by Homer Hickam
He checked her restraints again. “I’ll go find out what’s holding them up. Sit tight, okay?”
Penny blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Okay, Virgil. It’s not like I have a choice, is it?” When he plugged her headset into her seat, she heard a loud whistle. “Ouch.” She grimaced. “That hurts!”
“Let me see your cap.” She allowed him to take the cap and fiddle with it. He handed it back. “It checks out, ma’am,” he said.
Penny put the cap back on while the technician climbed out of the hatch. The noise was gone but now her headset seemed unnaturally quiet. She pressed the transmission switch. “This is High Eagle. Anybody hear me?” She heard nothing, not even static. “Great,” she grumped. “Doesn’t anything work out on this pad?”
Penny saw out of the corner of her eye a blue-suited man crawl through the hatch. He stood up and looked at Penny. He seemed surprised to see her. “Dr. High Eagle,” he said, finally. “I’m Hoppy Cassidy. I just came by to wish you luck.” He laid a big grin on her. He had about a million teeth, it seemed.
Penny recognized Cassidy from the photographs along the wall at the astronaut office in Houston. He was still a good-looking guy. She would have flirted with him had she not been wrapped inside a foul-smelling rubber suit. “Where’s the rest of the crew?” she asked.
Cassidy shrugged. “A glitch. I’m on a consulting team, here to keep things safe. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure we’re ready topside.” He turned to the technician. “You need to take care of the rest of the equipment, Virg,” he said, and then climbed the ladder to the flight deck, cutting off further conversation.
“Well, shit ,” Penny grumbled under her breath. “What a lash-up.”
After a few minutes the burly technician crawled back through the hatch, pushing several duffel bags of equipment and what appeared to be the rest of the crew parachute packs. He was below her so she couldn’t see what he was doing, but it sounded like he was stowing everything. That didn’t seem right. Weren’t the other crew members supposed to wear their parachutes too? Penny squirmed under the tight straps, trying to see what he was doing. “I think my headset’s dead,” she complained. “Did you find out what happened to the rest of the crew? And why are you stowing their parachutes?”
“Just putting them up for protection until they get here,” he said, coming up beside her. He was fumbling in a duffel bag for something she couldn’t see. “You won’t believe this, but their elevator got stuck. We’re working on it now. Your headset? I wouldn’t worry about it. Not much going on over the loops right now. But I’ll look at it in a minute. We’re having a few glitches.”
The telephone in the white room rang and Virgil abruptly left her to crawl through the hatch and answer it.
A few glitches? Penny thought that wasn’t the half of it. The air-conditioning unit on her suit was definitely broken. And she had already used her diaper for number one. If she was going into space today, she was going hot, wet, and stinky.
Flight Deck, Orbiter (OV-102) Columbia
Cassidy settled into the commander’s seat and checked a laptop computer and a playback unit plugged into the comm system by Virgil. The playback unit had the voice of each crew member recorded during the countdown training the week before. The computer “listened” for the standard queries from the Launch Control Center and had each crew voice respond appropriately via the playback unit. The system had worked perfectly. Launch Control believed all the crew members were comfortably seated, answering calls, and ready to go. With the automatic sequence initiated he felt Columbia begin to wake up. She first needed her own internal power. Three hydrazine-fueled auxiliary power units (APUs) gave her the hydraulics to actuate propellant valves and move the main engines on their gimbals. Three fuel cells provided her electricity. Inside the cockpit the indicator lights blazed. Cassidy patted the panel in front of him, whispering a greeting: “G’mornin’, sweetheart. Daddy’s home.”
Interior, Crew Elevator #1, LC 39-B
Grant assessed the situation. “This is bullshit,” she summed up. She tried the telephone. Dead.
“Maybe they don’t know we’re stuck yet,” Brown offered.
“They expected us topside ten minutes ago,” Grant replied. “Somebody’s pulling something.” Her eyes fell on Barnes. “Janet, you’re small enough to get through the access hatch. Do you think you can climb up the shaft?”
“Sure, Ollie.” Barnes struggled to get out of her LES suit, peeling it back from her shoulders.
