Saucer: The Conquest (7 page)

She had flown the entire mission in the simulator numerous times; the computers and autopilot were working perfectly. Charley, Lalouette and the controllers monitoring telemetry data had only identified seven gripes on the spaceplane, none of them major. If the spaceplane were experiencing serious mechanical problems, she would not be as confident as she was, but she was in no mood to share that thought with Artois.

“I can hack the program,” she told him now. “I can fly this bucket anywhere we have the fuel to go. You know the state of the medical facilities at the lunar base, not I. If you feel Lalouette will get adequate care there, then we can go on.”

Wearing a trace of a smile, Artois asked, “Did you know that the simulator instructors referred to you as Captain America?”

Her look of surprise widened his smile. Apparently satisfied, he keyed his headset microphone to tell Mission Control and the lunar base physician of his decision. “We continue,” he said. “Our destination remains the moon.” With that pronouncement, he gave Charley a nod and flashed another smile, then left the headset on the top of the instrument panel and went aft to check again on Lalouette.

Charley Pine took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Whew! Double whew! She was going to have to be on top of her game—she had certainly been there before—and she was going to walk on the lunar surface. She would be the first American to do so since the Apollo astronauts left their footprints in the lunar dirt thirty-two years before. No doubt the footprints were still there. “Hot diggity dog,” she muttered, and smiled broadly.

All alone in the cockpit, she took off and stowed her copilot’s headset. Although it would function perfectly if plugged into the pilot’s radio jacks, she wanted Lalouette’s. She transferred to the pilot’s seat and retrieved the headset from its glare shield bracket. She settled it on her head.

It fit perfectly.

She punched up a navigation computer display. The ship was within a minute of crossing the invisible boundary that separated the pull of earth’s gravity from the pull of the moon’s. Alone, covered with goose bumps, she watched the seconds tick down. Then they were across. As it crossed this invisible boundary, the ship had coasted to its slowest speed of the journey; now under the pull of lunar gravity, it would accelerate. Just for grins, she began monitoring the speed on the navigation readout. Within a minute it began to respond, picking up a few dozen feet per second with every passing minute. Only fourteen hours to go to lunar orbit insertion.

The voice of the mission controller crackled in her ears. “If you are going to go it alone, we need to begin now on the systems function tests and checklist items.” His name was Bodard. Charley had spent many hours with him during training. He had a paunch and always smelled of garlic and tobacco.

Charley’s mood instantly shifted to all business. “Let us begin,” she said.

C
HAPTER
4

“Are you ready?” Egg called. He was standing in front of the hangar aiming a video camera mounted on a tripod.

“I guess,” Rip Cantrell answered, loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the idling truck engine. He was seated in Egg’s old Dodge in the center of the grass runway. He had removed the batteries from the truck bed and installed two large generators in the engine compartment of the pickup, with sheaves and belts to power them from the fan-belt takeoff.

“Any time,” Egg shouted, and bent to his viewfinder.

Rip wiped the perspiration from his forehead, so it wouldn’t get into his eyes, and tightened the belts in his three-point harness. His stomach was tied into a knot. He goosed the engine a couple of times with the accelerator, watching the amp meter rise and fall. Oil pressure okay, radiator temp okay. He did it one more time, allowing the engine RPM to rise. The truck rose a few inches, then settled back onto the tires as he let the RPM drop.

He had a small control box he had salvaged from a model airplane radio-control unit mounted on a piece of metal, a joy stick, protruding from the dash to the right of the steering wheel. He moved the stick back and forth, left and right.

“Here goes nothing,” he muttered, and jammed the accelerator to the floor.

The truck rose into the air as the electrical power from the generators energized the antigravity rings under the pickup. The truck began to tilt backward. Rip moved the small control stick forward, lowering the truck’s nose and stopping rearward movement.

The truck rose until it was about a dozen feet in the air. The natural gravitational field of the earth and the man-made one he had induced in the truck were repelling each other. As the engine under the hood roared at full power, Rip kept the pickup level and stationary by using the stick.

