Mayday (7 page)

The seven outward-opening lavatory doors blew open into the vacuum, hurling their occupants into the cabin and toward the
two gaping holes that awaited them.

In the lounge on the upper deck, drink glasses and liquor bottles were sucked toward the spiral staircase that led down to
the first-class cabin. Books, magazines, and newspapers were ripped from passengers’ hands and sent into the vortex of rushing
air. Every loose object in the lounge spun around the stairwell like a tornado.

The passengers who had chosen to stay in the lounge when the seat belt signs came on watched in horrified fascination as every
movable thing in the room was sucked toward the growing vortex of debris around the stairwell.

Eddie Hogan, the piano player, had been playing “Autumn Leaves” when the sudden burst of airflow pulled him backward off the
rigidly mounted bench. The bench had been equipped with a special seat belt, but Hogan had declined to use it. He was pulled,
head-first, down the staircase, across the main cabin, and then swiftly out through the gaping starboard hole.

A blind man, seated near the piano, screamed repeatedly for someone to tell him what was happening. His body strained against
his seat belt and he pulled against the leash of his Seeing Eye dog. The golden retriever seemed to be pulling away from him
with an unnatural strength. He yelled at the dog. “Shannon! Shannon! Stop that!” The dog whimpered as she dug her claws into
the soft pile. The leash broke and the dog was taken into the vortex and carried down into the first-class cabin, where its
limp body wedged under an empty seat.

As the dozen lounge passengers watched from their secured seats, the piano and bench danced in their mounts but continued
to hold against the maelstrom. Everyone in the upper deck became hysterical almost simultaneously.

In the first-class cabin below, objects from the lounge ripped through the accelerating air, cutting and smashing against
heads and arms held up in protective gestures. The cloud of debris raced through the curtain into the tourist cabin and joined
the other, incredibly numerous objects in their headlong rush out into the vacuum as though this void could be filled, satiated,
if only enough objects and people were sacrificed to it.

In the tourist cabin, a big man strapped to his seat in the aft section was bellowing at the top of his lungs. He was raging
against the wind, against the hurtling objects, and against the fates that had conspired to put him on this aircraft for his
first flight. He had seen his half-dressed wife pulled out of one of the seven outward-opening lavatories and watched her
as she seemed to run, tumble, and fly toward the hole, screaming his name as she went by and looking at him with puzzled eyes.
Suddenly, he unfastened his belt and jumped to his feet. He half flew, arms and legs outstretched over seated passengers,
skimming their heads as he sailed along. At the starboard-side hole his big body smashed into the jagged aluminum skin, opening
his throat and severing his left arm as he was vomited out of the sick and dying aircraft.

In those lavatories that had opened, water gushed out of the taps and commodes into the low-pressure environment. From the
bowels of the giant airliner, waste tanks flowed backward and their contents came up through the sink drains and toilets.

In the galleys, water valves ruptured and water overflowed the sinks. Pantries and refrigerators swung open and their contents
flew out into the passageways and into the cabins.

In the pressurized baggage compartments below the cabin floor, aerosols and pressurized containers ruptured and disgorged
their contents throughout the luggage. The cats and dogs that rode in kennels beneath their masters were banging wildly against
their cages in fear.

The outward-opening cockpit door held for a moment. It strained against its lock and aluminum hinges, but the difference in
pressure between the cockpit and the cabin was too great and the door finally burst outward into the first-class upper lounge.

Captain Stuart heard the door go. Suddenly, every loose object on the flight deck—maps, pencils, coffee cups, hats, and jackets—lifted
into the air and converged on the open door, then disappeared into the lounge and down the stairway. Stuart felt himself pulled
back into his seat. His arms flew up over his head and his wristwatch ripped loose. He pulled his arms down into his lap and
waited until the initial rush of air subsided. He sat still trying to steady the hard beating in his chest. He calmed his
rushing thoughts and tried to reconstruct what had happened in the last few seconds. He remembered that he had felt the jolt
of a mild impact on the Straton only seconds before, but he had no idea what had caused it. What he did know was that the
autopilot was still functioning and the craft was still under control. He glanced quickly at McVary, then glanced quickly
back at Fessler. “What happened?” he yelled.

