by Dean Ing
“Not much vision unless I do. Rolling to starboard anyhow. Will try to stabilize at six-oh degrees.”
Wes tried to visualize Rogan in the tiny dart, rising ever more slowly to an orbit nearly a hundred and thirty miles up, trying to hold it at a sixty-degree bank. But the roll attitude would make no difference, once he was in airless space. Wes looked at Allington and snarled, “He won’t make it?” Allington’s headshake preceded his answer by scant seconds, but in those seconds Wes Peel cut through his own confusion and anger with a phrase that was, like Kaplan’s, a ' heartfelt prayer: “God in Heaven, help him!” His fury seemed a petty response as te began to accept the idea that somehow, without major resources of any government or corporation, these few men had fired an aircraft into low earth orbit. He could strangle them all later, but right now, God, help Glenn Rogan.
“Not as bad as it might be, Wesley,” Allington said softly, both of them listening to the comm set as Rogan switched to a cellular radio relay near El Paso. It appeared that Boff Allington had made the best possible use of commercial channels, so that Rogan would remain in radio contact for the longest possible time. This was no NASA job with tracking stations around the world, but they had communication during those first crucial minutes after lift-off.
Allington motioned Wes to an inflated plastic globe that hung, swaying, from a tawdry piece of cord. O’Grady followed, saying nothing, ready for anything. “See this yellow tape? Rogan’s orbital path. The maglev was his first stage, up to transsonic where he could cut in the scramjets. The jets were the second stage; took him up twenty miles and about six hundred miles downrange. That’s about as high as he’d ever get because the scramjets can’t gulp enough air above that, even though they’re doing over Maeh twenty-five. But remember those laserboost units we tried on Delta One?” “You were testing ’em for this,” Wes accused.
“Guilty as sin,” Allington agreed cheerfully. “With liquid hydrogen feed switched to a thrust chamber, and Arizona State’s laser feed for sixteen seconds, Rogan doesn’t need anything more. That sixteen seconds of laserboost injected Rogan and Highjump into orbit. ”
“Not the one you wanted.”
“No, there’s still a few molecules of air where he is, and it’d bring him down within a few orbits whether he wanted or no.” Allington turned the big globe in his hands, following the yellow line of tape with a fingertip. “He passes near El Paso, then Corpus Christi, and then across a swath of South America. Then across the South Atlantic, off Cape Town and into the Indian Ocean. Then he swings past the northern tip of Australia, over the Pacific.” The fingertip stopped. “He’s got two options to land: La Paz, in Baja California, or Ma-zatlan, on the Mexican mainland. They’re both airports of entry for Mexico, and we’ve already filed his flight plan. He won’t even break any Mexican laws, Wesley.”
“But a pisspot full of ’em here.”
“Not as many as you think; mostly fraud, and he was only following orders. He’s even cleared with NORAD, even though I would dearly love to see their faces when they check flight plans against their radar plot.” Allington was beaming with the glee of a man who has brought off the all-time, gold-plated, Nobel-prizewinning practical joke.
Wes grasped the globe; began to turn it in his hands, noting with astonishment that this orbital path lay almost entirely over the world’s oceans, and nowhere near any nation that might view the flight as hostile. Then he released the globe and strode to the sectional charts on the hangar walls.
Here, too, a yellow line of tape stretched across the charts, proceeding from one he knew well. Wes studied the Los Angeles sectional chart, one he had spread across his lap a hundred times in cross-country flights. Someone had penciled in the maglev rail’s path along the power line route which was already marked, in standard cartography practice, on the chart. And yes, at exactly the highest elevation on that route lay that long, downhill west-to-east stretch where an earthbound maglev could piggyback a small vehicle to near-sonic velocity. Almost as if God and man had conspired to produce an orbital system. No! As if God had nudged man into it. And this path over the Phoenix sectional chart, perfectly situated to take a huge laser feed, a path almost exclusively over wilderness to the Gulf of Mexico.
Wes shook his head in wonder. “It can’t all be just by chance, Gram,” he muttered.
“Beg pardon?” It was Allington, standing by.
Wes snapped back to the present. “Never mind. I swore I’d never work on this kind of thing,” he said.