Brown and Betsy Newell lifted Barnes to the elevator roof. She pushed open the access hatch. The next level was twenty feet straight up, reachable by a ladder between the two shafts. “I can see the doors,” she said. “Here I go.”
“Good woman,” Grant called after her.
Columbia
Penny recognized the sounds from her one session in the shuttle simulator. The shuttle stack was readying itself for launch. But that didn’t make any sense. Where was Ollie Grant and her crew? She looked up at the flight deck, saw Hoppy Cassidy coming down the ladder.
“What are you doing?” she yelled at him. “Where’s the crew?”
“Who was that on the phone, Virgil?” Cassidy asked, ignoring her.
“LCC. Wanted to know why there wasn’t any video. I told them the camera’s fried. They bought it.”
Cassidy looked at Penny. “Dr. High Eagle, there’s been a change in plans. You’ve got a new crew. Sit back, relax, and we’ll haul you on into orbit safe and sound.” When she started to protest, he held up his hand. “Not now. Later.” He walked past her.
“If you think I’m just going to sit here...” Penny bristled, twisting until she saw Cassidy and “Virgil” by the hatch.
“Sorry, Hoppy,” Virgil said, loud enough that Penny could hear him. “I didn’t know what else to do except strap her in. She must have come up in a different elevator.”
“The rest of the crew?”
“In the other elevator, I think.”
“How about Jack?”
“He ain’t here yet,” Virgil said, peering worriedly out the hatch.
“Where is he?” Cassidy demanded.
“I don’t know. He just ain’t here! ”
Penny had heard enough. She started struggling with the unfamiliar straps around her chest, but the thick gloves of the LES suit defeated her. “Help me out!” she demanded.
“Why do you have a gun?” she heard Cassidy say.
“Are you nuts?” Penny demanded, twisting around again to see the two men. “This bucket is about to blast off and somebody’s got a gun?”
SMC, JSC
Sam Tate vultured his control room. Everyone on console had his head down, talking over the loops or scribbling notes. Sam sat down, keeping his eye on the clock, and then stood up and sat back down again. He couldn’t keep still. He and his people were ready to take over the moment Columbia lifted a millimeter off the Cape Canaveral pad. That was the jealous responsibility of Houston. Everything seemed to be nominal, but there was something about this flight that still bothered him. He’d called the IG office but the woman who’d answered the telephone claimed she didn’t know anything about an inspection team at the Cape. She was going to check on it, get back to him. That had been over an hour ago. At the Cape, Columbia’s automatic internal sequence had begun. Sam resisted calling Bilstein. What did he expect Bilstein to do, challenge NASA headquarters a few minutes before launch? Sam stood and started vulturing again. Glaring at his controllers made him feel better, anyway. Tate’s Turds, as they called themselves, kept their heads down. A murmur filled the room behind Sam and he turned and saw Center Director Frank Bonner settle into a chair in the glassed-in VIP room. Sam had known Bonner for over twenty years. Bonner had come down as a young fireball from headquarters and was placed immediately into positions of authority. He had even been the chief of flight operations for a year. Bonner was a good manager. He knew every NASA directive by heart. But he was tricky, too, a backstabber. He wo
uld attend meetings and just sit in the back, say nothing, and then later one of the participants would be out of a job. Sam wasn’t afraid of Bonner but he kept his distance from him too.
Someone tapped Sam on the shoulder. Sam recognized him as Hank Garcia, Bonner’s assistant. “Frank would like to see you, Sam,” Garcia said. The thin, balding man wore a sorrowful expression, as if he were summoning someone to an execution.
“I’m busy,” Sam retorted, turning away and pressing his hand against his headset as if he’d just received an urgent communication.
“He really wants to see you,” Garcia said, undaunted.
Sam eyed Garcia. The man looked pitiful. Might as well get it over with. Sam took off his headset, marched into the VIP room. “Dammit, Frank, I’ve got a shuttle about to launch.”
Bonner smiled as Sam came in the room, reached out his hand. “Sam. Been a long time. You used to come by the office, play cards at lunch. You never do that anymore.”