McVary kept staring silently at his instruments.

Fessler was looking back at the open door and didn’t respond.

“Descend!” Stuart commanded, and yanked shut the power levers controlling all four engines, then disengaged the autopilot
and pushed forward on the control wheel. The Straton transport abruptly nosed downward. But at their incredibly high cruise
speed, the forward momentum slowed their initial descent. Stuart watched the ground altimeter as they moved slowly downward.
Fifty-eight thousand feet. Fifty seconds had gone by since the impact.

Stuart quickly scanned his instruments. Cockpit indications were still good, except that he had already lost a major portion
of his pressurized cabin air. His first thought was that a fuselage door had somehow opened. He looked at the door warning
lights. They showed all the doors closed. Had a faulty window blown out? No. The decompression was much too rapid for that,
and what had caused the jolt? A bomb.
It had to be a bomb,
he thought.
What is happening back there?

Stuart looked at the cabin altimeter—the differential pressure gauge—which told him at what relative altitude the cabin pressure
was. The hands of the cabin altimeter were spinning upward like those of a broken clock. The cabin pressure, which had always
been kept at 10,000 feet, was now at 19,000 feet.
Losing pressure. Hold the pressure
. They were losing the artificial atmosphere that they had brought with them—this atmosphere from earth that made it possible
to live at 62,000 feet—throwing it out into subspace, through some large hole.

Stuart glanced at the two altimeters together. The ground altimeter showed that the Straton had only gotten down to 55,000
feet. The cabin altimeter showed that they now had an artificial altitude pressure of 30,000 feet, then 35,000 feet. Stuart
estimated that the artificial atmosphere would bleed off at about the time the Straton hit 50,000 feet. Then the altimeters
would read the same. Subspace would be in the cabin.

Stuart started to feel light-headed. Instinctively, he pushed the autopilot button back on. He slammed his hand into the automatic
descent selector, pushing it to its maximum rate of descent, letting the computer bring it down as fast as it was safely possible.
He sat back in his seat. His head was pounding with pain. Sinus cavities. The air pockets inside his skull could not adjust
to the rapid rate of cabin altitude change. His nose began to bleed. A river of blood poured down his white shirt. His lungs
had already been emptied of most of their air. He felt hollowed out. His hands and feet were cold, and he didn’t know if it
was from loss of blood or loss of cabin heat.

The Straton’s four engines were sucking up and compressing the thin outside air and pumping all the pressurized air they could
into the ruptured cabin. As they descended lower, the air was slightly thicker and the pressurized airflow became stronger.
But Alan Stuart suspected, knew really, that it was a losing battle. There was one hell of a big hole back there, and the
arithmetic of the problem . . .
If a basin has ten gallons of water and is losing one gallon a second through the drain, and a tap is replacing a half gallon
every five seconds, how long before
. . . Too long. His head was bursting, and he couldn’t think of anything but the pain now.

Captain Stuart turned his head slowly toward McVary. McVary had strapped on the copilot’s oxygen mask and was transmitting
an emergency radio message on the international distress frequency. Stuart shook his head. “Useless,” he said softly, but
he also reached for his oxygen mask and pulled it on, tightening the straps hard against his face. He looked back at Fessler.
Fessler was lying slumped across his desk. Blood was pouring from his mouth, ears, and nose.

McVary continued to transmit the distress signal, though his speech and thoughts were fragmented. He sucked hard on the oxygen
mask as he spoke, and blood collected in his mouth and he had to swallow it.

McVary knew that the oxygen mask alone was not enough. Without a sustaining pressure to force the oxygen into and through
his lungs, it was almost totally useless. The flight deck’s emergency oxygen canister, behind Fessler’s panel, could just
as well be back in San Francisco for all the good it was doing them. Only a military pressure suit—a space suit—of the type
he had once worn could exert the necessary pressure on his body so that he could breathe. But he knew that even if he had
one, there would not have been enough time to hook it up.

