by Homer Hickam
FSS, LC 39-B
Jack tucked the pistol in his belt and made for the crew access arm, hauling Cassidy with him. He’d lost all track of time. It might already be too late. He pressed the hydraulic actuator, and stumbled down the catwalk, Cassidy leaning heavily against him. The swinging, swaying arm, 150 feet off the ground, started to move. Columbia came into view at the end of the arm and Jack saw the open hatch, Virgil inside urging him on.
Then something happened. Not used to being slammed wide open, the hydraulics jammed and the arm stopped, frozen in place. There was a yard of empty space between the catwalk and the hatch.
Cassidy was coughing. “Jack?” He looked up into Jack’s face. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
“Not your fault, Hoppy.” He looked up, saw Virgil at the hatch. “Help me with him, Virgil!”
Virgil reached out, grasped Cassidy beneath his arms, and dragged the pilot aboard. Cassidy screwed up his face in pain. A little blood was staining the right thigh of his coveralls. It had to be a flesh wound, Jack thought. It was only a ricochet. There was a medical kit aboard—antibiotics, sutures, everything. He could fix his pilot, he was certain of it. He also had no choice. There was no time to get Cassidy off the pad. Columbia was the only refuge left.
LCC
Incredulous, still not quite grasping the enormity of what might be happening, Bilstein turned to look out the viewing windows at pad 39-B. He knew that if Columbia was continuing her automatic internal countdown, the solid rocket motors were already punched up, their control systems fully activated. The solids were unstoppable once lit. But the solids wouldn’t go until the main engines were turned on and no matter what the shuttle’s internal computers were doing, the mains could not ignite without a command from the LCC. That was Bilstein’s ace in the hole. No matter what happened out there, without an order from the LCC, Columbia was going nowhere.
Cedar Key, Northwest Florida
No one on the little island in the Gulf of Mexico took note of the eighteen-wheeler pulling out of the otherwise empty parking lot at the MEC facility at the airport. Inside the truck packed with electronics, Sally Littleton pressed the return button on a desktop computer and the disk inside started its program. “Godspeed, you guys,” she mumbled. “Amen,” someone else in the trailer automatically added. A red light on the console confirmed the connection with Columbia. The screen blurred with a column of numbers and then stopped. GO FOR SSME START, the screen blinked. GO FOR SSME START. A wild cheer erupted inside the trailer.
Crew access arm catwalk, FSS, LC 39-B
Jack heard Columbia ’s pumps start to whine and knew she was about to come alive. The sound of the pad’s massive deluge system hit him first, a roar from the great waterfall of water sweeping beneath Columbia ’s tail. Then the shuttle began to shake and a burst of fire and billowing exhaust suddenly erupted from her mains. Columbia ’s engines were being fed by turbo pumps capable of emptying an Olympic-sized swimming pool in seconds, each of her SSMEs producing nearly a half-million pounds of thrust. That thrust pushed up against the shuttle stack. The external tank took the brutish strain, absorbing the energy, shooting it throughout the structure, storing it in minute twists and strains. Columbia had turned into a coiled, monstrous spring.
From the end of the access arm Jack reached for Virgil’s hand just as the sonic blast created by the shuttle mains struck him. Knocked off balance, all he could do was jump, aiming for the hatch. He hit it, bounced off, grabbed air, and then fell away. Virgil, in a desperate lunge, caught his coveralls. Jack reached up and grabbed his savior’s big arms to pull himself inside, both men falling on the curved plate of the airlock.
Virgil got to his knees to close the hatch. Just as he clamped it down, the solids let go. A combined total of five and a half million pounds of thrust kicked the Columbia stack off the pad. In a crashing thunder of fire and smoke it all began to rise, not slowly like the lumbering giants of the Saturn-Apollo era, but like a white-hot arrow unleashed from a huge bow. Columbia leapt for the sky, the jackrabbit of all manned spacecraft, her solid rocket boosters screaming, her main engines erupting in licking thunder. Virgil went howling onto his stomach. Jack was pressed against the middeck firewall. The massive g-forces felt like an elephant standing on his chest.