Sam shook Bonner’s hand while straining to remember the occasion Bonner was talking about. It had to have been at least fifteen years ago. “Been busy, Frank.” He shrugged. Like most engineers he wasn’t comfortable with small talk.
“Sam,” he said, “is your team ready?”
“I guess you know that they are. You approved our training budget. We’ve drilled this team with a dozen full-scale sims, thrown every mal at them known to God and man. They’re a good bunch. Hell yes, we’re ready.”
“Good,” Bonner said, and then was quiet for a moment. “It isn’t my fault Columbia ’s being retired, Sam. I fought against it. The vice president had his mind made up.”
“I never said it was your fault, Frank,” Sam said truthfully.
Bonner nodded. “Have a good flight, Sam.”
Sam left the viewing pit, went to his console, put on his headset. “What did Bonner want, Sam?” Crowder, his assistant Flight, asked.
Sam shook his head. “Nothing. He’s just the loneliest man I’ve ever known.”
Launch Complex 39-B
With a groan the crew access arm began its automatic retraction. The ingress team, hunkered sullenly in the baskets, stood up, eyes wide. “Automatic launch sequence! We got to go!” Guardino screeched.
“Yes,” Jack replied calmly. “You do.”
Firing Room, Launch Control Center, KSC
Aaron Bilstein stood at his console, his plump body swaying as he looked over his team camped out in front of their blinking consoles. This countdown was as smooth as any he had ever run. The only glitch he could name offhand was that the television camera in the white room had kept frying itself until it had gone off completely. No problem. C-SPAN, the only network carrying the launch, didn’t come on board until seconds before launch, anyway. It was all going like a precision watch.
“Launch control, this is security.”
Bilstein squeezed the transmission button on the comm unit attached to his belt. “Go ahead, Ty.” Ty Bledsoe was the chief of the security guards at the pads.
“Aaron, UAC says the ingress team never showed up at the fallback. I checked with the gate. They don’t have a record of them leaving the pad.”
UAC was the United Aerospace Contractors, the ingress team’s employer. “You think they’re still at the pad?”
“Not really. The team got permission some time ago to go over to the slide-wire landing-area blockhouse and watch the launch from there. They were only supposed to do it for one launch, but you know Shorty Guardino and his guys.”
Bilstein’s eye fell on the countdown clock, a huge digital timer above the launch control room. T minus one minute, twenty-four seconds. The ET was pressurized, the nozzles on the main engines were aligned. A hell of a time for a glitch like this. He was going to raise hell with UAC during the debrief. “Get some eyes on the tower, Ty,” he growled. “Thanks for letting me know.”
“Anytime, Aaron.”
Fifth Level, FSS, LC 39-B
Barnes reached what she hoped was the crew accommodations level after climbing up the inside ladder. One of the lifts was there, blocking her. The door of the shaft of the stuck lift was closed. She hung on with one hand, stretched her body as far as it would go, and pushed her fingers inside the crack between the doors. She got a grip through the rubber bumpers and pulled with all her might. She worked out at the gym constantly. Her strength training paid off. When she got the door pulled back a few millimeters, it automatically opened.
Slide Cage Area, LC 39-B
Jack handed Guardino an envelope. Puzzled, Guardino turned it over. “What the hell is this? What are you trying to pull?”
“Give it to NASA,” he said, and slammed the release levers forward. The baskets fell until the cables took up the slack, then the overhead pulleys began to screech. Guardino opened his mouth but Jack couldn’t hear what he was yelling. Then he was gone. The two baskets raced down the cables. Jack watched until they slammed into the restraint net at the bottom and then, to his relief, saw the ingress team get out and run like rabbits for the bunker. Jack moved quickly to the mini—control room behind the IG curtain and threw the switch that sent a signal to the connection terminal room located below the pad’s elevated hardstand. A series of ten blasting caps on the main line were actuated, any one of them enough to blow the three-inch-diameter cable apart. The Launch Control Center no longer communicated with Columbia.
Firing Room, LCC, KSC
The voice level suddenly rose, calls coming over the loops. Ground Control got to Bilstein first. “Launch, we’ve lost service to the stack. Looks like a break in the main line.”