“God knows, you didn’t, Wesley.” Allington’s expression lodged somewhere between accusation and compassion. “But you paid for most of it. We kept a set of books on it so you’d know. Seemed like the least we could do for you.”
“You got that right,” Wes replied, then jerked his head up. Kaplan, after finishing his Kaddish, had moved nearer the two who were monitoring Rogan’s transmissions. Wes called, “What’s the status of Rogan’s whatchacallit?”
“Highjump,” Kaplan corrected. “The last cellular link was Merida, and he’s already jettisoned the bracelet. Probably taking pictures of the Amazon basin right now.”
Tom Schultheis stood up, rubbing his neck, and met the gaze of his employer. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that we had to do it this way, Wes,” he said softly. “But we did have to do it.”
Wes studied the little designer silently, and decided that Tom Schultheis did not look like a man filled with sorrow; he looked like Horatio at the got-damn’ bridge. “You want to tell me why? When you knew how I felt?”
“Because dis country is so full of people who will not look at de obvious,” said old Wolf Schultheis, pushing himself up from his seat. “Big shuttles do big jobs, but dey are much too large to be helped by a laser feed. De maglev sent Highjump off with cheap electricity, and orbital injection was with more electricity, Mr. Peel.”
Wes thought about that for a moment. “How much cheaper?” The old man looked toward his son. Tom said, “Payloads cost two thousand dollars a pound by shuttle, Wes. That’s why it’s taking so long to build our space stations. Using electricity and liquid hydrogen, Rogan has just released half a metric ton of water, tethered in bags like a bracelet so it’ll freeze into ice. We’d intended to get it into an orbit that wouldn’t decay for a few months. Anybody who wanted that water could go and get it. And pay Exotic Salvage forty dollars a pound. Fifty times cheaper. Now it looks like the stuff will vaporize during reentry pretty soon. But it’s out there, and radars all over this world will track it. Our point is made. Smaller can be better.”
“So in sixty flights this Highjump thing will equal one shuttle.”
“Or sixty Highjumps will carry the same tonnage,” Kaplan put in. “Maybe ten or twenty a day, maybe automated. How big a production line you think it’d take, Wes?”
“Oh, ...” Wes paused, and leveled a long stare at Kaplan. “I’m sure you could tell me.”
“That he could,” said Allington. “Peel Transit’s Line Two could build a hundred Highjumps in three years.” The Brit’s voice quickened, “Whatever happens to us, Wesley, we will use the trial to publicize our figures.”
By now, Wes had moved toward another chart he had known better in the days when he drove hell-for-leather down the length of Baja California. “I flew out of the Cabo San Lucas strip once,” he said. “Seems to me it would be a straight-in approach.”
“Too short,” said Kaplan. “Mazatlan’s Buelna is nearly straight-in, too, and it has almost nine thousand feet of runway; takes commercial jets. But DeLeon, in La Paz, is almost as long, and Rogan said you can generally depend on a brisk head wind. It was his choice.”
Wes gnawed his lip, eyeballing Rogan’s options which were separated by two hundred and fifty miles of the Sea of Cortez. “When does he come into radio contact again?”
Kaplan squinted at the console’s clock. “About ninety-five minutes from lift-off; an hour from now. He won’t be in contact until he’s scrubbed off some velocity, and you can�
�t transmit through that ionized stuff. He’ll make one skip off the upper atmosphere, right about here.” Kaplan’s long finger moved from Hawaii slanting toward the Baja peninsula’s Pacific coast. For the first time, Kaplan’s demeanor was uncertain as he added, “We weren’t absolutely sure our leading-edge coatings could take reentry thermal shock in one lump, so Glenn will watch his thermocouple readings.”
“So what? There’s nothing he can do about it.”
“He can stretch his reentry if he has to.”
Wes eyed the tall man. Tom Schultheis had moved near them, sipping a glass of iced tea, perspiration now drying at his temples. “So Rogan’s got Mazatlan if he has to overshoot,” Wes said, and saw Kaplan nod. “But what if he undershoots?”
“He can’t,” Tom Schultheis said quickly.
Wes turned, fixing his gaze on Schultheis. “You mean, he’d better not.”
