vanishes.

The launch conductor says, “Fuel tanks pressurized.”

For the next eleven seconds, nothing happens.

The jeep tore along the beach at top speed, dodging in and out of family groups. Luke scanned the cars, ignoring the cries of protest as his tires showered people with sand. Billie was standing up beside him, holding the top of the windshield. He shouted over the wind noise, “See a white Corvette?”

She shook her head. “It should be easy to spot!”

“Yeah,” Luke said. “So where the hell are they?”

The last connection hose drops away from the missile. A second later, the priming fuel ignites, and the first-stage engine thunders into life. A huge orange firelick bursts from the base of the rocket as thrust builds.

Anthony said, “For Christ’s sake, Theo, hurry!”

“Shut up,” Elspeth told him.

They were bent over the open trunk of the Mercury, watching Theo fiddle with his radio transmitter. He was attaching wires to the pins of one of the plugs Elspeth had given him.

There was a roaring sound like distant thunder, and they all looked up.

With painful slowness,
Explorer I
lifts off the launch pad. In the blockhouse, someone yells, “Go, baby!”

Billie saw a white Corvette parked next to a darker sedan. “There!” she screamed.

“I see them,” Luke shouted back.

At the rear of the sedan, three people were clustered around the open trunk. Billie recognized Elspeth and Anthony. The other man was presumably Theo Packman. But they were not looking into the trunk. Their heads were raised and they were staring across the sand dunes toward Cape Canaveral.

Billie read the situation instantly. The transmitter was in the trunk. They were in the process of setting it to broadcast the detonation signal. But why were they looking up? She turned toward Cape Canaveral. There was nothing to see, but she heard a deep, rumbling roar like the sound of a blast furnace in a steel mill.

The rocket was taking off.

“We’re out of time!” she yelled.

“Hold tight!” Luke said.

She gripped the windshield as he swung the jeep around in a wide arc.

The rocket picks up speed suddenly. At one instant it seems to be hovering hesitantly over the launch pad. At the next it moves like a bullet out of a gun, shooting into the night sky on a tail of fire.

Over the roar of the rocket, Elspeth heard another sound, the scream of a car engine being raced. A second later, the beam of headlights fell on the group around the trunk of the Mercury. She looked up and saw a jeep
heading for them at top speed. She realized it was going to ram them. “Hurry!” she screamed.

Theo connected the last wire.

On his transmitter were two switches, one marked Arm and the other Destroy.

The jeep was on them.

Theo threw the Arm switch.

On the beach, a thousand faces tip backward, watching the rocket rise straight and true, and a huge cheer goes up.

Luke drove straight for the back of the Mercury.

The jeep had slowed as he turned, but he was still traveling at about twenty miles per hour. Billie jumped out, hit the ground running, then fell and rolled.

At the last second Elspeth threw herself out of the way. Then there was a deafening bang and the crash of breaking glass.

The Mercury’s rear end crumpled, it jumped forward a yard, and its trunk lid came down with a bang. Luke thought either Theo or Anthony had been crushed between the cars, but he could not be sure. He was thrown forward violently. The bottom of the steering wheel caught his lower chest, and he felt the sharp pain of cracked ribs. A moment later, his forehead hit the top edge of the wheel, and he sensed hot blood flowing down his face.

He pulled himself upright and looked at Billie. She seemed to have fared better than he. She was sitting on the ground rubbing her forearms, but she did not appear to be bleeding.

He looked across the hood of the jeep. Theo lay on the ground in spread-eagle position, not moving. Anthony was on his hands and knees, looking shaken but unhurt. Elspeth had escaped injury and was scrambling to her feet. She dashed to the Mercury and tried to open the trunk.

Luke leaped out of the jeep and ran at her. As the trunk lid lifted, he shoved her aside. She fell to the sand.

Anthony yelled, “Hold it!”

Luke looked at him. He was standing over Billie with a pistol held to the back of her head.

Luke looked up. The red firetail of
Explorer
was a bright shooting star in the night sky. As long as that was visible, the missile could still be destroyed. The first stage would burn out when the rocket was sixty miles high. At that point, the rocket would become invisible—for the lesser fire of the second stage was not bright enough to be seen from the earth—and this would be the sign that the self-destruct system would no longer work. The first stage, which contained the explosive detonator, would separate and fall away, eventually to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean. After separation, it could no longer damage the satellite.

And separation would take place two minutes and twenty-five seconds after ignition. Luke figured the rocket had been ignited roughly two minutes ago. There had to be about twenty-five seconds left.

It was plenty of time to throw a switch.

Elspeth got to her feet again.

Luke looked at Billie. She was on one knee, like a sprinter at the starting line, frozen in position with the long silencer of Anthony’s gun pressing into her curly black hair. Anthony’s hand was rock-steady.

Luke asked himself if he was ready to sacrifice Billie’s life for the rocket.

The answer was No.

But what would happen, he thought, if he moved? Would Anthony shoot Billie? He might.

Elspeth again bent over the trunk of the car.

Then Billie moved.

She jerked her head to one side, then threw herself backward, hitting Anthony’s legs with her shoulders.

Luke lunged at Elspeth and pushed her away from the car.

The silenced gun coughed as Anthony and Billie fell in a heap.

Luke stared in dread. Anthony had fired, but had he hit Billie? She rolled away from him, apparently unhurt, and Luke breathed again. Then Anthony lifted his gun arm, aiming at Luke.