Bilstein responded. “All positions, this is Launch. This is a hold! Stop all launch proceedings immediately!”
The GC immediately came back. Commands were not getting through to Columbia.
“What the hell do you mean. . . ?”
“The line’s dead, Aaron.”
Bilstein looked at the countdown clock. It was stopped at T minus thirty seconds. But what was going on at the pad? The answer came quickly in a call from Ty Bledsoe. “Launch, this is Security. We got people coming down the wire. I say again, people in the cages coming down the wire!”
“What the hell, Ty. . . ?”
“I know, Aaron. I got a team going out there now to pick them up.”
“No, wait!” Bilstein cried. “We don’t know if Columbia ’s on hold or not. Just wait....”
“Jesus, Aaron!”
SMC
Sam couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but still he resisted the urge to get on the JSC/KSC push and yell at Bilstein. He knew the man had his hands full. From the excited chatter on the KSC loops it sounded, in fact, as if a full-blown disaster was in the making. In frustration Sam pounded both his fists on the console table. Tate’s Turds ducked their heads. He turned to look over his shoulder. Bonner just sat, staring, disbelief written all over his face.
FSS, LC 39-B
Jack ran into Barnes just as she emerged from the elevator shaft. He tripped over her, both of them sprawling on the deck. He stared incredulously at the tiny astronaut. She was looking back and Jack realized his blue suit made her think he was also an astronaut. He took advantage of that. “There’s a fire in the shuttle,” he said, helping her up. He pushed her inside the open elevator. “Go down to the ground level and stay inside and you’ll be safe.”
“The rest of my crew are trapped in the other elevator,” Barnes said.
“I know. A glitch. But we think they’re safe there.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “Why don’t I know you?”
Jack looked over his shoulder, anxious to be on his way. “I’m an ex-astronaut, never flew. They let me wear the blue suit anyway. I’m here with the, uh, fire team—contract outfit.”
Barnes stared at him but didn’t move, so he reached past her and pushed the ground-floor button. “Don’t come back up,” he warned as the doors closed on her.
Jack turned, saw to his astonishment that Cassidy was coming
down the passageway carrying a pistol. It was a big, blunt, and ugly instrument, a .45 automatic. “What the hell, Hoppy?” Jack demanded.
“I took it off Virgil,” Cassidy said, disgustedly brandishing the weapon. “I guess he was afraid we’d have to fight our way off the pad. I came out to pitch it and find you. We’ve got trouble. Dr. Penny High Eagle is strapped in—”
The sudden groan of the last flush of the propellants washing through the cryo pipes drowned out the rest of what Cassidy was trying to say. “Let’s go!” Jack yelled. Whatever it was, they’d have to sort it out later.
The elevator door suddenly opened. Barnes was standing there. “Listen—” she started to say, then stopped, her mouth agape at the sight of the two men and the pistol.
Instinctively, Cassidy raised the .45 toward the astronaut. Barnes ducked and threw herself forward, hitting Cassidy’s arm. He dropped the pistol and it hit the steel deck, punched out a round, and slid over by Jack’s feet. Cassidy lurched forward and fell onto the deck, taking Barnes down with him. “Jesus.” Cassidy gasped, his face contorted in pain.
Barnes quickly got to her feet while Jack snatched up the pistol. “Holy shit,” she breathed when she saw him point it at her.
“The shuttle’s going!” he bellowed. “Get in the elevator now!”
Barnes’s eyes rolled at the grumble of the cryos, the flexing of the ET with the super-cold liquids. She didn’t move. “You’re sure I’ll be all right in there?” she asked plaintively.
Jack kept his finger outside the trigger guard. He was taking no chances on another misfire. “Yes. We’ve tested it,” he screamed. “Now, go! Go!”
Columbia
Penny struggled to see what was going on behind her. The roar of the propellants flushing through the external tank was like a locomotive. “For God’s sake, close the hatch!” she screamed when she saw it was still open. “We’re about to lift off!”
“Come on!” the big technician was yelling at the opening. “Come on!”
“Are you crazy?” Penny yelled. “Close the hatch or we’re dead!”