Ha! Satisfied he had control, he moved the stick ever so slightly to the right. The truck tilted and began drifting in that direction.

Now he leveled the truck, then tilted the nose down a trifle for forward movement. The truck obediently began moving. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. He jockeyed the stick to control the rate.

After he had gone a hundred feet, when he was doing perhaps fifteen miles per hour, he laid the truck into a left turn. He had enough room. The nose of the truck obediently swung around, turning back toward the hangar.

He had just gotten it stabilized when a cloud of steam rose from under the hood. Water and steam sprayed on the windshield. The radiator temp gauge needle pegged right. Rip let up on the accelerator.

Not quickly enough. He heard a loud bang, then the engine noise stopped dead.

Still slightly nose down, the bottom fell out and the truck dropped toward the earth.

The shock of impact snapped his head forward and stunned him.

In the silence that followed the crash, he became aware of his uncle leaning in through the window. He had trouble focusing his eyes. Part of the reason was the dirt in the air— he seemed to be sitting in the middle of a dust cloud.

“You okay, Ripper?” his uncle shouted, only inches from his head.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Let’s get you out of this thing. I smell gasoline. You may have fractured the fuel tank.”

Soon Rip was sitting in the grass fifty feet from the wreck with his uncle seated beside him. As his head cleared, Rip stared at the smashed Dodge. Gray smoke and white steam wisped from the engine compartment. There was no fire.

“Blew the engine, I guess,” he said to his uncle. “Seemed like the radiator blew. Before I could react the crankshaft froze.”

“Locked up tighter than the hubs of hell,” Egg said, nodding vigorously. “You were at least ten feet in the air.”

“Sorry about your truck.”

“I’ll take it out of your allowance,” Egg said, then laughed. When he laughed his belly quivered.

Rip joined in. He lay back in the grass and laughed and laughed.

“It’s good to be alive, isn’t it?” Egg said when they finally calmed down.

“Yeah, Unc. It really is.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“Gonna put that system on the Extra. The airplane engine is designed to turn at high RPM all day. Won’t blow it like I did the truck engine.”

“Need any help?”

“Well, sure. But let me lie here another five minutes. And I want to see that video.”

• • •

The moon was a giant orb hanging in the black sky when Charley turned the spaceplane and lined it up for the lunar orbit injection burn. When she had it perfectly aligned according to the computer display, she ran through the checklist again, studying the items, fingering switches, assuring herself for the tenth time that they were in the right position. It would have been comforting to have a second pair of knowledgeable eyes examine each switch, yet the eyes she was burdened with were Artois’. He sat beside her in the copilot’s seat, watching everything, knowing nothing.

Both wore space suits complete with helmets, just in case Charley blew the landing and crashed on the moon, cracking the pressure hull. A sudden depressurization wouldn’t kill them. Assuming they survived the crash.

Jeanne d’Arc was closing rapidly on the moon. Even though this was the dark side, it was a massive presence, only sixty-five miles from the spaceplane. For the first time since they had left earth orbit, the presence of the world off the left wing gave her the sensation of motion.

The pilot checked the navigation display again, ensuring that the low point of the trajectory would be at precisely sixty miles, exactly at the point of the burn, which would occur on the back side of the moon, the side opposite the earth. All was as it should be.

She cracked her knuckles in anticipation, a gesture that startled Artois.

Poor devil, she thought. He had signed up an American female pilot to fob off the demands of French politicians, and now Charley was all he had. She couldn’t see his face inside his helmet, but she sensed his concern. She flashed him a grin that he couldn’t see.

“Nothing to sweat,” she said. “The program is working perfectly. There is nothing for us to do but sit and watch.”

“So anyone could fly these planes?” he said acidly.

“As long as all the computers work perfectly,” she replied carelessly. “If they don’t, then you hand-fly it.” Of course, Artois knew this already. He had been intimately involved in the design and engineering of the spaceplanes that made the lunar base possible. “That’s why you spent the money for the very best sticks you could find, isn’t it?”