NW Florida
The MEC tractor-trailer crawled out of Cedar Key, turned left up highway 19, heading north. It would be traveling, day and night, along back roads for as long as Columbia was in space. Littleton, boss of the MEC ground team, scrolled down her PC screen, and clicked on an icon shaped like a computer monitor. A red light on her modem flared for five seconds and then went off. Columbia ’s guidance parameters, the code that instructed the shuttle where to aim her nose throughout her ascent into orbit, had just been completely overwritten. She looked up at the monitor tuned to NASA Select closed-circuit television. Columbia was batting for the sky. “Go, sweet Jack,” she whispered. “Go!”
Columbia
Jack knew it was critical that someone answer Houston if they called. If Mission Control believed there was no crew on board, it might recommend to Cape Safety that it blow the explosives on the solid boosters and external tank to abort the launch. And that meant death to all on board.
Virgil was wrapped around the airlock. Cassidy was on the other side, curled into a ball on the aft bulkhead. Jack fought the g-forces, felt them ease a little as the mains cut back to make the roll. The bulkhead rivets still felt like nails being driven into his back. His arm seemed to weigh a ton, but he managed to reach up and plug his headset into the jack located on the back of one of the empty crew seats. Just as he clicked it in, he heard a Houston controller’s callout for the roll maneuver completion. Jack flipped the external comm switch. “Roger, Houston. Roll maneuver complete,” he gasped.
Then Columbia lurched. Her engines boomed in Jack’s ears, rattling the crew compartment. It felt as if she were coming apart.
SMC, JSC
Sam saw the capsule communicator mouthing something to her assistant. “Talk to me, CAPCOM,” he boomed. “I need to know what you know!”
“Sam, I didn’t recognize who called down the roll maneuver,” the CAPCOM answered, chastened. “It wasn’t Ollie Grant.”
“Engines realigning!” the booster systems engineer yelled. “There they go! Coming back up!”
“Flight, GNC.” GNC was the guidance, navigation, and control systems engineer.
“What the hell is going on, GNC?”
“Um, Flight, something caused Columbia to change her flight path. It doesn’t match up with the predicted trajectory at all. Whatever course she’s on sure as hell ain’t the one we programmed. We don’t know where she’s going.”
Sam had trained for this contingency, hoped it would never happen, but now it had. He had a bird out of control. “LCC, this is Flight. Prepare for autodestruct.”
Columbia
Jack heard the solids punch off and felt the g-forces abate. He needed to get to the flight deck. He pulled himself to his feet and caught sight, for the first time, of Penny High Eagle. She was riding uphill with her eyes closed, her seat rattling with the thunder of the booming mains. She opened her eyes and saw him. “Who are you?” she asked, gasping.
Jack shook off his surprise at seeing the famous Dr. Penny High Eagle in the seat. However she had managed to get aboard, he’d deal with her later. He clawed his way past her, got a handhold on the ladder going up to the flight deck. “Are we going to die?” she asked, plaintively.
“Not if I can help it!” Jack called, and then pulled himself up, his arm muscles feeling as if they were being torn apart. He grasped the pilot’s seat, got a toehold on the edge of the deck, and kicked himself up. He fell into the seat, breathing hard. He wasn’t a shuttle pilot. He desperately tried to recall what Cassidy had told him needed to be done, how the switches had to be configured.
“Are we going to die?” High Eagle had asked. All of a sudden Jack wasn’t certain of the answer.
&nb
sp; SMC, JSC
Sam tried to suck the blurred video picture of the Columbia stack into his brain. When the solids blew off, the picture changed to a view of the big boosters coming down, swinging on their parachutes. Then the NASA Select video went back to the shuttle, three glowing circles at its base showing perfect mains. Sam had to take his frustration out in some way. He kicked his chair, sent it flying. Dammit! The most beautiful machine in the world and it was going to be lost on his watch! Reports were rolling in from KSC. An ingress team in the escape bunker, screaming bloody murder about hijackers. A crew apparently stuck on the elevator. Up there, high above the contrail wisps blowing away in the jet stream, were some goddamn assholes who had stolen his spacecraft! By damn, he’d see about that!