Schultheis looked away. “Yeah, that’s what I mean.” Allington, from behind him: “Wesley, could you wait for your recriminations until Highjump is down - one way or another? This isn’t Peel Transit’s problem, it belongs to Exotic Salvage. Yes, it’s our company. This gentleman with you can witness what I say: No one can blame you for - ”
“Shut up, Boff,” Wes snapped. “I can have your collective asses on a shaker table anytime I like. Let’s get on with the agenda: Would this Highjump vehicle fit into a delta cargo hatch?”
“With its wingtips retracted, yes,” Schultheis replied. “I made sure of that a long time ago.” He saw the unasked question in Wes’s face and went on, “If someone were boosting a dozen Highjump cargoes a day to orbit, you’d expect an abort now and then, landing on strips in New Mexico and Texas. You’d have to retrieve ’em to stay on schedule.” “You bastards had it all worked out, didn’t you?” ' “God, I hope so,” said Schultheis, glancing back at that digital clock, then at the silent O’Grady. “I take it this guy will want to read us our rights.”
“I’ve heard ’em a few times,” O’Grady said. “Mr. Peel, if you’re sure about this crowd, I’d like to go tell Mr. W. If the rest of this went down while he was sitting in a dirigible, he’d have my liver on a plate. ”
“Go get him,” Wes replied. “Everybody in the got-damn’ country will know about this by tomorrow, and I don’t intend to face the press like a man who’s been hoodwinked on his own turf!”
TWENTY-FIVE
Joey Weatherby was perfectly capable of believing that Rogan’s tiny craft could achieve orbit, having seen it disappear so abruptly into the blue. What he could not reconcile was Wes Peel’s grudging acceptance of insurrection within his ranks. “So,” he said, not caring who heard him in that scruffy little hanger, “you’re gonna kiss and make up with a bunch of bozos stealing you blind?”
“Not stealing; just borrowing, ’ ’ Wes growled, still wrestling with a sense of betrayal nonetheless, rubbing his throat with a hunk of ice from his tea under the roof of that broiling shed. “Look, Weatherby: The truth is, these guys haye revolutionized cargo-lifting to orbit right under my nose. I’m not against it being done, I just. . . it’s a personal thing; I swore I wouldn’t do it.
“And I didn’t exactly, but they damn’ well did. Even if Glenn Rogan doesn’t make it down, he’s already up, fifty times cheaper than it’s ever been done before. That’s the breakthrough, man; they’ve just put this country into the commercial space business! How’s it going to look if I bring charges against my own people after they used my hardware to do it?”
“Like you run a sloppy shop, is how.” Weatherby watched Schultheis father and son as they arranged screens and charts for an event that could be no more than ten minutes away, now. “And you do, for a fact.” The heavy chest rumbled with mirth. “Just goes to show you. A man who’s always runnin’ this far ahead of everybody else can find his pants at half-mast. So what’s your next move?”
“Depends on Rogan’s luck,” Wes admitted. “If he makes it, we bring the vehicle back in Delta One, at our leisure. If he doesn’t, I guess we go to Rockwell or somebody for better reentry hardware. Either way, I’m backing this effort as of now. Those grandkids of yours will be got-damn’ glad of it!”
* * * *
Rogan wondered why his jaws ached until he realized it was from grinning for so long. Somehow it had little to do with the achievement, or the fame it might bring; it had everything to do with the reason why he had doled out precious gouts of peroxide to roll Highjump onto her back. Here, vision was everything, worth whatever it took. He marveled at the lights of Rio De Janeiro from one hundred and thirty miles up and, soon after (too soon, much too soon, but once he saw it, he knew this glory could not appear soon enough) the slow emergence of Indonesia on his horizon at dawn, with a cloud scatter of flat cotton batting across Micronesia, and the sun, oh God, the great flare of red changing slowly to yellow and rising to meet him over the Pacific where the only sounds in the universe were his own breathing, so that he held his breath to make the silence perfect.
Many times, spread-eagled in a controlled free-fall before grasping the D-ring of his chute, Glenn Rogan had imagined that he was truly flying, his arms mighty pinions that might carry him soaring, not merely into the clouds, but up and up, into the vast reaches of the high beyond, where nothing was imposed between him and those pinpoints of starlight that composed the rest of all Creation.
