by Homer Hickam
Penny waved at the excited reporters and correspondents, who were still yelling questions at her as she climbed aboard. The rest of the crew had grabbed front seats together, so Penny worked her way to the back. The bus stank like a closetful of wet rubber raincoats because of the LES suits. “Hey, High Eagle.” Astronaut Janet Barnes snickered. “You know the difference between you and God? I do. God don’t think he’s you!”
“Shut up, Janet,” Grant snapped, standing as she spoke. She walked down the aisle, leaned into Penny’s face. “High Eagle, have you got makeup on? Wipe it off. You’re not wearing powder into space. It’ll pop off you in zero g and float around and I, for one, don’t want to breathe it.”
“I guess I’m one of those women who like to look their best wherever they go,” Penny replied in a reasonable tone. She didn’t want a fight. Not now.
Grant reached above her, opened a locker, and threw her a box of tissues and a bottle of water. “Where you’re going, honey, all you need is a bag to puke in.”
Penny shrugged but complied. She was getting her jaunt into space, would get her book out of it, hit the best-seller lists again. On her way to success she’d dealt with a lot worse than Grant and her pumped-up astronettes. Penny finished, threw the tissues on the floor, and looked forlornly out the window as the lush swamp of Banana Creek slid by. People lined the road, waving. She waved back and then suddenly felt very alone. Penny had hoped she would be able to find at least one friend among the women astronauts. It was ironic, she knew, but it was the truth. Her books and articles about her adventures had made her one of the most famous women in the world but she had no friends, just associates, employees, and agents.
The crew bus slowly made its way to the access road that paralleled the reinforced concrete crawlerway. Pad 39-B loomed ahead. Penny drank in the sight. Columbia was beautiful. A wreath of surrealistic white mist, the liquid oxygen boil-off, swirled around the huge spacecraft. For a moment Penny allowed herself to savor the adventure ahead.
The guard trucks peeled off as the bus braked in front of the pad, and Penny followed the crew outside to the launch tower. When the elevator doors opened to take them up to the crew access level, Grant and the three other astronauts shuffled aboard. A guard approached Penny, holding an autograph book and a pen. “Would you mind, ma’am?” he asked politely.
“We’re not going to wait,” Grant snapped at her from the elevator.
Penny had learned long ago she could not be who she was without her fans and they came first, even here in Columbia ’s shadow. “Go ahead,” she said to her grumpy commander. “I’ll catch up.” More scraps of paper were being thrust at her and she was more than happy to oblige. Neither she nor the excited guards heard the nearly inaudible thump as the pulleys of elevator number one disengaged halfway between the fourth and fifth level where there was no floor structure.
THE IG TEAM
Fixed Service Structure, Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center
On the highest level of the tower, where even the pad rats rarely ventured, Jack stood beneath a vast bowl of clear blue sky and savored the salt-laden breeze coming off the rumbling Atlantic shore. He turned as Virgil came up the steps behind him. The big man nodded, took off his hard hat, and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “I checked the ET, boss. Tribble and Estes did a great job. I couldn’t see the seam at all. We’re ready to rocket and roll.”
Virgil was talking about the inside job two MEC employees had performed in the external tank plant in New Orleans. MEC had contracted with Lockmart, the tank manufacturer, to study the use of the ET as a cargo carrier. It had been expensive but it had gotten Tribble and Estes inside the plant, working all hours of the day. One night they’d put cargo in the base of Columbia ’s tank, then covered it with insulation, leaving no trace. Then they had gotten the hell out of there.
Virgil was in the white coveralls of a NASA IG (Inspector General) team official, festooned with all the necessary badges, all perfectly authentic, all completely fake. IG teams were feared on the pad. They came looking for errors and could destroy a career with one critical report. “Everything else copacetic, Virg?” Jack asked his engine man.
“As long as my little girl’s getting help, I’m happy.”
Jack patted Virgil on the shoulder, gave him an encouraging smile. Virgil had put much of the bonus he’d received for the mission into gene therapy for his daughter. The experimental treatment for cystic fibrosis was expensive and medical insurance wouldn’t pay for it, but Jack knew their daughter meant everything to Virgil and his wife.
Virgil left and Jack watched the ocean waves marching in and out, line after line, as if translucent blue ranks of soldiers. Then he heard the ringing of another set of footsteps coming up the steel steps. Craig “Hopalong” Cassidy, outfitted in blue astronaut coveralls, leaned on the rail beside him. “Hot damn, Jack,” he bellowed over the roar of the surf. “It’s gonna be a fine day, one for the books, eh? God, I can’t wait!”