Sam suddenly realized Bilstein was on the KSC/JSC loop, trying to talk to him. “We’ve got a situation here, Sam.” Bilstein was nearly sobbing. “I think it’s a runaway shuttle.”
“No shit, Aaron,” Sam hissed. “You blew it. Where the hell was your security?” He tore off his headset, not waiting for a reply, and vultured his people. Many of his controllers seemed to be praying. Some were crying. Sam looked over his shoulder. Bonner was standing, his hands pressed against the VIP-room glass. Sam tossed a handful of antacid tablets into his mouth and stood at the rail, hands on his hips, his long face drawn down to a baleful stare, thin nose pushed ahead, his jaw crunching the tablets. He had to get control. Carefully, he fitted his headset back on. “Aaron, are you prepared for autodestruct?”
There was a pause. “Roger. Is that what you want?”
Sam chewed his lip. He looked down on his troops, took his frustration out on his chair once more, giving it another kick with his size-twelve shoe. “No, dammit! There’s somebody on board. We don’t know who.”
Sam took a deep breath. The room was completely silent except for the intermittent chirp of a push being reset. All his troops were looking at him, waiting for his guidance. He remembered Apollo 13, the Mir fiascoes. But there had never been anything like this before in space. He took a deep breath. “Folks,” he boomed, “this institution has a reputation. We’ve never lost a ship once it reached space and we’re not going to start today.” He paused as if daring anyone to contradict him. The space shuttle Challenger had never made it to space, barely reaching 65,000 feet before that awful conflagration.
Sam continued, low and slow. “There’s only one way we’re going to be able to continue that record, and that is if every one of you does your job exactly as you’ve been trained. That is what I have demanded of you before this. . . thing. . . and it is what I expect of you now. I will give you information about what we are dealing with as I learn it. You have my word on that. Now hop to it. Protect Columbia!”
There was a brief moment of silence but then all at once his people, first the GNC and then the other controllers, began their clamoring systems readouts and parameter checks.
“Bonner is gone, Sam,” Crowder advised. Sam didn’t acknowledge. He didn’t care about Bonner, didn’t care about anything except how to recover from what had happened. He watched and listened and was satisfied by what he heard coming over the loops. He had no doubt about the outcome as long as Shuttle Mission Control kept its head. No one could fly a shuttle without them. There were things a shuttle crew, any shuttle crew, would need. It was all a matter of time before they called and Sam was going to be right where he was supposed to be, ready to reach down their throats and tear out their stinking livers when they did.
At Base of Pad Hardstand, LCC 39-B
Bilstein saw four white-smocked men walking unsteadily from the bunker beside the pad. Guards were posted around them, their pistols drawn. Up on the pad hardstand he could see four of the five astronauts he’d sent out to fly the shuttle. They had been found in the elevators, deafened by the launch but otherwise in good shape. The tiny one—Janet Barnes, he remembered now—had been yelling about a shooting. Ty Bledsoe was there to debrief them on the bus, find out what the hell had happened.
One of the ingress team jerked his arm away from a security policeman. “I don’t need your help now, you sumbitch!” he bellowed. Bilstein realized the man was nearly deaf, the result of being so close to the shuttle at liftoff. The gruff little techie saw Bilstein, stomped up to him. “Everybody be a witness!” he yelled, handing Bilstein an envelope. “I turned this over to NASA!”
Bilstein took the envelope, a standard manila mailing pouch from the look of it, and withdrew a thin pink slip of paper. With trembling fingers he unfolded it. When he saw what it was, he stared at Guardino. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
The team leader cupped his ear and then his face registered understanding. He’d obviously looked inside because he roared, “You got that right, buddy!”
Bilstein looked again, just to be sure he wasn’t mistaken. He wasn’t. The pink slip of paper was a receipt “pursuant to our agreement.” There was much more, all in fine print. The letterhead on the receipt said “MEC.” Bilstein had heard of the company but couldn’t quite place it. Attached to the receipt with a paper clip were also two cashier’s checks from the First Bank of the Cayman Islands, BWI. One made out to the Department of Transportation. The other made out to NASA.
Each for one million dollars.
LOW EARTH ORBIT
Cut off from the land that bore us,
Betrayed by the land that we find,
When the brightest have gone before us,
And the dullest are most behind—
Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!