Well, now he was doing it, blinking away the tears of joy that blurred his instruments, those reminders that he must roU back into the proper attitude for his first deceleration over
Midway Island in mid-Pacific. Though Highjump’s taped announcement played on several channels, only once had Glenn Rogan answered a response, from Darwin in Australia, perhaps because the accent was American. “That’s a roger, Darwin,” he’d said, “Commercial vessel Highjump, an hour out of Barstow with a cargo of water for the natives up here. Bound for Mazatlan, Glenn Rogan commanding.” And then he’d done some more grinning. It didn’t matter much what he said now, they were either gonna gold plate his ass or skin it when he got back. If he got back. As cargo vessels went, he commanded only a kayak but it was, by God, the only truly commercial vessel in this comer of the galaxy. Now, according to the digitals, it was time to make good that boast about Mazatlan, with the La Paz option still open.
He spent more peroxide than he’d like, overcoming Highjump’s inertia to start that slow roll maneuver, overcoming it again when the gyros told him his roll attitude would be on the money. The microwave DF locator placed him some twenty miles north of dead-solid perfect, too much for safety, with Midway off his starboard bow though he could no longer see it, seeing instead the star-pricked not-quite-black of space interrupted by shining arcs of lighter blue on each side of his bow through the tiny quartz windows. He might have used more peroxide to improve his vector a bit, but he needed it to orient Highjump properly. Then, when he employed those control jets for retro fire, she would ease downward against that shining shell of air beneath, presenting her insulated belly with her nose proud.
He spoke his intent, not only for the onboard recorder but for anyone who might be listening in case this was his last mortal act, and with the long retro bum felt the straps bite into his body in prolonged discomfort. It seemed to take forever before he felt the first faint shudder sixty miles up, and he resisted the temptation to urge her down faster because, now that her surfaces were scrubbing off more of that orbital velocity, Highjump would be coming down soon enough, maybe sooner than was healthy for a country boy from Okie State. He watched his thermocouple readouts leap, saw a flare of ionized particles bleeding back from Highjump’s bow. The deceleration grew from a suggestion to a definite surge of Rogan’s body against the straps. As the shudder grew to a hum through the structure, he stole one glance at the DF locator before pulling back on the control stick gently, ever so gently, and then a bit harder, twitching it to the right, then left again, as he did so. It was a gamble. Hell, so was picking your nose . . .
The bow flare dwind
led near Hawaii, and Rogan imagined that he felt through his educated rump that the craft was rising slightly now, but not for long, in a shallow skip off of the feather edge of atmosphere. The locator, computing his position from one millisecond to the next, yielded a plot of his progress, and that smidgin of pressure on the control stick while slamming into air molecules at miles per second had brought Highjump within twelve miles of her ideal path, maybe good enough and maybe not. There wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it in any case, because his peroxide tank light was on, and what was left must be available to keep the gyros happy.
Highjump was still over forty miles high, committed absolutely and inevitably to reentry now that she had bled off ten percent of her velocity in air friction. Thermocouples said that she was also bleeding off some of that heat, but Schultheis had told him straight-out that no one could say for sure whether that spray-coat insulation would protect the bird.
But that tricky maneuver to adjust his descent path had slowed Highjump a little more than he’d intended, and now he saw that there was no longer any Mazatlan option because Highjump would reenter well off the Pacific coast of Baja, and as the shudder grew to a hum, and the hum to a battering roar, a wall of flaming ionized air and particles of insulation began to wash back from Highjump’s bow. He described it profanely, the only way he knew, aware that the recorder was taping his instrument readings and that no one could hear his transmissions through that fireball with Highjump behind her bow wave and Glenn Rogan in the center.
The G-meter reading rose past six and was climbing rapidly before the hammering shudder blurred images too much to read, and his eyeballs were trying to pop out and the same deceleration force was hauling at his guts, but now he had turned Highjump over to the gyros and to God, letting the harness reels haul him cruelly back against the seat. Spam in a can again, just hapless meat in a roaring inferno committed to the automatic flight attitude program. Glenn Rogan did not know whether he really lost consciousness, but if it was a dream, the pounding of his heart was still hellish enough to punish him for ninety minutes in Heaven.