Luke looked death in the face, and a peculiar calm possessed him. He had done all he could.

There was a long moment of hesitation. Then Anthony coughed, and blood came out of his mouth. Pulling the trigger as he fell, he had shot himself, Luke realized. Now his limp hand dropped the gun and he slumped back on the sand, his eyes staring up at the sky but seeing nothing.

Elspeth sprang to her feet and bent over the transmitter a third time.

Luke looked up. The firetail was a glow-worm in space. As he watched, it winked out.

Elspeth threw the switch and looked up into the sky, but she was too late. The first stage had burned out and separated. The Primacord had probably detonated, but there was no fuel left to burn, and anyway the satellite was no longer connected to the first stage.

Luke sighed. It was all over. He had saved the rocket.

Billie put her hand on Anthony’s chest, then checked his pulse. “Nothing,” she said. “He’s dead.”

At the same moment, Luke and Billie looked at Elspeth. “You lied again,” Luke said to her.

Elspeth stared at him with a hysterical light in her eyes. “We weren’t wrong!” she yelled. “We were not wrong!”

Behind her, families of spectators and tourists were beginning to pack their belongings. No one had been close enough to notice the fighting: all eyes had been turned to the sky.

Elspeth looked at Luke and Billie as if she had more to say; but after a long moment she turned away. She got into her car, slamming the door, and started the engine.

Instead of turning toward the road, she headed for the ocean. Luke and Billie watched in horror as she drove straight into the water.

The Corvette stopped, waves lapping at its fenders, and Elspeth got out. In the car’s headlights, Luke and Billie saw her begin to swim out to sea.

Luke moved to go after her, but Billie grabbed his arm and held him back.

“She’ll kill herself!” he said in agony.

“You can’t catch her now,” Billie said. “You’ll kill yourself !”

Luke still wanted to try. But then Elspeth passed out of the headlights’ beam, swimming strongly, and he realized he would never find her in the dark. He bowed his head in defeat.

Billie put her arms around him. After a moment, he hugged her back.

Suddenly the strain of the last three days fell on him like a tree. He staggered, about to fall, and Billie held him upright.

After a moment he felt better. Standing on the beach, with their arms around one another, they both looked up.

The sky was full of stars.

Explorer I
’s Geiger counter recorded cosmic radiation a thousand times higher than expected. This information enabled scientists to map the radiation belts above the earth which became known as the Van Allen belts, named after the Iowa State University scientist who designed the experiment.

The micrometeorite experiment determined that about 2,000 tons of cosmic dust rain down on the earth annually.

The shape of the Earth turned out to be about one percent flatter than previously thought

Most important of all, for the pioneers of space travel, the temperature data from the
Explorer
showed that it was possible to control the heat inside a missile sufficiently for human beings to survive in space.

Luke was on the NASA team that put
Apollo 11
on the moon.

By then he was living in a big, comfortable old house in Houston with Billie, who was head of Cognitive Psychology at Baylor. They had three children: Catherine, Louis, and Jane. (His stepson, Larry, also lived with them, but that July he was visiting his father, Bern.)

Luke happened to be off duty on the evening of July 20. Consequently, at a few minutes before nine o’clock, Central time, he was watching TV with his family, as was half the world. He sat on the big couch with Billie beside him and Jane, the youngest, on his lap. The other kids were on the carpet with the dog, a yellow Labrador called Sidney.

When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, a tear rolled down Luke’s cheek.

Billie took his hand and squeezed it.

Catherine, the nine-year-old, who had Billie’s coloring, looked at him with solemn brown eyes. Then she whispered to Billie, “Mommy, why is Daddy crying?”

“It’s a long story, honey,” Billie said. “I’ll tell it to you, one day.”

Explorer I
was expected to remain in space for two to three years. In fact it orbited the earth for twelve years. On March 31, 1970, it finally re-entered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean near Easter Island, and burned up at 5:47
A
.
M
., having circled the earth 58,376 times and traveled a total of 1.66 billion miles.

Many people generously gave time and effort to help me get the background details right for this story. Most of them were found for me by Dan Starer, of Research for Writers in New York City, who has worked with me on every book since
The Man from St. Petersburg
back in 1981. Special thanks to the following:

In Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ruth Helman, Isabelle Yardley, Fran Mesher, Peg Dyer, Sharon Holt and the students of Pforzheimer House, and Kay Stratton;

At the St. Regis hotel, formerly the Carlton, in Washington, D.C.: concierge Louis Alexander, bellhop Jose Muzo, general manager Peter Walterspiel, and Mr. Walterspiel’s assistant Pat Gibson;

At Georgetown University: archivist Jon Reynolds, retired physics professor Edward J. Finn, and Val Klump of the Astronomy Club;

In Florida: Henry Magill, Ray Clark, Henry Paul, and Ike Rigell, all of whom worked on the early space program; and Henri Landwirth, the former manager of the Starlite Motel;

In Huntsville, Alabama: Tom Carney, Cathey Carney, and Jackie Gray, of
Old Huntsville
magazine; Roger Schwerman of Redstone Arsenal; Michael Baker, Command Historian of the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command; David Alberg, Curator of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center; and Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger.

Several family members read drafts and offered criticism, including my wife, Barbara Follett, my stepdaughters, Jann Turner and Kim Turner, and my cousin John Evans. I’m much indebted to editors Phyllis Grann, Neil Nyren, and Suzanne Baboneau; and agents Amy Berkower, Simon Lipskar, and, most of all, Al Zuckerman.