’Tis all we have left to prize:
One cup to the dead already—
Hurrah for the next that dies!
—Bartholomew Dowling, ”The Revel”
POSTINSERTION CHECKLIST (1)
Columbia
Jack savored the orbital maneuvering system burn, the last punch Columbia needed to insert herself into orbit. He rode with joy the two engines in the pods above the mains, merged with them, delighted in their sound and vibration and power. He knew every valve, line, and sensor in the OMS, could picture the monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide pushed by pressurized helium to mix and explode in thrusting power. Columbia ’s reaction-control system jet-puffed hot gas at opposing sides of her nose and, snorting like a giant flying bull, she turned herself over according to her program until the cockpit was head-down toward earth. Then, with a final grunt, the OMS and RCS snuffed out and there was silence. The shuttle was in a free-flight trajectory. Physics and orbital mechanics would keep them aloft for at least a week without another burn.
Jack didn’t bother to check the onboard computer. There’d be time enough to check exact positioning later. He looked instead through the cockpit window, allowing himself a moment to rise out of his seat, move in closer, press his nose almost up on the glass, and relish the view of the vast expanse of blue and brown turning beneath him. The Indian Ocean was a glittering blue lake, snowy clouds winding sinuously over it. Ahead was a gigantic black shadow, swallowing the planet. The translucent rainbow hues that defined the curved edge of the earth were crushed by the vast gloom and then Columbia ’s nose penetrated it, disappearing into the darkness of planetary night. Jack saw a wondrous spiderweb of lights below and realized Columbia had taken him over a vast city. Then, as the city receded, another wonder could be seen. On the face of the Pacific Ocean there rode a molten orb, dancing on the shimmering dunes of the dark water. The moon! Transfixed, he stared at it until he was distracted by a woman’s voice coming from the middeck. “Houston, we have a problem. Houston? Dammittohell! Houston! ”
Jack pushed away from the windscreen, marveling at his ability to fly in the microgravity of space. He allowed a small moment of pleasure in it, then pulled himself quickly over the seats to the hatch to do what needed to be done.
CEDAR KEY (1)
Beach Road, Cedar Key, Florida
Every morning Cecil Velocci ritually took a drive along the beach. On this morning, as always, it was
peaceful. Cedar Key, Florida, Cecil’s hometown, had spent its history being quiet. For a brief period it had been the pencil capital of the United States but after the cedar trees were all chopped down, the pencil factories went away. About all that was left was the fishing, and it waxed and waned; nothing seemed to stay permanently on the island except the solitude, and perhaps the colorful characters who were drawn to it. Cedar Key sat off by itself, a piece of Florida that was always about to be discovered but never quite was. And for that, Cecil Velocci, the Key’s only lawyer, was profoundly grateful.
At this hour very few of the permanent population were up, except for the fishermen who had gone out through the cut at sunup. All that could be heard was the lapping of the Gulf of Mexico, and the whisper of the wind in the big white oaks that grew near the shoreline, and the forlorn call of a seagull missing its flock. Three small motels and a bed and breakfast in a redecorated old general store on the narrow main street catered to what visitors there were. Richard Boone, of television Western fame, had been the B & B’s most famous guest and his picture in his all-black cowboy suit hung in one of the tiny rooms. In a protected sound there were real fishing families in small frame homes, their weathered old boats tied up on rickety piers. Cecil had come out of one of those families. His great-grandfather had been the first of his line to come to Cedar Key. To escape the battles raging between unions and businessmen in the garment district of New York, Levi Feldman had chosen to come to the strange semitropical climes of northwestern Florida to work as a clerk for one of the pencil companies. He eventually became the patriarch of a small but active Jewish community on the island, and imported a young woman from New York to be his wife. Levi had sired only daughters. One of them had married Cecil’s grandfather, an Italian fisherman named Antonio Paggiano, and one of their daughters had been Cecil’s mother. She also married an Italian fisherman, Bernardo Velocci. Through all those marriages the women had steadfastly clung to their original faith, and so it was that Cecil was an Italian Jew, although hardly anyone on the island was aware of it, or cared.