Despite his bravado Jack caught a flash of anguish on Cassidy’s face. He’s scared, Jack thought. Captain Craig “Hopalong” Cassidy, the best shuttle pilot on the planet, was scared. Cassidy was blond and blue eyed and looked every bit the part of what he had once been: America’s premier astronaut and fantasy figure of millions of women. He had piloted each of the shuttles several times, spent six months aboard the Russian Mir, joined a team of spacewalkers to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, and commanded a team of scientists on the Spacelab XXI mission. He had flown every high-performance aircraft in both the Air Force and Navy stables and even built his own experimental airplanes, using one to break the civilian altitude record. He could fly anything that had wings and land it on a dime. Or at least, that had once been true. Now, he was another NASA outsider, thrown out for one drunken brawl too many. And he was scared, needed reassurance. Jack gripped Cassidy’s shoulder. “This is going to be your day, Hoppy. You’re going to show the world you’re still the best shuttle jock there ever was.”
Cassidy nodded. The wind rustled his blond locks. “Thank you for believing in me, Jack,” he said after a moment. “I’ll do you proud, I promise.”
“You’ve done that already, Hoppy, just by agreeing to go with us.”
“Wouldn’t have missed this for the world.” Cassidy laughed. “Or the moon.”
The two men, outcasts to the community they loved, laughed together, and faced defiantly the constant, unceasing Atlantic wind whistling through the launch complex. Beneath them huge steel pipes grumbled and groaned as an immense wash of super-cold liquid propellants flooded through them into the shuttle’s external tank. At launch Columbia with her stack weighed 2,250 tons. Eight hundred and fifty tons of that was liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Immersed in the cacophony of wind and propellant Jack felt excitement crawl up his spine. He was ready, tired of waiting, and willed the clock forward. He was supremely confident but he also believed that the day’s work would be difficult, and all that followed filled with pitfalls. He didn’t care. The clock was counting. It was time to go into the history books or hell. Maybe both. “Let’s go do it,” he said to his pilot, and together they turned away from the wind.
THE JSC DIRECTOR
Building 1, Sixth Floor, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas
Frank Bonner, director of Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, surveyed each of his managers at the conclusion of the meeting he held every morning in his office. Sullen faces looked back. As was his habit, he’d chewed each of them out by turn. “That’s it,” he said. “Any questions?”
There were none. His managers had learned over their tenure that to ask a question was to invite a biting retort. Bonner didn’t like questions. He wanted action. They also knew today he was in an especially foul mood. One of his shuttles was being retired. That didn’t sit well with the director of Johnson Space Center. He needed every shuttle he could get to keep flying his astronauts into space.
Lily Acton, his secretary, came bustling into
his office while the managers filed out. She straightened his tie, brushed lint off the sleeves of his suit jacket. “Law, Frank, you can’t go down to the press room dressed like a tramp.”
Bonner frowned. “I don’t need you to look after me, Lily.”
“Somebody needs to,” she admonished.
When Lily finished checking him, she left, going back outside the heavy oaken doors to maintain her vigil, to keep away anyone other than approved personnel. Bonner still had fifteen minutes before he would go down the six floors and walk across the JSC campus to Shuttle Mission Control. He went to his floor-to-ceiling office window and drew back the curtains. His view was of a grassy park where a giant Saturn V moon rocket lay splayed on its side like a beached whale. It never failed to remind him of Huntsville, the city where the von Braun team had built the giant booster. When he’d first come to work for the agency, he’d spent a year as an engineering intern in the Rocket City. He’d enjoyed the work with the researchers and engineers of Marshall Space Flight Center. Most of the Germans who’d built the big boosters for Apollo had retired by then but he’d met the daughter of one of them, a vivacious, gregarious young woman named Katrina Suttner. She was a fellow engineering intern in the Propulsion Lab and he’d fallen hard for her, as hard as he ever had imagined that he could. He had doggedly pursued her, wore her down with long phone calls filled with his longing. He went after her as if he were on a campaign, every waking moment dedicated to the question of how to win her. For six glorious months he used logic on her, debated with her the relative merits of being single versus marrying someone such as himself. He was going somewhere in NASA, he’d told her. So was she. Together, they could change the agency and the world. When he’d asked her to marry him, to his astonishment and utter joy she’d said yes. Then she shared with him her greatest secret, what the late Wernher von Braun had arranged for her when she was a child. It was the happiest time in his life and he’d dedicated himself anew to NASA, to make everything she’d wanted come true for both of them. Sometimes, he would just wake up grinning. Every love song that was played on the radio seemed to be for him and Kate. He couldn’t get enough of her, ever. Then all his hopes and dreams of romance came crashing down. Someone else had taken his place, an arrogant man named Jack Medaris.
Bonner found himself angrily gritting his teeth. He turned away from the old rocket and the old memories. He left his office, the proud and tough director of JSC, to bitterly watch the last launch of Columbia from Shuttle Mission Control.
AUTOMATIC LAUNCH SEQUENCE
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?”