Artois didn’t answer that rhetorical question.

“Fifteen seconds to loss of telemetry,” Bodard said from Mission Control. At ten seconds to go he began counting, and his voice faded at two. Jeanne d’Arc was no longer in communication with anyone on planet Earth. She would be out of communication for sixteen minutes, until she swung out from behind the moon.

Charley keyed the intercom and announced, “Everyone in their seats, strap in and report, si’l vous-plait. The lunar orbit injection burn will occur in seven minutes.”

All six of the people not in the cockpit reported within the next five minutes. Claudine Courbet reported for Lalouette, who had been strapped in for hours and sedated. All were ready. They would remain in their seats until Jeanne d’Arc was on the surface of the moon.

The waiting was the hardest part, Charley Pine thought. She sat watching the display, her thoughts totally absorbed in the piloting problem.

Pierre Artois rubbernecked out the window at the moon. Since the spaceplane was hurling backward through space at the approaching burn point, the lunar surface slid by from rear to front. It was disconcerting, to say the least, to people used to viewing the earth from the window of an airplane.

The sun line appeared suddenly on the lunar surface, and reflected light filled the cockpit. Charley glanced at the lunar surface, adjusted the brightness of the displays and said nothing.

The seconds ticked down. The spaceplane dropped closer and closer to the lunar surface. Right on cue the rocket engines ignited, pressing Charley and Artois back into their seats. The Gs felt good after three days of weightlessness.

But the middle engine was not firing. Only the four smaller, outboard engines had ignited. Charley Pine instantly punched up a display that gave her a percentage of planned power. Only seventy percent. This meant that she would have to burn the engines thirty percent longer to get the required deceleration. She disconnected the autopilot, taking manual control of the ship and the burn. One of the engines was producingjust slightly less power than the other three, which was to be expected. No four engines would produce exactly the same amount of power. Without conscious thought she adjusted the controls to hold the ship in the proper attitude.

The seconds ticked down, and she stopped the burn as the clock read 0:00. She didn’t even notice the absence of G, so intent was she on checking the orbit. It would be a few moments before she knew precisely how well the burn had gone, how close to the desired lunar orbit they actually were.

The sensors were still locked on their guide stars. The distance to the moon from the radar seemed correct. She had only to wait for the computers to calculate the trajectory, which took time. The numbers were sorting themselves out, the display was moving, stabilizing… yes. They appeared to be within half a percent of the desired orbit, which was presented as a maximum and minimum distance from the planet. Now the graphic display stabilized.

She checked to ensure the orbit would take them to the desired burn point to begin the descent to the lunar base.

“We’re going to need another small burn,” she muttered, pointing at the display. “There. At that point.” She looked at her watch. “In eighteen minutes.”

“How long?” Artois asked, which was his first comment since before the orbit insertion burn.

“Two seconds.”

“That is very good. Congratulations.”

Charley didn’t have time. She keyed the intercom. “Florentin,” she said, calling the flight engineer by name, “the main engine refused to start. Please check it out.”

Artois tried to remain as calm as she was. “What if it won’t start for the descent burn?”

“We’ll just burn for a longer period.”

“And the ascent from the moon’s surface?”

Charley was stunned that he asked that question. “The moon only has a sixth of earth’s gravity,” she answered. “We need all our power to get off the earth’s surface, not the moon’s.”

He should have known that, she thought dispassionately.

• • •

Rip Cantrell was asleep in the old control tower near Egg’s hangar when he heard his uncle’s heavy tread upon the stairs. “You awake up there, Rip?”

“Yeah, Unc.” Rip rolled out and reached for his jeans.

The little room with windows on all sides was a nice private bedroom. It contained a narrow bed, one chair, a bookcase and a small desk. The restroom that Egg had installed years ago was on the ground level. When Egg topped the stairs he lowered himself heavily into the only chair and sighed. Rip was seated on the bed. The moon was five days old and still above the western horizon. Moonlight filled the small room when gaps occurred in the low clouds racing overhead.