Dan McVary, who as a young man had flown exotic military jets through wild maneuvers, was suddenly more frightened than he
had ever been. How had this happened? Commercial transports were not supposed to completely decompress the way military craft
did when they were hit in combat. The possibility of sudden decompression was so slight that it had been ignored by the aeronautical
engineers who built the Straton. There were no air-lock doors or pressure bulkheads between the sections as there were watertight
compartments on a ship or airtight compartments on modern dirigibles. These safety features were too heavy for an airliner.
Too costly. A complete decompression was not supposed to happen. But it had. How? He wondered if airtight compartments would
have helped anyway. The image of the
Titanic
with its so-called watertight compartments flashed through his mind. Engineering marvels . . . every contingency planned
for . . . only a set of the most . . . the most unusual circumstances . . . his head was splitting and he felt a coldness
deep down in his body that chilled him in a way he had never felt before. Dan McVary knew he was dying.

Captain Stuart’s vision began to blur. He pushed his face forward to read the digital clock. Over a minute had passed since
he felt the jolt. The Straton was still on autopilot and was beginning to descend very rapidly. He could see that the vertical
descent rate had increased to 12,000 feet per minute. They passed through 53,000 feet. The cabin pressure was up to 45,000
feet. They were definitely not going to get down to a level where the oxygen masks could be used in time to save anyone who
was still able to use them. They would not get into the naturally breathable atmosphere for several minutes after that. He
shook his head. They were all dead.

For an instant, Stuart considered the passengers. They were his responsibility. But there was nothing he could do, or even
say. There were no slow sinkings on an aircraft, no dramatic speeches from the captain, no leisurely good-byes or farewell
toasts. There were only a few minutes or seconds of horror, then death.

In the tourist cabin, the noise from the wind and escaping air had lessened considerably as the inside and outside pressure
approached equilibrium. People could hear each other now, but there was very little talking. Most people sucked hard on their
released overhead oxygen masks, inhaling and exhaling deeply, puzzled by the absence of that familiar feeling of having taken
a good deep breath.

A coldness permeated the cabin and deepened the effects of shock and increased the effects of oxygen deprivation. Layers of
condensed moisture formed along the ceiling, caused by the natural onboard water vapor that had suddenly been squeezed out
by the reduced cabin pressure. The passengers stared up at these forming clouds, unsure of what they were or what they meant.

Someone yelled, “Fire!” and some people screamed, but most remained silent, accepting this new aberration, too numbed and
disoriented to react. The cloud moved through the cabin like a sea fog rolling into a coastal city, casting an amorphous gray
haze over the silent people. The cabin lights shone with an unearthly luminescence through the cloud. Eerie white ice particles
began forming on the walls and windows. Near the starboard hole there was a brief snow flurry.

The moisture dissipated and the cabin atmosphere became dry except for the breath fog still exhaled by the living and the
blood pouring from the open wounds of the dying. Blood and breath crystallized and formed frosts of red and white wherever
they touched a freezing surface.

The outside sounds of the four Straton engines and the airflow past the gaping holes grew louder as the sound of the outward-rushing
air lessened. These new noises filled the tourist cabin and drowned out the weak moans of the injured.

An uncounted number of people were dead or dying, and most of the rest were in shock. But it appeared that the worst of the
ordeal was over. The aircraft was still flying and showed no visible signs of crashing. A strange calm, a pleasant languor
simulating the effects of alcohol or tranquilizers, took hold of the passengers of Flight 52 as the first effects of oxygen
deprivation began to register. There was still the pain behind the eyes, in the ears, but it did not seem so acute now.

Captain Stuart pressed his face against his console. Everything appeared dark in the cockpit, but he could see that the instrument
lights were working. They shone like dying suns in a faraway galaxy, yet they seemed to emit no light beyond their surface.
He read the two altimeters. Aircraft altitude was 51,000 feet, and descending. Cabin altitude was also 51,000 feet and descending
now with the aircraft. The cabin differential pressure was zero. Inside was outside. Outside was inside.